(PSN)chibitonka Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 1 hour ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said: "Why do people complain so much about it".... Here's a better question. Why would a company actually force a system that's not really accomplishing anything anymore, and makes people unhappy?... Since as you say, there are more people complaining about it than want it left in place.... If every time you walked into a $&*^'s sporting goods store, a dwarf in runed armor came sprinting out across the store from the climbing equipment section and punched you as hard as he could in the balls, wouldn't you stop shopping at $&*^'s pretty damn quickly? They are clearly growing more and more uncertain of the role of this mechanic in their game and it is pissing people...CUSTOMERS... Off. That by it's self is a great reason to eliminate the concept. i mean they're only customers if they buy plat/pa/packs through platform store/tennogen skins if pc, otherwise not really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Test-995 Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 16 minutes ago, (PS4)chibitonka said: i mean they're only customers if they buy plat/pa/packs through platform store/tennogen skins if pc, otherwise not really. So they are pissing potential customers off without real reason, wow how strange it is. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)chibitonka Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 1 minute ago, Test-995 said: So they are pissing potential customers off without real reason, wow how strange it is. if that's all it took for one to not spend any money on the game instead of choosing several other options besides risk blowing themselves up that's mostly the person's choice. Maybe I'm not bothered by the fact ppl blowing themselves up is a thing cause self accountability exists. Doesn't really matter why it's in the game. If it explodes and you know it can explode and choose to facetank it or not exercise caution lols/facepalms await. Like i've said in the thread earlier. Picking up a launcher is a non verbal contract with yourself where you're admitting that any chance of blowing yourself up is your own fault. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Test-995 Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 8 minutes ago, (PS4)chibitonka said: if that's all it took for one to not spend any money on the game instead of choosing several other options besides risk blowing themselves up that's mostly the person's choice. Maybe I'm not bothered by the fact ppl blowing themselves up is a thing cause self accountability exists. Doesn't really matter why it's in the game. If it explodes and you know it can explode and choose to facetank it or not exercise caution lols/facepalms await. Like i've said in the thread earlier. Picking up a launcher is a non verbal contract with yourself where you're admitting that any chance of blowing yourself up is your own fault. And seems like lot of people decided to not use those, some of them want to use it but can't because of those self damage. The point is, is self damage making the game better?. Because, if it's not, there is no reason to keep it at the cost of some people's fun. Personally i don't think self damage is good for warframe, warframe is a fast paced parkour shooter where you move really fast, and there is lot of AoEs that doesn't deal self damage, it's just making bad weapons even worse. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)chibitonka Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 (edited) 7 minutes ago, Test-995 said: And seems like lot of people decided to not use those, some of them want to use it but can't because of those self damage. The point is, is self damage making the game better?. Because, if it's not, there is no reason to keep it at the cost of some people's fun. Personally i don't think self damage is good for warframe, warframe is a fast paced parkour shooter where you move really fast, and there is lot of AoEs that doesn't deal self damage, it's just making bad weapons even worse. Self dmg is like an organic teacher. If you're this close to the blast it will kill you, if not you get the benefits of crowd smacking. If they want to use the weapons then they should put forward effort to learn how to use them without getting blown. Cost of ppl's fun? It's only costing them fun if they want to keep thinking the explosives should act like shotguns instead of something that explodes. If a scrublet like me can use them every single day with little incident there's no real excuse for majority of players. Aoes that don't explode yeah we know. Any beam weapon ever, any plasmor ever. Nigh Impossible for those to hit the user to begin with. Giving those self dmg would make no sense xD Also what mook uses explosives like a shotgun without using parkour to their advantage? People ignore the fact that parkouring like we can in this game also HELPS said weapons. Like for one allowing the user to mime flying mobile pinpointed artillery strikes. As for them being bad that's up to how one mods them. Most get by pretty well if you can at least crit cause hm is a thing. Those that can't usually get relegated to crit radiation builds. Then again I'm one that thinks giving their aoe and dmg a 3x boost would solve the problem 😄 Ogris much as i love that weapon it suffers heavily for lacking crit stats. But it's one of very few explosives that lack crit chance so it's not a norm. Edited June 11, 2019 by (PS4)chibitonka 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Test-995 Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 10 minutes ago, (PS4)chibitonka said: Self dmg is like an organic teacher. If you're this close to the blast it will kill you, if not you get the benefits of crowd smacking. If they want to use the weapons then they should put forward effort to learn how to use them without getting blown. Yeah it is, and it works for most games, but in warframe, people would feels like "wHy sTaTiCoR aLlOwEd?" and use it instead. Quote Cost of ppl's fun? It's only costing them fun if they want to keep thinking the explosives should act like shotguns instead of something that explodes. If a scrublet like me can use them every single day with little incident there's no real excuse for majority of players. Yeah, but in fact what it does is restricting their choice in combat, you can't dive into explosive you shoot, and it could cost the fun... maybe. Quote Aoes that don't explode yeah we know. Any beam weapon ever, any plasmor ever. Nigh Impossible for those to hit the user to begin with. Giving those self dmg would make no sense xD Yeah, staticor doesn't exists, but well, i suppose staticor is a only non-damaging explosive, so no argument for this. Quote Also what mook uses explosives like a shotgun without using parkour to their advantage? People ignore the fact that parkouring like we can in this game also HELPS said weapons. Like for one allowing the user to mime flying mobile pinpointed artillery strikes. You have to dedicate your movement into those weapons to not die, effectively reduce your mobility, but the game is built around those parkour. It can be problematic, but not always, not every tile. Quote As for them being bad that's up to how one mods them. Most get by pretty well if you can at least crit cause hm is a thing. Those that can't usually get relegated to crit radiation builds. Then again I'm one that thinks giving their aoe and dmg a 3x boost would solve the problem Ogris much as i love that weapon it suffers heavily for lacking crit stats. But it's one of very few explosives that lack crit chance so it's not a norm. Well, not actually bad, because at the very least you can kill things with almost every launchers. What it means is it's just a lesser variant of other things, it's not meta and doesn't need that much of downside. 3x AoE would be interesting. Honestly, buffing all those launchers even more ridiculously will be fine for me, i won't say anything against strongest weapons with biggest drawback. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)chibitonka Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 (edited) 13 minutes ago, Test-995 said: Yeah it is, and it works for most games, but in warframe, people would feels like "wHy sTaTiCoR aLlOwEd?" and use it instead. Yeah, but in fact what it does is restricting their choice in combat, you can't dive into explosive you shoot, and it could cost the fun... maybe. Yeah, staticor doesn't exists, but well, i suppose staticor is a only non-damaging explosive, so no argument for this. You have to dedicate your movement into those weapons to not die, effectively reduce your mobility, but the game is built around those parkour. It can be problematic, but not always, not every tile. Well, not actually bad, because at the very least you can kill things with almost every launchers. What it means is it's just a lesser variant of other things, it's not meta and doesn't need that much of downside. 3x AoE would be interesting. Honestly, buffing all those launchers even more ridiculously will be fine for me, i won't say anything against strongest weapons with biggest drawback. Staticor is in a weird spot. They gave it self dmg then took it away then did the cycle again. I mean if you're really comfortable with using the explosives then you can even do simple stuff like run and blast, slide and blast. Aimgliding and blasting is safest tho especially for beginners. Wall latching and blasting. OOOH my favorite is when you just jump upward and blast. Funnily enough it's not as restricting as it sounds. It's very reliant on the player to use it without getting caught in it. Which in a way is very rewarding in itself. Personally I find it fun charging up lenz/ogris and then letting it off when i see an opening. It's not much different than firing a bow in that regard. Angstrum and others that launch almost immediately you have to be more attentive. o.o it sounds more like a playstyle on it's own lmfao When the player learns how to move well and know where the safe zones are at all times it ends up being quite a ride. Kind of forces them to become way more observant too so they don't nuke themselves by mistake. End of the day it mostly boils down to the player more than anything else. If they can't or refuse to learn how to safely use them it's best they don't touch them. As for strongest weapons. Remember the Fatman from fallout? Remember the experimental mirv from fallout 3? That in warframe :O Edited June 11, 2019 by (PS4)chibitonka Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheLexiConArtist Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 9 hours ago, MJ12 said: The punishment for a door trap is falling flat on your face and losing some of your shields (unless you're knockdown immune in which case you literally bull through them), or taking a magnetic proc (unless you're proc immune in which case you ignore it). This is significantly less punishing than 'a missed launcher shot' and moreover they're easier to avoid in the first place as well. Moreover, door traps are far rarer than launcher shots. You're only likely to encounter a handful of door traps in a mission, whereas you're probably firing a launcher hundreds of times in the same mission. More importantly, "door traps" exist as part of the level design to slow down the first person to encounter them. They're a pacing tool that exist for a legitimate purpose, which is to keep players from getting too spread out in a mission, just like friendship doors. They exist specifically to manipulate mobility to avoid making it so that players who know how to use Warframe maneuverability (or simply load up with mobility enhancements) end up a mile in front of the players who don't. Making launchers force a player to slow down doesn't actually do this, in fact it does the very opposite by making it so that launcher users are more likely to end up even further behind non-launcher users. And last but not least, the devs have said on stream that they're very unhappy with door traps as they exist specifically because parkour punishments are undesirable given the current state of Warframe, which is much faster and more mobile than when door traps were implemented. There's been a trend of removing 'parkour punishments' like Stamina, jutting level geometry, 'cannot cast in air' effects, and the like. The punishment for a standard Corpus laser trap is knockdown. It's been argued this is an equivalent to the fatality of self-damage, so there's clearly a disconnect here to now say the same reaction is significantly less punishing. Magnetic procs sap energy. Taking aside the breed of player that spams energy restores like an absolute chump, that player's now been robbed of their abilities, you know, the core uniqueness of Warframe being the Warframes. That's a pretty hefty penalty to mistake, forcing you to wait out energy regen or orbs to get back access to the 'fun part' Jupiter traps often mean a gas cloud of toxin that can easily wipe out a softer frame just the same as self-damage would. Arguably better, because shields would offset the launcher damage. Door traps also don't slow down the first person to encounter them. They slow down the first person to deal with them. The punishments can hit everyone in the squad multiple times if nobody bothers to deal with it. They are prone to getting blown up in collateral, depending on the weapons in use, though. I'm gonna go ahead and slap the ol' [citation needed] on that last comment too. I haven't ever heard them say anything about door traps that way, and considering they added new door traps in Jupiter I think you're frankly talking nonsense. Removal of stamina and vent geometry is more about the parkour flow when parkour is appropriate, which is only partially related considering we're talking about cases where parkour is not appropriate. Because it's not always. Basic design for Experience Contrast; you need the variety of moments without an experience to validate the time with the experience. Why would we have wall latch at all if we're always meant to be moving at speed? 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: "Parallel with combat" implies that the game somehow intends for mobility and combat to be mutually exclusive, or at the very least separate, a notion that is patently false. We have wall-latching and aim-gliding for a reason, just as the game's enemy accuracy algorithm is designed specifically so that players avoid more shots when they're on the move. Making yourself a sitting duck while shooting is exactly what the game discourages. Interesting that you identify wall latching and aim gliding, both features which slow or halt your parkour vectors so you can control yourself and aim better. I don't think I could have made my point better than you already did with that. Okay, though. Maybe my mind works differently. Maybe I process situations quickly and my experience is not a representative median of judgement and reaction. But for something that should be such an absolute solution to That Group Right There, it's part and parcel of the experience to make that call. Where the guy mowing enemies down with the rifle at high speed has to aim at each individual target, compensating as they go, the guy with the explosives performs their assessment and adjustments up front, finds their clear distance and takes The Shot, and everything goes away with them surviving. Perhaps they both spent as long getting their aim on, it just varies in distribution? After all, given the standardised Fast Move includes a roll, Rifle Dave can't keep their aiming and shooting while at maximum movement either. 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: ... what reorientation is there to rolling and sliding? For sure, those traps mean that players can't just ignorantly walk through those doors without incurring consequences, but both of those trap types can be bypassed completely through the use of parkour, and so without even losing momentum. It's just a matter of observing those traps and/or shooting them, which can itself be done while in motion. If it's too difficult to adjust course on the fly, then yeah, you can pause to shoot those traps, but with a bit of experience that quickly becomes unnecessary, and one can just parkour through. Reorienting was specific to the Corpus traps mostly, since you have to have a semblance of control to have your roll ready and placed correctly even to pass a standard laser barricade. At full whack it's easy to still be aim-gliding after you rolled and end up being clipped unless you drop yourself short to get the roll back. Jupiter now doubles-down on that by having partial coverage. You might have to slide, you might have to orient yourself to a particular side. Occasionally there's even a low one you're meant to go over. Yes, they can all be shot, but pulling that off at full speed is a matter of experience and expertise.. just like learning how to wield an explosive safely yet without being glacially slow. 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: It's not a crime... but then, as mentioned above, the game doesn't really want you to just stand around and act like a stationary turret. The game's entire design encourages you to be constantly on the move, including during combat, so it makes zero sense to have a mechanic whose haphazard method of punishment interacts especially poorly with said movement. At this point, it's also worth mentioning that the mechanic isn't even good when stationary, as random bits of scenery, breakable objects, poor indication of the explosives' range, and sudden appearance of allies can all "punish" the player for the wrong reasons. The entire design, you say? In my version of the game there are defending-based objectives which are fairly well suited to stationary, cover-based approaches. They're not the only one that works, but they are excellent tools for the job at hand. Likewise, the explosive wielder may not be Volt doing the running-man to his destination (invariably kissing the nearest wall until he compensates momentum) but they can still move competently enough between and during their uses of those risky payloads to still be on their toes in a Warframe environment. I can't stand Volts, by the way, because by muscle memory and experience I'm overall slower with that arbitrary momentum buff than I am without it. Does that mean I fall completely behind every squad containing a Volt? Nah. I've even become fairly competent at spinning around to integrate the back-dodge into my parkour flow when I need to get rid of the buff. On paper they should be faster, just like on paper operating around the risk of explosives should make you slower, but the player element muddies those boundaries right over each other. If you're stationary and you die from shooting anything other than a rogue ally whose own parkour 'crosses the pipe' then that is absolutely a reason to punish the player. They took grossly inadequate care of entirely visible clues when judging their trigger pull. But that is why I suggested a resolution for ally issues (and possibly the 'distance to payload' issue) to handle those questionable cases. 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: ... because stealth is in fact something at least some part of the game genuinely tries to encourage, via silenced weapons, our parkour, enemy awareness, and Spy vaults. The game certainly doesn't do stealth well, because stealth isn't truly functional at this stage, and players aren't really incentivized to be stealthy, but at least stealth doesn't actively clash with the rest of Warframe's intended gameplay. Asking the player to engage in precise stealth gameplay to make proper use of what should normally be the absolute noisiest, heaviest class of weapon makes little sense in and of itself, to say nothing of how even stealth-oriented weapons don't demand that kind of setup. I'm not sure you understand the concept of analogy. You don't have to be a stealth player to use explosives, but if stealth can still be a played style, so can risky explosives, as they both require deviation from the norm, indirect pathing and more consideration in engagements than the average run 'n gun. The deviations are similar in concept but differ in execution. Stealth Joe cares where enemies are looking when deciding where he moves. Explosive Dave cares where they are standing and where he can move to clear his line of fire. Stealth Joe waits for patrols to turn their backs; Explosive Dave waits briefly for a detonation in an enclosed space or takes a somewhat slower route around the impending danger zone. Stealth weapons do require setups that behoove them. You get found if you shot a guy in front of his buddy, now. Arrows can carry corpses into view and alert guards as well. Explosives fare poorly in tight space unless you can back up a respectable distance, but have a better freedom of effective firing path in less-obstructed areas. 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: I mean, something's clearly not quite clicking with your reasoning, because players are not in fact making frequent use of these weapons, with self-damage being cited as one of the main reasons why most players don't touch launchers. If, by your logic, this means the quasi-totality of Warframe's playerbase is made of idiots with no depth perception... well, too bad, that's just the demographic you have to work with. With current risk-reward ratio and overpowering alternatives, few but the true enthusiasts make frequent use of most launchers. This says nothing about whether a more adequate balance within and without of their archetype would see people more willing to accept that risk. What is far more likely is that people who are enthusiasts already in spite of the risk and alternatives will probably feel at best like they just got their weapon replaced by a baby toy should the archetype be neutered in the way you suggest. 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: This is pure finagling on semantics: explosive weapons are not universally designed with self-damage in video games, and even if they were, that would not stop their implementation from making launchers fundamentally undesirable in Warframe. The fact remains that players want to be able to fire explosives at enemies in Warframe, but don't want to kill themselves at random in the process, and currently have no option that accommodates them. It is ridiculous to pretend that I am the only one with this opinion, and that I am single-handedly trying to bend Warframe to my whims, when explosive self-damage in Warframe is a notoriously unpopular mechanic. Other than the previously addressed issues, it's not 'at random' if the player can reasonably operate around the risk. You bring up semantics and then make a semantic call that the 'explosives' are desired as some unique property of their own above and beyond their archetype in relation to other AOE weaponry. What is it then? Is it art assets? Should I riot because my Ignis can produce noxious fumes instead of a stream of visually pleasing fire? If it's conventional ordnance that you want, they always came with self-damage, barring the obvious mistake, and saying you want one without the other is an oxymoron. If it's a radial AOE that you want, then there are other options currently, potential additional options later, and don't require the changing of one subset to become more identical to another. 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: This is a non-argument. Just because a number of people have one opinion and another number of people have another opinion does not mean those two groups have the exact same number of people making them up: as it stands, the majority of opinions expressed on explosive self-damage on all Warframe-related discussion spaces, and by content creators, has not only been negative, but severely negative. As in, people questioning why the mechanic exists in the first place. It's all very nice to go into conjecture on what people could be thinking, but the reality of what most people are expressing is that they don't like self-damage as a mechanic. I'm not sure if you were sabotaging yourself or not in vagueness considering the meat of what this replied to, being that it is not one group with A opinion and one group with B opinion, but one group with one opinion being declared the inarguable majority over several groups of several opinions. You have absolutely zero proof that the singular opinion of "zero self-damage" is the majority, especially not by their vocal nature. Look at the 'yes' posters here. How many of them are engaging to this extent? They all still obviously exist even if they've come and gone in a heartbeat. It's also a factor that those who are in a negative perspective are inherently more disposed to be vocal than those with a neutral or positive perspective. Outliers like myself notwithstanding, they have no need to go on tirades because they don't feel like they particularly require action. Sure, you can have people who question the mechanic! And I'll point them right to that old chestnut that proved the need. Then, I'll question the why not which is an equally valid question as why so, and one which you have done a respectable effort of debating but proved no more inarguably than I the opposite. 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: All of this is pointlessly and excessively vague, when it's not particularly difficult to identify key features of launchers that would not be removed, namely the fact that they all involve launching some explosive payload in discrete amounts. The Tonkor was never equivalent to the Ignis or to a punch-through Tigris even when its self-damage was still irrelevant. With or without self-damage, the Ogris will remain a rocket launcher, the Zarr a flak cannon, and the Lenz an explosive bow. I'm not really convinced here by the pretense that removing self-damage from launchers will somehow cause them to become unrecognizable from other weapon types, particularly since, as mentioned already, launchers also already have the distinct drawback of being slow to fire, while frequently having unwieldy travel times and arcs to their projectiles. This is no less semantically vague than my own can be argued. I'd posit more so in fact, because you're mixing the distinction between weapon individuals and weapon-archetypes. Is the Arca Plasmor a shotgun? In some ways - not least its designated ammo type - yes. In others, no. In no case is it going to be comparable to a Dread, but equally in some cases it's not comparable to any other shotgun, making it distinctly not one for lacking those pellet-based and partial-miss drawback qualities. Conversely, the Brakk is a 'pistol' that is a pocket shotgun, featuring all the distinguishing design and drawbacks of the shotgun caste. Is a Tonkor a grenade launcher and the Ogris a rocket launcher within themselves? Aye. But as conventional explosive launchers, they share that common and distinguishing feature of risk-to-self when compared to other archetypes involving radial blasts. Is a Syndicate Proc attaching an explosive launcher effect? Is the Staticor an explosive launcher? Currently no, but what tangible difference is there once 'explosive launchers' are reduced in nuance to 'weapon producing radial AOE'? 3 hours ago, Teridax68 said: Easy: not only remove the self-damage, but just massively buff the damage per shot, and even the blast radius of whichever launcher you're discussing. Thus, the Staticor would be a rapid-fire mini-AoE alternative to the slow-firing launcher capable of clearing crowds of enemies with a single, well-placed shot. Both weapons would offer significantly different paths to mastery, and the launcher would retain its key distinguishing features, while lowering the barrier to entry of becoming an enthusiast by dint of removing a horrendously unattractive anti-mechanic. You have successfully invented the Tonkor at launch and obliterated the barrier to entry while also removing the ceiling of non-entry, that is to say, supplied zero effective reason to use anything else except (at the time) the Simulors in 90+% of standard play. On the plus side, I realised my analysis spreadsheet is so old I still have calculations on there from original Tonkor Judgement Day. They may be changed now, but did you know despite the horrendous mag and reload, the single target DPS of a Tonkor at its baseline level already strongly competed or even exceeded those of meta rifles/LMGs even through those constant reloads? Now take that, multiply it for every extra target you hit with that burst on average, and bear in mind that it's a crit based weapon so it was taking the optimal per-slot advantage scaling up from there. And all that was in ignorance of autoheadshot. That may simply be a dated example but you can still see how easily these changes can muscle out broad swathes of completely different weapons that should be more suited for a job when you add the step of removing a limitation like that. Attach specific Warframes and the problem extends further. Turbulence removes flight-speed issues. Hall of Mirrors removed the setup of the Simulors allowing every shot to pop significant damage to the full area. 1 hour ago, MJ12 said: So I'd like to expand on the idea that mobility and combat mechanics influence whether your weapons have self-harm. One of the games I've actually played a lot and done reasonably well with (I have a bunch of 200+% difficulty clears in multiple classes, so I think I can say I am/was reasonably decent at it) is Synthetik. In Synthetik, every weapon in the game has self-harm. Bullets ricochet, often unpredictably, launchers explode, and every single weapon can overheat, dealing significant damage to you and debilitating you by reducing your fire rate. Every enemy does damage to other enemies. Synthetik is a game where the complexity of weapons handling forces very deliberate gunplay and engagement selection. Self-damage fits into that game. And it couldn't be more different than Warframe, which is a game where weapons work in a simple, straightforward fashion. So I'm not against self-damage in anything. I'm against self-damage in Warframe because when you make a hyper-fast parkour shooter, you probably don't want to suddenly tell people that actually what you're supposed to do is stand still and carefully aim every shot you make. (The punchline to the joke is that explosive self-damage is still less dangerous in Synthetik than it is in Warframe despite the game being built around weapons handling being very punishing). So, we're a game where weapons work in simple straightforward fashions, right? I think "That's a bomb, don't be there when it blows up" is pretty damn simple and straightforward in concept. You don't need to calculate the world, you just a) don't jump directly into the place you just sent the murder ball and b) shoot them clearly away from yourself. I think you're begging the question, with this image of 'hyper fast looter shooter' as if it's criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought. It's really not hard. You don't see your Chroma in Eidolon hunts bouncing off trees and having to land his Synovia shot in the middle of all that. They position for the shot and line it up so they get it right. Is that so different from slightly altering your playstyle based on the risks of an explosive? Maybe you tend to back-dodge, shoot, then parkour forwards through a cloud of vaporised opposition. Maybe you tend to take the most airborne approach you can when in anything but the narrowest toob of a corridor, raining down explosives from above instead of gut-shooting fools at point blank range. There's nothing objectively wrong with that. Only subjectively if you don't like it; if it doesn't work well with how you play. The funny thing is, I bet 90% of the vocal group complaining for absolute self-damage removal are only even paying any attention to it at all because of Cautious Shot's introduction. If DE hadn't communicated that they've got some interest in tweaking the self-damage curve, most of this group might just be quietly ignoring the weapons they don't like instead of clamouring for them to be thematically butchered into something they do like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robolaser Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 (edited) Il y a 5 heures, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx a dit : Since as you say, there are more people complaining about it than want it left in place I never said that. I said many people complain about it. Not that they are a majority. Il y a 5 heures, MJ12 a dit : I'm against self-damage in Warframe because when you make a hyper-fast parkour shooter, you probably don't want to suddenly tell people that actually what you're supposed to do is stand still and carefully aim every shot you make - it's only "hyper-fast" if you want it to be. You want super-fast? Forget guns altogether and use macro spin 2 win like everyone else. - you don't need to stand still to avoid self damage, why would you? Where did you get that from? - OMG careful aim might be required in a shooting game! Gentle sarcasm aside, NO, once you get used to it you don't even have to aim more carefully than with any precise weapon (and i'm not even talking about landing headshots, about which no one ever complained). Just shooting in the enemies' general direction is enough, as expected from AoE weapons. The only requirements in order to avoid self-damage 99% of the time are paying attention to your position, and to your surroundings. Which are very basic skill in almost every action-oriented games, not only shooters. It might even be useful IRL, so that you won't step on lego, bump against furniture, or fall off a cliff while texting. Try it out 🙂 Edited June 11, 2019 by Robolaser Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kontrollo Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 Oh, I've read some posts now. This is actually about taking it completely away from everything? Then a solid no on this. Self damage has some uses all on its own. There are enough weapons -- even AoE -- that don't have it. If it bothers you that much, simply use those. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MJ12 Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 Just now, Robolaser said: - it's only "hyper-fast" if you want it to be. You want super-fast? Forget guns altogether and use macro spin 2 win like everyone else. - you don't need to stand still to avoid self damage, why would you? Where did you get that from? - OMG careful aim might be required in a shooting game! Gentle sarcasm aside, NO, once you get used to it you don't even have to aim more carefully than with any precise weapon (and i'm not even talking about landing headshots, about which no one ever complained). Just shooting in the enemies' general direction is enough, as expected from AoE weapons. The only requirements in order to avoid self-damage 99% of the time are paying attention to your position, and to your surroundings. Which are very basic skill in almost every action-oriented games, not only shooters. It might even be useful IRL, so that you won't step on lego, bump against furniture, or fall off a cliff while texting. Try it out 🙂 Here's the thing. You're right that you can avoid self-damage via some situational awareness. Okay, and? Look, the Ogris is literally my most used weapon. I am very aware of how Warframe launchers handle. I can avoid their AoEs just fine. The entire process is still incredibly pointless frustrating busywork for weapons that literally aren't, and shouldn't be, any better than alternatives. The fact that you probably won't be regularly killing yourself doesn't change that using them is annoying because of the absurd self-damage, the absurd punishment for the use of self-damage weapons disinclines players to actually experiment with them and 'get used to it,' the deaths that you suffer from bad luck are extremely frustrating, and the level of punishment launchers in Warframe have for missed shots is far out of line of literally every other weapon type in the game. Even the Opticor, which is relatively punishing due to its charge mechanics and slow fire rate, means that if you miss a shot you... have to wait one or two more seconds to fire another one (and it also has two AoEs: The beam itself with a .5m radius, and the impact AoE to boot). If the punishment for a whiffed self-damaging launcher shot was a dud round or some visual disruption or a knockdown, that would be one thing. But it isn't. But I'm glad that instead of trying to engage in reasonable debate, you automatically decided that anyone who finds self-damage in Warframe unacceptably frustrating must be bad at the game and also bad at basic life skills. This sort of display of condescension and hostility doesn't help your case at all. 50 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said: So, we're a game where weapons work in simple straightforward fashions, right? I think "That's a bomb, don't be there when it blows up" is pretty damn simple and straightforward in concept. You don't need to calculate the world, you just a) don't jump directly into the place you just sent the murder ball and b) shoot them clearly away from yourself. You're exaggerating "carefully aim" into "calculate the world" now as if I was implying that avoiding self-damage required calculating windage and elevation. And you're also conflating "simple and straightforward in concept" with "work in simple and straightforward fashions" despite the fact that they don't actually mean the same thing. Requiring players to understand their weapon's poorly-telegraphed, unlisted blast radius, then get used to working around it so much that they can successfully use said weapon in close quarters, is a hell of a lot less simple and straightforward than putting your reticle on target and firing. Especially since almost all launchers in Warframe fire slow, arcing projectiles that have noticeable drop even over short distances, so they're already somewhat unwieldy even ignoring their slow fire and reload speeds and self-damage and everything else. Yet again, you're acting like most of Warframe's combat doesn't take place in cramped, indoors areas with average engagement ranges of maybe a dozen meters. The investment that self-damage weapons want from the player in a game where the mechanics incentivize dabbling in a lot of weapons and very few weapons require that level of investment is unreasonably high. 50 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I think you're begging the question, with this image of 'hyper fast looter shooter' as if it's criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought. It's really not hard. You don't see your Chroma in Eidolon hunts bouncing off trees and having to land his Synovia shot in the middle of all that. They position for the shot and line it up so they get it right. Is that so different from slightly altering your playstyle based on the risks of an explosive? Maybe you tend to back-dodge, shoot, then parkour forwards through a cloud of vaporised opposition. Maybe you tend to take the most airborne approach you can when in anything but the narrowest toob of a corridor, raining down explosives from above instead of gut-shooting fools at point blank range. There's nothing objectively wrong with that. Only subjectively if you don't like it; if it doesn't work well with how you play. Eidolon hunts have been criticized for basically rendering irrelevant most of the things which make Warframe unique (like mobility and agility) and devolving into Destiny 2 raid metas where you stand around stacking damage buffs and unload your highest DPS guns into the raid boss's weakspot, so I'm not sure appealing to something that's already debatable (the fact that you basically might as well stand still in an Eidolon fight unless you're targeted by a telegraphed attack) to defend the existence of self-damage is wise. Furthermore, it's funny that you strawman Warframe being a hyper-fast looter shooter into "it's criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought" when what I want is emphasizing thinking about movement and people firing while moving. But even assuming, arguendo, that eidolon hunts are a good example of why it shouldn't be "criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought" (hey that's another exaggeration, I never said it should be), that doesn't actually support your case. Eidolons are a break from the normal content in Warframe, much like most Warframe bosses are. They can only be fought at limited times, they're only limited to a single area and are primarily a self-contained ecosystem for Operator and extremely late-game items (Arcanes), and like the other bosses they attempt to change the gameplay up a little because they're allowed to be somewhat abnormal for the rest of the game because you're not expected to fight them that much and new mechanics are something of a draw for bosses. Hell, one of the bosses is literally a music puzzle with jumping puzzle elements. But launchers aren't an environmental weapon or something else that shows up in a handful of special missions where the launcher rules exist . Launchers are intended to be used in regular gameplay, which is supposed to be a fast-paced horde shooter. They should be not annoying to use if you want to play the game as a fast paced horde shooter, which means they should be reasonably forgiving in their handling, like the other guns in Warframe are. Again, if somehow AoE weapons are all incredibly unbalanced if they can be used at short range, give them a minimum arm distance, so short-range attacks plink off the enemy like Corinth alt-fires. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robolaser Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 (edited) il y a 33 minutes, MJ12 a dit : instead of trying to engage in reasonable debate I see, those who agree whith you are reasonable, others are not. Obviously. Well, have fun trying to convince people with your false assumptions and personal attacks 🙄 Edited June 11, 2019 by Robolaser Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kontrollo Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 18 minutes ago, MJ12 said: ... Again, if somehow AoE weapons are all incredibly unbalanced if they can be used at short range, give them a minimum arm distance, so short-range attacks plink off the enemy like Corinth alt-fires. I could envision that mechanic on certain weapons, but definitely not all of them. There are cases where you actually want that self damage, and there are cases where it'd be hard to set a good arming distance. An obvious example of the latter is Kulstar with its cluster bombs. Side note: Corinth alt-fire deals self-damage, too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MJ12 Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 21 minutes ago, Kontrollo said: I could envision that mechanic on certain weapons, but definitely not all of them. There are cases where you actually want that self damage, and there are cases where it'd be hard to set a good arming distance. An obvious example of the latter is Kulstar with its cluster bombs. Side note: Corinth alt-fire deals self-damage, too. You're never going to 'want' that self-damage in Warframe PvE. Unlike in a PvP game where trading might be relevant (the enemy has a power weapon and you don't, the enemy might be able to outplay you but you're in a trading opportunity) because it's a net draw in a 1v1 at worst and might get you more than 1 kill for your own death, you get hundreds or thousands of enemies swarming you in a mission and a 'trade' is never actually desirable. And that's at best. It's very likely that you might not even manage to get a kill because your weapon just doesn't deal that much damage. And you're right that it'd be hard to set a good arming distance for some weapons, but if you insist that people should be discouraged from using launchers at close ranges it's a better solution because it's less frustrating to whiff a shot than it is to instantly get downed and see the "BLEEDING OUT: 00:15" timer. This is exactly why I prefer removing self-damage from the game entirely, because it's simpler and it's hardly like being able to instantly engage in area of effect clears of nearby enemies is some extremely powerful added ability which would unbalance launchers when ground-slams and heavy melee weapons exist and can be instantly switched to. And the Corinth alt-fire does do self-damage, but you can only manage to hurt yourself with it if you use a -flightspeed Riven or do other extremely weird shenanigans via Archwings specifically in an attempt to break its arming distance. Functionally, its self-damage could be removed with zero impact. It's just there because it's there. Which honestly is self-damage in a nutshell in Warframe. It's just there because it's there. It doesn't actually balance anything and all it serves as is an arbitrary annoyance that existed because the first launcher in Warframe wasn't really well thought-out and was introduced in a very different paradigm, one where Stamina still existed, Super Jump was still a thing, and people hadn't quite figured out Zorencoptering yet. And at that time, DE was basically still aping other games' gameplay mechanics willy-nilly because Warframe didn't have its own gameplay identity quite yet. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kontrollo Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 1 minute ago, MJ12 said: You're never going to 'want' that self-damage in Warframe PvE. ... Yes, I do. There are certain effects and abilities that trigger on getting hit and taking damage, so sometimes it's useful, and I like having options. 6 minutes ago, MJ12 said: ... And you're right that it'd be hard to set a good arming distance for some weapons, but if you insist that people should be discouraged from using launchers at close ranges it's a better solution because it's less frustrating to whiff a shot than it is to instantly get downed and see the "BLEEDING OUT: 00:15" timer. This is exactly why I prefer removing self-damage from the game entirely, because it's simpler and it's hardly like being able to instantly engage in area of effect clears of nearby enemies is some extremely powerful added ability which would unbalance launchers when ground-slams and heavy melee weapons exist and can be instantly switched to. ... I've also said that there's already a multiplier on self damage which they could tweak and that there are enough options which don't deal self damage, at all. 8 minutes ago, MJ12 said: ... And the Corinth alt-fire does do self-damage, but you can only manage to hurt yourself with it if you use a -flightspeed Riven or do other extremely weird shenanigans via Archwings specifically in an attempt to break its arming distance. ... No, you just have to go fast enough because the game doesn't handle inertia properly. Which makes setting a proper arming distance a bit more problematic, too. I'm not going to debate whether it's necessary on that particular weapon, it was just a side note. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheLexiConArtist Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 20 minutes ago, MJ12 said: Here's the thing. You're right that you can avoid self-damage via some situational awareness. Okay, and? Look, the Ogris is literally my most used weapon. I am very aware of how Warframe launchers handle. I can avoid their AoEs just fine. The entire process is still incredibly pointless frustrating busywork for weapons that literally aren't, and shouldn't be, any better than alternatives. The fact that you probably won't be regularly killing yourself doesn't change that using them is annoying because of the absurd self-damage, the absurd punishment for the use of self-damage weapons disinclines players to actually experiment with them and 'get used to it,' the deaths that you suffer from bad luck are extremely frustrating, and the level of punishment launchers in Warframe have for missed shots is far out of line of literally every other weapon type in the game. Even the Opticor, which is relatively punishing due to its charge mechanics and slow fire rate, means that if you miss a shot you... have to wait one or two more seconds to fire another one (and it also has two AoEs: The beam itself with a .5m radius, and the impact AoE to boot). If the punishment for a whiffed self-damaging launcher shot was a dud round or some visual disruption or a knockdown, that would be one thing. But it isn't. Why shouldn't they be better (if better is defined as better damage output, specifically) than alternatives? If 'better' means the overall risks/rewards as a proportion, how does addressing that from both sides not also work to solve the inferiority of explosives in an incremental fashion until acceptable balance is reached? I interject to ask this because once again you have not actually identified any impersonal reason why self-damage is inexcusable. Consider weapon balance abstracted as a rectangular plot on a graph with positive X (Better Rewards), negative X (Bigger Risks) and positive Y (which we'll call General Applicability for want of a more succinct name). Most weapons are a relatively tall plot, which does not extend very far on either side of X. Low impact risks, average output. More specialised weapons squash the height of this plot to extend the width. In their worst, they can bring about much more lost opportunity than the basic, average plot. In their best, they bring greater rewards. The reduction in applicability means that they're just more specialised, more care needs to be taken in their usage to achieve positive X outcomes rather than negative X outcomes. Launchers with self-damage then are the shallow form of this plot. They should bring greater rewards in optimal use cases, they have the great deficit of self-damage and possible self-fatality when inappropriately used. As a shallow plot, that means they're among the most specialised, they require the most diligence, care, finesse, skill - whatever you want to call it - to ensure outcomes land on Positive X. Now, if all these abstract plots have a reasonably similar total area and are centred for X, we can consider them balanced. They may not see equal usage, but each is valid for people who wish to use them. More people will tend to the taller plots, fewer to the shallower plots, as is natural outside of specific scenarios that play into the positives or play out of the potential negatives. You do not have to make the plot less shallow to right an imbalance. You can squash or stretch the width as appropriate also. While this does not prove your desire abjectly wrong, if the less-shallow plot already exists in similar functionality (which it does, through the various AOE alternatives), there is no obligating reason whatsoever to make that Risky Explosive plot taller. 20 minutes ago, MJ12 said: You're exaggerating "carefully aim" into "calculate the world" now as if I was implying that avoiding self-damage required calculating windage and elevation. And you're also conflating "simple and straightforward in concept" with "work in simple and straightforward fashions" despite the fact that they don't actually mean the same thing. Requiring players to understand their weapon's poorly-telegraphed, unlisted blast radius, then get used to working around it so much that they can successfully use said weapon in close quarters, is a hell of a lot less simple and straightforward than putting your reticle on target and firing. Especially since almost all launchers in Warframe fire slow, arcing projectiles that have noticeable drop even over short distances, so they're already somewhat unwieldy even ignoring their slow fire and reload speeds and self-damage and everything else. Yet again, you're acting like most of Warframe's combat doesn't take place in cramped, indoors areas with average engagement ranges of maybe a dozen meters. The investment that self-damage weapons want from the player in a game where the mechanics incentivize dabbling in a lot of weapons and very few weapons require that level of investment is unreasonably high. Actually, I was extrapolating 'calculate the world' from your description of the minutia of this other game of yours. How is a simple and straightforward concept not inherently something that works in a simple fashion? You shoot an explosive badly, you died. You shoot it well, you kill the other guys (theoretically) and not yourself. Still simple. "This end towards enemy" and "operate at safe distance". That's all the weapons generally care for, the rest is your gameplay around that. It's not the weapon's fault if you don't distance yourself, hell, it's not even the weapon's fault if you clip a hitbox that's imperfect. The latter might not be directly yours, but you judged the value of that 'near miss' playing out as expected to be worth the fact that it is still, invariably, a non-zero risk compared to a clear field of view. Do go on about engagement ranges of 12m when the best base radius of a typical single payload is maybe half of that. I killed myself thrice last night playing around with my ol' Kulstar, not going to lie. But then I was dumbfiring at Infested within my cosy-ranged Snowglobe at the time, so when I made my distance I clipped the edge of the dome. Shockingly, trying to lay clusters down in a 6m radius led to a backing up slightly too far. If deaths mattered I wouldn't be doing that, of course, because I knew it was daft and needlessly risky. 20 minutes ago, MJ12 said: Eidolon hunts have been criticized for basically rendering irrelevant most of the things which make Warframe unique (like mobility and agility) and devolving into Destiny 2 raid metas where you stand around stacking damage buffs and unload your highest DPS guns into the raid boss's weakspot, so I'm not sure appealing to something that's already debatable (the fact that you basically might as well stand still in an Eidolon fight unless you're targeted by a telegraphed attack) to defend the existence of self-damage is wise. Furthermore, it's funny that you strawman Warframe being a hyper-fast looter shooter into "it's criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought" when what I want is emphasizing thinking about movement and people firing while moving. But even assuming, arguendo, that eidolon hunts are a good example of why it shouldn't be "criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought" (hey that's another exaggeration, I never said it should be), that doesn't actually support your case. Eidolons are a break from the normal content in Warframe, much like most Warframe bosses are. They can only be fought at limited times, they're only limited to a single area and are primarily a self-contained ecosystem for Operator and extremely late-game items (Arcanes), and like the other bosses they attempt to change the gameplay up a little because they're allowed to be somewhat abnormal for the rest of the game because you're not expected to fight them that much and new mechanics are something of a draw for bosses. Hell, one of the bosses is literally a music puzzle with jumping puzzle elements. But launchers aren't an environmental weapon or something else that shows up in a handful of special missions where the launcher rules exist . Launchers are intended to be used in regular gameplay, which is supposed to be a fast-paced horde shooter. They should be not annoying to use if you want to play the game as a fast paced horde shooter, which means they should be reasonably forgiving in their handling, like the other guns in Warframe are. Again, if somehow AoE weapons are all incredibly unbalanced if they can be used at short range, give them a minimum arm distance, so short-range attacks plink off the enemy like Corinth alt-fires. Okay then, let's put away Eidolon fights and sink back to other bosses. Are you going to parkour at full speed around the arena when aiming for the weak spots of Grineer bosses such as Lech Kril, Vay Hek, Sargas Ruk? Even Kela when she's in her own parkour mode? Or are you going to find the gap between attacks where you can slow down a second to take that shot? When you've downed an Ambulas, are you better off circling the arena or holding cover while you point-defend against the Remechs and hacking Crewmen - except when the artillery expressly makes you change up that strategy for a short period? Yes, Warframe promotes mobility, but it equally promotes ebb and flow between higher- and lower-mobility moments. Now those are bosses that exhibit that measure of approach in general, but it follows naturally in regular play based on what you bring: Some weapons play particularly well at high speeds, some need you to occasionally measure your shots to get the output you desire. Many are generally ambivalent where you just might not get as much out as accurately if you're being laissez-faire. But you can even get more out of a totally standard boring rifle with a little punch-through and lining your opposition up from your point of view. Yes, the risk of launchers is a big deal (although further mitigated by squads, bonus Arcane revives, Sacrifice sentinels..) but so what, fundamentally? Why can't we - as per the example under the first quote - let that shallow and wide group of balance plots just exist as the specialised gear they are? If brought to a more appropriate representative total 'plot area' by tweaks to the risk/reward relationship, they're balanced. Alternative AOE equipment with similar implementations exist as a thinner/taller plot already, so we're not filling a missing niche by squashing in the explosive class. We're just removing that separate level. Although you say your Ogris is your most used weapon, I hate to break it to you, but if you're getting that frustrated with killing yourself (and the process involved in not killing yourself), the appeal is definitely not the whole package - you're not attached to the sum of its parts, just some of its parts. The problem is, you're trying to cherry pick those parts for everyone. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teridax68 Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 (edited) 8 hours ago, MJ12 said: Synthetik is a game where the complexity of weapons handling forces very deliberate gunplay and engagement selection. Self-damage fits into that game. And it couldn't be more different than Warframe, which is a game where weapons work in a simple, straightforward fashion. So I'm not against self-damage in anything. I'm against self-damage in Warframe because when you make a hyper-fast parkour shooter, you probably don't want to suddenly tell people that actually what you're supposed to do is stand still and carefully aim every shot you make. (The punchline to the joke is that explosive self-damage is still less dangerous in Synthetik than it is in Warframe despite the game being built around weapons handling being very punishing). This is an excellent example, yeah. Worth mentioning is that Synthetik forces deliberate gunplay and engagement through more than just its weapons as well: its top-down perspective means the player has a full awareness of their immediate surroundings, its moderate movement speed and stable level layout means the player won't get caught by surprise by random bits of geometry, and its highly visible, slightly slowed-down projectiles means the player is given full information of how their weapons behave, and thus can be reasonably expected to act on it. I agree 100% with the idea that self-damage in general is not a bad idea (I don't think anyone's challenged that actually), and in fact I'd even push this a little further by saying that self-damage in Warframe can also work... just not through the explosive self-damage we're given. The Lenz probably does that kind of self-damage the best, but then again, the mechanic is highly specific, and I don't think it would be that great for variety to give every self-damaging explosion a telegraphed delay. 4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Interesting that you identify wall latching and aim gliding, both features which slow or halt your parkour vectors so you can control yourself and aim better. I don't think I could have made my point better than you already did with that. ... they are both parkour maneuvers, and aim-gliding specifically has you conserve momentum while moving while still giving you time to aim... while moving. Wall-latching, by contrast, has you directly attach yourself to the level geometry. Both are specifically part of a combat system where rapid movement and gunplay are part of the same whole, and the fact that you'd latch onto some superficial aspect to ignore this feels like you're trying to find excuses to avoid addressing the substance of the argument here. Quote Okay, though. Maybe my mind works differently. Maybe I process situations quickly and my experience is not a representative median of judgement and reaction. But for something that should be such an absolute solution to That Group Right There, it's part and parcel of the experience to make that call. Where the guy mowing enemies down with the rifle at high speed has to aim at each individual target, compensating as they go, the guy with the explosives performs their assessment and adjustments up front, finds their clear distance and takes The Shot, and everything goes away with them surviving. Perhaps they both spent as long getting their aim on, it just varies in distribution? After all, given the standardised Fast Move includes a roll, Rifle Dave can't keep their aiming and shooting while at maximum movement either. Literally none of this changes the fact that most people do not like self-damage, and unlike rifles, this is enough to make them not use launchers at all. One of the key flaws to the equivalence you are trying to establish is that most weapons, while perhaps not to everyone's preferences, only rarely have features that are actively disliked, meaning that anyone, even a fan of current launchers, can try them without being violently turned off. The same cannot be said for launchers, who have proven to be unpopular specifically due to self-damage. Thus, while I can certainly emphasize with wanting a weapon more suited for a more niche demographic of people, my ongoing criticism is that this should not mean excluding everyone else from the fun, which is why explosive self-damage is not really a "niche" worth implementing on an entire class of weapons, even if it might be fine on one or two like the Lenz (whose self-damage is implemented in a completely different manner). Quote Reorienting was specific to the Corpus traps mostly, since you have to have a semblance of control to have your roll ready and placed correctly even to pass a standard laser barricade. At full whack it's easy to still be aim-gliding after you rolled and end up being clipped unless you drop yourself short to get the roll back. Jupiter now doubles-down on that by having partial coverage. You might have to slide, you might have to orient yourself to a particular side. Occasionally there's even a low one you're meant to go over. ... but making one's movements more precise or orienting oneself mid-traversal are both central to the game's parkour, not opposed to it. The game isn't trying to slow you down with these traps forever, because with enough skill at parkour, those traps cease to pose a problem. Unlike explosives, parkour is a skill being constantly reinforced through play, which makes it reasonable to expect the player to have a measure of expertise in parkour after enough time playing. Quote Yes, they can all be shot, but pulling that off at full speed is a matter of experience and expertise.. just like learning how to wield an explosive safely yet without being glacially slow. ... except as I mentioned in one of my first posts here, self-damage isn't entirely based on personal failures, as the game, its levels, and even its explosive weapons do not have the predictability required to consistently avoid it. There appears to be an undue obsession with personal skill in this discussion, and an underlying fear of losing one's stated bragging rights with the removal of an otherwise demonstrably unhealthy mechanic. Quote The entire design, you say? In my version of the game there are defending-based objectives which are fairly well suited to stationary, cover-based approaches. They're not the only one that works, but they are excellent tools for the job at hand. ... which cover? Are you sure we're playing the same game? Because even defensive missions in Warframe still encourage the player to move around to fight waves of enemies coming from all sides. A lot of the stuff said here is so patently ridiculous in the face of even five minutes of actual in-game play that it feels like this conversation is being made for some completely imaginary game, and sustained entirely by the fact that it is being made on an internet forum, far from the reality of direct play experience. Quote Likewise, the explosive wielder may not be Volt doing the running-man to his destination (invariably kissing the nearest wall until he compensates momentum) but they can still move competently enough between and during their uses of those risky payloads to still be on their toes in a Warframe environment. I can't stand Volts, by the way, because by muscle memory and experience I'm overall slower with that arbitrary momentum buff than I am without it. Does that mean I fall completely behind every squad containing a Volt? Nah. I've even become fairly competent at spinning around to integrate the back-dodge into my parkour flow when I need to get rid of the buff. On paper they should be faster, just like on paper operating around the risk of explosives should make you slower, but the player element muddies those boundaries right over each other. Precisely: the player element muddies those boundaries, and means that discussion on paper turns out differently in practice. In this specific case, for instance, one can pontificate endlessly about how, theoretically, one could be able to stop oneself at just the right times, or engage in stealth gameplay in every mission, or have absolute awareness of the environment while moving at high speeds, without taking into account any of the many other random factors that trigger self-damage, all just to make launchers usable, but the reality is simply that players as a whole dislike self-damage so much that they'd rather not touch one of the most bombastic weapons classes in the game, sooner than go through hours of pain for very little payoff. Quote If you're stationary and you die from shooting anything other than a rogue ally whose own parkour 'crosses the pipe' then that is absolutely a reason to punish the player. They took grossly inadequate care of entirely visible clues when judging their trigger pull. But that is why I suggested a resolution for ally issues (and possibly the 'distance to payload' issue) to handle those questionable cases. Is it, though? Because the majority of explosions aren't actually well-conveyed, and as said above, the level geometry means that shots can collide much sooner than anticipated, even with seemingly clear visual information at hand. Warframe's levels aren't the perfectly regular, square-like environments of Synthetik, for example, they're tilesets with bits of scenery sticking out from all sides, including some fairly irregular bits as well, often in spaces so tight it's difficult to fire a launcher at all. You could say that the player deserves to die for using launchers in those environments, but then the problem is that many players agree with you, and so choose to not use those weapons at all. Idealistic player moralism in this case doesn't actually help the situation, even if it must feel good to establish a point of comparison to other players in which one feels superior. Quote I'm not sure you understand the concept of analogy. You don't have to be a stealth player to use explosives, but if stealth can still be a played style, so can risky explosives, as they both require deviation from the norm, indirect pathing and more consideration in engagements than the average run 'n gun. The deviations are similar in concept but differ in execution. Stealth Joe cares where enemies are looking when deciding where he moves. Explosive Dave cares where they are standing and where he can move to clear his line of fire. Stealth Joe waits for patrols to turn their backs; Explosive Dave waits briefly for a detonation in an enclosed space or takes a somewhat slower route around the impending danger zone. ... I'm sorry, were you not the one outright telling me players should be using the same method of parkouring around enemies and slowing one's pace in the same manner as stealth just to land an explosive shot? Because I can quote you on that. Feigning plausible deniability here by telling me that you were just speaking in analogies doesn't work here, as the substance is still the same: you still seem to be asking for players to go out of their way to slow themselves down just to manage explosives, which begs the question: why should anyone do that? What is the payoff here for this unusually large effort? Quote Stealth weapons do require setups that behoove them. You get found if you shot a guy in front of his buddy, now. Arrows can carry corpses into view and alert guards as well. Explosives fare poorly in tight space unless you can back up a respectable distance, but have a better freedom of effective firing path in less-obstructed areas. ... okay, but alerting someone because you shot them near their friend is a universal mechanic, whereas self-damage is not. Stealth weapons develop upon an existing framework and existing mechanics to operate, whereas launchers fabricate this entirely new mechanic that goes directly against how the rest of the game works. Properly engaging in stealth means the enemy stays unalerted and you get more Affinity; "properly" engaging in launcher gameplay means either turning into a sitting duck, or constantly running the risk of blowing up at random because of poorly predictable self-damage when in motion. Quote With current risk-reward ratio and overpowering alternatives, few but the true enthusiasts make frequent use of most launchers. This says nothing about whether a more adequate balance within and without of their archetype would see people more willing to accept that risk. This is a curious blend of conjectural optimism and the No True Scotsman fallacy, one that ignores a fact that has been pointed out multiple times already that self-damage isn't a problem purely because it's balanced wrong, but because its design fundamentally does not work in Warframe: On 2019-06-03 at 11:07 AM, Teridax68 said: The general player opinion on the matter seems to be a categorical no. Self-damage is a stupid mechanic in Warframe for a a number of reasons: The game emphasises constant mobility via parkour, meaning the player will be frequently travelling through rapidly changing environments at high speed. Killing the player just because some bit of level geometry went up in front of them makes no sense. A tremendous portion of the game's levels still are made of small rooms and tight corridors. It therefore makes no sense in this context to punish the player for firing a weapon too closely. For whichever reason, our weapons fire collides with our teammates, meaning that if a player steps in front of another with a self-damaging weapon (which happens often in defensive missions or cramped tilesets), the latter player will blow themselves up. Every time self-damage has been used by players to their benefit, e.g. Trinity at the time of her 99% Blessing, or Chroma, DE treated that development as an exploit to be fixed, rather than an interesting player usage of mechanics. Self-damage is thus, by DE's own intentional design, a mechanic intended to have purely negative consequences upon our gameplay. In general, the philosophy of expressly punishing the player for playing "poorly", by whichever nebulous standard we are setting in this context, through mechanics built into their weapons, just doesn't work. Warframe is not a game that aims to punish the player to begin with, and if only some weapons are made to apply disproportionate punishment just for using them like any other weapon, players are simply going to drop those in favor of weapons that don't try to screw us over, as is the case now. These are a few choice bulletpoints I made in my very first post on this thread. Balancing self-damage by reducing it would not address the above issues. Quote What is far more likely is that people who are enthusiasts already in spite of the risk and alternatives will probably feel at best like they just got their weapon replaced by a baby toy should the archetype be neutered in the way you suggest. And how exactly do you know that this is more likely? Because that's how you personally feel? Because you too are advocating to "neuter" the archetype by reducing self-damage, so really, all of this fearmongering leads to nowhere, because it is purely hypothetical and based on some arbitrary baseline neither of us seem to have decided upon. Even if by some freak chance a handful of people were so attached to self-damaged that they'd leave the game for it, yet that were to gain the game more players, players actually aligned with Warframe's gameplay... well, I guess that's just too bad. Quote Other than the previously addressed issues, it's not 'at random' if the player can reasonably operate around the risk. Indeed, it wouldn't be... except it is. It's been pointed out by many more users, and is demonstrated by actual player behavior in-game, where the few players who do pick up self-damaging weapons often end up killing themselves at random. Again, launchers are patently unpopular, so pretending that it's all the player's fault here is as pointless as it is false. Quote You bring up semantics and then make a semantic call that the 'explosives' are desired as some unique property of their own above and beyond their archetype in relation to other AOE weaponry. What is it then? Is it art assets? Should I riot because my Ignis can produce noxious fumes instead of a stream of visually pleasing fire? I'm not sure you understand the concept of semantics. To be clear, I called you out on semantics because you were inventing the notion that there was some sort of Platonic ideal of explosives, and that one of the essential characteristics of this archetype was self-damage, a line of reasoning that makes strictly no sense from beginning to end. By contrast "me likey explosives because big boom boom explosion" isn't a semantic argument. I had already answered you on this matter rather clearly: explosives tend to be popular because they produce discrete, yet powerful explosions that tend to feel impactful. It really isn't that hard to understand why people like explosions, as Michael Bay moviegoers can attest to. Trying to establish some vague association between the AoE of explosions and that of the Ignis therefore makes absolutely no sense, and would only make sense in an imaginary world where one were to abstract all weapons to such a high-level degree that the resulting design talk would be fruitless. Quote If it's conventional ordnance that you want, they always came with self-damage, barring the obvious mistake, and saying you want one without the other is an oxymoron. If it's a radial AOE that you want, then there are other options currently, potential additional options later, and don't require the changing of one subset to become more identical to another. ... case in point. You are completely ignoring prior arguments made here in favor of repeating the same, debunked talking points: self-damage is not an essential characteristic of "conventional ordnance", nor would it need to be if it were the case, and "radial AoE" is an intentionally vague term that completely misses the fact that using a flamethrower or a shotgun with punch-through does not have the same feel as firing a grenade or exploding rocket. Why is it an oxymoron to ask for launchers without self-damage? Would the Tonkor or Ogris cease to exist if their self-damage were reduced to 0? Quote I'm not sure if you were sabotaging yourself or not in vagueness considering the meat of what this replied to, being that it is not one group with A opinion and one group with B opinion, but one group with one opinion being declared the inarguable majority over several groups of several opinions. You have absolutely zero proof that the singular opinion of "zero self-damage" is the majority, especially not by their vocal nature. Look at the 'yes' posters here. How many of them are engaging to this extent? They all still obviously exist even if they've come and gone in a heartbeat. It's also a factor that those who are in a negative perspective are inherently more disposed to be vocal than those with a neutral or positive perspective. Outliers like myself notwithstanding, they have no need to go on tirades because they don't feel like they particularly require action. ... speaking of sabotage, you have diluted your point to the extent where it ceases to make sense here, while utterly missing the point of what I'm saying: attempting to gerrymander the playerbase along arbitrary degrees of intensity on the subject does strictly nothing in the face of the very obvious fact that self-damage is very unpopular. Players express a general dislike of self-damage, and only a tiny handful of people scattered across internet discussion spaces ever defend the mechanic. It is possible that more people would tolerate self-damage if it were reduced, but that is not the same as enjoying a mechanic, the latter of which is obviously better (and, speaking of, not even you have really expressed any actual enjoyment of self-damage, so much as the assurance that it'd feel less bad if it were reduced). Pretending that there's this silent majority of players who are satisfied with self-damage is equally laughable when launchers are themselves a notoriously unpopular class of weapons: more generally, the moment you count on a "silent majority" of players that just so happens to never have expressed themselves on the subject as being on your side, that is an implicit admission that your position is unpopular, and indefensible on its own terms. Quote Sure, you can have people who question the mechanic! And I'll point them right to that old chestnut that proved the need. Then, I'll question the why not which is an equally valid question as why so, and one which you have done a respectable effort of debating but proved no more inarguably than I the opposite. So, first off, just because I've said words and you've said words does not mean our words are equal in meaning and value. I've actually done the work of explaining why most self-damage in Warframe is bad by design, and so have several others on here and on many other spaces, and these are points you have yet to address. Meanwhile, your two central arguments so far, namely that self-damage can be balanced better (which I agree with), and that the unpopularity of launchers comes from Warframe's playerbase being collectively inferior to you, have been responded to in several different ways. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I have in fact been questioning the mechanic and its implementation, not simply opposing it categorically. It is only when you started digging your argumentative trenches that you decided to fall into this "us versus them" mentality, and pictured me as wanting to remove self-damage from the game entirely, when I specifically tried to meet you halfway by pointing out that explosive damage has in fact been implemented successfully... but only because its implementation was completely different from the standard. At no point have I said that all self-damage, regardless of implementation, was fundamentally bad, I simply pointed out that attaching this self-damage to instant, poorly indicated explosions, in a game with tight spaces and an emphasis on mobility in highly variable level geometry, is a bad idea. I even attempted compromise from my very first post by suggesting three different other ways of punishing the player for using weapons at the "wrong" ranges, including suggesting to remove the scaling with self-damage mods in an effort to make self-damage more tolerable (but still not fun). As such, you are the only extremist on this thread, as you are not only aggressively defending a mechanic that has proven not to work, but have constructed such a limited mental model of your debating opponents that the discussion has lost all nuance for it. To restate my position: I think explosive self-damage as it is implemented on the majority of current launchers is bad by design, and should be removed or changed. I think implementations of self-damage resembling the Lenz are genuinely fun, and could potentially be developed, but I also believe some weapons could have their self-damage removed entirely and only benefit from it. To reject all of this in favor of the extremely simplistic position that everything would be just fine if the numbers were toned down, and people learned to git gud, is not only needlessly reductive, but dismissive and antagonistic to the point of insult. Quote This is no less semantically vague than my own can be argued. I'd posit more so in fact, because you're mixing the distinction between weapon individuals and weapon-archetypes. What does this even mean?! I cited individual examples of launchers to specifically point out that they, and by extension the archetype as a whole, would lose strictly none of their identity if self-damage were removed. When I tell you that a rocket launcher is a rocket launcher regardless of whether or not the wielder is hurt by its explosions, and you tell me I'm being "semantically vague", that does not convey to me that you truly understand semantics, so much as it does that you're trying to find excuses to dismiss a cogent argument that makes your position more difficult to defend. Quote Is the Arca Plasmor a shotgun? In some ways - not least its designated ammo type - yes. In others, no. In no case is it going to be comparable to a Dread, but equally in some cases it's not comparable to any other shotgun, making it distinctly not one for lacking those pellet-based and partial-miss drawback qualities. Conversely, the Brakk is a 'pistol' that is a pocket shotgun, featuring all the distinguishing design and drawbacks of the shotgun caste. Okay, but this is being intentionally vague and too focused on semantics. I'm not trying to have a discussion with you on what constitutes the Platonic ideal of a shotgun, a pistol, or a launcher, unless you are so unwilling to establish any common ground that you are prepared to tell me that the only essential characteristic of an explosive weapon is its capacity for self-damage. Quote Is a Tonkor a grenade launcher and the Ogris a rocket launcher within themselves? Aye. But as conventional explosive launchers, they share that common and distinguishing feature of risk-to-self when compared to other archetypes involving radial blasts. Is a Syndicate Proc attaching an explosive launcher effect? Is the Staticor an explosive launcher? Currently no, but what tangible difference is there once 'explosive launchers' are reduced in nuance to 'weapon producing radial AOE'? Syndicate procs don't fire explosive payloads, and the Staticor is visibly designed to fire rapid-fire projectiles rather than those same slow, explosive payloads. You are undermining your point on several sides here, as citing the Tonkor immediately harkens back to when it had no real risk to self... and was still a "conventional explosive launcher", and citing "risk-to-self" as an exclusive characteristic of the launcher archetype means the Komorex, all glaive weapons, and even the Hema are "conventional explosive launchers" by your definition. In effect, by bringing this discussion down to pure semantics, you are showing that your concept of launchers is so alien that we may in fact be talking about two entirely separate classes of weapons. Quote You have successfully invented the Tonkor at launch and obliterated the barrier to entry while also removing the ceiling of non-entry, that is to say, supplied zero effective reason to use anything else except (at the time) the Simulors in 90+% of standard play. ... except the Simulors are also no longer meta, and they didn't receive self damage. Why's that, pray tell? Oh, that's right, better weapons arrived... and the Tonkor was also reworked into a much slower weapon, even after its nerf that not only reduced its self-damage, but reduced its damage and the reliability of its explosions. It is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that we'd all just go back to using the Tonkor now if its self-damage were removed, because self-damage does not even begin to describe why the Tonkor is outmatched by better weapons. Quote On the plus side, I realised my analysis spreadsheet is so old I still have calculations on there from original Tonkor Judgement Day. They may be changed now, but did you know despite the horrendous mag and reload, the single target DPS of a Tonkor at its baseline level already strongly competed or even exceeded those of meta rifles/LMGs even through those constant reloads? Now take that, multiply it for every extra target you hit with that burst on average, and bear in mind that it's a crit based weapon so it was taking the optimal per-slot advantage scaling up from there. And all that was in ignorance of autoheadshot. ... all of which got nerfed in addition to the increase in self-damage. It is indeed good that you have decided to update your spreadsheet, because you are using outdated information to come to entirely wrong conclusions (because, just so we're clear on this, the Tonkor is a completely different weapon now, and better weapons have arrived since). Quote That may simply be a dated example but you can still see how easily these changes can muscle out broad swathes of completely different weapons that should be more suited for a job when you add the step of removing a limitation like that. Attach specific Warframes and the problem extends further. Turbulence removes flight-speed issues. Hall of Mirrors removed the setup of the Simulors allowing every shot to pop significant damage to the full area. No, I can't actually, because you are expecting me to assume that removing self-damage on the Tonkor would also somehow undo all of the other statistical changes it's gone through since, while also somehow purging weapons like the Tigris Prime from the game. The fact that you bring up Mirage and the Simulor also clearly illustrates the fact that the meta shifts even on weapons without self-damage, further undermining your point. Yes, if the Tonkor went back to having the best damage out of all weapons, negligible downtime, and ultra-reliable explosions, on top of having no self-damage, then it would likely be a problem, but in its current state, the weapon fires one shot at a time and has a lengthy reload period in-between, which I'd say are sufficient enough tradeoffs on their own, without having to add self-damage on top. Quote So, we're a game where weapons work in simple straightforward fashions, right? I think "That's a bomb, don't be there when it blows up" is pretty damn simple and straightforward in concept. You don't need to calculate the world, you just a) don't jump directly into the place you just sent the murder ball and b) shoot them clearly away from yourself. Or, even more simply: "That's a bomb, I want to shoot it so that it blows up"... which just so happens to not work when doing so blows the player up during regular play. Warframes are superhumanly strong and resilient, on top of having magic powers, so there really is no reason to enforce some kind of realism in this respect. Once again, insulting the playerbase's collective intelligent isn't going to make anyone want to play launchers more, it just makes you look elitist and fundamentally out of touch with the game. Quote I think you're begging the question, with this image of 'hyper fast looter shooter' as if it's criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought. It's really not hard. Yet it is apparently too hard for a majority of players to want to use launchers. Again, I'm not criminalizing thought, and would in fact like to see more opportunities for tactical thinking in-game, I'm just pointing out that your mental model of explosive self-damage is not only demonstrably wrong, it is outright insulting, as it presumes that people only incur self-damage because they're stupid or otherwise unskilled. Are you trying to discuss design for a video game here, or do you just want to tell me you think you're better than everyone else? Quote You don't see your Chroma in Eidolon hunts bouncing off trees and having to land his Synovia shot in the middle of all that. They position for the shot and line it up so they get it right. Is that so different from slightly altering your playstyle based on the risks of an explosive? Yes, it is, because Eidolon hunts are an extremely specific format in a very specific and unusually open level... and even then, many Eidolon moves explicitly try to force the player to move, e.g. the delayed lightning, sky lasers, shockwaves, acid ground, and so on. This is not the same as asking the player to bend over backwards in regular play just to avoid self-damaging themselves in ways that are often not really in the player's control. Quote Maybe you tend to back-dodge, shoot, then parkour forwards through a cloud of vaporised opposition. Maybe you tend to take the most airborne approach you can when in anything but the narrowest toob of a corridor, raining down explosives from above instead of gut-shooting fools at point blank range. There's nothing objectively wrong with that. Only subjectively if you don't like it; if it doesn't work well with how you play. But I'm not opposing altering one's playstyle here, I just don't think it's an adequate solution to the problem at hand: with the Lenz, for example, I've found myself altering my playstyle in a manner I actually really like, because the weapon naturally pushes me to bullet-jump into the air, aim-glide, and fire a shot at a crowd of enemies to blow them all up in almost cinematic fashion. All of this works, because if I accidentally hit a bit of level geometry instead, I can just move out of the way or use Transference to avoid incurring self-damage. I cannot do this with the Tonkor, the Ogris, or the Penta, because if I attempt to jump away from my enemies while firing at them, I may very well just blow myself up instead because the explosive hit some random bit of scenery, or because one enemy in the omnidirectional horde I'm fighting decided that that would be the exact moment they'd use their jump move to position themselves right in front of me. This is why the way those weapons implement self-damage fundamentally does not work. Quote The funny thing is, I bet 90% of the vocal group complaining for absolute self-damage removal are only even paying any attention to it at all because of Cautious Shot's introduction. If DE hadn't communicated that they've got some interest in tweaking the self-damage curve, most of this group might just be quietly ignoring the weapons they don't like instead of clamouring for them to be thematically butchered into something they do like. How long have you been on the forums? Because people had in fact been complaining about self-damage pretty regularly even before Cautious Shot, it's just that Cautious Shot annoyed a lot of players by attempting to band-aid (ineffectively, might I add) what was generally considered a fundamental balance and design problem. It is no different in this respect from how The Vacuum Within only exacerbated discussion surrounding Universal Vacuum, a topic that continues to be discussed and was long popular before the event. Edited June 11, 2019 by Teridax68 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheLexiConArtist Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 I swear, in a display of comedic irony, getting out posts of point-per-point quote debate is more annoyingly inconvenient than the very subject we're discussing. But on we go. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: ... they are both parkour maneuvers, and aim-gliding specifically has you conserve momentum while moving while still giving you time to aim... while moving. Wall-latching, by contrast, has you directly attach yourself to the level geometry. Both are specifically part of a combat system where rapid movement and gunplay are part of the same whole, and the fact that you'd latch onto some superficial aspect to ignore this feels like you're trying to find excuses to avoid addressing the substance of the argument here. Therefore you're not moving at maximum optimal traversal speeds at all times when combat is in play. Since that selfsame steadiness and control applies precisely to the usage of launchers right now, just as it does to properly handling anything else with only a difference in the sequence of execution and vectors of travel, calling it superficial is laughable. I mean, even if you've never personally seen someone carpet-bomb from on high while aim gliding, only to land safely and continue their travels when the payloads have already connected, it's easy enough to envisage that saying such mastered executions are strictly impossible is a poor reflection on your impartiality. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: Literally none of this changes the fact that most people do not like self-damage, and unlike rifles, this is enough to make them not use launchers at all. One of the key flaws to the equivalence you are trying to establish is that most weapons, while perhaps not to everyone's preferences, only rarely have features that are actively disliked, meaning that anyone, even a fan of current launchers, can try them without being violently turned off. The same cannot be said for launchers, who have proven to be unpopular specifically due to self-damage. Thus, while I can certainly emphasize with wanting a weapon more suited for a more niche demographic of people, my ongoing criticism is that this should not mean excluding everyone else from the fun, which is why explosive self-damage is not really a "niche" worth implementing on an entire class of weapons, even if it might be fine on one or two like the Lenz (whose self-damage is implemented in a completely different manner). Most people probably don't like running out of energy. But we don't just abolish energy and efficiency and let people run amok. We provide options to play around that, from lazy consumables to efficiency builds and energy generation sources. Just because you say that's a flaw, doesn't mean it objectively is. Once again this is subjectivity being treated as the objective. Language like 'excluding everyone else from the fun' is just loaded rhetoric. There is a difference between excluding fun and just not being fun for everyone equally. Because there's no obligation. Compare this to removed features like Limbo's Stasis. That was fun-exclusive because you had little to no personal control over exactly when and where you would be obligated not to use your guns. If you wanted to be where the fight was, you would be in range of that player's negative influence. You would have to abort the mission to remove the problem.Personally selecting a launcher weapon is your own choice. There are not even Sortie modifiers forcing you to equip a self-risking launcher as your primary or sole option. If that gameplay variance is not fun for you, you have not been excluded from fun, you just found something that you don't like and can now happily pick something else in all future cases. This is also related to how problematic the Tonkor and Simulor meta were. You were excluded from the fun because you couldn't pick anything but those to relatively compete with the easy obliteration. You were excluded from fun because if you brought other things, everyone just removed 90% of your potential opposition without a thought or care, and that wasn't your agency. You don't pick what they use. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: ... but making one's movements more precise or orienting oneself mid-traversal are both central to the game's parkour, not opposed to it. The game isn't trying to slow you down with these traps forever, because with enough skill at parkour, those traps cease to pose a problem. Unlike explosives, parkour is a skill being constantly reinforced through play, which makes it reasonable to expect the player to have a measure of expertise in parkour after enough time playing. Another statement as if to suggest explosives cannot be made safer to use through certain parkour approaches. Launchers don't strip you of aim glide like a deployed Archgun. You're free to weave full parkour with and around proper use of explosives. Mobility and explosives are not exclusive. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: ... except as I mentioned in one of my first posts here, self-damage isn't entirely based on personal failures, as the game, its levels, and even its explosive weapons do not have the predictability required to consistently avoid it. There appears to be an undue obsession with personal skill in this discussion, and an underlying fear of losing one's stated bragging rights with the removal of an otherwise demonstrably unhealthy mechanic. [citation needed] It's 'unhealthy' because you can die from misusing it? Well that's probably because - stick with me here - that's a punishment for misuse. Which is entirely avoidable, to say nothing of how I have also suggested ways to further aid that judgement and mitigate risks in a way that doesn't sacrifice the fundamental mechanic because it doesn't need to. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: ... which cover? Are you sure we're playing the same game? Because even defensive missions in Warframe still encourage the player to move around to fight waves of enemies coming from all sides. A lot of the stuff said here is so patently ridiculous in the face of even five minutes of actual in-game play that it feels like this conversation is being made for some completely imaginary game, and sustained entirely by the fact that it is being made on an internet forum, far from the reality of direct play experience. I'd cite a fallacy here but I'm not even sure what to diagnose that mess as. Even the Simulacrum has a significant amount of cover in it, and then there's all the Warframes that supply their own deployed cover to operate within and around. Are we playing the same game, indeed? Yours seems to be a flat open plane where there's nothing around you that can get between yourself and the enemies. Except, that is, when you pull the trigger of a launcher in which case scenery arrives out of the aether to interfere. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: Precisely: the player element muddies those boundaries, and means that discussion on paper turns out differently in practice. In this specific case, for instance, one can pontificate endlessly about how, theoretically, one could be able to stop oneself at just the right times, or engage in stealth gameplay in every mission, or have absolute awareness of the environment while moving at high speeds, without taking into account any of the many other random factors that trigger self-damage, all just to make launchers usable, but the reality is simply that players as a whole dislike self-damage so much that they'd rather not touch one of the most bombastic weapons classes in the game, sooner than go through hours of pain for very little payoff. Bandwagon is also a fallacy. Also, for the 'most bombastic weapons' there sure are a lot of complaints about the output being outmatched, almost like the whole (case of majority not using the weapons) is greater than the sum of its parts (output, risk, burden of mastery, etc). I can describe it esoterically as a general approach to deconstructing the risks involved in the environment, or I can describe it more granular as in specific example cases and personal experience. But you'd only dismiss both. it's 'overly vague pontificating' or 'anecdotal personal experience'. The trouble is, we're arguing two distinct concepts here: How the player can mitigate the risk, and whether the risk should exist in the first place. We will never agree on the ability for people to operate around self-damage risks while our stances on the risk existing as a mechanic are so diametrically opposed. From my side, "can be possible" is a perfectly adequate resolution to operating around risks, because the risk is there and you either get used to it or use something else. From your own, presupposing the risk's outright removal, "can be impossible" serves as your foundation. We're technically agreeing on the facts of the matter - both of us are saying that it's player-dependant on whether they comfortably operate around risks - we just disagree on what that means for the second point of contention. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: Is it, though? Because the majority of explosions aren't actually well-conveyed, and as said above, the level geometry means that shots can collide much sooner than anticipated, even with seemingly clear visual information at hand. Warframe's levels aren't the perfectly regular, square-like environments of Synthetik, for example, they're tilesets with bits of scenery sticking out from all sides, including some fairly irregular bits as well, often in spaces so tight it's difficult to fire a launcher at all. You could say that the player deserves to die for using launchers in those environments, but then the problem is that many players agree with you, and so choose to not use those weapons at all. Idealistic player moralism in this case doesn't actually help the situation, even if it must feel good to establish a point of comparison to other players in which one feels superior. What explosions aren't well conveyed? You point it at a few guys and you see that those ones died, and those ones a bit further away didn't. What difference would it make to have a more flashy visual, exactly, when you already made the mistake you had every necessary piece of information to avoid? It's still not difficult to just not shoot when up against scenery. It's also still not a problem if people agree with that fact and choose not to seek out the clearer shots, in favour of something with more generalised application. That's kind of the point, in fact. It's easy to spin-to-win melee than to execute combos for the desirable outcomes of damage and mobility between targets. Spin attacks are generalised to the point where most players will even use them on single targets where a combo might easily perform better through inherent multipliers or forced procs. That doesn't mean combos are conceptually being removed outright. A drawback is slated to be eased (making individual combo variants a bit more predictable to access) much as I suggested the rebalance to launcher risk/reward eases their drawback. The more generalised option is implicitly still going to be preferable to many or most who don't want to engage and learn how to properly use the other. Also, nice ad hominem. Reading that I'm now wondering if I can stand to push through the rest of this goalpost-moving doublespeak. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: ... I'm sorry, were you not the one outright telling me players should be using the same method of parkouring around enemies and slowing one's pace in the same manner as stealth just to land an explosive shot? Because I can quote you on that. Feigning plausible deniability here by telling me that you were just speaking in analogies doesn't work here, as the substance is still the same: you still seem to be asking for players to go out of their way to slow themselves down just to manage explosives, which begs the question: why should anyone do that? What is the payoff here for this unusually large effort? ... okay, but alerting someone because you shot them near their friend is a universal mechanic, whereas self-damage is not. Stealth weapons develop upon an existing framework and existing mechanics to operate, whereas launchers fabricate this entirely new mechanic that goes directly against how the rest of the game works. Properly engaging in stealth means the enemy stays unalerted and you get more Affinity; "properly" engaging in launcher gameplay means either turning into a sitting duck, or constantly running the risk of blowing up at random because of poorly predictable self-damage when in motion. You can go ahead and quote, but you're the one who makes such absurdist conclusions as "Launchers are stealth weapons?" and "You have to play exactly the way stealth players do just to use explosives?" Either you fail to grasp analogy or you're wilfully making these inane statements to construct strawmen you can poke fun at. What's the payoff for stealth? They might get shot at less - but the guy who obliterated everything incautiously doesn't get shot either. They might get affinity multipliers - but the guys who killed 5 times as many enemies in the same time, and moved on to the next spawns, also got a bunch of affinity. There's no real reason required. Players do all sorts of things for fun. Hildryn in No-Shield Nightmare is objectively unfun but someone's out there running it for personal amusement regardless. Once again, self-damage is not random in almost every case, and this vague 'rest of the game' concept can be applied to basically anything with the right coercion. Naturally silent weapons shouldn't exist because the rest of the game alerts enemies when triggers are pulled? Dissolving a body with certain effects shouldn't exist because in the rest of the game, they stick around to potentially alert enemies? It's meaningless. Self-damage is part of the game in its own right, historically and consistently among a thematic weapon group. It is, by definition, an existing mechanic, it operates predictably in that you get hurt if you stand in the blast radius and it's your responsibility to put the blast radius elsewhere. 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: This is a curious blend of conjectural optimism and the No True Scotsman fallacy, one that ignores a fact that has been pointed out multiple times already that self-damage isn't a problem purely because it's balanced wrong, but because its design fundamentally does not work in Warframe: These are a few choice bulletpoints I made in my very first post on this thread. Balancing self-damage by reducing it would not address the above issues. If you're going to Tu Quoque me, you should probably get your act in order. That's not a No True Scotsman, it's a simple observation. Currently, for various reasons, they're not used except by people who do really like them enough to overlook shortfalls or work around challenges they pose. Your choice bulletpoints were already argued as almost wholly subjective, so 'fundamentally' you're taking the high road of "this is fundamentally and objectively true" off a sheer cliff of "because I say so". If anyone, it's actually you pulling the appeal to purity, because "no true Warframe player accepts self-damage and the steps required to mitigate its risks". 7 hours ago, Teridax68 said: Spoiler And how exactly do you know that this is more likely? Because that's how you personally feel? Because you too are advocating to "neuter" the archetype by reducing self-damage, so really, all of this fearmongering leads to nowhere, because it is purely hypothetical and based on some arbitrary baseline neither of us seem to have decided upon. Even if by some freak chance a handful of people were so attached to self-damaged that they'd leave the game for it, yet that were to gain the game more players, players actually aligned with Warframe's gameplay... well, I guess that's just too bad. Indeed, it wouldn't be... except it is. It's been pointed out by many more users, and is demonstrated by actual player behavior in-game, where the few players who do pick up self-damaging weapons often end up killing themselves at random. Again, launchers are patently unpopular, so pretending that it's all the player's fault here is as pointless as it is false. I'm not sure you understand the concept of semantics. To be clear, I called you out on semantics because you were inventing the notion that there was some sort of Platonic ideal of explosives, and that one of the essential characteristics of this archetype was self-damage, a line of reasoning that makes strictly no sense from beginning to end. By contrast "me likey explosives because big boom boom explosion" isn't a semantic argument. I had already answered you on this matter rather clearly: explosives tend to be popular because they produce discrete, yet powerful explosions that tend to feel impactful. It really isn't that hard to understand why people like explosions, as Michael Bay moviegoers can attest to. Trying to establish some vague association between the AoE of explosions and that of the Ignis therefore makes absolutely no sense, and would only make sense in an imaginary world where one were to abstract all weapons to such a high-level degree that the resulting design talk would be fruitless. ... case in point. You are completely ignoring prior arguments made here in favor of repeating the same, debunked talking points: self-damage is not an essential characteristic of "conventional ordnance", nor would it need to be if it were the case, and "radial AoE" is an intentionally vague term that completely misses the fact that using a flamethrower or a shotgun with punch-through does not have the same feel as firing a grenade or exploding rocket. Why is it an oxymoron to ask for launchers without self-damage? Would the Tonkor or Ogris cease to exist if their self-damage were reduced to 0? ... speaking of sabotage, you have diluted your point to the extent where it ceases to make sense here, while utterly missing the point of what I'm saying: attempting to gerrymander the playerbase along arbitrary degrees of intensity on the subject does strictly nothing in the face of the very obvious fact that self-damage is very unpopular. Players express a general dislike of self-damage, and only a tiny handful of people scattered across internet discussion spaces ever defend the mechanic. It is possible that more people would tolerate self-damage if it were reduced, but that is not the same as enjoying a mechanic, the latter of which is obviously better (and, speaking of, not even you have really expressed any actual enjoyment of self-damage, so much as the assurance that it'd feel less bad if it were reduced). Pretending that there's this silent majority of players who are satisfied with self-damage is equally laughable when launchers are themselves a notoriously unpopular class of weapons: more generally, the moment you count on a "silent majority" of players that just so happens to never have expressed themselves on the subject as being on your side, that is an implicit admission that your position is unpopular, and indefensible on its own terms. So, first off, just because I've said words and you've said words does not mean our words are equal in meaning and value. I've actually done the work of explaining why most self-damage in Warframe is bad by design, and so have several others on here and on many other spaces, and these are points you have yet to address. Meanwhile, your two central arguments so far, namely that self-damage can be balanced better (which I agree with), and that the unpopularity of launchers comes from Warframe's playerbase being collectively inferior to you, have been responded to in several different ways. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I have in fact been questioning the mechanic and its implementation, not simply opposing it categorically. It is only when you started digging your argumentative trenches that you decided to fall into this "us versus them" mentality, and pictured me as wanting to remove self-damage from the game entirely, when I specifically tried to meet you halfway by pointing out that explosive damage has in fact been implemented successfully... but only because its implementation was completely different from the standard. At no point have I said that all self-damage, regardless of implementation, was fundamentally bad, I simply pointed out that attaching this self-damage to instant, poorly indicated explosions, in a game with tight spaces and an emphasis on mobility in highly variable level geometry, is a bad idea. I even attempted compromise from my very first post by suggesting three different other ways of punishing the player for using weapons at the "wrong" ranges, including suggesting to remove the scaling with self-damage mods in an effort to make self-damage more tolerable (but still not fun). As such, you are the only extremist on this thread, as you are not only aggressively defending a mechanic that has proven not to work, but have constructed such a limited mental model of your debating opponents that the discussion has lost all nuance for it. To restate my position: I think explosive self-damage as it is implemented on the majority of current launchers is bad by design, and should be removed or changed. I think implementations of self-damage resembling the Lenz are genuinely fun, and could potentially be developed, but I also believe some weapons could have their self-damage removed entirely and only benefit from it. To reject all of this in favor of the extremely simplistic position that everything would be just fine if the numbers were toned down, and people learned to git gud, is not only needlessly reductive, but dismissive and antagonistic to the point of insult. What does this even mean?! I cited individual examples of launchers to specifically point out that they, and by extension the archetype as a whole, would lose strictly none of their identity if self-damage were removed. When I tell you that a rocket launcher is a rocket launcher regardless of whether or not the wielder is hurt by its explosions, and you tell me I'm being "semantically vague", that does not convey to me that you truly understand semantics, so much as it does that you're trying to find excuses to dismiss a cogent argument that makes your position more difficult to defend. Okay, but this is being intentionally vague and too focused on semantics. I'm not trying to have a discussion with you on what constitutes the Platonic ideal of a shotgun, a pistol, or a launcher, unless you are so unwilling to establish any common ground that you are prepared to tell me that the only essential characteristic of an explosive weapon is its capacity for self-damage. Syndicate procs don't fire explosive payloads, and the Staticor is visibly designed to fire rapid-fire projectiles rather than those same slow, explosive payloads. You are undermining your point on several sides here, as citing the Tonkor immediately harkens back to when it had no real risk to self... and was still a "conventional explosive launcher", and citing "risk-to-self" as an exclusive characteristic of the launcher archetype means the Komorex, all glaive weapons, and even the Hema are "conventional explosive launchers" by your definition. In effect, by bringing this discussion down to pure semantics, you are showing that your concept of launchers is so alien that we may in fact be talking about two entirely separate classes of weapons. ... except the Simulors are also no longer meta, and they didn't receive self damage. Why's that, pray tell? Oh, that's right, better weapons arrived... and the Tonkor was also reworked into a much slower weapon, even after its nerf that not only reduced its self-damage, but reduced its damage and the reliability of its explosions. It is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that we'd all just go back to using the Tonkor now if its self-damage were removed, because self-damage does not even begin to describe why the Tonkor is outmatched by better weapons. ... all of which got nerfed in addition to the increase in self-damage. It is indeed good that you have decided to update your spreadsheet, because you are using outdated information to come to entirely wrong conclusions (because, just so we're clear on this, the Tonkor is a completely different weapon now, and better weapons have arrived since). No, I can't actually, because you are expecting me to assume that removing self-damage on the Tonkor would also somehow undo all of the other statistical changes it's gone through since, while also somehow purging weapons like the Tigris Prime from the game. The fact that you bring up Mirage and the Simulor also clearly illustrates the fact that the meta shifts even on weapons without self-damage, further undermining your point. Yes, if the Tonkor went back to having the best damage out of all weapons, negligible downtime, and ultra-reliable explosions, on top of having no self-damage, then it would likely be a problem, but in its current state, the weapon fires one shot at a time and has a lengthy reload period in-between, which I'd say are sufficient enough tradeoffs on their own, without having to add self-damage on top. Or, even more simply: "That's a bomb, I want to shoot it so that it blows up"... which just so happens to not work when doing so blows the player up during regular play. Warframes are superhumanly strong and resilient, on top of having magic powers, so there really is no reason to enforce some kind of realism in this respect. Once again, insulting the playerbase's collective intelligent isn't going to make anyone want to play launchers more, it just makes you look elitist and fundamentally out of touch with the game. Yet it is apparently too hard for a majority of players to want to use launchers. Again, I'm not criminalizing thought, and would in fact like to see more opportunities for tactical thinking in-game, I'm just pointing out that your mental model of explosive self-damage is not only demonstrably wrong, it is outright insulting, as it presumes that people only incur self-damage because they're stupid or otherwise unskilled. Are you trying to discuss design for a video game here, or do you just want to tell me you think you're better than everyone else? Yes, it is, because Eidolon hunts are an extremely specific format in a very specific and unusually open level... and even then, many Eidolon moves explicitly try to force the player to move, e.g. the delayed lightning, sky lasers, shockwaves, acid ground, and so on. This is not the same as asking the player to bend over backwards in regular play just to avoid self-damaging themselves in ways that are often not really in the player's control. But I'm not opposing altering one's playstyle here, I just don't think it's an adequate solution to the problem at hand: with the Lenz, for example, I've found myself altering my playstyle in a manner I actually really like, because the weapon naturally pushes me to bullet-jump into the air, aim-glide, and fire a shot at a crowd of enemies to blow them all up in almost cinematic fashion. All of this works, because if I accidentally hit a bit of level geometry instead, I can just move out of the way or use Transference to avoid incurring self-damage. I cannot do this with the Tonkor, the Ogris, or the Penta, because if I attempt to jump away from my enemies while firing at them, I may very well just blow myself up instead because the explosive hit some random bit of scenery, or because one enemy in the omnidirectional horde I'm fighting decided that that would be the exact moment they'd use their jump move to position themselves right in front of me. This is why the way those weapons implement self-damage fundamentally does not work. How long have you been on the forums? Because people had in fact been complaining about self-damage pretty regularly even before Cautious Shot, it's just that Cautious Shot annoyed a lot of players by attempting to band-aid (ineffectively, might I add) what was generally considered a fundamental balance and design problem. It is no different in this respect from how The Vacuum Within only exacerbated discussion surrounding Universal Vacuum, a topic that continues to be discussed and was long popular before the event. Christ, look how much of that is left. Just skimming that vaguely I can see a whole cavalcade of 'no u', minor hypocrisies, fallacy citations waiting to be made, and not inconsiderable counts of you just ignoring arguments that don't suit you. I do love a good debate, but this is getting to be much more quantity than quality and if you truly have no interest in understanding an opposing view whatsoever (deifying subjective viewa as "fundamentally correct" suggests this) then it's not worth my earnest time spent coming up with new analogies and explanations for you to inevitably gloss over. Now, before I get another tu quoque, no I do not fail to understand the opposing view. I can see why people might not want to engage in self-damage at the current balance state (hence my proposition) and I can understand people who might not want to elect to engage in self damage at all - they just don't find that particular variation and nuance of gameplay fun enough - but they have their alternatives; so for the topic of the thread overall this becomes a conclusion of "self-harm is not unnecessary in this game". It has a place, we don't need it removing any more than we need it adding onto everything like that other game you two were citing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kefirno Posted June 11, 2019 Share Posted June 11, 2019 (edited) On 2019-06-10 at 10:38 PM, Robolaser said: How often do you fail a mission because of self damage? Never because I swap weapon or go to extraction after wasting 3 revives. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The funny thing is, I bet 90% of the vocal group complaining for absolute self-damage removal are only even paying any attention to it at all because of Cautious Shot's introduction. Before Cautious Shot it seems like DE doesn't care of fundamentally misunderstands something but at least now there's hope. Also, guys, those walls of quotes are pretty cringe tbqh. Edited June 11, 2019 by Kefirno Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teridax68 Posted June 12, 2019 Share Posted June 12, 2019 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Therefore you're not moving at maximum optimal traversal speeds at all times when combat is in play. Since that selfsame steadiness and control applies precisely to the usage of launchers right now, just as it does to properly handling anything else with only a difference in the sequence of execution and vectors of travel, calling it superficial is laughable. ... but who ever said anything about "moving at maximum optimal traversal speeds"? That is yet another straw man, the point I simply made is that the game expects you move and use parkour, as opposed to standing stock still on the ground or just walking at a leisurely pace. Using parkour does not mean you have to literally always be moving as absolutely fast as possible, and framing this in spite of the fact that aim-gliding and wall-latching are still parkour moves feels like a deliberate attempt to avoid addressing the point. At best, it fundamentally misunderstands how parkour works in Warframe, which does not establish the sufficient common framework needed to be having this discussion. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I mean, even if you've never personally seen someone carpet-bomb from on high while aim gliding, only to land safely and continue their travels when the payloads have already connected, it's easy enough to envisage that saying such mastered executions are strictly impossible is a poor reflection on your impartiality. I literally went into an extended description of how one could do just that with the Lenz, and contrasted this specifically with other explosive weapons, whose payloads can end up connecting far sooner than expected if they hit a random bit of scenery. Your claim here reflects poorly upon not only your own impartiality, but also your willingness to read and internalize contrary points. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Most people probably don't like running out of energy. But we don't just abolish energy and efficiency and let people run amok. We provide options to play around that, from lazy consumables to efficiency builds and energy generation sources. ... which, for all intents and purposes, abolishes Energy as a gating mechanism at higher levels. What is your point again? 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Just because you say that's a flaw, doesn't mean it objectively is. Once again this is subjectivity being treated as the objective. Language like 'excluding everyone else from the fun' is just loaded rhetoric. There is a difference between excluding fun and just not being fun for everyone equally. Because there's no obligation. But I'm not arguing just from my own opinion, and when the subject of discussion is the design of a video game, which is itself purely subjective, consensus matters. As it stands, the consensus visibly is that explosive self-damage is unpopular, and there have been non-subjective reasons for this cited here as well, which you are yet again deliberately ignoring here. Because self-damage is unpleasant enough to so many people that it turns them off of using launchers completely in Warframe, asking to preserve this mechanic for your own sake is in fact excluding others from the fun. In other words: just because you say something is good design, doesn't mean is objectively is. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Compare this to removed features like Limbo's Stasis. That was fun-exclusive because you had little to no personal control over exactly when and where you would be obligated not to use your guns. If you wanted to be where the fight was, you would be in range of that player's negative influence. You would have to abort the mission to remove the problem.Personally selecting a launcher weapon is your own choice. There are not even Sortie modifiers forcing you to equip a self-risking launcher as your primary or sole option. If that gameplay variance is not fun for you, you have not been excluded from fun, you just found something that you don't like and can now happily pick something else in all future cases. That's all very nice, except you are deliberately ignoring the context of this exchange, in which this is a design debate where your position is to preserve explosive self-damage, a mechanic that is known for making people refuse to use launchers, thereby lowering the amount of overall fun to be had from playing with Warframe's arsenal. You are effectively asking to make the game less fun for the majority of players, and thereby exclude them from fun, just because you've personally chosen explosive self-damage as your hill to die on in an internet forum. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: This is also related to how problematic the Tonkor and Simulor meta were. You were excluded from the fun because you couldn't pick anything but those to relatively compete with the easy obliteration. You were excluded from fun because if you brought other things, everyone just removed 90% of your potential opposition without a thought or care, and that wasn't your agency. You don't pick what they use. But your example perfectly demonstrates what I'm telling you: limiting the player's arsenal along harsh divides of meta and unviable weapons is bad, because it reduces the player's options. Reducing the meta to two weapons is bad, but so is excluding a whole class of weapons from viability. It is good that we started using more weapons than the Tonkor and Simulor (and notice how the Simulor fell out of favor without needing self-damage), just as it would be good if launchers as a weapon class started seeing more use, or any real use for that matter. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Another statement as if to suggest explosives cannot be made safer to use through certain parkour approaches. Launchers don't strip you of aim glide like a deployed Archgun. You're free to weave full parkour with and around proper use of explosives. Mobility and explosives are not exclusive. ... but they work poorly together, as explained already several times. Arguing by assertion does not make you any less wrong on this matter, nor does it demonstrate good faith in this exchange. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: [citation needed] You have made several disparaging and passive-aggressive comments about the playerbase regarding their unwillingness to use explosive weapons, framing it as a flaw in character or skill (e.g. "It's really not hard"), while using yourself in examples of how to use explosives "properly" or outright bragging, such as with this particular gem of arrogance: On 2019-06-11 at 7:37 AM, TheLexiConArtist said: Okay, though. Maybe my mind works differently. Maybe I process situations quickly and my experience is not a representative median of judgement and reaction. One of the reasons this is worth mentioning is because not only is this kind of self-aggrandizement at the playerbase's expense a consistent attitude I've seen among people defending explosive self-damage in Warframe, it often tends to be one of the defense's central arguments, including here: much of your argumentation here has focused on the fact that explosive self-damage isn't so bad if one plays "properly" by whichever arbitrary standard you've set for yourself, even if this is a standard only few people follow (or at least claim to follow on the forums; I have yet to see people apply that in practice despite having been playing the game for quite some time). When challenged on this, the implicit response has been that everyone else is too lazy, stupid, or unskilled to play the game your way. You're not the only one here with this attitude, by the way, as demonstrated by the following: On 2019-06-04 at 5:18 AM, (PS4)chibitonka said: Self dmg mostly punishes players that want to brain dead the game. Or this: On 2019-06-06 at 1:38 AM, (XB1)CertainLeader6 said: People just prefer going suicidal mode and charge in guns blazing, and next thing you know, your out of ammo because you overly rely your guns, and get the sh1t3 beat out of them Or this: On 2019-06-10 at 8:38 PM, Robolaser said: How often do you fail a mission because of self damage? If you're that careless, maybe you should simply consider using one of the many harmless AoE weapons instead, as they're obviously more suited for mindless shooting. If you're not, then self damage really isn't a problem. I understand that one's ego might get some bruises as they keep downing themselves in a casual shooting game, but i really hope this isn't the true reason why so many complain about self damage here. So yeah, I sense a running theme here. In many ways, this isn't dissimilar to the equally tiny, loud and elitist crowd of Conclave players, who are in a similar state of denial at just how unpopular and isolated the mode is relative to the rest of the game. For whichever reason, whenever an ultra-minoritary group grows around a maligned mechanic in a videogame, that's almost always accompanied by a superiority complex within. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: It's 'unhealthy' because you can die from misusing it? Well that's probably because - stick with me here - that's a punishment for misuse. Which is entirely avoidable, to say nothing of how I have also suggested ways to further aid that judgement and mitigate risks in a way that doesn't sacrifice the fundamental mechanic because it doesn't need to. Case in point. As explained already in detail, including in a post I quoted in the response above, explosive self-damage can occur accidentally, and not exclusively from "misuse". Once again, your argument has degenerated into sneering repetition, suggesting the fundamental interaction problem between explosives and Warframe's environments is an argument you simply have no answer for. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I'd cite a fallacy here but I'm not even sure what to diagnose that mess as. This in fact perfectly describes your following paragraph, which I'll address shortly: 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Even the Simulacrum has a significant amount of cover in it, Ah yes, the Simulacrum, the best example of levels in Warframe the player will actually fight in. Also... what cover? The pillars in there are for parkour, not for the player to take cover behind. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: and then there's all the Warframes that supply their own deployed cover to operate within and around. Ah yes, the famous cover abilities: do you mean Atlas's Tectonics, an ability near-universally recognized as useless, precisely because its only real function is to provide cover? Or do you mean abilities like Frost's Snow Globe, Limbo's Cataclysm, or Gara's Mass Vitrify, which are commonly used to cover static objectives while our warframes move about freely? Perhaps you mean Volt's Electric Shield, whom players get behind exclusively for the bonus electric damage to their shots? Or perhaps Garuda's Dread Mirror and Zephyr's Turbulence, perhaps the only effective pieces of cover in the game owing to the fact that they move with the player? Gee, I didn't realize Warframe was such an in-depth cover-based shooter... 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Are we playing the same game, indeed? Yours seems to be a flat open plane where there's nothing around you that can get between yourself and the enemies. Warframe has no cover system by design, and the fact you are trying to frame literally any bit of vertical level geometry as "cover" demonstrates galaxy-brained levels of bullsh*tting and straw-grasping. It doesn't in fact seem like we're playing the same game, because from what you're telling me you're playing a cover-based shooter where players are encouraged to hide behind the scenery and shoot from behind it. Meanwhile, I'm playing Warframe. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Except, that is, when you pull the trigger of a launcher in which case scenery arrives out of the aether to interfere. ... which happens when you're parkouring, due to a busy level design that frequently features a lot of level geometry going about in unusual directions and shapes, and often demonstrating undue amounts of solidity or thickness. But I don't suppose you'd know, as you're apparently too busy shooting from behind cover. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Bandwagon is also a fallacy. It is a fallacy when the discussion is on a matter of objective truth: it does not matter if the majority of people think 2+2=5, that will still remain objectively wrong. However, in this particular case, the subject of discussion is whether the playerbase considers explosive self-damage a good mechanic in Warframe, which not only makes "bandwagon" not a fallacy, but in fact makes it the objectively correct way of answering the question. The majority of players does not consider explosive self-damage a good mechanic in Warframe, therefore the mechanic is objectively unpopular. It's cute to throw out fallacy names, but kind of silly to throw them around without understanding what they mean and actually apply to. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Also, for the 'most bombastic weapons' there sure are a lot of complaints about the output being outmatched, almost like the whole (case of majority not using the weapons) is greater than the sum of its parts (output, risk, burden of mastery, etc). ... yes, there are complaints, because the bombast of explosives comes from the explosions they create, and it feels weird for those weapons' damage output to be so piddly as to be in almost direct opposition to one's expectations. I really fail to see this obsessive need to overintellectualize the appeal of big explosions. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I can describe it esoterically as a general approach to deconstructing the risks involved in the environment, or I can describe it more granular as in specific example cases and personal experience. But you'd only dismiss both. it's 'overly vague pontificating' or 'anecdotal personal experience'. Because neither are valid arguments, as you are either abstracting too much or using made-up individual events with no general application. It does not take a genius, nor any big, pretentious words to be able to make verifiable statements with general application, e.g. "Warframe's tilesets tend to have bits of scenery and level geometry that rapidly approach the player as they parkour around". 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The trouble is, we're arguing two distinct concepts here: How the player can mitigate the risk, and whether the risk should exist in the first place. We will never agree on the ability for people to operate around self-damage risks while our stances on the risk existing as a mechanic are so diametrically opposed. From my side, "can be possible" is a perfectly adequate resolution to operating around risks, because the risk is there and you either get used to it or use something else. From your own, presupposing the risk's outright removal, "can be impossible" serves as your foundation. We're technically agreeing on the facts of the matter - both of us are saying that it's player-dependant on whether they comfortably operate around risks - we just disagree on what that means for the second point of contention. The entire dichotomy you're setting here is false, as the much simpler problem is simply that you are continuing to rely on the assumption that the risk of incurring explosive self-damage is entirely within the player's control, whereas I have pointed out from my very first post on here that there is always a measure of risk that the player cannot be reasonably expected to control, and so that punishment based off of that risk is unacceptable. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: What explosions aren't well conveyed? You point it at a few guys and you see that those ones died, and those ones a bit further away didn't. What difference would it make to have a more flashy visual, exactly, when you already made the mistake you had every necessary piece of information to avoid? So two things: The explosions themselves do not accurately convey their range, and if you have to see which enemies got their health bar chipped away and which didn't to determine the range of an explosion, that in itself is an implicit admission that the visuals of the explosion itself failed to properly deliver that information. Contrast this to the Lenz, for example, whose area of effect is extremely well-conveyed thanks to a highly visible and telegraphed image of its main explosion's range. What you are describing is precisely why the current implementation of self-damage doesn't work: even if explosives did have better visuals to convey their explosion radius, that still likely wouldn't improve things by much, because by the time the player gets punished, they would already have made the "mistake". Contrast this again to the Lenz, where even if the player messes up or accidentally gets the arrow caught on random scenery, they are still given a fair chance to escape or protect themselves. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: It's still not difficult to just not shoot when up against scenery. It's also still not a problem if people agree with that fact and choose not to seek out the clearer shots, in favour of something with more generalised application. Yet again, you are framing this issue as one of player character, rather than one of game design. Even if this was indeed a problem purely based on the faults of the entire playerbase, guess what: you're not going to change human nature, but you can change your game's design so that it can be played adequately by humans. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: That's kind of the point, in fact. It's easy to spin-to-win melee than to execute combos for the desirable outcomes of damage and mobility between targets. Spin attacks are generalised to the point where most players will even use them on single targets where a combo might easily perform better through inherent multipliers or forced procs. That doesn't mean combos are conceptually being removed outright. A drawback is slated to be eased (making individual combo variants a bit more predictable to access) much as I suggested the rebalance to launcher risk/reward eases their drawback. The more generalised option is implicitly still going to be preferable to many or most who don't want to engage and learn how to properly use the other. ... except combos have been criticized for the very reason that they are overly fiddly and often not nearly as effective as simple quick-melee (back when it still existed), or spin-attacking. This is, in fact, why these comboes are being reworked, so that they can be made more functional and accessible. In other words, instead of telling the collective playerbase to git gud, DE has changed their design to accommodate the faculties and expectations of us mere mortals. Your example effectively proves my point. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Also, nice ad hominem. Reading that I'm now wondering if I can stand to push through the rest of this goalpost-moving doublespeak. So far, you have been the one trying to shift conversation away from the design of explosives and onto the faults of playerbase, which you have at times directly contrasted to yourself. Meanwhile, I have remained consistent in my criticism of explosive self-damage, so really, not only is my "ad hominem" pertinent to the discussion, your own ad hominem here is hypocritical. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You can go ahead and quote, but you're the one who makes such absurdist conclusions as "Launchers are stealth weapons?" and "You have to play exactly the way stealth players do just to use explosives?" Either you fail to grasp analogy or you're wilfully making these inane statements to construct strawmen you can poke fun at. Except you are the one drawing the inane strawmen and making some of the stupidest claims I have seen on the forums, such as the one that Warframe is designed for players to shoot from cover. You don't quite seem to grasp what even constitutes analogy here, as you are the one who outright told me that using diversions and stealth-like movement is how one should be using explosive weapons optimally. I can in fact quote you on all of this, because that is a surefire way of verifying the truth of a statement such as this, a quality you do not seem to value. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: What's the payoff for stealth? They might get shot at less - but the guy who obliterated everything incautiously doesn't get shot either. They might get affinity multipliers - but the guys who killed 5 times as many enemies in the same time, and moved on to the next spawns, also got a bunch of affinity. But the guy who obliterated everything incautiously does get shot at, unless they're playing a AoE nuke frame in such a low-level mission that the enemy dies before they can fight back. Just because you get a bunch of Affinity fast from all-out gunning does not mean that amount is equal to the one you get from stealth multipliers -- this is in fact the reason why a Focus farming strategy that endures even today is to go through Exterminate missions with a stealth or sleep frame, e.g. Equinox, and kill enemies to rack up stealth-multiplied Affinity. I can fully agree with you that stealth isn't balanced in such a way that it's as attractive as just running and gunning in most missions, but the fact remains that stealth is a playstyle that Warframe has and rewards. By contrast, the optimal way to use launchers, by your own implicit admission, clashes directly with the way the game is designed to be played. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: There's no real reason required. Players do all sorts of things for fun. Hildryn in No-Shield Nightmare is objectively unfun but someone's out there running it for personal amusement regardless. ... it's not, though? It's certainly needlessly difficult and intentionally self-sabotaging, but that is not "objectively" unfun, and stating it as such does not demonstrate the best grasp of the difference between an objective and subjective statement. Unless you are arguing that people are picking launchers in the same vein of intentional self-sabotage, that's not exactly the best example to bring up. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Once again, self-damage is not random in almost every case, ... and here you let slip that the game does in fact have random instances of self-damage, which validates my point and, by extension, disproves yours. To be clear, I never said that every instance of self-damage is random, and to imply as much is itself a straw man. I merely acknowledged the fact that self-damage often happens outside of the player's realistic control, and that this makes the mechanic poor design even if the majority of instances of self-damage came from misplays. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: and this vague 'rest of the game' concept can be applied to basically anything with the right coercion. Naturally silent weapons shouldn't exist because the rest of the game alerts enemies when triggers are pulled? Dissolving a body with certain effects shouldn't exist because in the rest of the game, they stick around to potentially alert enemies? It's meaningless. Indeed, it is meaningless, because you are applying the word of the argument with complete disregard for its substance, and the context in which it was made. In this instance, I pointed out that, whereas gameplay such as stealth develops upon the game's core systems, including common or universal mechanics (e.g. enemies getting alerted), launcher gameplay does not, as by your own admission it expects the player to go out of their way to accommodate an extremely minoritary mechanic that goes against much of the game's core systems. Using silenced weapons does not ask the player to go against the game's core mechanics, because it specifically relies on them for its unique gameplay to emerge, and the same goes for body-vanishing effects. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Self-damage is part of the game in its own right, historically and consistently among a thematic weapon group. It is, by definition, an existing mechanic, it operates predictably in that you get hurt if you stand in the blast radius and it's your responsibility to put the blast radius elsewhere. Indeed, a mechanic that exists is, by definition, an existing mechanic, well done. That does not make it any more congruent to the rest of the game's design, however. Once again, you try to shift the goalposts to this discussion by trying to reframe it around the perceived failings of players, and falsely assuming perfect predictability of self-damage in spite of prior points made, and implicit admissions on your part. No matter how many times you repeat yourself on this matter, it's not going to be any more convincing than before. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: If you're going to Tu Quoque me, you should probably get your act in order. That's not a No True Scotsman, it's a simple observation. "Tu quoque (/tjuːˈkwoʊkwi, tuːˈkwoʊkweɪ/;[1] Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s)." So... where am I accusing you of hypocrisy in this particular point? It feels like you just looked up fallacy names and decided to throw one out at random in response to my pointing out an actual fallacy in your argument. More specifically: On 2019-06-11 at 7:37 AM, TheLexiConArtist said: few but the true enthusiasts make frequent use of most launchers. Is a No True Scotsman: you are stating that those who don't frequently use launchers aren't "the true enthusiasts", as if being a "true enthusiast" somehow conferred special status in this discussion. Even if that was not your intention, your very choice of framing itself indicates an unhealthy us-versus-them mentality that has visibly colored the rest of your argumentation. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Currently, for various reasons, they're not used except by people who do really like them enough to overlook shortfalls or work around challenges they pose. Just to labor the point a tad, this is you implicitly admitting that launchers are only truly used by a minority of people. Thus, it is pointless to faff about how one cannot be sure what the numbers are, whether there's a silent majority of satisfied players, and so on. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Your choice bulletpoints were already argued as almost wholly subjective, so 'fundamentally' you're taking the high road of "this is fundamentally and objectively true" off a sheer cliff of "because I say so". If anyone, it's actually you pulling the appeal to purity, because "no true Warframe player accepts self-damage and the steps required to mitigate its risks". Argues as "almost wholly subjective"... where? By whom? Does the game not feature a large amount of tight corridors and small rooms? Do our projectiles not collide with our teammates? Has DE not made changes specifically to avoid players exploiting self-damage? There is a difference between making an argument that something is subjective, and simply dismissing something as subjective, which is what you are doing now. The former makes a point that can be addressed or conceded, the latter just indicates you aren't willing to engage in proper discussion, and instead prefer to deny the existence of arguments that discomfit your position. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Christ, look how much of that is left. Just skimming that vaguely I can see a whole cavalcade of 'no u', minor hypocrisies, fallacy citations waiting to be made, and not inconsiderable counts of you just ignoring arguments that don't suit you. Name one example. As it stands, I have answered you in scrupulous detail, as itself noted by the sheer size of my post and the fact that it comprehensively includes your own, so simply making these kinds of wild, unsubstantiated claims doesn't really work. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I do love a good debate, but this is getting to be much more quantity than quality and if you truly have no interest in understanding an opposing view whatsoever (deifying subjective viewa as "fundamentally correct" suggests this) then it's not worth my earnest time spent coming up with new analogies and explanations for you to inevitably gloss over. This whole statement applies more to yourself than it does to me, as not only have I specifically pushed for a more nuanced discussion and tried to establish common ground with you, you have repeatedly been negatively received on this very thread for starting arguments with other posters, ignoring their arguments wholesale, and continually pushing the same, borderline fanatical agenda. I do not see how you can reasonably accuse me of "glossing over" your arguments when not only have I answered your literal every point, but you have written that paragraph immediately after openly announcing that you wouldn't even bother addressing a huge part of my post. 12 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Now, before I get another tu quoque, no I do not fail to understand the opposing view. I can see why people might not want to engage in self-damage at the current balance state (hence my proposition) and I can understand people who might not want to elect to engage in self damage at all - they just don't find that particular variation and nuance of gameplay fun enough - but they have their alternatives; so for the topic of the thread overall this becomes a conclusion of "self-harm is not unnecessary in this game". It has a place, we don't need it removing any more than we need it adding onto everything like that other game you two were citing. But this is a lie: you are deliberately failing to understand the opposing view, and so by consistently turning it into a straw man and constantly insulting your opponents by claiming they and anyone who dislike launchers are just too unskilled or lazy to play properly. Meanwhile, I have taken great pains to understand your position, and even agree with you that self-damage as an effect is not inherently bad, even if I believe its implementation on most launchers is unworkably poor. Actually, tell you what, I've already said this in my previous post, in a nice little paragraph that sums up our entire discussion. Of course, you chose to gloss over it, and I suspect you did not even bother to read it: On 2019-06-11 at 12:24 PM, Teridax68 said: I have in fact been questioning the mechanic and its implementation, not simply opposing it categorically. It is only when you started digging your argumentative trenches that you decided to fall into this "us versus them" mentality, and pictured me as wanting to remove self-damage from the game entirely, when I specifically tried to meet you halfway by pointing out that explosive damage has in fact been implemented successfully... but only because its implementation was completely different from the standard. At no point have I said that all self-damage, regardless of implementation, was fundamentally bad, I simply pointed out that attaching this self-damage to instant, poorly indicated explosions, in a game with tight spaces and an emphasis on mobility in highly variable level geometry, is a bad idea. I even attempted compromise from my very first post by suggesting three different other ways of punishing the player for using weapons at the "wrong" ranges, including suggesting to remove the scaling with self-damage mods in an effort to make self-damage more tolerable (but still not fun). As such, you are the only extremist on this thread, as you are not only aggressively defending a mechanic that has proven not to work, but have constructed such a limited mental model of your debating opponents that the discussion has lost all nuance for it. To restate my position: I think explosive self-damage as it is implemented on the majority of current launchers is bad by design, and should be removed or changed. I think implementations of self-damage resembling the Lenz are genuinely fun, and could potentially be developed, but I also believe some weapons could have their self-damage removed entirely and only benefit from it. To reject all of this in favor of the extremely simplistic position that everything would be just fine if the numbers were toned down, and people learned to git gud, is not only needlessly reductive, but dismissive and antagonistic to the point of insult. So yeah, take it or leave it. To be honest, this paragraph alone answers your entire latest reply, as for all the volume you've posted, you've failed to move discussion forward an inch. I'm here to genuinely discuss self-damage and, as noted above, have been openly welcoming constructive exchange from the start: in many respects I in fact agree with you, in the sense that I believe toning down self-damage would go a long way towards making it feel less bad. However, discussion with you has been entirely unsatisfying, because you yourself are not willing to discuss or engage with other users: so far, you have done nothing but start arguments, and defend an indefensible position against all facts, all reasoning, and all evidence. Until you realize that the playerbase dislikes launchers in Warframe for a reason, that reason not being that they're all unskilled and lazy, and until you stop trying to shift the topic of conversation onto your perceived failings of the playerbase, nothing new or useful will come from your position. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheLexiConArtist Posted June 12, 2019 Share Posted June 12, 2019 I'm going to exercise restraint this time and try to make my responses as succinct as possible in the hopes we can cut down this web of quotes. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: ... but who ever said anything about "moving at maximum optimal traversal speeds"? That is yet another straw man, the point I simply made is that the game expects you move and use parkour, as opposed to standing stock still on the ground or just walking at a leisurely pace. Using parkour does not mean you have to literally always be moving as absolutely fast as possible, and framing this in spite of the fact that aim-gliding and wall-latching are still parkour moves feels like a deliberate attempt to avoid addressing the point. At best, it fundamentally misunderstands how parkour works in Warframe, which does not establish the sufficient common framework needed to be having this discussion. Salient point: I have posited that parkour at anything other than maximum pace is entirely within reason for safe explosive usage. It's slow(er) but it's very possible and fun to take mastery of personal-risk weaponry to that level. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: I literally went into an extended description of how one could do just that with the Lenz, and contrasted this specifically with other explosive weapons, whose payloads can end up connecting far sooner than expected if they hit a random bit of scenery. Your claim here reflects poorly upon not only your own impartiality, but also your willingness to read and internalize contrary points. The comment on the Lenz was in the very end of the post when I'd already worn thin. I believe you bring it up again later in the responses, I'll answer it down there. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: ... which, for all intents and purposes, abolishes Energy as a gating mechanism at higher levels. What is your point again? It provides options to mitigate the risk, it does not unilaterally remove the mechanic. Energy Restores may be the most egregious option, but even they have implicit restrictions - as a consumable, each costs resources. To get the most out of each you sit with it. Players not liking an outcome does not implicitly indicate that abject removal of that outcome being possible. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: But I'm not arguing just from my own opinion, and when the subject of discussion is the design of a video game, which is itself purely subjective, consensus matters. As it stands, the consensus visibly is that explosive self-damage is unpopular, and there have been non-subjective reasons for this cited here as well, which you are yet again deliberately ignoring here. Because self-damage is unpleasant enough to so many people that it turns them off of using launchers completely in Warframe, asking to preserve this mechanic for your own sake is in fact excluding others from the fun. In other words: just because you say something is good design, doesn't mean is objectively is. -- That's all very nice, except you are deliberately ignoring the context of this exchange, in which this is a design debate where your position is to preserve explosive self-damage, a mechanic that is known for making people refuse to use launchers, thereby lowering the amount of overall fun to be had from playing with Warframe's arsenal. You are effectively asking to make the game less fun for the majority of players, and thereby exclude them from fun, just because you've personally chosen explosive self-damage as your hill to die on in an internet forum. Please indicate "non-subjective" reasons that I have ignored, as I am pretty sure from your quoted content prior to entry onwards I have systemically addressed each assertion. Also, bandwagon fallacy aside, consensus being that 'current self damage is unpopular' does not automatically conclude 'remove self-damage risks'. Fun is not being excluded because you are not obliged to use these weapons. It is not removing the fun that is to be had from playing with varied arsenals to retain one of these varieties. Where I say "a player doesn't like this, so they should use something they do like instead" you say, "a player doesn't like this, so it should be made into the type they do like". 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: But your example perfectly demonstrates what I'm telling you: limiting the player's arsenal along harsh divides of meta and unviable weapons is bad, because it reduces the player's options. Reducing the meta to two weapons is bad, but so is excluding a whole class of weapons from viability. It is good that we started using more weapons than the Tonkor and Simulor (and notice how the Simulor fell out of favor without needing self-damage), just as it would be good if launchers as a weapon class started seeing more use, or any real use for that matter. Limiting viable approaches to a vanishingly small subset of weapons is not comparable with the idea of a small (if not as small) subset of the many available options simply not being popular and widely-applicable choices. I actually showed that the Simulor could not be given self-damage as it was actually unreasonable to avoid that outcome with its stats (mainly the extra effect radius and limited projectile travel). That doesn't mean it wasn't broken for the same reasons of no drawback, high damage in wide AOE. It just required a different mechanical change. The Tonkor did not require a different mechanical change. Launchers do not require a total mechanical change. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: .. but they work poorly together, as explained already several times. Arguing by assertion does not make you any less wrong on this matter, nor does it demonstrate good faith in this exchange. As 'explained' => as asserted several times. All you're doing is insisting that they don't work together, the reasons for which I am rebuking with arguments of my own. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: You have made several disparaging and passive-aggressive comments about the playerbase regarding their unwillingness to use explosive weapons, framing it as a flaw in character or skill (e.g. "It's really not hard"), while using yourself in examples of how to use explosives "properly" or outright bragging, such as with this particular gem of arrogance: One of the reasons this is worth mentioning is because not only is this kind of self-aggrandizement at the playerbase's expense a consistent attitude I've seen among people defending explosive self-damage in Warframe, it often tends to be one of the defense's central arguments, including here: much of your argumentation here has focused on the fact that explosive self-damage isn't so bad if one plays "properly" by whichever arbitrary standard you've set for yourself, even if this is a standard only few people follow (or at least claim to follow on the forums; I have yet to see people apply that in practice despite having been playing the game for quite some time). When challenged on this, the implicit response has been that everyone else is too lazy, stupid, or unskilled to play the game your way. You're not the only one here with this attitude, by the way, as demonstrated by the following: Or this: Or this: So yeah, I sense a running theme here. In many ways, this isn't dissimilar to the equally tiny, loud and elitist crowd of Conclave players, who are in a similar state of denial at just how unpopular and isolated the mode is relative to the rest of the game. For whichever reason, whenever an ultra-minoritary group grows around a maligned mechanic in a videogame, that's almost always accompanied by a superiority complex within. You argued that my personal experience is incomparable to the capability that should be expected of the general playerbase. In response, I say "Okay let's assume I'm 'better', what does that leave?" and you call that elitism. That is hilarious. I say "It's not hard to operate around it" with the subtext of if you find it engaging to try. That's not saying they're lazy or stupid for not wanting to engage in that learning process. They just don't want to - they don't find the process and results fun - so they can use other equipment which presents different requirements. That is fine. They don't have to 'git gud' with explosives, any more than I have to, say, 'git gud' at drawing art. If I don't feel the motivation to learn and I don't find it engaging to seek out the result in spite of the failure along the way, I just don't try because nothing's forcing me to. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Case in point. As explained already in detail, including in a post I quoted in the response above, explosive self-damage can occur accidentally, and not exclusively from "misuse". Once again, your argument has degenerated into sneering repetition, suggesting the fundamental interaction problem between explosives and Warframe's environments is an argument you simply have no answer for. The only self-damage without reasonable personal agency involved in the result are: Unpredictable ally crosses the firing line. (Arguably) A triggered explosive you no longer realised was out happens to be nearby when you set off further ones. Those I have already accepted and resolved - ally collision disabled unless absolutely required, and UI markers on payloads to let the player track them. Everything else is 'accidental' by virtue of a failure to execute. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Ah yes, the Simulacrum, the best example of levels in Warframe the player will actually fight in. Also... what cover? The pillars in there are for parkour, not for the player to take cover behind. Ah yes, the famous cover abilities: do you mean Atlas's Tectonics, an ability near-universally recognized as useless, precisely because its only real function is to provide cover? Or do you mean abilities like Frost's Snow Globe, Limbo's Cataclysm, or Gara's Mass Vitrify, which are commonly used to cover static objectives while our warframes move about freely? Perhaps you mean Volt's Electric Shield, whom players get behind exclusively for the bonus electric damage to their shots? Or perhaps Garuda's Dread Mirror and Zephyr's Turbulence, perhaps the only effective pieces of cover in the game owing to the fact that they move with the player? Gee, I didn't realize Warframe was such an in-depth cover-based shooter... Warframe has no cover system by design, and the fact you are trying to frame literally any bit of vertical level geometry as "cover" demonstrates galaxy-brained levels of bullsh*tting and straw-grasping. It doesn't in fact seem like we're playing the same game, because from what you're telling me you're playing a cover-based shooter where players are encouraged to hide behind the scenery and shoot from behind it. Meanwhile, I'm playing Warframe. Have you ever moved behind a wall to cause a Bombard rocket to explode, or break a Ballista's wind-up? That all counts as cover. You don't need to go into a special animation rubbing your cheeks up against level geometry for it to be 'cover' that you can freely use. Survivals where people camp? Cover from fire and line-of-sight., causing enemies to filter into the chokepoints. And yes, Snow Globe, Mass Vitrify and Cataclysm do all count as cover. Snow Globe even disinclines you not staying inside it because it blocks your line of fire from outside as well (arguably it shouldn't given Mass Vitrify doesn't, but that's beside the point). You're generally safer inside that space than outside, that's what cover is. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: ... which happens when you're parkouring, due to a busy level design that frequently features a lot of level geometry going about in unusual directions and shapes, and often demonstrating undue amounts of solidity or thickness. But I don't suppose you'd know, as you're apparently too busy shooting from behind cover. Do you get run over by parked cars often? Because saying the scenery 'goes about' in directions and shapes is tantamount to that. It is not moving, you are moving, and you control where you move. Onus back on the player. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: It is a fallacy when the discussion is on a matter of objective truth: it does not matter if the majority of people think 2+2=5, that will still remain objectively wrong. However, in this particular case, the subject of discussion is whether the playerbase considers explosive self-damage a good mechanic in Warframe, which not only makes "bandwagon" not a fallacy, but in fact makes it the objectively correct way of answering the question. The majority of players does not consider explosive self-damage a good mechanic in Warframe, therefore the mechanic is objectively unpopular. It's cute to throw out fallacy names, but kind of silly to throw them around without understanding what they mean and actually apply to. The Tonkor was incredibly popular. By all accounts of the bandwagon fallacy, the Tonkor would not be nerfed. The Tonkor was in fact nerfed because we, the side against, sufficiently proved that the negative subjectives were greater in effect than the positive subjectives. Bandwagon may count for considering a view, it does not prove any view beyond question. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: ... yes, there are complaints, because the bombast of explosives comes from the explosions they create, and it feels weird for those weapons' damage output to be so piddly as to be in almost direct opposition to one's expectations. I really fail to see this obsessive need to overintellectualize the appeal of big explosions. Generalising to a false dichotomy. Note that I have observed how complaining about self-damage is actually disincentive for damage output to be increased. So if you want 'bombastic explosions', either put up with self-damage as it is right now, or accept a rebalance of the relationship so that both halves of the equation are satisfied. Appropriate risks for better rewards. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Because neither are valid arguments, as you are either abstracting too much or using made-up individual events with no general application. It does not take a genius, nor any big, pretentious words to be able to make verifiable statements with general application, e.g. "Warframe's tilesets tend to have bits of scenery and level geometry that rapidly approach the player as they parkour around". The entire dichotomy you're setting here is false, as the much simpler problem is simply that you are continuing to rely on the assumption that the risk of incurring explosive self-damage is entirely within the player's control, whereas I have pointed out from my very first post on here that there is always a measure of risk that the player cannot be reasonably expected to control, and so that punishment based off of that risk is unacceptable. You have not proved either interpretation false, only dismissed them as invalid out of personal disbelief. Again you need to explain how exactly the scenery you can see jumps out at you from your own controlled movement, and how exactly it is impossible to intuit all required information besides the two minutia I previously addressed in order to make a safe shot with an explosive - in ways that have not already been refuted. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: So two things: The explosions themselves do not accurately convey their range, and if you have to see which enemies got their health bar chipped away and which didn't to determine the range of an explosion, that in itself is an implicit admission that the visuals of the explosion itself failed to properly deliver that information. Contrast this to the Lenz, for example, whose area of effect is extremely well-conveyed thanks to a highly visible and telegraphed image of its main explosion's range. What you are describing is precisely why the current implementation of self-damage doesn't work: even if explosives did have better visuals to convey their explosion radius, that still likely wouldn't improve things by much, because by the time the player gets punished, they would already have made the "mistake". Contrast this again to the Lenz, where even if the player messes up or accidentally gets the arrow caught on random scenery, they are still given a fair chance to escape or protect themselves. You do not need to know the precise range of an explosion to make 'safe shots', only 'questionable shots' where you are implicitly inviting the risk of being wrong. Also, I already suggested payload distance markers. Explosions are generally 4-6m in base range from what I recall of testing them. It's not that wildly variant. By your own admission, the player is punished when they already made a mistake. The Lenz then is a luxury in allowing you to escape one mistake unless you make that second one and take damage. Ergo, self-damage through instant explosions is valid and a visual indication is strictly superfluous because it's only relevant after failure. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Yet again, you are framing this issue as one of player character, rather than one of game design. Even if this was indeed a problem purely based on the faults of the entire playerbase, guess what: you're not going to change human nature, but you can change your game's design so that it can be played adequately by humans. It can be played by humans. You just don't want to. As previously stated... that's fine, but we're not making you, so you are not entitled to have the game remove that weapon class' inherent challenge. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: ... except combos have been criticized for the very reason that they are overly fiddly and often not nearly as effective as simple quick-melee (back when it still existed), or spin-attacking. This is, in fact, why these comboes are being reworked, so that they can be made more functional and accessible. In other words, instead of telling the collective playerbase to git gud, DE has changed their design to accommodate the faculties and expectations of us mere mortals. Your example effectively proves my point. Combos are being reworked, not removed. Your "point" instead is that players should all just automatically beyblade all the time because most people do that instead of the less-attractive combos. Instead we're keeping them, you still have to get in there, move and position, but the risk - of mucking up the combo and not getting towards the payoff strikes - is being eased. This directly correlates to my suggestion to make the risk of self damage less fatal earlier therefore lowering the barrier to entry while keeping the core concept in place. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: So far, you have been the one trying to shift conversation away from the design of explosives and onto the faults of playerbase, which you have at times directly contrasted to yourself. Meanwhile, I have remained consistent in my criticism of explosive self-damage, so really, not only is my "ad hominem" pertinent to the discussion, your own ad hominem here is hypocritical. I said your arguments are misleading and fallacious at best. I'm still addressing the argument, there. Also, another tu quoque. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Except you are the one drawing the inane strawmen and making some of the stupidest claims I have seen on the forums, such as the one that Warframe is designed for players to shoot from cover. You don't quite seem to grasp what even constitutes analogy here, as you are the one who outright told me that using diversions and stealth-like movement is how one should be using explosive weapons optimally. I can in fact quote you on all of this, because that is a surefire way of verifying the truth of a statement such as this, a quality you do not seem to value. This is just "no u" in more words. I've already elucidated the points as far as you could be genuinely misconstruing them. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: But the guy who obliterated everything incautiously does get shot at, unless they're playing a AoE nuke frame in such a low-level mission that the enemy dies before they can fight back. Just because you get a bunch of Affinity fast from all-out gunning does not mean that amount is equal to the one you get from stealth multipliers -- this is in fact the reason why a Focus farming strategy that endures even today is to go through Exterminate missions with a stealth or sleep frame, e.g. Equinox, and kill enemies to rack up stealth-multiplied Affinity. I can fully agree with you that stealth isn't balanced in such a way that it's as attractive as just running and gunning in most missions, but the fact remains that stealth is a playstyle that Warframe has and rewards. By contrast, the optimal way to use launchers, by your own implicit admission, clashes directly with the way the game is designed to be played. I was talking about natural stealth, where enemies can't simply be put to sleep en masse and cleaved down in droves. If you want to bring specific frame influences into the equation then you lost any argument against self-damage because Assimilate Nyx exists. Of course, your point is you shouldn't have to use that - and my point is you don't. Stealth is possible without sleep effects, explosive use is possible without immunity to self-damage. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: ... it's not, though? It's certainly needlessly difficult and intentionally self-sabotaging, but that is not "objectively" unfun, and stating it as such does not demonstrate the best grasp of the difference between an objective and subjective statement. Unless you are arguing that people are picking launchers in the same vein of intentional self-sabotage, that's not exactly the best example to bring up. It's an extreme example. Correlation counts without being absolute equivalence. If someone can have 'fun' with something as "objectively unfun" (read: mechanically obstructive) as losing all of Hildy's shields and abilities, then the risk of self-damage (which is by far less obstructive) can also be fun. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: ... and here you let slip that the game does in fact have random instances of self-damage, which validates my point and, by extension, disproves yours. To be clear, I never said that every instance of self-damage is random, and to imply as much is itself a straw man. I merely acknowledged the fact that self-damage often happens outside of the player's realistic control, and that this makes the mechanic poor design even if the majority of instances of self-damage came from misplays. To be clear myself, those 'random' instances are the two I bulletpointed and advised on solving previously in this reply. Not any case where you hit obstructions or fire too close to yourself, which is actually what happens in the overwhelming majority and is in your control. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Indeed, it is meaningless, because you are applying the word of the argument with complete disregard for its substance, and the context in which it was made. In this instance, I pointed out that, whereas gameplay such as stealth develops upon the game's core systems, including common or universal mechanics (e.g. enemies getting alerted), launcher gameplay does not, as by your own admission it expects the player to go out of their way to accommodate an extremely minoritary mechanic that goes against much of the game's core systems. Using silenced weapons does not ask the player to go against the game's core mechanics, because it specifically relies on them for its unique gameplay to emerge, and the same goes for body-vanishing effects. That's a lot of words to say nothing. A player goes 'out of their way' to do anything compared to anything else, because variety involves doing something different. Going from a stealth bow to a rifle to a carefully-used launcher is fundamentally no different than going from Loki to Rhino to Garuda. Each asks you to play the game differently for best results. Loki doesn't stealth or disarm? He's dying sooner than some less-paper frame who isn't expected to use those mechanics. Garuda bloodlets and doesn't build any altars? Whoops, slash proc, dead. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Indeed, a mechanic that exists is, by definition, an existing mechanic, well done. That does not make it any more congruent to the rest of the game's design, however. Once again, you try to shift the goalposts to this discussion by trying to reframe it around the perceived failings of players, and falsely assuming perfect predictability of self-damage in spite of prior points made, and implicit admissions on your part. No matter how many times you repeat yourself on this matter, it's not going to be any more convincing than before. Non-statements. You're accusing me of repetitive assertions when that is your own sole foundation of circular logic. "Self damage doesn't fit with Warframe because X" "X is inaccurate because Y" "Y is invalid because Self-damage doesn't fit with Warframe" 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: "Tu quoque (/tjuːˈkwoʊkwi, tuːˈkwoʊkweɪ/;[1] Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s)." So... where am I accusing you of hypocrisy in this particular point? It feels like you just looked up fallacy names and decided to throw one out at random in response to my pointing out an actual fallacy in your argument. More specifically: Is a No True Scotsman: you are stating that those who don't frequently use launchers aren't "the true enthusiasts", as if being a "true enthusiast" somehow conferred special status in this discussion. Even if that was not your intention, your very choice of framing itself indicates an unhealthy us-versus-them mentality that has visibly colored the rest of your argumentation. Paraphrased, "you're doing a fallacy too so you can't call me out on mine". Your citation of fallacy was your defence and you didn't use it right. No True Scotsman requires me to be making an active claim, not a passive observation. "Only top athletes are competing in the Olympics" is not a No True Scotsman fallacy, it's an observation because the Olympics is a top-level challenge with limited participants. There's no point in average or weak athletes being in the Olympics. There's no current reason why a non-enthusiast would be heavily using launchers because they have a risk-to-reward ratio currently overshadowed by alternatives. Conversely, if I was saying only true enthusiasts are ever allowed to use launchers - appeal to purity. But you're allowed to use them, and you're allowed to like or not like them, and you're allowed to stop using them for not liking them. We cycle back to the idea of "it's possible, but if you don't want to, nothing's making you". 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Just to labor the point a tad, this is you implicitly admitting that launchers are only truly used by a minority of people. Thus, it is pointless to faff about how one cannot be sure what the numbers are, whether there's a silent majority of satisfied players, and so on. Ah, but I'm not saying there's a majority that are satisfied. I'm saying that there is likely not a majority that would be unsatisfied with anything but removal. The shouty boys are already heavily split among "change it" and "remove it", so it's reasonable to believe change it would satisfy those who are happy with it, those who don't care, and those who simply wanted it changed but not removed, leaving the remainder as a probable minority. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Argues as "almost wholly subjective"... where? By whom? Does the game not feature a large amount of tight corridors and small rooms? Do our projectiles not collide with our teammates? Has DE not made changes specifically to avoid players exploiting self-damage? There is a difference between making an argument that something is subjective, and simply dismissing something as subjective, which is what you are doing now. The former makes a point that can be addressed or conceded, the latter just indicates you aren't willing to engage in proper discussion, and instead prefer to deny the existence of arguments that discomfit your position. Questions answered in order: Earlier in the thread By myself Depending on tileset and map generation (but in no case too tight to ever utilise explosives in a mission) Yes, but I have advised solving this already as one of the few genuine issues No, DE has made changes to avoid some undesirable interactions in which self-damage was involved but not necessarily responsible, for example: 99% Bless Trinity was a design problem which made self-damage the only viable way to access the buff reliably, Castanas/Link Trinity was a problem with stacking additive resistances to 100% immunity, removing the self-damage interaction was not the correct response as this interaction still exists (including on enemies!) Ironic that you should draw the line between argument and dismissal, when you've been treading all over that for some time now. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Name one example. As it stands, I have answered you in scrupulous detail, as itself noted by the sheer size of my post and the fact that it comprehensively includes your own, so simply making these kinds of wild, unsubstantiated claims doesn't really work. Which would you like? It says a lot that out of that whole last part I can intuit scant few of the origins for those responses without double-checking back. Spoiler "It's not but it is" is a lovely 'no u', the contradictory points of mobility and tight spaces depending on what suits that particular moment, goalpost-moving fallacies where you say something doesn't count for some additional unrelated criteria to say nothing of the abject strawmen, and you still flagrantly ignore my arguments that it's viable to mix parkour and explosives without shooting yourself in the foot with assertations that your viewpoints are 'objective' and unassailable. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: This whole statement applies more to yourself than it does to me, as not only have I specifically pushed for a more nuanced discussion and tried to establish common ground with you, you have repeatedly been negatively received on this very thread for starting arguments with other posters, ignoring their arguments wholesale, and continually pushing the same, borderline fanatical agenda. I do not see how you can reasonably accuse me of "glossing over" your arguments when not only have I answered your literal every point, but you have written that paragraph immediately after openly announcing that you wouldn't even bother addressing a huge part of my post. Ad hominem. You know, I've got black marks on my record for 'arguments', but none here yet. Some of the modding staff have trouble dissociating heated debate from attacks, and inevitably I might get one, but that doesn't make my points less valid. The ones I got, almost exhaustively, were in using the other person's own words to highlight exactly how unreasonable they were being. Oops. "Abusive behaviour". I said why I wasn't touching the rest of that post. Since I'm trying to formulate new analogies and explanations it takes sweet time to get this out, and when you blatantly disregard it that time is wasted. Life called first. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: But this is a lie: you are deliberately failing to understand the opposing view, and so by consistently turning it into a straw man and constantly insulting your opponents by claiming they and anyone who dislike launchers are just too unskilled or lazy to play properly. Meanwhile, I have taken great pains to understand your position, and even agree with you that self-damage as an effect is not inherently bad, even if I believe its implementation on most launchers is unworkably poor. I'm not doing either of those things. If you truly are trying to engage me then this whole assertion of 'objectivity' and vilifying me has to stop. They're not lazy, they just don't find it fun. They're not unskilled plebs who can't hack it, they just don't enjoy developing the skill. Both of those are fine, because I'm not telling them to pick it up and git gud, I'm saying that they can leave it alone without insisting that it gets changed to suit them. 12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: Actually, tell you what, I've already said this in my previous post, in a nice little paragraph that sums up our entire discussion. Of course, you chose to gloss over it, and I suspect you did not even bother to read it: Spoiler I have in fact been questioning the mechanic and its implementation, not simply opposing it categorically. It is only when you started digging your argumentative trenches that you decided to fall into this "us versus them" mentality, and pictured me as wanting to remove self-damage from the game entirely, when I specifically tried to meet you halfway by pointing out that explosive damage has in fact been implemented successfully... but only because its implementation was completely different from the standard. At no point have I said that all self-damage, regardless of implementation, was fundamentally bad, I simply pointed out that attaching this self-damage to instant, poorly indicated explosions, in a game with tight spaces and an emphasis on mobility in highly variable level geometry, is a bad idea. I even attempted compromise from my very first post by suggesting three different other ways of punishing the player for using weapons at the "wrong" ranges, including suggesting to remove the scaling with self-damage mods in an effort to make self-damage more tolerable (but still not fun). As such, you are the only extremist on this thread, as you are not only aggressively defending a mechanic that has proven not to work, but have constructed such a limited mental model of your debating opponents that the discussion has lost all nuance for it. To restate my position: I think explosive self-damage as it is implemented on the majority of current launchers is bad by design, and should be removed or changed. I think implementations of self-damage resembling the Lenz are genuinely fun, and could potentially be developed, but I also believe some weapons could have their self-damage removed entirely and only benefit from it. To reject all of this in favor of the extremely simplistic position that everything would be just fine if the numbers were toned down, and people learned to git gud, is not only needlessly reductive, but dismissive and antagonistic to the point of insult. So yeah, take it or leave it. To be honest, this paragraph alone answers your entire latest reply, as for all the volume you've posted, you've failed to move discussion forward an inch. I'm here to genuinely discuss self-damage and, as noted above, have been openly welcoming constructive exchange from the start: in many respects I in fact agree with you, in the sense that I believe toning down self-damage would go a long way towards making it feel less bad. However, discussion with you has been entirely unsatisfying, because you yourself are not willing to discuss or engage with other users: so far, you have done nothing but start arguments, and defend an indefensible position against all facts, all reasoning, and all evidence. Until you realize that the playerbase dislikes launchers in Warframe for a reason, that reason not being that they're all unskilled and lazy, and until you stop trying to shift the topic of conversation onto your perceived failings of the playerbase, nothing new or useful will come from your position. See, again, your concluding at the bottom is this same holier-than-thou concept that made me abandon the remainder of your last post in the first place. What point is there for debate if you're not prepared to even say my views could be wrong? Now, for the actual meat i've spoilerquoted back in there for reference: Your arguments have at best been flowing back and forth between a standpoint of "It has no place" and "It needs to be changed". Since I've accepted the possibility of 'needs to be changed' by bringing my own suggestions to the table, the remaining assertions of it being fundamentally unworkable are what I'm contesting. So your argument boils down to this 'bad by design' idea, and okay. Let's go back onto that. Launchers have an instant forfeiture for failure. Why is that bad, as you've made the mistake? You say, because that failure is not always the player's fault, citing causes mainly involving allies and scenery, with a dubious sub-point about 'telegraphing' I have acknowledged that allies are a bad interaction for more than just explosives and should be treated separately I have allowed for a solution to the 'telegraphing' in the case where it may reasonably matter (lingering, indirect explosives) with UI markers and a general understanding of the 4-6m range typical of payloads. The remaining citation of scenery is argued not valid because it is entirely possible for a player to discretely select the right alternative weapon for situations where they truly cannot find a safe shot (e.g. surrounded in a tiny corridor), or find the safe shot in every other instance (since you only require average >=6m of clearance to the impact point). You assert that launchers do not play well with mobility. I counter that they in fact work just fine with mobility, as mobility aids in finding the safe shots and quickly making distance with the prospective impact point. An argument is made that launchers are infrequently used in their current state. This is not wrong, but you are asserting the cause of this to be purely isolated on the risk when it is a multifaceted cause involving the risk and relative reward. It is equally valid to posit several potential changes from this: Adding significant reward without reducing risk at all Statistically rebalancing the values of risk and reward Mechanically removing risk At this stage we have not defined any of these as objective 'correct' solutions. Arguments between the options can be introduced citing additional reasoning and sources: Solely adding reward may introduce an indirect obligation to use the weapon significantly better in spite of the risk and in spite of personal preferences on risk-based gameplay. We don't want people who don't enjoy the paradigm to be strong-armed into it. Mechanical removal of risk is A) unnecessary due to equivalent alternatives already existing for that playstyle and B) introduces the possible return of a historic problem case i.e. Tonkor Meta. You identify this (objective fact of current usage levels) as a problem to be solved when it may not necessarily be a problem or may not be as much of a problem as you believe it to be. As per previous analogy, allowing some specialised weapons that are infrequently used is not a problem if alternatives exist and overall balance is achieved between simplicity/difficulty of use, potential reward and potential drawbacks. You identify the Lenz as the 'one true launcher' for its two-step detonation. By admission, should you be in the area where that arrow lands, a mistake has been made. The Lenz allows you to recover from this mistake. Recovery does not mean a mistake was not made, and therefore does not mean that every other 'risk-based' weapon absolutely must allow this luxury of escaping the consequences of mistakes. Future weapons can be put anywhere across these nuanced concepts. Maybe there's more delayed Lenz-types. Maybe there's more softer-damage AOE radials like the Sonicor/Staticor. Maybe more like the Corinth alt-fire with its smart-arming. Okay? That doesn't mean we have to drastically change these ones when a simple rebalance could reinforce their niche and playability while keeping the basic framework unaltered: Risk of failure that scales with the reward, but if used well, brings worthwhile reward. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)chibitonka Posted June 12, 2019 Share Posted June 12, 2019 end of the day weapons like this aren't for everyone. Exploding self dmg weapons are a playstyle in their own rite. *looks at glaives, wolf sledge* yes you too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(XBOX)Ava1onUndead Posted June 13, 2019 Share Posted June 13, 2019 Wwwwwwwaaaaaiiitttt, is this whole thing about weapons that are pretty much suicidal because the damage is so low and the AI have more troops and better weapons? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(XBOX)Ava1onUndead Posted June 13, 2019 Share Posted June 13, 2019 On 2019-06-09 at 9:33 AM, Lone_Dude said: If you're "breaking" under such conditions, you should visit a psychiatrist. STRESS. Games like Warframe can at times be stressful. Have you ever felt the stress? Maybe when you first started playing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teridax68 Posted June 13, 2019 Share Posted June 13, 2019 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I'm going to exercise restraint this time and try to make my responses as succinct as possible in the hopes we can cut down this web of quotes. Are you sure you tried? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Salient point: I have posited that parkour at anything other than maximum pace is entirely within reason for safe explosive usage. It's slow(er) but it's very possible and fun to take mastery of personal-risk weaponry to that level. What justifies your "salient point"? Clearly, your position doesn't apply to reality. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The comment on the Lenz was in the very end of the post when I'd already worn thin. In other words, you still took prodigious amounts of time to a post you had not bothered to read in full. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: It provides options to mitigate the risk, it does not unilaterally remove the mechanic. Energy Restores may be the most egregious option, but even they have implicit restrictions - as a consumable, each costs resources. To get the most out of each you sit with it. Players not liking an outcome does not implicitly indicate that abject removal of that outcome being possible. But the resource costs aren't particularly meaningful, nor are Energy restores necessary to not suffer Energy constraints in the vast majority of content. For all intents and purposes, Energy may as well not exist as a constraint in the vast majority of cases, and this has nothing to do with whether or not players like running out of Energy. Whether or not we should remove Energy from our design completely is an entirely separate issue, and it feels like you've been confusing what is and what ought to be here. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Please indicate "non-subjective" reasons that I have ignored, as I am pretty sure from your quoted content prior to entry onwards I have systemically addressed each assertion. Gladly: On 2019-06-03 at 11:07 AM, Teridax68 said: The general player opinion on the matter seems to be a categorical no. Self-damage is a stupid mechanic in Warframe for a a number of reasons: The game emphasises constant mobility via parkour, meaning the player will be frequently travelling through rapidly changing environments at high speed. Killing the player just because some bit of level geometry went up in front of them makes no sense. A tremendous portion of the game's levels still are made of small rooms and tight corridors. It therefore makes no sense in this context to punish the player for firing a weapon too closely. Every time self-damage has been used by players to their benefit, e.g. Trinity at the time of her 99% Blessing, or Chroma, DE treated that development as an exploit to be fixed, rather than an interesting player usage of mechanics. Self-damage is thus, by DE's own intentional design, a mechanic intended to have purely negative consequences upon our gameplay. In general, the philosophy of expressly punishing the player for playing "poorly", by whichever nebulous standard we are setting in this context, through mechanics built into their weapons, just doesn't work. Warframe is not a game that aims to punish the player to begin with, and if only some weapons are made to apply disproportionate punishment just for using them like any other weapon, players are simply going to drop those in favor of weapons that don't try to screw us over, as is the case now. These are all "non-subjective" reasons why self-damage is unpopular, all of which you have deliberately avoided addressing. You have certainly dismissed these in bulk as "subjective", just as you have "posited" the rather questionable assumption that self-damage can be reasonably expected to be under the player's perfect control, an assumption that is itself disproven by the above points. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Also, bandwagon fallacy aside, consensus being that 'current self damage is unpopular' does not automatically conclude 'remove self-damage risks'. ... why not? It is certainly a solution, and if the fundamental implementation of self-damage does not work, and does not generate any tangible benefits, why preserve it? So much has been typed about whether or not it would be justified to remove self-damage, but really, the actual question here should be: why is the current implementation of self-damage worth preserving? What fun gameplay does it generate? How does it add to the game? Also, how can you still accuse me in good faith of using a bandwagon fallacy when I explained precisely to you why player consensus is relevant to the point? Simply throwing out fallacy names in pure ignorance of what's actually being said doesn't make it look like you know what you're talking about, especially when you also don't even read most of the post you're responding to. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Fun is not being excluded because you are not obliged to use these weapons. It is not removing the fun that is to be had from playing with varied arsenals to retain one of these varieties. Where I say "a player doesn't like this, so they should use something they do like instead" you say, "a player doesn't like this, so it should be made into the type they do like". Once again, you repeat yourself while deliberately failing to address the point: nobody is saying players should be forced to use these weapons, but the fact that people are not being allowed to have a good time while using these weapons means they will not use those weapons, thus lowering their range of weapons they will realistically use, and thus lowering fun overall. When there is a whole range of toys for the player to pick from, it is less fun for only some of them to be fun, rather than for all of them to be fun. It does not take a genius to realize that asking for a range of weapons in Warframe to be unfun for the near-totality of players is going to lower the overall amount of fun that can be had in the game. At this stage, it is also worth mentioning that, for all your vociferous defense of explosive self-damage... you don't actually seem to want to engage with the mechanic much at all either. Your most played explosive weapon is the Kulstar, at a whopping 3.4% play rate. Tell me: with you positioning yourself as an extremist defender of explosives, if removing self-damage from launchers were to affect you so badly that you'd stop using them... how much fun would that actually reduce for you? If people who genuinely liked self damage (and genuinely liked, not played devil's advocate for on the forums) were to stop having fun then, but everyone else would play these weapons far more often, would that not increase total fun overall? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Limiting viable approaches to a vanishingly small subset of weapons is not comparable with the idea of a small (if not as small) subset of the many available options simply not being popular and widely-applicable choices. Why not? In both cases, there are unnecessary divides to the viability of weapons that restrict the player's available roster and thereby limit diversity. If removing the one mechanic making these weapons unplayably bad to most players were to make them at least slightly more popular, why not go for it? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I actually showed that the Simulor could not be given self-damage as it was actually unreasonable to avoid that outcome with its stats (mainly the extra effect radius and limited projectile travel). That doesn't mean it wasn't broken for the same reasons of no drawback, high damage in wide AOE. It just required a different mechanical change. The Tonkor did not require a different mechanical change. Launchers do not require a total mechanical change. ... why not? Simulor projectiles can't bounce back into the player's face, which can happen with the Penta or Tonkor. Clearly, there are more drawbacks available to launchers than just self-damage, with even the Tonkor being made a much slower weapon. Why then establish this arbitrary distinction? Where is the justification to any of your bolded statements here? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: As 'explained' => as asserted several times. All you're doing is insisting that they don't work together, the reasons for which I am rebuking with arguments of my own. No no, I actually did explain, as noted in the bulletpoints you have deliberately avoided engaging thus far. For someone accusing me of "no u", you are illustrating it perfectly here, as you are responding to a comment of my own that pointed out that your own position has degenerated into pure arguing by repetition, and insistence (with bolded text to boot) upon claims you've made that you've simply expected everyone to take as fact, without a shred of justification. Again, one need not play Warframe for any particularly long amount of time to notice that a) the player can move really fast, and is encouraged to, b) Warframe's tilesets are full of tight spaces and unusual level geometry, c) that level geometry's hitboxes don't always reflect what the player visualizes, and d) explosions are typically not conveyed well enough for the player to clearly know their radius, which leads to e) the player getting a projectile caught on a random bit of rapidly approaching scenery while moving (a process made all the easier thanks to multishot), and blowing themselves up. Your counterpoint to all this is... what, exactly? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You argued that my personal experience is incomparable to the capability that should be expected of the general playerbase. In response, I say "Okay let's assume I'm 'better', what does that leave?" and you call that elitism. That is hilarious. Because I did not in fact assume you were better than anyone: you chose, entirely unprompted, to boast about your self-presumed superiority, in a post where you have repeatedly insulted the intelligence and skill of other players by framing the problem of explosive self-damage as a failure of character. It is not simply the fact that you choose to aggrandize yourself (falsely, might I add, as noted by your rather unimpressive usage of explosives), it is the fact that you also openly disdain players who dislike self-damage that makes your attitude on this thread elitist. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I say "It's not hard to operate around it" with the subtext of if you find it engaging to try. That's not saying they're lazy or stupid for not wanting to engage in that learning process. They just don't want to - they don't find the process and results fun - so they can use other equipment which presents different requirements. I'm sorry, how does this improve your argument in any way? Even if one were to assume that there were this "subtext" to frame your point in this manner (which there isn't), what you're simply saying here is that players criticizing self-damage are biased and unwilling to understand how self-damage can be fun. It is still a contemptuous and contemptible view of the playerbase. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: That is fine. They don't have to 'git gud' with explosives, any more than I have to, say, 'git gud' at drawing art. If I don't feel the motivation to learn and I don't find it engaging to seek out the result in spite of the failure along the way, I just don't try because nothing's forcing me to. If nobody has to "git gud", why do you keep framing the issue of self-damage as one of pure personal responsibility and failure to play properly? Your attempt to rebrand yourself isn't quite working here, because you have been using your negative assumption of the playerbase's collective character as your central argument: if players aren't unskilled, and shouldn't have to bend over backwards just for a weapon to become less unpleasant... why still advocate for a near-universally unpopular mechanic that expects the latter? Why immediately jump to assumptions of player skill when someone mentions that self-damage can happen even to players who know how to use explosives, and so for reasons beyond their reasonable control? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The only self-damage without reasonable personal agency involved in the result are: Unpredictable ally crosses the firing line. (Arguably) A triggered explosive you no longer realised was out happens to be nearby when you set off further ones. Those I have already accepted and resolved - ally collision disabled unless absolutely required, and UI markers on payloads to let the player track them. Everything else is 'accidental' by virtue of a failure to execute. And this is where the problem lies, because you are deliberately ignoring all the situations that make your position less secure, which have been mentioned several times already. Even as you continue to backpedal and undermine your point further by admitting that, actually, not all self-damage can be attributed to a player mistake (in which case, why still have it?), you still refuse to acknowledge the rather basic fact that explosives can get caught on scenery in ways the player cannot reliably predict, whether it be because the game's parkour causes the irregular scenery to change so rapidly relative to the player that one cannot reasonably expect perfect awareness of its exact topography, or simply because factors such as deceptive scenery hitboxes, multishot, and random weapon spread based on accuracy all cause explosives to travel and collide in places the player cannot reliably calculate. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Have you ever moved behind a wall to cause a Bombard rocket to explode, or break a Ballista's wind-up? That all counts as cover. You don't need to go into a special animation rubbing your cheeks up against level geometry for it to be 'cover' that you can freely use. I haven't, actually, because I just jump out of the way, and if I were to hide behind scenery the enemy would throw one of those grenades to dislodge me (which, by the way, tend to deal a fair amount of damage to defense objective, so best not camp it unless you can reliably kill everyone coming your way before they can attack... which would defeat the point of cover). The game actively tries to prevent you from playing it like a typical cover shooter, and you trying to tell me that any game with levels that are anything except flat, empty planes is a cover shooter I find literally incredible. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Survivals where people camp? Cover from fire and line-of-sight., causing enemies to filter into the chokepoints. Except when people camp Survival, it's by specifically going into small rooms so as to funnel enemies as quickly as possible, not to hide behind cover. Not only are you trying to desperately apply "cover" to any piece of vertical scenery, the way you describe gameplay in Warframe, including Survival camping strategies here, differs so severely from the actual game that it feels like you came here to discuss an entirely different video game, and just so happened upon the Warframe forums by accident. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: And yes, Snow Globe, Mass Vitrify and Cataclysm do all count as cover. Snow Globe even disinclines you not staying inside it because it blocks your line of fire from outside as well (arguably it shouldn't given Mass Vitrify doesn't, but that's beside the point). You're generally safer inside that space than outside, that's what cover is. ... but then if that's what cover is, that cover does not in fact encourage the player to be stationary, not even Snow Globe, whose line of fire block was implemented in the hopes of trivializing defensive missions less (you'd have to get back into the globe or destroy it if an enemy went through). Ultimately, the game doesn't have a cover system and expressly discourages cover-based approaches, but even if one were to buy into the utterly insane claim that literally any solid object with height makes for a cover shooter, that cover does not actually encourage players to stop being mobile in Warframe, which was the original point that drove you to go into this tangent (but hey, exercising restraint and succinct responses amirite). 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Do you get run over by parked cars often? Because saying the scenery 'goes about' in directions and shapes is tantamount to that. It is not moving, you are moving, and you control where you move. Onus back on the player. I don't get run over by parked cars often, because I don't spend my life as a magic cyborg parkouring over, around, and under them at blinding speeds, in a sci-fi environment full of random bits of machinery and architecture sticking out, that I'm expected to move through at that same speed, while also shooting at other moving targets. It is difficult to adequately describe just how stultifyingly dumb your analogy here is. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The Tonkor was incredibly popular. By all accounts of the bandwagon fallacy, the Tonkor would not be nerfed. The Tonkor was in fact nerfed because we, the side against, sufficiently proved that the negative subjectives were greater in effect than the positive subjectives. Bandwagon may count for considering a view, it does not prove any view beyond question. ... the Tonkor was used often, that does not mean it was incredibly well-liked, as noted by many complaints then. You are deliberately conflating popularity in terms of pick rate, and popularity in terms of enjoyment here, while also misunderstanding the difference between something that is and something that ought to be, itself typically known as an is-ought fallacy. Just because a weapon is picked often does not mean it ought to be so dominant. Meanwhile, if a mechanic is generally recognized as poor design, and does not in fact present real benefits, then it in fact ought to be removed. It's not a difficult concept to understand. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Generalising to a false dichotomy. Which false dichotomy? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Note that I have observed how complaining about self-damage is actually disincentive for damage output to be increased. ... why? With current balancing you'd still be killing yourself either way. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: So if you want 'bombastic explosions', either put up with self-damage as it is right now, or accept a rebalance of the relationship so that both halves of the equation are satisfied. Appropriate risks for better rewards. ... or just remove the self-damage? I think I understand your fallacy name-dropping better, because from the looks of it you just announce the fallacy you are about to commit. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You have not proved either interpretation false, only dismissed them as invalid out of personal disbelief. ... where did I dismiss them out of personal disbelief? I pointed out the issues with excessive abstraction and anecdotal evidence, and pointed out your "interpretations" continue to rely on the assumption that the player cannot possibly incur self-damage without it being the direct consequence of a mistake, an assumption you yourself have disproven by acknowledging the existence of alternative interpretations. Once again, explaining why you are wrong is not the same as dismissing you, and speaking of which, you are also dismissing my point here on the lack of consistent control players have over self-damage. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Again you need to explain how exactly the scenery you can see jumps out at you from your own controlled movement, and how exactly it is impossible to intuit all required information besides the two minutia I previously addressed in order to make a safe shot with an explosive - in ways that have not already been refuted. See above. It was not the first time I explained it, either, so really, at this point you are simply wilfully denying arguments presented at you. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You do not need to know the precise range of an explosion to make 'safe shots', only 'questionable shots' where you are implicitly inviting the risk of being wrong. Also, I already suggested payload distance markers. Explosions are generally 4-6m in base range from what I recall of testing them. It's not that wildly variant. But then having to make "safe shots" with poor knowledge of one's explosive radius implies bending even further backwards to accommodate a class of weapons whose punishment mechanic is poorly-conveyed by your own admission. Right here, you directly admit that you too acknowledge the poor communication of explosion ranges as a problem, so why are you insisting upon the opposite? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: By your own admission, the player is punished when they already made a mistake. ... where? I used "mistake" in quotation marks specifically to underline how self-damage can be incurred by accident, which you have so far purely framed as a player mistake. Are you so intent on parroting back my arguments at me as to deliberately misconstrue what I've written? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The Lenz then is a luxury in allowing you to escape one mistake unless you make that second one and take damage. Ergo, self-damage through instant explosions is valid and a visual indication is strictly superfluous because it's only relevant after failure. ... I'm sorry, what? Why is the Lenz a "luxury"? Luxury by whose standards? Why would that validate self-damage through instant explosions? Literally no part of your claims here follow from each other or appear to have any grounding whatsoever; it's like you expect me to just take you on your word for everything you say here. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: It can be played by humans. You just don't want to. As previously stated... that's fine, but we're not making you, so you are not entitled to have the game remove that weapon class' inherent challenge. Who's "we"? Not only is this a rather slimy ad hominem ("you're only complaining because you're lazy and don't want to be challenged"), it is rather precious that you would accuse me of entitlement when you are the one specifically asking to keep a poorly designed mechanic against player consensus: what makes you personally more entitled to this than a far larger number of players? Why are you so intent on denying fun to other players? Also, yet again, you ignore the point made and keep parroting the debunked notion that this is purely an issue of player skill, even though I pointed out that even if this were true, that would still not make you right: even if explosive self-damage was purely the result of player mistakes, which even you admitted not to truly believe in, the fact remains that it is reducing the fun of the majority of the playerbase with its existence. Thus, the correct move would be to remove it, because even if it were a skill-checking mechanic, it is one that has failed to generate any appeal. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Combos are being reworked, not removed. Your "point" instead is that players should all just automatically beyblade all the time because most people do that instead of the less-attractive combos. Instead we're keeping them, you still have to get in there, move and position, but the risk - of mucking up the combo and not getting towards the payoff strikes - is being eased. This directly correlates to my suggestion to make the risk of self damage less fatal earlier therefore lowering the barrier to entry while keeping the core concept in place. But this is simply not true, and you are merely repeating yourself here while drawing up yet another strawman of my position. As I have already pointed out, the fiddliness of comboes is getting removed, even though the fiddliness was deliberately meant to be a skill test. You, by contrast, are desperately trying to frame explosive self-damage as a pure skill test, because you think this somehow absolves it of criticism and the threat of removal. The fact remains that DE have shown themselves willing to change their game's design, and cut out stuff that doesn't work, in order to improve the game, with comboes being one such piece of design getting reworked. By contrast, your suggestion to tone down the numbers on self-damage do not alter the fundamental implementation of it, and therefore do not change its design. If self-damage were to, say, all be turned into the Lenz's implementation, that would be a design change, but as it stands you have been categorically opposing design changes to self-damage, for whichever arbitrary reason you chose on this forum argument. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I said your arguments are misleading and fallacious at best. I'm still addressing the argument, there. Also, another tu quoque. Randomly accusing me of shifting the goalposts to this argument and of being intentionally misleading, without even a hint of justification, is an ad hominem, one that adds strictly nothing to discussion. Moreover, as has already pointed out, you don't really seem to understand "tu quoque", as it applies specifically when one tries to defend oneself purely by accusing one's opponent of making the same mistake: by contrast, I have defended my position and pointed out the absurdity of your own accusations, all while pointing out what you did wrong, which for whichever reason tends to mirror almost exactly the accusations you levy at me at that same moment. Perhaps you believe that projecting your rhetorical flaws upon me, and thus anticipating the resulting criticism, will somehow magically protect you from it. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: This is just "no u" in more words. I've already elucidated the points as far as you could be genuinely misconstruing them. And this is you merely denying yet another point that you are incapable of answering. You have elucidated nothing, and so far no single part of your post has said anything that hasn't been debunked already. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I was talking about natural stealth, where enemies can't simply be put to sleep en masse and cleaved down in droves. If you want to bring specific frame influences into the equation then you lost any argument against self-damage because Assimilate Nyx exists. Of course, your point is you shouldn't have to use that - and my point is you don't. Stealth is possible without sleep effects, explosive use is possible without immunity to self-damage. I see the No True Scotsman fallacy has reared its ugly head here yet again. Tell me: why establish the false dichotomy of "natural" versus "unnatural" stealth here? How is it relevant to the argument? How does Assimilate Nyx disprove anything I've said so far about self-damage? You are visibly grasping at straws, while inexplicably hoping for me to fill in the gaps in your argumentation. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: It's an extreme example. Correlation counts without being absolute equivalence. If someone can have 'fun' with something as "objectively unfun" (read: mechanically obstructive) as losing all of Hildy's shields and abilities, then the risk of self-damage (which is by far less obstructive) can also be fun. No amount of pretentious expressions here (what does "absolute equivalence" even mean in this context?) disproves the fact that you have been proven wrong on the matter, and that your attempts at saving your argument only defeat it further: yet again, you are comparing picking a self-damaging weapon with deliberately sabotaging oneself in a playstyle that is clearly not encouraged. Effectively, you are trying to tell me that self-damage should stay, because apparently it's worth accommodating this mechanic specifically so that an incredibly small amount of players can have fun intentionally gimping their play. You are effectively one slip of the tongue away from accidentally admitting to me that not even you believe self-damage adds anything positive to gameplay. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: To be clear myself, those 'random' instances are the two I bulletpointed and advised on solving previously in this reply. Not any case where you hit obstructions or fire too close to yourself, which is actually what happens in the overwhelming majority and is in your control. Repeating yourself here yet again will, yet again, not make you any less wrong on the matter. Tell me: how exactly do you reasonably expect a human being to not only establish a detailed set of relations between themselves (or their in-game avatar) and a complex, rapidly-shifting alien scenery many times a second, but also perfectly anticipate the random spread and trajectory of their explosive weapons, their poorly-conveyed range, and the disguised hitboxes of said scenery? In fact, how do you even expect a superintelligent being to predict all of this perfectly, when some factors are clearly random or otherwise out of the player's control? It doesn't matter how magnanimous you want to come across by listing a subset of cases, you are still deliberately ignoring the ones you visibly don't have a solution for... or at least, not one that wouldn't involve removing self-damage, or changing its implementation on most explosive weapons. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: That's a lot of words to say nothing. I guess I could've just said "stealth develops upon the game's core mechanics whereas explosive self-damage goes against them", which still says something, but then I realized you were referring to your own post: 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: A player goes 'out of their way' to do anything compared to anything else, because variety involves doing something different. Going from a stealth bow to a rifle to a carefully-used launcher is fundamentally no different than going from Loki to Rhino to Garuda. Each asks you to play the game differently for best results. Loki doesn't stealth or disarm? He's dying sooner than some less-paper frame who isn't expected to use those mechanics. Garuda bloodlets and doesn't build any altars? Whoops, slash proc, dead. In other words: you apparently think being expected to perform literally any action when playing a video game is equivalent to directly running against a game's core design, and incurring all of the resulting gameplay problems, for no tangible payoff. Impressive. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Non-statements. You're accusing me of repetitive assertions when that is your own sole foundation of circular logic. "Self damage doesn't fit with Warframe because X" "X is inaccurate because Y" "Y is invalid because Self-damage doesn't fit with Warframe" If that is what you believe to be my argumentation, then you have fundamentally failed to understand my arguments (which wouldn't surprise me, considering you apparently don't even read them). If we were to reduce my position down to the simplest propositional logic: Self-damage on explosive weapons in Warframe exists to punish the player for making mistakes, and so is a punishment mechanic. Punishment mechanics are valid only if all punishments they issue stem from genuine player mistakes. Some instances of self-damage on explosive weapons in Warframe are incurred by factors outside of the player's control (e.g. random projectile travel/spread, scenery collisions the player could not have predicted, etc.). Therefore, self-damage on explosive weapons is not a valid punishment mechanic. Your disagreement stems from you denying point 3, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, which simply makes you wrong and unwilling to acknowledge reality. But also, along with that: A game should have a mechanic only if some sufficiently large portion of its playerbase considers that mechanic fun, if the mechanic is necessary to support another that is similarly considered fun, or if that mechanic contributes towards the game's artistic intent. Explosive self-damage in Warframe as currently implemented is largely considered unfun, does not support any other fun mechanic, and does not contribute towards the game's artistic intent. Therefore, Warframe should not have explosive self-damage as currently implemented. Simple stuff, really, though so far you have yet to produce any answer to this, besides "well I say it's fun (even though I barely use explosives at all) and my opinion on the matter is more important than everyone else's put together". 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Paraphrased, "you're doing a fallacy too so you can't call me out on mine". Your citation of fallacy was your defence and you didn't use it right. But this is simply a lie, though? I pointed out that your argument was fallacious and purely based on conjecture, then pointed out that you accusing me of Tu Quoque didn't work, because I had not in fact accused you of hypocrisy in this particular point, let alone used it as "defence". As pointed out already in the very post you are replying to, you are the one who cited fallacy as your only defense, and didn't even do it right. It's like you're engaging in this bizarre tactic where you keep making fallacious arguments, accuse me of the fallacies, then cry out "tu quoque" when called out on it. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: No True Scotsman requires me to be making an active claim, not a passive observation. ... says who? You're just making stuff up at this point. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: "Only top athletes are competing in the Olympics" is not a No True Scotsman fallacy, it's an observation because the Olympics is a top-level challenge with limited participants. There's no point in average or weak athletes being in the Olympics. There's no current reason why a non-enthusiast would be heavily using launchers because they have a risk-to-reward ratio currently overshadowed by alternatives. You seem to misunderstand how the No True Scotsman fallacy works: "top athletes" is a quantifiable, objective measure insofar as one agrees upon the performance metrics and number of athletes being counted (which is the case when talking about the Olympics). However, when talking about how "no true Scotsman would do such a thing", or in your case, "true launcher enthusiasts", the fallacy comes from setting arbitrary standards in an attempt to create a false separation between two groups. In your case, it is obvious you are trying to contrast "true enthusiasts" to the rest of us in an attempt to frame those who dislike explosive self-damage as unqualified to speak on the matter. This is not, by the way, the only time you have committed this fallacy, as mentioned above. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Conversely, if I was saying only true enthusiasts are ever allowed to use launchers - appeal to purity. But you're allowed to use them, and you're allowed to like or not like them, and you're allowed to stop using them for not liking them. We cycle back to the idea of "it's possible, but if you don't want to, nothing's making you". ... but we're apparently not allowed to have our feedback be accepted as valid, because "true enthusiasts" don't want that. Your rhetoric here is transparent. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Ah, but I'm not saying there's a majority that are satisfied. I'm saying that there is likely not a majority that would be unsatisfied with anything but removal. The shouty boys are already heavily split among "change it" and "remove it", so it's reasonable to believe change it would satisfy those who are happy with it, those who don't care, and those who simply wanted it changed but not removed, leaving the remainder as a probable minority. So, in other words, you are arguing on pure conjecture, all while trying to arbitrarily divide opponents of explosive self-damage in order to make the resulting subgroups appear somehow less overwhelmingly majoritary than they are. I myself have been one of the most vocal opponents of explosive self-damage in this thread, and even I'd fit into the "change it" camp if you decided to frame my posts under a certain light; that does not stop me and many other players from acknowledging that the current implementation of explosive self-damage is fundamentally poor. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Questions answered in order: Earlier in the thread Where? Point to where, I want to see an actual cogent argument for once. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Depending on tileset and map generation (but in no case too tight to ever utilise explosives in a mission) Which question does this answer? Because the following question was a simple yes/no, and you seem to be saying "yes", even though you really don't want to admit it. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Yes, but I have advised solving this already as one of the few genuine issues Despite your protests, it sounds an awful lot like you admitting my arguments are not, in fact, as subjective as you tried to claim when you initially dismissed them. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: No, DE has made changes to avoid some undesirable interactions in which self-damage was involved but not necessarily responsible, for example: 99% Bless Trinity was a design problem which made self-damage the only viable way to access the buff reliably, False: at the time of 99% Bless Trinity, the damage reduction was based off of the health of the most wounded teammate, which is what enabled self-damage Trinity. Blessing was then changed to have its damage reduction based on an average of the whole team, then capped at 75%, then changed to a fixed amount per cast. Self-damage was the key reason behind the initial change. Still, though, it's an interesting narrative you've got there; shame it's completely made up. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Castanas/Link Trinity was a problem with stacking additive resistances to 100% immunity, removing the self-damage interaction was not the correct response as this interaction still exists (including on enemies!) False again, DE specifically changed Trinity to address self-damage. You are in blatant denial. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Ironic that you should draw the line between argument and dismissal, when you've been treading all over that for some time now. Except as noted here, I am continuing to address you point-by-point, using evidence and reasoning to support what I'm saying. You, by contrast, are apparently unable to substantiate even your own defense of the same criticism. Not only are you engaging in the Tu Quoque fallacy you so frequently (and incorrectly) cite, your accusation is itself demonstrably untrue. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Which would you like? It says a lot that out of that whole last part I can intuit scant few of the origins for those responses without double-checking back. ... just give even one example? You are transparently dodging the point here, while bizarrely trying to fault me for you losing your grip on the line of discussion. The fact that you literally cannot cite even a single concrete instance upon request, and have instead tried to stall, speaks volumes. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: "It's not but it is" is a lovely 'no u' ... literally just quote me, instead of paraphrasing? As it stands I have no way of knowing which part of my post you're even referring to, or whether you're referring to my post at all. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: the contradictory points of mobility and tight spaces depending on what suits that particular moment And the contradiction is... where? The game encourages mobility, including in tight spaces, which make up the majority of its tilesets. Again, you aren't picking concrete examples here, you're just inventing stuff. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: goalpost-moving fallacies where you say something doesn't count for some additional unrelated criteria to say nothing of the abject strawmen, and you still flagrantly ignore my arguments that it's viable to mix parkour and explosives without shooting yourself in the foot with assertations that your viewpoints are 'objective' and unassailable. Literally where? Again, you have been specifically asked to substantiate what you're saying... only to post absolutely nothing of substance, with only further repetition of your unsubstantiated claims. Clearly, you know how to use the quote button, so why can't you put it to proper use here? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Ad hominem. ... where? At this point it feels like you throwing out fallacy names is more of a nervous tic than a defense strategy, as I fail to see how "ad hominem" even begins to approach a solid counterargument here to what I've just said. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You know, I've got black marks on my record for 'arguments', but none here yet. Some of the modding staff have trouble dissociating heated debate from attacks, and inevitably I might get one, but that doesn't make my points less valid. The ones I got, almost exhaustively, were in using the other person's own words to highlight exactly how unreasonable they were being. Oops. "Abusive behaviour". Cool story bro. As it stands, though, I have criticized you on both the substance and the style of your arguments, both of which demonstrably have severe issues, issues that have visibly shown to be intentional. Are you writing this because you fear you might get another "black mark" out of this, and pre-emptively want to defend yourself? 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I said why I wasn't touching the rest of that post. Since I'm trying to formulate new analogies and explanations it takes sweet time to get this out, and when you blatantly disregard it that time is wasted. Life called first. Pffffft. If "life called first"... why did you write such a large volume of text in response? It would've taken you comparatively less time to read my post in full without responding (and you could've always done that at a later date) than to do what you did instead. Honestly, it would be less embarrassing for you if you just came clean, and admitted that you simply felt compelled to answer my post, but didn't want to make the effort of reading through it before responding. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: I'm not doing either of those things. You are, and are simply denying it here. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: If you truly are trying to engage me then this whole assertion of 'objectivity' and vilifying me has to stop. Speaking of glossing over the substance in favor of the style, this is a good example of it. It doesn't matter how angry you feel in this argument, that does not change the veracity of what I'm saying, or the verifiability of my claims. There is objective common ground to be had, and if even that is too much for you to admit, then why are you even arguing in the first place? Nobody is compelling you to respond, either, so if you don't like getting called out on your rhetorical tactics... then don't engage in those rhetorical tactics, and perhaps try to actually listen to what someone else has to say instead, for a change. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: They're not lazy, they just don't find it fun. They're not unskilled plebs who can't hack it, they just don't enjoy developing the skill. Both of those are fine, because I'm not telling them to pick it up and git gud, I'm saying that they can leave it alone without insisting that it gets changed to suit them. Immediately after attempting to clean up your image here, you shoot yourself in the foot: even when trying not to appear disdainful of the playerbase, you continue to disparage them by implying players who dislike explosives are biased and entitled. You are continuing to insinuate players are lazy, even as you deny the fact. One of your central arguments so far has been that essentially all instances of explosive self-damage are the result of playing poorly, too, so repeating your spiel here does not make it any more convincing. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: See, again, your concluding at the bottom is this same holier-than-thou concept that made me abandon the remainder of your last post in the first place. But, apparently, not the first whole part, which you responded to in detail, and so ignoring the fact that you ignored far more than just the end conclusion. I'd recommend not making so many excuses for yourself here, it just makes you look worse. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: What point is there for debate if you're not prepared to even say my views could be wrong? See, I completely agree! Which is why I left plenty of room for debate on possible ways to address self-damage, and have repeatedly asked you to ground your claims in evidence, as I do mine. You should be directing this question towards yourself, as you are visibly more preoccupied with winning this argument, by whichever standard you have set for yourself, rather than saying anything constructive or with any actual relevance to Warframe. A view can certainly be wrong, but facts and evidence are objective, and I have been basing my opinions on those (which does not make my opinions objective, even if the facts are, just so you know). If you chose not to base your own views on anything factual, that's entirely on you; I don't have to pretend that everything is relative and up for debate just so that you don't feel offended when I point out you make claims that are provably false. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Now, for the actual meat i've spoilerquoted back in there for reference: Your arguments have at best been flowing back and forth between a standpoint of "It has no place" and "It needs to be changed". Since I've accepted the possibility of 'needs to be changed' by bringing my own suggestions to the table, the remaining assertions of it being fundamentally unworkable are what I'm contesting. It looks like you may not actually understand my position, then, because there isn't a contradiction to what I'm saying: I pointed out that self-damage, as implemented on most weapons in Warframe, has an unworkably poor design, and so the current implementation needs to be removed. Whether one is to do a pure removal, or replace that mode of self-damage with one that has genuinely good design, like on the Lenz, is secondary, as both approaches I think are fine. Your idea of "needs to be changed", by contrast, seems to resume itself to just toning down the self-damage numbers, an approach that, as I pointed out already, would not fully address the design issues being discussed. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The remaining citation of scenery is argued not valid because it is entirely possible for a player to discretely select the right alternative weapon for situations where they truly cannot find a safe shot (e.g. surrounded in a tiny corridor), or find the safe shot in every other instance (since you only require average >=6m of clearance to the impact point). But this argument is in itself not valid, because the problem comes from the player believing their shot is correct, only for it to literally blow up in their face. Lecturing to that player with 20/20 hindsight that they should've used another weapon instead is pointless, and fails entirely to address the issue. As it stands, you are also missing the point to what I said regarding scenery and unpredictable collisions, a recurring issue with your post. By pure coincidence, this is apparently the only problem with self damage you apparently have no solution for, which suggests your opposition to what I'm saying lies more with you defending that one thread you made for fear it might be made irrelevant. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You assert that launchers do not play well with mobility. I counter that they in fact work just fine with mobility, as mobility aids in finding the safe shots and quickly making distance with the prospective impact point. ... which ignores how mobility interacts with terrain and cannot consistently enable "safe shots" owing to Warframe's frequently cramped tiles. You are, yet again, dodging the point, particularly since the situations I was referring to were not exclusive to the player constantly backpedalling in-game (which rarely happens in the first place anyway, so you isolating mobility to just that scenario also isolates your argument to just that scenario). 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: An argument is made that launchers are infrequently used in their current state. This is not wrong, but you are asserting the cause of this to be purely isolated on the risk when it is a multifaceted cause involving the risk and relative reward. This is false, as I also acknowledged the fact that many launchers also have weak damage, a statement you yourself responded to in the same reply. You are also misconstruing my argument as one of pure pick rates, when I am also arguing that players explicitly voice their dislike of launchers, citing self-damage as the reason. The writing is on the proverbial wall. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: It is equally valid to posit several potential changes from this: Adding significant reward without reducing risk at all Statistically rebalancing the values of risk and reward Mechanically removing risk If the issue were one of pure risk, and that risk were entirely within the player's control, which as pointed above, is not the case. Substitute "risk" for "poor design", and you have the actual point at hand (and, incidentally, that should explain why one of the solutions is better than the others). 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Arguments between the options can be introduced citing additional reasoning and sources: Solely adding reward may introduce an indirect obligation to use the weapon significantly better in spite of the risk and in spite of personal preferences on risk-based gameplay. We don't want people who don't enjoy the paradigm to be strong-armed into it. Buffing the Ogris to be not crap is not going to "strong-arm" anyone. If it were overbuffed, sure, but then that is a risk that can come from any buff. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Mechanical removal of risk is A) unnecessary due to equivalent alternatives already existing for that playstyle Why does the existence of alternatives make the removal of a poorly-designed mechanic unnecessary? One doesn't simply let a troubled part of the game rot just because some other bit of content exists. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: and B) introduces the possible return of a historic problem case i.e. Tonkor Meta. ... which, as explained already, did not arise as a result of the weapon's lack of self-damage, but simply because of its statistical strength and general lack of weaknesses at the time (notice how you conveniently forger a larger variety of possible factors when it suits you). 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You identify this (objective fact of current usage levels) as a problem to be solved when it may not necessarily be a problem or may not be as much of a problem as you believe it to be. Possibly, but then a large number of players agree with me. Conversely, you may be wrong here in telling me that it's not so bad after all. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: As per previous analogy, allowing some specialised weapons that are infrequently used is not a problem if alternatives exist and overall balance is achieved between simplicity/difficulty of use, potential reward and potential drawbacks. There is a difference between a niche weapon not being used because it's just not someone's style, and it not being used because, even though the person is interested, the weapon is poorly designed. As noted by the large number of people expressing a desire to use launchers, but an unwillingness to use them currently due to their self-damage, the latter is more likely to be happening than the former. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: You identify the Lenz as the 'one true launcher' for its two-step detonation. By admission, should you be in the area where that arrow lands, a mistake has been made. By admission where? Being in the area where the arrow lands could also be the result of an accident, as noted above. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: The Lenz allows you to recover from this mistake. Recovery does not mean a mistake was not made, and therefore does not mean that every other 'risk-based' weapon absolutely must allow this luxury of escaping the consequences of mistakes. Again with the talk of "luxury". Also, even assuming the player did make a mistake here, why does this mean this isn't a model for other launchers to follow? Your argument is circular here: as you yourself plainly listed, you are presupposing that the player has made a mistake by finding themselves in an explosive weapon's blast radius, and then drawing from that the conclusion that the the player has made a mistake by finding themselves in an explosive weapon's blast radius (and then, for whichever reason, making the leap that this somehow means we shouldn't change self-damage). For someone asking the other to acknowledge the possibility of being wrong, you are explicitly giving me a line of argumentation that relies entirely on you being right as the premise. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Future weapons can be put anywhere across these nuanced concepts. Maybe there's more delayed Lenz-types. Maybe there's more softer-damage AOE radials like the Sonicor/Staticor. Maybe more like the Corinth alt-fire with its smart-arming. ... none of which have the self-damage model of the Kulstar, Angstrum, Penta, Ogris, etc. What you are saying here is ultimately a pure rehash of what I've been saying in my very first post, so if nothing else, I'm at least glad you're finally coming round. 17 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: Okay? That doesn't mean we have to drastically change these ones when a simple rebalance could reinforce their niche and playability while keeping the basic framework unaltered: Risk of failure that scales with the reward, but if used well, brings worthwhile reward. What does this follow from? Your conclusion immediately above conspicuously avoided mentioning the model of self-damage I had been criticizing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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