Conservation on the Drift is somehow even worse than the other open world areas.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

It's not just that it's mandatory and I already hated it before this update even dropped.  I just went out for another attempt at getting the Avichaea I need for rank 3 after not playing for a week out of frustration with how buggy this is.

One hunt site for the birds is available.  One.  I start it up, start following the trail and get attacked by infested who are also squaring off with some Predasites.  I tranq the predasites real quick because I already have the rifle out, kill the infested and...  My trail is gone.  The zone of operation marker on the map is gone.  The hunt is now non-completeable.  The one, singular hunt that was available to me is gone, I have to go back inside, then come back outside just so I can have this utter BS bug out on me again.  And again.  And again.  I literally can't get rank 3 because every single hunt except the first one for these #*!%ing birds bugs out or is the wrong sub-type when they do actually show up.  Progress genuinely can't be made and it's entirely the fault of the game refusing to cooperate.

This is absolutely awful.  This update, conservation in particular, is making me hate this game.  I didn't play for a week, decided to come back and have been playing for 15 minutes and I'm already furious.  You made this awful trash mandatory and you haven't even tried to ensure that it actually works.  Because it hasn't for me.  Every single one of these hunts, save one, has screwed me over in some way and given me zero progress.  I just want to play the parts of the game that I like.  No one, literally no one wanted mandatory conservation.

[krc473]

33 minutes ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

One hunt site for the birds is available.  One. 

Don't waste your time with that. Just fly around and look for them. I found one of the Common birds with hunting sites. But many by just looking in AW. Edit: I forgot to add that DE has made it easier in a recent patch on PC. Not sure if it has made it to console yet. Stuff gets highlighted as with mining.

• Hunting spots are not required for anything. Everything can be found just roaming around.

Spoiler

Steps:

1. Use AW (I suggest Itzal, it is fast and can be invisible)
2. Equip tranq rifle.
3. Fly around and ADS
4. If there is a ping look around the area for the creatures.
   1. You might need to move around the area. They are not always close. 
   2. They will be highlighted on Tranq ADS when found.
5. Capture the creature.
6. Repeat until you have enough.

The only issue is that you cannot pick the species you want. But I found it much, much quicker than trying to use Lures - for everything except Medjay.

 

[(PSN)Silverback73]

I’m sorry.  I know how frustrating it is.  Helminth seemed like so much fun...

I walked away from the update for now, frustrated and sad at being required to do conservation and other subpar, non-combat activities...lowering the requirements doesn’t really change my position.

This trend started with Fortuna with Baruuk and Hildryn and the resource requirements and RnG stacking 

But at least snowboarding and animal trapping weren’t mandatory and I accepted the loss of MR experience for not doing it as fair.

I JUST NOW finished and built Hildryn and only because Mrs Toasterface requires syndicate rank 3 for Hildryn blueprint and many amalgam-Corpus weapons sit as blueprints due to resource requirements.

Fighting slow, giant damage-gated orb bosses is ok...but again is subpar to mainstream combat for me...

I feel you, OP.  I love DE, but I feel you on this.

 

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

22 minutes ago, krc473 said:

Don't waste your time with that. Just fly around and look for them. I found one of the Common birds with hunting sites. But many by just looking in AW. Edit: I forgot to add that DE has made it easier in a recent patch on PC. Not sure if it has made it to console yet. Stuff gets highlighted as with mining.

• Hunting spots are not required for anything. Everything can be found just roaming around.

  Hide contents

Steps:

1. Use AW (I suggest Itzal, it is fast and can be invisible)
2. Equip tranq rifle.
3. Fly around and ADS
4. If there is a ping look around the area for the creatures.
   1. You might need to move around the area. They are not always close. 
   2. They will be highlighted on Tranq ADS when found.
5. Capture the creature.
6. Repeat until you have enough.

The only issue is that you cannot pick the species you want. But I found it much, much quicker than trying to use Lures - for everything except Medjay.

 

I have never seen anything but vulps, predasites and burrowers from just natural spawn.  Unless you want to count the dragonfly things.  I actually got medijays from just flying around looking for birds.  Still never seen a bird in the wild outside of a hunt.

The birds are so broken.  They aren't even trying to fix this.  They're really just going to leave this BS as is.

[krc473]

1 minute ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

Still never seen a bird in the wild outside of a hunt.

They are more of a pain to find in the wild that other things. I have found them right on the edge of the map, or around large trees. But they also spawn in groups of up to three birds. Which makes it more efficient that messing around trying to get enough from tracking.

3 minutes ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

The birds are so broken.  They aren't even trying to fix this.  They're really just going to leave this BS as is.

You probably need more console players to report this issue for DE to do anything about it. In my experience on PC the track & tranq was a waste of time, but flying around looking for them wasn't. Mind you, that goes for all conservation species. I kind of figured conservation was actually just meant to be a tedious nightmare to get you to buy the tags for platinum. 

[taiiat]

25 minutes ago, krc473 said:

You probably need more console players to report this issue for DE to do anything about it. In my experience on PC the track & tranq was a waste of time, but flying around looking for them wasn't. Mind you, that goes for all conservation species. I kind of figured conservation was actually just meant to be a tedious nightmare to get you to buy the tags for platinum. 

the Birds do have a tendency to Spawn inside of Walls and other nonsense currently - i can't blame people being angry about that happening. 

[Mr.Holyroller]

Open world conservation in the Drift is better than its ever been for an open world. 
I really don't understand how you came to that conclusion.

That being said, there currently seems to be a problem with doing conservation the normal way with a lack of tracks to follow.
Not only that, but specifically one of the Avichaea tracks leads you inside a structure and it causes this spawn to bug out most of the time.

[Constalation]

There are certain places avichae like to hang about in groups of two or three. I don't know if they are constant or based on RNG, but it was siginifcantly easier to just fly in a circle around the map and tranq random conservation targets until I ran into the birds. Faster too since you don't get birds stuck in terrain ot footsteps turning back on themselves and then vanishing into thin air.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, krc473 said:

If there is a ping look around the area for the creatures.

1. You might need to move around the area. They are not always close. 
2. They will be highlighted on Tranq ADS when found.

 

Easier said than done. You're looking for a faint orange outline of a very small creature at long range, against a background that's bright orange almost everywhere and with bright orange spores that look A LOT like an animal outline at a glance. I've tried looking myself. I hear the beep, I start looking. And looking. And looking. I move around and look. 9 times out of 10, I find nothing at all. I don't know if I'm looking for a bird that'll be up in the sky or a ground animal below, I don't even know which cardinal direction to look in. Yes, I can try moving in and out of range of the beep to try and triangulate it, but by that point the animals have usually been killed by the local Infested. And even then, 90% of what I find is White Velocipods and some variety of Predasites. I don't know what you guys constantly suggesting this are doing right, but I can't make it work.

 

1 hour ago, krc473 said:

forgot to add that DE has made it easier in a recent patch on PC.

No, they have not. The patch simply denotes animal scat with a diamond when aiming at it through the Tranq Rifle. Finding scat - though sometimes annoying - is easily the LEAST difficult part of Animal Conservation. This change accomplishes nothing. If they wanted to make hunting animals easier, they could have added directional pings to the Tranq Rifle like we have on the Mining Cutter. They could have added on-screen directional displays to the nearest detected animal so we can at least broadly orient ourselves towards it. They could have made an Oxylus mod that highlights Conservation animals at a distance. The change to Conservation was a load of nothing.

 

37 minutes ago, Mr.Holyroller said:

Open world conservation in the Drift is better than its ever been for an open world.  I really don't understand how you came to that conclusion.

How do you figure it's "better?" Conservation call points don't respawn, forcing you to reload the zone if you want more animals. Tracks are remarkably hard to follow because they blend into the background and hide under grass. A majority of call points bug out in all manner of ways - from tracks going through terrain to tracks disappearing to animals spawning inside walls to animals falling through the map to animals vanishing when you tranq them. The Tranq Rifle UI is the exact same colour as most of the Cambion Drift. And best of all - there's no Lure for Velocipods at all.

What exactly makes Conservation "better?" That you can find animals randomly roaming around the world in groups of three? You've been able to do that since Plains of Eidolon Conservation so that's hardly an "improvement." Especially since the Plains don't have nearly as many bugged call points and the animals don't blend into the background to such an extent. I don't see a single aspect of Conservation that's improved in the slightest, but a majority of them have degraded drastically.

[Inkogni]

Getting annoyed with those things myself, not sure if i got any in last patch when i tried. i often drop an elytron nuke and it shows roughly where things die, the damn thing was not where things died.
If only The Son would accept dead ones sometimes. wouldnt be surprised that even if 30% of these damn spawns happened in walls are giving me a really bad time "enjoying" the content. no way to tranq it with gun but i was on ivara and got to it eventually... then i nuked the damn area with Elytrons 4th to feel a bit better

[Buttaface]

Never did conservation much previously other than when pushed by Nightwave. Did more this time and here are my opinions good, bad and ugly in no particular order:

1. Good: Generally for those who don't like the conservation mini game, and I don't, this expansion is a blessing once learned. Once you get the hang of how the mobs spawn and respawn in the small open world, you don't even need to DO the mini game much if at all. Killing the map quickly will respawn a higher rate of tag animals of various rarities such that you just scoot around the map killing infested and then seeing where tag animals spawn in their place. I was able to get whole boatloads of tags, tens of thousands of Son token rep, of all rarities in a few hours on a three day booster in a single longer play session doing this and not even streamlined and optimized it yet with frames like Gauss or Volt, etc. This is far better for non conservation fans than the past, and if the aim is to generate tons of Son tokens, don't bother with the whole minigame, just cruise around and kill infested, then tag the respawns that replace them. Can go into more detail if wanted, but it's pretty simple to figure this out. The world is small enough with little dead open space, so it works fine.

2. Good: The species are cool and do cool things in the environment, forming a kind of ecology of sorts, e.g. fighting each other. This feeds into the new combat pets adding flavor. This needs some tweaking, such as all the wild "little" animals getting devoured, but overall is an improvement, adds to more of a dynamic feel.

3. Bad: The sidegame, if one does the full thing as opposed to "1" above, is very buggy and annoying, more so than any other conservation side game. Is this partially on purpose to push plat tag sales? Probably, and if so that's a pretty crappy, sharp business practice. Could be just sloppy playtesting, but DE doesn't have a very pure history in this respect. Yeah, I know it's a business, but some of the bugs are either inexcusably incompetent or sharp, no C answer and neither is good. Any small amount of testing would have revealed these things.

4. Ugly: THE BIRDS ARE TOO DAMN SMALL. Repeat in case someone at DE doesn't get it... THE BIRDS ARE TOO DAMN SMALL. Fix, but again, pretty sure they  realize that going in with ANY play testing. Not really any excuse for this in such a graphically busy zone, and the eye strain is nearly enough to make one just stop doing birds wholesale or the whole conservation side game OR the whole zone in toto, which is no gift to those with ANY eye issues, vertigo or prone to nausea. Great nausea simulator, though, if one needs to upchuck some poison, will give them that.

5.  Ugly: Putting the birds, that even a child could see are extremely buggy and too small, as a hurdle in the faction rep of Deimos is unable to be rationalized as just a mistake or bug. This was a conscious effort, and just another reason why Warframe is a game I come back to every so often, but do not spend $$ on. Want to get $$ from me? Dont do crap like this over and over. It's transparent and isn't fooling any experienced gamers or business people. Crucial flaw and despite it being well documented and complained about, they leave it sit when it would be a very easy fix. Not fooling anyone.

So, to end on a positive note, there are two spawns for birds now, don't use the "white-blue skull cave" use the other one. It has a less chance of bugging or spawning birds in the walls. And to those who say you can just farm birds randomly by restarting the zone, nope, you just got lucky. They are extremely rare, or I was extremely unlucky trying to spawn them randomly.