Dear Developers, low drop chances won't keep players engaged

[AndyBeans]

9 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Sure, I get that much. My point is I don't see much of a problem with people not wanting to "do the work." I'm of the opinion that the point of having cool toys is actually playing with them, rather than the effort of getting them. Warframe in general has this problem where by the time I complete a task and reap its rewards, it's time to junk them and work on the next task. The way MR works is particularly egregious: if I choose to play with my maxed-out weapon then I don't make progress, but if I choose to make progress then I don't get to play with my favourite toys. I love my Opticore Vandal but I don't get to play with it a lot because I need to level up a bunch of other weapons I actually hate.

Again, there's this belief that letting people have what they want will in some way damage their experience and that having "goals" is the only way to stay invested. I feel exactly the opposite. Having what I want is when I enjoy the game, and actually having stuff to do with it is what keeps me around. Throwing Vaulted Relics back into circulation doesn't give me more stuff to do. It just offers more rewards for stuff I was already doing. In fact, the removal of Alerts damaged my enjoyment of the game quite substantially because they were an easy way to have the game pick my next mission for me - something Nightwave doesn't do.

In short, I feel Warframe needs to focus less on grind and time sinks keeping players from having the cool guns they want and more on giving us opportunities to actually use them.

I'd already read your post, I was just pointing out that you were being too literal.

However, I disagree with your view, "value" comes from effort so reducing the required grind reduces the value of the reward. Making things easier doesn't increase engagement, as is patently obvious from all of the posts calling for more "challenging" content, in fact it would probably cause even more troubles for DE as people burn through content quicker and expect every grind to be nerfed.

Above all, DE have telemetry which shows them how ALL players are engaging, not just those on the forums, and they use this to ensure the game is balanced between their income and user engagement.

[Steel_Rook]

41 minutes ago, AndyBeans said:

However, I disagree with your view, "value" comes from effort so reducing the required grind reduces the value of the reward.

I strongly disagree with this statement. Effort does not contribute to a reward's value. It contributes to the reward's cost. That's often mistaken for value by means of the sunk cost and occasionally appeal to wealth fallacies. Cost is a measure of the difficulty of attaining an item, value is an estimate of its use once attained and worth is the net result of the two. Thus, the more an item costs in terms of money, resources or labour, the more its value has to also increase in order for it to retain its worth. Increasing the cost of an item without increasing its value makes it objectively worth less. Despite being a grown man, I still value my Nerf Longshot CS-6 toy gun as a decoration because it cost me money I had on hand. If I had to pull 10-hour shifts in a coal mine every day for 10 years in order to buy it, that wouldn't make the toy more valuable. It would simply make it not worth the time and effort, which could be spent on items of substantially greater intrinsic value.

That's objectively. Subjectively, people place value in all manner of things from collectable tchotchke to childhood memorabilia to things just because they're the perfect shade of pink, and I can't really fault them for it. Progression systems aimed at a broad-spectrum audience can't be based on subjective value, however, because that's literally impossible to balance around. Ephemera drops, for instance, are massively rare and by your logic would be tremendously valuable, but they hold no value to me. I don't like the way an of them look and I can't justify dumping a million and whatever else credits into crafting them. I certainly wouldn't have bothered grinding for them if they hadn't randomly dropped on me in the process of doing other things. A progression system based around such subjective value inherently exploits its audience by artificially inflating cost and leading to eventual disappointment.

That was my whole argument right there. The value of an item comes from HAVING and USING it. Its cost is the only thing affected by the act of EARNING it. And Warframe has a bad habit of slapping unreasonably high costs on fairly low-value items, fully knowing that people are going to grind for them regardless of worth. I simply don't find that to be an optimal approach to player retention. It works, but by coercion rather than motivation.

 

57 minutes ago, AndyBeans said:

Making things easier doesn't increase engagement, as is patently obvious from all of the posts calling for more "challenging" content, in fact it would probably cause even more troubles for DE as people burn through content quicker and expect every grind to be nerfed.

You're conflating a whole bunch of "things" here. The concept of "challenge" has very little to do with the game's reward system. It's tangentially related in that higher challenge generally equates to a higher cost, but the people asking for challenge aren't doing so within the context of rewards but rather the context of gameplay. There's a very distinct difference between "things to earn" and "things to do," and people asking for challenge are typically asking for more "things to do," even if they themselves often conflate the two. Rewards of some description are obviously necessary to make the challenging content worth it, but the goal is the gameplay first and foremost. Inversely, people asking for less grind aren't referring to challenge because their issue isn't finding things to do. Rather, they either feel forced into doing things they don't like, or feel there aren't enough things to do in order to justify the cost of rewards attached to it.

People don't "burn through content" by gaining rewards, but rather by burning out on content, instead. If a piece of content would not be worth playing without the rewards attached to it, then that's badly-designed content... Or worse, not content at all. Adding a few new (or rather, Vaulted) Warframes onto an existing activity is not content because it isn't giving us anything new to do. It's just slapping rewards onto something we were doing already. If I was burned out on Void missions, then slapping more rewards onto content I wasn't going to do anyway changes nothing. At best it fails to affect me, at worst it makes me feel compelled to do it and thus actively degrades my experience. Playing the Vaulted Warframes themselves is new content, obviously, but that content starts AFTER obtaining them. Prior to this, it's replaying old content.

And yes, I'm aware that the concept of "engagement" isn't the same as the concepts of "fun" or "entertainment" - the point is to keep people playing regardless of circumstance. I'd argue, however, that engagement without enjoyment is counter-productive and a primary cause of burn-out in players. It's a bit like binging on energy drinks instead of going to sleep. Sure, it kinda works short term but lack of sleep will catch up to you sooner or later and likely make you sick in the process. People who burn out but keep running the grind treadmill tend to crash hard, leave and either take long breaks or in some cases never come back. Naked engagement is habit-forming. Break the habit once and playing becomes really difficult.

You can keep players "engaged" with Skinner boxes and manufactured value, but there's only so long you can burn through your audience before you have to either give them something new to actually DO, or else you're going to bleed subscribers. These ridiculously low percentage chance drops on an activity which is itself RNG based aren't going to keep people engaged long-term. Not when the only reward at the end of the journey is disappointment at an item that's never, EVER going to be worth the cost you paid to get it. I've been dealing with burnout in various video games for over a decade now, so I can tell you from experience - if you're not enjoying the game now, then rewards later will never be worth it.

[Els236]

Il y a 10 heures, SordidDreams a dit :

Difference is, there's actually a reason why frames and guns are behind bad RNG, namely the fact that you can buy them. Those hard-to-get items 'encourage' players to spend money on the game. That's how the f2p business model works in a nutshell, you deliberately put an annoyance into the game and then give players the option to pay money to bypass that annoyance. And yes, that does mean you're deliberately making the game worse, which is why I'm very much on the fence about f2p.

 

DE isn't usually like this though, in fact they are on record for being one of the only developers that removed a paid mechanic from the game because it resembled a slot machine. 

So on one hand, they don't like slot machines, yet all of these frames are essentially hidden inside RNG slot-machine missions, the only difference being one is real money and the other is our time; it's up to you which you think is worse as I personally think my time is more valuable than £5/£10 worth of plat. I'm also of the mindset that "if I can't get this frame without grinding for 2 weeks, then screw DE, I just wont get the frame until they change drop chances". I know a lot of people don't think like this, but they really should so DE gets their butts in gear and does something about the god awful RNG of some things.

When it comes to cosmetics like the mask you mentioned and the ephemeras that people are always talking about, they said they did that because it gives players the idea that "they really earned it and are good at the game"... except that isn't the case here; someone could kill Wolf once at MR5 and get the operator mask; does that mean they are "epic players"? no, of course not, it means they got damn lucky. On the flipside, I see people moaning they did Exploiter Orb over 150 times and never got the ephemeras, does that therefore mean they suck at the game? Again, no.

DE really needs to work this extremely flawed system out. They did say they were going to change ephemeras, but that's not the only thing that needs changing.

[SordidDreams]

2 hours ago, Els236 said:

DE isn't usually like this though, in fact they are on record for being one of the only developers that removed a paid mechanic from the game because it resembled a slot machine. 

Eh... they have a history of removing the most blatant examples of such things. The DNA scrambler, the paid revives, that sort of thing. The more insidious methods of squeezing money out of people, though, like time-gating and BS RNG? They've actually been getting worse.

Used to be frames just dropped from bosses you could go fight at any time with no requirements other than having access to that node, you'd have the three parts in a handful of runs, and you could build them immediately with resources you already had stockpiles of. The last few, though? Hildryn drops from a boss that requires a resource only available sometimes. Baruuk requires ranking up with Little Duck, which itself requries a ton of toroid farming for standing, subject to MR-based daily caps, as well as farming up some of those much-maligned Profit Taker resources. And everything since Gara always requires whatever the newest resources happen to be, putting yet another roadblock in the path of a player seeking to obtain a frame for free.

Remember how annoyed people were when Equinox showed up and required you to farm up eight parts from a boss instead of just three? Yeah, seems like a walk in the park compared to some of the most recent ones, doesn't it?

2 hours ago, Els236 said:

When it comes to cosmetics like the mask you mentioned and the ephemeras that people are always talking about, they said they did that because it gives players the idea that "they really earned it and are good at the game"... except that isn't the case here; someone could kill Wolf once at MR5 and get the operator mask; does that mean they are "epic players"? no, of course not, it means they got damn lucky. On the flipside, I see people moaning they did Exploiter Orb over 150 times and never got the ephemeras, does that therefore mean they suck at the game? Again, no. 

I agree completely and I have no clue why DE thought it was a good idea. It's like they have blinkers on and can't see that there are other ways of creating a challenge than low drop rates and long farming times. That seems to be their answer to everything, everything's either RNG-based or time-gated.

2 hours ago, Els236 said:

DE really needs to work this extremely flawed system out. They did say they were going to change ephemeras, but that's not the only thing that needs changing.

Yeah, the thing is they said future ones would follow the Bleeding Body model, i.e. they would require a lot of some resource rather than a lucky RNG roll. And while that's better, it's still not good. RNG is just dependent on luck, but farming up 25 yellow nitain or whatever isn't exactly difficult either, it's just tedious. The only challenge is to the player's patience. I want something that actually challenges the core gameplay skills of the player, like running a really difficult parkour obstacle course or getting a lot of consistent headshots or defeating a tough boss.

Edited May 7, 2019 by SordidDreams

[Els236]

@SordidDreams

Yes, you're 100% right.

Gara and Revenant dropped from Bounties, however the Revenant BP required you to take on a quest which was only available after Rep. Farming.

Garuda also drops from bounties, so not too bad, although there are still like 11 different drops you can get instead of Gara/Revenant/Garuda parts while doing bounties, so still behind an RNG wall and also a grind-wall because you need PoE/Orb Vallis resources, which require rep. farming for the blueprints.

Harrow is split across 4 different missions, one of which is the most hated and tedious mission types ever, which also has a super crap drop-table.

Things became egregious with Ivara though and where things really went downhill (in my opinion). Spreading her parts and even her main BP throughout the Spy missions on the Star Chart, where each of said missions can give any number of crap rewards; also, Spy is my least favourite game mode simply because I suck at it, so not only do I have RNG for the drops, but I also have RNG where I may or may not get a 3/3 successful extraction (which is required for Ivara parts to drop).  

Nidus was god awful and it took me probably more than 50 C rotations to get the Neuroptics, to the point where I wasn't the only person on the forums thinking the drop-rates were bugged and Neuros. no longer actually dropped. It was always a kick in the teeth to get to C rotation and get an Ammo Drum or Magazine Warp or some such crap.

Khora is also a damn good example of this. You have to get to Zone 8 of S.O., which not everyone wants to do, so I have the RNG of finding a party willing to do it, then I have the RNG of whether or not I get the Systems (what I'm missing) or the Main BP (as they are both in C rotation), AND I could even extract with some BS captura scene I already have 20 of or any number of Relics.

Baruuk is locked behind Rank 3 of Vox Solaris, which forces you to Rep. Grind to rank 5 with Solaris United, then do some really crappy bounties with a 3/12 chance for getting Gryo/Atmo/Repeller, then farm one of the most horrendous resources ever, being toroids, to then Rep. Grind with Vox Solaris in order to buy the blueprints. Then it's not over as you need Orb Vallis resources to then even craft that frame.... holy hell.

Hildryn isn't bad for those who have done the Thermia Fractures event, but is completely unobtainable for anyone who didn't log on during those periods, which is stupid.

So, yes, looking at it, things are going downhill fast and Equinox does look like a cakewalk in comparison. 

 

Isn't it also funny how most of the frames I mentioned there (exception being Khora) are most of the 325 plat frames? So, although it is clearly built for "pay 2 skip", they then want to wrangle more money/plat out of us for the privilege. 

[000l000]

Il y a 19 heures, AndyBeans a dit :

I think you're taking the phrase "people want rewards but don't want to play the game" too literally. It's hyperbole, it doesn't actually mean they don't want to play, it means they don't want to do what's required to earn the rewards.

No one earns anything, Wolf is a random encounter with random (and quite low tbh) rewards. Everything about wolf and his rewards is basically random, OP is complaining about not dropping an all but mandatory cosmetics when players (including me) still didn't have dropped a hammer set.

And i've killed a LOT of Wolf, so people should stop with the quite insulting "earn" argument as if Warframe was some kind of job or whatever. Wolf rewards drop rate is completely unreliable and in the end there's no more satisfaction in killing an upteenth version of a boss who's only dropping uncommon mods. As i said in a previous thread, 35% drop rate is way too low especially for a boss you may encounter only a few times a day, perhaps only one if you don't play that much. Last 5 times i've killed him i've only seen uncommon mods so DE should fix this 35% non sense and at least make him drop his actual boss signature item the same way any other boss is - with a 100% drop rate.

[Teridax68]

For me, it comes down to respecting the player, their time, and the effort they've put into the game: I'm okay with players "working hard" (as much as that deserves to be said for a video game) or spending a long amount of time trying to obtain a sought-after reward, and in fact I believe that doing so is essential if the game is to give the player goals to play towards. When the game randomly throws a poorly-designed enemy at the player that takes twenty minutes to kill, however, who then is most statistically likely to drop the likes of Fever Strike or Molten Impact, essentially no reward at all, that I find is eminently disrespectful. The many recorded instances of this happening I think have given the game some pretty negative publicity recently, as it is a clear example of grind systems at their most egregious.

In general, I think the core problem with drop systems as they're implemented in Warframe is that they are completely random: the player could theoretically kill a thousand, even a million Wolves of Saturn Six, and still not get his mask, or even all the parts to his sledge. Sure, some players get lucky and get rare drops far earlier than expected, but many other players get unlucky and go for much longer without getting what they've worked for: these are the players who complain, who burn out, and often who don't come back. By contrast, no player comes to the forums or Reddit to praise the game's drop systems for giving them the Blazing Step ephemera on their first run of ESO, and ultimately I don't think getting lucky in that way really encourages players to commit for longer than they normally would, even though unlucky streaks have certainly reduced long-term commitment among many in the playerbase.

Because of this, I think Warframe really needs to start implementing pity mechanics in its rewards: considering how easy it should be to log how many of each mission type the player has played, which rewards they got, how that compares to the norm, and so on, it shouldn't be particularly difficult either to detect when players are having streaks of bad luck, and how to amend that. In the case of mission-specific rewards, this should involve giving players individual rare rewards that they haven't obtained yet after an exceedingly large number of "failed" runs, and in the case of random assassins like the Wolf of Saturn Six, both his spawns and his rewards should adjust so that the player doesn't end up playing for massive amounts of time without encountering him, and certainly doesn't end up getting some ultra-common mod as a sole reward. Removing the bloat from drop tables would also help towards this, as adding stuff like Vitality, Fever Strike, Heavy Impact, and so on to the drop tables of rare enemies is downright insulting, and at this stage I think does more harm than good to the game's longevity.

[Autongnosis]

In the meanwhile @Alselein i read your post and my heart broke cause i met the Wolf a total of 2 times over the entire season... Fun times...

Also ye, i agree with the point you make

[thewhalechan]

I think similar thing happened with the stalker sigil, it was a very rare drop and for whatever reason DE made it a 100% drop chance. So why not the mask for example?

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, Els236 said:

DE isn't usually like this though, in fact they are on record for being one of the only developers that removed a paid mechanic from the game because it resembled a slot machine.  

They are, though. I came into this game with head full of stories about how Warframe has DA BEST FTP EVA!!! just from random hype, and it really isn't all that good. Sure, there are no paid loot boxes, but the game doubles down on aggressively habit-forming gameplay, instead and still nickel-and-dimes you at every turn. It's just you can, in theory, avoid paying money for most of it if you play the game religiously. Catalysts and Reactors are still straight-up P2W as far as I'm concerned. Yes, they're available in-game in deliberately tiny amounts and their cost in resources and time is always vastly disproportionate to their RMT currency cost, yet they still constitute one of the most significant power boosts in the entire game. And that's just one example of many.

Sure, DE have stayed away from (or rather removed) the most egregiously terrible monetisation practices, but this is still a F2P game with the majority of the problems that come with a game of this nature. I'm personally fine with most of it because I don't believe in the myth of "free games." I came into Warframe with the explicit understanding that I'm going to spend money on it the same was I would on something like Payday 2 or Overwatch or XCOM 2. Luckily, I got a 75% off on Platinum on my first day and bought 1000 of it. That right there took the sting out of most of the F2P mechanics, since I had a buffer with which to buy slots, Catalysts/Reactors, cosmetics and the odd item I really wanted to have (like Atlas).

At the end of the day, while you CAN play Warframe for free, that really isn't the best experience by design. Your mileage my vary, but even a little bit of money makes a huge amount of difference.

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

LOL, I'm one day into farming Aura Forma and the drop chance and the absolute chore at getting one of these for my prime collection has me already thinking about dusting off Monster Hunter World or Elite Dangerous...

[(PSN)BenHeisennberg]

On 2019-05-06 at 12:12 AM, Alselein said:

trying to farm the saturn six mask. 

Not even sure it's actually supposed to be in yet.  Made me restart the game and doesn't work on operator.