15 Minute Survival - Impossible For Some

[Reaver_X]

Nekros' Desecrate. But yeah, Life Support drops from enemies are just too random to be really useful. And being forced to bring a Nekros with you just in case - can't be a solution either, can it?

 

Even WITH desecrate we were still hardly getting o2 drops....something is seriously wrong.

[PapaKicks]

i disliked using the single Defense tile for Survival. it's boring after you do Survival a couple times then.

 

i got the impression that Survival was going to be a never ending, progression through rooms to escape the massive hordes of enemies chasing you. enough enemies to force you to constantly move in the opposite direction, and fight the much slimmer forces from that 'forwards' direction.

there would be multiple options to extract thusly, instead of just one.

clearly this isn't what Survival was intended to be, but i thought it was... and that sounded a lot cooler than what we have. 3-5 tiles for an unknown length of time, just standing around, killing some enemies from time to time? meh.

 

I think it would be cooler to embrace the "plot" of survival. We are there to distract the enemy so that a tenno can stealth his way in and steal stuff. So it would be cool if we had to draw the enemy away from certain areas at specific times. Lotus could drop life support in a specific direction until the tenno finishes his thing. Then we have to move another direction to clear the way for objective two. Etc etc.

 

On topic, the best fix IMO is the auto +1 second per kill type thing. It would even scale with difficulty. The first waves all die fast, so no risk of running out of supplies. But as enemy level increases, you will eventually take too long to kill to keep going. Survival duration would literally scale with your player skill and gear.

[Reaver_X]

i wonder if some of this has anything to do with lag....?

[Fulmir]

Someone else who didn't read the first sentence of the op.

 

 T3 void survival is bad due to not enough oxygen drops from mobs  and a nekros gives you another chance at not getting one because the most common mob (drones) have 0% chance.

 

 T3 survival is not hard because of enemy levels or bad gear or no teamwork or any other reason given by people who didn't read the OP, it's because not enough o2 drops there!

 

Actually the Corrupted Ospreys (and shield drones) don't leave a Corpse and are therefore never a valid target for Desecrate. The fact that at least the Ospreys don' drop oxygen is also an issue but one separate from Desecrate mechanics.

 

There are 3 variables in survivals that will cause you to fail.

 

1) Players popping life support too soon

 

2) Not enough drops to keep you going to the next pod

 

3) Overconfidence when the challenge is mitigated early on

 

To explain:

 

#1 - People not realizing the percentage of life support that is replenished when a capsule is popped and they hit it too early, this coupled with #2 can really strain your ability to stick around.

 

#2 - Enemies not dropping enough little boosts to keep you going long enough for the next capsule, mostly due to #1, but occasionally your luck runs thin and there just aren't enough dropping off the waves to get you through even with perfect capsule popping.

 

#3 - You have competent players and you're waltzing through the waves without dropping below 50%.  Then you get to around the 25-30 minute mark and things take a turn.  Suddenly, the difficulty increases, heavy mob density escalates and those without sufficient damage can't pull their weight anymore.  You get overwhelmed because 'this is easy, we don't have to end it yet' has been the mindset for so long now they don't see the inherent danger coming at them like a runaway train.

 

Honorable mention: #4 - Infested Poison.  If someone goes down in poison and their health is dropping quick, they're still in it.  Everyone wants to be a hero and save their fellow Tenno so they rush over, realize too late the poison cloud is still there, first Tenno dies and they go down, too.  Sometimes there are impossible situations, don't kill yourself trying to save someone.  Better to keep yourself up to finish than attempt an impossible save (I believe Rhino with Iron Skin is an exception to this).

 

There is a certain amount of L2P in this, but it's not always the answer.  You may know how to play perfectly well and be dealt a bad hand via RNG.  The ability to recognize the situation and adapt to it will lead to your success.  If that means getting out before 15 mins because of an unfortunate array of circumstances, so be it.

 

You're forgetting bad map generation causing fewer or trapped enemy spawns.

 

Also with the poison you can crawl out of said poison while down and should endeavor to do so to avoid your team acting like lemmings in your revival. Also people not staying close enough together can make any down lethal.

 

Overall though we're not asking for the challenge to go out of Survival, we're asking for the RNG to be less of the capricious master of whether you can even get to Par. Right now it feels like a golf course with randomly generated trees and sometimes it just stuffs 20 redwoods right on top of the green...

 

Easier fix: use the defense maps just like the original Survival did.

Problem solved.

 

This would likely make Survival too easy and remove one of the interesting components of it over either Defense or a regular map in that you actually have to go back and forth within the level rather than just staying in one spot or going through the level linearly. It would be nice to see a bias toward some kind of ring setup for the level though, where it loops in a circle with extraction shooting off to the side.

[[DE]Whirrrrr]

Hi guys, just wanted to share my thoughts and answer some of the questions and issues raised in this thread.

First of all, it’s amazing to see so many people playing and talking about survival. We’ve been following this thread closely, and it’s clear from the number of discussions on the forums that Tower 3 survival is too difficult for many players to reach 15 minutes. While we always intended it to be very challenging, it was never meant to feel impossible or frustrating.

Currently the main complaints about Void survival are:

 

The enemy life support capsule drop rate

 

The current drop rate is scaled with maximum enemy count (the maximum number of concurrent living enemies allowed in a level, not the current total enemies spawned). Maximum enemy count in turn scales with difficulty and number of players. This helps to keep the drop rate fairly even whether you’re playing solo or in a full team of 4. Each faction also has their own drop rate to account for how long it takes to kill them; Infested have lower health on average than Grineer and are easier to kill, but there are a few more of them.

A few people suggested giving a small amount of life support for every enemy killed, or dropping a life support capsule every few kills. Both of these solutions sound good in theory, and we considered them early on when developing survival. We’ve tried to strike a balance between killing enemies and activating life support capsules. If we removed enemy drops, enemies could be avoided completely, posing no challenge. If we gave life support consistently for every enemy killed or every few enemies, you would no longer need to grab the lotus drops and keep moving around the level.

Giving each enemy a % chance to drop a life support capsule inevitably results in some variation in the actual number of capsules dropped. These variations are intended to challenge players beyond their comfort zone. Lotus drops provide a consistent element to life support alongside the more variable enemy drops.

As unbalanced as it was, the weekend event was a great opportunity for us to test an early version of survival in the field. We found that even a small difference in the drop rates between factions produced vastly different outcomes. Consequently we’re treading carefully when making any changes to survival timing and drop rates.

We’re currently testing a change internally which raises the enemy life support drop rate for Void survival missions to match the drop rate for Grineer.

Fusion drones spawning without fusion moas

Fusion drones will be replaced with shield drones, corrupted fusion moas will still spawn. There are some unconfirmed reports of fusion drones not dropping life support capsules. If it’s true, the number of drops may be well below what was intended. I’ll be investigating this shortly. Edit: Confirmed.

Enemy spawning issues

As with the Corpus Ship tileset, it’s possible that the Void occasionally has issues with spawning in survival, depending on the layout of the level. This is currently being investigated.

We’re continually looking for ways to improve survival. Various factors including drop rates and times between lotus drops are subject to change, but not before careful consideration.

Now to debunk some myths! We’ve seen some pretty imaginative theories in game and on the forums, mostly relating to life support depletion…

• Lotus drops stop completely at some point - They continue indefinitely but the time between each increases a little with each drop.
• Sprinting, breaking a window, or some other factor causes life support to drop faster – Life support always drains at the same rate across all tilesets and factions.
• Ember’s fire burns up all the oxygen – Love this one, fortunately it’s untrue!
• Life support was changed so it drains faster in a recent update - It hasn't changed since the weekend event, but a bug caused the Lotus’ warnings to play at the wrong times. We’re removing the 60 second warning so players aren’t encouraged to head to extraction too early and to reduce the overall volume of Lotus transmissions.
• Keeping the life support bar low, around 20% will give you more life support – Also untrue, the drop rate for small life support capsules and the time between lotus drops doesn’t scale with the amount of time left.

Thanks for playing! :) Edited October 25, 2013 by Whirrrrr

[taiiat]

Hi guys, just wanted to share my thoughts and answer some of the questions and issues raised in this thread.

-snip-

fantastic information.

i'm glad you guys were able to pull all of the real information out of this, and will investigate possible issues (though for some of us, those are long past possible :p).

Edited October 25, 2013 by taiiat

[PapaKicks]

A few people suggested giving a small amount of life support for every enemy killed, or dropping a life support capsule every few kills. Both of these solutions sound good in theory, and we considered them early on when developing survival. We’ve tried to strike a balance between killing enemies and activating life support capsules. If we removed enemy drops, enemies could be avoided completely, posing no challenge. If we gave life support consistently for every enemy killed or every few enemies, you would no longer need to grab the lotus drops and keep moving around the level.

 

I still think this is the best option. I don't see how it's any different than the current setup. We still can't keep up with drop rates (in non-void survival) and so have to activate lotus drops to continue. So matching the ratio of drops per kills to the amount of support per kill would still keep us running to capsules.

That said...

I would prefer to see the +support on kill idea brainstormed more, figure out a reason to activate capsules while still getting a fixed amount per kill. I believe what many of the people wanted was to remove the RNG from the equation.

[spacedkadet]

 

Fusion drones spawning without fusion moas

Fusion drones will be replaced with shield drones, corrupted fusion moas will still spawn. There are some unconfirmed reports of fusion drones not dropping life support capsules. If it’s true, the number of drops may be well below what was intended. I’ll be investigating this shortly. Edit: Confirmed.

 

 

Thanks for confirming this! This alone should make tower 3 actually do-able :)

Edited October 25, 2013 by spacedkadet

[esapto]

void survival is the only void mission that allows you to get exactly what you want without wasting keys, unlike any other void mission.

 

Void survival now gives prime rewards every 5 min (mag prime parts, latron prime, forma, etc), if you dont get the part you need just abort mission and restart,

 

Yesterday i got mag prime chassis at 5 min and systems at 10 min, but i just wanted forma so i just aborted and restarted until i got a forma.

I used 2 survival keys and got 2 formas (and some latron parts), exactly what i wanted.

 

No other void mission allows you to see your reward before finishing it.

[101010]

When they first told us about survival in a livestream I taught it would be more like a run across a hazardous environment something like an obstacle course mixed in with enemies attacking you.

 

Imagine you had to escape a ship that is self destructing and that there where rooms exploding / set aflame / depressurizing / frozen slowly and the only way out was to either kill all enemies in the room or something more puzzle-like with terminal hacking. I was hoping for a pace changing map where there was more then just shooting, like each room having another strategy so that the team had to really work together to survive and leave there alive. Well the "survival" did change the pace little with pods but still would have loved to see something else. Especially since Warframe is not just a shooter but also focuses on maneuvers like wall walks, slides and so on.

 

Sorry for the slight off topic. Just had to use this chance (DE reading this thread and all) to share some of my ideas. Critics are welcome. :)

Edited October 26, 2013 by 101010