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Since when has "power fantasy" become a compelling argument against game balance?


Flying_Scorpion

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9 hours ago, Ethorin said:

It's not "aware of your surroundings" when something the same color as the ground distinguishable primarily by small bumps often not visible through the grass pop out to murder you while you are bullet jumping in the middle of a fire fight. Possibly higher details would help but my PC takes plenty long enough to load the Vallis already. 

Nor is it "aware of your surroundings" when something from too far to make out details blasts you from behind. At least Grineer Ballistae are A. basically always in their towers and B. have a laser pointer to alert you.

 

Also, how exactly is "awareness" supposed to help when something bounces from behind me to still behind me and off screen knocking me down and preventing me from moving?

 

Being killed by your own mistake is one thing, being killed because you are somehow supposed to know that an opticor is about to hit you from behind is something else entirely.

 

Could all of these enemies have had more telegraphing added instead of nerfs to numbers? Sure. Did DE have the time and spare attention to actually make something that works? Maybe, but maybe not. Should DE return to the Vallis to make these enemies deadly again but with more telegraphing? I'd like that personally. But if your argument is "there was enough telegraphing already", no, no there bloody well wasn't. Possibly the Raknoids had enough with the right graphics settings, but again, my PC takes plenty long enough to load the Vallis and let me start moving once I'm ON the Vallis that any more load and I'm worried my PC will outright crap out.

Well I can sympathise with the graphics requirements causing issues but I disagree with the rest. After the initial deaths to put me on my toes I didn't often die to them so clearly I was doing was working. The only time when it was true pandemonium is when we started trying to find some good Toroid farming, using Nidus to pull a crewman inside so he would plant a beacon and enemies would spawn in a small room with AoE's going off. This only backfired when it started spawning enormous spiders inside the buildings lol which is a bit hard to dodge.

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56 minutes ago, kxZyle said:

Power fantasy isn't an argument against balance, it's an alternative to it. And it's necessary, considering DE has proven time and time again that they're absolutely awful at maintaining balance. Look at the current state of secondaries vs. primaries, guns vs. melee, the massive chasm in usefulness between the best and worst frames, the supposedly-balancing riven system, the varying usefulness (and uselessness) of the different sentinels and companions, and so on.

The one "balancing" move DE has up their sleeve is going after whatever people happen to be enjoying at the moment, and all that does is stop those people from having fun and contributes nothing towards actually fixing any of the massive underlying systemic problems.

No, it isn't.

Halo is a power fantasy, so is Devil May Cry and DOOM Eternal. Depending on your exact definitions, even Dark Souls could be considered a power fantasy. Power Fantasy is an extremely broad term that encompasses a huge chunk of modern media. It is ultimately just the fantasy of  being powerful, and that can be delivered in a myriad ways. Balance is merely how the game ensures that it delivers that.

As for the current state of these weapons, I wouldn't be too shocked if it's thanks to several underlying issues, and largely the fact that the playerbase will have a fit if DE does what they have to do and nerf the upper end outliers in order to bring that in line, rather than DE's own inability.

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13 hours ago, Flying_Scorpion said:

Warframe is an action game. You know what separates edge of your seat "action" from falling asleep in your chair "action"? If the protagonist is actually put at risk. Like if they *might* actually die or fail or whatever. If the protagonist effortlessly overcame any semblance of a challenge, it would become predictable and boring. If the protagonist barely manages to overcome the challenge, it keeps you on the edge of your seat.

That is all. Feel free to trash me now because I said something that conflicts with your worldview.

Use less powerful things and let others have fun with what they enjoy.

Your sort of argument always loses because you want to be forced to use worse weapons and abilities in order to have fun, even if it means everyone has to suffer under your ideal vision of the game.

No thanks, I want a power romp through the map and come up with the most fun and/or powerful combos possible. Builds are what the make the game fun, "balance" ruins that.
Besides, a lot of people think balance is about making everything have an equal output and don't understand that it's a range of numbers that allow for something to the be best or worst. They are ignorant and should never be listened to.

 

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1 minute ago, Loza03 said:

As for the current state of these weapons, I wouldn't be too shocked if it's thanks to several underlying issues, and largely the fact that the playerbase will have a fit if DE does what they have to do and nerf the upper end outliers in order to bring that in line, rather than DE's own inability.

They're already doing that by way of slowly nerfing rivens for popular weapons into the ground.

The only thing actually stopping them from doing proper balancing is that it takes far more work than nerfing flavor of the day, week, month etc. weapons and being done with it. It's part of their continued refusal to revisit older content as opposed to chasing new players with big, flashy, new updates.

The one Warframe: Revisited patch we had wasn't enough. We need like five more, and balancing could be part of them.

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I think you are confusing argument with reality. The game design in this moment is made to be able to take on hordes of enemies from lv1 to level 10k. The 10k "cap" is just an random number they put at the end to make it so people don't die in front of their computers after 30 hours non-stop play.
The mod system, the enemy scaling and the whole modding and gear check is in this game to make it so you can take those lv 10k if you want.
If it wasn't a power fantasy none of those numbers should be this high or exist at all and in place of them should be some real challenge.
So, yes "balance" of some item or ability in this context is pure bs.

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26 minutes ago, -CdG-Zilchy said:

After the initial deaths to put me on my toes I didn't often die to them so clearly I was doing was working.

Unless you can ARTICULATE what you were doing, why it was a response to the enemies, and how it worked, that's just as likely to be memory distortion as it is to actually be "the enemies had enough telegraphing".

 

And given that everyone ELSE who was surviving that environment did it using things like Iron Skin and Blessing and the various 95% damage mitigation tools...

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3 minutes ago, Smilomaniac said:

Use less powerful things and let others have fun with what they enjoy.

Your sort of argument always loses because you want to be forced to use worse weapons and abilities in order to have fun, even if it means everyone has to suffer under your ideal vision of the game.

No thanks, I want a power romp through the map and come up with the most fun and/or powerful combos possible. Builds are what the make the game fun, "balance" ruins that.
Besides, a lot of people think balance is about making everything have an equal output and don't understand that it's a range of numbers that allow for something to the be best or worst. They are ignorant and should never be listened to.

 

This sort of argument is also flawed.

It assumes that every player exists completely disconnected with each other, when they aren't. We are all playing the same game, and are all factors in the design of new content. DE cannot assume that people are going to willingly power down for new content, and so must design under the assumption that we're going to cheese it. This disproportionately affects players who are willingly powering down, because the anti-cheese measures or extremely bloated stats to try and suppress the other players are still in effect for them. This means that, since the content is designed around the arms race between community and developers, people who choose not to engage in it get left behind.

It also works on the flawed assumption that balance is bad for fun or powerful combos. Proper balance, for Warframe at least, would probably wind up being that the most fun combos are the most powerful. Balance is highly variable - it is just the game delivering the intended experience, and for Warframe, that does mean that highly personalised, customised experience. The main failure of Warframe's balancing is that, due to the outliers in certain fields, that experience isn't properly provided for as one particular experience type is disproportionately more rewarding in both loot and success rate than the others - and is exacerbated , that experience happens to be 'disable/ignore enemies and combat encounters as much as possible'.

7 minutes ago, kxZyle said:

They're already doing that by way of slowly nerfing rivens for popular weapons into the ground.

The only thing actually stopping them from doing proper balancing is that it takes far more work than nerfing flavor of the day, week, month etc. weapons and being done with it. It's part of their continued refusal to revisit older content as opposed to chasing new players with big, flashy, new updates.

The one Warframe: Revisited patch we had wasn't enough. We need like five more, and balancing could be part of them.

In fairness to DE, we can't forget that the game does run on the big flashy new updates. That's its own balancing act - games need new players to survive, but they also need to keep their old players. Quality of life and balancing updates don't bring in new players - big new updates don't keep old ones. 

Granted, power creep has only exacerbated that problem further (since we're so powerful that most combat encounters are the same, and most updates revolve around combat, that means that most updates wind up feeling the same before long, which reduces their longevity), and that much is DE's fault, but at the end of the day, the overall problem of 'new stuff vs fixing stuff' is among the hardest to solve, and people have been trying for as long as perpetual experience games have been a thing.

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9 hours ago, Ethorin said:

Unless you can ARTICULATE what you were doing, why it was a response to the enemies, and how it worked, that's just as likely to be memory distortion as it is to actually be "the enemies had enough telegraphing".

 

And given that everyone ELSE who was surviving that environment did it using things like Iron Skin and Blessing and the various 95% damage mitigation tools...

It kinda feels like you're just replying to have a go at me so I'm not too sure why I'm bothering but I was simply aware of the threat and actually watching out for it, that's not that difficult to grasp. I didn't use Primed Sure Footed(didn't have it at the time) and I sure as hell didn't use Rhino as I was farming. Pretty sure I was using Banshee for our runs. Do me a favour, try not to act like a school teacher in your reply, thanks.

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16 minutes ago, Ethorin said:

Unless you can ARTICULATE what you were doing, why it was a response to the enemies, and how it worked, that's just as likely to be memory distortion as it is to actually be "the enemies had enough telegraphing".

 

And given that everyone ELSE who was surviving that environment did it using things like Iron Skin and Blessing and the various 95% damage mitigation tools...

You can see where all damage is coming from in Orb Vallis. 

It's no ones fault if you're having rendering issues as I see everything in PS4. 

There are gun turrets whose projectiles can be traced back to the high ledges they are on if you use your eyes. 

You can use a weapon to shoot them, or void dash up to them and amp them or whatever else. 

You can or should be able to see the corpus' projectiles from afar as well. Their projectiles are little blue beams that are kind of hard to miss.... 

Then there are robots that can trick inexperienced players because they jump a long distance over to you and do a slam attack. 

There are mines and those comba guys that nullify abilities etc.

Meanwhile people forget those long range turrets can respawn so you have to still keep an eye on those as well.

The kyta raknoids drop that electricity net that casuals stand in and get killed by and forget the kyta Raknoids can teleport as well.

I can solo these with a simple nekros loadout involving health conversion and actually moving around shooting with my weapons to apply this thing called a "status" as well as using my melee weapons to kill them all no problem.

 

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12 minutes ago, -CdG-Zilchy said:

It kinda feels like you're just replying to have a go at me so I'm not too sure why I'm bothering but I was simply aware of the threat and actually watching out for it,

Ok, let me repeat myself

 

Pre-nerf I was dying to Opticor wielders firing into my back from far enough away that I would not be able to distinguish them from a rando with a Dera, even if my back was not turned. How, exactly, would one "be aware" of that?

 

Again, as far as I could tell there were no signs, there was nothing like "this happens then I die so I need to be aware of this thing", no, I just died. The closest I can relate it to is when Toxic Ancients kill you through a wall with their aura.

 

2 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

There are gun turrets whose projectiles can be traced back to the high ledges they are on if you use your eyes. 

Literally not what ANYONE was talking about, please actually READ before you try to retort.

3 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

You can or should be able to see the corpus' projectiles from afar as well. Their projectiles are little blue beams that are kind of hard to miss.... 

Not how the Opticor works.

3 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

There are mines

There are mines? I have literally never noticed any explosives in the ground. There's little spiders that hide underground and are effectively invisible 95% of the time until they actually attack, which used to always apply a very strong bleed proc, usually multiple, due to how close together they were, which was plenty to instantly murder basically any frame without either a health sub, invincibility, or 95% damage reduction.

5 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

can solo these with a simple nekros loadout involving health conversion

You mean the Nekros build that stacks absurd armor from the ludicrous health orb generation of Desecrate with the Shadow Shield augment to create one of the tankiest frames in the game? That's literally what I was talking about with people who survived the pre-nerf Fortuna with one of many 95% damage reduction tools lol.

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10 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

This sort of argument is also flawed.

It assumes that every player exists completely disconnected with each other, when they aren't. We are all playing the same game, and are all factors in the design of new content. DE cannot assume that people are going to willingly power down for new content, and so must design under the assumption that we're going to cheese it. This disproportionately affects players who are willingly powering down, because the anti-cheese measures or extremely bloated stats to try and suppress the other players are still in effect for them. This means that, since the content is designed around the arms race between community and developers, people who choose not to engage in it get left behind.

They can assume people will overpower the content and choose not to do something about it. I know your gut reaction is 'of course they have to' but they really, *really* don't.
You know one of the worst grinds I had to do, while farming for all the warframes? The new Jackal. They've time-gated the fight with invulnerability phases that force players to wait.

It's a cool one-off fight, but if you have to do with 30 times to get that one Rhino part, it becomes a not only not-fun experience, but a toe curling repeating nightmare of stupidity.
That's how DE deals with powers and weapons, they circumvent you entirely and force you to wait. It's so stupid it's not even funny and they keep repeating it.

You have the choice to power down, deal with it. I'm sorry but my point stands, just play the way you think is fun. No one is getting left behind, because you can do nearly everything with a kitted out melee weapon and the rest with an average gun with forma on it. What you are arguing is a made up dilemma that only affects people who look for things to get annoyed over.
 

11 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

It also works on the flawed assumption that balance is bad for fun or powerful combos. Proper balance, for Warframe at least, would probably wind up being that the most fun combos are the most powerful. Balance is highly variable - it is just the game delivering the intended experience, and for Warframe, that does mean that highly personalised, customised experience. The main failure of Warframe's balancing is that, due to the outliers in certain fields, that experience isn't properly provided for as one particular experience type is disproportionately more rewarding in both loot and success rate than the others - and is exacerbated , that experience happens to be 'disable/ignore enemies and combat encounters as much as possible'.

Balance is overrated and it is an antithesis to fun in a game that revolves around making builds, often with the goal of breaking the game in mind.

There is no "proper" balance, it's an illusionary ideal that means something different depending on who's defining it. You don't have to adhere to it very much at all, you don't have to cater to people, especially not for ones deliberately going out of their way to impede others.

There are games that have suffered massively under the banner of "balance", Blizzard games being the primary example. WoW went from unique classes to all of them sharing nearly all of their kit with others. Overwatch constantly balances powers, making the characters so underwhelming that no one person can affect the game with anything apart from superior aim, making abilities not very engaging or fun to use and certainly not very effective.

I'm sorry but I'm done with this line of reasoning, it has proven to be worthless and detrimental to the game. What DE needs to do is let loose and throw balance completely to the wind. Let people have fun however they want and if DE finally has a proper vision for the game, then I'll welcome a genuine effort to tailor the content. They don't though, they make up things as they go and it shows.

My arguments aren't flawed at all, they come from a place of over three decades of experience with games and how they've evolved. You can't force a game to be fun all the time, it comes in bursts as things change radically for better or worse or when new content comes out. You might not agree with them with what you think is fun or reasonable, but then this isn't for you, you're looking for a different experience.

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9 hours ago, Ethorin said:

Ok, let me repeat myself

 

Pre-nerf I was dying to Opticor wielders firing into my back from far enough away that I would not be able to distinguish them from a rando with a Dera, even if my back was not turned. How, exactly, would one "be aware" of that?

Very well, at first I didn't know about them and I got 1 shot out of the air by something. But instead of getting mad I decided to figure out what the hell did it, looked around with my scope and spotted a corpus on top of a hill, went over for a look and saw the opticor in his hands, figured that's what did it. After that, I then kept my eyes open, operator dashed to any hilltop to remove snipers, learned to move out of the way of trenchers, timed jumping over shockwaves from the moas and side stepped the trenchers charge etc. Like I said, I became aware of what was around me and what it could do and was able to negate their potential damage through this. But I enjoyed the fact that I had to do it. The enemies now after nerf, can't even take half your health in 1 hit in bounty 5 with beacon level 4 active and it's a crying shame. That original opticor enemy 1 shot a Mesa with shatter shield active. Yeh I know it's not the tankiest frame around but that's still a pretty solid amount of damage for a corpus unit. And as I said, once we started farming indoors I switched to Banshee which was even more fun to avoid damage with.

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2 minutes ago, Ethorin said:

Ok, let me repeat myself

 

Pre-nerf I was dying to Opticor wielders firing into my back from far enough away that I would not be able to distinguish them from a rando with a Dera, even if my back was not turned. How, exactly, would one "be aware" of that?

 

Again, as far as I could tell there were no signs, there was nothing like "this happens then I die so I need to be aware of this thing", no, I just died. The closest I can relate it to is when Toxic Ancients kill you through a wall with their aura.

 

Literally not what ANYONE was talking about, please actually READ before you try to retort.

Not how the Opticor works.

There are mines? I have literally never noticed any explosives in the ground. There's little spiders that hide underground and are effectively invisible 95% of the time until they actually attack, which used to always apply a very strong bleed proc, usually multiple, due to how close together they were, which was plenty to instantly murder basically any frame without either a health sub, invincibility, or 95% damage reduction.

You mean the Nekros build that stacks absurd armor from the ludicrous health orb generation of Desecrate with the Shadow Shield augment to create one of the tankiest frames in the game? That's literally what I was talking about with people who survived the pre-nerf Fortuna with one of many 95% damage reduction tools lol.

Damage reduction is a part of the game. You're gonna have to deal with it. Most frames have some built in DR, even squishy nova.....there are mods and arcanes and even this thing called movement....which the devs themselves have stated is a part of mitigating damage.

You can have a buddy heal you or just do it yourself like everyone else and use one of the many tools available to heal yourself. 

Elevate, Repair, life steal melee, health pads, arcanes etc. 

If you're not ready to solo orb vallis then make a group. It should be impossible to fail with 4 frames.

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6 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

Damage reduction is a part of the game. You're gonna have to deal with it. Most frames have some built in DR, even squishy nova.....there are mods and arcanes and even this thing called movement....which the devs themselves have stated is a part of mitigating damage.

You can have a buddy heal you or just do it yourself like everyone else and use one of the many tools available to heal yourself. 

Elevate, Repair, life steal melee, health pads, arcanes etc. 

If you're not ready to solo orb vallis then make a group. It should be impossible to fail with 4 frames.

And plenty of frames have effectively no DR built in, and plenty of those are frames I quite enjoy playing. Also, again, I was literally dying BECAUSE of moving because tiny spiders that instantly blend you. Ah, yes, Healing, the PERFECT answer to getting oneshot in 0..01 seconds! Such a good solution!

 

12 minutes ago, -CdG-Zilchy said:

After that, I then kept my eyes open, operator dashed to any hilltop to remove snipers

...I've literally never actually had Opticor dudes standing out on their own... There's always other stuff with them initially and since not every random spawn has Opticor in it this idea never occurred to me, I generally had something else that I needed to be doing besides just killing everything.

14 minutes ago, -CdG-Zilchy said:

learned to move out of the way of trenchers, timed jumping over shockwaves from the moas and side stepped the trenchers charge

...When they are behind you? Really?

11 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

If you're not ready to solo orb vallis then make a group. It should be impossible to fail with 4 frames.

Ah yes, make a group... Sure, I'll just sit in recruit chat for three hours before I give up(literally did this). Plenty of things you won't be able to get a group for and on Public just going out to the Vallis you'll pretty much always be looking to do something different from at least two other people in the squad. Bounties are usually fine, well, the normal ones, the Vox Solaris ones I basically never find a pub for and no one ever responds in recruit chat.

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9 hours ago, Ethorin said:

...I've literally never actually had Opticor dudes standing out on their own... There's always other stuff with them initially and since not every random spawn has Opticor in it this idea never occurred to me, I generally had something else that I needed to be doing besides just killing everything.

...When they are behind you? Really?

Well they certainly were when Fortuna was released, they seemed to actually put proper snipers into the game and it was great.

Behind me? Well that just means I wasn't aware of my surroundings and failed to look out and deserved to get hit now doesn't it.

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4 minutes ago, Ethorin said:

And plenty of frames have effectively no DR built in, and plenty of those are frames I quite enjoy playing. Also, again, I was literally dying BECAUSE of moving because tiny spiders that instantly blend you. Ah, yes, Healing, the PERFECT answer to getting oneshot in 0..01 seconds! Such a good solution!

 

...I've literally never actually had Opticor dudes standing out on their own... There's always other stuff with them initially and since not every random spawn has Opticor in it this idea never occurred to me, I generally had something else that I needed to be doing besides just killing everything.

...When they are behind you? Really?

Ah yes, make a group... Sure, I'll just sit in recruit chat for three hours before I give up(literally did this). Plenty of things you won't be able to get a group for and on Public just going out to the Vallis you'll pretty much always be looking to do something different from at least two other people in the squad. Bounties are usually fine, well, the normal ones, the Vox Solaris ones I basically never find a pub for and no one ever responds in recruit chat.

Don't really know what to tell you. Everyone else makes it work one way or another.

Failure is a part of progress. I used to die in the Vallis all time until I worked on myself.

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31 minutes ago, Ethorin said:

ou mean the Nekros build that stacks absurd armor from the ludicrous health orb generation of Desecrate with the Shadow Shield augment to create one of the tankiest frames in the game? That's literally what I was talking about with people who survived the pre-nerf Fortuna with one of many 95% damage reduction tools lol.

To be fair, other games out there play like that too where high level deals enough damage to take you down hard in one hit so you have to utilize all gears you have, even if that means stacking damage boost and many damage reduction to survive

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11 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

Don't really know what to tell you. Everyone else makes it work one way or another.

Failure is a part of progress. I used to die in the Vallis all time until I worked on myself.

It works, I just sometimes randomly die because spiders hidden by grass or trencher or opticor to the back.

17 minutes ago, -CdG-Zilchy said:

Behind me? Well that just means I wasn't aware of my surroundings and failed to look out and deserved to get hit now doesn't it.

...What sorcery are you using to stay mobile and keep the enemies spawning from one direction?

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Just now, Smilomaniac said:

They can assume people will overpower the content and choose not to do something about it. I know your gut reaction is 'of course they have to' but they really, *really* don't.
You know one of the worst grinds I had to do, while farming for all the warframes? The new Jackal. They've time-gated the fight with invulnerability phases that force players to wait.

It's a cool one-off fight, but if you have to do with 30 times to get that one Rhino part, it becomes a not only not-fun experience, but a toe curling repeating nightmare of stupidity.
That's how DE deals with powers and weapons, they circumvent you entirely and force you to wait. It's so stupid it's not even funny and they keep repeating it.

You have the choice to power down, deal with it. I'm sorry but my point stands, just play the way you think is fun. No one is getting left behind, because you can do nearly everything with a kitted out melee weapon and the rest with an average gun with forma on it. What you are arguing is a made up dilemma that only affects people who look for things to get annoyed over.

Yes, you can do that, but that doesn't make it fun. Going up against over a dozen hitscan enemies that can oneshot you (which was my experience in earlier Railjack before Shield Gating) that take several seconds to kill isn't fun, but neither is dropping god mode on them. Powering yourself down stops being fun once you realise that the enemies aren't designed around doing that. Like it or not, every combat encounter is a two-way engagement - the enemies must be well designed.

And even then, even if you do find beating your head against a wall fun, you then come down to the fact that the grind complaint? That only gets worse if you power down. Because the boss fights are enemies too. And consider this - if you find getting timegated annoying when you're barely even trying, how fun do you think it is on try 300 when the boss is designed for OP players who are borderline invincible, and therefore can shred you in one and a half because you're only 'decently tanky', and that's still an order of magnitude lower? Or likewise, takes far longer because the boss designed to take orders of magnitude more damage?

The game, at the end of the day is about fun. Not about being able to do the thing, but for that thing to be fun. Fun is the start and end of this conversation, and if someone finds that the playstyle they find fun is no longer considered when designing the game, and the playstyles that are are also not fun for them, they have been left behind. And that is far too many at this time.

17 minutes ago, Smilomaniac said:

Balance is overrated and it is an antithesis to fun in a game that revolves around making builds, often with the goal of breaking the game in mind.

There is no "proper" balance, it's an illusionary ideal that means something different depending on who's defining it. You don't have to adhere to it very much at all, you don't have to cater to people, especially not for ones deliberately going out of their way to impede others.

There are games that have suffered massively under the banner of "balance", Blizzard games being the primary example. WoW went from unique classes to all of them sharing nearly all of their kit with others. Overwatch constantly balances powers, making the characters so underwhelming that no one person can affect the game with anything apart from superior aim, making abilities not very engaging or fun to use and certainly not very effective.

I'm sorry but I'm done with this line of reasoning, it has proven to be worthless and detrimental to the game. What DE needs to do is let loose and throw balance completely to the wind. Let people have fun however they want and if DE finally has a proper vision for the game, then I'll welcome a genuine effort to tailor the content. They don't though, they make up things as they go and it shows.

My arguments aren't flawed at all, they come from a place of over three decades of experience with games and how they've evolved. You can't force a game to be fun all the time, it comes in bursts as things change radically for better or worse or when new content comes out. You might not agree with them with what you think is fun or reasonable, but then this isn't for you, you're looking for a different experience.

And here's where I think your concept of balance is, honestly, wrong.

See, I would consider both Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch to be balanced games, more or less. Yet Team Fortress 2 puts huge emphasis on individual performance and extremely powerful abilities (relatively speaking), whilst Overwatch does not, and this is despite the fact the games are in the same genre (down to the subgenre of 'hero shooter') and even having several characters who are alike in almost all but visual design - Widowmaker and Sniper being the most clear example, but Medic and Mercy share major similarities and I'm fairly sure Roadhog takes a breather from aersolised Sandvich.

How can both be balanced if they have such similar mechanics yet deliver entirely different experiences? Because balance is simply the means by which the developers ensure that experience is delivered. It is not rigid. It varies hugely from game to game. This can be seen by the one TF2 clone character in Overwatch that ceased to be so - Torbjorn. Torb used to be as 1:1 with Engineer as Widow and Sniper, but Engineers core design was innate to how TF2 is balanced - as a chaotic experience that relies on both extreme power highs and extreme power lows, alongside it being 12vs12. Overwatch was designed as an Esport - as deeply teamwork focused, so it balances its characters to have fewer strengths, but also fewer weaknesses, and drops the team size. Engineer was designed for chaos from the ground up, so the transplanted Torbjorn needed to be reworked for something that fit Overwatch.

Balance didn't kill Blizzard games for you - Blizzard's merely took on a different design philosophy you don't agree with. Balance was only how they achieved that design philosophy.

 

 

The irony here is that 'letting players have fun however they want' requires balance to achieve. Because Warframe doesn't. Warframe in Co-op lets one player take all the work from other players and actively prevent them from having fun, and in solo the same thing with extra steps. If you want players to have fun however they want, that innately requires that players will progress at roughly even rates and have similar success rates however they play.

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9 hours ago, Ethorin said:

It works, I just sometimes randomly die because spiders hidden by grass or trencher or opticor to the back.

...What sorcery are you using to stay mobile and keep the enemies spawning from one direction?

Well I'll tell you, I kinda failed Hogwarts so I had to revert to any of the MANY CC abilties available on the frames. Also there's a wonderful mod available that I believe is very underrated, it's called Vigilante Pursuit.

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Just now, -CdG-Zilchy said:

Well I'll tell you, I kinda failed Hogwarts so I had to revert to any of the MANY CC abilties available on the frames.

...Counting Nyx with Augment there's fourish frames that come to mind when I think "long term recurring CC to lock down an area when enemies spawn into it"... And none of them actually have the range to lockdown enough to keep enemies on the Vallis coming from one direction consistently.

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7 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Yes, you can do that, but that doesn't make it fun. Going up against over a dozen hitscan enemies that can oneshot you (which was my experience in earlier Railjack before Shield Gating) that take several seconds to kill isn't fun, but neither is dropping god mode on them. Powering yourself down stops being fun once you realise that the enemies aren't designed around doing that. Like it or not, every combat encounter is a two-way engagement - the enemies must be well designed.

And even then, even if you do find beating your head against a wall fun, you then come down to the fact that the grind complaint? That only gets worse if you power down. Because the boss fights are enemies too. And consider this - if you find getting timegated annoying when you're barely even trying, how fun do you think it is on try 300 when the boss is designed for OP players who are borderline invincible, and therefore can shred you in one and a half because you're only 'decently tanky', and that's still an order of magnitude lower? Or likewise, takes far longer because the boss designed to take orders of magnitude more damage?

The game, at the end of the day is about fun. Not about being able to do the thing, but for that thing to be fun. Fun is the start and end of this conversation, and if someone finds that the playstyle they find fun is no longer considered when designing the game, and the playstyles that are are also not fun for them, they have been left behind. And that is far too many at this time.

And here's where I think your concept of balance is, honestly, wrong.

See, I would consider both Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch to be balanced games, more or less. Yet Team Fortress 2 puts huge emphasis on individual performance and extremely powerful abilities (relatively speaking), whilst Overwatch does not, and this is despite the fact the games are in the same genre (down to the subgenre of 'hero shooter') and even having several characters who are alike in almost all but visual design - Widowmaker and Sniper being the most clear example, but Medic and Mercy share major similarities and I'm fairly sure Roadhog takes a breather from aersolised Sandvich.

How can both be balanced if they have such similar mechanics yet deliver entirely different experiences? Because balance is simply the means by which the developers ensure that experience is delivered. It is not rigid. It varies hugely from game to game. This can be seen by the one TF2 clone character in Overwatch that ceased to be so - Torbjorn. Torb used to be as 1:1 with Engineer as Widow and Sniper, but Engineers core design was innate to how TF2 is balanced - as a chaotic experience that relies on both extreme power highs and extreme power lows, alongside it being 12vs12. Overwatch was designed as an Esport - as deeply teamwork focused, so it balances its characters to have fewer strengths, but also fewer weaknesses, and drops the team size. Engineer was designed for chaos from the ground up, so the transplanted Torbjorn needed to be reworked for something that fit Overwatch.

Balance didn't kill Blizzard games for you - Blizzard's merely took on a different design philosophy you don't agree with. Balance was only how they achieved that design philosophy.

 

 

The irony here is that 'letting players have fun however they want' requires balance to achieve. Because Warframe doesn't. Warframe in Co-op lets one player take all the work from other players and actively prevent them from having fun, and in solo the same thing with extra steps. If you want players to have fun however they want, that innately requires that players will progress at roughly even rates and have similar success rates however they play.

The bolded simply isn't true. There are always going to be near incompetent players that don't help themselves. 

Balance doesn't work because players are innately different. You can have 2 people use the same loadout and one will excel and one won't.

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9 hours ago, Ethorin said:

...Counting Nyx with Augment there's fourish frames that come to mind when I think "long term recurring CC to lock down an area when enemies spawn into it"... And none of them actually have the range to lockdown enough to keep enemies on the Vallis coming from one direction consistently.

Nyx, Banshee, Limbo, Nova, Vauban, Frost, Hildryn, Hydroid, Nidus, Loki, Equinox, Excalibur, Gara, Ivara, Khora, Octavia, Revenant, Zephyr. 
Do you need more CC frames than that? You don't need to keep them coming one direction consistently, you just have to control them so they can't attack you, nothing more. Perhaps you just need more experience. 

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3 minutes ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

The bolded simply isn't true. There are always going to be near incompetent players that don't help themselves. 

Balance doesn't work because players are innately different. You can have 2 people use the same loadout and one will excel and one won't.

Just because perfection is impossible doesn't mean that we shouldn't constantly strive for it.

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A part of me actually kind of likes the idea of DE putting in the work to establish an actual game balance standard. However..

A clear established standard is not how DE balances their game. And as a result of DE's development style, a lot the community doesn't understand why DE's random nerfs (the main counterbalance they tend to utilize) don't usually accomplish much.

Game balance is best accomplished through an established vision from the start. If such a vision ever existed for Warframe, it has long been lost and abandoned. Meanwhile, good nerfs should operate by bringing something back in line with an established standard when there has been a clear deviation. Instead, Warframe nerfs usually take a big swing at something and hope that knocks down the player usage data they collect.

Basically with DE's development style, they're just slinging bologna at the wall and seeing what sticks. And if a piece of bologna lands too high, they move it to a different random location, only lower.

For example, that's why some Warframe abilities are out here doing massive "% of of enemy max health" damage, where others are just given flat values. They are just randomly throwing ideas out there per each Warframe design..

To establish a true game balance that isn't just a big illusion, DE would need to do things like reworking Warframes, Scaling, DR, Mods, Damage Types, Healing, Support Characters, DPS ability scaling, Armor (again), Buff Stacking, Enemy Levels, Boss Fights, New Player Progression, Late Game Progression, etc. Such an overhaul could be the mark of a new vision for an established balance standard.

And if such an overhaul was aiming to create difficulty, they would need to create late game content that plays by the rules of their established power standard. (Basically it can't be easy-breezy, or a gaudy Bullet Sponge parade)

Obviously, a game balance standard that makes sense is not really is the cards. Which is why most nerfs come across as pointless, fun-killing randomness that is just posturing at the idea of game balance.

And people cling to the idea of Power Fantasy because it's how they derive enjoyment from a game where balance so abstract that it's usually a combination of knee-jerk reactions to usage data, and some Dev's vague whims.

If a power fantasy is what DE and much of the community really wants Warframe to be, let it be so. There are other games that can scratch the balance/difficulty itch, while this one scratches the power fantasy itch. 

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