The Acolytes Return

[Kontrollo]

3 hours ago, This_Guy_Steve said:

Time limited events is not worst kinds next to Plague Star. RNG mission? Random players can find the acolytes and do something else while your waiting. Time limited can be completed for only for 5 or 4 runs at best. RNG rewards for these are not the worst. I got last time over 9 argon Scopes and 12 maiming strikes. AT LEAST ITS NOT THE SENTIET SHIP where I as a player spent more than 5 weeks with at least 2k runs with less 1% on spawning the red cache. Do you really think DE will update these in the past 3 years? No they won't!

Not quite certain what point you're trying to make.

Anyway, I have nothing against the event itself -- that is when looked at it from a gameplay perspective. In fact, i think having frequent events is a good thing for the game. My problem is with how they structured the incentives to do it -- ultimately, the rare mods people are after.

Previous event rewards were on a model of timed exclusivity, i.e. they would eventually be made generally available. And that's what they should've done here, too.

 

Is your point that because the sentient ship was bad, it's ok that this is bad, too? Stacking RNG on top timers on top of RNG is bad design, and serves only to aggravate and alienate the players.

But that's just my opinion, of course, ymmv. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Camfro]

So why isn't the helmet the acolytes are wearing not a reward???? Very silly if you ask me lol idk why its so hard for you guys to update the acolytes reward pool and come up with better reward?

[RyuhoTheDragon]

PLS DE give some sort of tutorial for 1st time player hunting acolytes, The amount of new players that think its not a certain spawn and dont search for the right tile is astonishing and annoying

[PirateLubby]

Would be nice to get a hold of the Stalker noggle that was exclusive in some update back then. It helps to complete the whole collection with the Acolytes.

[(PSN)zenhumphrey]

On 2020-02-08 at 3:37 AM, Kontrollo said:

This event has a combination of the worst kinds of elements and should've been replaced with its rewards spread into other systems years ago.

• time limited event
• RNG missions; discovery/encounter
• time limited nodes
• RNG rewards

true, i can do 75+ runs and still might not even get one of the rare mods, worst part is that if i actually dont get the rare mods then i would either wait til next year or buy it from other players, I dont think limited time events should come with extremely low drop chances

[(PSN)demishock]

On 2020-02-07 at 3:07 PM, [DE]Helen said:

Unfortunately, we were unable to fix his exclusion in time for this Acolyte return. We hope to bring you much Misery in the future.

What's broken with him? This is the sixth time the Acolytes have returned since the original Operation: Shadow Debt. What is so broken with Misery that the event can't just be re-run in its entirety?

[(PSN)Maunstre]

On 2020-02-07 at 12:37 PM, [DE]Helen said:

Our community Warframe Fandom has a page with lots of info about the Acolytes! https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Acolytes

Our wiki volunteers do an amazing job of keeping their info up-to-date. I highly recommend checking it out!

Helen, this response illustrates a massive problem with providing information to the player base, double in that the Wiki did apparently little to actually answer the user's question.

Why isn't all the information a new player needs to participate in the event present in the OP? Why would you link the Wiki, something not maintained by DE, potentially inaccessible, potentially incorrect (the Wiki has absolutely been incorrect in the past), or just plain opaque, instead of giving that missing information here? The Wiki's page is a text wall - something that is a turn-off to read for what is a simple event, and could be easily distilled into a few points for a forum post like this. The OP has the barest of information for this event:

On 2020-02-07 at 12:18 PM, [DE]Helen said:

Twisted Warframes that follow the Stalker in pursuit of vengeance, the Acolytes will not stop until they are destroyed or until the Stalker’s mission is fulfilled. Gather your Squad and hunt them down one by one before the hunter becomes the hunted.
Just like previous incursions, the Acolytes will appear randomly on the Star Chart. Find where they hide and drive the Acolytes out to earn rare Mods.

There is no useful information given here.

- "Won't stop until they are destroyed or the Stalker's mission is fulfilled." The Stalker isn't involved in any way. This suggests that something needs to be done with Stalker himself, when he is utterly uninvolved mechanically.

- "Just like previous incursions" - what does this actually mean? We haven't had anything called an incursion for... two years at least?

Instead of vague non-instructions like this, please actually describe what a player needs to do to participate in the event to help reduce confusion and frustration. EX:

"The Stalker's Acolytes have Returned! The Acolytes are sinister, twisted Warframes that follow the Stalker's pursuit of vengeance, and will not stop until they are destroyed!

How to participate: The hunting of the Stalker's Acolytes is a community effort! Each Acolyte will appear one after the other over the course of the event, notified in-game by the Acolyte tab of the world-state window showing their health and location. An Acolyte's location will begin as "Unknown", and will change to a named location only when they are encountered in-mission by a squad! Once the Acolyte is found their location will be shown community-wide in the world-state window so that everyone can join the hunt. Be sure to search every corner of the mission - Stalker's Acolytes are cunning, and may be hiding off the beaten path. Their discovery in-mission will be heralded by flickering lights and a cryptic transmission. Be thorough, but hurry, Tenno! The Acolyte's location will change over time as it moves across the system, resetting to "Unknown" and requiring discovery once again!"

Additionally, this is an event that the Lotus should notify us of in our communications inbox. We get emails for the Ghouls, a regularly recurring event which we are in no danger of missing out on. Can we get instead get emails for more exciting / pressing events like this? The Acolytes come out once a year and are not signified in-game by anything aside from a extra mysterious symbol in the world state window that is easy to miss and tells us nothing about the event or what we need to do to participate. Speaking personally, I only know how to participate because my friends told me how two years ago when I was a n00b.

[Carisso]

...Great. So the ONE BLOODY ACOLYTE I need to get Body Count isn't even gonna show up. What a crock. Can't even get the events right....

[Slayer-.]

1 hour ago, LegendXCarisso said:

...Great. So the ONE BLOODY ACOLYTE I need to get Body Count isn't even gonna show up. What a crock. Can't even get the events right....

Read the wiki, Angst currently in the star chart drops Body Count 51.52% chance. Get out there and get it, such a common mod too.

[(PSN)FISSIONoMAILED]

First time encountering this event and had some pretty nasty experience(I'm on PS4, I'm about 80+ acolyte encounters).

-There's a recurring problem that the acolyte won't spawn even if the dialogue or queue for it to appear triggers.

-If you take the mission, and the acolyte moved, there's no indication/sign/warning that the acolyte did so  and won't spawn(so the whole squad will be wandering the whole mission map like idiots looking for acolyte farts)

-Why are we the one trying to find  the locations of these acolytes?  Are they that stupid of a hunter that  the Shadow Stalker purposely trained them wrong as a joke? Is that why sometime I hear squeaky shoes when they spawn?

[(NSW)H0rst]

This points have been said before, but I want to leave my feedback here, too:

- It's nice to have the possibility to farm the acolyte mods. Before I only had blood rush, now I got argon scope and body count, too.

- However, limiting a few mods which are considered mandatory for many builds (especially argon scope and weeping wounds, since meme strike has been nerfed and blood rush drops from lua spy, too) to an event which lasts for approximately 3 days per year (each acolyte lasts for 3 days roughly) isn't nice. If you can't spend those 3 days entirely farming for argon scope for example, you are pretty much screwed. 4 % drop chance on an enemy which takes, depending from the mission he spawns on 3-7 min to kill but is available only for 15 min results in 2-4 runs until he vanishes again. Then it takes 45-70 minutes until he is found somewhere else and the 15 min time window starts over again.

- A suggestion from my side would be to make it token based, like plague star. Every time you kill one of the acolytes, you get an acolyte token and depending from the acolyte with some low chance a certain ephemera or armor or whatever. Then you can spend 1 token to get the common drop and up until 25 tokens for the rare ones. This way it is fairer and you get the rare drops guaranteed after 25 runs.

[ESYLD]

Not sure if anyone else is having the same bad luck as me, but Pressurized Magazine is just not dropping from Angst.  Are drop rates broken for this mod?

[Slayer-.]

48 minutes ago, ESYLD said:

Not sure if anyone else is having the same bad luck as me, but Pressurized Magazine is just not dropping from Angst.  Are drop rates broken for this mod?

 

The drop rate is 4.04% the lowest for all of Angsts mods, which is why you're not getting it, I've done these events a few times and I still don't have Pressurized Magazine so you are not alone.

Angst

 Pressurized Magazine     4.04%

 Repeater Clip                   22.22%

 Spring-Loaded Chamber   22.22%

 Body Count                       51.52%

[(PSN)ESYLD]

6 hours ago, Slayer-. said:

*snip

Thanks for your response.  Yes, I am aware of the 4% drop chance.  It just seemed a bit disproportionately low this year compared to my experience in previous years, so I thought something must have broken in the coding.  I suppose I'll keep at it. 👍

[Slayer-.]

38 minutes ago, (PS4)ESYLD said:

Thanks for your response.  Yes, I am aware of the 4% drop chance.  It just seemed a bit disproportionately low this year compared to my experience in previous years, so I thought something must have broken in the coding.  I suppose I'll keep at it. 👍

Yeah RNG does suck, I can say after years of bad RNG on that one mod Pressurized Magazine I got it today after my post. 

[(NSW)H0rst]

vor einer Stunde schrieb Slayer-.:

Yeah RNG does suck, I can say after years of bad RNG on that one mod Pressurized Magazine I got it today after my post. 

It sure does. I didn't get Argon Scope from Torment 28 times in a row and then on try 29 and 32. Luckily, I don't aim for any other rare acolyte drop except meme strike maybe.

[OrSpeeder]

This whole thing is annoying me, a lot.

1. As another guy commented, the reply from DE employee was... bad, explained nothing about the event. I still didn't figured out how I find out in what planet Acolyte is, I only see it in a specific place, or unknown.

2. Never figured how to make sure Acolyte will show up or not on the map.

3. Veterans will kill acolyte AND leave, without telling newbies where they left the mod, and then extract, taking the whole team with them.

4. I can't even get some silver mods, got chewed out a lot on my work too, becuase the acolyte in question was almost dead, so I kept killing it over and over again and ended sleeping too late. Seriously DE, having important mods be available only 3 days per year is completely unfair to people that have day jobs, specially when they are not even on a weekend.

5. It is utterly boring, having to acolyte after acolyte and being unable to do all the other thousand things the game offers, because you need certain mods for basic builds (for example other day I complained how my focus school is useless, with the heavy focus on combo counter, that doesn't do anything, people pointed out that I am wrong, school is wonderful... as long I use a bunch of Acolyte mods).

6. The acolyte spawning system is kinda buggy, often we look over almost the entire map, don't find it, then we do it again, and it appears when we are in an area we already passed over, sometimes even in a room where the objetive of the mission was present.

[Voltage]

On 2020-02-07 at 3:07 PM, [DE]Helen said:

Unfortunately, we were unable to fix his exclusion in time for this Acolyte return. We hope to bring you much Misery in the future.

Will we see him return in the Steel Path? I (and many other Tenno) still need his Codex scan, and given his drop table was moved to Deimos bounties, I don't see a reason not to add him. It would also be one more retired enemy brought back to the game out of the long list.