Trials, and the ways in which they can and cannot return to the game.

[Senguash]

In the communities that played trials it really felt like they were beloved by all, but in the grand scheme of things a relatively low percentage of warframes playerbase ever touched trials.

I'm one of the people who loved trials. I played them every day until the day they got removed. They're some of the best and most ambitious content you've ever put out DE.

But I understand why they got removed. Every hotfix kept causing new bugs in them because they were made up by years old archaic spaghetti code, and in addition to that relatively few people were playing them. Because of these issues it made sense to remove them, and they can never come back as they were.

But that's not actually what I want anyway. What I want is content that fills the void left behind after trials.

I want content that forces cooperation. Not only did trials force you get a full squad of at least 4+ players, it also forced you to communicate with your squadmates. In every stage of Law of Retribution you faced an obstacle that forced you to communicate with your friends. Initially just to complete the mission, and later on to make it fast and smooth. Communication eventually got boiled down to only a couple one word calls, but as long as it kept serving as an excuse to get on voicechat. Friendships were made and communities were started off the back of people who got to know each other through trials. I loved getting on discord with 7 of my friends every day from 8pm to 9pm. I miss that community aspect, because of how consistent it became. That consistency was a result of the ingenious rewards.

The main rewards were arcanes. You were limited to one per trial per day, and some of them had a very low dropchance. What this effectively meant is that it took months, or even years, to naturally build full sets. For example Arcane Avenger had a 2.46% droprate from LoR which that with average luck it would take over 400 days of doing raids to complete just a single full set. They were elusive, but for the most part not that powerful which kept their prices from going crazy. Buying them with plat was always an option, an out from the grind if you will. This meant that that you could make very long term goals like a complete arcane collection, which you would then get a little bit of progress towards every day. Warframe needs more rewards like that. Elusive, but not exclusive. The arcanes is what made trials feel like a worthwhile endgame.
In addition trials gave a significant chunk of credits, which was nice in general, but also meant there was something for those who did multiple of the same trial on the same day.

Another really cool thing that trials had is this: https://web.archive.org/web/20170730152325/http://content.warframe.com/dynamic/trialStats.php
A webpage which listed the most recent completions with the people who did it, the final objective, and the time. This allowed for the creation of leaderboards over trial times like https://trials.wf where players could compete with each other for things like the fastest time of the month or the fastest raid of all time, as well as wiew both their own and other peoples records. I had a lot of run with that and it's another thing I miss. It's not the most important aspect to trials but it definitely still contributed to the fun I had.

These are the things I miss from trials that I want back in warframe. To summarize:

• A requirement of communication and teamwork. Preferably for no less than 4+ players.
• Long term progression in rewards, preferably without true exclusivity.
• Ability to compete with other players for records. Preferably through ingame leaderboards and profile stats.

However, trials were far from flawless, so here's what I don't miss:

• Severe lack of approachability. If trials had been much more intuitive it would've helped a lot with getting people to play them. Easy to understand but hard to execute should be the goal, what we had was more like the opposite.
• Archaic key system where one person pays and the rest just comes along. A key system is still a good thing, because there should be a consequence to failure, but lets have them be cheap and have everybody bring one.
• Challenges that doesn't bottleneck the group based on the weakest player. If the content dynamically allows veterans to step up and do more than newbies it helps greatly in introducing new players to the missions.

The puzzle in stage 2 of law of retribution is an example of a mission that did not do these things well.
If you didn't already know what was going on you couldn't tell, and someone doing their first trial had to do just as much as an experienced veteran. The combination of these two problems resulted in the type of frustrations that made a lot of people never touch the content again.
Stage 1 in LoR did a much.better job overall. Newbies could be eased into it by having them press a button a couple of buttons, and hacking a console here and there. But it wasen't perfect either, because the mechanics weren't nearly obvious or intuitive enough either.

It was easy for me to look past all the flaws and just love the content, but I can still aknowledge them.

What I want is truly for trials to return.
I want new content that brings the qualities of trials back to the game, but which doesn't suffer from all the problems of trials.
I know it's a tall order, but it's been proven possible. Maybe I'm just dreaming, but I'm allowed to do that, right?

So dear DE; please consider bringing back trials.
Not becase of the people who keep whining that they're gone, but for the people who never got to try them.
I also thouroughly believe that the reintrodution of something trials-like will make the game better, and that's good for everyone.

[Yuri_Doujinshi]

Trials should also be FAR more rewarding. That is the prime reason why I only ever ran 5-10 runs of LoR; pretty much all arcanes are optional, with some being extremely good. Running a tedious mission for hours for a chance at 1/10th of something that gives a minor quality of life improvement and 250k credits is not a valuable use of my time. If anything, the raids should have been significantly harder and rewarded fully built arcanes.

The fact that I can now have up to 6 chances at Energize in a span of 50 minutes really demonstrates how terribly unrewarding Trials were. Furthermore, doing high cap eidolon runs is far more skill-based and rewarding than trials for me. It requires you to know mechanics extremely well, be very skilled in those mechanics, and have the builds to back up that skill. It puts a focus on individual improvement far more than Trials, which is a lesson on pressing your CC ability and standing on pads for minutes at an end to complete obnoxious puzzles. Measuring improvement is also far easier with Eidolons, since you are working within a set time limit to complete as many runs as possible.

I would welcome trials back into the game with open arms if:

A. They had more of a balance between personal skill and puzzle activities (old trials were like 95% puzzle 5% bossing)

B. They rewarded you adequately for time invested. 

[Voltage]

I definitely understand their reasoning for removing them in the first place. They were quite a mess at times. Removing a mission from the game has it's ups and downs.

My favorite part of Trials was the amount of communication needed. Waypoints, Discord, Squad Chat, etc. You needed some way to tell players what they should do to have a successful run. It's a part of Warframe that is quite hard to come by. The closest thing to that for me is the Profit Taker and Operation: Hostile Mergers (Disruption), but it's much harder to find good players who run it religiously. Co-op content is definitely not forgotten, but it feels more disconnected as time passes. I do hope that when DE gets to Trials, they step away from the stuff that made them hard to get into. Public matchmaking and removing keys would really help. Something between Trials (multi-mission lock) and Sorties (changing gear between) could be a good stepping stone for players to learn before attempting the full Trial in a dedicated team.

I agree though that I want them back not only for my own enjoyment, but to let current age players try them. There are plenty of players ranging from fresh after TennoCon 2019 all the way back to Update: Shrine of the Eidolon back in February 2018 that have not experienced a Trial "Raid" in Warframe.

[Voltage]

1 hour ago, Yuri_Doujinshi said:

Trials should also be FAR more rewarding. That is the prime reason why I only ever ran 5-10 runs of LoR; pretty much all arcanes are optional, with some being extremely good. Running a tedious mission for hours for a chance at 1/10th of something that gives a minor quality of life improvement and 250k credits is not a valuable use of my time. If anything, the raids should have been significantly harder and rewarded fully built arcanes.

I remember seeing some runs taking an hour, but they did not consistently take hours. I would say 40 minutes was a pretty casual run and 12-15 minutes was the optimized squads. The Arcanes themselves were optional, but unlocking that section of the arsenal through the mission was pretty rewarding to me atleast. I agree though that 90% of Arcanes could use new abilities/buffs. I would welcome Archwing Arcanes and Empyrean upgrades from a Trial/raid as well.

1 hour ago, Yuri_Doujinshi said:

The fact that I can now have up to 6 chances at Energize in a span of 50 minutes really demonstrates how terribly unrewarding Trials were.

That makes sense. However, the Tusk Thumper dumps more rewards than fishing/mining/bounties for reputation in Cetus. That doesn't necessarily make it the most rewarding content for the effort put in. Different gameplay mechanics that may tailor to different players are there as well. What is rewarding and appealing is different for everyone, and just dumping rewards on players could potentially set a bad precedent of expectation with future content. I really enjoyed the Credits earned from Trials despite only one Arcane per day.

1 hour ago, Yuri_Doujinshi said:

Furthermore, doing high cap eidolon runs is far more skill-based and rewarding than trials for me. It requires you to know mechanics extremely well, be very skilled in those mechanics, and have the builds to back up that skill. It puts a focus on individual improvement far more than Trials, which is a lesson on pressing your CC ability and standing on pads for minutes at an end to complete obnoxious puzzles.

Eidolon "skill" is not far off from Trials. Both employ speed based skills in certain actions. One is centered around DPS, the other is about puzzles. However, efficiency and squad effectiveness is key in both. I have done 11 minute LoR runs, and I have also done 6x3 Eidolon hunts. The communication in an Eidolon hunt is far less than a Trial was. That does not mean Eidolons are not good/rewarding content. They payout well, but Trials had something special that Eidolons do not offer. 

1 hour ago, Yuri_Doujinshi said:

Measuring improvement is also far easier with Eidolons, since you are working within a set time limit to complete as many runs as possible.

This applies to Trials as well. Night cycles are actually not consistent by a couple seconds, and those can make or break high efficiency runs sometimes. While you may not think Trials had the "complete within a set time", you could measure your improvement with https://trials.wf/ and make your "set time" lower and lower. For me, over 12:45+ in LoR was slow. For other people, that could be 12:00, 15:00, 20:00, or even 50:00. Eidolons are not too different. Many players are happy with 3x3, and there are some players who get upset at anything under 5x3. It's all about perspective on how you want to measure improvement, and both systems allowed that.

1 hour ago, Yuri_Doujinshi said:

A. They had more of a balance between personal skill and puzzle activities (old trials were like 95% puzzle 5% bossing)

Can you please define what you mean by personal skill? I believe Trials had plenty of personal skill despite you not using high DPS weapons on a boss. Some examples can be seen on YouTube with fast Trial runs.

Trials were not flawless as OP stated, but they had many great features around skill, teamwork, communication, and unique rewards (although these needed some work). Eidolons touched some of this (dumping more rewards, speed rewarding more Arcanes per night, etc), but they also have some drawbacks. The Plains of Eidolon day and night cycle is similar to the Trials one per day mechanic. These two systems employ players to create a schedule for these missions. I would hope DE goes into Trials with the Profit-Taker/Exploiter Orb attitude of letting players do these things whenever they see fit to reap rewards and take down a boss.

Edited July 27, 2019 by Voltage

[--F--NerevarCM]

I think Trials have a lot of chance of coming back. There are new mechanics in the game to do that.

1- Fortuna's Deck 12 mechanic: Being able to do raids in stages like the old ones, however all stages can be done in the same game section using the "elevator/door mechanic" from Deck 12. No more host migrations between phases.

2- PoE added in mission loading. Now DE can make a huge map that can load the next part and unload the parts the players will not come back while the players do the mission.

3- Use PoE Door/ Fortuna Elevator to enter raids from hubs or open world maps. Imagine going to that Orokin Door in the Vallis and entering an raid directly from there.

4- Onslaugh mechanic: Different pockets of playable area with different types of enemies in each area with different tilesets.

Edited July 27, 2019 by -OP-NerevarCM

[LascarCapable]

Thread cleaned from a few unconstructive posts.

[Yuri_Doujinshi]

5 hours ago, Voltage said:

Can you please define what you mean by personal skill? I believe Trials had plenty of personal skill despite you not using high DPS weapons on a boss. Some examples can be seen on YouTube with fast Trial runs.

Trials were not flawless as OP stated, but they had many great features around skill, teamwork, communication, and unique rewards (although these needed some work). Eidolons touched some of this (dumping more rewards, speed rewarding more Arcanes per night, etc), but they also have some drawbacks. The Plains of Eidolon day and night cycle is similar to the Trials one per day mechanic. These two systems employ players to create a schedule for these missions. I would hope DE goes into Trials with the Profit-Taker/Exploiter Orb attitude of letting players do these things whenever they see fit to reap rewards and take down a boss.

Sorry, I was a bit jaded by my bad experiences with trials and didn't quite get my thoughts out properly. At the time I wrote that, my brain was dividing up raid encounters into knowledge-based encounters (puzzles, for example) and player skill-based encounters (something like a boss battle, for example). I chose to categorize the latter as "personal skill" which in hindsight is misleading; you can obviously be skilled at game knowledge as well.

Essentially what I meant is that I want more diversity in raid encounters. Pretty much every single encounter in LoR was a slightly different form of standing on pressure plates and hacking consoles, which is mind-numbingly tedious for me (I never ran Jordas, but it sounds even worse). I enjoy action, so some boss battles would be amazing for keeping me engaged in a raid, which is likely why I favor eidolon hunts so much; there is never a time when you aren't doing something.

I disagree with the notion that the day/night cycle is similar to the one per day mechanic. That is similar to saying the Trials once-per-day mechanic is similar to D2's once-per-week mechanic. Both have their benefits and drawbacks, and I feel that the day/night cycle is appropriate for eidolons and the way that their encounter works. I would be perfectly fine with the once-per-day mechanic as well, but the game needs to give me a reward good enough that I would be fine getting only one chance at one per day.

[Nemuri]

Dead horse. Go back to posting in patch notes.

[Trapologist]

Just now, Nemuri said:

Dead horse. Go back to posting in patch notes.

👏