Disruption is not sustainable content.

[NotaJedi]

I had a bit of a disagreement with a guy who knew all about the endgame meta and farming 6m operator points in a day and enduring arbitrations against lv 150 enemies, I said there was no point, he said we had different views of progress.

What we do need which would add a lot of depth and IMO make the game more enjoyable, and actually make me want to be in a party with other people nuking the map indefinitely, is team dynamics, like you actually have to help someone and work together instead of "i go this way and do the objective and then complain when no one is at extraction"

I propose special enemies with trapping/1 hit kill mechanics and global events which make is so you have to help one another, like infested spores surround players for a time and make them vulnerable, your allies come in and shake it off you, event would last for about a minute, nothing too serious, or the assassins that keep interrupting appear more often and have boss mechanics, they drop a resource you can farm and get that sweet stalker weapon he never seems to drop -despair, cough- make of that what you will.

Next we should make it so frames have "classes" like in traditional rpg's, this would give them either a passive or new ability which benefits the team and promote parties having different skillsets instead of everyone being a one man army where if something doesnt die in less than 2 seconds its not meta and you're doing it wrong. I admit this would be hard to implement in the game in its current state, but something along those lines.

If all else fails, add another affinity grind to equipment which would increase their BASE stats, making tougher enemies drop the things you need to improve the weapons, and have  good old endless Diablo rift farm, the kids and streamers love those.

As for the rewards, I think DE is getting better at that, we're not really there yet but there has to be something to work towards, as far as i'm concerned I don't need anything "meta" because I can clear almost all of the content on the chat by myself, I am working on getting gud at killing the tridolons and I haven't faced off against the orb yet, but the only thing I need parties for are survivals and sanctuary because efficiency.

TL;DR Once we fix the core game mechanics then we can talk about sustainable content, the fact you can queue up for any mission and do nothing as long as 1 person in the party has memeing strike or nuke frames and still win, we're not going anywhere.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-09-02 at 9:51 AM, pisces13 said:

For the longest time I keep waiting for DE to come up with "good" rewards that would encourage players both veteran and new to play a mission for more than 5-10 minutes before deciding to jump out. The fact that newer items are placed in rotation c does not solve this problem. Once the item sought after is obtained, there is literally no point in playing the game mode ever again.

Because as we all know, Warframe is a terrible, unfun game that none of us would be playing if we weren't getting paid to do so. Heaven forbid we play a game mode because we enjoy playing it, even if we already have all of the rewards. We're not in it for the experience of actually playing the game. We're in it for the loot slot machine.

Pardon me for being cynical, but I grow increasingly worried about the health of the video game industry as a whole when I see people complaining bout not having enough Skinner Box and about games not relying on Pavlovian conditioning enough. I'm old enough to remember a time when video games HAD no rewards of any kind, besides the experience of playing them - not even achievements. I'm not denying that progression systems do matter, but for Pete's sake! They're not the ONLY thing which matters. If all you ever care about is the carrot at the end of the stick then yeah - the game's going to feel boring and barren and "content drought" and what have you... But that's an incredibly reductive way to look at the game.

Without wishing to be rude, I have to ask: At what point have you had "enough" rewards that you can actually allow yourself to enjoy what you actually already have?

 

On 2019-09-02 at 9:51 AM, pisces13 said:

Which leads to the next issue. The AI in warframe is atrocious. Their pathing is linear. They behave like mindless bots. Improved AI system adds a lot to the feel of gameplay. Adding emotions like anger and fear, or special animations they perform gives more realism. It adds more depth than enemies just mindlessly running to their deaths (Im looking at you infested).  

The problem is that none of what you propose actually matters in a game like this. You can give enemies the most elaborate, complex behaviour of likes and dislikes, fears and beliefs and complex behaviours. None of it is going to matter when a Warframe flies past at super speed and insta-kills said AI critter. Warframe is a horde shooter, and horde shooters benefit from having simple, telegraphed enemy behaviour such that a player can get a decent measure of the enemy horde at a glance. Sure, better reaction animations (mostly for stagger) wouldn't go amiss but you vastly overstate the importance of AI complexity. The most important aspect of a Horde Shooter AI is that it's active, aggressive and able to consistently find the player regardless of terrain or circumstance. This is why old-school Payday 2 went from brain-dead cops to intelligent cops simply by increasing the AI task limit dramatically.

Smart AI isn't good AI. Simple, predictable, telegraphed AI which superficially appears smart is good AI. FEAR gets praised for its frankly rudimentary finite state machine logic predominantly because they dressed it up conditional voice lines and canned animations. DOOM 4 gets praised for its "push forward gameplay," but that's achieved by making the AI deliberately dumb, intentionally avoiding cover and not shooting near explosive containers so the player can use them instead. AI isn't the enemy and its goal isn't to kill the player. AI is the robot cowboys in Westworld (the 1973 film, have not seen the series), and its goal is to let the player win while having an exciting thrill ride in the process.

As long as AI is able to path correctly without getting stuck or taking too long, as long as AI is able to aggressively push and pursue the player, as long as AI is able to be responsive without tanking the host's performance, then that's more than good enough. Dressing it up with conditional callouts and telegraphed intentions helps, but those aren't AI complexity. They're smoke and mirrors.

 

On 2019-09-02 at 9:51 AM, pisces13 said:

Next issue is the difficulty slider. There needs to be an option to increase enemy spawns to that similar to 4 squad survival, defense, mobile d, etc for solo players. Variation for enemies is long overdue. We are tired of fighting the same 4 types of enemies from each faction. Just add ghouls to grineer tilesets, increased bursas and comba units for corpus, and more scary infested units that blockheads. 

No issue here. The more difficulty customisation we have access to, the better. The more knobs you give to players by which to adjust their own experience, the better. I've often argued in favour of customising the level and enemy density of a node separately from each other. With that said, however - what do you mean "we" kemosabe? "We" aren't tired of fighting the same four enemy types. "We" are tired of functionally indistinguishable, minor variations on existing enemy types. "We" would like to see fewer but more uniquely distinct enemy types. "We" would rather not have eleventy billion kinds of Combas and then an equal amount of functionally identical Scrambus enemies when all of them do broadly the same thing. "We" would rather a clear distinction between "common" and "special" enemies, both in terms of difficulty and in terms of mechanical complexity.

Warframe doesn't suffer from lack of difficulty and throwing more Specials at us doesn't fix anything. Rather, Warframe suffers from lack of deliberate enemy design, as individual enemies appear to have been added one at a time over the years, with no clear vision of what role each would play. The overplayed "we" joke aside, I'm of the opinion that we can stand to lose 90% of the enemy variety, give the remaining enemies their own unique silhouettes, sound packs and mechanics and the experience would be better for it. Go the direction of the Nox, rather than the Bombard. Even something as simple as Payday 2 managed to get away with 2 types of Commons and something like 4-5 Specials for its entire run, while Warframe has hundreds upon hundreds of enemies that I can't tell apart in the frikkin' Codex.

 

21 minutes ago, NotaJedi said:

I propose special enemies with trapping/1 hit kill mechanics and global events which make is so you have to help one another, like infested spores surround players for a time and make them vulnerable, your allies come in and shake it off you, event would last for about a minute, nothing too serious, or the assassins that keep interrupting appear more often and have boss mechanics, they drop a resource you can farm and get that sweet stalker weapon he never seems to drop -despair, cough- make of that what you will.

And what about those of us who play predominantly solo? What do WE do with those mechanics?

Edited September 3, 2019 by Steel_Rook

[NotaJedi]

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

And what about those of us who play predominantly solo? What do WE do with those mechanics?

We wouldn't see these enemies or have some way to combat them alone, I was thinking of more players = greater risk, or even better, have solo bosses with their own tables, which means more work but we could trade such rewards with others and find some way to compensate both the lone wolves like us and the party people.

I'm just brainstorming over here, I know game design isn't easy and we all have our tastes, personally I love keeping to myself and soloing everything I can.

[ikkabotz]

At this point I'm skeptical Warframe will ever near the game you (or myself and some other players) want it to be in the more obvious short comings. Do yourself a favor and move on from it. Trust me, it's worth walking away from the frustration and will always still be here if they ever sort it out or you feel like coming back. I check in here and there on the website or YouTube to see what's new, but the type of changes to really pull me back in have not materialized for probably going on two years now? 

Edited September 3, 2019 by ikkabotz

[Steel_Rook]

4 minutes ago, NotaJedi said:

We wouldn't see these enemies or have some way to combat them alone, I was thinking of more players = greater risk, or even better, have solo bosses with their own tables, which means more work but we could trade such rewards with others and find some way to compensate both the lone wolves like us and the party people.

Right, but then you start walking into "solo" vs. "team" content dynamics, and that complicates matters drastically. I don't mean to shut you down, I've just seen games attempt this in the past. City of Heroes tried this for the longest time, as lead designer Jack Emmert's original vision was closer to an "EverQuest with superpowers" design. Developers tried to make the game impossible to solo for two full years, then gave up because it wasn't working, then spent then spent the next 6 trying to make it solo-friendly... In some bizarre ways. Defenders - a pure Support class - got damage buffs which dropped off on a team, Controllers got damage added to their control effects, the team-only Archvillain class started scaling down into Elite Bosses in a REALLY broken way, etc. Granted, City of Heroes was at its core a late 90s "TEAM or GTFO!" style MMO, but its issues are similar.

On the other side, you have L4D2's various mutators. That game was designed with similar mechanics to what you describe, with nearly all Specials being able to one-hit-pin players, and eventually kill them unless a team-mate intervened. One of the mutators the game introduced was a solo mode against just Specials, and they had to break their own mechanics with Specials letting the player go after a while.

Point being, trying to tailor content to party size has the potential to add a LOT of complexity and special-case exceptions to game that... I honestly feel just isn't really designed for it. Maybe when Warframe was still new and had that awful legacy movement system which forced players to walk everywhere that might have worked. With Movement 2.0 and the current game design direction towards larger areas with more verticality, I feel one-hit-kill and pinning enemies would feel more like a nuisance and a cheapshot than actual team dynamics. Then again, maybe it's just my bias talking - I really don't like game systems which literally require multiple people to fully utilise.

[_Kiro]

I do agree that disruption isn't sustainable content... like warframe all in all doesn't even have sustainable content. The moment you get everything, in any of the game modes, you do lose interest on them - that's normal. Why should I keep running anything if whatever I get in it is already in my inventory?

Rewards that escape this ruling are your standard typical Kuva, Relics, Credits, maybe an occasional Veiled Riven would be nice, Endo, etc... those are rewards that you always need and I'm always happy to farm for them even though I have everything in the game. Kuva for one is something I'm personally addicted to farming cuz I'm always rolling rivens but I digress...

The point is I believe DE should be focusing on giving us more rewards like these, I for one loved the fact you can now get a syndicate universal medallion on this new disruption missions since it's something that is always useful.

This is not something easily discussed or solvable though as there's always the "I have enough endo, credits or whatever" argument and then you lose interest anyway. This whole topic is a conundrum that DE has been trying to find a solution for without any success in the long run.

It's borderline impossible to find a permanent solution for this problem, no matter what you decide to do, there will be people raging about it. I'm not defending DE here though, their job is to figure this all out, all we can do is present feedback (and either way, in the end, they're the ones who decide anyway).

Edited September 3, 2019 by _Kiro

[Steel_Rook]

2 minutes ago, _Kiro said:

I do agree that disruption isn't sustainable content... like warframe all in all doesn't even have sustainable content. The moment you get everything, in any of the game modes, you do lose interest on them - that's normal. Why should I keep running anything if whatever I get in it is already in my inventory?

As I said before - because you enjoy the activities? I mean, I presume you do because you're still playing the game.

[_Kiro]

1 minute ago, Steel_Rook said:

As I said before - because you enjoy the activities? I mean, I presume you do because you're still playing the game.

Yes I do enjoy the game still, I don't think I ever implied I did not... if I did it wasn't my intention.

I spoke as an answer to the op, I did not include a personal view of the problem. If that was the point then I would just say:

"I play the game whenever I'm able to or want to, I help other players farm what I already have for fun and when I'm bored I just go play other stuff. Playing this game til burnout never amounts to anything and there's a lot more games in the market that I can dedicate time to while I wait for Warframe to get updated."

^ but this isn't an appropriate answer to a thread like this as we're talking about sustainable content in warframe, either way when something like this is said, by any kind of player, we get the stereotypical reply that:

"It's players like you who are holding back the game, passive players like you who just close your eyes to the problem..." etc etc.

Topics like this tend to go up in flames easily so I hold my arguments as an habit. Though I do enjoy the discussion that rises from them.

[Tsukinoki]

2 hours ago, NotaJedi said:

I propose special enemies with trapping/1 hit kill mechanics and global events which make is so you have to help one another, like infested spores surround players for a time and make them vulnerable, your allies come in and shake it off you, event would last for about a minute, nothing too serious, or the assassins that keep interrupting appear more often and have boss mechanics, they drop a resource you can farm and get that sweet stalker weapon he never seems to drop -despair, cough- make of that what you will.

Thing is DE tried this and it just didn't work.

Early on (U6 or U7 or so) DE added in seekers with "Nervos" mines.  They would throw these at players and if they hit you then you would hunch over in a pain animation.  You wouldn't be able to do anything until either the enemies killed you, or an ally came over and knocked off the Nervos.
Guess what 99% of the playerbase did?  Completely ignore you and left you there for the rest of the mission unable to do anything.  After all, why bother helping that player when you could just finish the mission instead?

DE wanted to add more teamplay like that, and saw that the warframe community doesn't really want that.  It wasn't fun.  It didn't add anything to the game.  It was just a horrible nuisance.  And it had the capability of destroying you're entire team if everyone got hit by one.

In this game I don't see those mechanics working very well.
Think of how many random people actually revive others.  Now think of those same people being responsible for helping you out of those situations.

2 hours ago, NotaJedi said:

Next we should make it so frames have "classes" like in traditional rpg's, this would give them either a passive or new ability which benefits the team and promote parties having different skillsets instead of everyone being a one man army where if something doesnt die in less than 2 seconds its not meta and you're doing it wrong. I admit this would be hard to implement in the game in its current state, but something along those lines.

I feel that this would break more of the game than it would fix.
The game was designed with the mentality of "You can do it alone with nearly any frame..." and I would prefer that it stays that way instead of going towards the "holy trinity" of classes you see in MMOs where you go "Well I'm a support....and completely screwed unless I have a DPS or Tank to help me!"

DE stated many times in the early versions of the game that they want to avoid the "holy trinity" of RPG classes.  They don't want to just go down the lines of "You're a Tank, DPS, or Healer and that' it!"

Warframes are supposed to be one man armies.  That's kinda the whole point to them.

I can agree with increasing the TTK by a bit (nothing extreme but a few extra seconds to clear a room wouldn't be bad), but not by forcing RPG roles onto all of the frames.

2 hours ago, NotaJedi said:

If all else fails, add another affinity grind to equipment which would increase their BASE stats, making tougher enemies drop the things you need to improve the weapons, and have  good old endless Diablo rift farm, the kids and streamers love those.

So basically add power creep for no real reason?

We're already strong enough as it is...we don't need more power thrown at us just because.
I mean, do I really need my Tigris Prime to deal more damage and have a higher status chance?
Do i really need my catchmoon to deal more damage when I can already shoot it down a hallway at sortie levels and kill everyone in it at once?

Edited September 3, 2019 by Tsukinoki

[Tsukinoki]

13 hours ago, -HoB-KurtOn said:

That moment the OP is 90% right, and the community still bashes him about the 10% disregarding the other 90%..What a sad day it is.

Good job @pisces13 , i for one, have nothing negative to say, good feedback 🙂

Ok...please tell me what 90% is right and how only 10% of what the OP says is wrong...because its a lot more than 10% that has issues.
But lets break it down, shall we?

Quote

I'm writing to voice my opinion on this persistent "content drought". How long I've been around to see warframe evolve. Changes in damage systems, warframe abilities, nerfs, buffs, failed promises, fashion frames, etc. There is always something though. DE seems to miss the mark regarding replayable content. It happened with ESO, open world maps, infested salvage, and now disruption.

Ok, OP opens up talking about how DE fails to make replayable content.  That seems to be the main thrust of their topic, that the content we have isn't sustainable.

Quote

Disruption game mode is decent. The enemies scale reasonably well enough to enjoy testing maximized builds. 2 things fall short however.

1. The rewards still suck.

2. Theres no reason to keep playing once you acquire what you want.

For the longest time I keep waiting for DE to come up with "good" rewards that would encourage players both veteran and new to play a mission for more than 5-10 minutes before deciding to jump out. The fact that newer items are placed in rotation c does not solve this problem. Once the item sought after is obtained, there is literally no point in playing the game mode ever again. Also about disruption, the most interesting buffed enemies bum rush a node and self destruct. What in the world is that about? The point is to let the players go head to head with these enemies. It defeats the point if the enemies commit seppuku 100% of the time.

They bring up how the rewards suck for the game modes and how there are no reason to keep playing once you get the rewards.
This is a known issue because most of the rewards (relics, mods, etc) become pointless once you have the prime parts or the mods in question, or the have finished focus so the new "lua lens" doesn't interest you.

OP does miss one of the main points about disruption though: To be able to kill those buffed enemies before they can make it to their objective by hopefully finding them early enough that you have time to kill them.

Quote

Which leads to the next issue. The AI in warframe is atrocious. Their pathing is linear. They behave like mindless bots. Improved AI system adds a lot to the feel of gameplay. Adding emotions like anger and fear, or special animations they perform gives more realism. It adds more depth than enemies just mindlessly running to their deaths (Im looking at you infested).

So they say that the AI is bad and need more behaviors and complex animations.
How is this supposed to help with sustainable and replayable content?  Especially considering we can wipe out entire rooms without ever entering them?

Sure the AI could use some work, but this is a horde shooter.  We aren't just fighting a small group of smart enemies, we go through hundreds every single mission.  So how is making them smarter going to help?  Especially when the OPs main point is that content isn't re-playable and the rewards aren't good enough?
How is making the AI marginally smarter (where most players won't ever notice) going to make the game that much more enjoyable that it'll solve the issue of people jumping in for only "5-10 minutes before deciding to jump out"?

Sure improving the AI could be nice...but it wouldn't solve the problems that OP is ostensibly talking about.

Quote

Next issue is the difficulty slider. There needs to be an option to increase enemy spawns to that similar to 4 squad survival, defense, mobile d, etc for solo players. Variation for enemies is long overdue. We are tired of fighting the same 4 types of enemies from each faction. Just add ghouls to grineer tilesets, increased bursas and comba units for corpus, and more scary infested units that blockheads.

So then they walk about how we need some sort of "difficulty" slider.
Again this wouldn't make gameplay any more sustainable.  It wouldn't make the gameplay any more replayable.  They just want the ability to ramp up spawn rates for groups less than four to a four man squad rate.  In fact this would make missions like survival easier.

Adding more unit variation is something DE does work on slowly, and they try to to dit where it makes sense.  Ghouls don't appear in other maps because of their purpose in the lore and how they work.  And while I wouldn't mind more bursas or more infested units (as long as it isn't more "we buff everyone around us!" that the infested have too much of), how would this solve the problems that OP is ostensibly trying to solve?

Sure more variation is good, but it wouldn't suddenly make any content more sustainable/replayable.

Quote

Give the players a challenge! Stop with the weird gimmics like efficiency in ESO or life support in survivals. I do not want to be limited by external factors. It just leads to annoying map nuking warframe builds and premature mission length of time.

And then OP goes to the "Give us a challenge!!!" argument...without ever stating what would be a possible challenge or two.  Especially since that is highly subjective.

They also demand to stop the "gimmicks", without understanding why we have them or suggesting alternatives that doesn't turn ESO or survival into AFK farms where you can spend 36+ hours with zero risk of failure.
Those "gimmicks" are needed to have a fail condition in those gamemodes.  For ESO and survival its that you're not able to kill fast enough.  Without those fail conditions you could just hide yourself away somewhere in the map and nuke them without ever seeing them for as long as you want with absolutely no way to fail.

At that point why not just have a clicker game that you can click a button for rewards over and over and over again and just turn it into an idle game.  After all what would really be the difference?

Quote

As for rewards. Its never an easy thing to add nongame breaking items to the game. Ephemeras were a step in the right direction. Some rewards I want to see are:

1. rare skins- this can be for attachments, warframe skins,  pets, sentinal, landing craft, literally anything

2. More ephemeras with prevalent but not over-the-top gfx. The prime accessory ephemera is a bit much.

3. Rare useful mods. Give us alternatives than using serration and multishot mandatory mods. I prefer buffing base weapon dmg as it progresses in levels to 30 and removing serration type mods altogether to add more unique modding.

4. Rare warframe augments that actually change the way certain skills work. This gives wiggleroom to add uniqueness to play style.

5. Rare pet mod that grant invincibility while nerfing pet dmg delt. This works so squishy frames can have pets that wont die every 2 seconds in harder missions. DE almost did well with this by adding tek assault. Almost*

These are some ideas that DE could work with. Its nothing gamebreaking and it could add some meat to this game. Meat is good! Rare meat is even better. 

And then OP goes on to list a bunch of rewards that are completely counter to their "Give us sustainable/replayble rewards" that they are demanding at the start.
All of these ideas are rewards that once you get them are pointless drops that turn into non-rewards.  After all what are you going to do with a second or third copy of an ephemera?  You might as well have gotten literally nothing for that rotation.

13 hours ago, -HoB-KurtOn said:

That moment the OP is 90% right, and the community still bashes him about the 10% disregarding the other 90%..What a sad day it is.

So please, tell me: What 90% is the OP right about?  ANd how is only 10% of the OP wrong.

We aren't disregarding anything...just pointing out that none of the OPs suggestions would solve their problem of not having replayable and sustainable game modes.
But maybe you could point out what we all seemed to miss?

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, _Kiro said:

^ but this isn't an appropriate answer to a thread like this as we're talking about sustainable content in warframe, either way when something like this is said, by any kind of player, we get the stereotypical reply that:

But see - I think it IS, though. Assertions like the OP presuppose a certain model of gameplay as fact - that players only care about rewards and wouldn't play a game mode if they weren't rewarded for it. While that can be true in some cases, that we bring it up points to a deeper problem than rewards. It points to a progression design which disincentivises the core gameplay loop in favour of incentivising Skinner box conditioning. Whether that's a result of poor-quality content, poor reward distribution or (usually) of both, I can't say. Point is, throwing more rewards at content isn't a good way to make players play it... I mean, it's a good way to MAKE them PLAY it, but that doesn't make for an enjoyable experience and so players stop the moment they aren't being paid to continue.

It bothers me when I see "sustainable content" conflated with "sustainable rewards" because rewards are not content. There's a sharp, unambiguous distinction between the catch-all that is "content" and the specific which is "rewards." An RPG breaks down into "things to do" and "things to earn," broadly speaking. Giving people things to earn helps, but people get bored and leave only when they run out of things to do. Giving them more things to earn on its own doesn't help this. It just breeds resentment, exactly like Nightwave did.

The problems of sustainability in Warframe aren't problems of rewards. In fact, "sustainable rewards" are almost always a BAD thing, because it usually means one of three things: rentals, consumables, upkeep. Yes, in theory this produces a sustained cycle of earning rewards and burning rewards in order to earn more of them, but all that results in is World of Tanks. That is to say, it results in a game which asks you to play content you don't like in order to amass enough resources to play the content you do like (if any) for a little bit, after which point you go back to grinding resources. Or you can pay money to buy said resources straight-up. That is a SOUL-CRUSHING grind of most hollow kind. With talk about Echos of Umbra, I am genuinely concerned that this is exactly where Warframe is going.

I make these comments because I disagree with the fundamental assertion of what constitutes "sustainable content," and because I feel compelled to challenge the sacrifice of gameplay on the alter of rewards. In my worldview, you make a game fun to play in the first place, THEN you add rewards to it. If people wanted to play your game regardless, rewards can be a great tool to keep them coming back. If people didn't want to play your game to begin with, then rewards breed resentment and irritation. If the only reason people play Disruption is for the new rewards, then that says a lot about Disruption... As well as something about people. It says comparatively very little about the rewards, in my opinion.

[Teridax68]

12 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

But see - I think it IS, though. Assertions like the OP presuppose a certain model of gameplay as fact - that players only care about rewards and wouldn't play a game mode if they weren't rewarded for it. While that can be true in some cases, that we bring it up points to a deeper problem than rewards. It points to a progression design which disincentivises the core gameplay loop in favour of incentivising Skinner box conditioning. Whether that's a result of poor-quality content, poor reward distribution or (usually) of both, I can't say. Point is, throwing more rewards at content isn't a good way to make players play it... I mean, it's a good way to MAKE them PLAY it, but that doesn't make for an enjoyable experience and so players stop the moment they aren't being paid to continue.

This hits the nail on the head, and is the exact reason why I also disagree with the OP. Putting aside how the OP's suggestions are themselves not sustainable (giving us more and better rewards still means our playtime on the mode will be limited, unless there's a constant feed of new drops via updates), the very notion of basing "sustainability" around rewards is both contradictory and seriously unhealthy. Grinding for a one-time reward is inherently limited by nature, and thus unsustainable, which means the only way of making any such reward "sustainable" would be to break it down into temporary or limited-use consumables, which Echoes of Umbra tried and thankfully failed to introduce (for now at least). I'd rather not have my content watered down just so that I have to go through the constant chore of re-obtaining the thing I've already worked to earn, and to a broader extent the entire notion of "working" to "earn" something in a video game quickly becomes toxic when it translates to turning the game into a chore. I would rather pick a fun, yet limited-duration game over a sustainable "game" that feels more like a second job, and for all the talk of Warframe needing sustainable content, I think pushing to turn it into the latter would be what would genuinely harm the game.

I also agree that adding more rewards fundamentally misses the point of why content in Warframe is currently unsustainable, because it doesn't give a satisfactory answer to the question: "why am I playing this content?". If the only answer one can give to that is "I'm playing this content because it gives this reward", then one will end up having no answer to that question once that reward is obtained, which means there ends up being no reason to play, and thus no sustainability. Unfortunately, that is also typically the only answer available for the vast majority of content in Warframe: virtually all mission types are ultimately just time sinks to hook the player in with the promise of a reward, and nothing else. There is no connecting thread between our missions, no real story within the mission other than our pursuit of a reward, and no real reason to care about the mission we're running or what goes on in it, besides the extrinsic reward we're going for. This, in turn, causes us to dissociate emotionally from the game we're playing, its setting, and its missions, a process that is typically referred to for comparable situations as alienation: when our entire participation is merely a means to an entirely separate end, rather than something we can inherently enjoy or have a stake in, our enjoyment of that participation declines, which is why so many players end up getting jaded with Warframe's otherwise largely excellent gameplay.

Thus, the only way to make any kind of content sustainable, including Disruption, is going to involve making us care about the mission we're running. Disruption I think is in a much better situation than many other modes, notably Defection, because its gameplay seems to have been largely well-received, so unlike Defection, its own design will likely not need to change by much, or at all, for it to become sustainably enjoyable. What DE needs to do, however, is find some way to make the missions we run have some kind of intrinsic meaning. Perhaps this Disruption mission we're running to extract valuable information about some other important operation going on, or maybe we're looting valuable resources to save a specific person (or group of people in need), in a manner that would have actual causes and consequences before and after said mission is run. We already have the barest bones of this with the randomly-generated Sortie text linking its three daily missions together, as well as the transitional lines in-between bounties, and in the near future the Kingpin system in the form of Kuva Liches will give us a persistent stake in the in-game world. The more dynamic events and entities that exist in the world that we can affect, the more stakes we have in the in-game world, which means that if these stakes are connected to our missions, the more possible answers we'll have to why we're running whichever piece of content. If DE can manage to make these stakes procedurally generate themselves and be sufficiently diverse, all content could in fact become sustainable, as we would always have a relevant reason to participate, independently of limited rewards.

[Nitro747]

Main problem with how DE makes their missions is that once you play a single mission ONCE, you'll get the full experience of the mission type. There's not a single difference between Disruption node in Jupiter from the Disruption node in Mars and the disruption node in Lua. And its the same for literally every other mission type available. From Exterminate to Survival.

DE said they added more disruption missions to the star chart, and that's false. All they did was ctrl+c ctrl+v the disruption mission in Jupiter to a few other nodes and added it to their RNG map generator (which is the same since 2014). Everyone who played Disruption before will get the same experience they got previously. You go in, get keys, kill demolyst, rinse and repeat until you get bored. At least Disruption is not as mind numbing as defense missions are.

Ironically, the devs will be, within a few weeks, asking themselves and scratching their heads thinking why people already got tired of Disruption.

[ikkabotz]

On 2019-09-03 at 1:27 PM, Nitro747 said:

Main problem with how DE makes their missions is that once you play a single mission ONCE, you'll get the full experience of the mission type. There's not a single difference between Disruption node in Jupiter from the Disruption node in Mars and the disruption node in Lua. And its the same for literally every other mission type available. From Exterminate to Survival.

DE said they added more disruption missions to the star chart, and that's false. All they did was ctrl+c ctrl+v the disruption mission in Jupiter to a few other nodes and added it to their RNG map generator (which is the same since 2014). Everyone who played Disruption before will get the same experience they got previously. You go in, get keys, kill demolyst, rinse and repeat until you get bored. At least Disruption is not as mind numbing as defense missions are.

Ironically, the devs will be, within a few weeks, asking themselves and scratching their heads thinking why people already got tired of Disruption.

Will they scratch their heads though? I feel like it's pretty transparent there is a core issue with the gameplay experience itself. 

Edited September 4, 2019 by ikkabotz

[Nitro747]

33 minutes ago, ikkabotz said:

Will they scratch their heads though? I feel like it's pretty transparent there is a core issue with the gameplay experience itself. 

It took them 5 years to figure out the whole Vacuum mod drama and they still didn't quite get it. There's a loooooot of stubbornness going on over there. They still didn't figure out that the last thing players want is more of these content that gets released and then forever forgotten and completely discarded by the devs. As I say that I ask: when was the last time we've heard of ESO and Arbitrations, the supposed "endgame" content of this game ? 😄 😄 😄

Edited September 4, 2019 by Nitro747

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-09-03 at 5:35 PM, Teridax68 said:

Thus, the only way to make any kind of content sustainable, including Disruption, is going to involve making us care about the mission we're running. Disruption I think is in a much better situation than many other modes, notably Defection, because its gameplay seems to have been largely well-received, so unlike Defection, its own design will likely not need to change by much, or at all, for it to become sustainably enjoyable. What DE needs to do, however, is find some way to make the missions we run have some kind of intrinsic meaning. Perhaps this Disruption mission we're running to extract valuable information about some other important operation going on, or maybe we're looting valuable resources to save a specific person (or group of people in need), in a manner that would have actual causes and consequences before and after said mission is run.

I feel Warframe's central issue is that its core gameplay look is so engagingly basic that even otherwise pretty decent gameplay starts to feel like rote repetition very quickly. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the game's gunplay or movement mechanics or even its melee system, but the mission structure built around it is Early Access levels of basic and unrefined. I often bring up Payday 2 as a comparison because it solves this problem quite neatly by offering packaged "heists" with scripted events, complex objectives and plenty of side objectives, with the addition of loot on top. By contrast, most missions in Warframe have a single objective and boil down to two things - rush to the objective, then rush to the exit. There are a few exceptions like Assault (a favourite of mine), but the majority of missions are just that simple. There's no narrative reason why we're doing them, there's no narrative explanation of what we get out of them, there's no structure or objective complexity. We're plopped down into a map, then told to go to one spot, kill one thing and leave.

Despite my disdain for "Defence" objectives, I rather like Disruption for its own sake. I also rather like Defection and Infested Salvage, despite the community's general take on those. The one thing inherent in all three of those mission types is they keep me engaged throughout. In Disruption, I'm always listening for that Demolyst pulse and scanning all the entrances. In Defection, I'm always on the move, always on the lookout for batteries, always paying attention to which survivor is where along the way. Infested Salvage is a bit dumb with a team since you sit and fight at a terminal, but solo it can be a lot of work having to balance dropping resources at all of the terminals and moving quickly. I get bored of Warframe when the game gives me nothing to do but get to a waypoint 1.2Km away with nothing of substance between me and it but enemies whom I could optionally shoot at if I'm bored.

Contrast this against PD2 again. Even a simple Bank Heist has multiple objectives across multiple stages. Ignoring Stealth, you need to find a drill, bring it to the vault and protect it for 6 minutes, during which time you're also tying down and moving hostages as a resource. Optionally you may look for planks to close off windows and block off enemy sight lines. Eventually, Turret trucks show up. You can optionally avoid their sight lines, or take time away to shoot them. Eventually the vault opens, which gives you at least 4 heavy bags of loot, and 100 lockboxes to open if you're greedy. Once all of that's done, you need to escape across open ground while moving 4-12 bags one at a time, with the possibility of them being repossessed by the cops if you leave them unattended. Optionally you may also try to hang onto some of your hostages. And in all of this, actually shooting cops gives you NOTHING in the way of progression. You get XP for finishing heists, not for shooting cops - they're just in your way.

Warframe is fully capable of this level of engagement. Assault does this, once you fish-flop your way past a Km of unrelated Kuva map to actually get to the Navar Cannon. Get to the Cannon, now hack 3 consoles quickly, get to the control room, find three keys, insert them into the consoles, now guard this for 2 minutes, go back and retarget the cannon, go back to the control room and sabotage the equipment, now fight your way to the van extraction. Yes, the mission is a bit less procedurally random, but just imagine if we had a whole bunch of these? Hell, Assault is proof positive that Warframe can do Payday-style "bag moving" via the carryable system. The game's existing implementations are capable of SUBSTANTIALLY more complex objectives than it has right now.

Looking to rewards for "sustainable content" is a mistake. Creating actually compelling, engaging gameplay is the way to go, in my opinion. Empyrean seems to be going for a system along those lines, but I want to see that done across the Star Chart. Warframe really shouldn't have remained this reductive for this long, as far as I'm concerned.

[Teridax68]

1 minute ago, Steel_Rook said:

I feel Warframe's central issue is that its core gameplay look is so engagingly basic that even otherwise pretty decent gameplay starts to feel like rote repetition very quickly. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the game's gunplay or movement mechanics or even its melee system, but the mission structure built around it is Early Access levels of basic and unrefined. I often bring up Payday 2 as a comparison because it solves this problem quite neatly by offering packaged "heists" with scripted events, complex objectives and plenty of side objectives, with the addition of loot on top. By contrast, most missions in Warframe have a single objective and boil down to two things - rush to the objective, then rush to the exit. There are a few exceptions like Assault (a favourite of mine), but the majority of missions are just that simple. There's no narrative reason why we're doing them, there's no narrative explanation of what we get out of them, there's no structure or objective complexity. We're plopped down into a map, then told to go to one spot, kill one thing and leave.shouldn't have remained this reductive for this long, as far as I'm concerned.

I fully agree with this, and I too have no intention of altering the core gameplay in the name of sustainability, because our movement, shooting, melee are largely quite solid (but could still be improved). The mission structure you described from PD2 also sounds a lot like what I'm trying to push forward as well: in an ideal game, Warframe should put us in an environment we truly have a reason to invest ourselves in, with many different potential things to do, many paths to success, and many different potential outcomes depending on our actions and results. In fact, Warframe would have even more potential for this than PD2, because our range of activities goes well beyond just stealing valuable items. In the meantime, at the very least though, there's likely much more to be done about procedurally creating narrative threads in-between missions, which would in itself likely be more feasible in the short-term than changing the internal structure of all individual missions.

[Vit0Corleone]

21 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I too have no intention of altering the core gameplay in the name of sustainability

I don't see why would you have to pick one.

Warframe could even stay exactly as it is, but with an added continuous progression system attached to a challenge<>reward loop that would make veterans want to keep getting stronger and stronger so they can face increasingly difficult challenges. This is the missing piece, nothing to do with gameplay, which is already awesome as it is.

[Teridax68]

Just now, Vit0Corleone said:

I don't see why would you have to pick one.

... that was my exact point. If gameplay is to be addressed, it should be for entirely separate reasons, not sustainability, because it's already very good at providing a durably interesting gameplay loop within misisons.

Just now, Vit0Corleone said:

Warframe could even stay exactly as it is, but with an added continuous progression system attached to a challenge<>reward loop that would make veterans want to keep getting stronger and stronger so they can face increasingly difficult challenges. This is the missing piece, nothing to do with gameplay, which is already awesome as it is.

How exactly would this "continuous progression" work, though? How does one make players progress infinitely in a manner that they'll always care about? How do you balance the game around theoretically infinitely powerful players?

[Vit0Corleone]

16 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

How exactly would this "continuous progression" work, though? How does one make players progress infinitely in a manner that they'll always care about? How do you balance the game around theoretically infinitely powerful players?

Same as other games do it, I suppose.

New War for example would be perfect to introduce this. Like an event that opens up a new season, where the star chart is being invaded by Sentients, and you have to fight your way through to liberate all nodes. Of course, enemies would be stronger, starting at say level 80 instead of level 1, while at the same time you would be able to grind for new powerful gear/mods/focus/whatever that would make you stronger along the way, the same way as when we start the game.

6 months after ( as an example, not sure what works best for timings ), another event happens that triggers yet a new season, with some other creative idea to keep it fresh.

Sprinkle this with Raids/Trials/Dungeons etc., rinse and repeat, and you have a sustainable loop that DE could keep doing forever.

 

Edited September 5, 2019 by Vit0Corleone

[Teridax68]

2 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Same as other games do it, I suppose.

... which other games, though? Diablo 3 has some form of infinite progression via Paragon points, but that system failed to generate much player retention, because players realized they were being put on this treadmill where their increases in power were being countered exactly by the enemy's. Infinite progression put up against infinite enemy scaling without any change in our gameplay isn't progression, it's just a hamster wheel, and that only goes so far.

2 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

New War for example would be perfect to introduce this. Like an event that opens up a new season, where the star chart is being invaded by Sentients, and you have to fight your way through to liberate all nodes. Of course, enemies would be stronger, starting at say level 80 instead of level 1, while at the same time you would be able to grind for new powerful gear/mods/focus/whatever.

6 months after ( as an example, not sure what works best for timings ), another event happens that triggers yet a new season, with some other creative idea to keep it fresh.

Sprinkle this with Raids/Trials/Dungeons etc., rinse and repeat, and you have a sustainable loop that DE could keep doing forever.

But you don't, you just get power creep. Warframe is already suffering from the consequences of giving players more and more power, because every time we become more powerful, more and more of the game's content becomes trivial. Every single MMO that runs on this same kind of model of expansion-based scaling suffers from the exact same problem, where outside of a tiny handful of designated endgame content, there's no reason to play any of the rest of the game's content with a power-crept character, unless said content implements some kind of gear/stat squish. That in itself is inherently unsustainable, because it wastes a huge portion of the game's content by making only a tiny fraction of it desirable or accessible at any point in time.

[Vit0Corleone]

4 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Diablo 3 has some form of infinite progression via Paragon points, but that system failed to generate much player retention, because players realized they were being put on this treadmill where their increases in power were being countered exactly by the enemy's. Infinite progression put up against infinite enemy scaling without any change in our gameplay isn't progression, it's just a hamster wheel, and that only goes so far.

Agreed. That is why they would need to keep it fresh and wrap it in events that change things substantially so it doesn't always feel like you are just doing the same thing all over. The Sentient invasion I mentioned with some specific raids/trials associated to it, is an example of how to make us want to repeat the whole star chart but with enough creativity so it doesn't feel repetitive.

IIRC, Diablo doesn't really do this. It does have that challenge<>reward loop, but you're essentially doing the same exact thing all over and over.

8 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

we become more powerful, more and more of the game's content becomes trivial

Which is why every quarter or so it would make sense to keep adding new, more challenging content, to keep players engaged. Power is only a problem because you have nothing to do with it.

 

[Teridax68]

4 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Agreed. That is why they would need to keep it fresh and wrap it in events that change things substantially so it doesn't always feel like you are just doing the same thing all over. The Sentient invasion I mentioned with some specific raids/trials associated to it, is an example of how to make us want to repeat the whole star chart but with enough creativity so it doesn't feel repetitive.

IIRC, Diablo doesn't really do this. It does have that challenge<>reward loop, but you're essentially doing the same exact thing all over and over.

D3 does in fact have seasons that make you redo characters from scratch and complete new challenges in order to access special gear. Still didn't work, because it's still obviously repetitive, and the player's progress makes little real difference.

4 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Which is why every quarter or so it would make sense to keep adding new, more challenging content, to keep players engaged. Power is only a problem because you have nothing to do with it.

And what exactly happens to the rest of the game in the meantime? Do higher-end players just discard all of it as they become increasingly powerful? Is it really a sensible idea to constrain the entirety of the game's relevant content to whichever few missions get released every three months, and forget about the entire rest of Warframe's massive amounts of content?

[Vit0Corleone]

4 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Do higher-end players just discard all of it as they become increasingly powerful?

Do high-end players often go clear nodes on the star chart killing level 10 enemies? There's just no reason why you would go clear a random node on the star chart as it is.

High-end players already discard pretty much everything else that isn't specific game modes, relics, eidolons etc. Even that, it's questionable, since you have no challenge to make use of the stuff you get.

The example I was using, on top of what you already do on a daily basis, just gives you an option to actually use your over grown power to clear the star chart in a creative way that gives you a challenge.

[Tsukinoki]

22 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Which is why every quarter or so it would make sense to keep adding new, more challenging content, to keep players engaged. Power is only a problem because you have nothing to do with it.

So what....veteran players would only have 2 or 3 maps at any one time that wouldn't be instantly nuked by the billions upon billions of damage that their guns would deal at that point?  Meanwhile newer players would go "I have to do what in order to even see those maps?"
And what happens if they join a sortie with their guns dealing billions upon billions of damage?
Or what happens if they decide to do some Eidolon or orb fights?

DE doesn't want to segregate the playerbase like that, nor would it be entirely healthy for the game....it would definitely be less healthy than what is currently happening.

Do we really need a new shotgun that hits enemies for 23B damage, or have enemies that have 400B health?
What would really be the difference from what we have currently in the game?

it seems like your asking for large numbers just to have large numbers with nothing behind the numbers to actually keep people engaged or give reasons.

I mean we could achieve the exact same thing by slapping 4 zeros behind all of the numbers in warframe as it stands...nothing would change except "WOW, the numbers are so big!"

That's not sustainable.

Edited September 5, 2019 by Tsukinoki