(XBOX)KayAitch Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 (edited) Certain missions (defence and survival in particular) seem really stingey at spawning reactant enemies. It's quite easy to fail either killing enemies too fast, being too far apart, or sometimes the game just deciding that no reactant enemies will spawn (even if you are in affinity range of all the team). This is not a fun mechanic, and there's no point to it. Bring a frame to a defence mission that can survive 30 waves and you will have to sit out the first 10 waves because you'll kill the wave before any reactant drops. That isn't fun. It can also be trolled - take an Overextended nuker frame on a Lith defence and you can stop anyone from unlocking a relic for ages. Join a random team on survival and spend the last minute running round with 8 reactant desperate trying to find any enemies at all. That isn't fun either. TL;DR: There should always be loads of reactant dropping enemies, and killing enemies quickly should reward you with more, not fewer reactant drops. If it took some skill to unlock reactant I'd be fine with that, but rolling for spawn rate should not be it. Edited July 21, 2019 by (XB1)KayAitch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rawbeard Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 just because you start with a full team you should not expect to get enough reactant. don't be so entitled! urgh. most missions below level 30 seem to have insanely low spawnrates below minute/round/wave 20. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FrostedMike Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 I agree that the drop rate of reactants should be increased. Sometimes you get 10 reactants on the second wave, sometimes 10 just barely before finishing the fifth wave, sometimes there are not enough reactants that drops from enemies even if you've been there since the beginning of the mission. The drop rate is too inconsistant. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)corpusbonds Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 Gotta agree. Even with all of us camping they just... don’t seem to spawn sometimes. I’ve had teams cooperate with each other and mark out the reactants, we’ve tried to relocate to different rooms but nothing seems to work. Really frustrating too. Reason why I don’t do a lot of relic survivals anymore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)sister-hawk Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 Yeah for some reason the endless mission types have terrible reactant drop rates, especially solo. Do an exterminate and I get 10 reactant in the first 20 seconds of the game. But survival, excavation, defense, interception? You gotta be real careful not to kill uncorrupted enemies or you just will not open a relic that round. I should not have to purposefully delay the mission objective just to make sure I get enough reactant first. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(XBOX)KayAitch Posted July 21, 2019 Author Share Posted July 21, 2019 1 hour ago, (PS4)corpusbonds said: Really frustrating too. Reason why I don’t do a lot of relic survivals anymore 2 minutes ago, (PS4)sister-hawk said: But survival, excavation, defense, interception? You gotta be real careful not to kill uncorrupted enemies or you just will not open a relic that round Yup. Captures used to be awful (capturing the target stopped reactant entirely) but now they're amazing. Endless modes: awful. Excavation at least you can stop feeding the excavators and wait until some reactants spawn. It just feels broken at the moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 Threads like this remind me of Payday 2... Mostly because Warframe has all the same AI issues as that game, plus a few more. Here's what I've found. Problems: Warframe appears to spawn enemies onto discrete points in each tile, but spawn points that players have no line of sight over seem to be active. That's more or less the old L4D spawn system, and it shares a lot of the same issues, such as spawning enemies in dead-end rooms and at the same time spawning enemies too far away for them to amass in large numbers. Worse, the density and distribution of these spawn points vary from tile to tile, with larger tiles seeming to have fewer of them. As a result, Survival missions become less about bringing optimal weapons with which to kill quickly and more about finding a place to stand where enough spawn points will be active in close proximity to provide sufficient enemy density. When players have to figure out specific implementation by sheer trial and error, you know that implementation is at fault. Additionally, all instances have pretty conservative caps for critters on the map. Because of this, players are able to simply outrun the group of enemies spawned nearby and be treated to a completely empty map until that group catches up. There doesn't seem to be any system for despawning or teleporting enemies closer to players who run away, which causes further problems. Flawed pathfinding gets enemies stuck on terrain who are NEVER going to find the player again, yet at the same time still count against the enemy spawn cap. Consequently, the number of enemies engaging the player keeps dropping over time as more and more of them get stuck. This is particularly bad when important enemies - such as Battery Carriers on Excavation missions - get stuck unable to path to the player. Because these appear to have their own spawn caps, just a few of them getting stuck can stop them from spawning almost entirely. That's BY FAR the worst issue with Excavation - Battery Carriers simply stop spawning after a while, at least when solo. Solutions: I'd argue that several things need to happen. Enemies need to be able to spawn within close proximity of players, and potentially in their line of sight. This could be done via teleportation effects, or you can go with the Payday approach of spawn spawn points built into terrain. Grineer, for instance, can emerge from otherwise inaccessible doors, come out of pipes, jump down from vents, emerge from the floor or just teleport in in some fashion. This would ensure that the game will always consistently spawn enemies near players regardless of where said players are standing. Additionally, I'd argue that enemy enemy who hasn't seen the player in, say, 15-20 seconds needs to either be despawned entirely, or else respawned nearer the player from an applicable spawn point. Additionally, it would help if the game would try to identify where a player might be going and prioritise spawning enemies "ahead" of them, so that it's harder to lead every enemy on the map on an endless lemming train. After all, L4D itself had such a system for Specials. If the Survivors ran too far ahead of a Special, said Special would effectively teleport ahead and try to head them off, instead of chasing them. And finally, please work on pathfinding. Maybe have the AI check its own position every so often. If it has been trying to go somewhere for 10-15 seconds but hasn't moved more than 1 meter, either let it respawn or allow it to do a no-clip, direct-to-terrain jump to get itself out of whatever it's stuck into. We really should not have to worry about enemies stuck in terrain in this day and age. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(XBOX)KayAitch Posted July 21, 2019 Author Share Posted July 21, 2019 (edited) 30 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said: be active. That's more or less the old L4D spawn system, and it shares a lot of the same issues, such as spawning enemies in dead-end rooms and at the same time spawning enemies too far away for them to amass in large numbers. Pretty much, yeah. 30 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said: Additionally, all instances have pretty conservative caps for critters on the map. This too, because they want to support really old hardware. It's a pity, because Infested should spawn 10x what Corpus or Grineer do and because they can't they feel too weak. 30 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said: There doesn't seem to be any system for despawning or teleporting enemies closer to players who run away There is, to test solo take Ivara and Prowl scan every enemy without killing anything (you'll get a load of Simalris rep doing this) and after a tile or two every enemy will appear to be already scanned. The problem is if you take two people and one stays in the initial tile the front runner wont see any enemies at all. I think it does this some set time after the last player leaves a tile. I suspect the survival issue is due to players being at the edge of tiles with enemies trapped at the far end. I think the real issue there is the host mechanic - all the enemies AI are running on the host, the client just sees shells, and so the game can't spawn 20 enemies for one player on one tile and another 20 for someone else on another tile as all 40 need to run on the host, who might be on 2012's minimum spec. The fix could be as dumb as: if not all players have 10 reactant and less than 1 min remains then every enemy should drop it and every spawn should become active, even if players are close (like Sanctuary Onslaught does). Edited July 21, 2019 by (XB1)KayAitch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OnceADrog Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 The endless modes also tend to suffer from either NOTHING spawning, or re-enactments of a bad day on Klendathu.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Velothed Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 Is this still a thing? I remember it being a problem when relics came out but nowadays I get rifts opening after a wave was killed and before the next starts, haven't had a problem with spawnrate in months. Just today I was doing a lith defence on earth with a Volt nuking the map and we always had enough reactant. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe it's console specific? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OnceADrog Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 (edited) Of course, then you get American hosts with the world's most awful internet because of ISP monopolies crushing any actual investment in decent internet, so then their awful dial-up quality internet lags out the reward screen. Today I had two different games in a row with: - Invisible rewards, what did we get? What could we choose? Who knows?!?!? But at least the counter worked... - Lagged out, with no counter on the reward screen, after a few minutes we all just abort. And I've experienced both of those issues before. Meanwhile here I am in a little Mexican town of 150,000 people, with a fibre connection... Edited July 21, 2019 by OnceADrog apparently some words are banned Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OnceADrog Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 4 minutes ago, Vethalon said: Is this still a thing? I remember it being a problem when relics came out but nowadays I get rifts opening after a wave was killed and before the next starts, haven't had a problem with spawnrate in months. Just today I was doing a lith defence on earth with a Volt nuking the map and we always had enough reactant. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe it's console specific? I had it on my last run (PC) but it could've been the MR 26 & 27 guys who kept running off and spawning new excavators and pulling spawns all over the map. Either griefers, or idiots who paid cash money for max rank accounts and don't know how to actually play... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)AbBaNdOn_IGN Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 Failures in fissures happen because of one thing. Stupid people. They have no idea how to work as a team or even how to do them. You dont run around with nuke frames and kill everything before they have a chance to turn. You dont run around like an idiot in survivals so that the reactant gets spread all over hell and half acre. You dont fill every extractor you possibly can as fast as you can. You dont control every control point in interceptions. You use TACTICS and team work........ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted July 22, 2019 Share Posted July 22, 2019 4 hours ago, (XB1)KayAitch said: This too, because they want to support really old hardware. It's a pity, because Infested should spawn 10x what Corpus or Grineer do and because they can't they feel too weak. Yup, sounds like Payday 2 all right. Put too many critters on the map and the host lags out, causing the critters to idle and fail to respond to player presence. To fix that, Overkill limited the AI to 1 action per frame, with a single critter in combat needing 10 actions per second, so you can imagine what a host running at 20 FPS was like 🙂 I can definitely see Warframe suffering from the same issues on a low-end host. But then, that's why I feel we need explicit hosting. 4 hours ago, (XB1)KayAitch said: There is, to test solo take Ivara and Prowl scan every enemy without killing anything (you'll get a load of Simalris rep doing this) and after a tile or two every enemy will appear to be already scanned. Fair enough - I wasn't aware of this. If this is done per tile, though, that's still a problem. Tile size can vary WILDLY, and some tiles are comprised of multiple discrete locations. I'm of the opinion that this should be based either on proximity to the player or line of sight to the player. Or both. I realise that's probably going to be more computationally expensive, but you can limit the checks to, say, once a second. If a critter has failed to either get close to the player or catch sight of the player for 10-15 seconds, respawn it closer. These can naturally vary by tileset or even by tile if need be, as well. It's just the current system makes it far too easy to outrun the entire map during combat, and when enemies do eventually catch up many turn up missing. Again - solo Excavation is utterly miserable after the fourth or fifth Excavator because battery critters just all but stop spawning. I tend to give up after sitting on the same excavator for a 5-10 minutes until I can scrounge up enough batteries to power it up fully. 5 hours ago, (XB1)KayAitch said: I think the real issue there is the host mechanic - all the enemies AI are running on the host, the client just sees shells, and so the game can't spawn 20 enemies for one player on one tile and another 20 for someone else on another tile as all 40 need to run on the host, who might be on 2012's minimum spec. Right, right - you can't spawn enough enough enemies for a team that's scattered, that much I agree with. However, this problem persists even if the team sticks together. How many enemies you get depends VERY heavily on precisely where you choose to camp. Ideally, you want to find a spot that's out of line of sight of most of the rest of the tile so enemies spawn in the tile you're currently in (they can do this, I've seen it often enough) rather than spawning in nearby tiles and having to path to you the long way. A good example of this one of the Orokin Tower starting rooms, the one with Death Orb triggered from within a loot area. If you stay on the upstairs area near a sight-blocking pillar, enemies will keep spawning on the area below, seemingly within the stairwell and come out in a never-ending torrent. Every so often, they'll also spawn on the other side of the occluder, if you move far enough forward. The problem is that we as players can't see the enemy spawn points, thus we can't tell where these "ideal" positions are. We can't tell where to stand so that we're close enough to spawn points that enemies will reach us quickly, but not close enough that our presence disables them. We can only guess. Hence my criticism of Survival. It's not a game mode of skill or build. It's a game mode of "guess the codebase implementation." When your players have to guess at meta-game implementation, your design is bad and needs to be refined, fixed or - in some cases - scrapped and replaced with something which isn't so volatile. 2 hours ago, (PS4)AbBaNdOn_IGN said: Failures in fissures happen because of one thing. Stupid people. They have no idea how to work as a team or even how to do them. Actually, "stupid people" is pretty far down on the list of reasons why Survival Fissures fail. The above-mentioned issues of having to guess at game mechanics are a far more frequent cause of failure. If you already know where to stand in order to spawn the most enemies the fastest, then good for you but that's not really tactics or skill. That's finding exceptions in inconsistent design by brute-force repetition. Because you can do everything right, stay as a team, pick a strong defensive position, kill enemies quickly... And still fail if they trickle in one at a time because they're having to run from their spawn points 100 meters away. Enemy spawns and enemy pathfinding have been consistent, persistent issues sapping the fun out of any game mode which relies on enemy kills for as long as I've been playing. Not always, not on every mission, but often enough to make me highly resentful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ham_Grenabe Posted July 22, 2019 Share Posted July 22, 2019 This is yet another thread pointing out why the relic should be cracked simply by completing the mission, and reactant should no longer be a thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(XBOX)KayAitch Posted July 22, 2019 Author Share Posted July 22, 2019 (edited) 5 hours ago, Ham_Grenabe said: This is yet another thread pointing out why the relic should be cracked simply by completing the mission, and reactant should no longer be a thing I refer you to the original post: 14 hours ago, (XB1)KayAitch said: If it took some skill to unlock reactant I'd be fine with that, but rolling for spawn rate should not be it Also... 8 hours ago, (PS4)AbBaNdOn_IGN said: Failures in fissures happen because of one thing. Stupid people. They have no idea how to work as a team or even how to do them. You dont run around with nuke frames and kill everything before they have a chance to turn I'm not arguing that it's too hard, I'm arguing that it's boring. Again from the original post: 14 hours ago, (XB1)KayAitch said: Bring a frame to a defence mission that can survive 30 waves and you will have to sit out the first 10 waves because you'll kill the wave before any reactant drops. That isn't fun. It can also be trolled - take an Overextended nuker frame on a Lith defence and you can stop anyone from unlocking a relic for ages. And... 8 hours ago, (PS4)AbBaNdOn_IGN said: You dont run around like an idiot in survivals so that the reactant gets spread all over hell and half acre In survival that sometimes doesn't matter. There can be 3 teammates in affinity range of you at all times and still no spawns. 14 hours ago, (XB1)KayAitch said: sometimes the game just deciding that no reactant enemies will spawn (even if you are in affinity range of all the team) Do any of y'all even read the post before wading in with angry replies? Yeah, I can stand around and draw out missions by not doing anything (except survival, which I think is flat out broken) but it's boring. It's not fun. My objections are about making relics more fun to crack. 8 hours ago, (PS4)AbBaNdOn_IGN said: You dont control every control point in interceptions. Except that one. The game should never ask you to do something and then penalise you for doing it, that successfully dominating a match loses you the round is up there with Glast Gambit levels of stupid. Edited July 22, 2019 by (XB1)KayAitch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ham_Grenabe Posted July 22, 2019 Share Posted July 22, 2019 9 hours ago, (XB1)KayAitch said: I refer you to the original post: Your referral would be useful if I could read! 😖 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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