Encouraging words from Rebecca on Warframe's difficulty problem (GameSpot interview)

[TioMegaManX]

22 minutes ago, Zilchy said:

And most people aren't going to tell them how either since their kneejerk response to finding out about how players are doing such things is to blanket ban. 

What's that blanked ban? I remember the whole Warbros thing where they went from DE's favored clan to the one they would bend the rules to screw up thanks to their constant discovery of bugs and exploits which they actually reported, I stopped playing after Howl of the Kubrow was introduced but I remember several leaderboard resets during Breeding Grounds thanks to a crippled but still successful Warbros campaign in which they found out enemies would stop spawning after getting past certain level (can't remember how the Breeding Grounds event worked back then), and then the whole Dark Sector taxing controversy in which DE's then current pet clan owned important dark sectors with high taxing and seemed to have unlimited funds to pay up their supporters... until someone inside the clan gave like a million credits for each battle pay and managed to put said clan in the red.

[TioMegaManX]

4 minutes ago, belanya said:

They can still pull out a bullet sponge with damage cap per hit, immune to cc, operator/wf abilities, status and who can randomly one shot you without being able to revive. And obviously, go for at least 16 phases with unskippable transitions to artificially increase the fight lenght. Oh and yeah, put some limitations in order to avoid those tryharder to spam it, like one every 12 hours. Sounds very fun to me.

The tantrum when people managed to destroy all of the Exploiter Orb's vents simulaneously was priceless, the one they threw when people used Shattering Impact on Profit-Taker was infuriating, the worse part is how subsequent enemies were made so their health was armor, making the whole armor reduction exception on PT rather pointless when they can just update her to have alloy armor as health like Wolf and Thumpers.

[-CdG-Zilchy]

21 minutes ago, VanFanel1980mx said:

What's that blanked ban? I remember the whole Warbros thing where they went from DE's favored clan to the one they would bend the rules to screw up thanks to their constant discovery of bugs and exploits which they actually reported, I stopped playing after Howl of the Kubrow was introduced but I remember several leaderboard resets during Breeding Grounds thanks to a crippled but still successful Warbros campaign in which they found out enemies would stop spawning after getting past certain level (can't remember how the Breeding Grounds event worked back then), and then the whole Dark Sector taxing controversy in which DE's then current pet clan owned important dark sectors with high taxing and seemed to have unlimited funds to pay up their supporters... until someone inside the clan gave like a million credits for each battle pay and managed to put said clan in the red.

Oh just in general, everything these days is an exploit if they didn't know about it. All the BS during the last event is a great example. 

Edited October 8, 2019 by Zilchy

[0_The_F00l]

1 hour ago, VanFanel1980mx said:

Didn't they admit they are making up stuff as they go? I think that's why they discarded the connection to Dark Sector.

Which is not a good thing.

[IamLoco]

Warframe lives from the fluid and fast paced gameplay. If we couldn´t oneshot 99% of the things, this would change everything.

We need some new bosses, mini bosses, random encounters that bring a challenge to a whole team. What we don´t need is buffed trash mobs that simply slow down the game and annoy the crap out of everyone.

[Corvid]

59 minutes ago, IamLoco said:

Warframe lives from the fluid and fast paced gameplay. If we couldn´t oneshot 99% of the things, this would change everything.

You can have fluid and fast gameplay without oneshotting. The recent release Luminous Avenger iX demonstrates quite nicely.

[TioMegaManX]

55 minutes ago, Corvid said:

You can have fluid and fast gameplay without oneshotting.

What about enemies one-shotting you? because that's the other side of the coin when people keep asking for difficulty, we get bullet sponges that take less time to kill you than the time it takes the player to kill them.

[Corvid]

25 minutes ago, VanFanel1980mx said:

What about enemies one-shotting you? because that's the other side of the coin when people keep asking for difficulty, we get bullet sponges that take less time to kill you than the time it takes the player to kill them.

Ideally enemy oneshotting would also be minimal. Enemies would deal enough damage that getting caught in a bad position would feel dangerous, but not so much that players wouldn't be able to manoeuvre their way to safety if they reacted quick enough. I've recently started playing Vanquish again with the aim of staying in cover as little as possible (instead using evasion and boosting to get out of the way of enemy fire), and I'd say that general level of difficulty would be a good balance for Warframe.

While the relative number of enemies in Vanquish is generally lower, a similar effect could be achieved by restricting how many enemies can attack a player at a given moment (IIRC, DOOM 2016 actually uses a system like this, so it is possible). This would preserve the feeling of tearing through hordes of enemies, but allow DE to tune enemy damage output around smaller numbers. Such a system could also be scaled to make a difficulty curve. The stronger your gear is, the more enemies can attack you at once.

A mechanic that I was considering suggesting would be the addition of something akin to SAO Fatal Bullet's prediction lines to hitscan attacks. That way you get a split second of warning before the damage hits that allows you to react (Projectile and melee attacks wouldn't need this, as they are inherently telegraphed). No more out of nowhere health loss.

 

Forgive my little ramble, this was a bit of a stream of consciousness.

[Lancars]

They should just have enemy scaling to a point so low levels can still be a challenge but you're not running around killing everything by just looking at them. Have your power means something but don't ruin the feel of being able to fight hordes of enemies. So people can't stand there and hit the same button over and over till the enemy levels go beyond what they can handle.

[-AiLuoLi-]

Just make everything immune to abilities and call it a day.

[Sigma-118]

12 hours ago, Jarriaga said:

I play DMC5 on Dante Must Die difficulty. I say bring it on! If that's what it takes for DE to keep me engaged for 2 more years so I can buy Khora Prime Access then I'll gladly take it! 

See why veteran player retention is important? 

Yes it did, up until my growth rate continued to grow disproportionately with regards to how I was approaching the game and how the game reacted to me. It started to feel like instead of killing enemies, I was killing ants by pouring molten aluminum down their nest. Meaning, extremely one-sided, and therefore no longer engaging.

To me, the enemies that show up just 1 hour into Arbitration feel like the enemies I should be fighting by default. I miss the struggle. I miss the adrenaline of barely surviving a mob and having to run away to reload or find some health orbs. I miss feeling like it's not just a numbers game.

I had that in the early game. 

Ok lets be honest here, none of us players have the statistics available to know what parts of the community sends DE the most money.

We have nothing to incinuate that it is speciafically veteran players whos retention is financially speaking the most valuable.

 

Ok so the sense of difficulty was good for a bit untill it plateaud and then sank. you know thats how difficulty works right? Not just in games litterally everywhere, everything! 

Everything that is difficult eventually becomes easy if you do it enough. Cant expect DE to have devine powers. The pysichal limitaions of our existence cannot be broken with our current capabilities. Yet what you ask would fundamentally require this.

Plus we got movement 2.0, "movement is power in games and warframe wants you to be as powerful as you can possibly be" 

Quote by youtuber Skill Up 

I mean just think about it, no matter how weak you can imagine DE making you if you still have that movement youll still never die expect for the literal random chance of autodeath when in line of sight (high lvls, hit scan weapon enemies)

[Jarriaga]

15 minutes ago, Sigma-118 said:

Ok lets be honest here, none of us players have the statistics available to know what parts of the community sends DE the most money.

We have nothing to incinuate that it is speciafically veteran players whos retention is financially speaking the most valuable.

I never said that the veteran base was the most valuable or that DE gets the most money out of veterans. I am using myself as a reference as to why veteran retention is important, because they still lose money when they lose us. They'll need to keep me invested for at least 2 more years so they can get Khora Prime Access money from me in particular. I'm not quantifying which base spends the most. I'm referring to what I want to spend money on. Money they'll lose if they can't retain me.

No idea why you went there.

15 minutes ago, Sigma-118 said:

Ok so the sense of difficulty was good for a bit untill it plateaud and then sank. you know thats how difficulty works right? Not just in games litterally everywhere, everything! 

Everything that is difficult eventually becomes easy if you do it enough. Cant expect DE to have devine powers. The pysichal limitaions of our existence cannot be broken with our current capabilities. Yet what you ask would fundamentally require this.

There was a guy who beat Dark Souls using a guitar hero controller. There is a point in which you become so good at a game that nothing can keep up with you. That is true.

However, in those other games, that difficulty plateau is still designed to accommodate what is expected from a late-game player. Warframe completely ignores it. Difficulty peaks extremely early into the game vs. how much you can grow, hence why the disparity is so painfully noticeable.

15 minutes ago, Sigma-118 said:

Plus we got movement 2.0, "movement is power in games and warframe wants you to be as powerful as you can possibly be" 

Quote by youtuber Skill Up 

I mean just think about it, no matter how weak you can imagine DE making you if you still have that movement youll still never die expect for the literal random chance of autodeath when in line of sight (high lvls, hit scan weapon enemies)

Warframe mobility is only an advantage in the early game. Late game players stand still and nuke the map.

Edited October 8, 2019 by Jarriaga

[0_The_F00l]

2 hours ago, Sigma-118 said:

Everything that is difficult eventually becomes easy if you do it enough. Cant expect DE to have devine powers. The pysichal limitaions of our existence cannot be broken with our current capabilities. Yet what you ask would fundamentally require this.

Just specifically pointing out that you are mentioning doing things regularly will make it easy.

I agree with this ,

but then the issue is , pretty much anything that DE makes is in essence more of the same so its not new , and so is not challenging or difficult. i do not need to think , i can keep doing the same thing i am doing so far without much change.

[SneakyErvin]

21 hours ago, VanFanel1980mx said:

I am just saying the general feel the staff gives me when it comes to testing and saying "that's challenging" seems to rely on people who barely play vs people who have played extensively, there isn't even a middle point most of the time, despite the time I have played Warframe I consider myself around the middle where I like to breeze through sometimes while having some good action here and there, a lot of people who ask for challenge seems to limit themselves to complaining how everything dies too fast and thus allows DE to just keep the broken scaling system and keep adding stuff that basically mandates tank or nuke frames unless they also add dispels and immunities, are there even people who actively play the game on the dev team? and I mean play the game like the average player does, not just meme streams and half-baked demos.

They tend to mean challenging out of a Star Chart perspective i.e the point you should be at the first time you hit up the node. They never mean challenging or "high level" out of a geared-to-the-teeth perspective. I can actually see disruption being a challenging mode if you are somewhere in the appropriate area of progression for the node and dont have access to weapons that insta-gib the suicide bombers etc.

[CalmClouds]

23 hours ago, Chappie1975 said:

There is so much that can go wrong with your idea ...more than I think can go right.   This happens in engineering all the time.  We have a "great idea that will solve most of our problems" until we actually start poking at it and go "well...crap". 

Such as?

[TioMegaManX]

1 hour ago, SneakyErvin said:

They tend to mean challenging out of a Star Chart perspective i.e the point you should be at the first time you hit up the node. They never mean challenging or "high level" out of a geared-to-the-teeth perspective. I can actually see disruption being a challenging mode if you are somewhere in the appropriate area of progression for the node and dont have access to weapons that insta-gib the suicide bombers etc.

A little far in the star chart I see more annoyance rather than a challenge or a good time myself unless I pick up an immortal frame, homing rockets, instant slash procs, enemies spawning behind my back, etc.

[GPrime96]

5 hours ago, Jarriaga said:

Warframe mobility is only an advantage in the early game. Late game players stand still and nuke the map.

Until those "Late Game Players" notice why they are getting one shot later on.

[Jarriaga]

19 minutes ago, GPrime96 said:

Until those "Late Game Players" notice why they are getting one shot later on.

At that point most of them leave. No matter how good your parkour skills, you can't dodge hitscan. And yes, some of them just want it easy and the moment they have to struggle to stay alive, they leave because it is no longer "efficient" to stay in the mission.

Edited October 8, 2019 by Jarriaga

[Corvid]

46 minutes ago, Jarriaga said:

No matter how good your parkour skills, you can't dodge hitscan.

Depending on how it's programmed, yes you can. It's called aimdodging.

[Jarriaga]

1 hour ago, Corvid said:

Depending on how it's programmed, yes you can. It's called aimdodging.

You can not dodge hitscan. You can only dodge projectiles.

Hitscan weapons calculate damage by virtue of being on the weapon's LoS damage cone within a certain distance. Anything in that cone gets immediately and instantaneously damaged even if you're at the edge of the cone. A projectile on the other hand requires for the bullet geometry to collide with an object in order to calculate damage.  

Enemy accuracy increases with enemy level in WF. There's a point in which it is impossible to dodge hitscan unless you wish to present the argument that you are so fast in your input that you can get away faster than a computer calculates "Is X present in LoS hitscan cone Y/N? If Yes, damage¨.

Edited October 8, 2019 by Jarriaga

[(XBOX)Kuljack]

This isn’t a real issue.

We will always, in every game, eventually hit this point where we are more powerful than the content. It’s a combination of acquiring mods, weapons and skill in the game over your playtime.

We can make the game more challenging for ourselves while waiting for new content that has stronger enemies, by reducing our own power, and by result further increasing our skill.

Step away from pure damage, experiment with CC and other weapons. Support the new player base, step outside for some fresh air or just binge a netflix series.

Content takes time to develop, test and push out. If there were less posts whining about content and needless wants, they could spend more time reading posts that have actual value to the games progress.

Meaningful & productive conversations lead to Meaningful & Well-implemented content.

[Loza03]

2 hours ago, Corvid said:

Depending on how it's programmed, yes you can. It's called aimdodging.

I mean... not really.

What you're doing at that point is just improving your odds at RNG.

12 minutes ago, (XB1)Kuljack said:

This isn’t a real issue.

We will always, in every game, eventually hit this point where we are more powerful than the content. It’s a combination of acquiring mods, weapons and skill in the game over your playtime.

We can make the game more challenging for ourselves while waiting for new content that has stronger enemies, by reducing our own power, and by result further increasing our skill.

Step away from pure damage, experiment with CC and other weapons. Support the new player base, step outside for some fresh air or just binge a netflix series.

Content takes time to develop, test and push out. If there were less posts whining about content and needless wants, they could spend more time reading posts that have actual value to the games progress.

Meaningful & productive conversations lead to Meaningful & Well-implemented content.

CC and stuff like that is still OP - whilst I agree and accept that there's always going to be a max-power setup where we're probably above what the game can reasonably deliver, a lot of games still encourage and offer engaging gameplay within that. Warframe doesn't - max power gameplay is either standing on a carpet of corpses that died to your nuke, running between incapacitated enemies that can't hurt you or running between unalerted enemies that can't hurt you because you don't know you're there.

Simply put, maximum power in Warframe is literally us just breaking the game - ignoring sacred rules of game design that allow actual engagement to take place, specifically those that prevent the player from not interacting with the game. Gameplay in Warframe revolves around combat. We have a lot of different ways to not actually engage in combat.  If most gameplay involves something we can not engage with, than we're not really playing the game anymore.

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

22 hours ago, Zilchy said:

3 reasons why REAL challenge will never exist.

1. DE suck at playing the game, too much god mode in dev testing and not enough knowledge of known tactics.

2. DE's main focus is to sell cosmetics to newer players, not to please the existing player base (the rank 30 reward for this nightwave was an operator skin...) 

3. They don't have the balls and are far too interested in just making money instead of catering to the players who want challenge because the whiney, entitled casual playerbase represents the larger percentage of players. IF they truly wanted to establish challenge it's as simple as making the Tau system content ONLY ACCESSIBLE after a certain number of logins. MR locks are meaningless, as are planets unlocked when taxis exist, solo quests will always be cheesed, even hours played can be exploited. Only daily logins cannot be cheesed by a new player. But we all know DE would never have the balls to do such a thing and then endure all the rage threads on the forums. They'd cave in within a week cos that's how they are.

Wow. You really are using those weak talking points that some CCs use. Ok, here we go:

1) DE isn't the issue, it's you, the player. You can whine about difficulty all you want but it's not the model of the game and especially was not what the call to arms was about until after you had your fill. The very core of the gameplay is to build an overpowered super ninja that has very entertaining ways to destroy enemies. Every adjustment to the gameplay was directly requested from the early version of "you", before hour 1000 or login day #365. That said, why would DE design something players didn't originally lust for? Kinda hard to go from overpowered to underdogs unless the new content warrants it.

2) Trying to please a spoiled kid that has everything is a nightmare unless you either take all the toys away and make new ones (throwing him into a temper tantrum) or teach that spoiled rotten kid patience until new toys can be made (throwing her into a temper tantrum). It's not a smart idea to just throw rewards in to a model that vets would still complain about (Ropololyst rewards taught DE that lesson when vets and Youtubers bashed then over it). Also, if an operator skin is great for player one but sucks for you, then what would your reward be? Answer that carefully because player one might be pissed at your reward.

3) Since many players, logged in constantly or not, haven't even defeated the tridolan, let alone the first orb boss, then why would DE rush to create a solution to so few? Content isn't difficulty. Content is Gas City and it's crazy size, new puzzles, updated lore, new game mode, new warframe, new weapons, new boss, new secret rooms, new mods and new melee/gunplay mechanics. None of that cost us money so I don't know where you got that lie that DE is all about cosmetics. I do agree that Tau should be locked, level 50+ and make corrosive and bleed damage non factors with the sentients. Lastly, DE is employed by adults dude. I'm quite sure they're not worried about your little "dare".

[Aldain]

4 hours ago, Loza03 said:

Simply put, maximum power in Warframe is literally us just breaking the game - ignoring sacred rules of game design that allow actual engagement to take place, specifically those that prevent the player from not interacting with the game. Gameplay in Warframe revolves around combat. We have a lot of different ways to not actually engage in combat.  If most gameplay involves something we can not engage with, than we're not really playing the game anymore.

Well said, that inequity between the power floor and power ceiling is exactly the issue of why so many problems exist in terms of content and reward design as well.

Since players can clear content quickly, in order for any form of retention to take place they need comically low drop rates of certain resources, weapon parts/blueprints and mods.

[844448]

11 minutes ago, Aldain said:

Well said, that inequity between the power floor and power ceiling is exactly the issue of why so many problems exist in terms of content and reward design as well.

Since players can clear content quickly, in order for any form of retention to take place they need comically low drop rates of certain resources, weapon parts/blueprints and mods.

Isn't comically low drop rates exists on every game? Even with games with hard cap/power ceiling to make people stay and grind while the new content is in progress