The Game is a Veteran's Wasteland right now. Difficulty Slider when?

[(PSN)BenHeisennberg]

8 hours ago, AshenHaze said:

Difficulty slider is silly in design.

What  we need is level scaling for solo play and reverse level scaling for multiplayer. In solo play, missions should scale to an effective "rating" of  all your combined mods. In multiplayer you should be "fit" to the level by decreasing power, hp, and so forth based on the mission level. It's really not that hard a concept, tons of other MMORPG's do it. It would actually be super easy in Warframe as everything is basically instanced anyway.

The rating should be essentially based off of the rank total of all your mods. This would start essentially a 0-10 scale, based around the 10 rank mods such as primed mods and Rivens. This will eventually be averaged by all the mods you have equipped currently in your loadout giving you a score between 0 and 10. Then the mission can read this and if you're on solo play, adjust the  enemies accordingly with a full rank 10 ish set giving enemies up to level 60 across the map or so (just brainstorming here). Then if you join a multiplayer game you are scaled down to meet the existing mission level. You'll still probably be OP but  not to such an  incredible extent. This "down scaling" could be done by essentially making your mods 'effective rank' appropriate for the mission at hand. So joining a level 6 mission you  won't have rank 10 mods effectively but rank 0 or 1. This would actually allow new players to enjoy the game rather than AFK. Plus with things being harder to kill, drop rates should be improved as a result.

This would effectively mean that builds don't matter.

What we need is higher level content available to those who have progressed, and lower level content for those who have yet to reach it.  They tried once with Arbitrations, they just screwed it up with tedium, drones, and other issues.

For those acting like there's 20 Warframe players and this will split them up:  amazingly, I can go to Arbitrations, ESO, SO, PoE, Orb Vallis, Eidolons, the Profit Taker, and fissures, and still get a full squad if I want.  The playerbase is split, and it's doing just fine, at least on PS4.

[Xzorn]

On 2019-05-17 at 8:35 AM, SordidDreams said:

I just hope that's a sign of them learning that too much grind is bad rather than cynically altering the level of grind to maximize profit. If they ever get it into their heads that they can deliberately make new content excessively grindy to maximize profit from selling the items for plat, then reduce the grind later to appease the player base and score goodwill points because "we listen to player feedback"? And just keep repeating that exact same cycle with every new update? Yeah, that'll be the death of this game.

 

I can't tell if that's sarcasm or you just purposely described PoE and Vallis development cycles?

You missed one thing though. Hard resets for each cycle so players grind from scratch each time.

It's a common tactic for content extending and sales. They just decided to go full throttle as of late.

[SordidDreams]

10 hours ago, Xzorn said:

I can't tell if that's sarcasm or you just purposely described PoE and Vallis development cycles?

You missed one thing though. Hard resets for each cycle so players grind from scratch each time.

It's a common tactic for content extending and sales. They just decided to go full throttle as of late.

Well that's what I'm worried about. It's possible those were just mistakes, in, which case I'm willing to forgive and forget. If it keeps happening, though, it will become clear that it's intentional.

I do get the hard reset, though. If they didn't do that, you'd just immediately build all the new stuff from your stockpiles of old materials. If they want you to play the new content at all, they kinda do have to introduce new materials every time.

Edited May 19, 2019 by SordidDreams

[(PSN)Jedi_Arts_]

I think there are still too many people trying to change Warframe as a game. I understand that the idea of regulating everything to a very strict balance seems "correct." But I really don't think that's Warframe's identity. It's a lot more creative than that. The Devs have never really prioritized absolute balance. And obviously the reason why they can get away with it is because it's a PvE Co-Op game. When they create something new for the game, they just sort of throw it in there as balanced as they can get it and deal with the consequences later. That's why most of the things that get nerfed are just very obvious choices. But the game doesn't really have a strict balance system. (just note the wild variation in math formulas and game mechanics)

I bring all of this up to make this point. Warfame will never really fit into the Enemy Level Range that you would have to condense it down to fit the Starchart. At least, not without DE completely Overhauling, Nerfing, and Rebalancing their game. And they are not going to do that. And why should they? They don't have the resources. And why fight the progression and evolution of the game through these years. We should be creating content to fit what the game has become.

That's why we need a Difficulty Rework. The Difficulty Slider is just a necessary first step. You're not going to be able to make Late Game content more present throughout the game without optional Difficulty adjustments for the player (which is standard in games generally). DE did say that they will be working on creating different kinds of challenges for different kinds of players. But difficulty has several dimensions. And Enemy Level is one of them. It's also probably the easiest to modify, and the one that will make the most immediate impact. If the enemy levels are optional (as opposed to Veterans always being forced to play content far below their Build Level) that would be a great first step.