Nerfs in Warframe is getting absurd

[grindbert]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Unreal Engine stuff is interesting. Given how Warframe looks (or used to) and behaves, I had a suspicion it's based in some way on Unreal, but none of the information I can find online supports this. I have often wondered if Unreal modules could be adapted to Warframe. Depends on how the game is set up. Unfortunately, it's often the case that these decade-old games end up with spaghetti code which makes new features difficult to implement due to lack of future-proofing and just bad coding habits. City of Heroes was notorious for being a mess internally, especially when it came to its UI code, and Payday 2 had persistent issues of developers misunderstanding how their Lua codebase worked.

If DE could grab off-the-shelf solutions, then I'm personally all for it. Not sure what licensing fees for software will do for the bottom line, but I'm definitely not insisting on reinventing the wheel. They've certainly sunk a LOT of time on the back-end pretty much all throughout 2019, with very little actual content on the front-end for users to enjoy. Even if they stick to purely in-house solutions, I'm of the opinion that we can do with a period of less innovation and "more of the same" so all those new systems they implemented can grow some meat on the bone. Railjack in particular is barely more than a tech demo. It needs more mission types, more locations, more enemy variety, more objective types, more girth to the progression system so we don't end up grinding for singular items, etc. One day, I would dearly love for Railjack to take over from Ground Missions entirely, but I'll settle for making it worth playing on face value for the time being.

oh for sure, i wouldn't mind waiting quite a lot longer for an actually decent implementation. that would also imo help them long term as taking your time properly testing and debugging before any kind of release spares you a lot of "on-demand" hotfixing. often if you have to repair a live version in order for it to be decently usable you rush patchworked crap into it that "kinda works so kinda sticks" which never gets taken out and makes building on top of that very difficult.

that is what i am criticising the most. rushed production with little thought about the long term troubles for the software engineers. i wouldn't have minded waiting a year more for railjack, 6 months for liches, whatever, as long as the initial implementation and the mechanics behind it are enjoyable and worked out properly. i'm not expecting a bug free release, that's impossible. but at least i would hope for something that doesn't need 8-10 hysterically stitched together hotfixes to even work at least decently.

but then again i have a job and other responsibilities so the 8-10 hours tops i can put into the game weekly leave me with plenty of content to waste my time on (hell, i haven't even minmaxed half the kuva weapons). it's probably different from the view of a 24/7 nolifer (which i have been myself in the past at times) that has nothing left to do but collect prime sets and roll rivens for profit.

although i can understand the nolifers very well, i wish they would take a step back and maybe take a break or something to give DE some room to breathe to improve production quality and their code base in general. but then again DE seems to be desperately chasing those concurrent player numbers and very shallowly cater towards that crowd so they kinda shat in their own bed with that strategy.

 

PS: don't underestimate how much such selfmade inhouse solutions can depend on the pride of either the company or the lead dev. it's a pride that has to be swallowed in order to clean up the process. many can't, and most of those sooner or later drown in their own cluster#*!%. dev time goes up, releases become less frequent and less substantial, player numbers drop, and into the vicious circle we go.

to some degree we already are fair in the center of said circle if you look at what was promised with railjack and liches and what was ultimately delivered. yes, it might get there eventually but it seems that the development process took too long for the planned content to be pushed out at once so it was shaved aggressively to at least deliver something with the hopes of completing it in the future. 

on the other hand so many features in warframe have been half-assed and abandoned midway and just left to rot that it might just be pure incompetence/negligence. ultimately i can't and don't know. i can just make assumptions from what i see and the experience that i have.

Edited April 1, 2020 by grindbert

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, grindbert said:

oh for sure, i wouldn't mind waiting quite a lot longer for an actually decent implementation. that would also imo help them long term as taking your time properly testing and debugging before any kind of release spares you a lot of "on-demand" hotfixing. often if you have to repair a live version in order for it to be decently usable you rush patchworked crap into it that "kinda works so kinda sticks" which never gets taken out and makes building on top of that very difficult.

Yup. Seems like most commercially-successful games operate like that. Back in the day, City of Heroes publisher NCsoft wouldn't budget programmer time for anything outside of new content. No time to adapt old content to new systems, no time to fix old bugs as long as everything's working, often no time to even create a good implementation - just something "that works." So you ended up with an otherwise really good game made an absolute pain in the ass to maintain, especially long-term. Developers seemed to design A LOT of content - missions and data structures and so on - in Notepad or Excel. This has seemed to hold true across the industry, at least near as I can tell. Payday 2 developer Overkill seemed to have decent programmers, even if the Lua codebase was nightmarish. However, it seemed like these programmers were almost never actually used on Payday 2 itself outside of implementing new mechanics. Rather, designers who had only superficial understanding of the code worked on trying to fix issues, often leading to cascade failure. Getting Overkill to sit down and address several obvious and well-documented desync bugs was like pulling teeth... BUT IT #*!%ING WORKED!

I understand people's desire for DE to drop what they're doing and just fix bugs, fix design, fix implementation, migrate old content to new systems and generally keep the game up-to-date. I'm one of them - Warframe Revised is one of my favourite updates so far, warts and all. But stuff like this just doesn't "sell." For whatever reason, DE are obsessed with their concurrent metrics, and concurrents drop HARD between major content releases. I often hear people complaining about companies "milking the playerbase" or releasing content instead of fixing bugs, but the metrics tank when developers actually do that. I don't know if DE have investors to answer to, or whether they need metrics to show to Leyou, but they have incentive to push new content in the hopes of pushing concurrent player numbers over fixing their own S#&$, because the latter rarely generates as much noise.

I mean, there has to be SOME reason, because damn near everyone in the gaming industry does it this way, and that can't be fun for anyone involved - developer OR player.

 

1 hour ago, grindbert said:

that is what i am criticising the most. rushed production with little thought about the long term troubles for the software engineers. i wouldn't have minded waiting a year more for railjack, 6 months for liches, whatever, as long as the initial implementation and the mechanics behind it are enjoyable and worked out properly. i'm not expecting a bug free release, that's impossible. but at least i would hope for something that doesn't need 8-10 hysterically stitched together hotfixes to even work at least decently.

Yeah, especially when some of the issues are immediately obvious. I remember having a laugh when Scott McGregor commented on how the 100x Restores had a squashed icon and their description text clipped off the screen. His delivery was exasperated but funny. Then the update rolled like that anyway. Now, the wrong icon is ultimately not a big deal, but a LOT of bugs slip through like these - not all of them as innocent. I can maybe buy Steve Sinclair's explanation of feeling like they NEEDED to release Railjack in whatever state they had it in as a "cleansing" exercise because they'd been sitting on it for too long (I suspect tossing it around in management limbo) maybe ONCE, but it's not just Railjack. Everything of late has been launching in Early Access, and it starts to make me wonder what effect this is going to have on the future of Warframe. It has to be burning out the developers in charge at the very least, which was pretty clear watching DE's team on Dev Stream late last year.

Honestly, I feel the studio would ultimately do better by accepting a hit to their concurrent users stats and just trying to deliver less unfinished content. This is seriously starting to take the wind out of the sales of new releases. I've only been around for a couple of years, but even I'm starting to regard new releases not with excitement about what they bring so much as with dread about what unrelated things they'll break. I mean, sure - it was my fault I decided to go shopping during Scarlet Spear just because that's when I got 75% off on Platinum, but broken Dojos making trades impossible for a bit wasn't fun.

I'm reminded of something an old shopmaster used to say: "Oh, so there's never enough time to do it, but there's always enough time to do it twice?"

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I can maybe buy Steve Sinclair's explanation of feeling like they NEEDED to release Railjack in whatever state they had it in as a "cleansing" exercise because they'd been sitting on it for too long (I suspect tossing it around in management limbo) maybe ONCE, but it's not just Railjack. Everything of late has been launching in Early Access

It bothers me to see what they showed in the demos for Liches, and Empyrean and the hype they kept up for The New War, and to look at what shipped.  Liches are literally base star chart missions.  Only the art/sound and parazon system are actually new for that update.  Empyrean is 1 mission.  There will probably not be an actual New War cinematic quest, it's probably all going to be iterations of Scarlet Spear with a tiny bit of lore in it.  I honestly believe we will never get anything even close to what was shown in those demos.  The vibe I get from their reaction to the community's complaints and things they've said makes me think all of that is going to stay pretty much exactly like it is.  That portion of it is done.  When they add Corpus Liches and Corpus Empyrean it will be the same thing with have now but with a different faction and maybe a splash of different colored paint, just like Fortuna was with POE.  I hope I'm wrong, but I'd bet money I'm not.

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

It bothers me to see what they showed in the demos for Liches, and Empyrean and the hype they kept up for The New War, and to look at what shipped.  Liches are literally base star chart missions.  Only the art/sound and parazon system are actually new for that update.  Empyrean is 1 mission.  There will probably not be an actual New War cinematic quest, it's probably all going to be iterations of Scarlet Spear with a tiny bit of lore in it.

Yeah, that's because the Trailer they showed at TennoCon was fake. It was the same staged "aspirational" highlight of what DE "wanted" Railjack to be as the Anthem reveal trailer, though at least the Warframe one wasn't CGI with no game behind it and the developers finding out what they're working on for the first time. What DE delivered was whatever bits of finished work they had kicking about towards the end of 2019, slapped together into something vaguely playable so they could call it a release. Steve Sinclair said as much in one of the Dev Streams. It's why Liches are nothing more than Star Chart missions, it's why Railjack has one mission type and no AI crews, it's why everything feels early access - it simply wasn't done, not even close. For whatever reason, DE seemed to not be making any progress on Railjack and felt they needed to release it now, build on it later. Jump off a cliff and learn to fly on the way down, as one forum poster put it recently.

To me, though, that's a really bad way to do software development. Releasing an unfinished product with a road map and lots of promises is... Well, it's Anthem for one thing. But more than that - it's the antithesis of future-proofing. Because both Liches and Railjack involve so much grind and actual real-money purchases, DE have locked themselves into a design which simply might not end up being conducive to Railjack's long-term future. Suppose DE want to move away from the Mk.1/2/3 system... Well, they CAN'T any more, because people have been grinding Mk.3 components for months now, so simply levelling the playing field will end up with hurt feelings. This sort of rushed development also leads to shoddy coding practices. Things which might require entire novel coding implementations of their own (like Railjack instances) might end up being bodged to the end of existing other systems (like the Dojo instance), causing implementation issues down the road.

In short, I'm with grindbert on this one - DE's approach to software development is causing them more problems than it helps.

[(XBOX)Harbinger XK5]

Already has been, I made this post originally then it just disappeared and i was wondering what happened to it.

yeah no that would be awful, just fix the current game so my $3000+ aren't a complete waste.

Warframe 2 would be the worst idea ever.