Nightwave: Get rid of "Do X with Friends"

[DatDarkOne]

1 minute ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

... Did you even read my post?

Your sentence just happened to spark it, but my comment was directed to the whole forum community in general.  

As for the rest of this topic, I consider it a Fuster Cluck in my honest opinion.  

[DiabolusUrsus]

4 minutes ago, DatDarkOne said:

Your sentence just happened to spark it, but my comment was directed to the whole forum community in general.  

As for the rest of this topic, I consider it a Fuster Cluck in my honest opinion.  

Well that was a really bad pick on your part, then, because I was wrapping up an extensive argument in favor of accommodating solo players.

The point was that Warframe is advertised as a co-op game, thus it shouldn't need to force players to cooperate. It should come naturally.

I would appreciate it if you didn't misrepresent my position because you can't be bothered to put a single sentence in context. There are plenty of players in this thread who are opposed to the OP's suggestion for whatever reason - please direct your criticism at them.

I was not arguing or implying that WF is exclusively coop.

Edited April 23, 2019 by DiabolusUrsus

[Thrymm]

As the event draws to a close, the one thing I'm seeing, based upon my own experience, is that it doesn't matter.

I entered this thing with the attitude that I was simply not going to do anything I didn't want to do, and as a result I've skipped a great many of the challenges, and specifically skipped the derptastic hour long drool slogs.  If I wanted an hour in one mission, one of the very last games I'd ever play is warframe, it's a fast paced horde shooter that runs missions in volume, it just isn't the place for such atrocities.

But as we get closer to the end, it turns out that any concerns about skipping the terrible challenge choices making me come up short has been unfounded.  I'll hit level 30 with quite a bit of room to spare.  Frankly, I'm a little concerned that the thing will drag on long after I finish it, even, which is quite different than my initial take.

So honestly, in all seriousness, skip it.  If you're doing even a modest shred of the missions, and as a byproduct capturing the inmates as they come up, you wind up with enough standing.  Yes, even with the worst challenges being 5k items.

It doesn't mean I wouldn't rather see better options(seriously, you don't need a friend requirement to know if you want to group up, that's just dumb), but it does mean that we should be aware that not participating in things we don't want to do will be fine.  And in the end, this is what will make things change--everything else in this game changes based upon whether we use it or not, this one will too.  If we're whining but participating, it's going to stay.  Don't do it if you don't want it, and before you know it it'll be changed to something you do.

[DiabolusUrsus]

13 minutes ago, Thrymm said:

Don't do it if you don't want it, and before you know it it'll be changed to something you do.

I agree that players should simply not do things if they don't want to, but it's not like bad challenges will magically be improved if nobody says anything about them.

[Teridax68]

Once again, a useful and pretty elementary discussion gets hijacked by people looking to fiddle with semantics instead of having a proper conversation: no, the game is not literally forcing the player to do anything; the player is free to put the game down at any time even when the game does put them through some mandatory mission. Similarly, people are generally aware that it's not difficult to friend people on Recruiting and do the Nightwave challenges from there: in fact, it is precisely the ease with which the intent of those challenges can be bypassed that makes those requirements all the more unnecessary.

Nobody is complaining that the Nightwave challenges are particularly difficult; the recurring criticism is simply that Nightwave challenges have some imperfections and need some updates for the next event. One would think this would be a given, considering how Nightwave is a brand-new, experimental overhaul to the Alert system, yet apparently in the eyes of some users, even that little criticism is unacceptable. Just because it's not the worst thing in the world to have to friend people for certain challenges does not mean that the requirement is pointless and adds nothing to gameplay. Similarly, just because it's perfectly possible, even fairly easy, to run Defense missions for 40 waves, Kuva Survival runs for 60 minutes, and so on, does not mean that those kinds of endurance missions aren't tedious for many players, rather than genuinely enjoyable or challenging.

What irritates me the most is that it could be really easy to accept that different people enjoy different parts of the game differently, realize that one's enjoyment of the game does not make said game perfect, or invalidate other people's negative experiences with it, and thus work towards a common goal of making the game more enjoyable for everyone: instead, far too much time on these forums is spent bickering on perceived levels of salt, entitlement, skill, and so on. There has been plenty of feedback given for Nightwave already, and even if one likes the system, that does not mean it can't be made better. It would be a loss to no-one if "friend" requirements were removed from Nightwave challenges entirely, and it would likely be of much greater benefit to everyone if players could, say, choose which challenges to set for themselves, rather than be handed missions that would require them to run through content they dislike. People who jump from those basic requests to conclusions of excessive saltiness, entitlement, or perceived lack of skill are precisely the people who aren't contributing positively to discussion, not the players posting their "salt" in the first place.

[Steel_Rook]

To me, the "with friends" challenges always come across like a zookeeper locking two Giant Pandas in a cage desperately hoping they'll mate. The end result is people placing randos on their friends list temporarily, doing a mission with them, then immediately taking them off. Trying to "encourage" people to make friends only ends up encouraging people to game the system.

And even for a lot of us who do have friends and do play together, those challenges are still a pain in the ass. Most of my friends who play Warframe are 10 time zones away from me, meaning we get maybe a couple of hours time together tops before one of us has to walk the dog, go to bed, go to work, leave for dinner, etc. Spending a full hour of uninterrupted time not able to so much as take a phonecall in a game mode that - let's face it - isn't terribly fun to begin with is a non-starter. I can afford an hour of uninterrupted time. My friends can afford an hour of uninterrupted time. We can't always do that all at the same time.

Locking challenges to friends only does far more harm than good, as far as I'm concerned.

[(NSW)Henalie]

I'm lucky in that me and my partner play warframe as a 2-player game so we don't struggle with 'play with a friend' challenges. We still hate them because if we weren't playing together we'd absolutely struggle to find anyone we would want to play with. We've played a lot of online games and MMO's and mostly what we've found is that adding other random people into our gaming involves a lot of stress, anxiety, and disappointment. Stuff like this always disproportionately affects people with issues relating to social anxieties and fears relating to discrimination, so I also think that 'play with a friend' challenges are a little bit exclusionary too. Back when I was working for fortnite I always left 'play with a friend' dailies and rerolled them as soon as I was able. Maybe NW's system needs a way to reroll challenges we dislike or don't want to do, because the rigidity of the system is a major issue a lot of people have with it.

Of course, none of the challenges are mandatory, but doesn't everyone feel a little bit like they 'should' be doing them, just a little? The rewards will vanish, and maybe the season will repeat down the line, but we can't bank on that. We were all suddenly presented with a 'do this now or miss out forever' situation, which has got everyone a little crazy, one way or another.

[(XBOX)Dic3man]

9 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Removing the friends requirement does not prevent you from teaming with friends. If you like to team up, Warframe is a co-op game and you should obviously be allowed to do that. If you are claiming to only enjoy the challenge because it says "with a friend" on it, I'm not really sure how to reason with that.

No it kinda doesnt make sense, its just an annoying step they make me do to friend a random (reboot game, this on xbox to be sure that they really are friended before commit to a 60min run). 
I would rather they just changed it to "with a squad" (if I want to add one of them after as a friend I do that)

Edited April 23, 2019 by (XB1)Dic3man

[DrivaMain]

Oh boy these 2 elite weeklies challenges again. I thought DE would reduce it to 20-30 minutes just like DE reduced the 5 sorties to 3.

as an Eidolon hunter who hunts daily yes I know I could spend that time on those missions. But I choose not to, especially with a friend or clan mate.. why? Because I don’t want to spend an hour defending capsules on a mission that has no scaling or worth the time investment rewards or adding randos to my friend list that I know would get removed as soon as I am done with the mission. Doing these weeklies is not hard, it’s just boring and tedious.

Majority of the warframe players are casuals. If DE keeps catering on the minority here (endurance runners, no life players, etc) they could potentially lose players because they can do it, but they don’t have the time or the incentive to do it because the rewards is not worth the time investment.

[DiabolusUrsus]

4 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

it is precisely the ease with which the intent of those challenges can be bypassed that makes those requirements all the more unnecessary.

Well said, thank you!

4 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

People who jump from those basic requests to conclusions of excessive saltiness, entitlement, or perceived lack of skill are precisely the people who aren't contributing positively to discussion, not the players posting their "salt" in the first place.

Also well said, thank you again!

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

Majority of the warframe players are casuals. If DE keeps catering on the minority here (endurance runners, no life players, etc) they could potentially lose players because they can do it, but they don’t have the time or the incentive to do it because the rewards is not worth the time investment.

Honestly, all they have to do is think about both sides of it. For example, a 30 minute survival with a stretch goal to 60 and doable solo should satisfy everyone without stepping on anyone's toes.

[DrivaMain]

10 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Honestly, all they have to do is think about both sides of it. For example, a 30 minute survival with a stretch goal to 60 and doable solo should satisfy everyone without stepping on anyone's toes.

I could get behind this. Like Complete a 30 minute survival that rewards 5000 standing but if you could complete it in 60 minutes you get 10000 standing. 

I proposed the  new challenge groups will be like this : dailies (1000 standing), weeklies (3000 standing), elite weeklies (5000 standing), Master weeklies (10000) standing. The 60 minutes survivals or 40 waves defense can go to the master weeklies section.

 

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

I could get behind this. Like Complete a 30 minute survival that rewards 5000 standing but if you could complete it in 60 minutes you get 10000 standing. 

I proposed the  new challenge groups will be like this : dailies (1000 standing), weeklies (3000 standing), elite weeklies (5000 standing), Master weeklies (10000) standing. The 60 minutes survivals or 40 waves defense can go to the master weeklies section.

Why even bother separating them? Just attach them to the existing Elite weeklies as "extra" goals. Like "Complete minimum 3 Sorties, or 5 for bonus standing."

Same end result, less UI clutter.

[(NSW)Henalie]

28 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Honestly, all they have to do is think about both sides of it. For example, a 30 minute survival with a stretch goal to 60 and doable solo should satisfy everyone without stepping on anyone's toes.

This won't work though. The problem is that there will still be standing available for it and people who aren't at that level yet will still feel like they 'have to' do the hard goals because the goals give standing. The standing is how you get the exclusive and missable rewards that systems like NW provide. Because we don't know how DE is going to reuse the season or if they will at all, people have a strong FOMO around the goals, standing, and rewards, so that even though you technically only need 60% a lot of people are stressing about getting 100%.

[Aldain]

44 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Honestly, all they have to do is think about both sides of it. For example, a 30 minute survival with a stretch goal to 60 and doable solo should satisfy everyone without stepping on anyone's toes.

I'd suggest a "once a week reroll any challenge" option personally, that way the players who like the 60 minute weeklies can do them and everyone else can do a different random mission.

I honestly cannot see an issue with giving players some choice in the matter, like choose one mission to re-roll and pick one of three options to replace it with once per week.

Everybody gets an OPTION that way, but I'd put money on some people being upset that people are getting to re-roll the 60 minute missions they like, because players having a choice in the matter somehow cheapens the 60 minute mission they would have done anyway.

[Steel_Rook]

45 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Honestly, all they have to do is think about both sides of it. For example, a 30 minute survival with a stretch goal to 60 and doable solo should satisfy everyone without stepping on anyone's toes.

The problem is that the stated design intent behind those challenges was - and we were told this in no uncertain terms - deliberately to appeal to endurance runners, as well as to try and push players into doing content they normally wouldn't. I'm in absolute agreement that a more moderate challenge would be more broadly appealing, but it seems like DE's goal is the exact opposite. The challenges were deliberately targeted at fringe sections of the player base both to appeal to those sections and push more traffic into them.

I THINK the idea was that people would just pick-and-choose whatever challenges they could do and ignore the rest of them - the whole "ONLY 60%!!!" mantra that people have been repeating like it's the anti-life equation. And if DE thought that, then it demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of not just their own player base, but the very nature of how incentives and challenges work in a game like this. Attaching highly desirable rewards to a deliberately exclusionary activity WILL make a plurality of people who dislike it nevertheless feel compelled to participate, do it and then deeply resent the experience. It's astounding to me the kind of official comments I've read on the matter and just how... Disconnected they come across from what to me seemed like the obvious and expected result.

Forced teaming requirements have never, in the history of MMOs, been popular. People's level of tolerance was at one point far higher, sure, but this discussion isn't new. I've been having it for 15 literal years over and over again, across a number of different titles, and I'm a nobody on the Internet. Paid, professional game designers should have seen this coming a mile away. If you want your players to socialise, give them better more convenient social tools. Trying to enforce socialisation merely prompts people to game the system and do social events in the most asocial way possible.

I've been doing random game joining for years. The vast majority of pubbies I run across act like they don't really want to team. What they want to do is play a single-player game with competent bots who do their job and don't talk back. They're not playing with me because they're looking to socialise. They're playing with me because it's the only way they have to progress quickly. To mis-quote Gabe Newall: lack of social interaction is a service problem, not a personal problem.

[Fallen_Echo]

13 hours ago, MagPrime said:

You're being encouraged to try new things, to break out of your comfort zone and branch out.  It's a fairly strong theme of the entire game, considering how we have to experiment with builds and use weapons or Warframes we don't like in order to advance within the story and star chart.

Its a strong aspect of the game yes but its also a faulty one.

Forcing someone to take nekros just to be able to finish a survival challange will only make them loathe the experience.

Same goes for all those challanges for rivens, mastery ranks, missions, its not an encouragement it feels like you have to take this punishment if you want to go on with the content.

You are good with Atlas and hate the spammy caster frames? Well congrats you are unviable for ESO! Either change to spammy caster frame or give up!

[Sloan441]

14 hours ago, Magicfingers said:

i have no friends...i'm the only one in my clan....i prefer it that way. so i guess i just miss out on that aspect of the challenges

People come and go far too often to keep any kind of friends list current. I have lots in the list; I see very few. The clan is moribund--I rarely see those still in it and they barely play. Worse, we don't share schedules. 

I'm not adding random people to the friends list for no other reason than to do this ill-considered challenge. They aren't friends. They might become such, but chances are they will not. You can say the same exact thing about running in PuGs, but without the hassle of fishing for a friend invite. It's...needless complication and adds nothing of consequence. 

I don't prefer it this way, but it's how the game is. Keeping a clan up is hard work--I've seen it in other games and have participated in it. I no longer have the time and inclination of rolling this particular rock up a new hill. 

The challenge should apply to any group undertaking it. 

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 hours ago, (NSW)Henalie said:

This won't work though. The problem is that there will still be standing available for it and people who aren't at that level yet will still feel like they 'have to' do the hard goals because the goals give standing.

That's kind of the whole point of a "challenge" though, isn't it? Do it if you can but don't if you can't? I absolutely agree with other posters saying "don't do it if you don't want to," because 100% completion isn't needed to finish the reward tiers.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Henalie said:

The standing is how you get the exclusive and missable rewards that systems like NW provide.

I am suggesting extra standing on top of what is there already; 5k for 30 min and X bonus for pushing to 60.

I am relaxing the requirements and providing minor incentive to do the tougher run. It's an objective improvement over the current situation - there are no rewards made MORE missable than before under my proposal.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Henalie said:

Becausewe don't know how DE is going to reuse the season or if they will at all, people have a strong FOMO around the goals, standing, and rewards, so that even though you technically only need 60% a lot of people are stressing about getting 100%.

And I would be one of them. I started late enough in the season that even with 100% completion I will likely not hit 30. This is compounded by the fact that I will not play Warframe exclusively in the semi-limited time I have to play games at all.

However, this is a flaw with how Nightwave itself is implemented, not the contents of specific challenges. The system forces players to play on a schedule: you get X challenges per week, which you must complete or ignore. There will always be challenges which some players find unpleasant; the solution to that is eliminating the artificial scarcity of challenges so that players truly can pick and choose what they want to do.

2 hours ago, Aldain said:

I'd suggest a "once a week reroll any challenge" option personally, that way the players who like the 60 minute weeklies can do them and everyone else can do a different random mission.

I honestly cannot see an issue with giving players some choice in the matter, like choose one mission to re-roll and pick one of three options to replace it with once per week.

Everybody gets an OPTION that way, but I'd put money on some people being upset that people are getting to re-roll the 60 minute missions they like, because players having a choice in the matter somehow cheapens the 60 minute mission they would have done anyway.

Definitely a start, but doesn't really help when you have weeks like this one where 3 such challenges appear.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

The problem is that the stated design intent behind those challenges was - and we were told this in no uncertain terms - deliberately to appeal to endurance runners, as well as to try and push players into doing content they normally wouldn't. I'm in absolute agreement that a more moderate challenge would be more broadly appealing, but it seems like DE's goal is the exact opposite. The challenges were deliberately targeted at fringe sections of the player base both to appeal to those sections and push more traffic into them.

I THINK the idea was that people would just pick-and-choose whatever challenges they could do and ignore the rest of them - the whole "ONLY 60%!!!" mantra that people have been repeating like it's the anti-life equation. And if DE thought that, then it demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of not just their own player base, but the very nature of how incentives and challenges work in a game like this. Attaching highly desirable rewards to a deliberately exclusionary activity WILL make a plurality of people who dislike it nevertheless feel compelled to participate, do it and then deeply resent the experience. It's astounding to me the kind of official comments I've read on the matter and just how... Disconnected they come across from what to me seemed like the obvious and expected result.

Forced teaming requirements have never, in the history of MMOs, been popular. People's level of tolerance was at one point far higher, sure, but this discussion isn't new. I've been having it for 15 literal years over and over again, across a number of different titles, and I'm a nobody on the Internet. Paid, professional game designers should have seen this coming a mile away. If you want your players to socialise, give them better more convenient social tools. Trying to enforce socialisation merely prompts people to game the system and do social events in the most asocial way possible.

I've been doing random game joining for years. The vast majority of pubbies I run across act like they don't really want to team. What they want to do is play a single-player game with competent bots who do their job and don't talk back. They're not playing with me because they're looking to socialise. They're playing with me because it's the only way they have to progress quickly. To mis-quote Gabe Newall: lack of social interaction is a service problem, not a personal problem.

Agreed 100%.

Even so, DE is hopefully open to revision regardless of the original intent.

[Aldain]

6 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Definitely a start, but doesn't really help when you have weeks like this one where 3 such challenges appear.

If DE were smart they'd fix it so that no more than one endurance challenge shows up per week, unless you reroll one in because the player likes them.

[(NSW)Henalie]

35 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

There will always be challenges which some players find unpleasant; the solution to that is eliminating the artificial scarcity of challenges so that players truly can pick and choose what they want to do.

My point is that people want as much standing as they can get, and because the reward tiers carry on infinitely. If there was an end point, say tier 30, then missing a challenge means nothing if tier 30 can still be achieved, As it is: If there's standing to be gained, people will want it, and the forums will fill up with numerous people going "this is too hard" and "this isn't fair to newer players" whenever there's a hefty endurance challenge or play with a friend. Skipping a challenge at the moment means potentially missing out on a reward tier which many will be afraid of, so making more challenges just means there will be more challenges that people will feel beholden to even though they can still, technically, skip them.

Edited April 23, 2019 by (NSW)Henalie

[DiabolusUrsus]

1 hour ago, (NSW)Henalie said:

My point is that people want as much standing as they can get, and because the reward tiers carry on infinitely. If there was an end point, say tier 30, then missing a challenge means nothing if tier 30 can still be achieved, As it is: If there's standing to be gained, people will want it, and the forums will fill up with numerous people going "this is too hard" and "this isn't fair to newer players" whenever there's a hefty endurance challenge or play with a friend. Skipping a challenge at the moment means potentially missing out on a reward tier which many will be afraid of, so making more challenges just means there will be more challenges that people will feel beholden to even though they can still, technically, skip them.

I don't think you really understood what I said. This would only be a problem if players are forced to pick from a limited pool of challenges each week.

If players could acquire unlimited new challenges by continuing to play regardless of an arbitrary "schedule," they could safely ignore unfavorable challenges because they can simply replace them with something else. In other words, players would be able to acquire the same amount of standing in the end given the same degree of investment.

If a player is going to insist on obligatory 100% completionism when it doesn't make a practical difference because the game has already given them viable alternatives, that's on them.

Nightwave also already has an "end point" at 30; everything after that is just Wolf Creds meaning players can stop whenever they have what they want from the Cred offerings.

[(PSN)Onder6099]

Isn’t a shame to not have friends?

[Methanoid]

23 hours ago, MagPrime said:

You're being encouraged to try new things, to break out of your comfort zone and branch out.  It's a fairly strong theme of the entire game, considering how we have to experiment with builds and use weapons or Warframes we don't like in order to advance within the story and star chart.

in this particular case tho he is not being asked to simply try something new and different, he is being told he cant do something new and different until he manages to arrange a convenient hour to play with someone else, if he has friends/clanmates available and up for it and they have time then he is laughing, if he doesnt then the "challenge" just becomes an irritant, esp as many players could cheese that solo if not for the stupid requirement being enforced.

The funnier part is that DE are setting up these stupid "invite a friend" type requirement knowing full well that many players irl friends have probably tried the game and quit near instantly, i know thats been my issue since 2013, totally zero of my friends/family/coworkers have stuck for more than 1 week apart from 1 who did a month or so, yet here i am being mocked for the lack of my friends in the game and the clan side of things is no better, i recently had to delete a load of 200-1000+ day noshows, even later successfully adding some randoms who arent attracted to the big clans isnt much use as the inevitable 1-2 weeks later they also bail and are never heard from again, after a while you just kinda give up knowing its all pointless which is why you hear of many 1 man clans that people do because they have nothing better to do and it keeps them busy.

Now you are left basically begging randoms on that nice archaic spam irc channel, the more funny part there being ofc that even once you group up with 3 others you cant even click a convenient "add friend" from the player list, you have the option to see their profile but not the important "add friend", instead you have to do that the long way which is another pain in the rear, then once thats all done you get the inevitable argument of where to go and why with some dropping out almost instantly when their suggestion isnt complied with.

Basically its all a huge annoyance.

Also i think you are kind of making the whole "experiment with weapons" thing sound more varied than it actually is, most weapons and builds have near carbon copy mods on them with very very little variations, there isnt much to experiment with, all you do is maximize the already present stats on a weapon, there simply isnt room to do much of anything else.  Also new players wont own much of anything of any decent rank to experiment with while clearing the star chart and quests, they will just use whatever little junk they have with whatever weaposn they happen to be runnign with till its done.

[DatDarkOne]

6 minutes ago, Methanoid said:

in this particular case tho he is not being asked to simply try something new and different, he is being told he cant do something new and different until he manages to arrange a convenient hour to play with someone else, if he has friends/clanmates available and up for it and they have time then he is laughing, if he doesnt then the "challenge" just becomes an irritant, esp as many players could cheese that solo if not for the stupid requirement being enforced.

In all honesty, a player can just skip those challenges that they either can't or don't want to do.  I did this very thing and I still managed to max out on Nightwave last week.  I want to be sympathetic, but I just can't really see this as a serious issue.