Arbitrations Revisited

[Hallelion]

I honestly think that permadeath is a unique idea, but sadly, not gonna work in a game like this. I'd rather have some items taken from Destiny 2 to make it so that the fear of dying is not quickly translated to toxic rage:

1. There's bleed out state with the timer reduced to 5 seconds, and have the revive time increased by half. (Inspired by Destiny's "respawn restricted" 30 second revive delay for dying) 

2. Once you die, you need to wait until next round to return to the game without penalties (inspired by the "respawn restricted" concept). You won't get the rewards from previous rounds where you died, but you get another shot for loot on the next.

Example: In an interception mission, Player 1 gets downed, his teammates would get 5 seconds to try and revive him. If they fail, he is dead for that round. At the end of the round, if his squad mates were successful, the remaining players get their rewards, and choose if they will continue for one more round. If yes, Player 1 returns to the game, giving him another shot at Arby glory. 

[Protomorph]

These really aren't the changes that Arbitration needed. It's unfortunate this is what D.E. came up with after acquiring 6 months of data.

Adding some form of revive is good. This is what arbitrations needed, because right now arbitration is severely limited in which frames you can run. There's two kinds of frames in arbitration: tanks and dead. So you have Inaros, Nidus, Gara, Rhino, Nezha... and the frames who are lucky to make it past 10 minutes.

Let's also keep in mind the fact that Warframe is, as a whole, still horribly unbalanced even after 6 years of development. Let's just say that having a permadeath mode when things like Toxic Ancients exist in their current form is purely ridiculous. Toxic Ancients: the things that walk up next to you and silently kill everything with no warning or counterplay. There's a hundred other examples...

Adding revives: good, thank you. Increasing enemy scaling: bad, and unnecessary. This is a traditional D.E. mistake: "We buffed something, therefore we must nerf something or increase difficulty. Because we operate from the assumption that this mode was already perfectly balanced so every buff requires a nerf, and every nerf requires a buff." Arbitrations weren't well-balanced, that's why you're changing them. No changes to level scaling were necessary.

Adding Arch-Gun rivens: good, thank you. It's great to add something new to the game, it's great to have rewards to bring people to play. This doesn't address the problems, and won't make people play arbitration.

The current state of arbitrations is this:

Tank-only meta: what I said.

PUGs don't work. People come in unprepared (trying to play a non-tank frame), and die. Frustrated, they usually swear off the mode. No one can blame them. Tanks survive, make it to 20 minutes or so then quit out of frustration.

Premade groups can make it to 40 minutes + (if everyone is playing a tank), but no one can stand to go past 40 minutes even if you're able to because the mode is a horrible, drawn-out slog and is not fun.

Arbitration mode takes too long, for too little rewards. Even in terms of grinding, even in terms of Warframe grinding, Arbitration takes too long, is too difficult, is not fun, and is unrewarding. You made the intervals in Arbitration missions take twice as long as normal, and that was a mistake. Bring it to parity with other modes in regard to the time to complete rounds/waves.

What I'd like to see in Arbitrations to fix it:

Add some form of revives (thus allowing non-tanks to be viable). Great change, keep it.

Decrease time for rewards to be on par with normal modes (people aren't playing because no one can stand to go for as long as is necessary. Too unrewarding for time invested.)

Do not increase rate of enemy level scaling. Unnecessary. Maxed out Tonkor barely kills things past 20-30 minutes. Why make ABCCC+ rotations when it's nigh-impossible to reach 40 minutes, and no one can stand to play it long enough to go past that? The math doesn't work.

Archgun rivens: Great, keep it. I'd love to get these, but it's not enough to make me play it really. Arbitration still isn't worth my time if reward intervals take twice as long while difficulty is ridiculous. Address the root problem.

[Romwald]

*Dreams about Elite Arbitrations with friendly fire*

[ZeroEpsilon]

1.Arbitration mission like Defense, defection, Infested Salvage are loathsome  to every tenno, don't you think these should be solve first?

My suggestion is add Challenge like u did in Flucture x4 coolant mobile defense, that task is super fun( if u change radiation to other element that is)

not Tedious, boring  like what we have right now. Arbitration and Sanctuary should be stand for endgame content which is mean exist to scratch veteran itch and solve their boredom. 

2. Kill the fun Drone should be change to various problem maker like "leech air support drone", "super Strong Globe drone", "Mr.Nuller drone (that keep soaring the null aura)", "damage enchanted", "mind control drone (like Alad V M do to us)",  "Element hazard drone", "Endgame drone (that keep counting down till exploding = nuke the whole room with huge explosion.  I still don't know why we stop at dumb nully link drone. that's boring

3. Please add Boss challenge to the game and keep throwing those assassin, sentient, boss to the match. i'm sure people dying for it. 

[DonLakonchinno]

This improves nothing and achieves nothing, completely missing what is actually wrong arbitrations, and the change itself doesn't deserve "Revisited" title.
If anything it makes an already boring slog of a game mode also an annoying one both gameplay and reward-wise.
For archgun rivens.

[--END--Rikutatis]

Personally I'm perfectly fine with endo as rewards. I sell maxed primed mods for plat, and DE has been releasing a lot of primed or r10 mods lately. I always max them all. Together with archgun rivens and unique cosmetics I think the rewards are adequate. But yea, the 10 min/wave intervals make it a real slog. 

 

[Rokynator99_CZ]

Sounds good to me, but the 10 min reward rotations, this should be changed, staying longer in the mission just to get endo/sculpture, nothing great. BUT maybe keep the 10 min rotation (survival scenarion now) for mods, cosmetics, and vitus essence, and between, 5 min rotation, just endo, sculpture, for example. Arbitrations already start at higher levels and  with normal enemy scaling + annoying drones, that is a bit more challenging and rewarding at the same time. Just idea

[lihimsidhe]

6k+ hours into Warframe. I love this game but one of the most bewildering and confounding aspects of it is the utter scarcity of meaningful challenge. The proposed changes to Arbitrations do not fix them. I will explain why shortly but first let me share what I do to challenge myself in Warframe:

• Endurance Runs. They are still more appealing than Arbitrations because they do not have drones. With Nullifiers I can see the narrative team at DE trying to work in an in universe counter measure to warframes and I can respect that. Drones though? A 100% transparent and arbitrary way to inflate difficulty. They may add to the difficulty sure. But do they add to the fun?  In my opinion no. They absolutely do not.
• Eidolons & Profit Taker. They are both lore driven and meaningfully challenging. It's a shame that some frames are straight up locked out of being very useful (Revenant, Excalibur, etc.).
• Conclave. Say what you will about this mode but it's some of the most challenging if not THE most challenging PvP I've ever had. A stark contrast from the dumb AF mobs in PvE that literally run to get slaughtered. I find myself running from getting slaughtered!
• Elite Sanctuary Onslaught..Sometimes. Because the drain mechanic is so squarely biased in favor of nuke frames ESO becomes do I want to play Saryn, Equinox, Volt and/or hope someone else plays them?  What could have easily been a true end game mode literally has its potential drained out of it.
   

Now let me show you something that drives a point home:

Earth is a BEAUTIFUL tileset.  It's f**king gorgeous! However, when I heard Earth was getting remastered it made me sad. Sad because all this work was being put into a set of maps that Tenno do their best to race out of only to come back for random alerts. All the while it would take something so extremely simple and within DE's power to do in a matter of a week or two:

Allow Tenno to pick a node they want to battle on and give us a resource that lets us push the level of mobs way, way, up with scaling rewards.  So if I want to go back to the beautiful Earth nodes and have the mobs start at level 200, 500, 1000 or w/e I can. Let other Tenno know there is an active 'scaled up' option available on the node they selected just like Nightmare modes.  Throw in some randomly spawning bosses appropriate to that tile set and call it a day.

You do not need permadeath, weird revive towers, and Warframe ability and weapon bonuses that only contradict the point of an end game mode to begin with.

Finally the most 'end game' node in all of Warframe is Tycho, Lua. Corpus Nullifiers + Sentients?  That mode is NO joke.  And it has nothing to do with lame drones and permadeath. It's just brutal in a good way.

 

 

[Danielw8]

DE we need something hard to do, real hard, something like when you start everything need be eximus and lvl 200, and at 30 min lvl 300, we need something real hard to do with good drops / rewards

 

stop making the game ultra easy ...

[tarfeef101]

Here's some feedback:

• Revive changes do nothing to people who solo and don't want to run only tanks
• Still too much endo, not enough ephemera, peculiar mods, awesome weapons, skins, or anything else vets might care about. I don't recall the last time I cared about endo
• Takes so long to get rewards that it doesn't really feel worth it. Make em every 5, or really push for better rewards to fix this
• Drones still are a cheap difficulty. They remove most of what warframe is about: your warframe. It's again just restrictive and forces you to use high dmg crit weapons cause status won't help and neither will enemy debuff/team buff abilities. Or damaging abilities. 
• Thanks for fixing scaling. I legit appreciate that. 
• Revive mechanic seems fine for teams, but as point #1 stated doesn't help solo-ers

 

If we could see these addressed, I might want to do an arbitration rather than wait through 40 mins of crap in an axi survival before I get to good levels. But at least there I get traces, open relics, get the endless fissure buffs, and the scaling was faster (now equal, of course).

[joak410]

ok, but 1 question why exalted blade and dex pixia deals 0 dmg against drones? i understad that negated abillities, but dmg? it sucks tat i have to desactivate razorwing every time i need to kill a dron, wich happends really often.

[Xerachiel]

So you are telling me that now, players that die in abritrations because of bad builds, being afk or just being plain bad players, will PUNISH the players that DO know what they are doing? (in the video you posted you can see how picking up these new "revive points" debuff your stats like the ones on the index)
Don't put this in the game, you will only make people solo arbitrations even more! 
Leave the permadeath like it is, if you die in them it's because you are not ready! 

[Deadoon]

This isn't punishing people who die, this is punishing those that revive.

If you want to have a death punishment, make it so that it delays their reward cycle in some way, or make it cost you a vitus essence to resurrect yourself.

[MartinVole]

Quote

we plan to compensate by making enemies scale at the rate they do in other mission (instead of the reduced rate of scaling that Arbitrations have now).

Don't add revives, if you plan to increase scaling rate to normal, just make reward rates normal. Time does not equal hard, just... time consuming.

[SiderealBrick]

Now, that the arbitrations scale normally you should shorten the missions otherwise they will scale to ridiculous levels for meager rewards for the amount of time and effort making them even less popular. At least in my opinion.

[Vitirian]

I really don't want to revive people in Arbitration. And I also don't want to pick up stuff used to revive people that will end up hindering my own performance because it's decreasing my health and energy in the way index points do because someone else died in what's supposed to be the hard end-game missions.  
 

[Ein0r]

While I dont need to waste my Vitus Essences for Archwing Weapons to begin with, I dont even know how I would want to store them. I rarely can afford Riven Slots. I have more important things to spend my plat on. And if I can finally get around to scrap some plat together for Riven slots, I prefer to fill those slots with mods I might want to use. I rarely use Archwing Weapons outside of Archwing Missions, my weapons are plenty strong for that. And for nearly all Archwing Missions, besides maybe Atlas farm, the damage of these weapons is enough most of the time.

In Arbitrations, for me at least, the biggest problem isn't that I am alone or that a teammate gets killed but the long time to get any decent rewards. 10 waves for 1 statue reward and 20 waves for 2 statue rewards aren't fun and take long. The increased scaling makes it a lot worse to protect the dude past wave 20 or 30.

Ten minutes per survival wave? Even if people are able to  continue for a longer time. because they brought strong frames and strong weapons, most extract after 20-40 minutes anyway because they dont have more time, can't concentrate or lost to the boredom boss. And survival gets harder now because of the scaling. No it doesn't have to be a breeze or super easy, but when it is already pretty boring, making it harder earlier just hurts twice.

Defection is barely played. The only times people play defection is to grab a Rotation A statue and extract before the arbitration resets (which was right around the corner anyway). With the bigger scaling, people are even more likely to avoid that mode.

Interception, although quick, is also not very much liked. The only mission type that profits from those changes is Excavation. The scaling in this case is not too dangerous (depending on the enemy faction) and you can get the rewards relatively quickly. The revives are nice for this mission type.

 

Edit: The revives are instant at least, which negates a possible domino effect of team mates getting killed while they revive.

If anything, work on the Arbitration Drones please. There is only a handful of frames you see in every arbitration. Inaros and Wukong. Maybe Gara, Valkyr, Nidus and Limbo. If there were changes to those drones, they would at least alleviate the boredom problem because players would pick different Warframes. Why bother playing Hildryn when your Aegis doesnt work for 2 out of 3 spawn groups? Why bother playing Baruuk? His exalted weapon can dish out very good damage but you always run the risk of getting bugged out of it because you have to use your weapons in 2 out of 3 spawn group to kill the drone. And with the drone the whole spawn group.. Or literally any caster frame. +300% strength für Hydroid is nice. For 1 out of 3 spawn groups.

[Fazel412]

If you die, it's 100% your fault.

This has been true throughout online gaming as a whole, or at least in mmorpgs. I even bring Oberon with Phoenix Renewal because I've always enjoyed playing as a healer in mmorpgs and the accomplishment of being able to keep the whole team alive even despite near impossible odds, sometimes even proving that wizards, likely the most fragile class in any mmorpg, can tank bosses, live, and simultaneously surprise even them (I could do without dps players dying like idiots and blaming the healer for not stopping them from their own stupidity though). My personal favorite arbitration run was almost 3hrs in an excavation run with Frost, Limbo, and... I think Chroma, clearing 50 excavations against an upward of lv255 infested mobs (which is actually the worst faction for me because Parasitics and Ancient Disrupters). Casualties? A kavat. Rest in peace. Oh, and we got Seeding Step Ephemera too, which we were actually hoping for. This is a completely random team, btw. Not premade.

But this... revive system in arbitrations... I'm sorry, but this will encourage more reckless gameplay, while punishing those who are adequately prepared for the game mode. I bring Oberon to give my teammates a second chance in case of those instances where they get oneshotted despite doing everything correctly, which includes being adequately prepared, thoroughly knowing their frames and tools, and not being forced to use Inaros or something. If people die even under Phoenix Renewal, especially if they keep falling off the map or walk into a nullifier bubble, or even refuse to walk over to my waypoint to pick it up, then why should I be punished and burdened with the task of saving them while increasing the risk of my own death?

On the other hand, if they actually survived long enough but die due to one of those cheap shots (like getting oneshotted by a nullifier's sniper rifle even despite Renewal active, because I REALLY hate it when that happens) or because they slipped up (because sitting in arbitrations for a while does dull your attentiveness and sense of caution), then yes I will accept the burden and risk to save them. But most likely with this system I'll only get 2 scenarios: having to save people constantly before the first C rotation, or people who survive long enough that I will likely not need to worry in the first place. You want to encourage team play and teamwork. This is a noble goal. However, the end does not justify the means.

This is also a personal insult to me, because by doing this you are basically saying healers are irrelevant and unneeded and only dps are allowed to exist (though truth be told that has felt that way for quite a while given Trinity's nerfs, Vazarin's Protective Dash, and the existence of Magus Repair). Death in any other mode merely means a loss of affinity, which means nothing if you're not specifically leveling anything. And because there are little to no repercussions when dying and being revived in any other game mode, healers are unnecessary and only asked for very specific situations, like eidolons to keep lures alive or ESO for quick energy. Arbitrations made death meaningful in the sense that people have to actually have some situational awareness to succeed and can't yolo recklessly like they do in other game modes. The only people who has a problem with arbitration's 1 life system are those who probably shouldn't even be in arbitrations to begin with.

Does your revive system also drain energy when afflicted with the burden? If so, this is a major problem and an even more unjustified punishment as a lot of frames rely on that very energy to keep themselves alive or even function. I will definitely not risk Oberon's energy pool with the revive system unless the one who died TRULY deserves to be revived. Your video cuts off your energy pool, so I cannot tell.

Please rethink this. Please thoroughly read the feedback on this very thread. A lot of good reactions are posted here. We're not posting them out of spite or maliciousness (though no doubt some are frustrated and angry); we are posting them because we do not want to see Warframe ultimately die off because of bad decision making and player unfriendly mechanics.

If you die, it's 100% your fault. This is not toxic behavior. This is not elitism. This is reality. This will remain true no matter where you go or what you do. If you don't like being a liability, don't be a liability. If I die in arbitrations, I do not want my team to risk their own deaths in an attempt to save me. Then again, if I die as Oberon, the run is pretty much finished because they realize that I am their last line of defense against certain death, so they might actually risk their own lives to save me, and thus themselves >_>

Oh, and regarding archgun rivens... why? You knew the riven system only ended up further enhancing very specific weapons instead of making more weapons viable. Why would you think archgun rivens will make all archguns viable now? Why repeat your past mistake? I sincerely doubt people will suddenly want to use Dual Decurion or Phaedra over Larkspur or Fluctus when given a riven for any of them. Or are you saying that the situation will be different because of the upcoming Railjack content, because it probably won't be? ...Whatever. At the very least, please increase riven cap past 90.

[Almagnus1]

Something I would hope DE would do with arbitrations is cut them down to normal waves, yet ramp up the scaling quickly, and also ramp up the rewards, so the rewards would go something like:

A

AB

ABC

ABCC

ABCC

ABCC

ABCC

[AdunSaveMe]

Any changes to arbitration drones? They're all but invisible for people with colourblindness and hard to see for those without.

[AdunSaveMe]

11 hours ago, OvisCaedo said:

...And, anything about how tedious and drawn-out feeling a lot of the mission types are?

That's my main issue with arbitrations at the moment. It just feels like a chore, not a challenge. Is doubling the rotation length really the best way to make it harder? Does it even make it harder at all? I'm sure there are better ways to accomplish this. I didn't think revives were more of a problem than that.

[(XBOX)GorgonKratos97]

I play a fairly decent amount of arbitrations the main issue I have is with the rotation time. I feel like making it so that the rotations are the normal 5 minutes and make it so that the enemies scale faster than in normal missions would be the way to go.

Also I'm not that big of a fan of the revive system this will just force me to play solo even more as I don't want to deal with the negative effects from accidentally picking up the shards, this is rewarding those who can't survive and punishing those who are alive. I also don't want to deal with toxic players who will rant in chat to be revived. What about solo arbitrations adding a revive system in group games but not solo seems quite strange to me.

How about instead of the shard system for revives you add a consequence to the mission for being revived like say you lose a certain amount of life support, defence target becomes vulnerable to damage for a certain period of time etc. The decision on whether or not you are revived will be on the team. This will add a consequence based system for dying and will be able to be implemented into solo games as well. 

[(XBOX)GrandSageDragon]

Give us it soon please 

[Evanescent]

Arbitrations are tedious. Here's why:

• rounds take too long to get at rewards
• enemies become immune to warframe powers (even though the mode offers to buff power strength to certain frames ???) and cannot be mopped up to speed up rounds
• revive restriction, broken enemy scaling result in a forced tank meta prevailing if you don't want to burden your team

Instead of high adrenaline high difficulty rushes you are forced into a slog through treacle. These changes don't address the concerns expressed above, nor do they actually solve the problem of players and dying. Chances are if a player died, they were not properly prepared and will keep dying, burdening their team. Thus just leaving them seems to be a better option, since you are being forced into debuffing yourself to help them out in an already restrictive game mode!

Arbitrations need a fundamental change with regards to how to work and reward. Right now it's not really an endgame mode but a soul-less slog for barebones chances at rewards.

[Brasten]

As long time player who basically doesn't play Arbitrations...

Absolutely none of these changes have any appeal to me, and really just annoy me.

• The rewards didn't ever seem worthwhile for the amount of time required to obtain them.
• 10 minutes/waves per reward is just too long for the rubbish clutter in the table.
• No revives is just Warframe gatchas in full force and punishes playing anything but Undying tanks (complete opposites of what your bonuses were trying for)
  • Warframe has too many "oops you just instant die" things going on as levels scale up. Plasma Grenades, Toxin Ancients, Corpus Nullifer Scrambus Combras weapons.
  • The option to pick up revives for dead team mates does not change this.

I don't see any of your changes making me want to play Arbitration any more then the absolute minimum I already do. The meta will remain undying frames, with weapons for taking out the Arbitration Drones ASAP. Nothing else maters.

Hurry up and get on with the Dynamic personal (forget locking it behind clans) Antagonist (Shadow of War) system.