Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?

[Lone_Dude]

8 hours ago, (XB1)CertainLeader6 said:

You've forgotten about spy missions, where you must (yes, your right) be fast, but you can also entirely screw yourself if you trip the alarm, starting the computer "clean up", breaking under the stress, and the files are going going gone. And what you said about not having to worry when not using self serve weapons, everyone makes mistakes. Your no exception.

Forgotten about spy mission where I "must" press 2 and not have to worry about anything else as long as I remember the map and can hack terminals in time. That's the extent of stealth. If you're "breaking" under such conditions, you should visit a psychiatrist.

[MJ12]

8 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

It's clear from that response you have no interest in the actual debate. Not even worth continuing.

It's clear from your response that you don't know what a strawman argument is.

Pointing out the core flaw of your argument-the fact that your argument is entirely based on the belief that self-suicide is something that you should reward, because you insist on a 'risk-reward' paradigm where more launcher damage means higher risk of suicide-is not a "strawman." It's just making a point you don't want to address.

You still haven't answered the question though. So I'll ask it again.

Why is it that committing accidental suicide in Warframe should be encouraged? And if you don't think committing suicide in Warframe should be encouraged, why do you demand that players be rewarded for committing accidental suicide with more power (which is what 'risk/reward balance' actually means)?

[Teridax68]

5 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Why is it that committing accidental suicide in Warframe should be encouraged? And if you don't think committing suicide in Warframe should be encouraged, why do you demand that players be rewarded for committing accidental suicide with more power (which is what 'risk/reward balance' actually means)?

See, I could perhaps get behind the whole risk/reward argument if AoE were this precious and ultra-rare thing in Warframe: if AoE weapons were capable of clearing crowds much faster than standard rifles, shotguns, pistols, melee weapons, etc., and the game was designed in such a way that firing these explosives always put the player near the danger zone, in such a way that self-damage arose purely from a misplay, and the self-damage were reasonably punishing without being instantly lethal... then yeah, there would be a risk-reward paradigm.

As we all know, however, AoE is common as dirt in Warframe, with a whole slew of weapons like the Ignis, Tigris, etc. being capable of decimating crowds of enemies at a time, including through walls, without any self-damage. Even single-target weapons like assault rifles tend to still be good, because no individual enemy takes long to kill anyway. Meanwhile, most launchers are crap, because on top of their self-damage they tend to be extremely slow, ammo-inefficient, and outright sub-par in their damage output against enemies, and as we also know, the game simply isn't designed for launchers to be used any differently from any other weapon: it does not take any real amount of risk or skill to fire a Zarr explosive shot into an incoming crowd of enemies, and the only time most players will find themselves suffering self-damage is by accident. As we also all know, and as even @TheLexiConArtist is willing to admit, self-damage isn't balanced appropriately relative to our own health, making the risk disproportionately large relative to an often meager reward, in addition to often being out of the player's control. Framing self-damage here as "high-risk, high-reward" therefore relies on some imaginary version of Warframe that doesn't, and likely will never exist in order to even start making sense, which is why I'd say we should just stop trying to protect the feature that clearly doesn't work and find other ways to balance launchers (which exist already, e.g. their slow firing rates).

Edited June 10, 2019 by Teridax68

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

As we all know, however, AoE is common as dirt in Warframe, 

Are you sure? I can't think of a single shotgun in the game that like... Fires plasma or something, and can fill an entire corridor with death with a single trigger pull... Are you suggesting that there is some... Shotgun.. In this game that like... Fires plasma bolts six meters wide and can instantly wipe an entire battalion of enemies? And surely such a shotgun would never be made by the the corpus right?....

Really is all I'm saying. There are tons of weapons that are oppressively meta in that they can literally overwhelm any level of enemy. Entire crowds of them in fact.... And yet people want to obsess over the need for some of the overall weakest weapons in the game to inflict damage to the player... So I'll say for atleast the fifth time... If they eliminated the suicide physics from these weapons? People would still not use them. All the suicide physics cause is people who might want to just play around with these weapons to deliberately never touch them. 

[Teridax68]

3 hours ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

Really is all I'm saying. There are tons of weapons that are oppressively meta in that they can literally overwhelm any level of enemy. Entire crowds of them in fact.... And yet people want to obsess over the need for some of the overall weakest weapons in the game to inflict damage to the player... So I'll say for atleast the fifth time... If they eliminated the suicide physics from these weapons? People would still not use them. All the suicide physics cause is people who might want to just play around with these weapons to deliberately never touch them. 

Exactly. Even without self-damage, the Ogris, Castanas, or even the Tonkor at this point would still not be especially popular, because these weapons would still not be as good at killing enemies as many other weapons already at our disposal, including the Arca Plasmor as you mentioned. When the Plasmor fires room-clearing walls of high radiation damage multiple times in succession before needing to reload, while the Ogris needs to charge up for every anemic shot and the Tonkor can only fire one round before needing to reload, there's no real need for an additional balancing mechanic on those weapons. In fact, balancing launchers around having slower, spaced-out shots (with powerful AoE damage) would likely work much better with the pace, movement, and gameplay of Warframe than self-damage.

[Guest]

TBH, the only relevance of Self Harm is Chroma charging his own Vex. If they brought back Castanuke Trinity maybe it will be ok.

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

48 minutes ago, Datam4ss said:

TBH, the only relevance of Self Harm is Chroma charging his own Vex. If they brought back Castanuke Trinity maybe it will be ok.

I still prefer to call that build trampoline trinity....It's a nuke and all that good stuff but it was always just so glorious to watch a trinity going "boing boing boing boing boing boing boing boing" in the middle of eso like a toddler on on a mattress...

[Test-995]

It's not needed, game is already powercreeped to hell.

Remove self damage entirely, or nerf literally every AoE weapons with no downside.

[TheLexiConArtist]

11 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

As we all know, however, AoE is common as dirt in Warframe, with a whole slew of weapons like the Ignis, Tigris, etc. being capable of decimating crowds of enemies at a time, including through walls, without any self-damage. Even single-target weapons like assault rifles tend to still be good, because no individual enemy takes long to kill anyway. Meanwhile, most launchers are crap, because on top of their self-damage they tend to be extremely slow, ammo-inefficient, and outright sub-par in their damage output against enemies, and as we also know, the game simply isn't designed for launchers to be used any differently from any other weapon: it does not take any real amount of risk or skill to fire a Zarr explosive shot into an incoming crowd of enemies, and the only time most players will find themselves suffering self-damage is by accident. As we also all know, and as even @TheLexiConArtist is willing to admit, self-damage isn't balanced appropriately relative to our own health, making the risk disproportionately large relative to an often meager reward, in addition to often being out of the player's control. Framing self-damage here as "high-risk, high-reward" therefore relies on some imaginary version of Warframe that doesn't, and likely will never exist in order to even start making sense, which is why I'd say we should just stop trying to protect the feature that clearly doesn't work and find other ways to balance launchers (which exist already, e.g. their slow firing rates).

Most of those other weapons have their drawbacks too, it's just less visible than the instant anti-gratification of fatal self-damage.
To get a good area clear on standard shotguns you're absolutely burdening them with mods for that purpose - which is fine - and particularly for the Tigris you spend time reloading. It's also a different ideal case than the radial AOEs, either your enemies are doing the Conga or you're not hitting the full load on all of them (even when they are lined up, punch through is limited and falloff applies).
The Ignis I've mentioned before, has some ammo economy problems of its own in upper content, has its own shaped AOE, and does also still have falloff, plus the less-statistical drawback of a continuous fire often requiring prolonged exposure to enemies, where direct-damage AOE even with comparable on-paper DPS implicitly involves less risk of opposition firing back before they keel over. This effect can be linked back to shotguns thanks to the middle-ground of the Phage - it's extremely underused since the other shotguns just remove opposition instead of spending time tickling them to death.

But then we come back to launcher under-performance. Setting aside the historics of losing an effective 50% of their output, I still maintain that DE is directly being disinclined to buff the output by complaints about self-damage currently in place. Cautious Shot in itself is a statement - "Self-damage is deemed worth keeping, but we'll try to provide an optional way around it killing you outright". The recent buff to it reinforces this idea. It's throwing numbers at the wall until something sticks so they have a foundation for future balancing of self-damage effects.

This is why I suggest the compromise of grabbing the current boundaries of risk and reward and stretching the whole thing out, as it were. Providing a formulaic reduction allows an easy tweak for future power creep if necessary, and makes the mechanic work on a more believable and steady curve - rather than currently, where it's a sharp rise to a flat ceiling of 'YOU DIED'.

9 hours ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

Are you sure? I can't think of a single shotgun in the game that like... Fires plasma or something, and can fill an entire corridor with death with a single trigger pull... Are you suggesting that there is some... Shotgun.. In this game that like... Fires plasma bolts six meters wide and can instantly wipe an entire battalion of enemies? And surely such a shotgun would never be made by the the corpus right?....

Really is all I'm saying. There are tons of weapons that are oppressively meta in that they can literally overwhelm any level of enemy. Entire crowds of them in fact.... And yet people want to obsess over the need for some of the overall weakest weapons in the game to inflict damage to the player... So I'll say for atleast the fifth time... If they eliminated the suicide physics from these weapons? People would still not use them. All the suicide physics cause is people who might want to just play around with these weapons to deliberately never touch them. 

We aren't saying those weapons don't exist, but then again, so did the old Tonkor.

DE makes mistakes sometimes on weapon balance. Sometimes, big ones. Kitguns make almost all other secondaries obsolete. Spin to win melee exists. Old Tonkor, Arca Plasmor. But then people get them and would absolutely riot if their shiny new cheap trick got balanced. You should have seen how hard it was to fight the Tonkor/Simulor metas back then for the same reason.

Back then we didn't have Rivens, though. Nowadays it seems like DE try to play both sides at once - users and non-users - by just hitting Riven disposition instead of actually changing the weapons themselves in most cases. That way, they have three direct reactions (not counting people who don't know or don't care):

1. Riven-elite on the arguably imbalanced weapon, a smaller population than the overall weapon users, who still get peeved that their mods are slightly less egregious.
2. Everyone else who still uses the weapon, who either didn't get harmed at all (no Riven) or didn't have anything amazing enough to salt over. These people just keep on using the same old questionably-balanced weapon as it is, and are content.
3. Everyone who doesn't use that weapon, and are sick of it. Since they see everyone in groups 1 and 2 as a problem, they're not happy either because the fundamental problem as they see it has been flagrantly ignored.

I'll concede that there was one direct change in the Plasmor's case (no headshot bonus) but it's still questionable whether that was enough of a hit to the reward to mitigate insufficient drawbacks.

In other cases, though, sweeping changes are made that inhibited the problem weapon but also everything like it. Tonkor caused autoheadshot removal, damaging the reward curve of every other launcher as well - while not good enough to counter the non-drawbacks of the weapon as it was. Spin to win melee caused non-penetrating Melee strikes to become the norm, and that is maddening for all of us who never abused Meme Strike and excessive-range together in the first place. Once again, that hasn't stopped spin to win gameplay.

Because they weren't directly addressing the fundamental problem. Tonkor hadn't got drawbacks to make it not the best tool for every job, with base stats that were still strong enough even without autoheadshot. Spin to win melee still hyperscales Meme Strike with Blood Rush with only the inconvenience of performing the manoeuvre (if you don't have a macro) compared to regular melee strikes, and the Plasmor is still a "shotgun" in name only that effectively shoots out giant walls instead of a spread of pellets meaning it doesn't take any finesse to acheve the maximum - and still significantly strong - output.

Trouble is, you know that quote people love to paraphrase as a 'rebuttal' when the idea of nerfs for balance comes up? "If everyone's super, no one is"? Yeah, that's not a real thing, because there's the whole ecosystem around those entities that hasn't also been upscaled accordingly. Turns out in a situation of everyone being OP enough to delete the entire map at the press of a button, everyone is still OP. We have a Warframe 'razor' for that quote: "Everything is OP... on Mercury". A reminder that you can't just look at one localised portion of the game, you have to look at the entire picture of all the interrelated parts. ^{And why Ember should never have been murdered in cold blood, but that's another topic entirely.}

[Teridax68]

44 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Most of those other weapons have their drawbacks too, it's just less visible than the instant anti-gratification of fatal self-damage.

This is why I suggest the compromise of grabbing the current boundaries of risk and reward and stretching the whole thing out, as it were. Providing a formulaic reduction allows an easy tweak for future power creep if necessary, and makes the mechanic work on a more believable and steady curve - rather than currently, where it's a sharp rise to a flat ceiling of 'YOU DIED'.

I actually completely agree with the observation that most other weapons have drawbacks, but it is the distinction you raised with self-damage that I think is crucial: some of the best weapons in the game have clear downsides, and in fact I believe that good weapon design should dictate that a weapon should give a convincing reason to use something else in certain other situations, which implies some sort of drawback at some point in its usage. Long reload times render the player more vulnerable, lower damage on continuous AoE weapons like the Ignis mean the player has to switch to a more bursty weapon or ability to deal with high-health elite targets, short ranges force the player to put themselves at greater risk, and so on.

Where I think the difference lies, however, is that unlike explosion self-damage, these drawbacks tend to work: being forced into a long reload is fairly predictable, and gives the player plenty of options to do other things while they reload, and the same goes for low damage or range. There's perhaps a degree of interference with parkour, because rolling interrupts reloads, but aside from that these drawbacks play well into the rest of the game. Even a weapon that reliably damages the player, like the Hema, can be made similarly predictable in this respect. Meanwhile, explosion self-damage in a game full of corridors and janky level geometry means the mechanic will often punish the player by accident, or simply just for playing the game correctly. Just because a feature presents a drawback does not mean that drawback is inherently valid, in my opinion: one can argue that the "drawback" to a lot of melee weapons is that their stances make said weapons difficult to control, which legitimately makes those weapons less strong than if one could control them perfectly, but I don't think that can be argued to be a legitimate design feature, because ultimately it's simply not fun or congruent to the rest of the game to be locked into clunky forced animations. This would be a valid tradeoff in a game like, say, Dark Souls, just like self-damage is valid in games like Quake, Team Fortress 2, and so on, but Warframe plays by different rules from those games, and those rules don't really accommodate self-damage well.

This isn't to say that we should never include self-damage in a weapon, because honestly I think it can be genuinely fun to avoid self-damage when firing the Lenz (that is, of course, when the shot works properly, and doesn't instead collide with a breakable object to explode instantly). However, the Lenz I think works because it doesn't play by the same rules as standard self-damage: the AoE is clearly telegraphed, so if the player messes up, they can move out of the way or use whichever ability to protect themselves. In other words, there is gameplay to the Lenz's self-damage, whereas self-damage on most explosive weapons boils down to a binary yes/no check on whether the player was in range of what is often a poorly visible explosion. If we are to keep self-damage on weapons, it should demand gameplay from the player that is reasonable: in this respect, asking the player to memorize the exact range of a weapon's area of effect while moving rapidly through complex terrain isn't reasonable, even if the punishment for it were lessened.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Teridax68

[TheLexiConArtist]

3 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I actually completely agree with the observation that most other weapons have drawbacks, but it is the distinction you raised with self-damage that I think is crucial: some of the best weapons in the game have clear downsides, and in fact I believe that good weapon design should dictate that a weapon should give a convincing reason to use something else in certain other situations, which implies some sort of drawback at some point in its usage.

Meanwhile, explosion self-damage in a game full of corridors and janky level geometry means the mechanic will often punish the player by accident, or simply just for playing the game correctly.

This isn't to say that we should never include self-damage in a weapon, because honestly I think it can be genuinely fun to avoid self-damage when firing the Lenz (that is, of course, when the shot works properly, and doesn't instead collide with a breakable object to explode instantly). However, the Lenz I think works because it doesn't play by the same rules as standard self-damage: the AoE is clearly telegraphed, so if the player messes up, they can move out of the way or use whichever ability to protect themselves. In other words, there is gameplay to the Lenz's self-damage, whereas self-damage on most explosive weapons boils down to a binary yes/no check on whether the player was in range of what is often a poorly visible explosion. If we are to keep self-damage on weapons, it should demand gameplay from the player that is reasonable: in this respect, asking the player to memorize the exact range of a weapon's area of effect while moving rapidly through complex terrain isn't reasonable, even if the punishment for it were lessened.

Forgive the anecdotes, but I have rarely gotten tripped up by the enclosed space or geometry. It's possible, by all means, but it is by no means an absolute. Far, far more often I make a mistake of simply not paying attention to what weapon is out and do something stupid like point-blank a Lancer with my Kulstar after picking up a datamass. I die then, and yeah, I deserved it.

I have agreed that there are improvements that could be made in terms of visibility and false-negatives where the player didn't actually make a mistake, e.g. allies parkouring into the way at inopportune moments. Applying the Elytron UI marker tech would remove a lot of the by-eye requirement of the explosion. If you have a distance marker on your payload, and you know its radius, then you've all the information required, right?

But mostly I think it comes down to what you said (my emphasis) up there at the start. It's using something else in those situations where an explosive is inadvisable that really matters. If you want to be flying around recklessly - tend towards non-instant explosives. If you're in tight quarters - maybe not point blanking a cluster bomb. The price for taking that risk may currently be too steep, as we've all acknowledged, but that is a risk that has been taken.

Does that mean self-risk explosives have a narrower field of use than most weapons? Sure, maybe it does, not unlike their archetype in reality. On the other hand, you don't have to parkour full speed while shooting, you can slow a little to line yourself up just as much as the sniper-user alongside you can choose to take careful headshots instead of accepting a bunch of haphazard bodyshots if they want. There's faster and slower mission types. Mobile and stationary. It's down to the individual to find those use cases and enjoy them all the more for having done so without killing themselves, I feel.

[Teridax68]

20 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Forgive the anecdotes, but I have rarely gotten tripped up by the enclosed space or geometry. It's possible, by all means, but it is by no means an absolute. Far, far more often I make a mistake of simply not paying attention to what weapon is out and do something stupid like point-blank a Lancer with my Kulstar after picking up a datamass. I die then, and yeah, I deserved it.

... okay, but by your own admission, this is anecdotal evidence. It is a known fact that Warframe is a game where the primary mode of movement is parkour, yet where most spaces are also quite small, and where there are plenty of bits of geometry that stick through the scenery, including bits of scenery with deceptive collision areas. There are plenty more records of players experiencing this contradiction, where the mode of punishment inflicted by explosive weapons clashes directly with moving at high speed through varied scenery in often tight spaces.

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But mostly I think it comes down to what you said (my emphasis) up there at the start. It's using something else in those situations where an explosive is inadvisable that really matters. If you want to be flying around recklessly - tend towards non-instant explosives. If you're in tight quarters - maybe not point blanking a cluster bomb. The price for taking that risk may currently be too steep, as we've all acknowledged, but that is a risk that has been taken.

Okay, but then what you're saying is that players shouldn't be using explosives in most tilesets, where the tiles will more often than not force the player into close quarters. Add to this the fact that most launchers are also not that great at long distances or wide areas (which rules out open levels like the Plains and Vallis), and what you have is a class of weapons that is very harshly balanced around a range of distances that isn't all that present in Warframe. Meanwhile, snipers are obviously more functional at longer ranges, yet they don't punish the player in such a binary manner for using them in mid- or short-ranged combat. "Flying around recklessly" -- or as most Warframe players say: parkouring -- is how the game fundamentally expects players to move, by placing emphasis on agility and constant motion. Asking the player to slow themselves down just to not damage themselves with a weapon is also itself too much to ask, particularly when most other weapons don't hassle the player like this in order to function. In general, I just don't think it's a good idea to try to force a design that goes directly against the game's intended and encouraged gameplay, in this case by punishing the player for parkouring across scenery and shooting in tandem.

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Does that mean self-risk explosives have a narrower field of use than most weapons? Sure, maybe it does, not unlike their archetype in reality. On the other hand, you don't have to parkour full speed while shooting, you can slow a little to line yourself up just as much as the sniper-user alongside you can choose to take careful headshots instead of accepting a bunch of haphazard bodyshots if they want. There's faster and slower mission types. Mobile and stationary. It's down to the individual to find those use cases and enjoy them all the more for having done so without killing themselves, I feel.

Sure, you don't have to parkour full speed, and you could slow a little... but why? Slowing down to line up a headshot makes sense, because you are specifically trying to land a precise shot. Slowing down to fire an explosive weapon from the hip, on the other hand, does not, as the very point of explosives is that they do not require precision to do their job. In the end, if you're designing a game, you're going to have to work with your players, rather than expect them to bend over backwards just to satisfy your own little designer fantasy: it's all well and good to implicitly lay the blame on players for not having the skill or openness of mind to accommodate a class of unwieldy and poorly balanced weapons, but that's not going to make anyone change and start using launchers, not when there are weapons that do a better job without the threat of random suicide. On the flipside, making these weapons legitimately functional, and removing an arbitrary punishment mechanic that demonstrably does not work in a game like Warframe, is far more likely to make these weapons more popular, and more interesting to play for more players.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Teridax68

[TheLexiConArtist]

16 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... okay, but by your own admission, this is anecdotal evidence. It is a known fact that Warframe is a game where the primary mode of movement is parkour, yet where most spaces are also quite small, and where there are plenty of bits of geometry that stick through the scenery, including bits of scenery with deceptive collision areas. There are plenty more records of players experiencing this contradiction, where the mode of punishment inflicted by explosive weapons clashes directly with moving at high speed through varied scenery in often tight spaces.

Okay, but then what you're saying is that players shouldn't be using explosives in most tilesets, where the tiles will more often than not force the player into close quarters. Add to this the fact that most launchers are also not that great at long distances or wide areas (which rules out open levels like the Plains and Vallis), and what you have is a class of weapons that is very harshly balanced around a range of distances that isn't all that present in Warframe. Meanwhile, snipers are obviously more functional at longer ranges, yet they don't punish the player in such a binary manner for using them in mid- or short-ranged combat. "Flying around recklessly" -- or as most Warframe players say: parkouring -- is how the game fundamentally expects players to move, by placing emphasis on agility and constant motion. Asking the player to slow themselves down just to not damage themselves with a weapon is also itself too much to ask, particularly when most other weapons don't hassle the player like this in order to function. In general, I just don't think it's a good idea to try to force a design that goes directly against the game's intended and encouraged gameplay, in this case by punishing the player for parkouring across scenery and shooting in tandem.

Sure, you don't have to parkour full speed, and you could slow a little... but why? Slowing down to line up a headshot makes sense, because you are specifically trying to land a precise shot. Slowing down to fire an explosive weapon from the hip, on the other hand, does not, as the very point of explosives is that they do not require precision to do their job. In the end, if you're designing a game, you're going to have to work with your players, rather than expect them to bend over backwards just to satisfy your own little designer fantasy: it's all well and good to implicitly lay the blame on players for not having the skill or openness of mind to accommodate a class of unwieldy and poorly balanced weapons, but that's not going to make anyone change and start using launchers, not when there are weapons that do a better job without the threat of random suicide. On the flipside, making these weapons legitimately functional, and removing an arbitrary punishment mechanic that demonstrably does not work in a game like Warframe, is far more likely to make these weapons more popular, and more interesting to play for more players.

It seems like you're operating strictly from this standpoint of Never Stop Moving Ever when that's simply not the case. It's a common playstyle, sure, but limiting players from being able to do exactly that - to simply GO and never THINK - is the only shred of argument that supported removing the efficacy of World on Fire over other wide-clearing alternatives.

I'm not saying you have to go slow permanently to use an explosive, even if there are players who do enjoy that pace even in Warframe. Stealth boys are still out there (somewhere).
You can parkour your way around enemies to find that opening, then steady yourself to get your safe shot. You can switch to your on-the-move pistol as you blow past stragglers, then see a cluster of enemies in your destination hall/doorway, switch to a launcher and boom, clear them out to resume parkouring. It's disingenuous to present this binary idea when there's a natural ebb and flow, only accentuated by those choices made.

Maybe you, maybe most people might not want to risk themselves, might not want to take that moment to check their surroundings and let off an explosive. That's fine. But you admit there are alternatives for that playstyle already, so what does it really harm to leave a risk-thrill weapon archetype in the game especially if that risk/reward relationship is changed to something better-proportioned?

I mean, look at bows. You can say they're underperforming, sure - their drawbacks and benefits might not be too well-balanced currently either. But you can only cut the drawbacks - improving the draw speed and projectile speed/arc - so much before you've just made them snipers with a different animation set, you know?

Edited June 10, 2019 by TheLexiConArtist

[Teridax68]

15 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

It seems like you're operating strictly from this standpoint of Never Stop Moving Ever when that's simply not the case. It's a common playstyle, sure, but limiting players from being able to do exactly that - to simply GO and never THINK - is the only shred of argument that supported removing the efficacy of World on Fire over other wide-clearing alternatives.

But I'm not saying players should Never Stop Moving Ever, that's a total strawman, I'm just saying parkour is central to how players move in Warframe, and imposing a punishment mechanic that interacts very badly with that system is simply not good design. It's great to make players stop and think, but unless you are trying to tell me that the near-totality of the Warframe playerbase has some sort of attention disorder, that's not what's making players not want to use launchers.

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I'm not saying you have to go slow permanently to use an explosive, even if there are players who do enjoy that pace even in Warframe. Stealth boys are still out there (somewhere).
You can parkour your way around enemies to find that opening, then steady yourself to get your safe shot. You can switch to your on-the-move pistol as you blow past stragglers, then see a cluster of enemies in your destination hall/doorway, switch to a launcher and boom, clear them out to resume parkouring. It's disingenuous to present this binary idea when there's a natural ebb and flow, only accentuated by those choices made.

I'm sorry, explosives are a stealth weapon now? Doorways now apparently open for the player even when they're distant enough to not get hit by explosive self-damage? Do you really believe players are going to take a detour every time they want to take a shot without killing themselves? None of this makes sense with the way Warframe actually plays, which is precisely why players don't engage in the strategies you are theorycrafting here. I can agree that we should be encouraging stealthier and slower-paced gameplay as a legitimate option, but framing this as a means of using explosive weapons is itself fundamentally in opposition to what explosives are meant to do.

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Maybe you, maybe most people might not want to risk themselves, might not want to take that moment to check their surroundings and let off an explosive. That's fine. But you admit there are alternatives for that playstyle already, so what does it really harm to leave a risk-thrill weapon archetype in the game especially if that risk/reward relationship is changed to something better-proportioned?

... because that weapon's just going to pick up dust, instead of delivering on gameplay many more people could enjoy? The issue here is that self-damage has been applied as a standard, such that there are no real options for players who want to use launchers without having to deal with self-damage. If there were launchers that did not self-damage, then you'd have a more convincing argument here, but as it stands launchers are disappointing to players precisely because all of them come saddled with a near-universally loathed mechanic, one that is only ever defended by a tiny, vocal minority of people arguing on internet forums, far from the reality of a game that is capable of demonstrating immediately why the mechanic just doesn't work.

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I mean, look at bows. You can say they're underperforming, sure - their drawbacks and benefits might not be too well-balanced currently either. But you can only cut the drawbacks - improving the draw speed and projectile speed/arc - so much before you've just made them snipers with a different animation set, you know?

... but why are you suggesting to turn them into snipers, then? Why not capitalize on the aspects that make them from distinct from snipers, like their improved effectiveness at medium range? What does this have to do with a discussion on launchers? If you are implying I'm asking to turn launchers into some other class of weapon, which weapon class would that be, and why?

Edited June 10, 2019 by Teridax68

[TheLexiConArtist]

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But I'm not saying players should Never Stop Moving Ever, that's a total strawman, I'm just saying parkour is central to how players move in Warframe, and imposing a punishment mechanic that interacts very badly with that system is simply not good design. It's great to make players stop and think, but unless you are trying to tell me that the near-totality of the Warframe playerbase has some sort of attention disorder, that's not what's making players not want to use launchers.

Parkour is central to mobility, mobility is parallel with combat. Sometimes intertwined, but not exclusively.

You want to talk about parkour punishments? Door traps have existed for a long time. Their sole purpose is to make the player deviate from the parkour norm. Do they not trigger that camera, do they aim and pop that sensor bar, and now especially in Jupiter, do they take a moment to reorient their movement to deal with the hazard.

It's not a crime to temporarily halt or redirect mobility, be that through level hazards or necessitating proper cautious usage of a weapon with risks attached.

13 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I'm sorry, explosives are a stealth weapon now? Doorways now apparently open for the player even when they're distant enough to not get hit by explosive self-damage? Do you really believe players are going to take a detour every time they want to take a shot without killing themselves? None of this makes sense with the way Warframe actually plays, which is precisely why players don't engage in the strategies you are theorycrafting here. I can agree that we should be encouraging stealthier and slower-paced gameplay as a legitimate option, but framing this as a means of using explosive weapons is itself fundamentally in opposition to what explosives are meant to do.

I know this isn't what you meant, but while we're being obtuse, explosives used to be the best damn stealth weapons in the game. Silent trigger, silent explosion. You must know the stealth comment was an analogy strictly based on the idea of game pace. General stealth (without frames' aid) slows the game down more than launchers ever would, and yet there are players who do go for that. It's not the majority populace, but they're out there.

And yes. I believe players will back up from body checking enemies with a rocket. I believe they have a semblance of common sense to maybe look for a clear opening or switch to equipment better suited for the environment at that moment in time if there is inadequate space. I also believe that's not every player's desire, but those players have plenty of other options to explore.

13 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... because that weapon's just going to pick up dust, instead of delivering on gameplay many more people could enjoy? The issue here is that self-damage has been applied as a standard, such that there are no real options for players who want to use launchers without having to deal with self-damage. If there were launchers that did not self-damage, then you'd have a more convincing argument here, but as it stands launchers are disappointing to players precisely because all of them come saddled with a near-universally loathed mechanic, one that is only ever defended by a tiny, vocal minority of people arguing on internet forums, far from the reality of a game that is capable of demonstrating immediately why the mechanic just doesn't work.

Setting aside quasi-launcher equipment like the Staticor... There's no launcher options without self-damage because launchers have self-damage as part of their archetype. The real issue seems to just be this projection of perspective. Your view of the game disagrees with launchers as they stand, and you're asking that they be brought in line with your view of the game.

You're entitled to your opinion, but it's not as objective as you think. People have differing perspectives. Some use launchers, considering them fine with the risk they already have (albeit desiring the power grade to be less overshadowed). Some would use them more if it was just less immediately fatal long before a full build. There's people who think some percentage-based design would marry the risk up better, although I'd personally disagree for other reasons.

A whole spectrum. Calling everyone defending the risk archetype a 'vocal minority' is fairly dubious when 'remove self-damage outright' is just an extreme end of that spectrum.

13 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... but why are you suggesting to turn them into snipers, then? Why not capitalize on the aspects that make them from distinct from snipers, like their improved effectiveness at medium range? What does this have to do with a discussion on launchers? If you are implying I'm asking to turn launchers into some other class of weapon, which weapon class would that be, and why?

The point is, and I've tried so much to avoid using this word, but.. Homogenisation.

All the AOE variants we have. Some conical. Some radial. Risk of self, risk of exposure in the continuous. Falloff and not. Even object punch-through and target punch-through are distinct in some cases now.

You take away too much from an archetype's primary identifying features, yes, even if it's identified more by a unique drawback... and you're taking away what makes them.

 

Instead of "Can I remove something from this launcher to make it more like [the Staticor]" you should ask "Can I make this launcher distinct from and worthwhile compared to [the Staticor]".
Hence tweaking the curve; making it more worthwhile without changing the distinguishing features any more than necessary. Preservation of what the current enthusiasts like, while lowering the perceived barrier to entry of becoming an enthusiast.

[MJ12]

1 hour ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Parkour is central to mobility, mobility is parallel with combat. Sometimes intertwined, but not exclusively.

You want to talk about parkour punishments? Door traps have existed for a long time. Their sole purpose is to make the player deviate from the parkour norm. Do they not trigger that camera, do they aim and pop that sensor bar, and now especially in Jupiter, do they take a moment to reorient their movement to deal with the hazard.

It's not a crime to temporarily halt or redirect mobility, be that through level hazards or necessitating proper cautious usage of a weapon with risks attached.

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.

[vaarnaaarne]

No.

[Robolaser]

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.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Robolaser

[MJ12]

1 hour ago, 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 in other words, your argument is that self-damage doesn't actually do anything meaningful in the game but people should just deal with it because otherwise they have "fragile egos" or something? au contraire. This is an argument against self-damage because it's literally admitting and conceding that self-damage is pointless, because self-damage doesn't ever actually have a meaningful gameplay consequence. At which point, it's not actually a balancing factor and it's utterly unnecessary to have because it doesn't actually balance anything. There's no significant consequence from it, it's just annoying and frustrating.

So here's the 'true reason' why people complain: Self-damage is incredibly annoying, and makes the weapons it's on extremely unfun to use, and people pick up on how these weapons don't actually fit in Warframe. You pooh-pooh "mindless shooting" but Warframe isn't Synthetik, it's not a game built 100% around complex gun handling.

If literally every weapon could self-damage via ricochets and overheating, literally every weapon had complex gun handling that forced you to stand still and plan your shots via punishing recoil, high rewards for precision, and the ability to do things like fumble reloads and waste ammo, maybe you'd have an argument that launcher self-damage is fine because they behave in-line with the complex handling traits of literally every other weapon, and learning to master them is teaching you transferable skills to literally every other weapon in the game.

But it isn't. Almost single weapon in Warframe handles extremely well, with high accuracy, simple reloads, and no friendly fire or self-damage or any need to check your backstops. As @Teridax68 said, in Warframe basically the only thing that ever punishes you is the enemy. The most punishment you can cause yourself outside of extremely rare exceptions is a loss of resources, and even then for things like Garuda's Bloodletting they're not 'punishments' but tradeoffs-Bloodletting is basically core to Garuda's gameplay loop, which is about constantly gaining health and using her health to fuel unlimited power usage even without Efficiency mods.

Except for launchers, which seem like they came out of an entirely different game because they have extremely finicky handling and can directly punish you. Denigrating "mindless shooting" in "a casual shooting game" kind of defeats your own point. A casual shooting game probably should make sure all its weapons are conducive to mindless shooting.

[Robolaser]

il y a 22 minutes, MJ12 a dit :

self-damage doesn't ever actually have a meaningful gameplay consequence

So, if it doesn't have a "meaningful gameplay consequence", why would people complain so much about self damage?

You're just admitting that they do it for other reasons, not related to serious gameplay issues. Which was obvious anyway, and lead me to question their true motives.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Robolaser

[MJ12]

1 hour ago, Robolaser said:

So, if it doesn't have a "meaningful gameplay consequence", why would people complain so much about self damage?

You're just admitting that they do it for other reasons, not related to serious gameplay issues. Which was obvious anyway, and lead me to question their true motives.

I already told you: Because it's annoying and it doesn't fit the pace of Warframe and the rest of the game mechanics. In fact, I said it in my last post, in one of the paragraphs you snipped off.

Self-damage is bad because not only is it unnecessary for 'balance' (if we assume, arguendo, being able to fire your launchers at close-range makes them overpowered, simply making it so projectiles don't detonate if you would be in their blast radius would fix that problem without self-damage) but it's frustrating because it instantly downs you, it's frustrating because it incentivizes avoiding the use of Warframe's extremely fun movement system, and it's also frustrating because literally every other weapon and power in the game is designed around the worst punishment from their use being that you ineffectually expended resources and time, rather than self-harm so these weapons don't fit in Warframe and people can recognize that.

[Teridax68]

7 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Parkour is central to mobility, mobility is parallel with combat. Sometimes intertwined, but not exclusively.

"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.

Quote

You want to talk about parkour punishments? Door traps have existed for a long time. Their sole purpose is to make the player deviate from the parkour norm. Do they not trigger that camera, do they aim and pop that sensor bar, and now especially in Jupiter, do they take a moment to reorient their movement to deal with the hazard.

... 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.

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It's not a crime to temporarily halt or redirect mobility, be that through level hazards or necessitating proper cautious usage of a weapon with risks attached.

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.

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I know this isn't what you meant, but while we're being obtuse, explosives used to be the best damn stealth weapons in the game. Silent trigger, silent explosion. You must know the stealth comment was an analogy strictly based on the idea of game pace. General stealth (without frames' aid) slows the game down more than launchers ever would, and yet there are players who do go for that. It's not the majority populace, but they're out there.

... 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.

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And yes. I believe players will back up from body checking enemies with a rocket. I believe they have a semblance of common sense to maybe look for a clear opening or switch to equipment better suited for the environment at that moment in time if there is inadequate space. I also believe that's not every player's desire, but those players have plenty of other options to explore.

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.

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Setting aside quasi-launcher equipment like the Staticor... There's no launcher options without self-damage because launchers have self-damage as part of their archetype. The real issue seems to just be this projection of perspective. Your view of the game disagrees with launchers as they stand, and you're asking that they be brought in line with your view of the game.

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.

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You're entitled to your opinion, but it's not as objective as you think. People have differing perspectives. Some use launchers, considering them fine with the risk they already have (albeit desiring the power grade to be less overshadowed). Some would use them more if it was just less immediately fatal long before a full build. There's people who think some percentage-based design would marry the risk up better, although I'd personally disagree for other reasons.

A whole spectrum. Calling everyone defending the risk archetype a 'vocal minority' is fairly dubious when 'remove self-damage outright' is just an extreme end of that spectrum.

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.

Quote

The point is, and I've tried so much to avoid using this word, but.. Homogenisation.

All the AOE variants we have. Some conical. Some radial. Risk of self, risk of exposure in the continuous. Falloff and not. Even object punch-through and target punch-through are distinct in some cases now.

You take away too much from an archetype's primary identifying features, yes, even if it's identified more by a unique drawback... and you're taking away what makes them.

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.

Quote

Instead of "Can I remove something from this launcher to make it more like [the Staticor]" you should ask "Can I make this launcher distinct from and worthwhile compared to [the Staticor]".

Hence tweaking the curve; making it more worthwhile without changing the distinguishing features any more than necessary. Preservation of what the current enthusiasts like, while lowering the perceived barrier to entry of becoming an enthusiast.

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.

 

Edited June 11, 2019 by Teridax68

[SerphV]

Well my take is that if they want to do self harm, be consistent about it... then it becomes more interesting...

Aka all AOE weapons should have self harm...

Because logic... 🙂

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

4 hours ago, Robolaser said:

So, if it doesn't have a "meaningful gameplay consequence", why would people complain so much about self damage?

You're just admitting that they do it for other reasons, not related to serious gameplay issues. Which was obvious anyway, and lead me to question their true motives.

"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.

[MJ12]

 

2 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.

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.

Part of the game is entirely about learning how to deal with, and manage, self-harm, because literally every weapon does it. Self-harm in Synthetik is acceptable because its mitigation is a core gameplay mechanic. Furthermore, the game makes it clear that self-harm is intended to be suffered, because it acknowledges that blowing yourself up or shooting yourself is nearly inevitable. You can't self-crit, you take reduced self-harm damage, and your health and damage are balanced alongside enemy health and damage.

Learning to ride the heat curve and set up your fire lanes in Synthetik is a vital gameplay skill. In fact, the game's weapon handling mechanics (where you are extremely inaccurate while moving and headshots are highly rewarded) complement all weapons dealing self-harm. You're supposed to know when to stand still and open up, then dodge out of the way and reposition, selecting good firelanes to funnel enemies into so they can act as human (well, android) shields to protect you from harm. A lot of Synthetik is knowing how to make it so the enemy is shooting themselves while you're not at risk of hitting yourself, which is helped by the terrain design in the game and how you have limited enemies that get prespawned, reinforcements are rare, and you have plenty of useful chokepoints that enemies will chase you into. And even reloading, where you need to eject a magazine, reload again, and time an active reload to maximize your damage output, is far more complex than Warframe and teaches you that the game is entirely about staying calm and still under fire (and knowing when you need to relocate), and making careful, deliberate action.

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).