An analysis of Conclave from someone who doesn’t play it

[Ewokman]

Background:

I'd like to preface this post with the fact that I don't play conclave. I'm barely whirlwind and I don't even recall playing most of that to obtain that rank. Being MR27, I've played a fair amount of Warframe, but am by no means a veteran. If I've got anything wrong, or if you have points you'd like to add feel free to let me know. The intention of this post is to facilitate a discussion about the possibilities of Conclave in the future. I've also posted this on the Warframe Reddit.

Universal Medallions:

• I get that this is an unpopular opinion, but universal medallions should not apply to conclave standing. I’ve seen the argument of “Well if someone wanted to max out conclave with them it would take thousands of hours!!!” and I agree that’s absurd.
• It’s clear that DE never intended them to be used that way. I get that there is a bit of frustration with the whole situation of DE saying they would be able to be used that way and then backtracking on that.
• DE has frequently introduced items/game modes/etc. into Warframe and expanded/changed them based upon player feedback in the past. It’s likely that these medallions are one of many of DE’s experiments, and that there’s potential for higher drop rates/more valuable medallions that could be implemented in the future.
• I know it may sound extreme, but I believe adding a PvE way to obtain the conclave rewards through these medallions is a start towards the slippery slope of making PvP completely irrelevant in Warframe.
• Introducing a PvE way to obtain PvP rewards is not the solution. The solution should be to change and improve Conclave into a state where players can still have an enjoyable PvP experience and gain rewards at a reasonable pace.

State of Conclave:

• It's pretty clear to see that Conclave has been neglected and ignored by the majority of the player base as well as DE. If nothing changes, it will likely continue to remain this way and just be a relic gathering dust in our orbiters.Conclave has a lot of issues, but also a lot of potential

Current Issues:

• Servers: Conclave relies on player hosted servers, meaning that many players can often experience high ping/lag if they are in a region that is located far away from those servers. Migrating Conclave to dedicated servers hosted by DE would be a good way to help decrease this imbalance. I know that seems like a stretch, but I feel it's achievable as Conclave will likely still have a small player base making the servers not too burdened. Perhaps it could even serve as a sort of test in the event DE ever makes the decision to switch to dedicated servers for normal missions.
• Players: Let’s face it, not a lot of people play conclave. Often players will not be able to find matches to even gain conclave standing as there is simply no one queuing up. Additionally, the skill disparity of conclave players seems to be very high. Players are either very experienced or not experienced at all with little in between. This results in players who might want to try playing conclave getting destroyed by a skilled player and getting turned off of playing entirely.
• Effort to Reward Ratio: Standing is gained by performing well: Getting kills, completing objectives, etc. This is fine conceptually, however it becomes an issue when players are frequently unable to actually get kills and complete objectives due to being outclassed by a veteran conclave player. It's difficult at the moment to gain standing at any sort of efficient rate. Challenges might benefit from changing to focus more on participation rather than victories.

Why play Conclave?

• For a lot of players, completionism is something that's important. Conclave offers a plethora of rewards to collect like mods, weapon skins, sigils, captura scenes, and a syandana. Additionally, there's plenty of room for more rewards to be added in the future depending on the direction Conclave ends up going.
• However, not all players are interesting in "catching them all" and that's fine too! PvP doesn't have to be a frustrating experience. There's plenty of fun to be had in competing with your fellow Tenno.

Future Potential:

• There's a wide variety of new modes that could be added to provide new PvP experiences, the possibilities are limitless. K-Drive Racing, Stalker Mode, Corpus vs. Grineer, etc.

TL;DR:

• Conclave has a lot of problems: servers, low population, skill disparity, effort/reward ratio, etc. Universal medallions aren't meant to be a substitute for conclave. There's plenty of fun to be had in playing PvP as well as collecting the rewards conclave has to offer. And there's plenty of room for new and exciting modes that can make getting conclave standing easier and fun while not comprising on it's PvP exclusivity.

[(NSW)Fiftycentis]

51 minutes ago, Ewokman said:

Universal Medallions:

Imo they should apply, they just need to balance the drop chance and the amount of standing you get from the future bigger ones, or add a cap.

52 minutes ago, Ewokman said:

Servers: Conclave relies on player hosted servers, meaning that many players can often experience high ping/lag if they are in a region that is located far away from those servers.

Hey, at least it's not p2p like normal missions anymore, last time I played i don't remember the servers being the issue

54 minutes ago, Ewokman said:

 

Imo the biggest thing of pvp is that if done properly, it's the real endgame of a game like this (like most mmo). It gives you endless replayability and it's not monotonous as pve.

The main problem of conclave for many is how weak you feel while playing with reduced stats and damage

[Jiminez_Burial]

7 minutes ago, (NSW)Fiftycentis said:

Imo the biggest thing of pvp is that if done properly, it's the real endgame of a game like this (like most mmo).

Oh please don't make that argument.  I play Warframe to avoid PvP (and so do most of the people I know) so saying PvP should be Warframes end-game could be very damaging if DE decides to listen.  For any game, the endgame should be in-line with the design ideology of the rest of the game and in Warframes case it isn't PvP.  We need an end-game yes, but it needs to be PvE (in terms of actual gameplay) so it doesn't become entirely dis-jointed from the rest of the game and further alienate those of us who have stuck around waiting for proper Warframe end-game.  Plus Warframe isn't really an MMO in the same way No Mans Sky isn't an MMO.

[beercritch]

Ive played a little bit of conclave. The whole reason was to get the mods that are both PvP and PvE and eventually I did that but for my 10p I noticed a few things.

 

Firstly its very hard. Thats not necessarily a bad thing, but as the OP has covered  its hard for a noob to make headway, which leads to my second and main point.

Its very difficult to get any mods that may or may not make a difference to your game. You can get PvP mods by earning standing through difficult objectives and then using that standing to buy mods from teshin. In the end I played enough to almost get to max standing but have literally got half a dozen mods. Its a lot of play for little reward.

Lastly its just not much fun. Where the feeling of power? you run around killing alien mobs with massive weapons and theres a real feeling that the weapons you are using have real power. Then you go and spar against other tenno and it feels like you are using small rocks and sticks.

 

IF its ever going to work it needs a complete rethink and I for one am happy that I can max my standing and get some conclave cosmetics by playing other game types. Who knows maybe eventually I will get piles of PvP mods from universal medallions which transform the game and make it playable.

Edited September 8, 2019 by beercritch

[Kontrollo]

4 hours ago, Ewokman said:

Effort to Reward Ratio: Standing is gained by performing well: Getting kills, completing objectives, etc. This is fine conceptually, however it becomes an issue when players are frequently unable to actually get kills and complete objectives due to being outclassed by a veteran conclave player. It's difficult at the moment to gain standing at any sort of efficient rate. Challenges might benefit from changing to focus more on participation rather than victories.

Just to add to that:

• It's definitely something that would make the experience less frustrating, especially for newer players, and that's something which is sorely lacking. We had that back in the beginning, but some people would try to hide away somewhere and afk through matches, so it got changed.
   
• It's no secret that the Conclave is unrewarding, and not just in terms of standing. There have been numerous suggestions over in the feedback forums over the years to make that better, and they were ignored.