Additional Nightwave credit rewards are not an incentive, as is.

[Velothed]

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm a whale. I bought my Arcane Grace from Warframe Market for 1700 Plat. The game kept insisting on giving me 75% off after 75% off, figured I might as well use it. I've actually done that to quite a few aspects of the game. I've bought a LOT of Catalysts and Forma and Lenses and such - more than I rightly should. Because honestly, I can afford it with all the discounts and I'd rather play the game with my favourite toys than grind the game to get them, burn myself out and not get to enjoy them. I fully realise that this very behaviour is what encourages such monetisation practices, but...

Oh, I'm a whale too, well, not to unhealthy levels I think, but still, I pretty much bought every DE_Cosmetic (only around 10 parts of Tennogen though) and I bought so many Catalysts and formas over the time, also slots, I want to pretty much have every piece of equipment available and ready to go. This is also the main reason why I'm not bored yet, my most used Frame sits somewhere around 7% usage and it's similar for weapons. The thing with arcanes is, that I don't absolutely need them right now and this way I still have some stuff to look forward to.

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

"No, seriously! Grind for 20 hours and the game gets better!"

Well, yes it does, but I don't think it's not fun till then. About half a year ago I startet a new account, just to see how the early game changed in the last 6 years and honestly it's gotten way better imo. And I pretty much fell in love with warframe day one.

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The game's balance is currently heavily undermined by a series of core mechanics from damage buff stacking to armour scaling to a lack of structure in enemy design and more. I want to see them take a hatchet to the status quo and push major changes because frankly

I fear warframe might have become to popular for that, the last thing I heard was last week steve talking about damage 3.0 and how they think of something, work on it and then scrap it again completely. I believe it's the same with Melee 3.0 right now, they seem way more cautious in doing sweeping changes to core mechanics.

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't see it as dividing the player base, though.

What I meant, that DE seems to want new and old players to play the same missions together, but the differences between the two have gotten so big, that that will never happen on a large scale and it will get only worse as long as we become more and more powerfull. I think they really have to stop the powercreep, even though many people want to always get stronger, and look more towards diversifying gameplay. Take augments, in my opinion, they should have their own slot, but they should change the abbility, not make it stronger.

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, Vethalon said:

What I meant, that DE seems to want new and old players to play the same missions together, but the differences between the two have gotten so big, that that will never happen on a large scale and it will get only worse as long as we become more and more powerfull. I think they really have to stop the powercreep, even though many people want to always get stronger, and look more towards diversifying gameplay. Take augments, in my opinion, they should have their own slot, but they should change the abbility, not make it stronger.

Right - that sort of thing has pretty much never worked outside of games which aggressively scale players and content together. City of Heroes had the Sidekick/Exemplar system, where low-level players would be scaled up to play with high level players and vice versa. All of Cryptic's games since - Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Neverwinter - have featured seamless automatic level-scaling across the board. It works most of the time, though its success is heavily dependent on mechanical implementation. However, all of these games have a generic "level" characteristics as a primary determinant for a character's power from which everything else is based, so scaling THAT gets you most of the way there. Warframe has nothing of the sort, so scaling players to each other is... Let's go with "difficult" to hopefully avoid superlatives.

I don't see how DE could even expect veterans to play with new players when their own progression system is purpose-designed to create a significant power gulf between different builds. If they'd done ANYTHING to scale player stats, power or level I might concede intent, but they don't seem to have lifted a finger in making that actually happen. Best case scenario, Veterans make weaker newbie builds with which to play low-level content and help new players. Worst case scenario, Veterans just join low-level missions, run roughshod over everything and ruin the experience for new players.

Generally speaking, I don't think newbies will see any degradation of their experience of Veterans were allowed to start Earth and Mars missions at level 40.

[giefalias]

On 2019-09-05 at 11:31 AM, Steel_Rook said:

The events ARE the incentive, though - at least that's how Nightwave was sold to us when it first arrived. It was supposed to be a more fun, more engaging version of Alerts. Because if all DE wanted to accomplish was a DETERMINISTIC version of Alerts, they could have implemented a Nightwave-like store, but rewarded Nightwave-like credits directly from the old Alerts. But ultimately, that's a question players need to ask themselves, rather than the game. Why am I doing this? What am I getting out of it? Is it worth my time? Rewards aren't the only incentive. I run Spy missions not because of any particular reward, but because I like Spy missions. The same goes for Defection, actually. I run missions on Jupiter predominantly because I like the tileset. I do stuff for all manner of subjective reasons.

I think you're looking at Nightwave "prestige level" rewards a bit opposite to their design. Nightwave is the Warframe Battle Pass, and the Battle Pass design is finite. You grind your levels, you get your rewards, you're "done" with the season and wait for the next season to end. Under standard conditions, you'd stop earning rewards altogether once you hit level 30. Because DE don't want to leave players without a way to engage with the system, however, they keep offering perpetual rewards, but they're deliberately tuned very low. The goal of these "prestige level" rewards isn't to actually be worth the effort, but rather to acknowledge the effort in some way. Mostly, they're there to prevent people who were going to do Nightwave stuff anyway from feeling like they're wasting their time.

If you look at the events and see stuff you don't particularly enjoy doing, then look at the rewards and see stuff you don't particularly want to have... Then do the sensible thing and don't do it. It's what I've done with a lot of Warframe's content. I look at Arbitrations, ESO, Conclave and think "Yeah... I can do without that in my life."

 

It's a question of scope. Yes, we form mental shorthand habits as a means of dealing with the complexities of a chaotic-seeming world, but ideally we want to form habits which are in some way useful. Psychological conditioning such as in Pavlovian Dogs or Skinner Pigeons, however, is subversive - it hijacks the brain's reward system in order to push subjects into inherently unrewarding activities. In more "videogamey" terms, it's a way to trick you into thinking that you're having fun because all of the usual signs are there, when you actually aren't. It's a way of getting you to keep playing a game long after you've stopped enjoying it, and the long-term consequences of that are severe.

The longer I hang around MMO forums, the more clear it becomes that people in general simply don't recognise their own burnout. Time and again I see people who talk like they're completely burnt out and really should stop playing the game, but they keep on doing it and having a miserable time. And they'll blame everything else BUT their own burnout. The game has changed for the worse, other players have changed for the worse, developers have changed for the worse, there isn't enough content, there isn't enough challenge, there isn't enough depth, there isn't enough complexity, "it's just not the same." Look at the response The Division 2 got. All of of the people burnt out on The Division 1 but playing it out of habit moved onto the new game and started talking about being unable to recapture the fun they WEREN'T HAVING in the prequel.

Everything has a price. Conditioning your playerbase to keep coming back not out of affinity but out of compulsion does work, but it takes a toll on the playerbase. It generates ill will and short tempers, and it causes people to ragequit swearing to never touch the game again, rather than taking breaks looking forward to the next major release. "The tighter you squeeze, the more people will slip through your fingers." At the tail end of it, this sort of design leads to exactly what we're seeing right now - perfectly good content is cast aside because nobody actually enjoys actually playing the game unless they're being paid to play it. I have to imagine this sucks for the developers, too, who put effort and creativity designing what they thought was a fun activity, only to be met with "This sucks. The whole game sucks. Pay me!"

This isn't new, obviously, but MMO communities behave like drug addicts. Nobody cares about the substance of what's being offered. All anyone cares about is the next psychological "fix," the next "high." Sometimes I get the impression people would push a button repeatedly, if it generated Umbral Forma or an Ephemera or Rivens or whatever the game tells them is rare and valuable. That's bad for the game and bad for the players.

I think I'm looking at the Nightwave "prestige levels" rewards a bit opposite to their design too. However, that's the conclusion of my interpretation. Which then leaves the subjective question of whether it's a good or bad design, overall. Those mentions of "acknowledgement" holds no value to me, which leads to my scepticism. 
I look at plenty of events, which I don't do. Because it's not worth it to me. Which, again, emphasizes my subjective point. Refraining from doing them doesn't exclude pondering, though.
I wholeheartedly agree with your description of psychology within the gaming industry. But the generality, with which you apply your perspectives doesn't encompass all of us. Just look at yourself 😉
 

[MediumRareLizard]

Well if this stuff comes in Sorti, maybe i will do some of them by accident. But since i got lvl30 i havent done a single task intentionally. Not for 15 bugs. would do it for 50 since you can buy Kuva with them ...

 

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-09-09 at 1:56 PM, giefalias said:

I think I'm looking at the Nightwave "prestige levels" rewards a bit opposite to their design too. However, that's the conclusion of my interpretation. Which then leaves the subjective question of whether it's a good or bad design, overall. Those mentions of "acknowledgement" holds no value to me, which leads to my scepticism. 
I look at plenty of events, which I don't do. Because it's not worth it to me. Which, again, emphasizes my subjective point. Refraining from doing them doesn't exclude pondering, though.

To be fair, you're not wrong to look at Nightwave "prestige levels" that way. I was more trying to point out that it doesn't seem like they were designed to be treated that way. If I'm reading you correctly, you see those rewards as incentive - a justification to keep engaging with Nightwave when you otherwise wouldn't. If I'm reading the design intent correctly, however, they're intended as a consolation price - people are going to do Nightwave activities anyway due to how that event is structured, so it makes sense to give them SOMETHING rather than nothing at all. If you compare Nightwave Season 1 vs. Season 2, you'll note how much more front-loaded the latter is. Season 2 gives you a large chunk of currency right out the gate where Season 1 offered only a small amount several Ranks in. Season 2 offers its Umbral Forma at Rank 25, where Season 1 offered it at Rank 29.

The longer it goes on and the more DE refine it, the more I realise that Nightwave was always intended to be a finite system, a system where there is such a thing as "enough." You put in your 30 ranks, you get your rewards, you're done with it. If you want to stick around and do more, then nothing's stopping you, but you do so predominantly because you enjoy the activity, not because you're being compelled to engage in it. I'd argue that by FAR Warframe's most pervasive, most destructive problem is a community-wide feel that everyone hates actually playing the game. I don't know if it's due to how DE have structured the game's grind or if that's just how gamers are nowadays, but I can't remember the last testimonial from someone who actually seemed to enjoy what they were doing. Reward-driven design has taught people to resent their time spent with the game and refuse to do anything unless they're being richly rewarded, and I just feel that that's having a detrimental impact on content development. Having a discrete end point to an activity that's short of the physical absolute maximum a player could have possibly done is - to me at least - good design.

Ultimately, that design is going to turn off goal-oriented people because... Well, why bother playing an activity which generates poor rewards when you can be playing one which generates better rewards? I myself fall in this trap very often, as I tend to prioritise Nightwave over "whatever I feel like at the time" because the former is time-limited and I'm loss-averse. I don't there's a good way to fix that without switching all the way to the other side. And frankly, I tend to burn out on games far faster if they give me very little "downtime" when I can pick my activities based on what I enjoy, rather than based on what is the most practical.