Mission Failure Imminent needs to go

[Absolute_Kriatura]

Hi there,

I'd like to highlight a problem I have with this old mechanic but first:

1. I generally play solo, I'm an explorer and I like to complete things like the codex or achievements and overall I really admire the awesome work of the world-builders from DE, specially now after Jupiter rework.
2. I like to play around with bosses to learn their patterns and test things against them, be it abilities or weapon builds. Also to scan some adds that might only appear during their fights.

Now the question: Why am I punished as a solo player with an imminent failure timer (losing my time invested, drops and rewards if i can't rush fast enough to reach extraction if possible or kill the boss asap, impossible task with some of them) if I've already completed the mission assigned task/s and want to explore the map fully or in case I'm in an assassination because I'm practicing / testing / scanning things?? Why is this old mechanic such a thing this days?? You have created an awesome game with wonderful environments to explore with high details and hidden things, more or less nice boss fights, so why punish those players like me who really enjoy investing time playing and not rushing your game??

Example of situations where it kicks in and it ruins the fun:

• Starting a Derrelict Extermination mission, killing enemies at a steady pace, waiting for the Juggernaut to roar and appear or any of the Death Squad syndicates or Assassins you're marked with, plus finding the Simaris special enemy. Add to this scanning Kavats meanwhile you progress with the mission. This kind of layout has a lot of hidden rooms and side ways to explore. You are reaching the extraction point and the Simaris enemy is still missing. This is where my play-style kicks in because any other player will just extract and re-run the mission not me. I backtrack all the way to the starting spawn point, clearing the map from missing crates and caches. It's clear I've missed a side route somewhere so I start to check all corridors and doors, I find the alternative path leading to a corrupted orokin parkour test, completed it and while still exiting that big room bam! Imminent Failure message in the face, no way I can reach extraction in less than 40sec and the damn Simaris enemy was still missing somewhere. Waste of time, lost everything and it counts as a failure in my stats... why just why was I punished??
• Starting Merrow assassination mission in order to take down Kela de Thaym but my main task is to try to scan those rollers with a gun she spawns randomly, reaching the boss room is done fast and with no alarms, started the fight and moving around killing the rollers while ignoring her waiting for those rare spawns I need to scan, like 10min later she didn't spawn a single one, still the 1st phase of the fight against her, bam! Imminent Failure message in the face, like seriously??? I have no issue staying alive against her or the orbital attacks, even so I'm punished for trying to scan an enemy that's generated randomly by her... well, tell me DE how am I supposed to scan it then?? It does not spawn anywhere in the game, only Kela summons it.
• My very first time exploring the new Spy mission vaults in Jupiter after their rework... I was punished for exploring every alternative route and learning how to do them properly and I was at the 2nd vault only (the one with 3 possible paths: fire, ice and lasers) so not much time passed inside the mission, maybe 12 or 15min.

I'm a very patient player but this old mechanic has slapped my face so many times already while playing your game, I needed to say something: It needs to go.

Thank you for your time and effort creating such awesome game.

Edited June 11, 2019 by Gorgorex
Grammar, not my main language.

[Pro3Display]

to answer why: it was brought in cause people were farming capture missions for resources as if they were endless missions

[Absolute_Kriatura]

40 minutes ago, Pro3Display said:

to answer why: it was brought in cause people were farming capture missions for resources as if they were endless missions

It's older than that. Anyway those kind of "exploits" were all patched by now, it's free punishment for no reason already.

Edited June 11, 2019 by Gorgorex

[Hello]

When I started playing, I was frustrated with this also. I'm a solo player and exploring if the fun, constantly getting hit with the mission failure is why I gave up just speedrun everything to get it over with. 

The one time I was close to just uninstalling, was on a Lua exterminate, the garbage enemy spawns struck again and I couldn't find a single enemy anywhere and I had to kill around 40 more enemies. Failed the mission because of something DE still hasn't fixed, lost a sculpture and 2 of the drift mods. Granted this was almost a year ago but that's why it's so frustrating since it's still this way today.

[Zelmen]

I have only had this issue happen a couple times and those were looking for caches. But it seemed consistent at 30 min after completing the objective. There should definitely be some kind of 2 min warning.

Helios + Endless scanner modification is a life saver. Can focus on killing while he does his thing.

[(PSN)joehan1287]

vor einer Stunde schrieb Pro3Display:

to answer why: it was brought in cause people were farming capture missions for resources as if they were endless missions

This is something different you mean that you don't capture the target when he is on the ground. There is a other timer that kicks in when you don't kill an enemy for some time i think 10 mins but im not sure about the exact time.

[DoomFruit]

1 minute ago, (PS4)joehan1287 said:

This is something different you mean that you don't capture the target when he is on the ground. There is a other timer that kicks in when you don't kill an enemy for some time i think 10 mins but im not sure about the exact time.

This, incidentally is the second "fix" they've applied to capture missions which does exactly the same thing (the first being that the alarms will die down and enemies stop spawning). Both of them are still active right now.

DE are good at this, where "this" is defined as "add some strong disadvantage to an existing mechanic to prevent it from being used, then stop the usage entirely while still leaving the disadvantage in place". The earliest example I can think of would be the interaction between Quick Thinking and Rage. At the start, you could slot both mods and then become completely invulnerable because the energy gained from Rage was greater than that taken away by QT. This was prevented by adding an uninterruptable stagger when QT activates (so that you'd basically get stunlocked for all eternity if this happened)... and then they decreased the gain from Rage so that you couldn't become invulnerable any more.

Naturally, they left the stagger in place. The net result is a bunch of gimped mechanics.

[Hobie-wan]

I mostly solo too and take my time. But man, you must really be taking your time and not occasionally killing an enemy if you're running into that timer. The only time I ever ran into it was as someone else noted, when I was searching for a sneaky cache in a sabotage. But even then it was a long time ago when enemies would only spawn a set number in the mission which was changed ages ago.

[Absolute_Kriatura]

11 hours ago, Hobie-wan said:

I mostly solo too and take my time. But man, you must really be taking your time and not occasionally killing an enemy if you're running into that timer. The only time I ever ran into it was as someone else noted, when I was searching for a sneaky cache in a sabotage. But even then it was a long time ago when enemies would only spawn a set number in the mission which was changed ages ago.

Missions that have limited number of enemies: Extermination, Capture, Rescue, Spy, Def Mobiles, Sabotages, hell even the Assault mission in the Kuva Fortress has limited number of units. Completing the mission but not extracting in order to explore means always the same: getting the Imminent Failure message with barely 40sec to extract. Dunno about you but I don't like to explore when engaged in combat, ofc I enjoy playing stealth and that's what I've been doing lately, not been seen and not been spotted by gunfire. But even playing stealth all the time gets boring at some point, no matter the warframe you use: Octavia, Loki, Ash, Umbra, Ivara, or using the kubrow or arcanes to stay invisible/unnoticed.

Even most of the void missions have limited number of enemies, yes even sabotages... the orokin ships are scary silent when there are no more enemies around.

From my own experience I can tell fully clearing a map, breaking all crates, opening all the possible caches, finding all the hidden rooms takes some time depending on the map layout. It's something that can't be rushed. Have you ever fully discovered 100% of the map in any of the Kuva Fortress missions??? I think very few players do such thing.

I know where are all the hidden rooms in the game and how to open some. So far only 1 room I'm missing and it can be found in the Kuva Fortress assault mission, the switch to open it is inside of said room but there seems no way to find the hidden path leading to it.

Edited June 12, 2019 by Gorgorex

[Hobie-wan]

11 minutes ago, Gorgorex said:

Missions that have limited number of enemies: Extermination, Capture, Rescue, Spy, Def Mobiles, Sabotages, hell even the Assault mission in the Kuva Fortress has limited number of units.

Extermination used to only have as many units as you were supposed to eliminate on the map. This was changed along time ago so that you wouldn't be stuck trying to find the one last enemy that spawned in the wall or was stuck under the stairs somewhere.

As for your exploration method, don't "clear the map" so to speak and then backtrack to explore. Clear a room, then explore that room. Then go on to the next and you'll always be disposing of enemies to keep the timer in check.

[Absolute_Kriatura]

9 hours ago, Hobie-wan said:

As for your exploration method, don't "clear the map" so to speak and then backtrack to explore. Clear a room, then explore that room. Then go on to the next and you'll always be disposing of enemies to keep the timer in check.

Please give a second read to my previous post, I already wrote I changed the way I play and even so, from time to time, the timer kicks in (3rd point on the examples paragraph in my 1st post, during the Spy mission).

With an aggressive play-style, alarms ringing everywhere and the likes this is not possible, that's why I changed to a stealth play-style. And even so sometimes, more than not, it's not possible to explore. At this point I'm not sure if it's fault of the AI even, playing fully stealth (invisible almost 100% of the time and with hushed weapons) the game "refills" rooms previously empty with new enemies and the game keeps doing it till you complete the task assigned, then enemies stop appearing from thin air. You will laugh a lot for sure seeing enemies forgotten in side routes rushing at volt speed to catch up you in the next big room full of enemies waiting for you too, like if the game were filling missing spots that should be empty in 1st instance because you killed already the enemy silently.

By any means I leave the game afk while I'm in a mission, so dunno what triggers this damn timer of doom besides "you didn't kill anything in X min then you are afk" when it's clear I'm not.

Also playing like I do is how I find most of my ayatan sculptures, I see those as a reward for exploring but again if the timer kicks in, it's all for nothing.

Don't tell me play "Arbitration" for sculptures... I'll do when DE fixes the issues related to that game mode but that's a thing for another thread.

Edited June 12, 2019 by Gorgorex
Grammar.

[NoSpax]

I just came out a spy mission on Jupiter  timed 1h 10m 1s.. I was whopping 70 Minutes in there, no timer at all. Also did some secret labs.

This was the first time I played the new Jupiter, so I have no idea, how those vaults work. -> Explore Mode engaged.

 

[Drasiel]

Just how long sre are you staying in those missions? I play solo predominately for health reasons and have spent an hour in missions looking caches or medallions without ever encountering this.

[Steel_Rook]

I've never run into this "imminent failure" mechanic. What is it and how is it triggered?

[Tsukinoki]

38 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I've never run into this "imminent failure" mechanic. What is it and how is it triggered?

Its a mechanic to avoid AFK farming of missions.
Basically if you go for long enough without killing an enemy or "progressing" in the mission it'll straight up kick you out after a while with a failed mission.

For example: You play an Earth Sabotage mission, get to the defense part but don't put in the anti-toxin, with a Greedy Mag and sit in a corner where enemies come by, set up a macro for pull and maybe energy pads, and then just go AFK while your account farms resources/mods/endo/whatever, the mission will eventually fail out back to your liset.

It was started because people would do it commonly in capture missions, especially corpus capture missions, where they would knock the capture target over and then just camp the body and abuse the endless rush of enemies to get endless resources without having to worry about enemies leveling up or anything else.
DE fixed the capture mission specifically by adding a death timer to the target if they are knocked down long enough without capturing them, but they added the mission failure immanent to other missions because players started doing similar things in other mission types.
For a while people would camp out at the second or third MDef consoles and just AOE everything and collect drops every once in a great while (I'm talking hours spent doing this), because enemies will endlessly spawn and come to you.

DE considers that exploitative so they added in a timer where if you don't kill anything, or progress (such as moving towards a new objective, actually starting the mdef hack, moving towards extraction) the mission will auto fail.

This apparently catches the OP from time to time...but you really have to be trying to hit the limit as it is usually well beyond the norm of time people spend in missions.

[5H4DE]

Been playing this game for years and never came across that "imminent failure" message, until know I didn't even know about it. I guess you really take it slow huh?

[(PSN)AyinDygra]

I've hit that message during Lua Spy vaults mission, trying to figure them out on my own, without watching videos. Quite annoying. Not sure how necessary since they implemented other means of stopping the abuses.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Tsukinoki said:

Its a mechanic to avoid AFK farming of missions.
Basically if you go for long enough without killing an enemy or "progressing" in the mission it'll straight up kick you out after a while with a failed mission.

Hmm... OK, now that you explain it like this, I think I WAS caught by this once. Had to rush off to a bathroom emergency, came back quite a while later to find my character standing in the Orbiter with a Mission Failed screen. Must have been this mechanic which kicked me. How odd... I have a habit of exploring entire mission maps, even on Capture missions after I eliminate the Capture target. Guess I've managed to move briskly enough to not get tagged by this mechanic.

I don't follow the logic here, though. Why is endlessly farming enemies a problem when plenty of endless missions exist which already allow players to do that? What's the difference between camping a corner on, say, Mobile Defence and on Survival, or even just Orb Vallis with a high enough alert level. I've heard of people exploiting Capture missions in the past, but I've never been able to piece together why that matters...

[Hobie-wan]

The other thing I don't get from several posts in this thread is if you're doing a mission solo, set yourself to solo mode. Then you can either hit P and be on the progress or ESC for the menu. Then the game will pause. You don't have to worry about being killed or any timers if you step away because life happened for a little bit.

[Tiltskillet]

DE wants to break the meta where too many people are taking too much time in missions doing too much exploring.

[Tsukinoki]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I've heard of people exploiting Capture missions in the past, but I've never been able to piece together why that matters...

The difference is that in survival or defense the enemies level up as you do the mission, meaning that eventually you either be pushed out by their damage or their survivability, further just macroing one AoE ability will eventually fail to kill the enemies as you go through.
In a non-endless mission though?  They'll never level up.  They'll be whatever level you started with 5 minutes in or 5 hours in, meaning that if one cast of your efficient AoE killed a room at the start of a mission it'll still be easily able to kill that entire room 5 hours later.

DE wants people playing the game, not loading into an MDef and then macroing an AoE to kill everything in a room and leaving that on for 12 straight hours gaining them resources, mods and endo.
Because that is seriously what people were doing.  You would see 4-6 hour capture missions going on.
Those weren't people playing the game, they were people who left it AFK with a macro and came back to a massive pile of stuff.

Even in Vallis you can't just set up a macro in a populated area and walk away with 100% certainty that your character will be able to sit there and gain a pile of mods, resources, and endo if you leave it there for 5 hours.  You have to deal with either the reputation rising, which forces you do actually be active in some regard to survive the change in enemy types and density, or you have to deal with enemies not coming by regularly, which forces you to be active in some regard to actually find enemies to kill.

If you want to endlessly grind for resources on a Node you have missions for that:
-Survival
-Defense
-Excavation
-Desertion
-Disruption
Those all have a few things in common: namely that enemies get higher level and more numerous as time goes on.

The non-endless mission types though?  The enemies will never change, will never level up, meaning that with a very simple macro you can AFK camp in a mission node essentially forever.  And DE has repeatedly said that they don't want that type of "playstyle" because it means that someone actually isn't playing the game.

That's the difference that DE sees.
In one you are playing with an interacting with the game as a necessity (dealing with higher level enemies, more numerous enemies, or changes in enemy locations in the open worlds as well as the scaling types of units that can appear there).
In the other you are dealing with static level 5-30 enemies that once you have a macro going to wipe the room is pretty much no more interaction of any kind is required and you can just leave the macro going for as long as you want and come back to essentially infinite resources with absolutely zero player interaction.  At that point, why even have the gameplay at all?

This has bled over to affect all mission types to ensure that players are playing with and engaging with the game in some fashion by actually working towards the mission objectives.

[TaylorsContraction]

i agree that this is a problem,  not only in solo play but even with teams.

for example,  we had the wolf spawn in a mission where some teammates and I were leveling gear.

the fight was taking so long,  that this warning popped upbecause we hadn't killed anything while fighting him (can't kill his lackeys either and enemies just stopped spawning after a while). while we managed to kill him,  we barely extracted in time with less than 10 seconds on the clock.  i would be pretty mad if the mission failed after we had invested all the effort into killing the boss. 

it's one thing if we weren't doing anything and just afking in a complete mission,  but it's another when you're in a janky boss fight where theboss is a bullet sponge god immune to status effects with immortal side kicks...

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

That's the difference that DE sees.

Fair enough, I suppose. Thanks for the explanation.

[Tenno76856]

Just out of interest, what IS the actual timer limit before that timer kicks in? I like exploring after capture as well occasionally trying to find ayatan statues without worrying about being attacked from every corner (worse on later planets for level im at atm). i can only remember that type of timer OP mentions once and that was a fair while back and i kept wondering WTF failing mission when i clearly did not...

[sam686]

I sure want to either get rid of this hidden timer, or make this timer always visible at all times. If Nightmare with timer modifier always show time limit all the time, why not regular missions?

PC update 18.5 have some notes about this timer.. way back then.

• Exterminate Missions now require a players to earn a kill every 15 minutes.  A 20 second warning will be given before the end of the 15 minute period, at which point players that have not killed an enemy will automatically fail the Mission.  *Please note: This timer is cancelled when an Exterminate Objective has been completed, allowing players to roam a level for as long as they like!

 

but... my recent video disagrees with that old update notes. 60 second warning, and it happens while extraction is available. Looks like timer is NOT cancelled at all. Timer only resets back to 15 minutes on enemy kill. It is nearly impossible to reset the timer when all enemies are dead and no more enemies are left.

See this last minute of this Exterminate (E-Prime, Earth) mission while extraction is available. See the problem of this stupid hidden timer happening while extraction is available? Exterminate kills is complete and extraction is now available, all while the fail mission timer is still secretly ticking hidden away, until the last minute.

This timer also happens in other mission types like Sabotage, mobile defense, spy, and more, why? At least it does not happen in Free roam (Orb Vallis, Plains of eidolon)