K-Drive Way Too Onerous

[thurmack]

Apologies if this is in the wrong thread - I am fairly new to the game. Please feel free to move it if it belongs elsewhere.

Speaking as a new player, I would like to share my experience with the k-drive.

First of all, it is nice to be able to move around Orb Vallis and the Plains faster. It's almost essential, honestly, as walking the open realms takes ages.
So I'm glad there's an option, but I have a two concerns:

MR-Gated Archwings
Everyone MR5+ uses an Archwing, so in shared missions a new player is basically just following behind even with a K-Drive. MR-gating Archwing use in the open realms seems like a strange decision, since the consequence is just the alienation of low MR players.

Getting a mod-able K-Drive takes an insane amount of effort, much of it repetitive and unrewarding
You start with a K-Drive that cannot be modded, and doesn't gain affinity. That means for the majority of these efforts you are earning nothing but Standing which you must spend on the new K-Board pieces.
To buy the four pieces you need 20,000 standing. On a fully charged jump with 3-4 tricks I gain about 100 affinity on average (sometimes up to 200, but often a bit less if a jump is cut short or I land hard and lose all my points). That's 25 standing for the ventkids.
That's 800 jumps. That's well over five hours of literally doing nothing but jumping back and forth, and realistically most players are just going to jump while they're exploring the region (which slows down transit). 
There are ways to get bigger point awards (like the long pipe near Fortuna), but they take longer and are consequently only slightly more efficient. Running the pipe I was able to get my last 5k in just under an hour. But it was a boring tedious hour, and that was just for one quarter of the standing.

TLDR: Earning enough standing to buy the very first mod-able board blueprints is monotonous and takes way too long imo.

And then you're not even done. Not even close!

At that point you need to be I think T3 to get all the recipes for the K-Drive ingredients, and you need to fish and mine extensively for all the pieces. I've spent hours on both, and still only have about half of the needed resources.

And here's the kicker, nearly all of those activities are fun for a bit but are not engaging enough to fish or mine for many many hours to earn a K-Drive especially considering...

...it is nearly useless after MR5. I have run hundreds of open squad bounties, and played with many dozens (maybe even hundreds) of players in Orb Vallis, and I've only ever seen another player using a K-Drive once. I don't know if the mods aren't especially useful, or the combat functions just don't compare with Warframe guns and abilities, but it seems that K-Drives are outshone so extremely that they seem to only be used as a stepping stone for MR1-5 before Archwings become deployable.

TLDR: Farming components also takes ages, and perhaps most importantly the result is lackluster (almost to the point of being useless).


I know DE has tried to make this experience less onerous with some recent patches. Please understand that I'm not trying to complain about their efforts, just giving a new player's perspective on the system as it is now. I'm just one dude and maybe my opinion isn't reflective of the majority, but for what it's worth I am finding the K-Drive content extremely weighted on the side of boring. Maybe as a new player I am just naive about the amount of grinding in WF, as I have yet to grind for any content that I didn't actively want to use, but surely this interesting mechanic should serve some purpose other than ranking up MR, right?

I'm not sure what the solution(s) might be. The lack of rewards (particularly while grinding for standing) kind of make that whole process particularly cumbersome, and the end result could maybe have some more interesting combat or bounty uses perhaps. Maybe this is the best it's going to get, and DE has already done all they can to make the system smooth and fun. I hope not, because I'm anticipating a considerable let-downs both when I get my rank-able k-drive and find it doesn't do anything useful, and again when I get to MR5 and chuck the whole thing in a closet.

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

I'm going to be honest the more and more I think about Archwing and K-Drives..It almost feels like they should have been individual Warframes rather than vehicles...Two specific frames that could do this one thing and then we all just moved on...The end...

[(XBOX)R3d P01nt]

31 minutes ago, thurmack said:

Running the pipe I was able to get my last 5k in just under an hour. But it was a boring tedious hour, and that was just for one quarter of the standing.

As you get better at it, it takes a lot less time.  When I was grinding out standing I was down to about 15 minutes to max my daily, which was 26k or 27k at the time.

32 minutes ago, thurmack said:

I hope not, because I'm anticipating a considerable let-downs both when I get my rank-able k-drive and find it doesn't do anything useful, and again when I get to MR5 and chuck the whole thing in a closet.

The rankable K-drives have mods that make the process easier, like giving extra speed or a bonus +4 to your trick combo, but beyond being able to mod them, they aren't different at all from the starter in terms of utility.

[LSG501]

Honestly, my issues with k-drive are....

• they should not have given k-drives their own syndicate, especially considering how poor the xp gain is with it.  If it was linked into the main solaris standing it wouldn't be an issue getting the xp.
• they should not have made them require levelling... honestly this is the BIGGEST issue for me, they're an mr linked item which takes far longer than anything else in the game to level AND getting standing requires you to do things which specifically takes you away from the reason that we actually play the game in most cases... it's not skateboarding, I can play a tony hawk game if I wanted to do that.
• their syndicate has the same issue as getting xp for them in as much as it takes you away from the main reason most of us plat the game...
• except for the mr there is literally no reason to have more than one k-drive, there's no performance differences, it's just visual. 
• I can't even use my pistols while on the k-drive, hell I see no reason why I can't go zooming along with my melee out slicing and dicing as I go.
• Archwing is faster (not just itzal blink) because I can fly OVER the mountains instead of being forced around them,
• I can use weapons while using archwing and the archwing has abilities..

The absolute biggest thing though... I don't actually WANT to use them, even less so on fortuna. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, k-drives should have been released with PoE, archwings with OV, PoE is far more suited to a k-drive for moving around than fortuna is.

[Floofy-Booper]

I actually really enjoy the K-Drive. I find it relaxing and feel like the movement is pretty fluid (for the most part). I enjoy that I have to navigate terrain and jump over obstructions, because it feels more intuitive than just going into my arch-wing, going in the air, and then moving forward for 3 minutes until I reach my location. Heck, often times I'll just divert from the path that I'm travelling in order to do some grinding and tricks. Sure, if I'm doing a mission with a group of randoms, I'll use the arch-wing just out of consideration for my teammates, but if I'm alone or with friends then out comes the K-Drive!

TL;DR: I find the journey more rewarding than the destination

However, I agree that the standing does feel tedious, but not anymore so than arch-wing missions. Whereas I get tired of farming XP for arch-wings after a two or three missions, i find myself constantly hopping on my K-Drive whenever I can. On top of that, it's completely optional. At no point are you required to use the K-Drive, let alone increase your vent kid standing.  You can completely ignore it and you wouldn't be any worse off. In my mind, it's like being able to ride the whale creatures in Subnautica: Sub Zero. Yea, it doesn't do anything for you, but it doesn't remove from the overall experience. There are people who will enjoy it and find themselves constantly coming back for more, and there are others who will do it once then never again.

TL;DR: If it isn't hurting the experience, then is there really a problem?

Now, I do think that farming for standing should be less tedious - especially when there's really only one or two ways to farm it. But I also believe that the arch-wings need to be looked at too, if not more. Overall, it seems that both of these transportation methods should be reevaluated and improved. Arch-wings feel boring and, honestly, make me feel brain-dead when I use them. K-Drives are enjoyable, but farming their xp and the standing is a slog. Where it stands now, K-Drives are more of a distraction when you get tired of the grind, and just want to grind instead.

TL;DR: The game isn't perfect, but it's still enjoyable. Nothing included truly detracts from the overall experience, but changes could be made to improve it.

[Ham_Grenabe]

I don't object to their existence, although I definitely understand the problem that there's mastery hidden behind them. It's mastery I simply will not be getting. 

In DE's place, I would strip mastery from K-Drives, and figure out how to fairly compensate everyone involved. Then they're just toys - an entertaining way to noodle around, without any game-effect rewards. 

[Floofy-Booper]

6 minutes ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

I don't object to their existence, although I definitely understand the problem that there's mastery hidden behind them. It's mastery I simply will not be getting. 

In DE's place, I would strip mastery from K-Drives, and figure out how to fairly compensate everyone involved. Then they're just toys - an entertaining way to noodle around, without any game-effect rewards. 

I knew I forgot to mention one detail: Mastery. Yes, I completely agree that the Mastery aspect is a bit irksome, especially to those of us who are trying to Master every item. However, it's also just a percent of a fraction of the total Mastery you can get, especially if the theory of Mastery capping at 30 comes to fruition. It's kind of similar to people who have Excalibur Prime (heavy emphasis on kind of), albeit everyone has access to K-Drives. There will just be people who don't bother with them, so they wont get the Mastery points from K-Drives. Thinking about it, K-Drives are more of a "Here's something extra for people to play around with in the Fortuna release!" rather than a new mechanic like arch-wings were.

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

4 hours ago, (PS4)FriendSharkey said:

I'm going to be honest the more and more I think about Archwing and K-Drives..It almost feels like they should have been individual Warframes rather than vehicles...Two specific frames that could do this one thing and then we all just moved on...The end...

And then everybody and their Grandmothers will just flock to those Warframes for that specific content. Just like how everyone uses Chroma for Profit-Taker.

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

6 minutes ago, (NSW)Ace-Bounty-Hunter said:

And then everybody and their Grandmothers will just flock to those Warframes for that specific content. Just like how everyone uses Chroma for Profit-Taker.

Yeah so?...Nothing new to Warframe...

[SECURATYYY]

You can buy one for 60 plat. Go open some relics, sell the rewards, and buy one.

 

Now if you want a custom one, and custom mods, you gotta earn it.

 

Also when you leave fortuna, directly behind the building are large pipes. Grind on those, jump, turn around, and grind again. Rinse and repeat, do tricks in the air. 3k everytime.