Nightwave Thoughts

[SuperPiatos]

Welp, after weeks of grinding for Nightwave Standings (but missed a few missions) and is now lvl37 I realized some things:

1. Nightwave is in the middle of "beginner friendly" and "for veterans".
   • Why beginner friendly? This makes those beginners that spams only Hydron or only does EXP farm think about other stuffs that is also important i.e. fishing, mining, Venus & Earth Standings and make them want to get to lvl30 for the Arcane Energize, Umbral Forma and Saturn Six Armor.
   • Why for veterans? This also reminds them of the things I mentioned above
   • Why in the middle? Some beginners think that it's too hard. Veterans only do it for the Arcane Energize (for selling to plat), Umbral Forma and Saturn Six Armor (which in my opinion isn't that good)
2. Wolf of Saturn Six himself gives people a challenge. I don't know if Wolf's spawn rate is goes up when you have low leveled gears but at this point, people are making it a meme. "Want to farm the Wolf Sledge? Go equip low level weapons". But with his sturdiness (think much more sturdier than stalker), immune to abilities and his move set and the invincible wolf plebs, he is hard to kill even with max level weapons and good mod setup.
3. For "mid" players, they can challenge themselves with the 1hr Survival/40waves Defense missions and will eventually want to be strong/er. This also encourages the "mid" players to try out the 2hr+ Survival missions that is nowhere close to what the longtime players experienced with the maximum revives per day "feature".

These are my thoughts on the Nightwave Event and I am also one of those "mid" players. The event helped me to be more flexible especially the Nightmare quests. Because before this, I was only spamming Rhino and didn't want to use other frames until I tried the Nightmare Mobile Defense in the higher leveled planets.

[LoveNot]

i disagree with point 3, there should be no point in burning hours, on hours, with a high chance as time goes on for mission failure for whatever reason (*cough* host migration *cough*),  for nightwave/ as a challenge. 

What I consider it promotes, is more power creep decisions/Meta/ easy way out, just to get it over with, not to mention some (casuals) player, would easily be burned out going "try hard". Seriously, going into infinite scaling enemies that one-shot you, would either force the player to believe in either one shot-ing enemies back, or become unkillable. How is that quality in gameplay or player experience?

what's even the point in spending hours within a single mission, benefiting absolutely nothing (not even needed for nightwave rep or credits), except "XP", and small amount of mats (screw kuva, rivens are terrible and kuva is useless)?

 

I'll also note, i believe nightwave is NOT beginner friendly, (Lazy me for now wanting to share my opinion further)

Edited April 25, 2019 by LoveNot

[Firetempest]

I think the hour long missions should be turned into spend a combined X minutes in X mission type. So a newer player can choose to play ~12 rot A's over the course of a week while a older player can just do it in one go if they choose to. Its an "elite" chore but do-able by any tier player with less fear of trolling. Its not like they make you start on a tier 3 planet to begin with.

Edited April 25, 2019 by Firetempest

[-CdG-Zilchy]

A lot of what you say makes good sense but I would like to touch on 1 point. Wolf does not spawn more when you have low level weapons, that's been a myth since Stalker days. His spawn rate increases with the amount of players in the group, there is no algorithm in play determining the overall firepower ofeach player and increasing the odds. The reason it seems this way is because the level where most players are in a 4 man group which is actually increasing the spawn rate is Hydron. Where people are typically bringing less gear.

[-CdG-Zilchy]

4 minutes ago, Firetempest said:

I think the hour long missions should be turned into spend a combined X minutes in X mission type. So a newer player can choose to play ~12 rot A's over the course of a week while a older player can just do it in one go if they choose to. Its an "elite" chore but do-able by any tier player with less fear of trolling.

Then it wouldn't be an elite challenge. Tbh it still isn't but you get the idea. It's not a challenge to stay in a level 10 survival for 5 minutes. In it's current format it is at least a challenge for newer players and for them at least, earning the elite title.

Edited April 25, 2019 by Zilchy

[Firetempest]

31 minutes ago, Zilchy said:

Then it wouldn't be an elite challenge. Tbh it still isn't but you get the idea. It's not a challenge to stay in a level 10 survival for 5 minutes. In it's current format it is at least a challenge for newer players and for them at least, earning the elite title.

Neither is starting at V Prime lvls 3-8. Elite is rarely strictly elite and a poor term for more focused Actions. That's their core names. Acts. daily/weekly Actions. They are not missions, or story. Supposedly just an act of devotion. Much like any old Alert. They were an Act of attention to the game. You saw them you were present for them and you did them. None of them lasted an hour. Tossing in a tridolon with a friend is damned mission, making a fake recruiting friend for a hour is a mission. And reaching past 30 in NW is definitely not the most glorious goal anyway. Being "elite" doesn't get you much more of anything when its +5 extra ranks past 30 for one more catalyst. just lets you finish the reward tree faster so you can take a few weeks break... wait, what?

Why does a devotion meter need extra try-hard additions when they are mostly "do the things more" actions. I see it as a system trying to be too many things at once when they are already planning extra difficulty options. But again, will they even be rewarding.

Challenge in WF is gear checks. Devotion is time. In NW, to a newer player cant give time to all the acts without already having put in the time for the gear checks. Where as those who have already farmed can finish each devotion tree faster with less effort. The whole system gets easier with time instead of being a balanced attention check throughout it.. which was... originally the point? Alerts rewarded attention. NW rewards late game players more with less need for attention and newer players with burnout trying to scrape every point for rewards that have no timeline in returning and may very well be over a year.

[-CdG-Zilchy]

4 minutes ago, Firetempest said:

Neither is starting at V Prime lvls 3-8. Elite is rarely strictly elite and a poor term for more focused Actions. That's their core names. Acts. daily/weekly Actions. They are not missions, or story. Supposedly just an act of devotion. Much like any old Alert. They were an Act of attention to the game. You saw them you were present for them and you did them. None of them lasted an hour. Tossing in a tridolon with a friend is damned mission, making a fake recruiting friend for a hour is a mission. And reaching past 30 in NW is definitely not the most glorious goal anyway. Being "elite" doesn't get you much more of anything when its +5 extra ranks past 30 for one more catalyst. just lets you finish the reward tree faster so you can take a few weeks break... wait, what?

Why does a devotion meter need extra try-hard additions when they are mostly "do the things more" actions. I see it as a system trying to be too many things at once when they are already planning extra difficulty options. But again, will they even be rewarding.

Challenge in WF is gear checks. Devotion is time. In NW, to a newer player cant give time to all the acts without already having put in the time for the gear checks. Where as those who have already farmed can finish each devotion tree faster with less effort. The whole system gets easier with time instead of being a balanced attention check throughout it.. which was... originally the point? Alerts rewarded attention. NW rewards late game players more with less need for attention and newer players with burnout trying to scrape every point for rewards that have no timeline in returning and may very well be over a year.

Ok you seem to be ranting a little here when all I was doing is discussing it. First off alerts didn't award attention, they awarded not having a job or any other commitments in your life that prevented you being able to jump online wheneveran alert popped up. The end of the day if they have trouble completing the Act it is therefore elite to them. You're against awarding devotion in your post and yet you want them and yet you want them to "devote" their time to doing 60 mins of survivals anyway... which is an oxymoron. Indeed the only thing you're really advocating for is that the mission have less hard enemies in it which again, defeats the purpose pf it being an elite challenge in the first place.

[SastusBulbas]

7 minutes ago, Zilchy said:

Ok you seem to be ranting a little here when all I was doing is discussing it. First off alerts didn't award attention, they awarded not having a job or any other commitments in your life that prevented you being able to jump online wheneveran alert popped up. The end of the day if they have trouble completing the Act it is therefore elite to them. You're against awarding devotion in your post and yet you want them and yet you want them to "devote" their time to doing 60 mins of survivals anyway... which is an oxymoron. Indeed the only thing you're really advocating for is that the mission have less hard enemies in it which again, defeats the purpose pf it being an elite challenge in the first place.

Er, I work 12h shifts 5 days a week, had around 50 Nitain, and only missing a couple if cosmetics from alerts, I pretty picked and ignored alerts when I was playing.

 

Still got to find time, learn to hunt, and now need to make friends to do missions. 4 or 5 missions left to do this week. 

[HexOmega111x]

Il y a 1 heure, SuperPiatos a dit :

The event helped me to be more flexible

You are one of those type of player. You accept to "play the nightwave game" and you use it to create a new game experience. 

I don't participate to those nightwaves treads anymore. Always the same songs. I'm glad to read something new and positive this time. 

[-CdG-Zilchy]

13 minutes ago, SastusBulbas said:

Er, I work 12h shifts 5 days a week, had around 50 Nitain, and only missing a couple if cosmetics from alerts, I pretty picked and ignored alerts when I was playing.

 

Still got to find time, learn to hunt, and now need to make friends to do missions. 4 or 5 missions left to do this week. 

Solid effort working that much.  It definitely can be done and while it can never suit everybody, it is better for the majority of casual players to not have to set twitter alerts, apps etc and try get that alert at 4am.

[Shadow-Spawn]

Nightwave is a middle finger from DE to its gaming community.

I cannot remember the last time I logged in to play because it's no longer any fun.

[Uber.Munchkin]

A poster pointed out in another thread that they thought that I was pretty much the target audience for Nightwave, I'm MR20 but have pretty limited play time that means I get to play maybe once or twice during the week for a couple of hours and most Sundays for about 4 hours.

All told I have enjoyed Nightwave so far, the challenges have been fun to do.  However I steer well clear of the 1hr+ missions as it's just too much of my overall available playtime for it to be worth it, also hour long endless missions aren't really that exciting, it's just do the same thing over and over again for an hour.  I would be broadly supportive of something like the change mentioned above where it was changed to a total amount of time spent doing that mission type, that way at least I can vary the tileset.

I have appreciated the reminders to get out and look at the open world as I am terrible at remembering to get my rep farmed for PoE & Fortuna, I think I'm still only at like rank 2 or 3 with both of them, but I'll get there eventually.

The rewards have been good, I have managed to picked up some slots and get the two Aura mods that never appeared for me in alerts, I've also picked up a stock of Nitain and some nice cosmetics as well as the cosmetics you get from the levels of rep.  I'm at around about Rank 10 or so with Nightwave and I expect I'll get to 12-14 before the end and that is fine, I don't really need the Umbral Forma as I don't have any Umbral builds for my frames and if the armour cosmetic looks cool I can pick it up later.

The Wolf himself is ok, I don't enjoy fighting him but I also don't hate it, he's just a boring bullet sponge that I can't use any of my cool powers on.  His drop table is garbage though, he has never dropped anything other than the same two stance mods for me.  It's worse than the endless Dread blueprints from Stalker.  I really wish the fight with the Wolf was something more fun but I'm also not sure how that would be done. The biggest problem with him is when he turns a quick 10 rounds levelling at Hydron or Helene into a 30+ minute war of attrition because everyone is there levelling gear.

I am excited to see what comes next with Nightwave, DE are hopefully paying attention to how well Nightwave has done, they have the analytics about which challenges were most and least popular, ahead of next season and can tweak things accordingly.  Hopefully they will remove the statue challenge from the next season though as I have never managed to get it done due to the really low proc rate of statues in missions.

All told, for me, Nightwave is a solid improvement to the game and I look forward to seeing what DE add in next.