Start to phase out RNG.

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, Hmm...interesting. said:

I suppose it could work, but at the same time, I feel like if we're going to go through the trouble of curving drop tables like that, we might as well go all the way and make a completely reliable, predictable system that is fair to the players. 

The idea was that it would be a mid-ground compromise.

By keeping the base RNG system, it means that you have the base game functioning exactly as it always has. By implementing just the 'personal drop table' function you would make the overall game more accessible for everyone. But the bias ones make the game actually rewarding for players that are able to scale up their play more successfully.

Whether solo or in a team the combined effect would get the kind of rewards that you're looking for with your changes, with one complete difference:

You cannot ever reliably base the performance of a player or team on stats in Warframe because the stats are so wildly variable depending on as little as the player's mood or who they joined a team with.

Because it's co-operative, because invasions into missions happen, because the composition of a team creates different roles for individual players, it's too random per mission to allot points to anything we do.

Imagine if you were running the Sorties and the un-nerfed Wolf spawned into your Exterminate. The un-nerfed version at level 70 took a team of four a documented 24 minutes to kill with the weapons they had on hand since many Warframe abilities are completely ineffective and his immunity to Status blunts any and all builds we have for taking down tanky enemies in any convenient space of time. Now imagine if the Sortie rewards for that mission had been based on performance. Because part of the reason that the Wolf was so difficult was the invulnerable allies also at level 70 that chucked napalm hazards at the team, causing repetitive deaths and for those players to revive each other a total of 17 times in that 24 minute period. Unless you were able to magically stop whatever timer, efficiency gauge, penalty for death and so on counter you were using for the duration of that encounter, that team would not get a 5 star reward even if every other part of that mission went as normal.

What is the condition for getting a 5 star reward that does not conflict with that mission also being a Kuva Siphon, or a Syndicate mission with medallions to hunt down?

I know that some players run solo levelling runs for Melee weapons not on Adaro with their stealth build, but on the Spy mission there instead so that they can actually get more spawns and three large chunks of Affinity from the vaults there. In that situation the reward is two-fold, the end-mission reward and the Affinity gain. They are looking for the rewards from the Vaults (such as Ivara or Nitain drops), and they're looking for a good levelling run.

What standard would you actually put on that Spy mission that doesn't negate being able to complete both objectives? And if you can find a compromise one, what happens when the player is only looking for one and not the other? A timed mode wouldn't work, because players have different speeds for completing the Vaults. A kill count wouldn't work because players just running it for the Vaults wouldn't kill anything. Alarms sounded? There's already a punishment by having to perform an Exterminate finish to the mission instead of just running to the exit, why would you further punish them by lowering their rewards?

The question that I didn't address in my earlier comment was simply that matter of not just how to do this in the first place, but how to do this in a fair fashion for the vastly different ways that players can complete the missions currently, with all the possible variations that missions can actually impose on us.

What factors can you even put on any given mission in Warframe that would not adversely affect the flexibility of our game play as it is now? Rather than adding a way to get better drops for playing well, all this would really do is force a meta onto the people that wanted to get the drops, and push away the people that just wanted to play the game their way.

And, while the message is confused in @peterc3's comment, they aren't wrong either.

On the one hand you destroy the more balanced economy of the game, both through Trade and through Plat purchases in the Market, the guarantee of certain rewards for following the ideal method of attaining them will completely remove the impetus to actually do the parts you can, and then trade for things you can't.

On the other hand, you then create forced metas that players will be practically forced to conform to in order for other players to get their rewards, a pressure far more forceful than any meta has been in the game before now (and that's including the niche infinite-scaling builds from the long-run Prime farm meta too). Players without the meta frames and weapons are then pushed into acquiring them at the expense of frames they would rather play and can currently get exactly the same results from if they're active and completing missions.

At least with the bias curving of the drop tables, people are not forced into a particular play style, they're simply required to succeed in the mission.

I'm against your idea, not because the purpose is flawed, but because the method appears to have more impractical aspects to its concept than a chainmail bikini. Looks good when you first put it on paper, but when you come to put it into practice... the user isn't going to be having a good time.

Edited May 10, 2019 by Birdframe_Prime

[Hmm...interesting.]

5 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

The idea was that it would be a mid-ground compromise.

By keeping the base RNG system, it means that you have the base game functioning exactly as it always has. By implementing just the 'personal drop table' function you would make the overall game more accessible for everyone. But the bias ones make the game actually rewarding for players that are able to scale up their play more successfully.

Whether solo or in a team the combined effect would get the kind of rewards that you're looking for with your changes, with one complete difference:

You cannot ever reliably base the performance of a player or team on stats in Warframe because the stats are so wildly variable depending on as little as the player's mood or who they joined a team with.

Because it's co-operative, because invasions into missions happen, because the composition of a team creates different roles for individual players, it's too random per mission to allot points to anything we do.

Imagine if you were running the Sorties and the un-nerfed Wolf spawned into your Exterminate. The un-nerfed version at level 70 took a team of four a documented 24 minutes to kill with the weapons they had on hand since many Warframe abilities are completely ineffective and his immunity to Status blunts any and all builds we have for taking down tanky enemies in any convenient space of time. Now imagine if the Sortie rewards for that mission had been based on performance. Because part of the reason that the Wolf was so difficult was the invulnerable allies also at level 70 that chucked napalm hazards at the team, causing repetitive deaths and for those players to revive each other a total of 17 times in that 24 minute period. Unless you were able to magically stop whatever timer, efficiency gauge, penalty for death and so on counter you were using for the duration of that encounter, that team would not get a 5 star reward even if every other part of that mission went as normal.

What is the condition for getting a 5 star reward that does not conflict with that mission also being a Kuva Siphon, or a Syndicate mission with medallions to hunt down?

I know that some players run solo levelling runs for Melee weapons not on Adaro with their stealth build, but on the Spy mission there instead so that they can actually get more spawns and three large chunks of Affinity from the vaults there. In that situation the reward is two-fold, the end-mission reward and the Affinity gain. They are looking for the rewards from the Vaults (such as Ivara or Nitain drops), and they're looking for a good levelling run.

What standard would you actually put on that Spy mission that doesn't negate being able to complete both objectives? And if you can find a compromise one, what happens when the player is only looking for one and not the other? A timed mode wouldn't work, because players have different speeds for completing the Vaults. A kill count wouldn't work because players just running it for the Vaults wouldn't kill anything. Alarms sounded? There's already a punishment by having to perform an Exterminate finish to the mission instead of just running to the exit, why would you further punish them by lowering their rewards?

The question that I didn't address in my earlier comment was simply that matter of not just how to do this in the first place, but how to do this in a fair fashion for the vastly different ways that players can complete the missions currently, with all the possible variations that missions can actually impose on us.

What factors can you even put on any given mission in Warframe that would not adversely affect the flexibility of our game play as it is now? Rather than adding a way to get better drops for playing well, all this would really do is force a meta onto the people that wanted to get the drops, and push away the people that just wanted to play the game their way.

And, while the message is confused in @peterc3's comment, they aren't wrong either.

On the one hand you destroy the more balanced economy of the game, both through Trade and through Plat purchases in the Market, the guarantee of certain rewards for following the ideal method of attaining them will completely remove the impetus to actually do the parts you can, and then trade for things you can't.

On the other hand, you then create forced metas that players will be practically forced to conform to in order for other players to get their rewards, a pressure far more forceful than any meta has been in the game before now (and that's including the niche infinite-scaling builds from the long-run Prime farm meta too). Players without the meta frames and weapons are then pushed into acquiring them at the expense of frames they would rather play and can currently get exactly the same results from if they're active and completing missions.

At least with the bias curving of the drop tables, people are not forced into a particular play style, they're simply required to succeed in the mission.

I'm against your idea, not because the purpose is flawed, but because the method appears to have more impractical aspects to its concept than a chainmail bikini. Looks good when you first put it on paper, but when you come to put it into practice... the user isn't going to be having a good time.

The points that I see you making:

1. Mission objectives may be compromised by the composition of your team.
2. Mission objectives can be interrupted by things like the Stalker, Wolf of Saturn, Zanuka, etc.
3. The secondary mission objective could interfere with the primary mission objective
4. This could screw up the warframe economy

You seem to have misunderstood what the role of a 5-star reward is. A 5-star reward shouldn't be the standard reward. It should be a reward that you work toward or struggle to achieve. A standard run that you might do would probably be a 1-2.5 stars on a scale of 1-5 stars. I also want to clarify that there doesn't have to be difficulty tiers. That was just an example number. There could be 3 tiers, 7 tiers, or whatever you want (or DE wants I guess).

I'll answer the points in the order that I wrote them.

1. This gives a reason to optimize builds, sharpen your skills, and get a good team together in order to achieve a high rating. We can already see that people don't have a big problem with that. They already have specific groups to do eidolon hunting and stuff.
2. The assassins are there to mess your mission up. I can't think of a good reason that you can't just try the mission again.
3. Like I mentioned before, the 5-star reward isn't something that just comes with every mission run, so doing a kuva siphon and going for a 5-star reward should be two separate endeavors. 
4. The numbers for the rewards can be tuned so that it's still worth it to trade for stuff in order to skip the mission. The numbers in my example were just place holders.

I would like to add another note here as well. This system doesn't have to be present in every single part of the game. It was more for normal missions. For example, the relic system is already pretty decent. It isn't perfect of course, but it doesn't need very much changing. It can pretty much stay the way it is. Boss fights on the other hand, could very much benefit from this new system.

[(PSN)BattleCry1791]

DE when reading this title

Spoiler

 

Edited May 11, 2019 by (PS4)BattleCry1791

[Birdframe_Prime]

4 hours ago, Hmm...interesting. said:

The points that I see you making:

The point you've missed me making:

There are no stats that you can base this reward system off that will not invalidate the use of anywhere from 50-90% of the incredibly varied methods we use to finish a mission on a daily basis if you want that 5-star reward. The only metric that we can measure actual success by in Warframe is whether you finish the objective and extract.

Warframe is not, and never has been, able to base anything we do on 'merit' because the stats it's able to track with the game engine simply do not support it.

[Steel_Rook]

21 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

DE publish their exact drop tables right here on the site. They're completely transparent about the RNG chances of getting one thing or another, if you'd like I can link them to you, or you can find them through the relevant thread on the Forums.

While publishing drop rates is a step in the right direction, it's a bit like a supermarket price sticker giving me the base item price before tax: I still need to know what that tax is and do the math in my head. When it comes to drop rates - especially different drop rates from different activities - is that the expected number of runs isn't really obvious. An item drops either from Rotation B of one activity with a 20% chance or from Rotation A of another activity with a 10% chance. Which one gives better odds? You'd think the two attempts, but they actually give you an overall 19% chance at the drop. And even that still doesn't tell me roughly how many times am I likely to run this mission. The Wiki does that for some things (typically Warframe components) but not others (say, Void Relic stuff).

My point is that randomness itself obfuscates the intended amount of effort behind statistics and probability, to the point where most players aren't really going to bother figuring it out and instead go off of published percentages... Which can themselves be highly misleading. The Wolf Sledge Motor has an 11.28% chance to drop, but Wolf himself has a 35% chance to drop a component in the first place, which brings it closer to a 4% chance drop, and the spawn rate for Wolf himself was unknown until just yesterday. And incidentally, market prices for the Motor dropped by 2/3 overnight when the new mission launched just by forcing Wolf's spawn rate via guaranteed spawn Alerts.

There are ways for developers to be technically fully transparent with players while the practical design of their systems means most of the disclosed information is difficult to use, misleading or unhelpful. The whole point of random rewards is to keep people engaged on EVERY run of content by convincing them that rewards are right around the corner, when the published data suggests that that's very probably not the case. It plays on the thrill of gambling, even if it doesn't involve real money, and that bothers me personally. At least when deterministic alternatives don't exist.

 

21 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

RNG for end-of-mission or end-of-wave rewards doesn't need to be phased out, the RNG just needs better management. Certainly better management than DE have been setting so far.

While I realise that that's not what you're saying here, I agree in principle. I just feel that RNG reward systems NEED a deterministic "out" at inflated price. A streakbreaker mechanic like you propose later (I'll get to that) might work, but I'm still of the opinion that a Baro-style buy-back reward system for damn near everything would help take the edge off. That way, every failed roll still gives you some amount of progress as even the worst, least desirable reward from the drop table is still work some amount of currency. Fail the roll enough times and you still get what you want in the end. Getting lucky and snagging the item you want directly off of RNG simply means you get the item faster and more easily, but you nevertheless have a fall-back.

The problem with that kind of system - as we saw with Nightwave - is that it directly exposes the developers' intended averages in cold numbers. Maybe if you got lucky off Alerts you could get four Nitain per day, or a Catalyst every couple of days. Maybe if you were unlucky you'd never get any of that. It's hard to say, because it's random. The moment we swapped from the random system into a deterministic one and DE had to put actual, fixed prices on times... Yeah, it turns out EVERYTHING is massively expensive and you only really get to buy a small handful of items every few weeks. Because despite some of us getting lucky, these WERE the intended drop rates for those respective items... It's just we used to blame RNG rather than the people who set it up.

This goes back to what I was saying originally - random rewards obscure the scope of the intended grind in ways that deterministic rewards lay bare. You can hide a massive grind in stacked percentages and be reasonably sure most people won't notice or would write it off as "RNGesus." You can't hide it in fixed-price market because people will take one look at the price, take one look at the activities which generate currency and get a pretty good idea of just how long it's going to take. Which is usually "a long damn time." This is made worse by the fact that developers (and DE especially) tend to err on the side of caution with deterministic reward systems, setting the price of rewards HIGHER than the intended average number of runs from a random system because the fixed price eliminates the potential for RNG to just not give you the drop you want.

Despite all of the above, however, I still feel that a deterministic fallback to an RNG reward system is about the best kind of reward system we can come up with. The deterministic component keeps developers honest and players both appraised of the effort expected and guaranteed an end to their misery, while the RNG component still retains the thrill of gambling the satisfaction of getting a reward well before you were expected to. I personally also believe it's just a fair thing to do. Never let players depend purely on RNG.

 

21 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

That would be step 1. The 'Personal Drop Table'.
That's step 2. The 'Scarcity Bias'.
Step 3. The Repeat Drop Bias.
Anyone else think this could work? 

Partially. I very much do like the way Void Relics do reward sharing, where everyone gets their own roll and we can all pick from each other's rewards. Basically, four rolls for the price of one for a full team. A bit off-topic, but this one of the GOOD ways to encourage teaming in video games. Rather than blocking people out of content unless they add a Facebook Friend to their list for 15 minutes, just offer reward sharing with team-mates. I'm not a huge fan of encouraging endurance runs since it feels like penalising regular runs, but that's also not a bad way of doing it. Stay around longer to more favourable drops later on. The devil's in the details for Steps 2 and 3, however, in precisely how and by how much you alter the weight of repeated and already owned drops.

The problem, though, is the same as what I pointed out before... The game's stingy with rewards. All of the systems you outline would help reduce the effort of obtaining rewards dramatically by heavily loading drop rates in our favour, XCOM style. Yeah, it's all RNG and you can still miss a 90% shot, but a smart player would only ever take those shots and thus almost always hit. My fear is that any change towards a system like this would end up seeing base drop rates reduced significantly such that the new optimal drop rates aren't too much higher than the old ones, meaning the basic gameplay experience degrades substantially and status quo shifts to endurance runs and item hoarding.

The reason I propose a deterministic fallback to RNG rewards is because that only caps the upper limits of bad RNG without shifting the actual expected rates down. Increasing the extreme end of item acquisition wouldn't impact the average rate too much, meaning drop rates themselves shouldn't need to be altered. A system like that, thus, ought to have a fairly minor footprint if left as an ADDITION TO random drops, rather than a REPLACEMENT OF it. Again, the majority of the heat Nightwave got was because it replaced an existing system, rather than adding to it, and I still feel that Nightwave + Alerts would have worked better.

Point being, there's no such thing as a free lunch. The more we allow players to tweak their own drop rates, the worse those drop rates are going to become to compensate. Because DE's design tells the tale of a studio paranoid of people earning all of the rewards they want and leaving the game.

 

16 hours ago, peterc3 said:

I'll make a point I made in another thread with the same premise. Why, given the knowledge I just have to grind out something win or lose, would I ever spend Plat in the Market for those items? Why would DE put a hard cap on how many times a given node or mission would be run by most people?

For the same reason I keep buying Forma for Plat in 3-stacks. The same reason I bought an Arcane Grace rather than farming for it. The same reason I try to maintain a Credit Booster and an Affinity Booster constant. Perhaps YOU wouldn't, but changes like these aren't aimed at you. Ideally, F2P monetisation would only lead you to paying money when you want to, not when you feel that you have to. That was the whole point of the argument you're responding to - a F2P model which monetises itself by extorting and irritating players is bad for the game's health long-term as it burns people out and generates a lot of negative emotions. And while this might seem naive, happy customers generally spend more money. Personally, I like Warframe and have disposable cash on hand. So when I get a 75% off, I might drop another $50 on Platinum for random cosmetics, Catalysts/Reactors/Gravimags, Forma and all the crap I can't be arsed to farm for such as the Wolf Sledge Motor. Or, hell, like Vaulted stuff like the Tigris Prime.

As I've said before, Free 2 Play games aren't free. They're just as paid as your regular retail release, often far more so. The primary difference is that some of us pay disproportionately high amounts of money and in so doing fund the game's maintenance and development for the rest of you. F2P monetisation isn't intended to monetise literally everybody, and a smart business will know this. There's value to supporting a major portion of your playerbase playing for free due to the word-of-mouth advertising they generate and the large community they build, as long as the paying part of said playerbase is still making bank. That's why modern AAA live services are the dreck that they are - because their publishers need to make all of the money in the world, and thus aggressively push to monetise every single player. "Turning players into payers." Put enough pressure with aggressive enough monetisation and you'll lose more revenue than you gain.

Long story short, monetisation which you feel perfectly happy to ignore while I still pay for it because I can't be arsed is doing F2P right.

[Hmm...interesting.]

10 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

The point you've missed me making:

There are no stats that you can base this reward system off that will not invalidate the use of anywhere from 50-90% of the incredibly varied methods we use to finish a mission on a daily basis if you want that 5-star reward. The only metric that we can measure actual success by in Warframe is whether you finish the objective and extract.

Warframe is not, and never has been, able to base anything we do on 'merit' because the stats it's able to track with the game engine simply do not support it.

Yes there are. We'll use a spy mission as an example since that's my favorite game mode. Keep in mind, completing a mission to a 3-star difficulty will require you to achieve the 3-star challenge, as well as the challenges for 2 and 1 star difficulties.

1-star difficulty: Don't let any vault alarms go off

2-star difficulty: Don't let enemies set off the general alarms

3-star difficulty: You can't be seen by any enemies

4-star difficulty: You can't use abilities

[Birdframe_Prime]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

While publishing drop rates is a step in the right direction, it's a bit like a supermarket price sticker giving me the base item price before tax: I still need to know what that tax is and do the math in my head.

As a point, this is yet another reason that I never moved to the US. In the UK tax is included on every single price you see.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

There are ways for developers to be technically fully transparent with players while the practical design of their systems means most of the disclosed information is difficult to use, misleading or unhelpful. The whole point of random rewards is to keep people engaged on EVERY run of content by convincing them that rewards are right around the corner, when the published data suggests that that's very probably not the case. It plays on the thrill of gambling, even if it doesn't involve real money, and that bothers me personally. At least when deterministic alternatives don't exist.

It does keep the interest in every run, but I don't agree with your analogy to gambling. This isn't a slot machine for anything other than time investment, and unlike gambling, you always gain from the process, even if that gain wasn't something you were looking for.

It's like the buyback system you mention, as with Baro, where getting parts you don't want can result in a reward you do. Except that already exists, because rewards such as blueprints are literally sold for credits, which is the base resource for construction in this game. Heck, when I first started Warframe, I ran Captain Vor over and over again because not only was there credits and resources to be had from the short boss battle, I doubled my money every time I got a Seer blueprint. Sure, 3500 Credits isn't exactly a massive amount for you or I at the point in the game we have now, but for the stages of play between starting and where we are... it's actually pretty good because you can build up a huge library of spare parts that you can sell on for Credits quite easily. The same with extra mods, where you can now convert them to Endo, and everyone will always, always need the resources you get.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The moment we swapped from the random system into a deterministic one and DE had to put actual, fixed prices on times... Yeah, it turns out EVERYTHING is massively expensive and you only really get to buy a small handful of items every few weeks.

You'll have to look at this again, because while the prices for things is actually expensive and you can only get a small handful of items every few weeks, the things that you actually need to progress are far more available than you seem to think. And even the cosmetics are now available practically on demand for the one you're actually looking for, instead of blindly picking up each as you happen to see it.

You used Nitain as an example, and I think it's a really good one. When Nitain was first released, I was literally unable to farm more than one every two weeks because my window for playing the game was only a couple of hours, and I could only sign in about four days a week. So the chances of the Nitain alerts being in that same two hour window in a day was low enough (even after the update that put at least one update in every 6-hour segment of the day), but for it being at that time on the specific day I was playing was even lower. I can't tell you the frustration of having a Vauban Prime to build with 20 Nitain, and only having 18 to build with and then for five days straight getting the little Twitter alert to say 'nitain extract alert' half an hour after having signed off, or ending five minutes before I got to the computer.

So how much does Nitain cost in the new system? It's 15 Credits for 5. You can literally get the exact number needed to build any single blueprint in your arsenal with 15. How many Credits were dropped in each pack during the Nightwave? 75. I make that the ability to instantly have access to 25 Nitain if you need it. And after you reach rank 30 you get an extra 15 credits per day.

Yes. I get that it takes longer to get to the Credits than it took to get to an individual Nitain alert. But you got way more for the same time investment than you ever could have gotten under the old Alert system. The same with one of the Helmets or the Vauban parts. I went a full year after having farmed Vauban, over a year, without ever having seen all three of his parts while I was online. The time between an individual helmet popping up on the Alerts was several weeks, with the others making up the other days in between.

So you're in one sense right; it is more difficult in terms of the amount of days you have to invest to get everything on the Nightwave list. However, if you want to get the one cosmetic for your favourite frame that's there? The second you have Credits, you have that specific reward.

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Point being, there's no such thing as a free lunch. The more we allow players to tweak their own drop rates, the worse those drop rates are going to become to compensate. Because DE's design tells the tale of a studio paranoid of people earning all of the rewards they want and leaving the game.

You're not wrong there, though, so I'll give you that point. Well made.

Moving back to the main person, though:

10 minutes ago, Hmm...interesting. said:

Yes there are. We'll use a spy mission as an example since that's my favorite game mode.

And you've just listed four things that, as I did say, would then negate 50-90% of the ways we are able to play this game.

More than that, you literally list the top 'difficulty' as doing something that Warframe actively will not encourage. There are places, very few, in this game where abilities are not allowed, but the entire process from start to finish shows that Abilities are like every other weapon in our arsenal, Energy is just ammo with plenty of ways to restore it, and using them whenever you need them is how you progress through the game. Why else is the very first thing you do when dropping out of your stasis pod in the original part of the game 'press 1'?

What is the point of bringing a Stealth frame, like Loki or Ivara to a Spy, the place their style of play is literally made for, if attaining the top rewards means they cannot use Stealth?

You're genuinely going to try that one?

I mean, if I hadn't been debating with you already, I would actually think that this response is a deliberate troll on the topic.

I'm not saying 'there are no stats that Warframe can track that allows for merit based gaming' from a vacuum here. This topic has come up before and will again, as all of these things do. And the answer in every single debate that I've read or been part of is that merit based gaming in Warframe has to be based off whether you actually succeed, not how you succeed.

Maybe it will, some day, but it doesn't.

There is already a penalty for causing alarms to go off in Spy Vaults, the penalty is having the Vaults get harder, have timers to finish, and then having to do additional objectives if you alarm multiple Vaults. Playing well and getting all three Vaults gives you access to the drop tables for those Vaults, you get better rewards for completing the game better already.

But basing the best rewards on the idea that neither you, nor a team member, is going to set off an alarm in the Vaults will not encourage better play, it will encourage players to never, ever, ever play with another player for Spy, even if they trust that player, because everyone has accidents sometimes. I've been playing Spy at least once in every game session I've started since the mode was invented, and even I still trigger an alarm now and again.

I mean, that's just... that's not a way to beat RNG, that's a way to guarantee people stop playing that game mode because the rules are basically stacked against anything except a perfect run if you want the good rewards.

And just how do you expect to 'not be seen by enemies' if you can't use abilities? I mean... don't make the requirement to rank 3 be countered directly by the requirement to get to rank 4... If you're not invisible you will, 100%, be at least seen by an enemy. Even if they do not activate the alarms, and if you think otherwise, go record that to prove it.

This list of requirements is... I'm sorry... I'm struggling to find my own words here because of how little thought went into it.

You, from all the conversations I've had with you, are not that lacking in foresight, and I'm a little worried about it.

[Hmm...interesting.]

56 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

And you've just listed four things that, as I did say, would then negate 50-90% of the ways we are able to play this game.

More than that, you literally list the top 'difficulty' as doing something that Warframe actively will not encourage. There are places, very few, in this game where abilities are not allowed, but the entire process from start to finish shows that Abilities are like every other weapon in our arsenal, Energy is just ammo with plenty of ways to restore it, and using them whenever you need them is how you progress through the game. Why else is the very first thing you do when dropping out of your stasis pod in the original part of the game 'press 1'?

What is the point of bringing a Stealth frame, like Loki or Ivara to a Spy, the place their style of play is literally made for, if attaining the top rewards means they cannot use Stealth?

You're genuinely going to try that one?

I mean, if I hadn't been debating with you already, I would actually think that this response is a deliberate troll on the topic.

I'm not saying 'there are no stats that Warframe can track that allows for merit based gaming' from a vacuum here. This topic has come up before and will again, as all of these things do. And the answer in every single debate that I've read or been part of is that merit based gaming in Warframe has to be based off whether you actually succeed, not how you succeed.

Maybe it will, some day, but it doesn't.

There is already a penalty for causing alarms to go off in Spy Vaults, the penalty is having the Vaults get harder, have timers to finish, and then having to do additional objectives if you alarm multiple Vaults. Playing well and getting all three Vaults gives you access to the drop tables for those Vaults, you get better rewards for completing the game better already.

But basing the best rewards on the idea that neither you, nor a team member, is going to set off an alarm in the Vaults will not encourage better play, it will encourage players to never, ever, ever play with another player for Spy, even if they trust that player, because everyone has accidents sometimes. I've been playing Spy at least once in every game session I've started since the mode was invented, and even I still trigger an alarm now and again.

I mean, that's just... that's not a way to beat RNG, that's a way to guarantee people stop playing that game mode because the rules are basically stacked against anything except a perfect run if you want the good rewards.

And just how do you expect to 'not be seen by enemies' if you can't use abilities? I mean... don't make the requirement to rank 3 be countered directly by the requirement to get to rank 4... If you're not invisible you will, 100%, be at least seen by an enemy. Even if they do not activate the alarms, and if you think otherwise, go record that to prove it.

This list of requirements is... I'm sorry... I'm struggling to find my own words here because of how little thought went into it.

You, from all the conversations I've had with you, are not that lacking in foresight, and I'm a little worried about it.

First off, I'll say that (since I'm bored) I have played spy missions without being seen and without using abilities. It's really hard, and the mission takes a while, but it's a good challenge. So it is possible. Secondly, how do you expect to have a challenge if we can play a game mode 50-90% of all the ways possible while being as overpowered as we are? Killing is part of the game, but it shouldn't be all of the game. Otherwise the difference between the game modes continues to get smaller and smaller. Also, just the fact that Ivara, Loki, Ash, and Octavia have long duration invisibility is god-tier broken for spy missions, among a few other game modes. And the limitations are simply the way they are because I haven't thought of a way to incorporate them into the missions. I guess that instead of no abilities, we could have an amalgam enemy or something that's sensitive to warframe abilities that could sense when you activate one and set off alarms or something, but there are better ways to include that. But seriously, how do you expect a challenge when we have warframe abilities that can completely trivialize any inherent challenge of a mission.

[Birdframe_Prime]

10 minutes ago, Hmm...interesting. said:

First off, I'll say that (since I'm bored) I have played spy missions without being seen and without using abilities.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but push that anecdotal too far and I will genuinely start insisting on proof.

10 minutes ago, Hmm...interesting. said:

Secondly, how do you expect to have a challenge if we can play a game mode 50-90% of all the ways possible while being as overpowered as we are?

This thread was started because you wanted to make achievement based rewards, as a specific method for clearing up RNG based rewards.

And the root of that is that RNG isn't an efficient, reliable or even all that rewarding way of getting actual Rewards. It's not about the challenge required to get those rewards, because the rewards are already balanced to how difficult the mission is, so ramping up the difficulty or challenge isn't the answer because that doesn't make the rewards somehow magically more worth our time and effort.

You can't swerve this into questions about 'how is that a challenge', because the difficulty and challenge of a mission is not the argument here. The missions should not become more challenging just to get the same rewards as always. That's just going to negatively impact how players feel about the missions overall, because they're being asked to work harder, and only get the same rewards.

The rewards for these missions are still going to be a warframe or weapon blueprint, they're still going to be an amount of credits, some mods and so on. 

While yes, your method does remove the RNG from the process, what in any way makes it better than the current way to get these rewards when it's introducing any of the theorised requirements? Unless you're intending to make basic missions now drop rewards that are worth more... what could you put at Rank 4/5 of the mission that's in our current drop tables for those missions to justify even attempting to get rank 4?

What I'm worried about, and anybody else reading should also be worried about, is that while you're trying to cut out the RNG, you're not thinking through the fact that the rewards you're getting under that system are not changing, you're not getting more reward for more challenge, it's just the same rewards for significantly more effort. And on top of that, the methods may be so precisely defined that not using those methods denies you access to the rewards you want. Not 'better rewards for better play'. It's 'best rewards are only attainable if you comply'.

Again, this links us back to forced meta play and the stigma against using anything that isn't that meta, pushing players to not diversify and experiment with frames and builds they might enjoy because not using the meta means not getting the rewards.

While the intent is definitely laudible, the only thing you will achieve with the method is forcing players into a very narrow view of how to play the game if they want the best rewards from it.

And the only reason you're even having to theorise these methods in the first place is because it's so far from what the game is set up to encourage and reward players for doing, which is to ignore the in-game stats, such as damage or accuracy or even completion time, and just focus on whether or not you actually complete your objectives. And this then allows, even encourages, players to have fun in those missions by using non-ideal builds or weapons that just have a cool mechanic, and then still getting the end mission rewards if they're successful.

As a side note before I go:

58 minutes ago, Hmm...interesting. said:

Killing is part of the game, but it shouldn't be all of the game. Otherwise the difference between the game modes continues to get smaller and smaller.

Warframe is a horde-shooter in terms of its enemy mechanics. The very fact that we have missions that are actively completed faster by not engaging with the enemies at all is a welcome function, the fact that we have missions where killing enemies in the slowest manner possible is also a viable way to complete the mission is a further welcome function.

Warframe already has mission diversity, and putting in 'challenges' that gate the end rewards behind completing these missions in a certain way doesn't increase that, it limits it.

[Hmm...interesting.]

9 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

The missions should not become more challenging just to get the same rewards as always.

I definitely agree. That was part of my thought process, but I realize now that I forgot to include that in my previous comments. My intention was to have a "better rewards for better play" system, and the difficulty tiers would simply be a benchmark to measure "better play." My example wasn't the best, but there are other benchmarks that you could come up with.

[Chappie]

This is a free to play game where all content is available to all users of all capabilities.  Any form of deterministic drops benefits the "git gud" group significantly more than the average player.  Thus in short...you are basically saying "if you are good at this game you don't need to pay at all" which seems asinine no matter how you frame it.    If DE said you must pay X up front for access to content, then determinism because you PAID for that content.     RNG + short missions = skill capability is minimized thus gives DE access to the complete pool of players for revenue.  

Sorry....IMO the "skill players" are just being selfish for their own needs and not really caring about others or the game itself.  

Edited May 12, 2019 by Chappie1975

[Atsia]

On 2019-05-10 at 1:12 PM, Birdframe_Prime said:

One point before I begin:

DE publish their exact drop tables right here on the site. They're completely transparent about the RNG chances of getting one thing or another, if you'd like I can link them to you, or you can find them through the relevant thread on the Forums.

I've played an awful lot of games with loot RNG on them before now, and given up on them, because the results genuinely are like a slot machine. But here, at least, we know what the drop tables are, what the percentages are, and we can look up where to go to farm every single item in the game with at least a degree of reliability. The harshest grind in game is for the Rare mods that previously only dropped from one location in the game, from one enemy, and that enemy only has a 1-in-3 chance to even appear: The Aerial Commander from the Plains of Eidolon. With the drop chance of those mods being 0.5% on that enemy, the chance of that enemy even appearing on the mission being only 33.3%, this meant that you could only get any one of those Rare mods (such as Gladiator Vice or Swooping Falcon) from an Assassination Bounty with 0.165% chance. Now that the Thumpers have been released some of these mods also appear there, and Swooping Falcon is sometimes, if rarely, a Reward for the Bounty itself, bringing its drop chance up to around 8% at max.

RNG for Warframe is not blind, RNG is bad because DE has set the reward tables to be biased against us farming anything quickly. They want multiple runs and have seemingly set the drop chances on some rare things so low as to make them take hundreds of runs in order even remotely guarantee acquiring them.

But that brings me on to my actual point:

RNG for end-of-mission or end-of-wave rewards doesn't need to be phased out, the RNG just needs better management. Certainly better management than DE have been setting so far.

For example, every single veteran of the old Prime Part farming system of Void Keys can attest to how much easier the grind for Prime Parts has become from the new Relic system. It kind of sucks for us because before the change a single Key could grant all four squad members multiple rewards from the same mission, getting rewards for every Rotation in endless runs for the investment of one player's Key. Plus you could farm Keys in advance and have a hundred ready for the next Prime release.

But now it's more reliable to get the rewards because even though you are required to have one Relic per reward you get, you now get 4 rolls at that reward. Relic runs with a team are 4x more efficient for the same time investment.

So, imagine if we had the same system for end-of-mission and end-of-wave rewards? Instead of everyone getting the same drop from that table at once, each player got the drop and each player could choose to have a copy of another player's reward instead. 4x more rolls at the drop table.

That would be step 1. The 'Personal Drop Table'.

The next idea would be the idea of a bias if you already have an existing copy of one of the rewards in your inventory, so while this wouldn't apply to resources like Endo or Ayatan Sculptures (which are just a source of Endo you can keep), mods and blueprints that are already in your inventory would then have a lower chance to drop in the next instance of your mission or in the next rotation where they were likely to appear. Unique rewards, such as Ephemera, would then not drop at all from that table if you already have them, freeing up chances of you getting something more relevant instead.

In theory this could be then applied to runs like bosses, where if you have all of the Day Form Equinox parts in your inventory (even if they're built, they're parts, not the whole Warframe), you are overall half as likely to get those again and can then have a proportionally higher chance of getting Equinox Night Form parts. And this continues while you accrue those parts, and so while the chance for Tyl Regor dropping a Warframe Part is 100%, the chance of getting the final part you need out of the set is then approximately 50% of that drop table or more.

Apply this to bosses like the Exploiter, which have a 300% chance to drop Resources, a 100% chance to drop a Warframe part and a 6% chance to drop an extra item. This means that, for example, your chance of getting an Ephemera is actually about 6%, the chance of getting one of the two is only 3%. What if you had all three Hildryn parts though? And that dropped the chance of getting a Warframe part down to only 60% then the Resources and the Ephemera each gained the 20% chance so you had a shot at an extra Resource drop and a total of 26% chance at the Ephemera? And, if you then had both, the chance of that extra item went away and just left you with the better Resource drops and a lower chance at getting a Warframe part?

Apply this to Arbitrations where the Mods, Aura Forma and Ephemera are the more desired drops, but having all of the mods then halves their chance of getting them, bumping the chance of an Ephemera or Aura Forma up by the amount the others dropped, from the 1.5% at the start up to a 5% say.

That's step 2. The 'Scarcity Bias'.

And the last bit would be to ensure that repeat rolls are minimised too, helping out players who actually can and do play for longer in these missions.

While everyone only playing to rotation C of Arbitrations would have exactly the same chance at the rewards as each other, players that could play to the third or fourth rotation C would benefit from this anti-repeat function.

Getting Endo every wave, for example, is entirely possible right now because the chance at Endo rises to 52.5% on Rotation C, but what if (because basic resources are not being affected by the Scarcity Bias, only reward table specifics like mods and unique items) getting Endo once then lowered the chances of getting Endo again the next wave? And more if it popped up a second time?

The idea being that if the drop table contains repeats of resources like Endo or Ayatan Sculptures, getting them once biases the game against you getting them again and so you can play for longer and slowly tilt the reward pool towards getting the unique items. In Arbitrations in particular, where the rotation goes A/B/C/C/C etc. This would mean that you could potentially lower the chances of getting Endo or Ayatan sculptures enough that the Mods, Aura Forma and Ephemera go up to 10% drops or higher.

Step 3. The Repeat Drop Bias.

Combine all of these things, the Personal Drop Table letting you pick rewards from other players if your RNG was bad, the Scarcity Bias reducing the chance that you'll get the same mod or cosmetic out of that table, and the Repeat Drop bias further lowering the chances of getting what you already have...

Farming for rare things would still retain RNG, but allow a player to completely shift the drop tables as they played and as they played better. The more you have, the more you play to the higher levels, the more chance of you getting what you want.

And beyond that? If you're not at that point, you benefit from it too. A higher tier player than you that has the mods you don't would have that high chance of getting the Ephemera or Aura Forma, and you could then choose that from the reward table at the end of wave or end of mission. From there on, you have the rare items which will then bias the reward table the other way and help you get more of the Mods, Endo and Ayatans than normal on the higher Rotations.

Anyone else think this could work?

Rarer rewards for actually playing the game to a higher level, and equal opportunity for getting those rewards for team members who can't play to those higher levels yet.

Partial return of the Long Run meta by skewing the rewards for better play, but also encouraging players to run in groups and attempt that content because they have more chances at the rewards even if they can't go for long runs.

I could see DE applying the Relic loot method to the rest of the game, which will definitely cut down RNG frustrations by a lot. What I'm more dubious about is them giving an automatic curving of drop chances. While they do have that in Relics too, it's through an outside refinement system (though we're apparently gonna be able to refine Relics in mission after the mainline, huzzah!). How much of your Step 2 and 3 suggestions would benefit DE or works towards what their intended average for loot drops is?

[Hmm...interesting.]

4 hours ago, Chappie1975 said:

This is a free to play game where all content is available to all users of all capabilities.  Any form of deterministic drops benefits the "git gud" group significantly more than the average player.  Thus in short...you are basically saying "if you are good at this game you don't need to pay at all" which seems asinine no matter how you frame it.    If DE said you must pay X up front for access to content, then determinism because you PAID for that content.     RNG + short missions = skill capability is minimized thus gives DE access to the complete pool of players for revenue.  

Sorry....IMO the "skill players" are just being selfish for their own needs and not really caring about others or the game itself.  

The idea is that the numbers should be balanced so that it will take you just as long to get the reward by struggling to do the mission skillfully as it would for you to do the mission many more times without playing to that higher level. I haven't done any testing with times, so the example numbers were just that, examples.

[Birdframe_Prime]

4 hours ago, Atsia said:

How much of your Step 2 and 3 suggestions would benefit DE or works towards what their intended average for loot drops is?

Fair point.

The whole gist was revolving around making the players' time in game more rewarded over time and to basically break the specific method DE are using to increase grind, which is the incredibly low drop chance on certain mods.

One point in the favour of DE, though, is that it does mean they don't actually have to tweak their current base rarity at all. Another is that, unless you're initially successful at getting one of the drops, the chances do not curve at all. And the third is that if the player is only playing the short-term game of running to Rotation C and leaving, the drop tables still won't have a chance to curve any more than if they got the basic resource drops from any rotation, because everywhere apart from Arbitrations, the drop table is almost completely different from A to B to C. Meaning that unless the player actually goes through Rotation C and starts again, the rarer rewards won't have any in-mission bias applied to them.

And on top of that, the reverse begins to happen to veteran players who then have all of the rare drops; they have lower and lower chances of getting the rare drops because they already have copies, and so building up a lot of them for sale is just as hard as it always has been. Instead they are more likely to get the resource drops every time for the first few rounds.

But going forward, even if the bias segments are not implemented, at the very least the personal drop table segment would give players that 4x roll at the loot they're looking for. It would make farming any specific frame, weapon or mod that little bit more reliable and re-affirm the strategy of playing in a team instead of solo.

[(PSN)Limorkil]

While there are some good ideas here, what this ultimately becomes is a request to make items easier to acquire.  Unintended consequences include-

The plat value of items in trade will be drastically reduced.  

If DE wants an item to be hard to acquire then whatever the system is it will still be hard to acquire, achieving nothing.  

I agree that trying to farm a rare item is frustrating, but i think it would be boring if everything was a reputation grind. 

[Steel_Rook]

18 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

It does keep the interest in every run, but I don't agree with your analogy to gambling. This isn't a slot machine for anything other than time investment, and unlike gambling, you always gain from the process, even if that gain wasn't something you were looking for. It's like the buyback system you mention, as with Baro, where getting parts you don't want can result in a reward you do. Except that already exists, because rewards such as blueprints are literally sold for credits, which is the base resource for construction in this game.

The problem with Credits (and Baro, realistically speaking) is that the buyback currency can't really buy what you're actually after. It doesn't matter how many credits I sell all the Saryn Chassis and Neuroptics for, because credits can't actually get me the Saryn Systems that I actually want. Meanwhile, I have plenty of other means of gathering credits at a far faster pace. Consequently, getting a roll I don't actually want brings me no closer to the roll I do want, because no such intermediary currency exists that I can sell my unwanted items for AND buy my wanted items for, at the same time. That's the psychological trick of loot boxes in general - you always get "something" with every pull of the lever, but its value is debatable.

I'm obviously not saying that random rewards ARE gambling. Rather, I'm saying that they exploit the psychology of gambling in order prop up artificially inflated player engagement by obscuring the true pace of progress. They're often sold as a way to get rewards faster, when in reality they offer merely the illusion of speed while maintaining roughly the intended pace anyway.

In my opinion, a proper, real deterministic fallback system would allow us to take a reward from a drop pool, convert it to some shared currency then use that currency to buy another reward from the same drop pool, obviously at some kind of significant markup. Obviously, that's not a trivial system to introduce as it has the potential to either create a large number of isolated, redundant currencies or else allow too much cross-purchase without running content. I'm just saying that selling unwanted blueprints for a trivial sum of credits doesn't really qualify as proper buyback, in my book.

 

19 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

You'll have to look at this again, because while the prices for things is actually expensive and you can only get a small handful of items every few weeks, the things that you actually need to progress are far more available than you seem to think. And even the cosmetics are now available practically on demand for the one you're actually looking for, instead of blindly picking up each as you happen to see it.

Availability wasn't my point. Rather, I was pointing out how moving from an RNG system to a fixed price exposes just how expensive everything is actually "intended" to be. You've seen the feedback on the matter. Fair or not, it hasn't been good. To give you a different example: Years ago, Blizzard tried to sell skins a flat money cost in Heroes of the Storm. They ran to the tune of $15-$20, and players were OUTRAGED! $20 for a skin! Horse armour! Then Overwatch came out, and you stopped hearing complaints about how skins were too expensive. After all, Loot Boxes were only €2 per stack of two and each could in theory contain the Legendary skin you wanted. Plus, you could earn them in-game... Like you could in Heroes of the Storm, except there the in-game currency cost was understandably astronomical. While in Overwatch where free loot box generation is pretty slow and consequently the price is just as high... Well, people were fine with it. Then fast forward a couple years and Blizzard sold an emote for $30. Everyone lost their minds. A $30 emote? Horse armour! Even though similar emotes cost about as much given the cost of loot boxes and their drop rates.

I didn't mean to get into a discussion on Nightwave balance specifically, though there are things to say there. Rather, I meant to highlight how differently costs are perceived when they're obfuscated by randomness vs. when they're laid bare for what they are. When a previously random item is made deterministic, people often react with outrage over what they perceive to be a price hike but is in fact pretty comparable to previous averages. Nightwave was just the easiest example of a random system going deterministic.

I should also do a minor correction. Wolf Credits are dropped in bunches of 50, not 75. This is important because Catalysts and Reactors cost 75 Credits, meaning they require two Wolf Credit rewards for a single one and three for both, assuming you buy nothing else. How attainable they were previously is up for debate, but their cost now is reflective of how attainable DE WANT them to be. And that really is the rub. With RNG, players will project their own view of an item's cost based on their own personal luck and - very often - the gambler's fallacy. Deterministic rewards remove the ambiguity and thus prevent players' wishful thinking of artificially lowering the apparent cost of items. Thus, the developers' intent is laid bare, and that's always going to be stingier and less available than players would like it.

This, however, is precisely why I personally prefer deterministic rewards over random ones. I appreciate the honesty of a game telling me straight up that an item costs 100 currency, I make 1 per action, so I really am going to have to do this 100 times. I might not always appreciate the balance point, but at least I know what's expected of me and can accurately appraise the reward's worth based on the subjective value I place on it. Sure, I want a Prisma Skana, but do I want it enough to spend 510 Ducats on it when I only have enough for the Primed Mods Baro is selling this time? Probably not, and I don't feel like grinding for it right now. Simply having access to drop rates doesn't really give me the same immediate sense of just how long I'm going to be at it, which is why I prefer fixed prices over random drops.

 

19 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

So you're in one sense right; it is more difficult in terms of the amount of days you have to invest to get everything on the Nightwave list. However, if you want to get the one cosmetic for your favourite frame that's there? The second you have Credits, you have that specific reward.

Just wanted to pick up on this as a conclusion: Nightwave is a step in the right direction. The system is expensive up-front, but its inventory is finite meaning that the apparent cost of items decreases the more of them we have. This is true for Baro, as well. Used to be I'd never have enough Ducats for much of anything. I have most of his Primed mods now, so I've been buying Prisma, Wraith and Vandal weapons, instead. Once I have all of those I'll consider grabbing cosmetics. The same is true for Nightwave, if DE can avoid stuffing the inventory with garbage like what Overwatch does to keep diluting the drop pools of their loot boxes. I have plenty of problems with Nightwave, but its reward system is the least of my concerns. The actual challenges and Wolf Credit earning are what I dislike, and most of that is a direct result of DE copy-pasting the Fortnite Battle Pass system with only the bare essential adaptations. That's entirely separate.

As a reward system, Nightwave is entirely deterministic and does precisely what I want. It removes the random component entirely and awards us currency instead, with which we can buy precisely the items we want. Well, sort of... The inventory is still random, but baby steps are appreciated. It's just a shame that the system is attached to what amounts to awkward achievements, meaning people end up earning substantially less in the way of Wolf Credits than I think DE intended, meaning the prices come across as more inflated than they actually are. But again, those issues are inherent in the "Battle Pass" portion of Nightwave. The actual Wolf Credits Store is PRECISELY what I want out of a proper deterministic reward system, and I sincerely hope this is the model of reward systems going forward.