DE you need to start caring more about player time investments again

[Senguash]

Increasing ephemera droprates and removing crafting costs from quill arcanes are the latest two examples in a somewhat recent tendency of completely invalidating player time investments.

I genuinly don't understand why this keeps happening. It's terrible for two reasons:

1. It makes old content worse. The plains of eidolon resource system makes no sense now.

Take Radiant Sentirum for example.
You used to need 500+ of those if you wanted a complete arcane set.
How much do you need now?

Behold, the ONLY non cosmetic item in the game, that requires sentirum.

The only one.

If you feel that mining two sentirum is too difficult for you, don't worry,
the tusk thumpers will spoonfeed them to you.

2. It feels TERRIBLE if you actively engage in new content.

I farmed something like 500-600 sentirum because I really wanted a complete arcane collection.
It felt really good when I was done with it, now not so much anymore.

When an ephemera is put in the ESO rotation C droptable with 1.01% drop chance, I thought you knew it was going to be hard to get.

The it takes about 22 minutes to get to zone 8.
The drop rate is 1%
You could've done the math.
It took me somewhere between 60 and 70 runs to get it and that's fairly average RNG.
That's about 30 hours of ESO.

And now it was said on the devstream ephemera droprates are gonna get increased...

 

 

Dear DE, it sucks because historically you've been really good at caring for player investment.
There's a lot of good examples, it's just longer and longer ago.

It just doesn't make sense to me.
If you're a new player the grind looks nonsesical in old content and daunting in new content.
If you're a veteran you just get punished over and over for playing the game.

If it's legitimately just because whenever new progression systems are being introduced, there's noone who does the math on the timescale of things, that needs to change.
Getting things like droprates, crafting costs and syndicate standing values right on release, (or within a couple of days) should be a huge priority.
When things like PoE and Fortuna drops your core audience definitely cares about whether these things feels sensible and fair or not.
You cannot just fix things several months later.

Edited May 3, 2019 by Senguash

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

The first rule of this game is...."don't get attached to anything in it"...They honor your time in certain ways in by not taking away your bait BPs and the such as an example...BUT...they will shuffle everyone along after so much time has passed for the next big content drop... or at least get you as close to ready as possible for it...

I chalk it up to the new players as the main factor and trying not to run them off with the daunting "grinds" (with an S) facing them with five variations of said grind to plow through to get at the latest content coming in November or December...

Time to get them past POE and into Orb Vallis..and then after Orb Vallis into whatever is coming out at the end of the year and the hype surrounding it....

I'm sorta like well don't stop with the Mining Tool working for everyone early on in Venus, where as the Nostrum one that took me forever to get, might as well have the best shock spear work on "all" the fish from Orb Vallis to POE already...

Edited May 3, 2019 by (PS4)FriendSharkey

[SpicyDinosaur]

Welp, people have now compl,ained ebout everything officially

[v1ld_wf]

1 hour ago, Senguash said:

I legitimately just because whenever new progression systems are being introduced, there's noone who does the math on the timescale of things, that needs to change.
Getting things like droprates, crafting costs and syndicate standing values right on release, (or within a couple of days) should be a huge priority.
When things like PoE and Fortuna drops your core audience definitely cares about whether these things feels sensible and fair or not.
You cannot just fix things several months later.

Good post.  I'm a newer player who has been happy to see the changes that have, as you rightly said, invalidated your past investment.  I think your closing statement above is spot on and wanted to repeat it for emphasis.  The math involved is very simple and it's difficult to assume that rates were set by anything other than design when these things were released, so it's very important to get it right out the door - and not hard to.

I suspect however, this change has nothing to do with intent and is purely a reaction to the volume of recent discontent from the player base - which means that the original intent is still there to set such bad rates, it's just been tempered in this one instance.  It's also a real problem in that we're just being conditioned to complain loudly when the most egregious excesses happen to get them fixed.  Better if DE conditioned their intent to more closely match what the player base is willing to swallow - I hate to use that phrase but it's an accurate reflection of what I've seen of the grind since I started in November (the horrible VS atmo grind is right up there for eg).

DE have used the word "content" in weird ways in what I've seen of devstreams and such since I started.  It's used for new open worlds, frames, weapons, art, sound, graphics and a whole host of other things I too consider content.  It's also used for NW which is for the largest part a set of repetitive tasks assembled from existing missions - yes, some art and a couple new enemies, but mostly a rehash.

Similarly "challenge" seems sometimes to be conflated with a low drop rate (ephemera) which is a weird way of looking at things.   RNG distributions have a very long tail (to infinity!) and saying so-and-so was unlucky to be in the 90th percentile is silly, 10% of players will have even worse luck and 10% of that will be in ridiculously long tail territory.  That isn't challenge, it's pure randomness.  All of this should be well known to those setting these rates.

I skipped all of the syndicates because of the grind and daily caps, buying augs from trade and eschewing the use of arcanes - the grind and numbers just didn't seem like it would be fun to me.  I started doing the open world syndicates only after the recent changes that made arcanes much easier to get[*].  So there's a good side to not having the ridiculous grind in the first place - more players will try for the existing "content" in the game instead of simply saying it's not worth it.

But yeah, please get it right in the first place instead of pushing the limits and reacting to complaints.  Please do consider what is meant by challenge and content.

[*] The daily standing caps have done what I feared and made me take an extended break from the game because all I was doing when I logged in was to satisfy them instead of playing the stuff I do like in the game.  NW was the other reason, it showed a direction I didn't like and today's NW2 announcement basically keeping all of that time-bound structure while simply easing the numbers involved validates that decision.

Edited May 3, 2019 by (NSW)v1ld

[Chaemyerelis]

So because you had to suffer through and farm for all this, others should too, got it.

[Yamazuki]

It only makes sense as time goes on some things get easier, there's already plenty of things to grind on Warframe, and as time goes on there's more added onto what there is to grind.

Edited May 3, 2019 by Yamazuki

[Voltage]

I feel similar in regards to the Exploiter Orb being added, Tusk Thumpers, Plains of Eidolon Arcane cost removal, and more. It's extremely hard to share this thought as any player will be happy to play the game less for the same reward. I mean, who wouldn't? However, the fundamental structure of Warframe is around grinding, and when something is hard to get, the goal should be to pace yourself and get it eventually, not get the drop rate raised. If DE had made Ephemeras too hard and fixed it in a week or so, it would make sense, but many many weeks later is quite honestly just to annoying for anyone interested in doing new content. The Wolf Mask is a perfect example of something I won't farm because I have seen everything get easier, and I highly doubt that the Mask of Saturn Six is an exception.

2 minutes ago, Chaemyerelis said:

So because you had to suffer through and farm for all this, others should too, got it.

This response is ignorant of what OP's statement is. He doesn't want any players to suffer, he wants time investments to be respected (See: Hema, Vauban Prime crafting changes, PoE Arcane changes at first, etc.).

There is a large difference between:

1 hour ago, Senguash said:

Getting things like droprates, crafting costs and syndicate standing values right on release, (or within a couple of days) should be a huge priority.
When things like PoE and Fortuna drops your core audience definitely cares about whether these things feels sensible and fair or not.
You cannot just fix things several months later.

AND

4 minutes ago, Chaemyerelis said:

you had to suffer through and farm for all this, others should too

[v1ld_wf]

5 minutes ago, Chaemyerelis said:

So because you had to suffer through and farm for all this, others should too, got it.

No you didn't get it, read it again.

I've probably ground less than most people in this game, didn't do any of the things OP has done, and still completely agree with their core point: do some thoughtful design up front, don't screw a bunch of people over and then go back and fix it when people complain.  They can compute all of the average efforts involved here, they can also compute what will happen to folks that fall into the 70th percentile or 90th percentile - all of this is calculable ahead of time, there should be no surprises when someone has to spend 20 hours on a basic thing when you designed that into the game.

Edited May 3, 2019 by (NSW)v1ld

[Senguash]

6 minutes ago, (NSW)v1ld said:

Good post.  I'm a newer player who has been happy to see the changes that have as, you said rightly, invalidated your past investment.

Thanks, and I'm glad you see it that way.

The way we can both win here is if they made all these changes within 3 days instead of within 3 months.

This issue only really bothers me because it doesnt have to be just one of us can win.

[MagPrime]

Been here for years, and I have to honestly say that I've never felt my investment invalidated by improvements.

I don't believe that I need to be compensated for playing an ever changing game nor that things should be stagnated in an attempt to make me feel my time is respected.  

Just happy the amount of grind has been reduced in some places.

[v1ld_wf]

1 minute ago, Senguash said:

Thanks, and I'm glad you see it that way.

The way we can both win here is if they made all these changes within 3 days instead of within 3 months.

This issue only really bothers me because it doesnt have to be just one of us can win.

Exactly, well put.  I chose to simply skip out on activities where the numbers made no sense to me, but that's an individual choice and I was ok with forgoing arcanes if I had to to avoid the grind - but it's a bad decision to put the player to in the first place.

I sincerely hope they have a basic internal tool that shows player impact for different rate settings.  For eg, x% drop rate, #tries for 50/75/90% success chance, y hours per try, z hours for 50/75/90% success chance.  The structure of open world bounties is quite bad for the player, but it too is easy to figure out and dump into a spreadsheet for easy validation when rates are set.

(I've done dozens upon dozens of T5 Ostron bounties and only ever gotten one Eidolon Lens - this is not surprising or even a major outlier given how those reward structures are set up.  This is not bad luck, this is built in.  I just bought 4 from trade, which is the only mitigation for this kind of "content" and "challenge".)

[Warhydra]

drop rate too low, crafting cost too high, people complain

DE increase drop rate and remove crafting cost, people complain

Man I really don't envy their position.

 

Giving terrible loot chance is why Anthem is crumbling, I do hope DE increase loot chance more. 

Edited May 3, 2019 by Warhydra

[v1ld_wf]

8 minutes ago, Warhydra said:

drop rate too low, crafting cost too high, people complain

DE increase drop rate and remove crafting cost, people complain

Man I really don't envy their position.

They're still complaining about the first thing you mention, not the second - I hope you get that.

The point being made was to get this right in the first place, not the 2nd thing you mention.

Gonna bow out of this discussion, but I thought I'd mention this once more as many folks seem to be assuming the point made by the OP was to not improve things - it's not, they're saying to get things right out the door more often since the effort involved is predictable.

Edited May 3, 2019 by (NSW)v1ld

[YandereWaifu]

13 minutes ago, Voltage said:

I feel similar in regards to the Exploiter Orb being added, Tusk Thumpers, Plains of Eidolon Arcane cost removal, and more. It's extremely hard to share this thought as any player will be happy to play the game less for the same reward. I mean, who wouldn't? However, the fundamental structure of Warframe is around grinding, and when something is hard to get, the goal should be to pace yourself and get it eventually, not get the drop rate raised. If DE had made Ephemeras too hard and fixed it in a week or so, it would make sense, but many many weeks later is quite honestly just to annoying for anyone interested in doing new content. The Wolf Mask is a perfect example of something I won't farm because I have seen everything get easier, and I highly doubt that the Mask of Saturn Six is an exception.

This response is ignorant of what OP's statement is. He doesn't want any players to suffer, he wants time investments to be respected (See: Hema, Vauban Prime crafting changes, PoE Arcane changes at first, etc.).

There is a large difference between:

AND

 

1 hour ago, Senguash said:

Increasing ephemera droprates and removing crafting costs from quill arcanes are the latest two examples in a somewhat recent tendency of completely invalidating player time investments.

I genuinly don't understand why this keeps happening. It's terrible for two reasons:

1. It makes old content worse. The plains of eidolon resource system makes no sense now.

Take Radiant Sentirum for example.
You used to need 500+ of those if you wanted a complete arcane set.
How much do you need now?

Behold, the ONLY non cosmetic item in the game, that requires sentirum.

The only one.

If you feel that mining two sentirum is too difficult for you, don't worry,
the tusk thumpers will spoonfeed them to you.

2. It feels TERRIBLE if you actively engage in new content.

I farmed something like 500-600 sentirum because I really wanted a complete arcane collection.
It felt really good when I was done with it, now not so much anymore.

When an ephemera is put in the ESO rotation C droptable with 1.01% drop chance, I thought you knew it was going to be hard to get.

The it takes about 22 minutes to get to zone 8.
The drop rate is 1%
You could've done the math.
It took me somewhere between 60 and 70 runs to get it and that's fairly average RNG.
That's about 30 hours of ESO.

And now it was said on the devstream ephemera droprates are gonna get increased...

 

 

Dear DE, it sucks because historically you've been really good at caring for player investment.
There's a lot of good examples, it's just longer and longer ago.

It just doesn't make sense to me.
If you're a new player the grind looks nonsesical in old content and daunting in new content.
If you're a veteran you just get punished over and over for playing the game.

If it's legitimately just because whenever new progression systems are being introduced, there's noone who does the math on the timescale of things, that needs to change.
Getting things like droprates, crafting costs and syndicate standing values right on release, (or within a couple of days) should be a huge priority.
When things like PoE and Fortuna drops your core audience definitely cares about whether these things feels sensible and fair or not.
You cannot just fix things several months later.

the way i see it is that they had x thing in mind at first but that wasnt well recieved by the community and so an alternative was added based on feedback. Eg plains and then fortuna.

lots of people complained about the costs of things from POE then we get fortuna and woopteedoo costs arent nearly as much of an issue in fortuna yet theres still a time investment. to be specific arcanes in this case, i remember seeing the cetus arcanes cost and i was like ehh ill do without it gotta get standing and all this other stuff to that i could use for other things, fortuna comes, im happy cuz i get standing and i can now buy an arcane and i dont have to craft it afterward and even better they said they were adjusting plains to suit fortuna based on the feedback, adding more conveniences like being able to do bounties without passing through the gates which can be a long wait if your on a potato and thumpers which are an ok challenge and honestly something i prefer doing for resources than all that mining and fishing though id still do fishing as mining is really rng, needless to say now i have much more of the cetus arcanes cuz of how much easier they are to get. im sorry that you had to work so hard and that grind is now meaningless but this was done for the sake of others who probs like me didnt have that much time to invest in getting these things or plat to buy them at the prices that they were at due to the grind behind them.

[Autongnosis]

Tbh, more than invalidating player investment i feel thinly insulted by being showered in resources i have literally no need for. Maybe two years ago, but now? At this point I'd rather not get them, so i won't have to look at those piles in my foundry and think, "oh man i really want to go in the plains and pray to spawn logic that a thumper spawns to fight it so i can drown in #*!%ing eidolon gems i have no use for..." 

I am refining those for the lols, if i keep it up and farm 10k refined Thysts/Sentirum will i win a prize? 

At least get a rep sink into those stupid syndicates so i can waste all that useless stuff you drown me into. 

 

Ephemeras as well were a kick in the nuts. Oh, this is prestige cosmetics! Oh cool how do we get them? By farming easy as S#&$ casualised content and hoping to win the #*!%ing lottery of all things. Genius. 

 

Edited May 3, 2019 by Autongnosis

[Xzorn]

It's literally always been this way.

Not that I agree with it but nothing has really changed and that's why the Hema fiasco was so comical.

The older something gets the easier it gets to attain and the newer the harder. That's just RPG-style games, esp F2P ones.

I dunno doesn't seem there's any changing that. I've just gotten used to farming things knowing my time will be halved if I wait.

[Warhydra]

3 minutes ago, (NSW)v1ld said:

The point being made was to get this right in the first place, not the 2nd thing you mention.

Getting everything right the first time pretty much never happens in this game or any other I've ever played, improvements are always required after the initial launch. 

 

[MJ12]

2 hours ago, Senguash said:

You cannot just fix things several months later.

Why? Why should DE be forced to maintain a frustrating and/or overly time-consuming system in a broken state simply because they didn't have the time to unbreak it immediately after it was introduced, or if they didn't think it was a problem at the time, but later realized that it was, in fact, an issue? Your proposal means that if something's not fixed within the week, it should never be touched ever again. A brief look at this would show you how awful this would be for the game.

Do you think the game would be more fun if you had to painfully grind up Control Modules one by one?

Or if you got all of a thousand credits per mission outside of random Alerts no matter what?

Or had to deal with bosses only having a chance of dropping a Warframe part, which was a physical item that could be lost if it fell into a pit?

What about the Mods 1.0 RNG grind (imagine if literally every mod that ever dropped in the game was a Riven mod)?

Or what about having to suffer through Oxium dropping in 1s and 2s?

I can keep going on and on about this. When DE has failed to respect "player time investments" it's generally because the underlying time investment is absurd and unreasonable. Otherwise, drastic change would obviously be unnecessary.

[SpicyDinosaur]

I literally have enough glappids in my inventory for the anspatha brace, and I just got them fishing. It's oceans at night, and a resource booster and possibly a smeeta will help you out, although oxylus will show you hotspots and ink fish for your game at least.

 

Why would you use that brace anyway. Use the Juttni Brace or better yet the Certus Brace

 

Edit: I just realized it literally asks for 2 sentinrum and then 3 of the glappid pieces. And the large number is how many you have. WTF? Why are you complaining again?

Edited May 4, 2019 by SpicyDinosaur

[MagPrime]

23 minutes ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

I literally have enough glappids in my inventory for the anspatha brace, and I just got them fishing. It's oceans at night, and a resource booster and possibly a smeeta will help you out, although oxylus will show you hotspots and ink fish for your game at least.

 

Why would you use that brace anyway. Use the Juttni Brace or better yet the Certus Brace

 

Edit: I just realized it literally asks for 2 sentinrum and then 3 of the glappid pieces. And the large number is how many you have. WTF? Why are you complaining again?

They spent a lot of time farming that stuff because other parts required them.  Since DE made changes, that's the only part that needs the resources they spent a lot of time farming.  They feel disrespected, and their time spent farming has been devalued.

[SpicyDinosaur]

2 hours ago, MagPrime said:

They spent a lot of time farming that stuff because other parts required them.  Since DE made changes, that's the only part that needs the resources they spent a lot of time farming.  They feel disrespected, and their time spent farming has been devalued.

thanks for explaining that for me, I am clearly not good and that reading stuff. 🙄

[000l000]

Good post. I'm tired of seeing casual everywhere and tbh i don't have a life, so everything i've spent ingame, time or money, is golden. Since fun is highly overrated investment is all i care about, i don't care much about fun and if i'd have a job, i'm pretty it'd be one where i can get as money as possible no matters how interesting it'd be.

I don't want to do anything else but play Warframe in my life so please DE, can you make us farm Kuva in real life too, i'm so bored.

Depression is real !

[Steel_Rook]

21 hours ago, Senguash said:

I farmed something like 500-600 sentirum because I really wanted a complete arcane collection.
It felt really good when I was done with it, now not so much anymore.

That's... Really bizarre logic there. Other people now have what you have, and that makes it worth less, somehow. Unless your value estimate of those Arcanes was based on the number people who DIDN'T have them, then that feeling is illogical. You haven't lost your Arcanes and it's pretty clear you weren't using all of them to begin with. Exclusivity and rarity were never part of their selling point. Their actual in-game effect was. I could see maybe being disappointed if you were looking to sell them for Platinum, but I don't see that argument being made here.

This whole thing reminds me of an old joke. "I smashed my thumb with a hammer 500-600 times. It felt really good when I stopped." Just because something exists doesn't mean you're obligated to have it. It's always a choice. You chose to dumb dozens of hours grinding for an unreasonably grindy item. That unreasonable grind was recognised and addressed, which I'd argue is a good thing. Not improving flaws with the progression system because of what reads like basic jealousy is counter-productive for the game's long-term future. I mean, you don't get your money back when I get a 75% discount on Platinum.

 

21 hours ago, Senguash said:

It makes old content worse. The plains of eidolon resource system makes no sense now.

Yeah, that was kind of the point. The original Cetus resource system was a pile of hot garbage. Switching over to the Fortuna resource system is a marked improvement, predominantly by sidelining it to a large extent. Warframe is not Age of Wushu or even World of Warcraft. While nobody can really complain about HAVING fishing and mining minigames, the way Cetus made them absolutely vital for its new progression system, which also happened to be Operator end game, was a mistake in the first place. The changes deliberately sideline those activities and minimise their impact while empowering players to skip them entirely. It's a tacit admission that DE's attempt at turning Warframe into an early 2000s world MMO was misplaced, marking something of a return to form for the game.

It's a bit like how the infinite Archwing Launcher, the Archgun Lancher and then later Railjack were a tacit admission that Archwing-specific missions are themselves a pile of hot garbage and the only way Archwing gear is ever going to be widely used is by being integrated into other content. Not every content development gamble pays off, and I think it's pretty clear at this point that Cetus as it was originally designed REALLY didn't. All the changes between that and Fortuna are testament to just that. And while I might complain about "bait for Standing," that's still a step in the right direction from a usability standpoint.

 

21 hours ago, Senguash said:

If it's legitimately just because whenever new progression systems are being introduced, there's noone who does the math on the timescale of things, that needs to change.
Getting things like droprates, crafting costs and syndicate standing values right on release, (or within a couple of days) should be a huge priority.

It's mostly because DE have a conservative approach. Err on the side of "too grindy," improve drop rates and acquisition methods after the player base has had a go at it and a chance to comment. The alternative would be to err on the side of availability, which means having to nerf drop rates and acquisition methods after release, and THAT generally makes people really angry. That, and people have stocked up on what was supposed to be rare by the time you make changes anyway. It's why developers err on the side of stinginess initially, so that subsequent changes meet with less resistance.

Getting drop rates on release is not in the cards, regardless of the amount of math you do. No plan survives contact with the enemy, no progression model survives contact with what players are and aren't willing to do. Rather, with what players are and aren't willing to do despite resenting doing it. Even in the best case scenario, it's always a gamble so why not make the safe bet? That, and releasing massively grindy content first means it keeps the compulsive portions of the player base busy for a while, while reducing costs later gradually introduces the rest of the player base into it.