Feedback on Conclave from a PvP gamer

[Spynathan]

Hello and welcome to my feedback, I'm not a huge MMORPG player but I do enjoy some games in the genre. That said I'm a somewhat competitive PvP gamer, I've competed and won some tournaments in several games which I'm unsure if I can mention here so I'll play it safe. I really enjoy the aesthetic of Warframe and if they expanded and improved in PvP just a bit it could easily become one of my favorite games. I've based this feedback both off my own experience, as well as my friends whom I've played Warframe with in attempts to express some of their opinions as well. With that said I hope you do give this post a read, thank you.

HIGHLIGHTED POINTS--

No1 Give better rewards.
Nobody is going to be willing to learn to "get good" if they don't have motivation to. The best motivation, is rewards. Now I don't think exclusive items are the right way to go about this, as that forces casual players to play PvP to get the items. Rather I believe that simply giving a pool of decent rewards based on score, would be a perfect solution. In the pool items like NORMAL mods, or conclave mods if you make conclave mods usable outside of conclave, (which you should seriously consider making conclave stances usable outside of conclave, but only stances for the sake of balance.) credits in various amounts depending on score, mastery points, endo, resources in varying amounts again depending on score, ect. Simply making PvP an enjoyable way to grind with your friends or just random people online.

No2 PvP is too fast for average people.
Now hear me out! I don't think they should slow down PvP, remove bullet jump, ect. But there's no way for people to build up getting used to that speed, normal PvE all the enemies are slow, you never really encounter enemies acting like a player. The best solution albeit a bit tricky, would to make interception a PvP mode. The need to hold down a specific point would force players to stay in a small area, giving others an opportunity to land a hit. This won't completely nullify the speed of PvP, but I don't think nullifying speed is something that should be done to begin with. This idea is simply making gameplay a bit easier to grasp for less competitive players by giving more unified objectives and attack areas. It would also make a great replacement for Lunaro or Cephalon Capture imo. Although I do believe interception should be made into the main PvP gamemode, so that players can warm up to more up front and challenging modes like standard Annihilation.

No3 Balancing needs work.
Now I'll be honest, some of the finer stats go over my head. I've been playing a decent bit of PvP and haven't lost many if any games at all so I'm going to assume I haven't found the more experienced players yet. But a lot of people do complain about balance, both in normal gameplay AND in Conclave. I don't think anyone expects perfect balance, but some problems are just unreasonably bad and are just being ignored for way too long. For a PRIME example, check Loxyen's post on Telos Boltace.

No3 Very few people play PvP.
This problem is something that is easily partially solved by just implementing point No1 and removing things like Telos Boltace. But to completely solve the problem will require you to actually acknowledge Conclave exists, I didn't even NOTICE that Conclave existed until I was well into the main story. Nobody mentioned it, I just assumed it was another PvE mission arc and so I never tried it. Making the Conclave more visible will get more people thinking about it and more people playing it.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I'm not a huge fan of the grind in MMORPG's but I love Warframes artstyle and aesthetics enough that I still play it a lot. If Warframe expanded on the PvP elements it could easily become my favorite game that's still alive. There's a huge amount of potential for PvP here, but it will require lots of hard work to see become a competitor to other PvP titles. But the points I listed, were all chosen because I believe it will be reasonably easy for the devs to implement. I've worked on games before and I understand that you can't just drop another ton of work into something that already flopped, but I think these 3 points, while still work, is easy enough to implement that they might consider it.



I hope you consider these ideas and criticisms, I'm not a Warframe pro by any means but every voice counts towards a small chance of the Devs touching PvP.

Psst DE over here, I would totally spend a lot of money on cosmetics and random effects if Warframe had better PvP 😉

[Stormdragon]

23 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

Hello and welcome to my feedback,

Hi there! And welcome to the Conclave feedback subforums. 

23 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

I really enjoy the aesthetic of Warframe and if they expanded and improved in PvP just a bit it could easily become one of my favorite games.

We're probably on a very similar spot even though we come from different sides of it since warframe used to be my favorite game back when DE actually worked on conclave, but now i've started to play it less and less as time passes and that's mostly because of DE's neglect to PvP.

With that out of the way, let's jump into the actual topic:

25 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

No1 Give better rewards.

Yes, i'd be actually happy if conclave was added to the game's economy and its rewards were wide enough to *at least* allow players to be able to craft and minmax the gear available in conclave (this includes stuff like warframe/weapon/forma/catalyst/reactor/exilus blueprints and the resources to craft them) and perhaps some other stuff like kuva caches (similar to steel path rewards). Cosmetics are just get and forget rewards, and even though these are neat, will never be enough to create player retention so useful consumable stuff should be the way to go in order to compliment them.

34 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

No2 PvP is too fast for average people.

Seems to be specially true for warframe players, where a big chunk of the playerbase seems to be used to press a button to become invincible and another one to clear entire hordes of enemies (and then any survivor is usually unable to move too which makes shooting it even easier)

34 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

Now hear me out! I don't think they should slow down PvP, remove bullet jump, ect. But there's no way for people to build up getting used to that speed, normal PvE all the enemies are slow, you never really encounter enemies acting like a player. The best solution albeit a bit tricky, would to make interception a PvP mode.

I like this approach since it puts a small handicap on whoever is meeting the conditions to win without arbitrary stuff such as "whoosh whosh, now you can't move", instead it leaves fight or flee to each player's (or team) decision.

40 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

No3 Balancing needs work.

[...]I don't think anyone expects perfect balance, but some problems are just unreasonably bad and are just being ignored for way too long.

Specially true after the release of Plains of Eidolon. Fwiw: back in early 2018 DE made a PvE weapon rebalance that bled into PvP and made several weapons really dumb but still bearable, then during that same year the balance team started disappearing slowly and reached the point of no frame being rebalanced for PvP after Gara (PoE's iconic warframe) and several imbalanced gear (like zaws) taking around an entire year before getting removed from pvp.

There have also been a lot of neat ways to rebalance conclave, but seeing how the devs haven't even replied in this subforum in a very long time many of the players providing feedback and reporting bugs started to move away from warframe as a whole because of how frustrating it is to offer feedback and get exactly the same replies that could be provided by a wall.

For instance: at some point we had this thread by @[DE]joebuck which has a lot of neat ideas, but seeing how many of those went lost in the way is probably easy to figure out; there were also times when @[DE]Saske would hang out on the conclave discord and get help replicating bugs if he requested it in order to fix them faster; and there was even a time when @[DE]Rebecca would play conclave on Prime Time (she's quite good at it!). But now we're stick with waiting for ~9 months waiting for something like removing Telos Boltace from conclave and some other bugs have made it to the game mode as well and some more may be coming bow that @[DE]Pablo has talked about buffing some warframe abilities for an upcoming system ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I probably went too fsr with the history time and kinda feel like a bitter old man after re-reading that lol)

59 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

No3 Very few people play PvP.
This problem is something that is easily partially solved by just implementing point No1 and removing things like Telos Boltace. But to completely solve the problem will require you to actually acknowledge Conclave exists, I didn't even NOTICE that Conclave existed until I was well into the main story. Nobody mentioned it, I just assumed it was another PvE mission arc and so I never tried it. Making the Conclave more visible will get more people thinking about it and more people playing it.

Yeah, balance, rewards and visibility are probably the 3 things on DE's end to help with improving conclave participation, we should also add there improvements to RC and match finding tools since RNG matchmaking is awful for any pvp experience with a small community with way too many different discrete player pools.

The rest is mostly up to us with other stuff such as fighting the constant streams of misinformation about PvP that are normally being spread by people who don't even play it.

1 hour ago, Spynathan said:

Psst DE over here, I would totally spend a lot of money on cosmetics and random effects if Warframe had better PvP 😉

I'd gladly go back to spend big money on warframe if PvP improvements started happening again, and you can be sure there are more players in a similar spot.

[Futuresoldier12]

+1 to this

[Tyreaus]

7 hours ago, Spynathan said:

Rather I believe that simply giving a pool of decent rewards based on score

This partly depends on the rewards, but given the grind mentality of a good portion of Warframe's playerbase, plus the high skill ceiling on Conclave, I can see this leading more to frustration and toxicity than anything beneficial. In my experience getting Conclave standing, there's a certain mental baseline created by a player's average capability. Basically, a player grinding out in that system starts to expect a certain amount of standing. And the points where they do a little bit better are not as prominent as the points where they do worse. It's the difference between "oh, yey, I got 1,000 standing [insert half-hearted party-blower sound]" and "f^%king s^%$ I got 200 standing this'll take 5,000 years" where the computer ends up out the window in the latter. That's just with current standing gain, which would be exacerbated with additional, skill-based rewards.

And I'm the kind of person who gets mad at myself more than others...

Obviously, players should be rewarded for their time. That I wholly agree with. But for Warframe's playerbase and the grind mentality, I don't think rewarding for skill is a spectacular idea, especially if you're talking about grinding anything, and most certainly if you're talking about completely different reward tiers or probabilities (like only match winners can get Forma BPs). It's bad enough with the standing.

Moreover, in my experience, the Conclave community - tiny as it is - tends to be pretty dang cooperative for an individualistic mode. I've had a lot of people encouraging me to get better and offering to coach me, and so on and so forth. I don't want to lose that because the game gives even more reason for people to take advantage of the lesser-skilled. And I certainly don't want to play Conclave to rip my hair out because I'm one of the people who doesn't use Telos Boltace to rack up 20+ kills and my sense of fair gameplay gets me shafted in the reward category on the reg. I want to play just to play, and if I happen to get a little happy dialogue from papa Teshin, cool. As it is, I'm counting my games, not my standing, for that exact reason.

That's just me, at least.

7 hours ago, Spynathan said:

No2 PvP is too fast for average people.

Interception is a great idea for PvP and the only tragedy is that it's unlikely to take off even in the best cases, just because it's hard to funnel players from something.

8 hours ago, Spynathan said:

No3 Balancing needs work.

Perhaps balancing alongside more transparency and simplicity. A good bit of PvP feels unbalanced because there's a lot of obfuscation, from an almost total lack of bullet trails to zero kill cams to differences in performance based on mysterious modding setups, up to the point people can use different skins and weapon names and unless you look at your log.ee file, you literally might not know what killed you if you aren't hyper-aware of firing sounds. PvE bleed-overs don't help, for sure, but neither does having no answer to "what the f^%k one-shot me from across the map?" (Turns out it was a lucky Tigris Prime...)

Plus things like having very little audio feedback when getting hit so shields can feel like they disappear with one bullet when it was actually five, but you'll never know.

I also think one problem that's plagued Conclave for a while is an over-reliance on calculators. For example, Snipetron used to be famed for 2-shotting on body shots and one-shotting on headshots. The idea in the math is that it has a long reload time, so it's decently balanced. In practice, though, the mobility makes it not that difficult to work around the reload time at all. There's various other pieces here and there that on paper seem perfectly fine and fair, and you can test them against an Excalibur training dummy, but the results don't feel fair in the actual gameplay.

If we double-checked our math with the gameplay feel and had a lot more clarity on what is actually happening, 90% of balancing complaints would probably be settled, and the other 10% would be those stupid PvE bleed-overs. (Hyperbolic numbers but, y'know...)

8 hours ago, Spynathan said:

No3 Very few people play PvP.

Been suggested to have some kind of icon in the alert tray on the Navigation console. Still say they should. (Bonus points if they add in a cycling event mode - gives more reason to put it there)

Only iffy on the "reward skill" concept. Otherwise, yeah. Agreed.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

10 hours ago, Spynathan said:

No2 PvP is too fast for average people.

Honestly this is the number one reason why I don't play Conclave in Warframe

too many insane bunny hopping flying players dominating the matches, and really that's not the kind of game I want to play.

I come from a more traditional FPS background, so slow and steady like Master Chief is how I like things.

noted that Hunters in Destiny1+2 kinda killed that game's Pvp for me to for the same reason....

[Spynathan]

@Tyreaus It's important to remember three things, firstly the difference between first and last place doesn't need to be that big. Let's say last place got 50k credits, even if 1st place only got 60k credits, it's enough to say "Hey well done, you got first place." I think the devs could have a community poll on something like that, to see what players think on it. The second thing that's important to remember is that risk/reward gameplay especially skill based has seen very, very positive results in similar games. D2's Crucible has huge rewards and huge differences in rewards based on your scores. And that ended up being one of the things that brought a ton of players into D2 as a whole, despite being just as if not more of a grind mentality player base than Warframe. Although I understand your concerns with toxicity, at least from my experience I've already ran into lots of *very* toxic players in the conclave lol. But hey that's just what happens, long as you're with friends I'm sure you'll have a good time. Lastly this wouldn't have anything exclusive, as mentioned it would be things you could get anywhere else with the only real objective is giving people a different way to grind. So if things were taking a long time and you were on a losing streak, you could just relax for a bit and go back to the normal grinding method for whichever resource you were grinding. And remember with interception there's no single winner, it's your whole team vs another whole team, this sets up to the option of a much more evenly distributed reward system that's still based on skill but gives everyone decent stuff.

@(PS4)haphazardlynamed Of course he's on PS4... Jk jk. On a serious note I know how you feel, especially on controller this kind of speed is hard to keep up with. That said they shouldn't just slow it down or make it a standard shooter, because there's already plenty of great games that do that and they'd just be copying at that point. Keeping Warframes speed, while not for everyone would certainly keep a cohesive gameplay structure and wouldn't be competing with practically every shooter game on the market. On top of that there's a huge lack of fast paced agile shooters and Warframe imo is the perfect fit for the role.

[Tyreaus]

2 hours ago, Spynathan said:

The second thing that's important to remember is that risk/reward gameplay especially skill based has seen very, very positive results in similar games.

Here's the major contention: we have a skill-based reward system in the form of standing. So we should be seeing some effects of that system in place. I think we do. I have seen a number of people decry the abysmal standing gain, basically suffer through PvP they dislike for that standing gain (with little desire to get better in spite of that incentive), and other people more than willing to cheese and abuse the game's systems for that standing gain. I have also seen toxicity (and never claimed Conclave was immune from that). I have not seen a massive influx for Conclave, and that's in spite of exclusive rewards - including PvP-exclusive, PvE-usable mods that can be traded for plat.

As you say, people flock to Destiny 2 over Crucible. However, people don't do that for Conclave, and indeed, many, many don't want PvP in Warframe in the first place. That means there's a fundamental difference between D2 players and Warframe players that can completely bugger any analogy or expectation. If I had to flip a coin over whether I'd get more or fewer credits playing Conclave versus doing a run of Index - which, given the lack of effective matchmaking, would be what it'd come down to - I would toss the coin to my Witcher and go to the Index. I'd bet that's quite common among Warframe's playerbase. We'll take the surefire route over the gamble, TYVM.

To reiterate: we have a skill-based reward system with exclusive rewards and faster progression for higher skill tiers. It hasn't worked. In what way would doubling down on that suddenly turn things around?

[Spynathan]

@Tyreaus I'll start with the point that many many people don't even want PvP in Warframe, and that makes a big difference between D2's player base and Warframe's. I'm unsure of what you mean by many, do you mean majority or just a decent number of people? Because I would argue even in D2 the majority of players wouldn't want PvP as a majority of players don't even want the game, huge amounts of players play for a few hours and drop the game. Now if you're saying most active players don't want PvP you'd likely still be right, but that would just as likely be the case in D2, but both D2 and Warframe are huge games, a 10-20% increase in active players from PvP even if small compared to the overall numbers, would be a massive pay off considering the price of development assuming prices are average and development has been well structured of course. So overall I doubt there's much of a difference in player base preferences, although I don't have insider statistics so obviously I can't say anything with certainty, I can only make the best guess based on what I can find out.

As for standing and standing rewards, personally I dislike the system of standing as a whole, Ostron, Sigil, ect. It's a bit overly grindy for my preferences, especially with ranks and all that, but I suspect most people are ok with it. With that said I have been actively asking friends I play with and random people I run into how they feel about conclave rewards before making this post, as I wanted to have a reasonably informed opinion before forming my own. And *almost* everyone disliked the current Conclave rewards. I'll point some huge problems in the current system out, that ruin any positive effect it could have had. Firstly these are almost all one off rewards, unless you're willing to sell for plat which personally I'm not willing to sit down and take the time to sell things to anyone because it's just not enjoyable to me, then all these rewards are just obtain and forget. Once you get them all, or if you're not interested in them to begin with, then they're pretty much useless. Second big problem is that a lot of these rewards are exclusives, this forces people who genuinely do not want to play PvP, to play PvP for these rewards. And that's always a terrible idea imo, make PvP a completely optional game mode, useful but completely optional. People being forced to play PvP will lead both to people hating on PvP,  and people who don't really enjoy PvP to want it simplified to the extreme. Third problem and this is a bit on the opinionated side, is that standing is a bit of a pain to grind, the amount of standing you get when you lose is wayyy too low to be enjoyable imo. Which I'll mention again it's very important for losing players to still get a reasonable reward, even in a skill based reward system.

This overall leads to players who don't want to play PvP, playing PvP and who ultimately just want to stop playing PvP ASAP. Rewards like resources, credits or endo, are things you will always use, can always get somewhere else just as fast and will be useful to *almost* every player even in late and end game. Also even with a skill based reward system, that will only work in a skill based game mode. Nothing ticks me off as much as a low/no skill meta in a "skill based" game mode that makes me lose consistently, and I'm sure others feel the same. People are much more likely to dislike a "skill based system", when it claims to be skill based but has absolute CHEESE metas. I'd go as far as to say a decent number of people probably don't want PvP at all just because of that kind of nonsense.

Also forgot to bring out this point earlier, but you had mentioned Snipetron and how the PvE math just doesn't work in PvP. I think that could definitely be one of the big things that leads to crazy broken balance. And this is a huge opinion here but I've always disliked one shot weapons, I think if Warframe was to be the odd ball in PvP, the fast paced unorthodox shooter, that they'd benefit from not having *any* one shot weapons. But I suspect that's probably a very controversial topic, but it's a hill I'm willing to die on kek. 

[Tyreaus]

7 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

I'll start with the point that many many people don't even want PvP in Warframe

I think it's important here to point out that you said, to paraphrase, that people flock to D2 for Crucible, and I was pointing out that that isn't the case for Warframe. That's the major point, with the problem of anti-PvP sentiment being secondary. Even if we were to assume that the contra-PvP sentiment is roughly identical between the two games - and I have no idea - there's an evident difference in results.

That is to say, in spite of having those sorts of skill-based rewards or progression systems in PvP, Conclave doesn't see the same results as Crucible. There is some kind of fundamental difference. And so besides my personal predilections that lean quite far away from trying to emphasize that, there's evidence saying that it might not work for Warframe.

(My personal opinion is that, Warframe being more of a casual game, it should lean into that more completely in terms of Conclave. That would mean de-emphasizing "super serious" competition, like skill-based rewards, and, instead, leaning toward a theme of "something to mess around / practice with". Like Stormdragon says, players are used to easy mode. That doesn't mean you can't have a competitive mode, or can't create an area that fosters competition, but it does mean trying to push a serious, competitive narrative onto players is ... anachronistic, for a lack of better phrase. I have the same contention with much of Warframe's theme as a whole and always found Dog Days to be the sort of thing that feels more fitting than...just about anything else not involving the Sentient - because there should be something that subverts thematic expectations at some point. But that's also just me.)

18 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

As for standing and standing rewards, personally I dislike the system of standing as a whole [trim]

This is why I mention the part about what the rewards are being an important caveat. If you're scaling credits or endo, it's inconsequential to me: just about any decent amount is nice to have. I think many people would go along those lines. That I'm fine with - obviously, because it doesn't matter to me.

The "problem", so to say, is that such apathy starts to negate competitive encouragement. For example, if you're happy with 100,000 credits and that's the least amount you can get, getting 200,000 would be nice, but it's not a big deal if you don't get it. Compare that to a scale that goes down to 0 credits, however, and you have a big reason to get better. You also have a big point of frustration.

And that's a big reason I'm iffy about it in the first place, because the stated goal is to encourage people to get better, and I'm not sure the relationship of that idea to the existing system. If the goal is actually just to add in skill-based rewards but give everyone decent rewards without a great deal of care how much it encourages competition - even if it's less than the current, exclusive-reward, gilded-200-standing-telephone-pole-up-the-backdoor standing system - then that isn't a problem. But if the focus is on encouraging competition more than the current system, then it seems that the people lower down on the totem pole have to be shafted even harder than 200 standing per match. First goal is fine, arguably an improvement on the current standing system because the consolation prize is acceptable. The second one sounds like it's ready to shove twelve Noxes into the works for the resultant fury and toxicity.

1 hour ago, Spynathan said:

how the PvE math just doesn't work in PvP.

It's less about PvE / PvP math and more about paper vs practical performance. For example, on paper, Snipetron has a lengthy reload to offset its large damage potential. The problem with that is, that's great for the second person who engages the guy who just killed you - assuming that person engages them immediately after, but I'll set aside the entire issue of engagement downtimes and reloads and mobility for now. To you? That reload didn't mean jack diddly squat. So of course it doesn't feel fair, because you don't even get to experience the balancing aspect of the weapon.

This also goes for things like Ignis - conceptually balanced (quite well so), but if your graphical settings aren't just right, enjoy looking into the f%$king sun. Paper DPS won't tell you advantages like that.

1 hour ago, Spynathan said:

And this is a huge opinion here but I've always disliked one shot weapons

Generally, I agree, except for bows. I think it comes down to a few factors:

1. Impact. I don't know if it's like this for anyone else, but if I get one-shot with a Daikyu, I feel it. The visceral impact makes it feel like the other player's earned it in some way, or at least that there's a sensible "right, of course I died". For a majority of sniper rifles, conversely, there's no impact. The player's character keels over dead.

2. Information. At longer ranges with bows, he player character ends up flying denotes where you were shot from, so you can determine at least the direction of your opponent and make sense of the arrow shot - so on and so forth. Usually, bows are also closer quarters, so that's a common data point. Snipers seem to lack bullet trails and don't have any character momentum so, as said, you keel over and die - which happens from any direction and any range. What killed me? Did I trip over a rock? I can guess, but I don't have a tangible idea.

3. Hate to say it, but hack potential. Being able to aimbot with a sniper rifle and get one-shots is obvious. Doing the same with a bow, while technically possible, is much less likely - certainly less likely to be done in a way that doesn't raise red flags because of the aforementioned information. So there's less of a snap judgement.

[Spynathan]

@Tyreaus For the first point, or what I can make out from the first point at least... Some of that was a bit convoluted with what I can only assume is the language of the gods, or native Ostron words. But yes there is a huge difference in how many people play PvP in D2 vs Warframe, but that's the whole point. If people were flocking to Warframe PvP and people praised it just as much, it'd be very hard for me or you to argue that it needs any changes. The fact that very few people play it and that it's generally criticized a fair amount, is the reason a lot of people give feedback. It seems much more likely to me that Conclave is the problem and not just people being against PvP. But of course I don't exactly have statistics on that.

As for rewards, people are willing to micro manage and rush around the map to get extra kills to rank their weapons up ever so slightly faster especially on places like Hydron, so I think a reward system partially based on score but that still gave people reasonable rewards would be enough incentive for people to try and improve and not be completely miserable because they didn't get anything worth while if they scored poorly. Although we'd have to see how people would react to it to know for sure of course, but things like that aren't hard to tweak based on feedback so I don't think it'd be a problem at all implementing and adjusting based on community polls as to how much a difference there should be, or if there should be any difference at all depending on score. Personally I'd prefer a big gap based on skill but I know that most people wouldn't like that, but I doubt people want flat rates either. However a simple feedback poll can remove any doubt on something like that and it's practically effortless to just make rewards flat rate, irrelevant of score so they could definitely change it in a small patch without any issues... Hopefully...

Fair points when it comes to paper vs hands on experience, hands on testing for everything is definitely better but if something is too much work, DE may just not bother with it although I really do hope they do more hands on testing with everything in general and rush less. But for fast work I think a general standard math specifically for PvP could work to a much better extent than whatever we have now. A minimum amount of hits and time required to kill so that people aren't one shot or insta yeeted by mega rapid fire and hard caps on what kind of stun and rag doll effects can be applied in PvP. If they aren't willing to hand test things at all then hopefully they could at least look at the most popular feedback of unbalanced Conclave weapons/mods/warframes and adjust accordingly.

As for bows I can partially agree, while it would constitute a fair one shot imo to snipe someone with a fairly normal bow on a headshot, there's nothing stopping people from just using bows as melee if that were the case. And having TTK (time to kill) last long enough for melee to come into play is pretty important *if* you want melee to be a thing of course. Unless you were to add some soft auto aim to melee kind of like what we have on archwing, but I'd rather just melee be viable as is without it being one shot either. As for something like bows, I wouldn't be against a damage multiplier based on how far away you landed the shot from, just far enough to prevent people from using it as melee.

[Tyreaus]

14 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

For the first point, or what I can make out from the first point at least... Some of that was a bit convoluted with what I can only assume is the language of the gods, or native Ostron words. But yes there is a huge difference in how many people play PvP in D2 vs Warframe, but that's the whole point. If people were flocking to Warframe PvP and people praised it just as much, it'd be very hard for me or you to argue that it needs any changes. The fact that very few people play it and that it's generally criticized a fair amount, is the reason a lot of people give feedback. It seems much more likely to me that Conclave is the problem and not just people being against PvP. But of course I don't exactly have statistics on that.

The gist:

You say Conclave should have incentive to get better because it would attract more players the same way Crucible attracts players with that kind of thing. "D2's Crucible has huge rewards and huge differences in rewards based on your scores. And that ended up being one of the things that brought a ton of players into D2 as a whole"

Conclave has an incentive to get better in the form of standing gains.

Conclave isn't flourishing like Crucible is.

That could be because Conclave is poorly designed. That could also be because people aren't attracted by "more stuff for doing better". Thus: "okay, sure, it works for Crucible; don't know if copy-pasting that would work for Conclave". It might. It also might not. Conclave might be better with less emphasis on competition. But just because it works for Destiny 2 doesn't mean it will, or even should, work for Warframe.

22 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

As for rewards, people are willing to micro manage and rush around the map to get extra kills to rank their weapons up ever so slightly faster especially on places like Hydron, so I think a reward system partially based on score but that still gave people reasonable rewards would be enough incentive for people to try and improve and not be completely miserable because they didn't get anything worth while if they scored poorly.

While you're definitely right in that we'd have to see how people take it, the comparison is kind of apples v oranges. Min-maxing on a build-screen versus improving in PvP is like learning computer shortcuts versus lifting at the gym. People who like one definitely aren't guaranteed to like the other (and I wouldn't expect people to).

26 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

Fair points when it comes to paper vs hands on experience, hands on testing for everything is definitely better but if something is too much work, DE may just not bother with it although I really do hope they do more hands on testing with everything in general and rush less. But for fast work I think a general standard math specifically for PvP could work to a much better extent than whatever we have now. A minimum amount of hits and time required to kill so that people aren't one shot or insta yeeted by mega rapid fire and hard caps on what kind of stun and rag doll effects can be applied in PvP. If they aren't willing to hand test things at all then hopefully they could at least look at the most popular feedback of unbalanced Conclave weapons/mods/warframes and adjust accordingly.

Most of the feedback on balance boils down to "fix PvE bleed-over", which should be a given. Otherwise, yeah: focus on the major things. A lot of the finer balance issues can be fudged. There's more leeway with specific DPS numbers than you'd think.

36 minutes ago, Spynathan said:

As for bows I can partially agree, while it would constitute a fair one shot imo to snipe someone with a fairly normal bow on a headshot, there's nothing stopping people from just using bows as melee if that were the case. And having TTK (time to kill) last long enough for melee to come into play is pretty important *if* you want melee to be a thing of course. Unless you were to add some soft auto aim to melee kind of like what we have on archwing, but I'd rather just melee be viable as is without it being one shot either. As for something like bows, I wouldn't be against a damage multiplier based on how far away you landed the shot from, just far enough to prevent people from using it as melee.

Eh I mean you have situational one-shots in the form of some shotguns so that problem's kind of there, bow or not...

As for damage multiplier, funny thing is, Spring-Loaded Broadhead. They're a step ahead!

[Kontrollo]

I agree with a lot you write in your OP, but part of the following discussion kinda misses the point without context. You guys should've been around in 2015/16 to understand how we've arrived at where we are. And in 2016/17 if you want to have a good discussion about Conclave balance.

 

6 hours ago, Spynathan said:

The fact that very few people play it and that it's generally criticized a fair amount, is the reason a lot of people give feedback. It seems much more likely to me that Conclave is the problem and not just people being against PvP. But of course I don't exactly have statistics on that.

Pfff haha. Go on Reddit r/gaming and search for Warframe, sort by top of all time. You'll still find that the most upvoted gameplay clip is from Conclave.

Spoiler

Now search for Conclave on r/warframe and try to find a thread in which there's positive talk of it (what we have in the game) and that isn't heavily downvoted. You can probably count those on one hand, and it's nothing new. This has been going on for years on end.

 

5 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

That could be because Conclave is poorly designed. That could also be because people aren't attracted by "more stuff for doing better". Thus: "okay, sure, it works for Crucible; don't know if copy-pasting that would work for Conclave". It might. It also might not. Conclave might be better with less emphasis on competition. But just because it works for Destiny 2 doesn't mean it will, or even should, work for Warframe.

How about: It hasn't properly been supported for years, and even before that there was only a small team working on it.

 

It's kind of moot for you guys to talk about balance and compare it to D2's Crucible, when the latter obviously has devs who work on it, and also proper matchmaking. Conclave on the other hand has Recruit Conditioning, and that's it. Also, you might know about the bug that new people start with a melee only if they happen to find their way into a game without changing their loadout first? It's not a recent bug, in fact, that has been unchanged since 2016.

Here's a small part of the timeline for Conclave 2.0 (current implementation). Got introduced in spring 2015, and there were some calls for better matchmaking already in that year. Here's what Joe said in the roadmap thread in autumn 2015 (that was in a time where some devs actually read this subforum):

Spoiler

About 6 months later we got Recruit Conditioning pretty much in its current form:

• Progression entirely based on Syndicate rank-up
  • Which also means we've had squatters who refuse to rank up ever since (e.g. read through other thread).
  • It's still entirely possible to be someone completely new to the game and face someone with hundreds of hours of PvE, and there's nothing that would change that experience for you unless you only play against friends, because there's only either RC or non-RC, no better way of matchmaking.
• Hard separation between RC and non-RC
• Gold mods disabled in RC
• No proper explanations

 

They also tried simpler. They did that in the Conclave mini-events in 2016/17. I was there for Snowday Showdown and in-game I had the impression people were enjoying it. But you should've seen the crowd on the forums... (threads from these events are still there, by the way. Just use Google instead of the crappy forum search function). And in fact that would be the best way to give people who don't want to play it regularly a way to easily gain some standing.

Why not bring them back? My guess is the devs are afraid some people would lose their S#&$ again over a decoration or other cosmetic reward. We already have the unwritten rule of "put nothing behind PvP that is relevant for PvE progression" (something I can get behind by the way) because of how the crowd here behaves and reacts. And yes, there's no question they should increase the standing gain and overhaul the rewards. Hasn't been done in years, either. The weekly challenge still rewards PvE stances, for example (they were shared once upon a time).

[(XBOX)Zweimander]

Well if PvP stuff cant be worked towards in PvE why should PvP players be able to get PvE stuff in conclave?

I would of agreed but then they removed medallions effecting PvP which would of been completely fair! It wasn't even that much rep and would of taken ages to get anything with them and yet it was revoked. Once they add that ability back to the UNIVERSAL medallions I can agree to givong better rewards but until then I give a hard NO! Blame the guy who whined and got the functionality removed for your lack of rewards PvP people.

[Sevek7]

17 hours ago, (XB1)Zweimander said:

Well if PvP stuff cant be worked towards in PvE why should PvP players be able to get PvE stuff in conclave?

I would of agreed but then they removed medallions effecting PvP which would of been completely fair! It wasn't even that much rep and would of taken ages to get anything with them and yet it was revoked. Once they add that ability back to the UNIVERSAL medallions I can agree to givong better rewards but until then I give a hard NO! Blame the guy who whined and got the functionality removed for your lack of rewards PvP people.

The majority of conclave players were actually in support of universal medallions working for conclave. I understand the urge to condemn an entire group based on the actions of a single person, but please try to be better.

[Miyabi-sama]

В 09.08.2020 в 09:37, Tyreaus сказал:

I can see this leading more to frustration and toxicity than anything beneficial.

There are always been people toxic about everything conclave. Screw them.

I'd play today if it was not for that stupid several weapons and stat abuses despite lack of reward. But for people interested in both conclave and PvE, and have not a lot of time, what we have now is basically a trade off: you either playing PvE and get tons of stuff, or playing conclave and getting a donut hole.

[BuckStagarr]

I just approach conclave when I'm bored, and usually approach tryhards with sarcasm and false praise...

[_nYsa_]

When I started Warframe I spent a lot of time playing Conclave until Plains of Eidolons was released. I'm not a Veteran Conclave player, i didn't even bother to level up the ranking.

Because i do not care about the rank.

I care about the fun.

And it was fun.

SO FUN (no sarcasm).

Yea sometimes got matched against scoom vets who keep spawn killing you even if you don't move.

Sometimes got matched against experienced duos or teams (premades) while my team was full of random people first time playing together and you lose quick.

Sometimes got matched against same level players as myself.

Sometimes got matched against PvP rank farmers who use only current OP stuff to climb. BORING.

People join PvP match and abandon it after 2nd death. During 1 match you get to play with 10 different people on your team as "there is free spot in the team" after someone quits.

Sometimes its the enemy who quits and after rejoins on my team because someone from my team quits also. THE TABLE TURNED.

But when you finally get those good match-ups, its sooooooo fun and you forget that you've waited 30 minutes in the queue.

My favorites were wrecking fireball Valkyr, flying down from the sky into 2-3 enemies for the sweet double-triple kill, or confusing enemy with radiation damage from Oberon.

@Spynathan Your feedback is good, but it is oriented for the PvP to be remade into a mode for "tryhards". The average Warframe player isn't even interested to play PvP, not because it's too fast but because it's PvP. Sensitive towards dying in games by the hands of other players. Mentality matters. That's why they play endless PvE modes and do the solo Eidolon hunts. That's fun for them. Forcing PvE mentality players to play PvP in modes like interception will result in interception not being played and toxicity rising.

How about removing all the mods and rewards at all? Strip PvP naked, play with basic stats only. Grind only to acquire new frame and weapon - or buy with plat (if PvP only) on market. Implement role queue like mage - dps - tank - support for the match up. Separate PvP rank for frames/weapons with a fashion reward for the ranked frame/weapon, can be existing fashion but with locked coloring options. And for the competitive "tryhards" can go for PvP point-based ranking which resets every month (maybe week?) with rewards like shiny chat titles for the next month duration and some rng loot-boxes with loot like prime weapons or prime frames. You would think pffff A CHAT TITLE ... actually, many want a shiny title, and will try to have it at least one time, resulting in more people playing PvP.

I'm not gonna touch balancing issue because all PvP games struggle with balance.

 

Sincerely,

nYsa