I'm not sure whether to be more disappointed in DE or myself.

[OricSharp]

I don't want to be melodramatic, as melodramatic as the title seems to me, but I am genuinely disappointed with the refusal to learn...on both sides.
I'm just not sure whether to be more disappointed in DE's stubborn refusal to learn from community feedback on their mistakes, or in myself, for hoping they'll have learned it this time. Been here since U7, but somehow, I still haven't grokked that they just don't learn. I don't even think I have suggestions for most of this, aside from 'do better.' It's 90%+ venting and then a bit of math at the end because it's stupid o'clock and I can't sleep. Hopefully it's at least amusing.

Every time there's a big release, it seems like, there's obvious issues - ones that are bafflingly obvious, in some cases.
Look at the Conservationist Token requirements for ranking up in the Entrati syndicate for an example of this. With 29.0.4, they reduced the theoretical work required pretty largely, by reducing the number of Entrati Tokens required to only one per type, halved the number of tags required for a 1 Token task, reduced the 'average number of tags' for 3-5 Token tasks, and then also put in a 'spend Plat to buy Tags' option. That last part feels greedy to me, given the issues already noticeable in the Conservation system on Deimos in particular, which I'll get to shortly, but the rest of it? The rest of it just looks like somebody just put numbers down, nobody looked at them, they pushed them out, and then got told they were ridiculous. I recall seeing people calculate that it would take more than fifty captures for the required number of tokens - I can't remember precisely, but I'm pretty sure it got to something like sixty or eighty.
Were they hoping people would just be glad they were reducing the numbers, and not wonder how they got to need reducing in the first place? That people would think they were being done a favor?
And this is on top of the already present issues with Deimos Conservation itself - one of the things required for moving on to Rank 3 is (at least currently, at 4:40 AM 8/28/2020) a set of 5 Common Avichaea tags. These 'Common' critters are posing a problem for many, myself included, partially because they just don't show up to be caught sometimes. For some, they find the Avi high in the air instead. For others, they're in walls. For me, they just aren't there at all, mostly - of the runs I've done of Avi tracks, I've found one Common, two Viscid, and one Sporule; at least as many runs have resulted in no Avi at all, despite doing everything correctly.
Went looking for Purple Velocipods, too, since I'll need those...and of course, the only ones I can find are the White ones, which seem like they're supposed to be the rarest. At least this one seems like it's just RNG, as opposed to "yeah sometimes they just spawn in the sky, where you gotta go flying around hunting for 'em despite the calls and all, or deep underground, where you just gotta call it a wash and start over."
Still, I for some reason will need their tags to build the Helminth Segment, and now that there's a Plat factor in the Conservationist's system, I can't not be suspicious and cynical. It's probably not an attempt to profit off of seeming errors, but can I be sure, when this is being implemented before the Conservation hunts are working properly, on the first day that Conservation tags are required for ranking up in Deimos, let alone to the rank where you can first access the Helminth Segment?
The Fishing on Deimos didn't originally have any guarantee that you'd get the special parts from the fish that you caught, either, which wasn't communicated at all as far as I'm aware. Somebody thought "Hey, let's randomize whether you get the fish bits," and nobody said "Okay, but let's make sure the players know about that." And then they made a fish part required for ranking up in the Entrati. When I went back to the Necralisk with eight Vitreospina, cut them, and only got one single Spinal Core Section, I had no idea it wasn't a bug. Just went and did the same thing a couple more times, same results. Day one of a big update. It's a weird time. Saw the hotfix retracting the RNG the next day. "Wait, that wasn't a bug? ...How did it take them until after release to realize that was a bad move?" If they'd made it clear that the fishbits were RNG-bound, that'd be one thing, but I really can't find any indication of that anywhere.
(and of course the fish parts were already something you could buy with plat from the sexy librarian tentacle monster so that seems not suspicious at all)
somebodygetmemytinfoilhat
On that note, Scintillant. They're still trying to make it a workable resource - aiming for 'revised Cetus Wisp,' apparently. Cetus Wisps, of course, you can get by flying around Plains of Eidolon's water features - not terribly engaging, but not difficult, a bit monotonous and definitely tedious, but compared to 'sometimes they'll show up flying around a room in a vault full of beefy Infested and you have to melee them to collect them, or you might get them rarely from a Bounty.' And then ask for five each for Xaku and the Quassus, and another two for the Necramech. Of course, now they've moved their spawn points to 'more trafficked areas,' increased their spawn chances and radius size (I have no idea what 'spawn radius size' means), given Necramechs a chance to drop them...will that be enough? Who knows? At least the Weapons person isn't asking for them anymore. And at least you can't buy Scintillant...but you sure can buy the two things that need the most of it!
Speaking of Necramechs...oh man, Necramechs. I'm not a fan of these, in any way. They're ugly, and that's the nicest thing I've got to say - they've got a Warhammer style of charm to them, and I did get a good laugh out of seeing that one just...plant itself headfirst while trying to look intimidating. Took a lot of the gravitas out of the scene overall, but eh. In practice...well, I don't have one yet, since it's locked behind yet another 'hey do our bosses' Syndicate, but the experiences I've had with them are at-best "Meh." Mostly, I just really hate the Isolation Vault Necramechs. Who thought it was a good idea to give an enemy damage reflection in a game where the numbers have gotten so wildly out of control? Trying to outpace enemy scaling by making sure our numbers are big enough just means that we're going to be annihilated by the Necramech shields. Which also make the Necramech invulnerable, because of course it needs seemingly at-will invulnerability phases on top of being a weakpoint fight. And of course it can also do stupendous amounts of damage regardless of whether it even has arms. And it also has a massive slow. sure would be a shame if you needed to move quickly to kill it
Now, of course, why is the damage reflection and the numbers such a problem? Because enemies have buckets of EHP, but do comparatively little damage, while the players do buckets of damage, but have comparatively little EHP. Can mitigate in a variety of ways, but in the end, turning enemy damage against them is only satisfying in theory. The practice tends to boil down to very little actual effect. Remember Amalgam Javlok Magazine Warp? It had a +6000% damage reflection, so you'd be returning a theoretically huge 60x the damage you were blocking. Was it useful? Not that I'm aware. Enemies just have too much EHP for even 60x the damage to matter. What is the point of a Necramech shield, therefore, returning a measly 2x damage? It's only useful against the players. Is this going to be added to Conclave? Why bother putting this on anything in PvE?

I do actually have a suggestion for the damage reflection part of that last one, and this is the only productive part of this whole pile of letters. Seems overly simple for such an enduring issue, but it might be an okay start.
First: Attacker damage premitigation (no resistances, no armor, nothing) divided by defender max shields and HP. Call this "relative damage percentage." How much damage would this do, relatively speaking, expressed as a percentage? (200/500 = 0.4 = 40%)
Second: Multiply attacker max HP and shields by relative damage percentage. (40,000 x 40% = 16,000)
Third: Apply multipliers - Amalgam Javlok Magazine Warp and Necramech Storm Shroud go here. (AJMW: 16,000 x 6,000% = 960,000; NSS: 16,000 x 2 = 32,000)
Last: Apply attacker damage mitigation as normal.
No idea what attacker these numbers might represent, so I'm not doing the math for that. Also, I'm not going to be watching this thread. Maybe just rant about the things in WF that disappoint you, but you're not really sure it's not your fault for still falling for it. Or turn it into a Spiderman thread. I don't care. I'm chasing stupid birds.

tldr no

[(XBOX)dude1286]

I had negative expectations going into the new open world and it was worse than I expected. You pretty much nailled it on the head. It also doesn't help that the copy/paste bounties from PoE/Fortuna don't even work half the time, which makes that farm for Scintillant even worse. The Vaults are just wait timers with a boss that most don't even know that has reflective damage. Also, the spawning is terrible in some bounty missions and the player is just sitting there waiting for more enemies to spawn, and some warframe anilities break the flow of some missions due to attracting attention elsewhere.

[Kaggelos]

I understand where you're coming from. 

But, and bear with me on this one, maybe, it doesnt have to do with DE, or the developers, but the ones at the back, Tencent? I dont even know if the purchase is complete. And DE cant say anything legally, sooo, yeah, i don't think it's their doing. 

[(XBOX)dude1286]

32 minutes ago, Kaggelos said:

I understand where you're coming from. 

But, and bear with me on this one, maybe, it doesnt have to do with DE, or the developers, but the ones at the back, Tencent? I dont even know if the purchase is complete. And DE cant say anything legally, sooo, yeah, i don't think it's their doing. 

If that's the case, this game really is a lost cause.

[Skaleek]

Most people don't even realize they havent even hit the worst grind yet - Necramech mods.

[Morthal]

44 minutes ago, Kaggelos said:

I understand where you're coming from. 

But, and bear with me on this one, maybe, it doesnt have to do with DE, or the developers, but the ones at the back, Tencent? I dont even know if the purchase is complete. And DE cant say anything legally, sooo, yeah, i don't think it's their doing. 

It's been this way for a few years now. Every publisher/Dev studio I can think of,save for CDPR(for now), has gone the way of Bethesda. Whoever just picked up Leyou's debt got scammed with Warframe. 

[Steel_Rook]

I don't know whose fault it is - be it DE or Tencent or the Illuminati - but this pattern keeps repeating itself and getting worse. Every bit of new content that releases has a worse, more hostile, more off-putting grind than the last. I kept thinking that stuff like Liches and Railjack were as bad as it could get, but Deimos blows both of them out of the water. Nothing in here is particularly new, but the end result is this chimera of awful progression, where all of the preexisting progression systems are piled on top of each other, to the point that there's basically no game on Deimos. There is only progression.

Digital Extremes have a problem. They're no longer designing video games. Sure, video game design exists somewhere within the overall product - a throwaway consideration worked in-between everything else. No, what they're designing is a "content delivery platform." What they're designing is a Skinner box no more ethical than your typical Ultimate Team loot box affair. Warframe isn't a "game" that you "play." It's either a job that you work in your spare time, or else a "gatcha" thing that you keep pouring money into. There was a brief time when I thought that DE might have learned, might have improved and focused on the GAME aspect of Warframe. You know - Warframe Revised, Railjack Revised, etc. Those were great. They came with no additional grind, but improved the experience dramatically. But no. We're right back where we started, releasing content that's fundamentally bugged and unfinished, but nevertheless riddled with time sinks and busywork and "progression."

Yes, there's new content in the Heart of Deimos, but that's not the point. No, the point is there are a whole bunch of new progression systems to waste our time with. DE seem to have given up on retaining players by offering us "a good game," and have entirely resolved to retain people by brute-force addiction, habit-forming mechanics and sunk cost fallacies. And it's honestly depressing.