"Friendship" doors

[Kefirno]

22 hours ago, KaijuKraid said:

You'd essentially be trading 'Waiting at Friendship Door' to 'Waiting more at Extraction.'

Yeah, huge extraction timer is a problem too. It should be cut to 20-30 seconds in non-endless missions. Minute in survival/disruption with separate extraction (thanks god it's a thing now) is reasonable though because it allows to avoid wasting more time on host migrations.

23 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

If a friendship door is blocking your path, it means you've run ahead of your team. If you're consistently running ahead of your team, you are not playing a team game.

Holding hands and walking together slowly is what you consider a teamwork? Crutches like friendship doors won't fix the issue (if you even consider this an issue) of 99% of the game not being designed with actual teamwork in mind.

Why not force all players to press X on capture target simultaneously then? Or make disruption conduits require 4 keys inserted at the same time? Or how about making every locker work like a friendship door? Friendship doors apologists really like lockers, I bet you'll absolutely love it.

Edited December 24, 2019 by Kefirno

[Colyeses]

On 2019-12-23 at 7:21 AM, Avienas said:

It serves no purpose except as a annoyance to prevent more skilled players from being able to get done with the mission sooner.

If you did not need your team and you have no intention of playing alongside them, why are you in public matchmaking?

[Colyeses]

2 minutes ago, Kefirno said:

Yeah, huge extraction timer is a problem too. It should be cut to 20-30 seconds in non-endless missions. Minute in survival/disruption with separate extraction (thanks god it's a thing now) is reasonable though because it allows to avoid wasting more time on host migrations.

Literal solution to all your problems: Play solo.

[Kefirno]

7 minutes ago, Colyeses said:

Literal solution to all your problems: Play solo.

Stock response that was already addressed in the thread. Opinion discarded.

[Colyeses]

16 minutes ago, Kefirno said:

Stock response that was already addressed in the thread. Opinion discarded.

Except you didn't. That's the literal only scenario where you benefit from playing public and guess what? If you try to finish it off before anyone else has a chance, their relics won't crack and you won't get their relic drops. 

So it's either you play with them and the buddy doors are not an obstruction in that playstyle, or you wanna play without them entirely and you're back to solo.

[Steel_Rook]

23 minutes ago, Kefirno said:

Stock response that was already addressed in the thread. Opinion discarded.

When you come into a discussion thread with the intent of picking fights and discarding opinions, this is the attitude you'll get in return. If you ever wonder why your feedback isn't being heard, this is why. Have fun arguing with yourself.

 

16 hours ago, Avienas said:

Short story: Basically create special consoles that require 2 consoles to be hacked simutaneously within X seconds (refer to the Fortuna Heists for a reference), Would just need to show the other console with a mark when you interact with the obviously put one and doing so would open up a HIGH-value loot cache which would have EXTREMELY high odds for rare loot caches or even loot on that planet at a significantly increased gain amount, since it would be a LOOT cache room and all that. Incentive for good loot is what whould create friendships not basically be forced into a match-making like system. But ultimately THIS would replace friendship doors, if people do not want to get very good loot, then they could all run ahead, otherwise the speed runner could enjoy waiting.

So reward players for going slowly rather than trying to restrict players from going quickly? That's not a bad idea on its face, but it still has implementation problems that I struggle to wrap my head around. My main reason for having doubts is DE have already attempted this. Things like Ayatan Sculptures/Stars, Rare Containers, Hidden Caches and probably a few other things see at leas on their face designed to incentivise going through the map more slowly and exploring for hidden goods. Steve (I think) said on the last devstream that the team liked the idea of players staying behind and scavenging for extra resources after a Railjack mission, while still admitting the "sweeping up" was too tedious, so that's a valid approach. It's just I don't think any of these approaches have really worked. When faced with the prospect of slowing down and being more methodical, most people just... Don't. They ignore the proposed rewards and rush ahead anyway.

Here's the central issue: Friendship doors are fairly common (at least one every few missions, if I recall). Whatever reward you're trying to replace them with needs to be similarly common. At the same time, these rewards require team coordination so they need to be fairly attractive in order to get faster players to slow down and coordinate. What you're proposing, then, is a reward that's both fairly common and fairly significant. Considering how stingy DE are with rewards, I simply worry that rewards like these will end up being a conundrum. I mean hell, look at how stupidly rare Rare Containers are. In 2000 hours of turning missions upside down looking for loot, I've run into maybe 10-20 of them, and their rewards even all that great - a 30 minute booster and some scraps. I just don't see what those rewards could hold which DE will actually want to give us in a reliable fashion.

And then there's the other issue - what about solo players? The scope of the rewards needed to actually get speedrunners to maybe slow down and wait for their team would have to be so disproportionately great as to feel mandatory, but you can't really do that in solo missions. I suppose you could do what friendship doors already do and just let a single player get them, but then you're simply incentivising everyone to play solo. Come to think of it, wouldn't a reward like that turn around and open the door to griefers and trolls? When you create significant rewards like this, you're basically offering people a prize that their team could deny them by rushing ahead. As before, I'm working through this as I type, so it just now occurred to me that trying to incentivise people like this has the potential to breed toxicity of its own. Not only do you have a player sitting at extraction and complaining in chat, but you also have another player sitting at a "friendship loot" console and complaining in chat.

Mind you - I'm not saying this is a BAD idea. I like the approach of fostering intended gameplay by incentive rather than restriction. I just worry that this is a complex problem, where solutions are very likely to spawn problems of their own. Ultimately, you're running against the core flaw in DE's design: Mission objectives are dirt simple, the majority of most instances doesn't matter and all the rewards people actually care about are in rotations at the mission reward screen. With very few exceptions, the end of mission reward is what people are there for. And when you stick rewards to mid-mission objectives or kill drops, you have the Quellor and Pennant problem of people joining missions, running off to roll on the drop, then leaving immediately when they don't get it. I genuinely don't know how to solve that.

 

17 hours ago, sitfesz said:

While FS doors don't interfere your pace, because one minute is mostly enough to catch up, it does mine and I have to unnecessarily give more attention to the game. My other option is when I meet a friendship door I tab out and risk getting afk foagged or killed and most likely make the other 3 players wait for me to extract timeout. My gameplay still doesn't have to be a walking simulator to others, because I get other jobs done while rushing and I don't know why do I have to get still punished for this, because it should slow me down enough. Oh and it makes me angry and makes others frustrated, because they see the message that someone is waiting for them.

Fair enough, and I do apologise for my harsh tone before. I just want to offer an alternate perspective here, however. When I personally go into a mission, I do it only in part for the rewards. In far larger part, I do it for the core gameplay of Warframe - the combat, the movement system, the ability to play with my favourite guns, etc. I've often said that some people treat games like a sport, others treat them like a toy. For me, Warframe is a toybox. I recently discovered the Euphona Prime - hilariously massive 5-shot slug shotgun. I've been having fun just one-shotting people with that and watching them ragdoll into the sky. When I go into a mission, in other words, I go in there because I want to engage in Warframe's core combat and objective mechanics. I want to shoot people, I want to slit people up, I want to drop a Snowglobe on the defence console and fight it out, I want to pull the coolant out of the reactor, I want to hack the spy vault, etc.

When a single player on the team rushes off ahead so fast that I'm never going to keep up, I have two options. I can either fight my way forward in which case all of the objectives will be done by the time I get to them... IF I get to them before I'm counted out of the instance... Or I can skip all the fights along the way and still be JUUUST a little too late to participate, having also skipped all the fun along the way. This goes double when people deliberately ignore complexity for the sake of speed, such as walking through Scanner fields in Spy Vaults instead of disabling them because "who cares, we can get the terminal in time anyway." Not only does that cost me 16K Affinity, it's also just... Not how that's supposed to work. It's a SPY Vault, it's designed to be snuck through cleverly. Shoulder-charging through all the sensors might be faster but it's just not COOL.

I genuinely don't think there's a good way to reconcile playstyle differences like that, though. Friendship doors do SOMETHING, but mostly through frustrating rushers which - as we've established - isn't the best way of handling. I honestly feel that by this point, Warframe just needs a not-S#&$ Matchmaking system. It needs some way to group like-minded people together and avoid grouping people with clashing playstyles. For instance, I ran a lot of T5 Spy Fissures the other day looking for a Lohk Requiem mod (never actually got it). That was an utterly miserable experience of watching pubbies barrel-roll through Spy Vaults, trip the alarm, get lost and need help not failing objectives. All of it except ONE run, with a lower-level player who admitted to not knowing how to do the Kuva Spy Vaults and asked me to do them instead. That same pubbie was struggling with the Grineer a little bit and moving slower through the map, so I slowed down and stuck with him. That was the ONLY run of Public Kuva Spy that was actually enjoyable for me, simply because it had a bit of structure to it. If a matchmaking system existed which would put me in teams like that every time I went public, then you won't see me here complaining about it. Similarly, if a matchmaking system existed which could consistently match you with people who could either keep up or didn't mind hanging back while someone did the mission for them, I suspect that would benefit you, too.

One can argue that Warframe doesn't have the player numbers to support matchmaking this specific. To this I say "Oh? But it has the playerbase to support matchmaking PER NODE?" If we ever got a decent matchmaking system, then I don't see an issue with removing Friendship Doors. One only hopes.

[sam686]

Solo is not a good option for void fissure, no option to choose a relic rewards.

The double lock "friendship" doors only exists in some mission types and some tile sets.

There are plenty of tile sets and mission types to completely avoid any double lock "Friendship" doors. Here is a list of them that are free of this double lock door.
Mission types: Capture, Survival, Excavation, Defection, Disruption, Free Roam
Tile sets: Grineer Forest (some Earth), Orokin Tower (void), Orokin Derelict, Orokin Moon (Lua)

Grineer Sealabs and Corpus ice planet, either does not exist or is rare, except for Rescue mission.

[KaijuKraid]

2 hours ago, Kefirno said:

Yeah, huge extraction timer is a problem too. It should be cut to 20-30 seconds in non-endless missions. Minute in survival/disruption with separate extraction (thanks god it's a thing now) is reasonable though because it allows to avoid wasting more time on host migrations.

You'd still have to wait for a second player for extraction timer to start. All you have done, again, is just trade waiting at Friendship Door to Waiting at Extraction.

You want to know why Friendship Doors exist? As people have stated here, to make the game for newer players not turn into Walking Simulators, like what Ember could do at one point. To give people an even chance of being together and to actually allow people in general to do more than just walk while one person to kill everything on sight like Melee 2.0 Spin to Win or Ember's World on Fire at one point.

"But if you care about kill count/damage%..." Well, clearly people do with the amount of people who wanted to nerf things like Ember's World on Fire and currently Saryn. 

Whether or not Friendship doors are a problem or not, it doesn't matter because if your whole goal is to SPEEDRUN a mission, it's faster to do it solo. If not, accept the fact you're also going to be waiting at Extraction until a second player comes along and then the extraction timer appears.

"But, the timer should be shortened!" Congrats, you're missing out on the idea that you may have newer players about or that other players may have a Simaris target or that a Kuva Lich may actually be present. I can tell you right now I've seen games where many people suddenly find their Simaris target and then get extracted ten seconds later or the Kuva Lich suddenly spawns fourty seconds before extraction actually happens, they have to run back hundreds of metres away and one person still stays at extraction, forcing that person to have to then extract by the time they're about to finish the Lich off with their Third Word.

Should be there a timer for extraction? Yes. Yes there should be. But Removing Friendship Doors and lowering the Timer? No, no they should not.

 

[Tsukinoki]

On 2019-12-22 at 11:21 PM, Avienas said:

Its a outdated mechanic that honestly needs to go. It serves no purpose

It does server a purpose:
To ensure that more than the speedrunner gets to be a part of the mission.
Also to ensure that more than just the speedrunner can get some of the drops.

On 2019-12-22 at 3:17 PM, Kefirno said:

They should not exist.

Honestly I think there should be more friendship doors.
Especially on the new sentient ship.  Stop a speedrunner from rushing to the ship alone, killing the sentients, and locking the rest of the team out of any drops because once they leave the sentient ship it becomes impossible to re-enter.

Same thing for the base and galleon side objectives so that one rusher can't stop the rest of the team from getting any of the material drops in that base/galleon.

Or for boss fights in general so that other players can actually see the boss.

[EinheriarJudith]

25 minutes ago, Tsukinoki said:

It does server a purpose:
To ensure that more than the speedrunner gets to be a part of the mission.
Also to ensure that more than just the speedrunner can get some of the drops.

Honestly I think there should be more friendship doors.
Especially on the new sentient ship.  Stop a speedrunner from rushing to the ship alone, killing the sentients, and locking the rest of the team out of any drops because once they leave the sentient ship it becomes impossible to re-enter.

Same thing for the base and galleon side objectives so that one rusher can't stop the rest of the team from getting any of the material drops in that base/galleon.

Or for boss fights in general so that other players can actually see the boss.

no what we need is better mission structure so that these doors are not needed. speed runners are the result of poor mission structuring and the the nature of farming/grind of the same node in repetition.

[EinheriarJudith]

the trouble children of this problem is capture, rescue, exterminate, sabotage (non reactor), assassination (excluding lephantis and other bosses like it).

Edited December 24, 2019 by EinheriarJudith

[Kefirno]

Just now, KaijuKraid said:

You want to know why Friendship Doors exist? As people have stated here, to make the game for newer players not turn into Walking Simulators

And it doesn't work. Whoever runs fastest and has the biggest nuke is going to end up killing most of the enemies. Even in a high MR party because balance, scaling and power creep in this game are absolute mess.

Also, stop referring to "new players" like they are some kind of cripples oppressed by evil speedrunners. Nothing wrong with showing new player how fast and efficient you can get.

19 minutes ago, KaijuKraid said:

players may have a Simaris target or that a Kuva Lich may actually be present. I can tell you right now I've seen games where many people suddenly find their Simaris target and then get extracted ten seconds later or the Kuva Lich suddenly spawns fourty seconds before extraction actually happen

Yeah, sure, let's artificially extend huge chunk of missions by a minute because of something that happens once every 100 missions.

Why not make extraction only available when everyone presses "I'm ready to extract" button? Just in case.

Extraction timers should give just enough time for occasional "oh crap, someone found simaris target/ayatan sculpture/rare container/haven't picked up enough reactant" moments to cancel extraction. That's it. I'm seeing players getting lost or having locker fever much more often than moments like this.

30 minutes ago, Tsukinoki said:

Honestly I think there should be more friendship doors.
Especially on the new sentient ship.  Stop a speedrunner from rushing to the ship alone, killing the sentients, and locking the rest of the team out of any drops because once they leave the sentient ship it becomes impossible to re-enter.

Same thing for the base and galleon side objectives so that one rusher can't stop the rest of the team from getting any of the material drops in that base/galleon.

Or for boss fights in general so that other players can actually see the boss.

Yep. Let's have more handicaps instead of fixing garbage bossfights, non-shared loot in RJ missions and poor ways of acquiring new weapons that encourage backwards approach to missions.

11 minutes ago, EinheriarJudith said:

no what we need is better mission structure so that these doors are not needed. speed runners are the result of poor mission structuring and the the nature of farming/grind of the same node in repetition.

Agreed. Handicaps like friendship doors are just inefficient bandaids for symptoms of fundamental issues.

[SenorClipClop]

On 2019-12-23 at 5:00 PM, Kefirno said:

No game should ever punish players for being good at it.

That would be true, if blazing through a mission as fast as you can run required you to be good at the game. All this tells me is you're using an Ignis, or an Amprex.

[EinheriarJudith]

23 minutes ago, SenorClipClop said:

That would be true, if blazing through a mission as fast as you can run required you to be good at the game. All this tells me is you're using an Ignis, or an Amprex.

i can use lesion, down a cap target and B-Line to extract. see the problem? what does his choice of weapon have to do with bad mission structure? same for rescue. can use loki, invis get target and do the same. can use equinox, mesa, volt or any radial nuke and go from room to room without leaving any trace for anyone else.

problem is mission structure not choice of equipment.

[SenorClipClop]

23 minutes ago, EinheriarJudith said:

i can use lesion, down a cap target and B-Line to extract. see the problem? what does his choice of weapon have to do with bad mission structure? same for rescue. can use loki, invis get target and do the same. can use equinox, mesa, volt or any radial nuke and go from room to room without leaving any trace for anyone else.

problem is mission structure not choice of equipment.

I was just pointing out that you don't need to be good at the game to make quick work of enemies. Anyway, your examples make it sound like overpowered players are the issue, not the structure of the mission (whatever that means).

[KaijuKraid]

2 hours ago, Kefirno said:

Also, stop referring to "new players" like they are some kind of cripples oppressed by evil speedrunners. Nothing wrong with showing new player how fast and efficient you can get.

I am not. But 'Showing a new player how fast and efficient' is very different to them actually 'Learning' how fast and efficient you can get. They seen it, plenty of times. Over and over. And over. They want to explore the tileset, acquire new resources and such that because they're new players and for them, they haven't got the vast amount of stocks of resources that we otherwise have. 

2 hours ago, Kefirno said:

Yeah, sure, let's artificially extend huge chunk of missions by a minute because of something that happens once every 100 missions.

Why not make extraction only available when everyone presses "I'm ready to extract" button? Just in case.

Extraction timers should give just enough time for occasional "oh crap, someone found simaris target/ayatan sculpture/rare container/haven't picked up enough reactant" moments to cancel extraction. That's it. I'm seeing players getting lost or having locker fever much more often than moments like this.

Except you're not 'artificially extending a huge chunk' when you need not only two people for a friendship door but two people for extraction as well. Let's say this again: "Two people are required for both." So if one person is speeding off and reaches extraction, then the timer doesn't start until the second person, who would have been at a friendship door with you, would also need to be there. 

You've never addressed this. 

Your Friendship Door argument about 'Extending a Huge Chunk of Time' only applies if only one person is needed for Extraction and if there wasn't a timer for Extraction. However, the slow player holding you up is not going to see the Friendship Door because the other two have zipped on ahead. You still have to wait for the slowest player or a 60 second timer. You'll literally be extracting at the exact same time with or without the friendship door. 

"So what harm would there be removing them?" Considering all the points, many it seems. But your argument for 'Speed and finishing a mission quicker because you want to choose what relic to get an item from' doesn't matter here because those players who are lagging behind will already be lagging behind. It's literally quicker for you to actually solo, which in this case is a viable argument. Not only that, but for the speed you don't get 'Choose Reward Screen!' and thus saving you time.

Hell, you could have gone with the other argument: Friendship doors SLOW DOWN Solo play. Which they do: By about one second every Friendship door. To which maybe they could add some coding to skip pressing the button and just make it so you have to hack into the Rescue Mission. 

Edited December 24, 2019 by KaijuKraid

[(PSN)Maunstre]

Friendship doors can be irritating in regular missions, but they still serve a purpose. Personally, I would want them to remain for missions like rescue, especially Sortie rescue where the execution timer starts immediately. There are too many hot-shots who think they know what they're doing, mess up, and ruin the mission for everyone else. Some have mentioned that friendship doors are an outdated mechanic, and that's probably true, but I'd rather them than elevators.

Ultimately, those here saying "just play solo" are right. If "going fast" is your primary objective, solo is your best mode to play hands-down unless your group is pre-made and everyone is on mic. FDs are still mildly annoying, but they aren't nearly as much of a slowdown solo as they are in pugs. FDs do act a little towards keeping a group together, which is a bit of the point in playing as a group despite how the game has taught us to play (at high-octane speed regardless of teammates' position or status in mission).

[EinheriarJudith]

4 hours ago, SenorClipClop said:

I was just pointing out that you don't need to be good at the game to make quick work of enemies. Anyway, your examples make it sound like overpowered players are the issue, not the structure of the mission (whatever that means).

even with strong gear, people cannot speed run spy, defense, survival, excavation, hijack, lephantis type bosses, mobile defense, interception, etc these missions are designed in a way that you cannot speed run them. when the objective is find person, kill or save, then leave yeah expect speed running. brain dead objective missions have that affect. putting friendship doors on them isnt a solution or a bandaid. its annoyance and avoiding having to actually do a revamp of those missions.

Edited December 24, 2019 by EinheriarJudith

[sam686]

Double lock "Friendship" doors are starting to be annoying, especially on Naeglar Hive. Double lock doors to dead end room often do the opposite. Others race to extraction and ignore caches, while I can't access all areas of map to find all caches.

Only when I block all UDP connections and disconnect other players can I finally open this double lock door and find all 3 caches. This locked doors fails to have "Friendship", when disconnecting players allow easy open of this doors.

More: Often is a Void fissure from time to time, so going solo have a penalty to no relic reward option.

Edited December 29, 2019 by sam686
added "More:"

[DrakeWurrum]

On 2019-12-24 at 4:55 PM, EinheriarJudith said:

even with strong gear, people cannot speed run spy, defense, survival, excavation, hijack, lephantis type bosses, mobile defense, interception, etc these missions are designed in a way that you cannot speed run them.

You can speed run spy. You just have to know the puzzle room layouts.

You're right about defense, survival, interception. They're endurance modes.

Excavation, mobile defense, and even hijack are kinda middle ground, tbh. You still have to wait on timers/power cells/moving the payload, but you can speed through it quickly, relative to survival/interception/defense.

TBH, the only doors that really annoy me are the ones that glitch out due to host desync and won't open. Happened to me in a Railjack mission... the literal entrance door for the pulse turbine glitched out even for me as the host, meaning I had to abort mission and let the other people finish the mission without me.

Edited December 29, 2019 by DrakeWurrum

[sam686]

Double lock door to a dead end room with resource cache in sabotage, needed to complete Nightwave cache hunter. This is often not in the path of objective, and all other players appears to run away from double lock door.

I have an easy way to open double lock door, block UDP connections using firewall in windows or network router. This double lock door is not "Friendship" when this door can open by kicking other players out into host migration.

Solo is bad for opening relics in Void fissure.