DE's mindset about usage stats

[Drachnyn]

We have heard it time and time again that things get nerfed because the usage is too high and how much it restricts choice. We've heard it with the bramma, with the catchmoon and with the xoris just to name a few examples. Now personally I think that's a bad way to go about balancing but that is not really the point i want to make here. In yesterday's devstream we saw all sorts of stats about the helminth system.

In particular we saw which abilities get replaced the most and leading that chart was Mesa's 1. Now we all already knew that mesa's 1 was garbage and not even worth casting. But now we know that DE have looked at those stats. Same is true for a few other abilities leading that chart and Inaros even has 2 abilities in the top 20 replaced. We also saw which ability got replaced the most on some warframes and with chroma it was an overwhelming majority who replaced his 1 (which we've also always known to be complete garbage).

Following that Rebecca threw out the easiest question to appear good for answering well. She asked if the devs would take the helminth stats about what gets replaced the most and use that information to buff some of the weakest abilities in the game. Scott's answer however was a massive disappointment. He didnt even manage to throw out a half hearted yes and I think that speaks to a bigger problem with DE's mindset about using statistics as grounds for balance changes. They are quick to point at usage for any nerfs but when it comes to buffs for clearly useless and underused things there is a surprising lack of action. 

Sure, making a garbage ability like chroma's 1 worth casting will require more than just a simple stat boost but that's not true for every ability on the list. All Mesa's 1 needs is to just not be capped with the damage it adds. But we didnt even get a "we'll look into it". 

It just seems dishonest to point at usage stats so often for nerfs but then not also buff the lowest/weakest things when the statistics say they are garbage and never used.

On a side note: Rebecca's question about what people will do with the helminth system if every ability was good (meaning it would be a difficult choice to replace something) was strange aswell. Does DE not want every ability to be atleast above garbage tier? Are chroma's and mesa's 1 abilities worthless intentionally? Didnt they say they dont want helminth to influence frame design? That question sounded like threatening someone with a good time and the reaction from Steve and Scott to that question wasnt very encouraging either.

[Rhyandra]

I've said it before that I've seen so many good fixes for so many problems (and I mean actual good fixes) that they simply ignore for no reason at all. Like.. how many things are bad in the game right now? Endless gamebreaking bugs STILL haven't been fixed after YEARS.

[Wyrmius_Prime]

Their goal is to literally get rid of fun by nerfing the stuff that people use and not compensating by buffing the bad stuff.

They had a good month after Tennocon while people were hyped for Heart of Deimos, but now they are back to being clueless as all hell about what they're doing.

[DrivaMain]

They say they'll look into Mark for death next week, so there's that.

My optimistic view is that the game is now so large it's very hard to track things. The game has what... more than 10 complex systems in place? 

[taiiat]

yeah, you're right. the only equality is inequality and the usual jazz.

 

Ballistic Battery could be fine enough if they reversed some of the indirect nerfs it got over the years, plus a little bit of touching up to the way it functions.
then it would be back to being hyperniche but it would atleast work.

so while you're very right, honestly the shift i'd rather see is asking the top 1% about things and taking their input seriously on how to go about things - we're the ones that know the most about how things currently work, have worked in the past, what can be used for what intentionally and unintentionally, what's viable but not popular, what's popular but is or isn't all that great in actuality - Et Cetera.
we're just collectively the people in the best position to know this sort of stuff, and also to be able to come up with creative solutions that fit within the power scale of the game.
the same can really be said about any game really - the top 1% are those in the best position to be able to know how to come up with ideas/functionality that can be easy to learn difficult master, be synergistic with other Abilities of the same Character as well as others, functionality that stays as unique from other existing things as possible, picking numbers that are high enough and low enough to work, Et Cetera.

as the saying goes, "let the experts do their job" - well, if that could end up being true in as many places in the world as possible, the world would run a lot smoother.

[(PSN)MYKK678]

1 hour ago, Drachnyn said:

We have heard it time and time again that things get nerfed because the usage is too high and how much it restricts choice. We've heard it with the bramma, with the catchmoon and with the xoris just to name a few examples. Now personally I think that's a bad way to go about balancing but that is not really the point i want to make here. In yesterday's devstream we saw all sorts of stats about the helminth system.

In particular we saw which abilities get replaced the most and leading that chart was Mesa's 1. Now we all already knew that mesa's 1 was garbage and not even worth casting. But now we know that DE have looked at those stats. Same is true for a few other abilities leading that chart and Inaros even has 2 abilities in the top 20 replaced. We also saw which ability got replaced the most on some warframes and with chroma it was an overwhelming majority who replaced his 1 (which we've also always known to be complete garbage).

Following that Rebecca threw out the easiest question to appear good for answering well. She asked if the devs would take the helminth stats about what gets replaced the most and use that information to buff some of the weakest abilities in the game. Scott's answer however was a massive disappointment. He didnt even manage to throw out a half hearted yes and I think that speaks to a bigger problem with DE's mindset about using statistics as grounds for balance changes. They are quick to point at usage for any nerfs but when it comes to buffs for clearly useless and underused things there is a surprising lack of action. 

Sure, making a garbage ability like chroma's 1 worth casting will require more than just a simple stat boost but that's not true for every ability on the list. All Mesa's 1 needs is to just not be capped with the damage it adds. But we didnt even get a "we'll look into it". 

It just seems dishonest to point at usage stats so often for nerfs but then not also buff the lowest/weakest things when the statistics say they are garbage and never used.

On a side note: Rebecca's question about what people will do with the helminth system if every ability was good (meaning it would be a difficult choice to replace something) was strange aswell. Does DE not want every ability to be atleast above garbage tier? Are chroma's and mesa's 1 abilities worthless intentionally? Didnt they say they dont want helminth to influence frame design? That question sounded like threatening someone with a good time and the reaction from Steve and Scott to that question wasnt very encouraging either.

So here's my problem. Normally i'd probably agree with you, but then normally this kind of post should only show up a few months down the line. I know that sounds a bit confusing as the devstream you refer to happened now not in a few months but allow me to explain in 1 sentence;

Show me a company who would make major changes to something 3 weeks after releasing it, and i'll show you when that company went under.

 

There is no possible way that DE has nearly enough data/info to implement these "buffs" you were disappointed not to hear about. We didn't start with Helminth from Day 1, and even after that it takes 24hrs for each subsume to complete. Realistically on-average they have about 2 weeks of data/info after that at most. The first week most likely comprised of a lot of people just Testing the mixed powers. So its actually closer to 1 week of solid metrics from Helminth. This leads to the real question you should be asking; Do you think it would be responsible/right for them to implement major changes based on 1 week of information?

After coming to the logical conclusion of "no", it makes more sense that a dev would be apprehensive about promising changes that may not even need a change after gathering actual true data. I get the concern and i'm not saying "don't be", what concerns you is up to you, but it is way, way too early for it.

As for your points about weps like Catchmoon and Bramma etc, lets try to keep that part honest yeah? It wasnt random, it was completely justified. They were OP, theres no second option here and no excuse. Wep A wouldn't be used more than Wep B unless Wep A is outperforming Wep B in Warframe. Its that simple. And keep in mind that if we're going to just "assume" intentions here then it works the other way too. Its not a double standard. So for every 1 popular Wep that gets balanced, we can assume theres probably 2 or 3 that are also popular but dont get changed because they're already balanced.

They're not going to be on a stream and be like "so we noticed Nikana is now a top used melee weapon again, but thats balanced........ so..........we'll just leave it.......yeah.......anyway onto our next topic!"

[(PSN)Hikuro-93]

I think DE usually overthink everything prior to making a decision, by being afraid of potential backlash. The thing is, there'll always be backlash either way, so might as well do the right thing instead of appeasing to the rageful loud minority.

I think they have good intentions, and they sure do it for balance. But I don't really like how when they find a good and passable excuse, they overuse it to the point of looking lazy, like the whole "It was never intended" excuse which has been so handy in the past few months. Every change that might be even slightly controversial gets immediately slapped with "Not intentional", and isn't met with a proper counter-buff to make players less disappointed, and maybe turn their attention to something even better, yet not game breaking. 

Sure, many nerfs, specially the bigger ones, usually have an alternative buff to go with it. But idk, I always felt like those small buffs that go along with nerfs could be compared to shush money. "Hey, we nerfed this to oblivion, BUT we did buff this tiny bit right here so you wouldn't be too mad. It won't really matter in the bigger picture, but we did it for you to accept the nerf better". And I'm usually not against nerfs, as I'm used to the possibility of them happening, it's just how I feel about DE's wording and apparent excuses.

Overusing the same few excuses to justify any seemingly bad change while not doing the same effort for comparable good changes, being quick to nerf and painfully slowly to fix, add QoL and buff, seem rather disappointing to me as a player.

I get that it's not a good position for DE to ben in by any means, and I can forgive (even respect) some sly tactics, but what I described above isn't honest or even sly, it's just using plausible deniability as a shield against accusations and backlash. Instead of being open about it and either hold off on both the nerfs and buffs, or be quick about both nerfs and buffs. Not being quick with nerfs and slow with buffs, which is what currently happens.

[Drachnyn]

vor 22 Minuten schrieb (PS4)MYKK678:

So here's my problem. Normally i'd probably agree with you, but then normally this kind of post should only show up a few months down the line. I know that sounds a bit confusing as the devstream you refer to happened now not in a few months but allow me to explain in 1 sentence;

Show me a company who would make major changes to something 3 weeks after releasing it, and i'll show you when that company went under.

DE does those things aswell though. The xoris change came very soon after launch, as did the marked for death changes. We even had nerfs to 6 subsumed abilities before release. Rebecca already said that they would buff abilities right after tennocon but so far we have only seen the tiniest buffs imaginable for 2 abilities. That seems like alibi buffs now.

vor 23 Minuten schrieb (PS4)MYKK678:

As for your points about weps like Catchmoon and Bramma etc, lets try to keep that part honest yeah? It wasnt random, it was completely justified. They were OP, theres no second option here and no excuse. Wep A wouldn't be used more than Wep B unless Wep A is outperforming Wep B in Warframe. Its that simple. And keep in mind that if we're going to just "assume" intentions here then it works the other way too. Its not a double standard. So for every 1 popular Wep that gets balanced, we can assume theres probably 2 or 3 that are also popular but dont get changed because they're already balanced.

Both of those nerfs were justified by DE with usage. I disagree that they were overpowered but that's not the point, rather it doesnt matter how strong something is, otherwise octavia would have been nerfed years ago. The point is that they happily point to usage as justification for nerfs but the logical followthrough would then be to look at the least used things and buff those.

vor 26 Minuten schrieb (PS4)MYKK678:

There is no possible way that DE has nearly enough data/info to implement these "buffs" you were disappointed not to hear about. We didn't start with Helminth from Day 1, and even after that it takes 24hrs for each subsume to complete. Realistically on-average they have about 2 weeks of data/info after that at most. The first week most likely comprised of a lot of people just Testing the mixed powers. So its actually closer to 1 week of solid metrics from Helminth. This leads to the real question you should be asking; Do you think it would be responsible/right for them to implement major changes based on 1 week of information?

Many of the most replaced abilities havent just become garbage with the introduction of helminth. Mesa's and Chroma's 1 have been worthless for years. They were basically empty ability slots. The thing I'm disappointed in is that they didnt even say they'd look into buffing those abilities. We are far away from actual implementation but just that wouldnt be a problem. There seemed to be a refusal of acknowledgement that some of those most replaced abilities are bad.

[johnno23]

If you want to balance weapons my answer is simple. 

All rivens fixed to disposition 1 and no other variations. so a mixture of stats that are random. Then instead of Nerfing every good weapon to stop people flocking to it just make the bad weapons better.

if you want to balance game play in public missions then use a tier approach. A newer player collecting resources in a defense mission on Helene should not have to face a situation where I at level 28 can waltz in nuke everything before they know what is going on. A newer player to the game can be overwhelmed rather than impressed.

In private groups made of friends and clans balance is never an issue as they do not infringe on other players wants needs or general play experience therefore you never hear people that play together in teams whining.

A tier level approach is not difficult to do for public missions. Simply make it that tier 1 would be players level 1 to 6 and tier 2 level 6 to 12 tier 3 level 12 to 18 etc.

A newer player in a clan that asks for help from a higher level player would not be effected as it would be an invite and closed to the public.

 

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

Honestly, their take away from the Helminth stats were more infuriating than every bad choice they’ve made the last 3 years.

If I was a game dev and I was given information that literally shows areas that could be improved I would immediately come to the conclusion that those areas will be improved. Trying to use “The Helminth System is it’s own beast” as a scapegoat from actually making things in the game better is mind boggling. Especially when it’s coming from the guy who has said he wants to improve more things more often.

[(PSN)Double991]

The little mini argument about Scott being surprised that Chroma was on that list was odd and showed some disconnect. Of course Chroma would be on that list!

[(PSN)MYKK678]

3 hours ago, Drachnyn said:

DE does those things aswell though. The xoris change came very soon after launch, as did the marked for death changes. We even had nerfs to 6 subsumed abilities before release. Rebecca already said that they would buff abilities right after tennocon but so far we have only seen the tiniest buffs imaginable for 2 abilities. That seems like alibi buffs now.

Both of those nerfs were justified by DE with usage. I disagree that they were overpowered but that's not the point, rather it doesnt matter how strong something is, otherwise octavia would have been nerfed years ago. The point is that they happily point to usage as justification for nerfs but the logical followthrough would then be to look at the least used things and buff those.

Many of the most replaced abilities havent just become garbage with the introduction of helminth. Mesa's and Chroma's 1 have been worthless for years. They were basically empty ability slots. The thing I'm disappointed in is that they didnt even say they'd look into buffing those abilities. We are far away from actual implementation but just that wouldnt be a problem. There seemed to be a refusal of acknowledgement that some of those most replaced abilities are bad.

Ok so theres a few things to clarify there because a lot has been left out, intentionally or unintentionally, to side with your point;

- Xoris wasnt a "major change" as we're discussing. Xoris' passive bonus had unforeseen/unintended interaction with certain frame powers. The prime suspect being Baruuk. They didn't increase nor decrease anything about ghe weapon itself as far as i recall, they simply fixed something that was not intended.

- i haven't heard of the marked change so i honestly cant comment on it. Thats not me saying it didn't happen either, just being honest that i haven't heard of it.

- There was no "nerf" to abilities before they were released. Abilities that were going to be too powerful added to Warframes they weren't intended to be on were balanced. Exactly the same way that every single power ingame right now is balanced before a Warframe is released. Exactly the same way that every Wep is balanced before its released. It was all based on proper data from internal testing and internal feedback. People saw the word "feedback", randomly decided to connect that to the forums, and went crazy with it. Literal imaginary connections were made without a shred of evidence to back them up.

- I feel like we already covered the "buffs after Tennocon" thing in the last post tbh. Tennocon 2020 was August 1st. Deimos released August 25th, so theres 25 days where there can be no buffs. Aug 25 to Today is about 3 weeks. 1st week people would be building/feeding Helminth. 2nd week about half of it people probably spent testing powers. At most, since Tennocon 2020 on August 1st, DE would have 7-11 days of usable data from Helminth being Live. Thats just not enough time to see any kind of trend or pattern. Any "mini-buffs" you've seen were more likely changes that didn't get approval before August 25th, so were hotfixed in along with bug fixes

- Lastly, apart from the 2 systems being centred around powers, theres no connection at all between Helminth and the Devs plans to buff/nerf powers. So far a few conspiracy theory loving Forum members decided to make up an imaginary connection and throw out the idea that "Helminth is the death of reworks". Rewind back to the middle of that last line though and you'll notice the most important detail; that info is Imaginary. Its made up. Theres been zero comment from DE stating that they are no longer doing reworks and that all we get now is Subsuming. Its a lie. Theres as much of a connection with that happening as there is with your boss in work asking you for a pen meaning you're fired.

 

I can only look at this one way myself tbh. Its too early for DE to have enough data to coherently make needed changes, so i'm glad they're not ready to. I'm both surprised and delighted that they've already thought to use Helminth data to single out underused powers. And i'm hopeful that the correct data will actually be used to help improve underused powers in the future when they're ready to be. Lets keep in mind too that they're not all in the office with their best tech. It could be a while, even after they have the required few months of data, before it can even be put to use.

[LuckyCharm]

Its weird how slow theyve gotten to act on things lately though. Failing to act on the helminth costs etc just mean theyre less likely to refund anyone later on now if they do nerf the costs. But its been a month of radio silence on it. Much as it was radio silence with the couple hundred pages of feedback people gave about the prenerfing abilities for helminth. I'm surprised not more has been said about which things need buffing. Lokis decoy for example is just a meme at this point, synonimous with rubbish ability. Much like mesa and chromas 1's. Nyx's mindcontrol too for example just needs the wuclone treatment to make it viable but since wuclone they sorta forgot about all of the summon sort of abilities too

[Drachnyn]

vor 10 Minuten schrieb (PS4)MYKK678:

- Xoris wasnt a "major change" as we're discussing. Xoris' passive bonus had unforeseen/unintended interaction with certain frame powers. The prime suspect being Baruuk. They didn't increase nor decrease anything about ghe weapon itself as far as i recall, they simply fixed something that was not intended.

They also called the loot frame nerf a fix. DE has lost most credibility on what is intended and what isnt and it also doesnt matter. The chroma deluxe heavy blade bug also wasnt intended but was kept in because it turned out to be a great addition. The interaction wasnt intended but it also wasnt bugged, it was just game mechanics.

vor 14 Minuten schrieb (PS4)MYKK678:

- There was no "nerf" to abilities before they were released. Abilities that were going to be too powerful added to Warframes they weren't intended to be on were balanced. Exactly the same way that every single power ingame right now is balanced before a Warframe is released. Exactly the same way that every Wep is balanced before its released. It was all based on proper data from internal testing and internal feedback. People saw the word "feedback", randomly decided to connect that to the forums, and went crazy with it. Literal imaginary connections were made without a shred of evidence to back them up.

- I feel like we already covered the "buffs after Tennocon" thing in the last post tbh. Tennocon 2020 was August 1st. Deimos released August 25th, so theres 25 days where there can be no buffs. Aug 25 to Today is about 3 weeks. 1st week people would be building/feeding Helminth. 2nd week about half of it people probably spent testing powers. At most, since Tennocon 2020 on August 1st, DE would have 7-11 days of usable data from Helminth being Live. Thats just not enough time to see any kind of trend or pattern. Any "mini-buffs" you've seen were more likely changes that didn't get approval before August 25th, so were hotfixed in along with bug fixes

Nerfed, balanced, rebalanced, call it whatever you want, they were intentionally changed to be weaker than they are normally (not calling that good or bad right here). You say they didnt have the data about buffing abilities but they had the data about nerfing abilities? The buffs to airburst and well of life are also specifically mentioned in the devworkshop about helminth, which makes sense because Rebecca directly mentioned ability buffs because of helminth.

vor 18 Minuten schrieb (PS4)MYKK678:

- Lastly, apart from the 2 systems being centred around powers, theres no connection at all between Helminth and the Devs plans to buff/nerf powers. So far a few conspiracy theory loving Forum members decided to make up an imaginary connection and throw out the idea that "Helminth is the death of reworks". Rewind back to the middle of that last line though and you'll notice the most important detail; that info is Imaginary. Its made up. Theres been zero comment from DE stating that they are no longer doing reworks and that all we get now is Subsuming. Its a lie. Theres as much of a connection with that happening as there is with your boss in work asking you for a pen meaning you're fired.

I never said they'll stop doing reworks.

vor 21 Minuten schrieb (PS4)MYKK678:

I can only look at this one way myself tbh. Its too early for DE to have enough data to coherently make needed changes, so i'm glad they're not ready to. I'm both surprised and delighted that they've already thought to use Helminth data to single out underused powers. And i'm hopeful that the correct data will actually be used to help improve underused powers in the future when they're ready to be. Lets keep in mind too that they're not all in the office with their best tech. It could be a while, even after they have the required few months of data, before it can even be put to use.

You say that but I dont understand your optimism about it. Just saying that they will look into the least used abilities would have been the easiest thing to say for scott there because it doesnt actually commit to anything any time soon. Yet he didnt. To me it seems Rebecca had to fight for even showing the data because the rest of the devs always seem very annoyed by the data being shown off. DE has the data and they probably had the data about what abilities get used for a long time but it didnt really seem to get a constructive reaction from scott.

[Tesseract7777]

I watched the Homestream as well. 

I guess I got a different impression. I got the idea the answer from Scott and Steve (and btw Steve made the Wild West comment I believe and Scott just backed him up so I don't know why Scott's getting all the hate here...), was just  saying it's too early right now to talk about that, we need a lot more useage statistics and feedback first to start even talking about making decisions based on that. 

I'm not saying I agree with their perspective as it did sound a tad cavalier, but it sounded to me like "too early too tell", not "we don't intend to look into that". 

[Drachnyn]

vor 2 Minuten schrieb Tesseract7777:

I watched the Homestream as well. 

I guess I got a different impression. I got the idea the answer from Scott and Steve (and btw Steve made the Wild West comment I believe and Scott just backed him up so I don't know why Scott's getting all the hate here...), was just  saying it's too early right now to talk about that, we need a lot more useage statistics and feedback first to start even talking about making decisions based on that. 

I'm not saying I agree with their perspective as it did sound a tad cavalier, but it sounded to me like "too early too tell", not "we don't intend to look into that". 

Bias probably made me hear things differently than you did but there are two things that still dont sit right with me: It evidently wasnt too early for them to adjust 6 abilities before launch (roar, dispensary, eclipse, larva, defy and warcry) and some of the abilities on the most replaced list have been garbage for a long time. Mesa's 1 and Chroma's 1 being worthless is no new revelation. It really isnt even too early to tell.

This is all going to Scott for this devstream because he is the head of the balance team. It's his responsibility, not Steve's.

[Tesseract7777]

7 minutes ago, Drachnyn said:

Bias probably made me hear things differently than you did but there are two things that still dont sit right with me: It evidently wasnt too early for them to adjust 6 abilities before launch (roar, dispensary, eclipse, larva, defy and warcry) and some of the abilities on the most replaced list have been garbage for a long time. Mesa's 1 and Chroma's 1 being worthless is no new revelation. It really isnt even too early to tell.

This is all going to Scott for this devstream because he is the head of the balance team. It's his responsibility, not Steve's.

Steve gave him the easy out though, which allowed him to walk away from a solid question from Rebecca with no real satisfying answer. But I do think part of the problem is that, if nothing else because of time concerns, actually buffing things that need it seems to be a super low priority. Instead they never seem to have enough time to do anything, and balance with a hasty, emergency form of triage, where unless something is making all other choices obsolete (in which case it's nerf time), they don't really balance that much at all. 

In fact, when you think about it for a live service game there really aren't that many regular balance changes around frames or weapons, that's why people act so excited when something gets buffed, or so mad when its nerfed, most of the time the balance team just sits on their hands. People just don't notice as much because this game doesn't have any serious PvP population, but most games people are more used to a regular buff and nerf cycle and so don't get as worked up when it happens. But with Warframe the developers will even let OP stuff go for years as long as it doesn't get TOO popular, and they'll let terrible stuff sit around for years as long as someone can make it halfway useable. I can only blame Scott so much for a companywide problem. My main constructive criticism of DE over the years, is that it seems they are always biting off more than they can currently chew, which means doing almost anything but light maintenance on a system in the game seems to cannibalize dev time from other systems. This has been a problem since as long as I can remember, no matter how much staff they had at the time. 

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

1 hour ago, Tesseract7777 said:

I watched the Homestream as well. 

I guess I got a different impression. I got the idea the answer from Scott and Steve (and btw Steve made the Wild West comment I believe and Scott just backed him up so I don't know why Scott's getting all the hate here...), was just  saying it's too early right now to talk about that, we need a lot more useage statistics and feedback first to start even talking about making decisions based on that. 

I'm not saying I agree with their perspective as it did sound a tad cavalier, but it sounded to me like "too early too tell", not "we don't intend to look into that". 

The question was “Will the Helminth system stats be used to see what abilities could use buffs”. And even before the system launched everybody here was talking about how the system could be used for that very purpose.

So to see the developers fail to reach a conclusion the players already reached a month ago is absurd.

[(PSN)thegarada]

To be fair, the questions Rebecca posed were not easy. Any answer Steve or Scott provided would have required commitment. This is why they dodged. We the players wanted concrete answers. Regardless, I do not think it is debatable that a skill like Mesa 1 sucks. The Helminth puts spot light on this issue. And nerfing Helminth available skills is not going to solve this issue. Even if a skill like roar is nerfed to 1%, it is still better than Mesa 1. 

The question is what is next for terrible skills like Mesa 1? DE, can we get a timetable for when can we expect all frames to get a balance patch?

[Duality52]

1 hour ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

To be fair, the questions Rebecca posed were not easy

At the same time, some but not all of the community's channeling their rage at her where she's just the primary liaison between DE and the community.

Take her stutter at Chroma's Spectral Scream. She slipped because of how either Steve or Scott would've dismissively responded to that, in spite the fact over how awful Spectral Scream is. I heard that when Oberon was getting reworked back in 2017, Scott disagreed with Rebecca's opinion (and the community's to an extent) that Oberon's original Passive was awful.

More instances of disconnect is where either community managers (Rebecca, Megan, etc.) would state how frames that needed to be reworked undoubtedly have no plans to be reworked. Chroma and recently Inaros the day before his Prime got released became victims of this. Again, it's most likely not the managers' fault for stating no plans to rework, but it's how DE developer team is shuttering the feedback out of pride/sensitivity to criticism.

TLDR:

Spoiler

Devstream from Home 6 demonstrates the disconnect between the devteam (particularly Scott and Steve) and the community. Rebecca voices our concerns and feedback as best as she can, only to be dismissed as a joke or rarely a rebuttal.

Feels like they're becoming what Mother caused the Entrati to be so splintered: refusing to acknowledge their own mistakes and pride for the better.

 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

1 hour ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

To be fair, the questions Rebecca posed were not easy. Any answer Steve or Scott provided would have required commitment. This is why they dodged. We the players wanted concrete answers. Regardless, I do not think it is debatable that a skill like Mesa 1 sucks. The Helminth puts spot light on this issue. And nerfing Helminth available skills is not going to solve this issue. Even if a skill like roar is nerfed to 1%, it is still better than Mesa 1. 

The question is what is next for terrible skills like Mesa 1? DE, can we get a timetable for when can we expect all frames to get a balance patch?

They have to be careful giving time tables. You guys will just pull the "but de lied to us" card whenever possible. He even said he didn't want to give more info about corpus railjack until it was more ready.

[Drachnyn]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb (PS4)thegarada:

To be fair, the questions Rebecca posed were not easy. Any answer Steve or Scott provided would have required commitment. This is why they dodged. We the players wanted concrete answers. Regardless, I do not think it is debatable that a skill like Mesa 1 sucks. The Helminth puts spot light on this issue. And nerfing Helminth available skills is not going to solve this issue. Even if a skill like roar is nerfed to 1%, it is still better than Mesa 1. 

The question is what is next for terrible skills like Mesa 1? DE, can we get a timetable for when can we expect all frames to get a balance patch?

I disagree that it was a hard question. But we didnt even get a noncommittal "we'll look into it" would have atleast shown that they knew it was the right thing to do. From Scott's reaction it seemed to me that he disagreed that something was wrong with mesa's 1 in the first place.

[Samhel]

10 hours ago, Drachnyn said:

They are quick to point at usage for any nerfs but when it comes to buffs for clearly useless and underused things there is a surprising lack of action. 

Here is the answer to this and to all of your question about why these things are happening: 

DE is always desperately trying to balance the game out of the power-fantasy, but when they fail, they let it go, because they have little motivation to stick to one subject and fix the problems with it after they hit the ground with it once. But this mindset applies to every content they ever created for the game. They tend to focus more on new things and that is because they are not interested anymore in the given subject that was born months or years ago. The motivation of getting new players and showing that they're indeed trying to balance things is bigger than the motivation to make the current playerbase happier, atleast for them right now. And this mindset I just described also proves this. 

They either need new members on the lead design team or they really need to use those statistics and also dig out information from the forums to make the game better, because sooner or later, new players won't come in, because of the negative feedbacks about nerfs, letting veterans down, making things hard for newcomers and not paying attention to player feedback.

There was a time in the history of Warframe when the devs were passionate about the story, gameplay and reworking stuff and they also read and considered lots of player feedbacks. I want those times back.

[Electropuncher]

I'm gonna be honest. I felt betrayed watching the stream yesterday. And the continued silence outside of one stream every six weeks is becoming infuriating. Real world issues are real. I can't imagine what it's like to make a video game with hundreds of people working remotely. We have no idea when DE will be back in the office again, or even if they ever will. But my god, the way the high brass have been interpreting data lately is baffling.

I've worked in food my entire adult life, more or less. If one of the entrees just isn't moving, and the feedback from diners is "it's too salty," my reaction isn't to coat everything in salt, it's to pull the entree and remake it with less salt. Conversely, if something is moving quickly and the feedback is "I like how spicy it is," I'm not suddenly gonna slather hot sauce on the mashed potatoes. Some things, real talk, needed to be nerfed. M4D was bugged, and the bug needed to be fixed. But the ability was fine on launch. Equinox, Octavia, Kuva Ogris, etc exist. Kuva Bramma was literally the overwhelmingly popular weapon on its launch, and it was just infuriating to be around a carpet bomb every two seconds. I don't get how Scott and Steve can look at the data we saw and say that nothing is slated for a second look. Because I'm in dire need of a new hobby, I've got a running list of stuff that I would change, from monetization to abilities to cosmetics. A lot of my ability changes are by no means drastic. For example, Make Spectral Scream a blast matching your element. Nothing fancy, just instead of being a channel that does abysmal damage, just make it hit hard enough to be relevant at high level and apply a status or two. For Ember's Fireball, just get rid of the silly charging mechanic it has. Inaros' Sandstorm? Make it a cast at cursor duration based move. There are admitted a few, like Ballistic Battery, where as it is, even if you remove the damage cap, it just won't do anything of note. Loki's Decoy, as it's in the game, is functionally pointless. Any ability that fires a ray is fundamentally worse than a gun, like Xaku's Deny.

I think the one thing truly holding back the game right now is the game itself. You log in, you wanna play some WF now, what do you do? You click ESO or Hydron. You hang out until your bloodlust is satisfied, pop back to your ship to change your loadout, and you go back in. Maybe you do a rep farm for the open world you're still working on. Possibly you do some nightwave, if you're not already maxed out. No matter what you do though, you're stuck basically guarding an objective, murdering tons of enemies, or some combination of both. Spy is about the only real departure from this format, but if you have Ivara and ciphers, the mode is entirely trivialized. XandyPants' DriftFrame is one of the genuinely cool ideas for a soft PVP, and I'm shocked DE hasn't put it in the game. In fact, what would be cool would be a multi-cap mission, where you need to intercept escaping prisoners from TennoJail (TM) and get them back in. Kind of a reverse Defection, but actually fun. Bosses are almost completely trivial, basically being "wait to shoot the vulnerable part."

I haven't played it in almost a decade, but I did enjoy World of Warcraft, and kind of use it as a metric for online games. One of the reasons WoW has such memorable encounters was 1) the bosses were actually balanced to match the appropriate gear for their encounter, 2) the bosses actually did something other than shoot at you or hit you with a melee weapon. 3) The unique mechanics were actually something you had to worry about. Sargas Ruk can make fire jets pop up, but you can also go into the fight as Gauss and be immune to fire. 4) Outside of the dungeons, you had stuff to do. You literally had the entire world of Warcraft. Now, I get that WF is structured around nodes, but that still feels more like a temporary thing than a final design, despite seven years of game telling me otherwise. Every planet is basically one of every mission type (with repeats, maybe minus defection) with a boss "fight." You get some branching, but the end goal is... Actually, what is the end goal of Warframe? I mean, we love to say Fashion Frame is endgame, but really, what are we working towards. I remember at some point we were told we were fighting for the independence of the human space colonies, but has anyone met these colonists? Like, there are some in the Nidus mission, but we never actually go to the proper colonies. And story wise, when we clear a planet, nothing has changed. The boss is still alive, despite me watching them literally get split in half. I know I'm harping on him, but Sargas Ruk has been in several events despite me having obliterated him. 

Even with ability changes, we're already starved for things to use them on. The devs want to discourage room-nuking, but the only thing we have to do is nuke rooms. Interception is a decent gamemode, but it requires four players to be played optimally. ...So how do we fix it? Make it have more than four zones. Give me a massive map with eight zones to track, and turn off the zones based on player count. Give me a reason to use CC. If Vauban's most useful ability is supposed to be Bastille, make a scenario where I would want to throw a Bastille at the objective and run to the next area. If Chroma is surprisingly popular, why did you expect him to be less popular? Is it because his kit is basically two passives, a janky ultimate, and a literally empty slot effectively? Give me a reason to not have my abilities active all the time, or make them more engaging than "keep 2 and 3 active, press 4 if you need to go for a run or raise some cash." Xaku's really emblematic of the failed design ethos of 2020 (for Warframe specifically!) of "tons of crowd control." Xaku can lift enemies, disarm them, mind control them, make them frozen in time, have them glue bullets to them, and weave around their attacks (kind of). None of the abilities really have any kill potential, and Void damage is unique literally to Xaku. Not to mention having three abilities slapped onto one. Thus, the best partner for Xaku is Xaku. Yes, I know the Broken frame is getting worked on actively, but... hoo boy. It's a long road. I'm not against pure support frames. I've been running Trinity like crazy lately after the Energy Vampire buff. My main is Nezha. But there's no good reason to use Xaku over any other frame. There's no goal. And that's what the real problem is.

There is no goal. Even if everything is nerfed into the ground (which part of me is actually for), it's still a matter of grinding for the sake of grinding. Anyway, I think I've rambled for long enough. Thanks for making it through yet another one of my walls of text.

[(PSN)MYKK678]

4 hours ago, Drachnyn said:

1) They also called the loot frame nerf a fix. DE has lost most credibility on what is intended and what isnt and it also doesnt matter. The chroma deluxe heavy blade bug also wasnt intended but was kept in because it turned out to be a great addition. The interaction wasnt intended but it also wasnt bugged, it was just game mechanics.

2) Nerfed, balanced, rebalanced, call it whatever you want, they were intentionally changed to be weaker than they are normally (not calling that good or bad right here). You say they didnt have the data about buffing abilities but they had the data about nerfing abilities? The buffs to airburst and well of life are also specifically mentioned in the devworkshop about helminth, which makes sense because Rebecca directly mentioned ability buffs because of helminth.

3) I never said they'll stop doing reworks.

4) You say that but I dont understand your optimism about it. Just saying that they will look into the least used abilities would have been the easiest thing to say for scott there because it doesnt actually commit to anything any time soon. Yet he didnt. To me it seems Rebecca had to fight for even showing the data because the rest of the devs always seem very annoyed by the data being shown off. DE has the data and they probably had the data about what abilities get used for a long time but it didnt really seem to get a constructive reaction from scott.

Sorry i'll have to number the responses here, i'm useless at separating quotes:

1) so that was a reply quoting our discussion about the xoris and yet the xoris is never mentioned again. I've no idea what this "loot frame nerf" refers to tbh. And we can't in any way compare the xoris to the chroma wep. I'm sorry but we really can't. A Wep being bigger than intended compared to a Wep making multiple frames powers unintentionally more powerful? Theres an absolute clear winner for "which 1 breaks the game" there. The reason the skin was left was because it had no impact, the complete opposite of the xoris situation.

2) i call it balancing because thats what happened. Internal increases AND decreases to a power/wep until it feels like what the developers want for the game. Numbers and feedback coming from official internal QA Staff members over months. Nerfing something is simply a reduction after release. Think of it this way, how could anyone complain about something being "nerfed" if they've never tried it? Thats the separation. As for the question about how they'd have enough data to reduce powers but not increase? Thats easier to answer. They didn't announce Helminth on August 1st and then begin work on it on August 2nd. They would have started work on it months ago and had QA Playtest each power a month or 2 before TennoCon. All the data that would have taken months to gather was possible because they had months to gather it.

3) I wasn't referring to you, just pointing out the absolute garbage some have been spewing since TennoCon, dressing their ideas up as facts. You aren't saying there wont be reworks but with this thread you are trying to say there won't be buffs, which falls into the same category. I'm simply pointing out that theres no evidence at all for either.

4) Optimism is easy when you realize its a choice, not something that falls on your lap. I've played a good few MMOs over the years and trust me when i say that if you think what DE does is enough to shake your confidence then you're better off not looking into any other MMOs. Ever. I also look back and see a ton of good choices amongst the bad.

- Catchmoon nerf: Correct

- Bramma nerf: Correct

- Railjack Changes: Correct (could obv still do with expansion)

- Promised to deliver what Tennocon showed instead of waiting years: Happened

- Recent Round 1 Xaku buffs: Correct

Thats just a few off the top of the head ofc not a proper list, but i just find it easy to be optimistic about Warframe compared to most other MMOs. Every day you see em take on bug reports. Almost every week theres a hotfix out with a wall of text of bug fixes. That to me is not a lazy developer, but one that tries.Even when they're stuck at home.