Railjack's Shared Looting/Affinity Should Be In All Modes

[MJ12]

The biggest change in Empyrean is Railjack itself, of course.

But one of the big changes that has largely gone uncommented on is that Railjack finally has shared looting mechanics for things other than credits and finally removes the affinity range mechanics. The shared looting mechanics imperfect-loot found inside away team missions is apparently not shared-but even partial shared looting is a huge gamechanger for Warframe in terms of quality of life. And affinity range's removal makes Railjack straight-up better because you're finally not tethered to the rest of your team if you want to gain affinity for things.

So naturally, DE should introduce it to all modes. You know all the complaints about hallway heroes? Shared looting/infinite affinity range will at least reduce those, because a single guy running off doesn't reduce your loot and XP share. Exploration teams splitting up becomes more rewarding rather than requiring courteous players to mark everything they find-even though they can only place one waypoint at a time. Shared looting and a lack of affinity range also means that Warframe can more easily implement split objectives in ground missions, where players are expected to split their team rather than walk around as a tight group within affinity sharing range. This would significantly help mission design for Warframe-it's pretty clear right now that Warframe missions, thanks to the constraints of individual looting and affinity range, are almost all designed around players being glued to each other by these constraints, the sole exception largely being Spy (and maybe Excavation if excavators ever get level scaling). This limits DE's creativity and prevents them from making missions more complex than simple linear 'move to objective, complete objective' operations. (If a player is solo, the objectives could be simplified to reduce player load-they're already being punished by getting fewer spawns, no need to force them into teams).

The only issue with shared looting/affinity range mechanics is AFK players, but AFK players can still just AFK on the objective for most gamemodes anyways, and the incentives are more or less the same. So I don't see this as a huge issue which should prevent the implementation of such a significant QoL change.

[Synpai]

Assuming it's actually working properly :c

[MJ12]

6 hours ago, Synpai said:

Assuming it's actually working properly :c

I mean yeah, but I think that goes unsaid. The affinity radius was basically a kneejerk, stopgap attempt to stop players from AFKing and it's pretty clearly not great at doing that. It just frustrates legitimate players without impacting AFKers much, so why not get rid of it?

Same with individual looting. It just slows players down without actually impacting leeching, so why not get rid of it?