Nightwave Player Choice suggestion (Re-roll Idea)

[Aldain]

We all know that Nightwave is a hot-to-the-point-of-melting-the-floor topic right now, I won't bore you with the sheer number of variable opinions on many of the challenges so I'll cut right to the point.

Allow players to once per week re-roll one weekly challenge (regular or elite) so that people can have a better chance at avoiding aspects of gameplay they don't like, or roll something they don't like into something they do.

I personally don't like the endurance challenges, so I would re-roll them, but if somebody does like the endurance challenges but would rather not run 5 sorties they could roll that away for something they want.

This system would allow for once a week a player could avoid a challenge they don't enjoy and choose one of three different challenges to replace it.

By adding a factor of player choice into the challenges it can allow for them to exist while simultaneously lessening the discontent for those who do not enjoy (or in the event of things like Profit-taker have access to) and solve at least in part some of the complaints and issues that some players have with this particular aspect of Nightwave.

[Voltage]

The system is already designed around doing a percentage of the challenges (not all of them). This change would be redundant, and players would still complain. The main issue with Nightwave is people want all the challenges completed, and they want them all tailored to themselves. DE can't make everyone happy and they never will, so the true best solution should be to tell players to suck it up. If we dumb down challenges, let us choose easier ones, or change them to easier ones, then the Nightwave mode becomes even more boring.

Edited April 24, 2019 by Voltage

[Test-995]

I'd rather want to see change challenges to weekly cap with passive reputation gain.

Something like, every cipher give you 100 standing, every eximus kills give you 50 standing, hydrolist capture give you 1000 standings and those kind of things.

Otherwise just allow us to do same challenge for multiple times, even with 1/10 efficiency.

Rerolling doesn't really fix anything imo, if people still have to do something they don't like (because one/week is extremely limited, and could easily roll another "bad" challenges), what is the point of rerolling? 

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, Voltage said:

The system is already designed around doing a percentage of the challenges (not all of them).

Except it isn't. Regardless of what DE's intent was, the design heavily emphasises doing all of the challenges all of the time. A Nightwave season's duration is limited, but the amount of Wolf Credits obtainable from it isn't, meaning that players are given incentive to get as much out of it as possible before the timer rolls over. With no Daily or Weekly caps and with infinite Wolf Credits gain past level 30, the system is "designed" to put players under maximum pressure. While I know it's en vogue to blame players for everything under the sun on these forums, the issue here is with the system, not the users. Player behaviour is defined by system design, and the behaviour you're blaming on the players is driven by Nightwave's fundamental design.

 

12 hours ago, Aldain said:

Allow players to once per week re-roll one weekly challenge (regular or elite) so that people can have a better chance at avoiding aspects of gameplay they don't like, or roll something they don't like into something they do.

The problem I see with this proposal is technical. By design, Nightwave offers a single unified list of challenges for all players. I suspect that part of the reason for this is to foster team play, as multiple players feel compelled to cooperate towards a common challenge. Never you mind that a lot of these challenges are heavily subject to in-team killstealting... The ability to re-roll a challenge would put one player out-of-sync with potentially the rest of the community. While that's not necessarily a showstopping problem (and indeed happens when some on the team have finished a challenge others are trying to achive), it's not a trivial change. There are a number of logistical issues, or at the very least decisions, which need to be addressed.

In no particular order... What list would the new roll be pulled from? Potentially the full list for the season? How many options would you offer per roll, could the system roll the same option and if not would rejecting the result of the roll be a possibility? Can the player re-roll a partially completed challenge, and if so does that matter? Does this have any kind of cost and if so how much of what resource?

Generally speaking, Nightwave seems entirely manual for the time being - something that's set by DE at the start of every week with no real capacity for randomisation. What you're proposing sounds like a good idea for a future season which can be procedurally generated and potentially offer an individualised set of challenges.

[Aldain]

36 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

In no particular order... What list would the new roll be pulled from? Potentially the full list for the season? How many options would you offer per roll, could the system roll the same option and if not would rejecting the result of the roll be a possibility? Can the player re-roll a partially completed challenge, and if so does that matter? Does this have any kind of cost and if so how much of what resource?

Ah yes, allow me to elaborate in listed order.

The list would be pulled from other challenges of the same tier, standard weeklies for standard weeklies and elites for elites with the exception of maybe things like the sortie elite as that is only possible if 5 sortie resets are avaiable, similar "once per day" challenges would also not be possible re-rolls to prevent lockout effects.

The player is given 3 options per roll, player picks one, rejecting could either be possible or impossible though that would be at the discretion of DE. I'd lean to allowing it to be refused personally, but I can see an argument either way. 

Yes a player can re-roll a partially completed challenge, but doing so will reset progress to zero, however the design would prevent something like rolling a 5 sortie mission 2 days before reset. If the options are rejected (assuming that is how the system is implemented) this re-roll is not refunded and progress on the challenge will remain as it was.

Cost would likely be a free, once per week re-roll that does not stack per week, in other words a use it or lose it option/fallback.

41 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

The problem I see with this proposal is technical. By design, Nightwave offers a single unified list of challenges for all players. I suspect that part of the reason for this is to foster team play, as multiple players feel compelled to cooperate towards a common challenge. Never you mind that a lot of these challenges are heavily subject to in-team killstealting... The ability to re-roll a challenge would put one player out-of-sync with potentially the rest of the community. While that's not necessarily a showstopping problem (and indeed happens when some on the team have finished a challenge others are trying to achive), it's not a trivial change. There are a number of logistical issues, or at the very least decisions, which need to be addressed.

I can fully understand these issues, though I personally don't see nearly as much teamplay coming out of Nightwave as would be expected, sure for things like sanctuary onslaught it does draw players to the mode for a few days but once most of the community completes the challenge it goes back to being dead. Also many complain about the "with friends" challenges which often just cause a recruit chat temp friend to be made and removed when done.

I can also see the logistical issues considering that there would be one mission different for each player, as the system is designed as a universal standard. The change I could see allowing for this would likely come down to simply marking the re-rolled challenge as complete (no reward given) and then making a "Personal" slot for the re-rolled challenge.

I do believe it would need more work to be fully realized, but a system like this could be a good way to meet the playerbase halfway and reduce dissatisfaction for some players. If implemented in a future season it could allow players to have both goals given and goals chosen which overlap with the goals the player themselves have in mind.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-04-24 at 7:04 PM, Aldain said:

Ah yes, allow me to elaborate in listed order.

The list would be pulled from other challenges of the same tier, standard weeklies for standard weeklies and elites for elites with the exception of maybe things like the sortie elite as that is only possible if 5 sortie resets are avaiable, similar "once per day" challenges would also not be possible re-rolls to prevent lockout effects.

The player is given 3 options per roll, player picks one, rejecting could either be possible or impossible though that would be at the discretion of DE. I'd lean to allowing it to be refused personally, but I can see an argument either way. 

Yes a player can re-roll a partially completed challenge, but doing so will reset progress to zero, however the design would prevent something like rolling a 5 sortie mission 2 days before reset. If the options are rejected (assuming that is how the system is implemented) this re-roll is not refunded and progress on the challenge will remain as it was.

Cost would likely be a free, once per week re-roll that does not stack per week, in other words a use it or lose it option/fallback.

The more I talked about the logistics of it, the more I realised this is very similar to item stat rerolls from the likes of Diablo 3 and The Division. You could follow similar rules, i.e. one reroll per week, three possible alternatives with the option to reject the reroll (without being able to repeat it). I'm personally against allowing partially-completed challenges to be rerolled, however, and there may need to be a "window of opportunity" to reroll before the option voids itself. Far too many challenges are dependent on daily resets, so it might be safer to simply lock people out of rerolling their challenges after... Say, server reset Tuesedy->Thursday? Mostly, I was trying to get into the nitty-gritty as that's where a lot of suggestions tend to sink or swim.

 

On 2019-04-24 at 7:04 PM, Aldain said:

I can fully understand these issues, though I personally don't see nearly as much teamplay coming out of Nightwave as would be expected, sure for things like sanctuary onslaught it does draw players to the mode for a few days but once most of the community completes the challenge it goes back to being dead. Also many complain about the "with friends" challenges which often just cause a recruit chat temp friend to be made and removed when done.

Well, I know from my own experience that friends of mine will start trying to organise teams for the dullest of the challenges, under the premise that we all need to do them. Challenge rerolling to me seems like a more appropriate option for a Nightwave implementation which already generates a unique challenge list per player, rather than a single one for the entire server... Similar to how Rivens work, I suppose. In the current implementation where everyone has the same set of challenges, a player re-rolling one of theirs would put them out-of-sync of almost the entire rest of the playerbase - something which might not be as much of an issue if all players were already out-of-sync with each other to begin with.

I'm not opposed to it, though. Just trying to look at the logistics behind it, is all. With the Wolf of Saturn Six coming to a close within the next few weeks, we're likely to see any major changes only with the next set of Nightwave.

[Aldain]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

The more I talked about the logistics of it, the more I realised this is very similar to item stat rerolls from the likes of Diablo 3 and The Division. You could follow similar rules, i.e. one reroll per week, three possible alternatives with the option to reject the reroll (without being able to repeat it). I'm personally against allowing partially-completed challenges to be rerolled, however, and there may need to be a "window of opportunity" to reroll before the option voids itself. Far too many challenges are dependent on daily resets, so it might be safer to simply lock people out of rerolling their challenges after... Say, server reset Tuesedy->Thursday? Mostly, I was trying to get into the nitty-gritty as that's where a lot of suggestions tend to sink or swim.

When constructing the idea initially I was often looking to other games with a similar setup for challenge completion and the benefits and downfalls of those systems so that's likely why they seem reminiscent of other games, in particular the reason why I leaned to player choice on the re-roll was due to remembering the time I spent playing Hearthstone where it was one click reroll with no options, often I'd get a quest even more disliked, hence the option for player choice.

Locking out the re-roll after a certain timeframe would also be a good idea to prevent the "daily reset lockout" that I didn't originally think about, though the reason why I'd personally lean to allow somebody to re-roll in progress missions would come down to changes in plans that can happen in life, for example completing one sortie for a 5 week sortie challenge when circumstances won't give the player enough time to complete 5 in a week, but the I can see the other side of the argument.

A 2 day grace period would also be a good idea for the lockout of the re-roll as it would still allow for 5 total days which is usually the max needed amount of time from what I've seen, if I've missed or forgotten one that takes longer please feel free to remind me, there's a lot of challenges to keep track of.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Well, I know from my own experience that friends of mine will start trying to organise teams for the dullest of the challenges, under the premise that we all need to do them. Challenge rerolling to me seems like a more appropriate option for a Nightwave implementation which already generates a unique challenge list per player, rather than a single one for the entire server... Similar to how Rivens work, I suppose. In the current implementation where everyone has the same set of challenges, a player re-rolling one of theirs would put them out-of-sync of almost the entire rest of the playerbase - something which might not be as much of an issue if all players were already out-of-sync with each other to begin with.

I'm not opposed to it, though. Just trying to look at the logistics behind it, is all. With the Wolf of Saturn Six coming to a close within the next few weeks, we're likely to see any major changes only with the next set of Nightwave.

I'm mostly thinking from a solo perspective so I apologize for my lack of insight on clan/friend preference, I should have considered that more thoroughly, but sadly I tend to stand alone outside of public matchmaking. If you have any ideas to adjust this possibility for both solo and teams do let me know, my trait as a solo player does limit my views on that and any input would be of help.

The out-of-sync issue is both a problem and an opportunity depending on how you look at it. While the problem is as you have discussed, I believe it may have an opportunity to bring extra life to the rest of the missions on the system, similar to how the old alerts would get players into missions they otherwise may not have gone into. This is something that I feel was lost with the change to Nightwave; Archwing missions in particular feel dead, whereas pre-Nightwave even on the Switch people were doing alerts on those mission nodes. However my feelings and experience aren't quite empirical data after all, but at the moment all I have is that and a theoretical suggestion.

I'm also grateful for the logistical input and counterarguments you've been presenting, it helps find cracks in the idea and assists in figuring out what would need to be addressed should it be implemented. After all, despite the system working in other games it may not be a right fit for Warframe overall, but there is also a chance it, or something similar to it, might be a relief to some of the complaints overall.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

On 2019-04-24 at 11:13 AM, Steel_Rook said:

Except it isn't. Regardless of what DE's intent was, the design heavily emphasises doing all of the challenges all of the time. A Nightwave season's duration is limited, but the amount of Wolf Credits obtainable from it isn't, meaning that players are given incentive to get as much out of it as possible before the timer rolls over. With no Daily or Weekly caps and with infinite Wolf Credits gain past level 30, the system is "designed" to put players under maximum pressure

The intent was to get people to play - and play a lot. The design as built works. If some people feel "maximum pressure" to farm a few extra wolf credits, thats on them, not DE.  I wonder if these same people felt maximum pressure to constantly monitor their phones so they could do every alert that popped up in the middle of the night or while they were at work or school.

As built, it is far easier to get formas, nitains, catalysts etc than under the old Alert system - and yet people want more.   Its never ending. Next will be - "We can roll 3 challenges, why can't we just roll them all"  

While it may bring relief to some of the complaints, it will just introduce more.  Thats what the players do - they whine. Half the complaints are from people treating it like a special one time Event that once expired they'll never get to participate.  Others complain the rewards aren't rewarding enough when they are more rewarding than the original Alerts. Still others complain that they can't do 100% of the challenges (regardless of reason - time, no friends, underpowered, whatever). And yet all of these people get more from it than they got from the Alerts.

Heres a hypothetical - lets say the design was you are presented with 12 challenges each awarding 1000 points.  You can do any of the challenges in a week but are capped at 10000 points per week.  This, in essence, is exactly like allowing one re-roll on one of 10 challenges.  BUt people would be crying "I did 10 of the 12 and was finished the day they were released.  Now I have nothing to do for a week - why can't you let us do the last 2 challenges and get the points."

In short, while I would like the option to re-roll any challenge I expect has an average (or forced) completion time greater than 30 minutes, I don't expect that if that were implement the community would be any less vocal about their displeasure.  All the while ignoring how many forma/catalyst/nitain/cosmetic alerts they skipped or missed under the old system.

 

[Aldain]

45 minutes ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

While it may bring relief to some of the complaints, it will just introduce more.  Thats what the players do - they whine.

That's kinda not a reason to never change things though, the usual whiners will whine for any reason, you can't change that, but below the players who never stop complaining there are players with valid complaints being buried underneath nonsense.

You can't stop players from complaining completely, but that's not the point of this discussion, the point is to try and alleviate SOME of the complaints, and yes, while it will give rise to new ones, I doubt there is a single thing that can be done that somebody won't complain about.

Complaints shouldn't be a reason to stop attempting new things, if that were the case Warframe would have died about 10-15 updates back from raw stagnation.

[Steel_Rook]

18 hours ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

The intent was to get people to play - and play a lot. The design as built works. If some people feel "maximum pressure" to farm a few extra wolf credits, thats on them, not DE.  I wonder if these same people felt maximum pressure to constantly monitor their phones so they could do every alert that popped up in the middle of the night or while they were at work or school. As built, it is far easier to get formas, nitains, catalysts etc than under the old Alert system - and yet people want more.   Its never ending. Next will be - "We can roll 3 challenges, why can't we just roll them all"  

For one thing, that's not true. I've personally gotten a lot more Catalysts and Reactors out of the old Alerts system than I have out of Nightwave. No, I didn't use the phone app or other tracking software, just kept an eye on alerts as I played. I've gotten pretty much none of that from Nightwave because Catalysts and Reactors are so expensive and I've spent my Wolf Credits on other things. While Alerts weren't ideal, at least they didn't make items mutually exclusive by running them through the same exceedingly stingy resource. But that's all immaterial.

More importantly, you're still blaming players for responding to a system with the behaviour that system was intended to incentivise. That's disingenuous and you know it. I get that you want to shift blame for structural problems with the game onto players for playing it wrong (that's what that whole post was ostensibly about) but that's not how things work. Games are designed for their players, and thus need to be designed around how players are naturally going to play them. That's why DE still talk about that "slot machine incident" with Kubrow cosmetic rerolls. Rather than blaming the player who spent potentially hundreds of dollars rerolling for being weak and stupid, the system was recognised as addictive and taken out of the game for that reason. Any game developer worth his salt needs to recognise that they are ultimately in control of how players end up playing their game. Blaming the end user is an abdication of responsibility.

Nightwave is a system with a limited time and limited progression, with the very real possibility of missing out on large chunks of it. Whether it'll come back or not is immaterial. The system's core design threatens players with missing out on potentially rare content, and this applies to literally everybody. The people who don't feel pressured are the ones able to manage this pressure themselves, but their ability to do so doesn't mean that pressure goes away. An open sewer doesn't stink any less just because I happen to have a stuffy nose and a high tolerance for bad smells. Dismissing players' complaints as "just whining" without even bothering to address their root causes beyond dismissing them out of hand is - as I said - disingenuous and frankly not worth addressing any more.

 

19 hours ago, Aldain said:

I'm mostly thinking from a solo perspective so I apologize for my lack of insight on clan/friend preference, I should have considered that more thoroughly, but sadly I tend to stand alone outside of public matchmaking. If you have any ideas to adjust this possibility for both solo and teams do let me know, my trait as a solo player does limit my views on that and any input would be of help.

Well, there is an admittedly ham-fisted way of addressing that. Let me replace one of my challenges with a specific challenge a friend of mine has. Granted, that works better in a system of all-random challenges where players will be out-of-sync by default. I'm going a bit off-topic here, but that might be a neat solution to that sort of issue, if DE decide to go down that route. And honestly - I think they will. Everything I've seen of Nightwave suggests that someone has to sit down at the end of the week and plan out the challenges for next week, which they will then slow-roll as that week advances. While that might work short-term, this is a very high-maintenance manual process which will have to be automated at some point. And I say "manual" because I refuse to accept it was "accidental" that all of the Dailies we got were "Kill 150 enemies with X damage type" on Week 2.

I personally foresee a future Nightwave event where every player receives their own set of events, possibly on much shorter timers. The Division, for instance, did "quarter-hourly missions" in the West Side Piers, where every player would roll for a new secondary objective every 15 minutes. They were pretty simple - kill with fire, kill with explosives, kill from 50 meters away, kill with melee, etc. If you finished the mission, you got the reward. If not, then it would roll over on the 15 minute mark and you'd get a new one. I suppose kind of like how the old Alerts system worked, now that I started talking about it. However, I can foresee a Nightwave season comprised predominantly of fast-renewing daily missions, with players able to reroll one per day or borrow one per day from a friend or some such.

Ultimately, though, I feel it's a bit too late in the day to propose changes for the Wolf of Saturn Six. The changes we've discussed here are significant and complex, so probably not something that's going to happen within the next two weeks before the event expires. However, I do want to give players a bit more control over their Nightwave challenges moving forward, and I do hope future Nightwave seasons will be a bit less "monolithic." Being able to reroll weekly challenges might be a good way to do that.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

2 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

For one thing, that's not true. I've personally gotten a lot more Catalysts and Reactors out of the old Alerts system than I have out of Nightwave. No, I didn't use the phone app or other tracking software, just kept an eye on alerts as I played.

YMMV - For me, the exact opposite is true - more cats & forma currently.  I will say I don't spend cred on cosmetics.

 

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

More importantly, you're still blaming players for responding to a system with the behaviour that system was intended to incentivise. That's disingenuous and you know it. I get that you want to shift blame for structural problems with the game onto players for playing it wrong (that's what that whole post was ostensibly about) but that's not how things work

No, I am pointing out that the system was intended to incentives consistent & constant gameplay. By this I mean getting the player base to play frequently (not taking months off the game), play many game modes, and play for extended periods (longer than just a 2 minute capture for a catalyst then logging out).  And its achieving that.  It was intended to replace alerts - and it does that.  And I was pointing out that people who don't recognize those two points are missing those two points.   Additionally, and only since it was brought up by a previous poster, the players self-inflicted need to do EVERY 'challenge' is exactly that - self inflicted.  If I worked at DE, and looked at the twitch streaming charts, looked at player usage/signing spikes around new content dumps with lulls in between, I would be trying to design mechanisms like nightwave to normalize the player statistics.

Calling it an "open sewer" hyperbole at best.  I'm also not claiming it is the best it could be - but I understand what it is and equally as important understand what it is not.  Even calling it "limited time" is misleading with the implication being there will be no return and a permanent miss on the resources you can acquire.  But the Alerts had "limited time" as well - in fact far more limited time as you had to be lucky with when you happened to sign on to play (and apparently you were) whereas now you have an entire week to peck away at it should you so desire.

As for addressing players concerns the very problem is that your concerns are not my concerns. And I mean that in a general way - the warframe community at large does NOT have common concerns - they don't even have common goals.  While a vocal minority can claim to speak for the masses - they don't.  They are imposing their view of the world on everyone else.  I could care less about cosmetics - For some they are everything.  I don't need credits/resources/whatever - some people that's their biggest issue. I don't find anything in the game challenging - some have a hard time surviving in low level missions.  Insert whatever you want - some people will care about it, some won't.

You seem to be of the opinion, and I may admittedly be wrong about this, that I am some kind of "DE can do no wrong" - which couldn't be further from the truth - in fact I am highly critical of them often.  By the same token, I'm critical of the playerbase who cry the sky is falling, this or that in the game is the worst ever, this or that is too hard.    In this particular case, I'm not even defending DE from the point of view that "Nightwave is good" but rather from the perspective of

• "I understand what they were trying to do, and it ticks most of the boxes for both them and a large percentage of the players". Obviously rather than ticking any boxes for some players, it simply ticks them off.  But to my point about common goals - no matter the system they implement this will be the case: some will be happy, some won't.  
• Additionally, I disagree with many complaints that over the course of a month, you can get less from this than from alerts. For some who apparently the sun shines on them often this may be the case, but I fail to see how for the majority that play the game when their schedule permits rather than when events in game occur, this system should be better.
• I disagree with people that view Nightwave as an "EVENT" in the traditional "EVENT" sense of Gate Crash/Eyes of BLight/Rathuum etc. 
• I disagree that the majority of the challenges are onerous.
• I AGREE that some of the challenges are no fun/tedious - 60 minute anything imposed by DE I don't enjoy. I will do my 5 hour survivals when I want thank you. I AGREE with people who would like to see them gone - but I'm not up in arms about it nor do I think they are challenging, they are marked as "Elite" and as a result while I don't care for them, I'm not running with a burning pitchfork at DE.
• I do not necessarily feel the wolf credits are properly implemented - I would have preferred 15 credits for every rank (or pick your number  -scaling or not per rank) then all the crap that is awarded between credits (emotes etc) be things that are purchased.  Because I don't see how this can keep up season after season - how many emotes do we need.  If they are worried it will be too easy to acquire forma/nitain/potatoes that way they could simply limit ones monthly purchases to equal however many monthly alerts there used to be for that item.  Then we could just get to rank 15 or what have you and stop if we didn't care about the cosmetics and emotes.  Of course this "solution" would conflict with the main objective of making people play more hours, more often, and more consistently.

 

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

I was pointing out that people who don't recognize those two points are missing those two points.   Additionally, and only since it was brought up by a previous poster, the players self-inflicted need to do EVERY 'challenge' is exactly that - self inflicted.  If I worked at DE, and looked at the twitch streaming charts, looked at player usage/signing spikes around new content dumps with lulls in between, I would be trying to design mechanisms like nightwave to normalize the player statistics.

Playing the game in the first place is "self-inflicted." Everything is optional, every aspect of gameplay is voluntary. This distinction is meaningless. Players are going to not just play a system the way it was designed, but exploit it in ways that the system allows itself to be exploited. Warframe players want rewards, typically quickly. Nightwave offers rewards, but their speed is predicated on how much of each week's challenges one completes. It's basic logic, then, that completing all of the challenges is the fastest way to progress. Yes, a player can opt out of completing all of the challenges, but that choice goes against optimal reward acquisition and so isn't going to be the intuitive one. A system which expects players to manage their own time and level of engagement but allows them to binge on it to the point of degrading their own experience is a badly-designed system, as far as I'm concerned.

There's a reason Daily Standing Caps exist. Yes, a large part of that reason is content gating and spreading out the grind, but I'd argue an equally large part is protecting players from themselves. It's a common bit of developer wisdom that "players will optimise all the fun out of your game if you let them," which is why smart game developers... Don't let them. DE designed a system that they expected players would do something like 60%, but failed to make THAT the median path. To me it was obvious that BECAUSE the system allows players to run 100% of content for faster progression, players were going to do just that, resent the experience and then complain about it. There's only so far you can go blaming players when what they were going to do was nakedly obvious before the the patch even dropped. This exact problem should have been obvious to anyone with any experience either designing or even really playing MMOs.

While players do need to take some amount of responsibility for their playing habits, I'm of the opinion that the majority of the responsibility still falls on the developer for the habits their design helps form. I gave the example of an "open sewer" simply because I have plumbing issues at my house and it's fresh in my mind, but you can go with any example. Leave your wallet in the road, blame other people for stealing it. Close a bridge, blame drivers for cutting across residential areas. Enable open-world PvP in a PvE zone, criticise people for ganking. The game's rules define behaviour, thus they are to blame for bad player habits first and foremost.

 

1 hour ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

I'm critical of the playerbase who cry the sky is falling, this or that in the game is the worst ever, this or that is too hard.

1 hour ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

And I mean that in a general way - the warframe community at large does NOT have common concerns - they don't even have common goals.  While a vocal minority can claim to speak for the masses - they don't.  They are imposing their view of the world on everyone else.

These two statements contradict each other. You can't treat the Warframe community as a collection of individual with their own wants, needs and objectives, then turn around and blame "the playerbase" for hyperbolic statements which are equally restricted to a vocal minority. The reason I call it "disingenuous" is that whether the community is unified or divided appears to come down to which better suits the argument you're making. When you need the community's feedback to be disregarded, you present them as divided where individual feedback is irrelevant because it's unrepresentative. When you need the community's feedback to be taken into consideration, you present them as united in their irrationality. I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways and attempting to do so taints the tone of your entire argument. We've consistently sidelined the issues with Nightwave to slag the community for not liking it, even though a critical reading of pretty much any Nightwave complaint thread will reveal no clear overruling consensus.

The problems with Nightwave are inherent in Nightwave itself, not with the way people choose to play it. People choose to play Nightwave the way Nightwave was designed to be played, and the way Nightwave was designed to be played - intentionally or not - is unhealthy for long-term player retention. It pushes all players into activities they don't want to engage in under the threat - real or perceived - of missing out. Playing the event "correctly" requires wrestling with what I'd describe as unnecessary psychological pressure. Some can handle it, most seem to buckle in different ways and their overall experience degrades as a result. As someone who's opposed to psychologically manipulative, habit-forming game design as a matter of principle (even if I'll still engage with it), THAT is the core issue with Nightwave that needs to be addressed. Not the people, but the system.

 

1 hour ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

• I disagree with people that view Nightwave as an "EVENT" in the traditional "EVENT" sense of Gate Crash/Eyes of BLight/Rathuum etc. 
• I disagree that the majority of the challenges are onerous.
• I AGREE that some of the challenges are no fun/tedious
• I do not necessarily feel the wolf credits are properly implemented

So point-for-point (somewhat):

Nightwave might not be the same kind of event as the ones you mentioned, but it's highly similar to events like the Fomorian, the Razorback Fleet and the Ghoul Purge. It's not a one-time event so much as a recurring one. Except unlike the Ghoul Purge, I have no idea when The Wolf of Saturn Six will return, other than I know it'll be at least another 10-24 weeks from now. So... potentially not for another six months, probably more. In this regard, it's actually closer to the Prime Vault. Say the Prime Vault opens for, I don't know... Carrier Prime. Anyone who really wants that thing will have to farm for it in the next few months not because it'll be gone FOREVER, but because it'll be gone for a really long time, potentially years. And if anything, the Prime Vault itself is less of a FOMO because all Primed parts are tradable and you don't need to be online for substantial amounts of time every week over the next few months.

Point being, the way Nightwave is structured can end up feeling like a deadline at my job. I have 10 weeks to complete this project, or else I lose my opportunity, potentially for another calendar year. That nightwave reminds me so much of working on my dissertation thesis, if not in the specifics then in the mental pressure it creates, tells me there are fundamental issues with the system's approach to incentives.

I'm not going to argue the nature of individual challenges, personally. I tend to fall on the same side of them as you, in that their difficulty isn't as much of an issue as their tedium. DE wanted to encourage all the players to try all the things, but only ended up ensuring everyone would have to play content they don't like. It's a bit like a smorgasbord where everyone has to eat from every dish. Heaven help you if you're a vegetarian, lactose intolerant or have some kind of peanut allergy. Or if you're like me and just don't like greasy food. I'm of the opinion that players ignoring large portions of a game and sticking just to the portions they like isn't just a good thing, but what keeps large-scale MMOs alive. Nobody likes every single aspect of a game. Rather, most people get by on sidestepping what they don't like. The Nightwave challenges, thus, are at issueless because they're difficult but rather because they're guaranteed to have at least one or two that you (the generic "you" in this case) really really don't like.

As to Wolf Credits... Yeah, no disagreement there. Nightwave IS the Warframe Season Pass. It's mostly garbage nobody wants thrown in there to pad out the actual useful rewards. It's the same practice most loot boxes use. And while I would normally share your concern about padding out future Nightwave seasons... Well, let's just say that Overwatch has managed to pad out their loot boxes with sprays, voice lines, profile icons and emotes for coming on three years now. With every event, the amount of garbage nobody wants out of their loot boxes grow, so you're never any more likely to get the stuff you actually do want. Emotes aren't trivial to make, but stuff like sigils and glyps and sprays (I forget what Warframe calls them) and static props - those aren't as expensive. I've no reason to suspect that DE will ever run out of Nightwave padding. Especially if they stick to the 14-week release cycle, possibly with a couple of weeks between seasons.

But to your broader point - yes, I'd much rather have Wolf Credits per rank, either instead of or in addition to the rank cosmetics. I absolutely despise how The Wolf of Saturn Six was set up, where you had to go through several levels (and so several weeks) earning tchotchkes before you got an actual useful reward. A friend of mine I introduced to the game recently was particularly incensed at all the non-rewards he was getting, which made the game as a whole a harder sell. Seriously, just have Credits AND a reward at every level. Just because Fortnite did it this way doesn't mean it was actually good...

In short - we seem to be in general agreement on the technical side, but I still maintain that the community strife you're seeing isn't ultimately the fault of the community.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Steel_Rook

[Aldain]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

However, I can foresee a Nightwave season comprised predominantly of fast-renewing daily missions, with players able to reroll one per day or borrow one per day from a friend or some such.

Hm, quicker turn around on objectives might be a potential option, though that could have some drawbacks when it comes to grinding out standing. Even having an hourly 500 standing challenge might backfire with people thinking they NEED to do every hourly challenge, despite that not being the case. Unless I'm not understanding exactly what you're saying properly.

The current problem with the current Nightwave system is that on paper it seems like a good idea, but how the overall system was implemented feels like it missed several marks, mostly in the reward design and the mission design rather than the core concept itself. Reward design in particular just has a large amount of "filler" items within it, the most egregious of these being the Glyphs, Emblems and Sigils. Overall I think they could do better front-loading more utility based items at lower ranks, rather than making players have to slog though ranks that give cosmetics when most early to mid level players would prefer things with more overall use, though I could be wrong in that assertion.

They would also need to figure out a better way to deliver Cred for the next Nightwave, there's little rhyme or reason to the way it was in WoSS.

Seriously, why is it rank 3, 6, 12, 16, 20, 24 31? There is no pattern there and the gaps between cred income are just absurd at times.

[Steel_Rook]

1 minute ago, Aldain said:

Hm, quicker turn around on objectives might be a potential option, though that could have some drawbacks when it comes to grinding out standing. Even having an hourly 500 standing challenge might backfire with people thinking they NEED to do every hourly challenge, despite that not being the case. Unless I'm not understanding exactly what you're saying properly.

Well, I'm personally a fan of Daily/Weekly standing caps. Much as those might suck to try and progress through, the limits they enforce allow the underlying systems to be substantially more flexible. Take Orb Vallis, for instance. I don't need to run Bounties AND fish AND mine AND run Conservation AND trade in Debt Bonds. I CAN do all of those, sure, or I can do some of them or even just one of them. For me personally at this point, it's Conservation since it's the one aspect from Fortuna that I actually enjoy. While the comparison isn't precise, you can do similar things with a fast-turnaround Nightwave. Give people a few weeklies and dailies, then maybe offer a new challenge every hours with the ability to reroll it or copy it from a friend a single time. Enforce a Weekly Cap, then ensure players are going to have several times the Standing available as compared to what's needed to hit the Cap and you're just about done.

Granted, I'm speaking off the top of my head so there are probably a lot of things I'm overlooking. Generally speaking, though, I find the best way to keep players from feeling pressured to do ALL of the challenges is to simply cap their Standing. Nightwave already does this by offering only a finite number of challenges (43K's worth of Standing per week for all of them), so I see no reason not to go with a 43K Standing Cap but offer double the amount of dailies, weeklies and elite weeklies, just as a lazy example.

With the above design, you can easily offer people, say, three "hourly" missions offset by 20 minutes from each other, which rotate through a series of simple challenges. And again - I'm aware that that's basically what Alerts were, but the difference here is Wolf Credits. With Alerts, you had to get the precise one which offered the precise item you wanted. With Nightwave, you get currency for doing them, with which you can later buy the reward you were after. So it doesn't matter if you miss the Challenge which pops up at 6 AM, as that's still only worth like 500 Standing - same as the Challenge which popped up at 7 PM when you were already playing.

The long and short of it is "Caps," though. They're unpopular, but they work.

[Aldain]

10 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Granted, I'm speaking off the top of my head so there are probably a lot of things I'm overlooking. Generally speaking, though, I find the best way to keep players from feeling pressured to do ALL of the challenges is to simply cap their Standing. Nightwave already does this by offering only a finite number of challenges (43K's worth of Standing per week for all of them), so I see no reason not to go with a 43K Standing Cap but offer double the amount of dailies, weeklies and elite weeklies, just as a lazy example.

Well that would solve the issue of player choice, albeit in a bit of a heavy-handed way.

I can agree that Caps work (though I utterly hate how Vox is behind Solaris U's cap personally) but I'm not entirely sure that it would change all that much of the perception.

Also I'm not sure that there's enough mission variety to increase the baseline weekly challenge pool much.

10 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

With the above design, you can easily offer people, say, three "hourly" missions offset by 20 minutes from each other, which rotate through a series of simple challenges. And again - I'm aware that that's basically what Alerts were, but the difference here is Wolf Credits. With Alerts, you had to get the precise one which offered the precise item you wanted. With Nightwave, you get currency for doing them, with which you can later buy the reward you were after. So it doesn't matter if you miss the Challenge which pops up at 6 AM, as that's still only worth like 500 Standing - same as the Challenge which popped up at 7 PM when you were already playing.

I do agree that they could meld the old Alert system into Nightwave to make something better than either alone though.

Having alerts be an alternate way to get standing along with a Cap on standing would be a good way to go about allowing players to avoid challenges they don't like.

The only issue I can see with this right now is "Standing Overflow" which can happen say if somebody completes a 5k mission when they only have 3k standing left, unlike bounties and syndicates Nightwave's standing is on a weekly cap which means that causing lost standing can be a much bigger irritant to some players.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Aldain

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, Aldain said:

The only issue I can see with this right now is "Standing Overflow" which can happen say if somebody completes a 5k mission when they only have 3k standing left, unlike bounties and syndicates Nightwave's standing is on a weekly cap which means that causing lost standing can be a much bigger irritant to some players.

Simple - hold it in Escrow, reward it next week. Or, hell, just award it to people and count it against next week's cap. To be perfectly honest, I wish Syndicate standing worked the same way. Catching a Kubrowdon Incarnadine and earning maybe 150 out of the 8000 Standing it awards is irritating. Granted, that does make the system a LITTLE abusable by letting players game the system and grab more than the allotted Standing per day/week/time period... But I'm not convinced it matters long-term. Since that's counted against the next period's cap, the most you can do is get slightly ahead of the curve.

I mean, let's say I managed to get 4K extra Standing with SU today, out of my 20K cap. Tomorrow, my Standing cap would be 20 - 4 = 16K. I could repeat the same trick and carry over another 4K into the day after that... For a total Rep gained of 20K today. Same as my cap, just differently distributed. And this patter repeats until the day I gain only as much as my cap will allow (i.e. 16K) and leave it at that, at which point I can start earning 20K from the day after that. It's a bit unintuitive, but I feel it's a decent way to handle overflow in any sort of capped system with the only downsides being transient at best.

[Aldain]

1 minute ago, Steel_Rook said:

Simple - hold it in Escrow, reward it next week. Or, hell, just award it to people and count it against next week's cap. To be perfectly honest, I wish Syndicate standing worked the same way. Catching a Kubrowdon Incarnadine and earning maybe 150 out of the 8000 Standing it awards is irritating. Granted, that does make the system a LITTLE abusable by letting players game the system and grab more than the allotted Standing per day/week/time period... But I'm not convinced it matters long-term. Since that's counted against the next period's cap, the most you can do is get slightly ahead of the curve.

I mean, let's say I managed to get 4K extra Standing with SU today, out of my 20K cap. Tomorrow, my Standing cap would be 20 - 4 = 16K. I could repeat the same trick and carry over another 4K into the day after that... For a total Rep gained of 20K today. Same as my cap, just differently distributed. And this patter repeats until the day I gain only as much as my cap will allow (i.e. 16K) and leave it at that, at which point I can start earning 20K from the day after that. It's a bit unintuitive, but I feel it's a decent way to handle overflow in any sort of capped system with the only downsides being transient at best.

That's a little bit complex, I mean it makes sense on paper but something just feels off about it that I can't put my finger on...

[Steel_Rook]

3 minutes ago, Aldain said:

That's a little bit complex, I mean it makes sense on paper but something just feels off about it that I can't put my finger on... 

Well, to be fair we ARE going a bit off-topic 🙂 In general, I have a problem with the way this game does Standing Caps for precisely this reason - doing a long and difficult task may yield only fractional rewards if I undertake it at the wrong time. With the ability to carry over excess Standing into the next period with a corresponding reduction in the next period's reward, this issue is removed without depriving the player of due rewards. It's complex on the back-end. From a player's perspective it should be pretty simple. At some point - whether when finishing a Bounty Stage or a mission - the game would alert you that you've reached your Daily Standing Cap with X Syndicate. Tomorrow when you log in, your your cap with X Syndicate might say 17 931 instead of 20 000, but you'd only even know this if you went to check first thing in the morning.

But again - I'd like to see that for all Syndicates irrespective of what happens to Nightwave.

[Aldain]

27 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I have a problem with the way this game does Standing Caps for precisely this reason - doing a long and difficult task may yield only fractional rewards if I undertake it at the wrong time.

I can't disagree with that statement, hell that's why I get standing for Cetus and Fortuna exclusively with Gems, Fish and Bonds, but that may more be down to Bounties being unrewarding overall.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Aldain