scarlet spear post mortem

[m0b1us1]

The only way I would ever be excited about the return of the worst event since I have started playing is if the return had so little in common with the original event that the only thing similar was the name.

SS was, quite literally, 2 mobile defense missions with 1 thing between "defense targets". A stagnant meat wall that provided no resistance of its own, and flying a railjack. This entire event, the only thing new was a new flying sentient and the condrix. That's it. At least the pacifist defect was an entirely new mode altogether that we haven't played thousands of times already.

[cha0sWyrM]

Over all i think it was a pretty good event. it was buggy in the beginning, but most bugs were squashed and the extra time to play the event was a good deal. id like to focus on the things i feel could have been better, so with that in mnd...lets get started...

1. the actual missions themselves were a bit too monotonous.
  i understand its just 1 event...but [morty voice] its just mobile defense with extra steps [/morty voice]. dont get me wrong...i dont mind that so much...but at a minimum of 40 minutes to an hour of the same map and the same fight over and over and over....its looses its luster fairly quickly. what ended up happening was that the ground mission was a slog and the space mission was dull.

2. balance.
  wow...this was a MAJOR issue. the space mission was so much faster and had so much better rewards that i felt almost cheated for having done the ground missions in the beginning. its not even close. not to mention that it was the ground mission that was more important. sure...you need the space mission to reach 100 for the bonus....but at least you could do the ground mission without any space squads at all for guaranteed points, not so much the other way 'round. still....too often it happened where space squads were waiting around for kill codes because no one wanted to do ground missions. i know i didnt want to after doing my first space mission. far FAR more reward for time played...the ground mission was about .25 as fast as the space mission was in earning credits. not to mention all the railjack specific things you got like intrinsics and such. really...it was woefully imbalanced.

3. rewards/offerings.
  ok so the rewards/offerings were a bit thin. seems to me that all of the arcanes should heve been on offer. yes yes...i understand that de is concerned about "exploits" or the arcane market crashing...but you know....thats whats going to happen anyway with an event like this. arcane energize isnt worth what it was before...thats just the way it is. sure...they can maybe have a rotating inventory for the next time....that would be an ok solution. apart from the arcanes...some more variety of items would have been nice. weapons, mods, skins, armor....just, you know...more stuff to choose from.

4. nerfing....
  so, this isnt such an important point but i still want to say it. its a bad look to nerf anything in a game. its especially bad when the thing being nerfed is only being nerfed because it breaks new content. change the new content...dont nerf things. its already cheap that some enemies are immune to warframe abilities....why give us abilities if we cant use them? its bad form to punish players for playing the game in the exact way you intended for them to play it. thats all im gong to say on that.

and thats all i have for now, im sure im missing some points. again over all i liked scarlet spear...i think its a great start to something new...but i do hope its just the start.

[Hawk1911]

"Well... bye"

You won't be missed, let's hope that DE learned their lesson after this event.

[(PSN)IndianChiefJeff]

An operation too small in scale, only involving 3 factions, having only 2 "raids", a plethora of bugs & an assortment of nerfs to go along with it?

Yup, sounds like a treasured memory to me!

[lukasystem]

Not reading anything at this point because it was objectively one of the worst events ever, it was basically a catch-up event for those who wanted to rank up their arcanes and sell those if already stuck up enough (basically everything contrary to what they said in their devstream about the new arcane ranks, just like they did with the whole Empyrean update). As such, the only reasonable thing they did was double the rewards and bonus credits so that everyone would stop whining about it.

Everything else was bad, gimmick recycled missions with nothing new on it, one of them made above an already broken content (Railjack).

The whole kill-code sharing between players was an outright atrocity, space missions taking more than a minute for a single kill code, and sometimes barely it would work "as intended".

Still, i'm closing the page, and just pretend it didn't happen, so i'm gonna wait for the new Nightwave and see what's next. I certainly hope we never get to see any of this ever again.

Will be remembered (sadly),

but missed???

Edited April 28, 2020 by lukasystem

[irwinz]

I opened the forums to see if anybody posted exactly that message. Thank you for doing it.

I wanted to write myself, that overall event was satisfying. Yes, we got standard problems, but the goal of testing new oplink mechanics and finding its weaknesses was reached, and we got our rewards.

What have I noticed personally:

1. I wanted to see more of sentient ship tileset. I saw a small spot we were forced to stand on. I guess to truly explore and enjoy the Murex I have to solo the Anomaly again.

2. A lot of strange bugs I haven't noticed before (at least not in such abundance): sudden locking of jumps (cannot jump/bulletjump with warframe, but still able to jump and dash with operator) or all offensive actions (cannot fire weapons, cannot switch weapons, cannot melee, cannot cast abilities, cannot switch to operator — but able to jump and use gear). It was triggering suddenly and I never caught a sequence of actions leading to it. State of being either jump locked or offensive locked lasted from few seconds to few minutes and resolved by itself without any obvious trigger for release (self-stagger or stagger didn't release the lock, dying and being resurrected didn't release it either — it just passed by itself).

3. "More ground please" — constant phrase in every chat of every flotilla I visited. After doing space part three times I switched to ground only. Yes, space is faster and more beneficial, but only if you have enough ground squads, otherwise you are stuck fighting waves of sentients trying to blow up you oplinks that are just sitting there doing nothing for minutes.

4. After feeling kind of useless in first runs I spent couple of days farming and leveling Kuva Bramma and forming Nova. That allowed me to stay on pair with other players most of the time. Cannot say that's really a problem, it's just a way Warframe is: every content has its "meta" (traditional "highest pew-pew possible" with a generous dash of CC this time).

But at last I've got my Shedu (without that "go-go-go, it's just half an hour, we don't get the drop, we abort" thing), upgraded my arcanes and actually enjoyed my time. Especially the squads in the last day of event: everybody learned how it's done, so we melted condrixes (or is it like "index" and therefore "condrices"?) like butter.

Also a thought that I had through all that days: after all those years battalysts are still one of most formidable enemy types, as seeing couple of squadmates with a pet or two going down in a second surely means that battalyst spawned and made its merry-go-round. Nothing else made such a magnanimous entrance.

[GreyDeath789]

5 hours ago, xHeretic said:

Nothing can compare as an live op with MILLIONS of players stress-testing your new game mode (liches, railjack and this are all new mechanics and yet people fails to understand why they were so buggy and then go "DE released 3 bad updates!!!1"). A stress testing so hard could cost millions (because testing isn't a cheap service). They sure try things out and try to balance it to internal data, isn't enough but is enough to at least log in as a player and jump on that content. That meme about "they don't play their game!" / "They don't test their content!" / "They don't know if you don't tell" is just a metric I use to see how ignorant is someone about game development.

Always good to see the "you don't know anything about game development" as a justification for buggy content is fine from the game developer. it shows just insight into the software development life cycle.

It would seem the general impression from the player community is sort of this...

• Update 22 - Plains of Eidolon...it had some bugs but compared to the amount of bugs with Scarlet Spear those were almost minor.
• Update 24 - Fortuna...it has some bugs as well but again not the amount of bugs as Scarlet Spear. However, it would seem fair to point out that Fortuna was released incomplete...missing things like Profit-Taker, Exploiter Orb, and where is the "third orb" mentioned in these forums from time to time. So...not a good image but still not as buggy as Scarlet Spear.
• Update 25 - The Jovian Concord...had bugs...possible more than PoE and Fortuna but was received better than Scarlet Spear.
• Update 26 - The Old Blood (Kuva LIches) seemed to have the typical amount of bugs as most content from DE.
• Update 26.1 - Rising Tide didn't seem to have as many bugs
• Update 27 - Empyrean (Railjack)...had more hotfixes than any of the above listed...but not as many as Scarlet Spear.
• Update 27.3 - Scarlet Spear....almost twice as many hotfixes as Empyrean.

Just doing a count of hotfixes for each update can give a general impression of the "bugs" in the content. More bugs in 27 and 27.3 (each) than the previous updates all the way back to 22. Yet, the justification suggested is it was a 'new game mode' and lack of being able to stress test the new game mode as a reason to expect the amount of bugs.

Plains of Eidolon was a new game mode...open world. Yet, while having some bugs, wasn't received with the same level of player frustration that Empyrean and Scarlet Spear (and Rising Tide to some degree) did...

Fortuna, while not a new game mode, was a new open world that seemed to be better received by the player community (despite the missing bosses) than either Empyrean or Scarlet Spear.

Did the player base increase drastically from PoE to Scarlet Spear to justify the claim of the inability to stress test the content? Probably not.

Why is Rising Tide, Empyrean, and Scarlet Spear viewed as 'bad' content updates?

Rising Tide - players want 'hard' content but didn't expect Kuva Liches to be so difficult to defeat...but the negative impression of Kuva Liches seemed to be more about HOW they were difficult to defeat. Guessing wrong meant death only because DE wanted players to die to an enemy for guessing. It wasn't that the enemies was necessarily deadly (in some cases at least). This left players feeling it was a cheap mechanic...not necessarily a buggy update.

Empyrean - It just wasn't "fun" for players as much as it was buggy. Not sure how to code "fun" into the software. Buggy for sure but "not fun" is hard to get around as well.

Scarlet Spear - Bug infested content. Design flaws. Kill codes not working was the major issue it would seem...players not receiving kill codes yet many being sent left players extremely frustrated. Inability to return to same flotilla. Inability to form squads efficiently. Confusion about the content ("fixed" by adding three (?) 'tutorial' screens). Repetitive content to "grind" rewards complaints. Loss of Scarlet Spear credits if moving between space and ground in same flotilla. And so on...

Yes, squad link is a new mechanic...and its implementation seems to have been done poorly (when speaking about performance) yet it isn't a new game mode. Squad link is just a part of a mobile defense mission on the ground and a defense mission in space. The other issues listed are not part of a new game mechanic...they are just poorly implemented.

So to claim it is 'new content' and therefore it is fine to have so many bugs just doesn't seem to be a fair assessment. The bugs in other content (PoE, Fortuna, etc.) haven't been nearly as numerous or severe as the last couple of updates.

• "they don't play their game!" - this isn't really a useful claim by anyone since it really is just trying to say the developers don't test the game.
• "They don't test their content!" - this is a fair point in some cases but having more testers (like the new PTC could provide) should help improve testing
• "They don't know if you don't tell" - this is completely fair to state...if players don't tell DE about bugs it is possible DE will rarely or never find some bugs

How ignorant is someone about game development if they claim it is hard to test (and stress test) the content...even with new game modes.

 

[trst]

Personally I feel the worst part was that as the first Railjack event it should have used Railjacks as more than a literal taxi cab. Especially as (what I presume to be the reason for the reward imbalance) it should have been the more difficult mode for the event yet it ended up being far easier than ground missions. And even if it would have brought the onslaught of people crying that they intentionally neglected their Railjacks they could have still done ground missions.

Though for your other points; I don't think they should have included more arcanes. Eidolons have a lot of entry barriers to them and having an alternative to their exclusive content helps out a lot of players while Arbitrations are far easier to get into and (imo) don't need to have attention taken from them as they're one of the closest "end-game" modes we have. Some more exclusives would have been nice though.

Then for the whole "nerf" drama: frames weren't nerfed they were unintended interactions that got fixed. Diminishing returns on Sentients wasn't added for Limbo as it is a long existing mechanic Sentients have that wasn't applying to Limbo's Stasis thus it was fixed not nerfed. Khora's change was horribly handled but the same issue still applies in that it was not intentional to be able to heal the OpLinks and Khora was able to thus the fix. DE "fixed" it in the worst way possible yes but she would have lost the ability for the event either way and it still brought up the conversation and (hopefully) soon we'll get the normalization on healing abilities. "Nerfs" to address mechanics and interactions that are not behaving as intended are necessary to any game.

[Larred]

9 minutes ago, irwinz said:

I opened the forums to see if anybody posted exactly that message. Thank you for doing it.

I wanted to write myself, that overall event was satisfying. Yes, we got standard problems, but the goal of testing new oplink mechanics and finding its weaknesses was reached, and we got our rewards.

What have I noticed personally:

1. I wanted to see more of sentient ship tileset. I saw a small spot we were forced to stand on. I guess to truly explore and enjoy the Murex I have to solo the Anomaly again.

2. A lot of strange bugs I haven't noticed before (at least not in such abundance): sudden locking of jumps (cannot jump/bulletjump with warframe, but still able to jump and dash with operator) or all offensive actions (cannot fire weapons, cannot switch weapons, cannot melee, cannot cast abilities, cannot switch to operator — but able to jump and use gear). It was triggering suddenly and I never caught a sequence of actions leading to it. State of being either jump locked or offensive locked lasted from few seconds to few minutes and resolved by itself without any obvious trigger for release (self-stagger or stagger didn't release the lock, dying and being resurrected didn't release it either — it just passed by itself).

3. "More ground please" — constant phrase in every chat of every flotilla I visited. After doing space part three times I switched to ground only. Yes, space is faster and more beneficial, but only if you have enough ground squads, otherwise you are stuck fighting waves of sentients trying to blow up you oplinks that are just sitting there doing nothing for minutes.

4. After feeling kind of useless in first runs I spent couple of days farming and leveling Kuva Bramma and forming Nova. That allowed me to stay on pair with other players most of the time. Cannot say that's really a problem, it's just a way Warframe is: every content has its "meta" (traditional "highest pew-pew possible" with a generous dash of CC this time).

But at last I've got my Shedu (without that "go-go-go, it's just half an hour, we don't get the drop, we abort" thing), upgraded my arcanes and actually enjoyed my time. Especially the squads in the last day of event: everybody learned how it's done, so we melted condrixes (or is it like "index" and therefore "condrices"?) like butter.

Also a thought that I had through all that days: after all those years battalysts are still one of most formidable enemy types, as seeing couple of squadmates with a pet or two going down in a second surely means that battalyst spawned and made its merry-go-round. Nothing else made such a magnanimous entrance.

i agree with like 95% of your opinion, however i will say i didnt get a single part of the shedu over like 25 runs of each side 

[irwinz]

1 minute ago, Larred said:

i agree with like 95% of your opinion, however i will say i didnt get a single part of the shedu over like 25 runs of each side 

Luck was really tough. I was scrolling through event page on wiki to see if there was some new info, and noticed that they mention event sentients dropping Shedu parts, albeit rarely.

After reading that I checked my inventory and saw that I already had a handle dropped. And I remember clearly I got none from anomaly.

Then I was in squad with Necro and after extracting I saw that we had three parts dropped (handle again and couple of barrels).

But drops were frequent enough to lower prices on Shedu parts on warframe market, so I bought receiver and chassis for 16 platinum total, which is totally OK by my standards.

[AegisSiege]

So, the event added Pillock to my lexicon, so I am tempted to give it a 10/10 for that alone, and ignore any issues I had.

[Larred]

43 minutes ago, irwinz said:

Luck was really tough. I was scrolling through event page on wiki to see if there was some new info, and noticed that they mention event sentients dropping Shedu parts, albeit rarely.

After reading that I checked my inventory and saw that I already had a handle dropped. And I remember clearly I got none from anomaly.

Then I was in squad with Necro and after extracting I saw that we had three parts dropped (handle again and couple of barrels).

But drops were frequent enough to lower prices on Shedu parts on warframe market, so I bought receiver and chassis for 16 platinum total, which is totally OK by my standards.

i had completely forgot you can go to trade chat for parts, time to go see what i can score, Thanks man

[(NSW)FlameDivinity]

7 hours ago, xXDeadsinxX said:

To an extent we do yeah, but what about the devs? Do they actually play test their own game? I really feel like they don’t.

They removed grass from PoE on the Switch in an attempt to improve performance. Guess what? Performance is worse. They most certainly do not test their own game.

[(PSN)Deadmennwalking]

7 hours ago, xHeretic said:

Nothing can compare as an live op with MILLIONS of players stress-testing your new game mode (liches, railjack and this are all new mechanics and yet people fails to understand why they were so buggy and then go "DE released 3 bad updates!!!1"). A stress testing so hard could cost millions (because testing isn't a cheap service). They sure try things out and try to balance it to internal data, isn't enough but is enough to at least log in as a player and jump on that content. That meme about "they don't play their game!" / "They don't test their content!" / "They don't know if you don't tell" is just a metric I use to see how ignorant is someone about game development.

Whilst nothing "can compare as an live op". There were some pretty basic things that had to be fixed. Or never were fixed. Such as:

Limbo making space murex trivial. How could DE not have noticed this? I would suggest that the two most commons frames used to defend in a mobile defense mission are Frost and Limbo. Limbo made space murex trivial whilst the Frost Snow Globe didn't stop sentient lasers. One was fixed. The other still occurs.

The unbalance between an easily achievable time required to complete a 5 murex run and a 17 condrix run. Namely 17-19 minutes in space murex and 20-30 minutes in ground condrix.

I appreciate that DE was attempting to encourage players into railjack. Perhaps the event should have had kill codes being sent FROM space TO ground. Space murex could alternatively take 45-60 minutes if you constantly have "waiting on kill codes". Thus encouraging players to return to ground mission and not play railjack.

The space murex satellite being 1 shot by a crewship with absolutely nothing the player could do about it. I have been in space when the satellite has been destroyed when the railjack was 1,000m from the satellite. Having a mission fail through no fault of the players is never a good idea.

100/100 bonus credits requirement being reduced. Again how did DE not anticipate this given the flotilla maximum player level, time it takes to complete runs, game giving you access to many more flotilla than it should.

Being unable to join a Space murex crew after it has completed 1 murex. This caused slower kill code completion for that group and almost always even more space crews with less than 4 players. Slowing kill codes even more. Why couldn't players join until the crew reached 5/5 completed? What disadavantage is this to the space crew? None. In fact it would make it quicker for the existing crew members. Ground crews had the same "joining" issue resulting in many less than 4 player crews.

Players in space murex not being required to deploy oplink (even if just in a timely manner) to get event credits and / or the player being booted from the mission. Thus enabling a player that would actually help by oplink deploy joining the crew.

Am I enjoying scarlet spear? Yes. (I am on ps4 so still have 15+ days to go, currently at 100+ murex 3 completions and over 2.5 million event credits)

Did I feel the grind was too much? No. Play smart and you could easily get 35 - 50k event credits in 3 hours

Am I happy with the event rewards? Yes. Due to being affected by the eidolon hunt visuals / sound I am only able to do terry hunts (completed over 100). Therefore the event gave me an opportunity to get arcanes I could not have otherwise been able to "earn".

 

Have fun and may RNG be forever in your favor.

 

Edited April 29, 2020 by (PS4)Deadmennwalking

[kevoisvevo]

Good riddance, buggy boring and convoluted event. I had the hit join dozens of times and lost the bonus half of the times I played. No skin of my back that this POS event is over. Only good thing it did was reduce the price of arcanes to normal levels but at the cost of tedious grind. Just hope scarlet spear gets completely reworked and then arrives better next year but who am I kidding since this is DE we are talking about.

[Hypernaut1]

1 hour ago, GreyDeath789 said:

Always good to see the "you don't know anything about game development" as a justification for buggy content is fine from the game developer. it shows just insight into the software development life cycle.

It would seem the general impression from the player community is sort of this...

• Update 22 - Plains of Eidolon...it had some bugs but compared to the amount of bugs with Scarlet Spear those were almost minor.
• Update 24 - Fortuna...it has some bugs as well but again not the amount of bugs as Scarlet Spear. However, it would seem fair to point out that Fortuna was released incomplete...missing things like Profit-Taker, Exploiter Orb, and where is the "third orb" mentioned in these forums from time to time. So...not a good image but still not as buggy as Scarlet Spear.
• Update 25 - The Jovian Concord...had bugs...possible more than PoE and Fortuna but was received better than Scarlet Spear.
• Update 26 - The Old Blood (Kuva LIches) seemed to have the typical amount of bugs as most content from DE.
• Update 26.1 - Rising Tide didn't seem to have as many bugs
• Update 27 - Empyrean (Railjack)...had more hotfixes than any of the above listed...but not as many as Scarlet Spear.
• Update 27.3 - Scarlet Spear....almost twice as many hotfixes as Empyrean.

Just doing a count of hotfixes for each update can give a general impression of the "bugs" in the content. More bugs in 27 and 27.3 (each) than the previous updates all the way back to 22. Yet, the justification suggested is it was a 'new game mode' and lack of being able to stress test the new game mode as a reason to expect the amount of bugs.

Plains of Eidolon was a new game mode...open world. Yet, while having some bugs, wasn't received with the same level of player frustration that Empyrean and Scarlet Spear (and Rising Tide to some degree) did...

Fortuna, while not a new game mode, was a new open world that seemed to be better received by the player community (despite the missing bosses) than either Empyrean or Scarlet Spear.

Did the player base increase drastically from PoE to Scarlet Spear to justify the claim of the inability to stress test the content? Probably not.

Why is Rising Tide, Empyrean, and Scarlet Spear viewed as 'bad' content updates?

Rising Tide - players want 'hard' content but didn't expect Kuva Liches to be so difficult to defeat...but the negative impression of Kuva Liches seemed to be more about HOW they were difficult to defeat. Guessing wrong meant death only because DE wanted players to die to an enemy for guessing. It wasn't that the enemies was necessarily deadly (in some cases at least). This left players feeling it was a cheap mechanic...not necessarily a buggy update.

Empyrean - It just wasn't "fun" for players as much as it was buggy. Not sure how to code "fun" into the software. Buggy for sure but "not fun" is hard to get around as well.

Scarlet Spear - Bug infested content. Design flaws. Kill codes not working was the major issue it would seem...players not receiving kill codes yet many being sent left players extremely frustrated. Inability to return to same flotilla. Inability to form squads efficiently. Confusion about the content ("fixed" by adding three (?) 'tutorial' screens). Repetitive content to "grind" rewards complaints. Loss of Scarlet Spear credits if moving between space and ground in same flotilla. And so on...

Yes, squad link is a new mechanic...and its implementation seems to have been done poorly (when speaking about performance) yet it isn't a new game mode. Squad link is just a part of a mobile defense mission on the ground and a defense mission in space. The other issues listed are not part of a new game mechanic...they are just poorly implemented.

So to claim it is 'new content' and therefore it is fine to have so many bugs just doesn't seem to be a fair assessment. The bugs in other content (PoE, Fortuna, etc.) haven't been nearly as numerous or severe as the last couple of updates.

• "they don't play their game!" - this isn't really a useful claim by anyone since it really is just trying to say the developers don't test the game.
• "They don't test their content!" - this is a fair point in some cases but having more testers (like the new PTC could provide) should help improve testing
• "They don't know if you don't tell" - this is completely fair to state...if players don't tell DE about bugs it is possible DE will rarely or never find some bugs

How ignorant is someone about game development if they claim it is hard to test (and stress test) the content...even with new game modes.

 

you claim those were better received, but i remember just as much complaining. Everything is always "the worst update ever" then years later it "We liked that update, but this new update is the worst EVER"

[Madway7]

I hope they remove the timers next time

[(PSN)Deadmennwalking]

3 hours ago, Meneliki said:

I've got leftover credits, now that it's over is there no way to spend them? Unless the event comes back every so often?

DE has advised that left over event credits will carry over to the next scarlet spear event.

Have fun and may RNG be forever in your favor.

[UltraMex]

Bye SS! The controversies and dramas surrounding you were more interesting than yourself but at least you gave me easy arcanes and fast intrinsics. 

[Marvelous_A]

Still waiting for something to do with my Railjack. I mean some actual thing to do instead of being a space bus.

[vanaukas]

2 hours ago, GreyDeath789 said:

Always good to see the "you don't know anything about game development" as a justification for buggy content is fine from the game developer. it shows just insight into the software development life cycle.

It would seem the general impression from the player community is sort of this...

• Update 22 - Plains of Eidolon...it had some bugs but compared to the amount of bugs with Scarlet Spear those were almost minor.
• Update 24 - Fortuna...it has some bugs as well but again not the amount of bugs as Scarlet Spear. However, it would seem fair to point out that Fortuna was released incomplete...missing things like Profit-Taker, Exploiter Orb, and where is the "third orb" mentioned in these forums from time to time. So...not a good image but still not as buggy as Scarlet Spear.
• Update 25 - The Jovian Concord...had bugs...possible more than PoE and Fortuna but was received better than Scarlet Spear.
• Update 26 - The Old Blood (Kuva LIches) seemed to have the typical amount of bugs as most content from DE.
• Update 26.1 - Rising Tide didn't seem to have as many bugs
• Update 27 - Empyrean (Railjack)...had more hotfixes than any of the above listed...but not as many as Scarlet Spear.
• Update 27.3 - Scarlet Spear....almost twice as many hotfixes as Empyrean.

Just doing a count of hotfixes for each update can give a general impression of the "bugs" in the content. More bugs in 27 and 27.3 (each) than the previous updates all the way back to 22. Yet, the justification suggested is it was a 'new game mode' and lack of being able to stress test the new game mode as a reason to expect the amount of bugs.

Plains of Eidolon was a new game mode...open world. Yet, while having some bugs, wasn't received with the same level of player frustration that Empyrean and Scarlet Spear (and Rising Tide to some degree) did...

Fortuna, while not a new game mode, was a new open world that seemed to be better received by the player community (despite the missing bosses) than either Empyrean or Scarlet Spear.

Did the player base increase drastically from PoE to Scarlet Spear to justify the claim of the inability to stress test the content? Probably not.

Why is Rising Tide, Empyrean, and Scarlet Spear viewed as 'bad' content updates?

Rising Tide - players want 'hard' content but didn't expect Kuva Liches to be so difficult to defeat...but the negative impression of Kuva Liches seemed to be more about HOW they were difficult to defeat. Guessing wrong meant death only because DE wanted players to die to an enemy for guessing. It wasn't that the enemies was necessarily deadly (in some cases at least). This left players feeling it was a cheap mechanic...not necessarily a buggy update.

Empyrean - It just wasn't "fun" for players as much as it was buggy. Not sure how to code "fun" into the software. Buggy for sure but "not fun" is hard to get around as well.

Scarlet Spear - Bug infested content. Design flaws. Kill codes not working was the major issue it would seem...players not receiving kill codes yet many being sent left players extremely frustrated. Inability to return to same flotilla. Inability to form squads efficiently. Confusion about the content ("fixed" by adding three (?) 'tutorial' screens). Repetitive content to "grind" rewards complaints. Loss of Scarlet Spear credits if moving between space and ground in same flotilla. And so on...

Yes, squad link is a new mechanic...and its implementation seems to have been done poorly (when speaking about performance) yet it isn't a new game mode. Squad link is just a part of a mobile defense mission on the ground and a defense mission in space. The other issues listed are not part of a new game mechanic...they are just poorly implemented.

So to claim it is 'new content' and therefore it is fine to have so many bugs just doesn't seem to be a fair assessment. The bugs in other content (PoE, Fortuna, etc.) haven't been nearly as numerous or severe as the last couple of updates.

• "they don't play their game!" - this isn't really a useful claim by anyone since it really is just trying to say the developers don't test the game.
• "They don't test their content!" - this is a fair point in some cases but having more testers (like the new PTC could provide) should help improve testing
• "They don't know if you don't tell" - this is completely fair to state...if players don't tell DE about bugs it is possible DE will rarely or never find some bugs

How ignorant is someone about game development if they claim it is hard to test (and stress test) the content...even with new game modes.

 

I stopped reading when you said PoE wasn't bug as SS. Dude PoE was filled with bugs until 2018, the grind was insane until they reworked the mining system and introduced the new mining beam with Fortuna (and later arcanes being builted on purchase), wich was also bugged as hell. Don't try to make SS appear more bugged than those 2 expansions, but I understand why they both were that bugged tho, I don't mind and I didn't mind on that time when that content was novelty.

1 hour ago, (PS4)Deadmennwalking said:

Whilst nothing "can compare as an live op". There were some pretty basic things that had to be fixed. Or never were fixed. Such as:

Limbo making space murex trivial. How could DE not have noticed this? I would suggest that the two most commons frames used to defend in a mobile defense mission are Frost and Limbo. Limbo made space murex trivial whilst the Frost Snow Globe didn't stop sentient lasers. One was fixed. The other still occurs.

The unbalance between an easily achievable time required to complete a 5 murex run and a 17 condrix run. Namely 17-19 minutes in space murex and 20-30 minutes in ground condrix.

I appreciate that DE was attempting to encourage players into railjack. Perhaps the event should have had kill codes being sent FROM space TO ground. Space murex could alternatively take 45-60 minutes if you constantly have "waiting on kill codes". Thus encouraging players to return to ground mission and not play railjack.

The space murex satellite being 1 shot by a crewship with absolutely nothing the player could do about it. I have been in space when the satellite has been destroyed when the railjack was 1,000m from the satellite. Having a mission fail through no fault of the players is never a good idea.

100/100 bonus credits requirement being reduced. Again how did DE not anticipate this given the flotilla maximum player level, time it takes to complete runs, game giving you access to many more flotilla than it should.

Being unable to join a Space murex crew after it has completed 1 murex. This caused slower kill code completion for that group and almost always even more space crews with less than 4 players. Slowing kill codes even more. Why couldn't players join until the crew reached 5/5 completed? What disadavantage is this to the space crew? None. In fact it would make it quicker for the existing crew members. Ground crews had the same "joining" issue resulting in many less than 4 player crews.

Players in space murex not being required to deploy oplink (even if just in a timely manner) to get event credits and / or the player being booted from the mission. Thus enabling a player that would actually help by oplink deploy joining the crew.

Am I enjoying scarlet spear? Yes. (I am on ps4 so still have 15+ days to go, currently at 100+ murex 3 completions and over 2.5 million event credits)

Did I feel the grind was too much? No. Play smart and you could easily get 35 - 50k event credits in 3 hours

Am I happy with the event rewards? Yes. Due to being affected by the eidolon hunt visuals / sound I am only able to do terry hunts (completed over 100). Therefore the event gave me an opportunity to get arcanes I could not have otherwise been able to "earn".

 

Have fun and may RNG be forever in your favor.

 

I believe they can improve (there is always room for improvement on design and human capacity) and foresight more and more things, but sometimes it's needed more input, because on paper a lot of things sounds good and when you know how things works on the inside is more easy to narrow your point of view and by extent your capability to foresight more things (some sounds pretty obvious, some don't until we interacted with that as players). Good luck on your farm, tenno.

Edited April 29, 2020 by xHeretic

[SenorClipClop]

6 hours ago, Morthal said:

Sorry but it's horsecrap.
I've done QA for a well known publisher/developer on a few titles and in many cases there's more contractors working on Console than PC. Even though PC has the most potential for conflicts, it doesn't require MILLIONS of people to stress test.

You misread. They said a testing, on the scale of the PC Scarlet Spear stress test, could cost millions of dollars. Anyway, metrics aren't the point.

[cha0sWyrM]

ah the shedu.....right.

i got all the parts on ground missions...like fast too....so it was possible.

on the other hand...the weapon itself just dont feel right. its far too weak to match its look and sound, and it doest really do what you think it should. it didnt work against the sentients better than my other weapons, as it seems like it should. not at all. my fulmin with no riven was substantially more effective.

dont get me wrong, i like the shedu, its fun and i think it looks cool (i know), which is why the fact that it doesnt feel right is so disappointing.

[hendrix923]

Sunday and Monday night I couldn’t find more than 1 station open to play in. Def ended in a whimper.  Now the new season of hope begins DE can pull off something good. 

[Kyronz]

dysfunctional matchmaking since it was only flotilla wide, had to login with first 15 mins of every 3 hour block, making us play at DE's whim and not  on our schedules.

DE ignored bugs, had that terrible 99/100 murex "design" to punish the few who actually played the event.

Terrible event, and they never apologized for it so we can  expect worse in the future presumably