"Echoes of Umbra" feedback

[Arcira]

I´d like suggest some technical/mechanical notes:

1.) A single Echo of Umbra should consist of several parts in order to prevent the a single item with abysmal drop chance annoyance.

2.) In addition there should be tiers to unlock with upgrades. As an example a single Echo of Umbra would only unlock the first row in your screenshot (more progression and bypass the one and done problem)

3.) A different approach compared to the Focus system: Focus requires a ton of points until you unlock the next level but doesn´t offer anything in between. In my opinion it would be more motivating if you get more but weaker steps with a basic bonus and a special one after unlocking the next level. Example for the lifesteal keystone it could look something like this:

Lv 0: (unlocked by Echo upgrade) offers 1% base lifesteal

Lv 0-1: additional 0.1% lifesteal per 10% progress towards lv 1, at lv 1: damage from companions counts towards lifesteal

Lv 1-2: additional 0.1% lifesteal per 10% progress towards lv 2, at lv 2: enemies affected by lifesteal deal 10% less damage for 5 seconds

Lv 2-3: additional 0.1% lifesteal per 10% progress towards lv 3, at lv 3: lifesteal also affects shields

Edited September 1, 2019 by Arcira

[(PSN)Vexx757]

I’m glad that this is a thing that’s happening, this is something that I wanted and have talked about top people since the announcement of POE.

I was told that it was a stupid idea and it doesn`t fit the lore, now DE making a thing, those same people should go to DE and tell them it’s a stupid idea and it doesn`t fit the lore, but they won`t because DE came up with it smh kmt.

 

But anyway, that being said, I have some suggestions to make this feature fun;

·       Warframes affected by echoes can use all their abilities.

·       Whatever weapon you are using before you switch to your operator, that is the weapon they are using.

·       In the options have a section where there three slide bars for primary, secondary and melee weapons representing the chance that the warframe will switch weapons e.g. if the primary and secondary weapons is down to 0% but the melee is a 100% this the warframe will only use their melee weapon.

·       Give them three options to either stay in one spot, follow you and to have a mind of their own which is a hold action.

·       Warframes with exalted weapons can use them when switching to operators and will use the mod setup the players have but have a duration of use for 30 seconds.

·       The behaviour of the warframe should be similar to wukong`s 1st ability.

 

These ideas are something that Umbra should get also. I hope that DE will also fix the AI for umbra as well.

Edited September 1, 2019 by (PS4)Vexx757

[DrBorris]

 

2 hours ago, Arcira said:

1.) A single Echo of Umbra should consist of several parts in order to prevent the a single item with abysmal drop chance annoyance.

If I had to pull a number out of my rear, I would guess that completing a single Warframe's Echo of Umbra tree would take between 25-35 Echos. Then multiply that by 41 current unique Warframes. That... is a lot of Echos. I don't really see the need to artificially slow the progression with excessively low drop chances, an Echo of Umbra should probably come in around a 10% to 15% drop on rotation C of Disruption (15%-20% on a Survival). This would leave it as something rare, but consistent enough to farm. I would even be game for having Lua spy guarantee at least one echo as a way to circumvent some RNG.

One of the most important parts to an "endgame progression" system is that every reward feels rewarding. Needing to get multiple things to craft a thing is one too many steps in my opinion, a reward should be a reward. If you bump the drop chances to say, 25%, but than require that you merge two of that item, now that drop is innately meaningless. The single drop you got has no use, you don't get to play with your new toy, you have to pray for another drop to even use the drop you just got.

2 hours ago, Arcira said:

2.) In addition there should be tiers to unlock with upgrades. As an example a single Echo of Umbra would only unlock the first row in your screenshot (more progression and bypass the one and done problem)

Rather than tiered upgrades ala Focus, I was thinking of just having more nodes like that screenshot from very (very, very) old Warframe. There would be multiple nodes that give the 'filler buffs'. For example, rather than have one node that increases DR that you upgrade, there are multiple nodes that give (stacking) DR scattered around the tree. One Echo would fully unlock one filler node. Then have the big nodes like unlocking an ability/augment cost up to 5 echos wouldn't be stretching it too much.

But you might be on to something, maybe the capstone upgrades (like lifesteal) could exist as a final sink for excess Echos. Given the absurd grind that it would take to max out every Warframe I don't think that a sink would be a high priority, I would rather see DE add new nodes than resort to a sink, but it is something to consider for sure.

Yeah... I like that idea for the capstones.

[Steel_Rook]

21 hours ago, DrBorris said:

Where did I say that the only place to get Echos of Umbra would be "on one planet on one mode". Like, I get it, I did not go into extreme detail about implementation, I did not talk about how/where you would grind, but did it cross your mind that isn't the point? When DE first proposed Echos of Umbra on Lua Disruption they phrased it as a test for the new reward, insinuating it would be rolled out to more places if it was a success (but it was such a huge failure that it never even got released, lol).

Because that's how DE have been doing things for as long as I've played Warframe. They introduce a new "thing," then funnel all rewards for the next six months through that one thing. We saw it with Fortuna. New Warframe? Grind Fortuna. Atmospheric Archguns? Grind Fortuna. New guns? Grind Fortuna. New event? It's in Fortuna. New resource? It's from Fortuna. Then FINALLY DE got over their obsession with Fortuna and now everything is in Disruption. Wisp? Disruption via Hexenon. Amalgam weapons? Disruption via Hexenon. Gauss? Disruption via component drops. New guns? Disruption via drops. ENTIRE NEW SODDING MECHANIC? Disruption via rare drop.

When the entire game is one giant series of content bottlenecks and DE don't seem interested in learning from their mistakes on the matter, is it any surprise that "grind one and only one mission forever" is my first thought whenever someone proposes an entire progression system gated behind a drop announced as coming from a single node? Rather than being angry at people for not reading your mind or running away with your suggestion to fill in the gaps, do your own legwork. Explain, engage and if need be edit the OP. You're not time-gated from doing so in any way. If you're seeing people consistently misunderstanding what you're saying, then fix what you're saying. Attach a disclaimer, attach additional explanations, expand on the suggestion, etc.

I, personally, am profoundly uninterested in yet another progression system. Warframe already has plenty, and the majority of them suck ass. The moment you start proposing a game-changing new progression system, I lean on my experience with the Focus system and start asking exactly how you intend to make not suck ass in that same precise way? How do you intend to implement this seemingly very important system that isn't going to make me grind my buttocks off doing content I hate in the precise same way Focus does? Because unless you can sort THAT bit out, then whatever you're proposing is irrelevant. A progression system is only as good as the activities needed to progress through it. The best RPG mechanics fail miserably when attached to bad gameplay, so you can't really sidestep this one.

And again, keep in mind what you're actually discussing. Echos of Umbra received almost universal criticism because it was a terrible system AND a worrying trend. Moving Warframe towards "infinite rewards" - a fancy way of saying grinding for consumables - is an existential threat to the game's existing appeal, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a lot of superlatives about it elsewhere, but the long and short of it is this - if Warframe's progression system moves towards consumables, rentals and upkeep, then I am going to stop playing it. This is the same reason I stopped playing World of Tanks (one of them, anyway) and the same reason I've no intention of touching the vast majority of F2P titles. It's the same reason I've barely touched Kubrows and Kavats, as well. If you're going to make me grind just to stay even, then you're offering me a job, not a game.

As such, if your vision of Echos of Umbra is "the exact opposite of what Echos of Umbra was presented to us as," then fine. But YOU are going to have to clarify precisely where you see that difference. I personally intend to challenge grinding for consumables wherever it pops up and have no intention of giving it the benefit of a doubt unless given compelling reason to do so.

[DrBorris]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

-snip-

Glad you hate it, because it is now a dead concept because of the thread merger. Not even worth talking about anymore because nobody is going to find the original proposal 13 pages into a thread. You win, I guess, it isn't worth the breath to have a conversation 14 pages into a thread that is completely disconnected from the OP.

 

Moderators, I understand merging threads, but this kind of thing makes the time I spend putting docs together feel pointless.

[Steel_Rook]

6 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

Glad you hate it, because it is now a dead concept because of the thread merger. Not even worth talking about anymore because nobody is going to find the original proposal 13 pages into a thread. You win, I guess, it isn't worth the breath to have a conversation 14 pages into a thread that is completely disconnected from the OP.

Actually, I'd look at it the other way around. This gives you a clean slate to make the proposal all over again, now that the OP is buried and people aren't likely to see it. Alternately, you could try reposting the original suggestion but without the references to the Umbra stuff. Your core idea isn't necessarily bad, and I don't think many people claimed that. It's worth having another go at it as a standalone without tying it to preexisting mechanics.

[DrBorris]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Actually, I'd look at it the other way around. This gives you a clean slate to make the proposal all over again, now that the OP is buried and people aren't likely to see it. Alternately, you could try reposting the original suggestion but without the references to the Umbra stuff. Your core idea isn't necessarily bad, and I don't think many people claimed that. It's worth having another go at it as a standalone without tying it to preexisting mechanics.

I may do a 2.0 at some point in the future, but it would probably be best to wait so it does not come off as spamming threads. Except by then Echos of Umbra will get their rework so... yeah. And I don't think another thread would get the success this one did, normally topics of that manner get maybe seven replies half of which being completely off topic. I got lucky.

I've spent my fair share of times on the Forums, I've tried nearly every way to format posts to gain feedback/discussion (even S#&$post). Some of the threads I am most personally prod of are quite long, but that ended up being their downfall. Having too many words causes a few things...

1. People don't like reading: This is pretty simple, if someone sees a "wall of text" then they will just skip the entire post.
2. Missing the big picture: People dismiss an entire concept because of one small questionable detail. The more details you have, the more things that people tunnel vision.
3. It is pointless: DE gonna do what DE gonna do, the extreme details of a post may be fun to theory-craft and talk about, but at the end of the day DE has shown themselves to distance themselves from fan concepts. DE takes inspiration from the community, not direction.

I personally love writing long threads, originally the original post was around twice the length of what it ended up. But writing 20,000 words for no one to see it is a waste of everyone's time. I tried to keep it brief and focus on the point, the core concept, that being an "endgame progression" that could compliment Focus. If I talked about the reward scheme, or even the finite balancing, that would only serve to distract from what I am trying to get across. I know that in a perfect world that wouldn't be a problem, but these forums are far from perfect.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-09-02 at 3:51 AM, DrBorris said:

• People don't like reading: This is pretty simple, if someone sees a "wall of text" then they will just skip the entire post.
• Missing the big picture: People dismiss an entire concept because of one small questionable detail. The more details you have, the more things that people tunnel vision.

While that's true, I personally find that proper formatting can go a long way in this regard. I've been writing walls of text of my own for the last 15 years. You can't make people read every single word you've written - they're going to skip around. However, you can manage this. Treat a suggestion like a technical document. Break it up into sections with nice, spaced-out, bolded titles, make sure that each section is largely self-contained and you're already most of the way there. Yes, people will skim through, but they'll generally skip to the next section once they get bored. Even the lazier readers will at least grab a quick overview of your section titles.

By contrast, a single large body of text - even if it's properly spaced out into paragraphs - gets hard to stay invested after a while. When people skip, they skip the whole thing and check maybe the bottom for a synopsis. In my experience, any body of text too much longer than three paragraphs (and any paragraph too much longer than 4-5 lines in this formatting) is going to be skimmed unless you offer some segmentation. That could be as simple as offering another quote, or as complex as going into another section. If you have images, people might skip straight to those, so ensure the images aren't easy to take out of context (like a pic of the terrible Legacy "modding" system, which you didn't intend to use as such).

I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know, but stuff like this is important to cover, I feel. Your idea isn't fundamentally bad - you just managed to hit a REALLY bad time to talk about this so most of us latched onto completely the wrong subject.

 

On 2019-09-02 at 3:51 AM, DrBorris said:

It is pointless: DE gonna do what DE gonna do, the extreme details of a post may be fun to theory-craft and talk about, but at the end of the day DE has shown themselves to distance themselves from fan concepts. DE takes inspiration from the community, not direction.

That depends on what your point is. Nothing posted on the forums is ever going to be taken as-is, and this holds true for every game. However, we do still have an influence on what they do in the broad strokes. Echos of Umbra is a perfect example of this, where an idea received such immediate and extensive backlash that it was pulled before it was pushed. Nightwave has been the same way. While there are many who would defend it, the overall feedback was (and remains) negative, which I feel is a large reason for why Nightwave Season 2 is so substantially better than Season 1. DE don't seem to care for specific implementation suggestions, true. In this way, they strike me as the folks at Overkill - even when given direct code snippets which fix outstanding issues, they refused to implement those changes and instead went with their own, inferior and usually still broken fix. I don't know what DE's stance on the matter is, but Overkill had the rather unhealthy "How would you feel if someone told you how to do your job?" stance. If people are offering you solutions, swallow your pride and at least listen to them, god damn it!

At the same time, though - eh, why not post a comprehensive, extensive suggestion? Worse come to worst, you at least have a thread that you can link to in future discussions so you don't have to keep repeating yourself 🙂

[DrBorris]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

-snip-

I have found wall of text to not necessarily mean a literal wall of text, but have seen any lengthy post be called out. You've seen it, the obligatory TL;DR as the first response to a detailed thread.

And I think my point with extreme details being pointless was a bit harsh, detail are necessary sometimes. There is a line that is pointless in my opinion though, numbers. Anytime you start attaching damage numbers, drop chances, etcetera into a proposal you have gone off the deep end. Because a) people love to tell you something is OP/UP and b) it is the most irrelevant thing to DE. The most important thing about a concept/feedback thread is to express your intentions, and if you need to go into deeper detail to get the point across then you don't have much of a choice.

I just have such a bad history with that kind of thing, I've been an active member of the Forums for over five years (oof, I need a life) now and it has made me grizzled. You see the "back in my day, Warframe was X Y Z" posts all of the time but honestly for me it is "back in my day, the Warframe Forums were X Y Z". I have a folder on my computer with nearly 200 rework/feedback/suggestion/theory-craft/discussion documents ranging from 200 to 20,000 (seriously, I need a life) words, most of which have and likely will never see the light of day. My hobby is more so to think about games than actually play games. For a while I tried having a "what" and "why" section to threads, so someone could get a quick idea for what I was proposing and if they did not understand the "why" would clear things up. Nobody read/cared about the "why", they just read the "what" and jumped to the worst conclusion possible. In this (former) thread I had a "thoughts" section at the end which was basically a condensed "why".

 

Which is why I hate when moderators break the rare threads that actually start a discussion. Most "successful" threads on the Forums are bad takes that everyone dogpiles on, these threads are pointless. In the little time that my thread was up the discussion that was had gave me great feedback. And sure, I can see the silver lining and make it better "next time", but it was killed prematurely. There shouldn't have to be a next time, feedback threads should be living documents that evolve, 14 page megathreads of jumbled ideas aren't going anywhere. I lost the opportunity to learn, to be inspired by other thoughts. And that just blows...

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-09-03 at 8:10 PM, DrBorris said:

And I think my point with extreme details being pointless was a bit harsh, detail are necessary sometimes. There is a line that is pointless in my opinion though, numbers. Anytime you start attaching damage numbers, drop chances, etcetera into a proposal you have gone off the deep end. Because a) people love to tell you something is OP/UP and b) it is the most irrelevant thing to DE. The most important thing about a concept/feedback thread is to express your intentions, and if you need to go into deeper detail to get the point across then you don't have much of a choice.

I'm not sure that I agree completely here. Yes, trying to do complex balance is usually pointless even on its own, but some suggestions are based around the underlying math. I had a thread which talked about how per-pellet Status Chance is calculated for weapons with native multishot. There's no good way to explain what's wrong with that without going through probability theory and calculus, because the issue lies in the radical function DE eneded up sing for it. Similarly, when talking about damage buff stacking, it's important to look at real in-game numbers since the issue is how they stack together. Saying that a weapon can be modded for "200 times base damage" sounds like hyperbole, but showing the stat progression of an an actual in-game weapon actually puts that into perspective. Or take armour scaling with enemy level - the numbers there are quite important because armour (rather, resistance) is a multiplicative stat the effects of which scale with player damage.

I'm a programmer by trade with a mathematical education, so the aspects of game design which interest me are inherently implementation-sided and numbers-based 🙂 I'll agree with you to the extent that adding numbers balance to suggestions is pointless in most cases, but I'll leave a rather wide margin of exceptions for discussing the numbers and their underlying math.

 

On 2019-09-03 at 8:10 PM, DrBorris said:

My hobby is more so to think about games than actually play games. For a while I tried having a "what" and "why" section to threads, so someone could get a quick idea for what I was proposing and if they did not understand the "why" would clear things up. Nobody read/cared about the "why", they just read the "what" and jumped to the worst conclusion possible. In this (former) thread I had a "thoughts" section at the end which was basically a condensed "why".

I've often described myself as a "collector of video game mechanics," so I know what you mean. It's why you'll see me citing other games so often, and why you'll see so many people respond with "Yeah, but this is Warframe :)" Ultimately, you're never going to avoid the "tl;dr" and "no" trolls and honestly it's not worth trying to. In my experience, you can just ignore them for the most part. As long as you can catch the attention and imagination of enough people who want to participate in the thread legitimately, the trolls will have little effect. And whatever you do, DO NOT derail your own thread. I don't mean to be offering advise, just - discussion is doable in this forum, as long as you go about it with a light touch and a cool head.

And if the thread ends up having 3 responses before it scrolls off the first page... Well, that's how that goes most of the time.

[vanaukas]

Now that we have Helminth, isn't possible to make this available and not for just 24 hours?