So why not make everything that's bad...good? (Or at least not so bad)

[PhreazerBurn]

There's obviously been a monumental amount of development time spent on the design, mechanics, and art for the hundreds of different weapons and dozens of different warframes. But MOST are laughably bad and have been that way basically forever. Is that necessary?

I know I'm not the only player that has found a few mediocre weapons/abilities that I liked but couldn't justify using against tougher enemies. While I may find the Boltor Prime an incredibly satisfying gun to use, it just feels terrible to spend several seconds per trash mob kill. Rivens are not the answer either. Even the godly riven I got unrolled couldn't make my Dera even half decent despite throwing 4 forma at it.

What is stopping DE from making a quick and dirty mass buff to all the things that are currently useless? Just looking at kuva weapons its clear that in many cases all it takes is a moderate tweak to the numbers, and you suddenly have something worth using.

I've been emphasizing weapons, but abilities are in the same situation. There are many warframes with a 1 ability that basically just does some damage in a small area. Many of these abilities are so poorly tuned that there is no reason to use them. The helminth kinda fixes this to a small degree, but what about warframes with basically zero good abilities such as Inaros? What's the harm in giving his Desiccation 1000 base damage? Its still not super strong, but its no longer a waste of a keypress. 

And that sort of change (if I'm not mistaken) is as simple as changing a single variable.

What if there are unintended consequences and some obscure weapon becomes suddenly OP? Hotfix it. Or don't. The game already isn't balanced to any serious degree.

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

If they give every weapon a wraith/vandal/prime/prisma then the normal weapons can stay sucky, otherwise just change the numbers and make some sucky ones not stay sucky forever especially since some of them have some fun mechanics. As for abilities it's more complicated than changing a number

[YUNoJump]

DE does occasionally do big stat changes for a bunch of weapons at once. The problem they have is that they're kinda stuck releasing or fixing big releases like Deimos, so they don't have as much time to fix smaller things that don't get a lot of hype/attention. Regardless, I think they've said an update like this is coming relatively soon. This may also come with some Warframe ability tweaks, it's unclear.

However, some weapons are designed to be worse than others. DE has tried to balance weapons based on their MR requirement; the higher the MR requirement, the better it should be. The problem then is that there are far more weapons than you need to get to each MR, so you always end up with a backlog of weapons below your current MR, but that's a whole different issue.

The exception to this whole thing seems to be Primes. DE can't resist power creeping each new Prime release. Just look at the stats of each Prime Heavy Blade; the Scindo is completely outclassed and the Galatine doesn't have much of a comparison with the Gram. DE should be focusing on adding unique mechanics or whatnot for each new Prime release in order to avoid power creep; especially for melee weapons, considering most melees can just use the exact same build.

[Loza03]

They tried. Shrine of the Eidolon, whilst its headline feature was the full Tridolon, also came with a huge list of buffs and changes to bring almost every single weapon up to snuff. It didn't achieve very much. And doing the same to Warframes would be much the same.

The problem with Warframe's balance is that there's no limits on anything the player does once you get far enough. Once you pick up Arcane Energize and Zenurik, Energy is functionally infinite, and Carrier will make most weapons have a bottomless reserve as well. Several do anyway. These resources are what are supposed to be the difference between a big-badda-boom rocket launcher and an Assault Rifle - using a more powerful ability incurs a higher cost. In Warframe, that has ceased to be the case. Without a reason to not use the most powerful items, less powerful one simply do not have a reason to exist. The only way to buff these abilities into relevance is to make them powerful enough to match their nuke counterparts, or in reality, surpass them. At which point, other abilities cease to have value.

 

I've held this opinion for a while, but I've recently watched a video about a similar phenomenon in Dungeons and Dragons, calling it the 'Tyranny of Fun'. Players don't see the limiters as part of the game's fun - the fun of building up a character and thinking around the problems the game presents to you, and all the different options and routes and characters that can be built within the system, and all the situations that can be experienced with all those different options. The fun of trying new things. In demanding the Dungeon Master - or rather, Digital Extremes - remove those limitations in the name of having more fun in the short term, we've lost what we had.

[Miser_able]

if you buff weaker weapons to be on par with the current meta, then they just replace it and we're right back where we started.

[trst]

Because not everything should be at such a level and what players think is "acceptable" power for any piece of gear varies wildly and is often beyond what should be reasonable within the scope of what we use them against.

Weapons are (meant to be) tiered by mastery; the higher MR lock a weapon has the better it is (supposed to be). There are outliers and inconsistencies with this but any weapons that seem weak should only be buffed if they're weak relative to weapons within their MR range.

And most gear in the game is still 100% viable and effective relative to the content the game offers. While not all "bad" weapons can be made to trivialize the bulk of the game most of them can do so. So wanting such weapons buffed is solely out of wanting to see higher numbers or wanting more gear viable for endurance running. Or alternatively they're bad everywhere but a specific niche like sniper rifles only being good against Eidolons.

 

Really the issue is how absent any real balancing is. With no properly established floor or ceiling of how powerful us or our weapons should be it's hard to determine where any one thing should be among everything else. And just making everything as strong as possible makes for a dull game and greater balancing problems down the line.

[PhreazerBurn]

44 minutes ago, trst said:

...and what players think is "acceptable" power for any piece of gear varies wildly...

That's fair enough. I think a reasonable standard for a weapon to be considered good enough to not need further buffs is when a good player with good mods can be able to take it into a L100 sortie and do like 10% of the team's damage on average.

A few people mentioned weapon power being based on MR. That's just not accurate, and there are far too many examples against it to even have them be worth mentioning. While there may be some validity for players in their first 50-100 hours MR quickly becomes little more than brag-rights.

Here's another example. Volt's Shock gets no use because Discharge does 5x the damage, hits the entire world, CCs, and has a powerful dot. What is the logic behind the baffling weakness of Shock?

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Every weapon isn't gonna have 50% status chance and 50% crit with 2.6 crit damage.

Every ability isn't going to be an aoe nuke that strips armor and does viral damage with a 100% status proc.

Every enemy in the entire game was made weaker just so even the worst player could actually kill stuff. 

Learn to strip armor, learn to mod correctly, and use primed faction damage mods as well as other Primed mods.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

10 minutes ago, PhreazerBurn said:

That's fair enough. I think a reasonable standard is for a weapon to be considered good enough to not need further buffs a good player with good mods should be able to take it into a L100 sortie and do like 10% of the team's damage on average.

A few people mentioned weapon power being based on MR. That's just not accurate, and there are far too many examples against it to even have them be worth mentioning. While there may be some validity for players in their first 50-100 hours MR quickly becomes little more than brag-rights.

Here's another example. Volt's Shock gets no use because Discharge does 5x the damage, hits the entire world, CCs, and has a powerful dot. What is the logic behind the baffling weakness of Shock?

Did you know that multiple 1 abilities have augments that increase your weapon damage? What is weak about 250% weapon damage?

[Hypernaut1]

2 hours ago, PhreazerBurn said:

 

I know I'm not the only player that has found a few mediocre weapons/abilities that I liked but couldn't justify using against tougher enemies. While I may find the Boltor Prime an incredibly satisfying gun to use, it just feels terrible to spend several seconds per trash mob kill. Rivens are not the answer either. Even the godly riven I got unrolled couldn't make my Dera even half decent despite throwing 4 forma at it.

 

This is you're problem right here. I have a decent riven for my Dera and its great in all content. It still isnt my best weapon, but you cant expect EVERY weapon to become gamebreaking with a riven. My Dera went from unusable to good enough, if i felt the need for variety. Expecting every weapon to become god tier is unrealistic. Same thing with the Boltor. 

Rivens ARE the answer. They allow you to revisit weaker weapons in endgame. There are definitely some weapons that are still unusable even with a riven though, but there isnt many. 

[Leyers_of_facade]

3 hours ago, PhreazerBurn said:

Even the godly riven I got unrolled couldn't make my Dera even half decent despite throwing 4 forma at it.

ok, first of all, dera does have a variant (dera vandal), so I hope you mean the vandal (it would not be a good idea to consider buffing normal / weaker versions of the weapon to the level of better variants)

 

anyway, very curious about what your "godly riven" is, because at least from the stats on wiki, it would seem that making the weapon do well isn't really that hard. Although for sure you would probably need to run something that adds flat crit (eg arcane avenger)

 

Honestly though, considering how weak the typical enemy is (by typical, I would mean anything that you can see within 1 hour of survival / endurance equivalent, and excluding exceptions such as eidolons), probably 90% of the non weaker variant weapons will be able to clear these enemies at a reasonable rate given enough effort into builds. Also yes, I am aware that things like stug exists, but there aren't that many weapons that is really that hopelessly awful. Bad mechanics and uncomfortable to use? perhaps. incapable of handling content? probably not, outside of a very selective few as well as weaker variants.

[trst]

1 hour ago, PhreazerBurn said:

That's fair enough. I think a reasonable standard for a weapon to be considered good enough to not need further buffs is when a good player with good mods can be able to take it into a L100 sortie and do like 10% of the team's damage on average.

A few people mentioned weapon power being based on MR. That's just not accurate, and there are far too many examples against it to even have them be worth mentioning. While there may be some validity for players in their first 50-100 hours MR quickly becomes little more than brag-rights.

Here's another example. Volt's Shock gets no use because Discharge does 5x the damage, hits the entire world, CCs, and has a powerful dot. What is the logic behind the baffling weakness of Shock?

That example is something literally every weapon can do. The real challenge with it is being able to do that much damage before someone with a nuke frame kills everything before you even see them on screen.

The MR scaling was the intent behind what weapon balancing they have done but is not something they've stuck to. And given how volatile the community is over nerfs is something we may never see a proper return to. It has nothing to do with the MR of a player but as a method of giving value to high MR and prevent brand new players from getting the strongest weapons out the gate.

And the logic behind Shock vs Discharge is that Shock costs a quarter of the energy, is a one handed action (doesn't prevent movement/attacking), and hits enemies much faster. There is no world in which Shock should ever be as powerful as Discharge. But the reason it's so weak is that it's focus is on CC which is a largely dead mechanic due to poor balancing.

[ShortCat]

OP used many words to mask a buff everything request as an earnest discusiion.

[vegetosayajin]

some are outdated, some are just for the starting tenno
and they did something like this with the last melee changes - this was the best "rework" of a system imo, now you have a real choice for melee(before it was a couple of zaws and 2-3 normal/prime weapons at the top), so many are so strong.
I hope they do the same thing for primaries and secondaries, give them something that doesn't scream after some level enemies go to: "Just kill them with melee, don't struggle."

[Guiver909]

Because they don't know how to do that.

DE takes the same approach Blizzard does and just nerfs based on usage.Its the lazy devs way of balancing (it never works)and its always a clear sign the devs don't know or play there own game which is why the ways in which they nerf things don't even make sense most times.

Much easier just to make flavour of the month metas in a cycle than actually balance things.

 

 

[OggerAZ]

6 hours ago, PhreazerBurn said:

There's obviously been a monumental amount of development time spent on the design, mechanics, and art for the hundreds of different weapons and dozens of different warframes. But MOST are laughably bad and have been that way basically forever. Is that necessary?

I know I'm not the only player that has found a few mediocre weapons/abilities that I liked but couldn't justify using against tougher enemies. While I may find the Boltor Prime an incredibly satisfying gun to use, it just feels terrible to spend several seconds per trash mob kill. Rivens are not the answer either. Even the godly riven I got unrolled couldn't make my Dera even half decent despite throwing 4 forma at it.

What is stopping DE from making a quick and dirty mass buff to all the things that are currently useless? Just looking at kuva weapons its clear that in many cases all it takes is a moderate tweak to the numbers, and you suddenly have something worth using.

I've been emphasizing weapons, but abilities are in the same situation. There are many warframes with a 1 ability that basically just does some damage in a small area. Many of these abilities are so poorly tuned that there is no reason to use them. The helminth kinda fixes this to a small degree, but what about warframes with basically zero good abilities such as Inaros? What's the harm in giving his Desiccation 1000 base damage? Its still not super strong, but its no longer a waste of a keypress. 

And that sort of change (if I'm not mistaken) is as simple as changing a single variable.

What if there are unintended consequences and some obscure weapon becomes suddenly OP? Hotfix it. Or don't. The game already isn't balanced to any serious degree.

My opinion on this is that in a game that will run for a long time trying to keep everything up to date.

And Warframe has some kind of solution for that which is weapon variants.

I think regular weapons don't have to be good, they should be fine for where they are used:

for Example a weapon with mr < 4 requirement does not have to be effective in MOT or requiem fissures. If it can clear the early planets it already does it's job well. It fulfills it's purpose.

weapon variants like wraith/vandal and syndicate weapons should imo be used to give old and forgotten weapons and give them niche applications.

prime weapon variants should be the 'strongest' version of a weapon and be usable for all 'later content' with maybe the exception of steel path.

unique weapons like zaws, kitguns and kuva weapons should exceed about any weapon in an area if you really go for it.

 

Something like that should be defined by the balance team(it was mentioned a few times that DE has something like that) and follow that ruling. 

[BahamutKaiser]

Some weapon progression is fine, not every weapon has to be competitive. I think they should look at making every weapon type competitive, so we aren't using only beam, explosive and automatic weapons, but unfortunately they haven't considered more diametrically unique ways of enhancing weapons.

Once regular bows, semi auto primary and secondary, and so on are at least rational choices, they don't even have to be strictly as good, than maybe it wouldn't feel so wasteful. 

[(PSN)robotwars7]

imagine if every single person who just said "buff not nerf" was a dev.. I wonder just what kind of dumpster fire the game would be...

[Surbusken]

9 hours ago, Loza03 said:

They tried. Shrine of the Eidolon, whilst its headline feature was the full Tridolon, also came with a huge list of buffs and changes to bring almost every single weapon up to snuff. It didn't achieve very much. And doing the same to Warframes would be much the same.

The problem with Warframe's balance is that there's no limits on anything the player does once you get far enough. Once you pick up Arcane Energize and Zenurik, Energy is functionally infinite, and Carrier will make most weapons have a bottomless reserve as well. Several do anyway. These resources are what are supposed to be the difference between a big-badda-boom rocket launcher and an Assault Rifle - using a more powerful ability incurs a higher cost. In Warframe, that has ceased to be the case. Without a reason to not use the most powerful items, less powerful one simply do not have a reason to exist. The only way to buff these abilities into relevance is to make them powerful enough to match their nuke counterparts, or in reality, surpass them. At which point, other abilities cease to have value.

 

I've held this opinion for a while, but I've recently watched a video about a similar phenomenon in Dungeons and Dragons, calling it the 'Tyranny of Fun'. Players don't see the limiters as part of the game's fun - the fun of building up a character and thinking around the problems the game presents to you, and all the different options and routes and characters that can be built within the system, and all the situations that can be experienced with all those different options. The fun of trying new things. In demanding the Dungeon Master - or rather, Digital Extremes - remove those limitations in the name of having more fun in the short term, we've lost what we had.

That sounded really good leaving the station, an actual point with an example for a change, but I had to get off the train when we reached "it's all the players' fault".

Everything is the developer's responsibility at all times. No matter how unreasonable or unfair the players are, the only people with any kind of influence per definition, has to assume responsibility.

As to your specific example, "the developers only followed player's suggestions for weapon balance" lol?

I actually wish they had done that, put the 20 or whatever best warframe players in a room and let them create a balanced system. I don't remember the last time I read a single forum thread, that did not have far better ideas. Including in variety, types of solutions. The creativity and dedication of the community is really endless, if only they weren't absolutely ignored.

In fact, everytime you see suggestions being brought up left and right on the fly, improvised by the players.

It's only when you ask the developers the conversation goes quiet and you see major issues hanging for years, as if they don't even have any ideas.

Additionally, the jungian thing of game developers, wouldn't it be a total declaration of failure to risk, letting players decide or design something and then have them outshine you? No, no, no. No ego could handle that or even consider taking that risk.

Obviously they don't have infinite time on their hands but this particular job is literally moving numbers around in notepad.

One of the things you have to include in this conversation, is the grind vs mr fodder.

Which is the most grind heavy result, from the developers' perspective, can you really assume they are interested in most if not all weapons being used? Question no. 1 always, what produces the most grind?

What if reality is the first 10 levels are just meant to waste your time and resources, hoping you might rush some items and put in 200 hours on trash weapons.

Or get a great weapon at level 5 and be content.

You want to get to mr 10 or mr 16, exactly because it's trash. You've assume the developers want every weapon to be used, you can't assume that.

Then couple that with flavour of the month items, where new purchases are generally better than old content... obviously.

I am not going to call the developers greedy or lazy or incompetent, simply say they make their decisions based on what - they think - is best for them, so it "being the player's fault" is the absolute last thing it is. lol.

 

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

10 hours ago, PhreazerBurn said:

There's obviously been a monumental amount of development time spent on the design, mechanics, and art for the hundreds of different weapons and dozens of different warframes. But MOST are laughably bad and have been that way basically forever. Is that necessary?

I know I'm not the only player that has found a few mediocre weapons/abilities that I liked but couldn't justify using against tougher enemies. While I may find the Boltor Prime an incredibly satisfying gun to use, it just feels terrible to spend several seconds per trash mob kill. Rivens are not the answer either. Even the godly riven I got unrolled couldn't make my Dera even half decent despite throwing 4 forma at it.

What is stopping DE from making a quick and dirty mass buff to all the things that are currently useless? Just looking at kuva weapons its clear that in many cases all it takes is a moderate tweak to the numbers, and you suddenly have something worth using.

I've been emphasizing weapons, but abilities are in the same situation. There are many warframes with a 1 ability that basically just does some damage in a small area. Many of these abilities are so poorly tuned that there is no reason to use them. The helminth kinda fixes this to a small degree, but what about warframes with basically zero good abilities such as Inaros? What's the harm in giving his Desiccation 1000 base damage? Its still not super strong, but its no longer a waste of a keypress. 

And that sort of change (if I'm not mistaken) is as simple as changing a single variable.

What if there are unintended consequences and some obscure weapon becomes suddenly OP? Hotfix it. Or don't. The game already isn't balanced to any serious degree.

Sigh. Please just think about it for a minute and you'll figure out that there's always a spectrum. It's never as simple as good and bad. It's always about "this is currently the most powerful, and these are everything else". And we'll always see players gravitate towards the most powerful they can obtain. 

Also desiccation acts as crowd control that gives you a trickle of health, and opens them up to finishers that restore even more health. Killing them outright won't be as useful to anyone who knows how to play Inaros. 

[Rakosta_Kai]

4 hours ago, Guiver909 said:

Because they don't know how to do that.

DE takes the same approach Blizzard does and just nerfs based on usage.Its the lazy devs way of balancing (it never works)and its always a clear sign the devs don't know or play there own game which is why the ways in which they nerf things don't even make sense most times.

Much easier just to make flavour of the month metas in a cycle than actually balance things.

Except they (DE) don't do that...

Fine folks like yourself come here and complain/rave about a weapon/skill/collection of skills interacting or post the same on youtube and expect that it's something DE won't read or watch...

Then it gets nerfed.

Usage analytics is just supporting documentation at that point. It's always been complaints that move the needle here—That's why there tend to be so many of them.

[DrivaMain]

Nerfing the top choice isn’t a lazy way most of the time. I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say you have pre nerf Kuva Bramma and any single target weapon really. Assuming both of these weapons can one shot enemies, good ammo economy, and both of them are equal in spamability. What will you pick? It’s obvious you will pick the Bramma. Why? Because it can one shot a group of 10 enemies in a single button press but with the single target you have to do it in 10 button presses or some aiming if it’s auto to spray it over the group of 10 enemies.

How will you balance this? You can’t just give the single target weapon explosive rounds! That basically made it another Kuva Bramma and kill the weapon’s identity. So, you have no choice but to either nerf the bramma’s economy, reduce the spammability by nerfing the fire rate, or nerf the weapon’s power to one shot enemies.

[Loza03]

2 hours ago, Surbusken said:

That sounded really good leaving the station, an actual point with an example for a change, but I had to get off the train when we reached "it's all the players' fault".

Everything is the developer's responsibility at all times. No matter how unreasonable or unfair the players are, the only people with any kind of influence per definition, has to assume responsibility.

As to your specific example, "the developers only followed player's suggestions for weapon balance" lol?

I actually wish they had done that, put the 20 or whatever best warframe players in a room and let them create a balanced system. I don't remember the last time I read a single forum thread, that did not have far better ideas. Including in variety, types of solutions. The creativity and dedication of the community is really endless, if only they weren't absolutely ignored.

In fact, everytime you see suggestions being brought up left and right on the fly, improvised by the players.

It's only when you ask the developers the conversation goes quiet and you see major issues hanging for years, as if they don't even have any ideas.

Additionally, the jungian thing of game developers, wouldn't it be a total declaration of failure to risk, letting players decide or design something and then have them outshine you? No, no, no. No ego could handle that or even consider taking that risk.

Obviously they don't have infinite time on their hands but this particular job is literally moving numbers around in notepad.

One of the things you have to include in this conversation, is the grind vs mr fodder.

Which is the most grind heavy result, from the developers' perspective, can you really assume they are interested in most if not all weapons being used? Question no. 1 always, what produces the most grind?

What if reality is the first 10 levels are just meant to waste your time and resources, hoping you might rush some items and put in 200 hours on trash weapons.

Or get a great weapon at level 5 and be content.

You want to get to mr 10 or mr 16, exactly because it's trash. You've assume the developers want every weapon to be used, you can't assume that.

Then couple that with flavour of the month items, where new purchases are generally better than old content... obviously.

I am not going to call the developers greedy or lazy or incompetent, simply say they make their decisions based on what - they think - is best for them, so it "being the player's fault" is the absolute last thing it is. lol.

 

We can't have threads like this where we voice our opinions of the game, give feedback on things we dislike and make suggestions about what we want the game to be, and then collectively wash our hands of the responsibility for the developers doing what was asked for upon reaslise that that it was a bad idea.

Of course the devs take their fair share of the responsibility - like with any dungeon master in my analogy, they could easily have just said "No. Them's the rules, and they're that way for a reason. I'm willing to change some rules for the purposes of the experience, but I have my own opinions, and I believe the game would be better off in the long run without your Wizard having multiple concentration spells and infinite spell slots.", but it's fallacious to pretend that not doing so is entirely to blame for 'that guy's' behaviour.

[Surbusken]

47 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

We can't have threads like this where we voice our opinions of the game, give feedback on things we dislike and make suggestions about what we want the game to be, and then collectively wash our hands of the responsibility for the developers doing what was asked for upon reaslise that that it was a bad idea.

Of course the devs take their fair share of the responsibility - like with any dungeon master in my analogy, they could easily have just said "No. Them's the rules, and they're that way for a reason. I'm willing to change some rules for the purposes of the experience, but I have my own opinions, and I believe the game would be better off in the long run without your Wizard having multiple concentration spells and infinite spell slots.", but it's fallacious to pretend that not doing so is entirely to blame for 'that guy's' behaviour.

The step you skipped, is giving feedback automatically means it's added to the game.

I don't assume that, I don't even assume they care enough to read posts at all. I'd go as a far as to say, I don't assume a single person on the planet, is going to care about what I have to say, lol.

From my perspective, it's self-entitlement on your part, to just automatically assume people find you relevant. You didn't even stop for 2 seconds to consider, just consider, that maybe no one is reading your posts. Or maybe they do read them but don't find them interesting, or maybe they do find them interesting but unrealistic. Maybe they are relasitic but don't match something else. I'd like you go back and re-examine your ego versus critical thinking on the matter based on realism.

Do 2 column. In the first one, you add the header "why they should listen to me", the second header "why they should not listen to me", then you write down everything you can think of it both and add up the math.

You went all the way to, "if I type something, it's automatically in the game" because I am obviously and flawless jewel.

Even in that world, which doesn't exist, look up 'every situation in the gaming industry since 1978' for emperical data on the subject, the point in case still comes back to the reality of, who do the developers care about? They care about them. As they should. It's their ass, not yours.

They - might - think having every weapon be viable fits their agenda, but they might not. We haven't established that yet. Jumped the gun there too.

Speculatively speaking, there are monotization reasons, as well as design advantages, specifically selling flavour of the month, to keeping certain items terrible, by choice.

Looking at it rationally, you'd have to speculate things are the way they are, because the developers concluded it made the most financial sense... for them. Is that crazy talk to you?

You still over there thinking you personally defined the whole game through your forum posts?

[killerJoke66]

1 hour ago, DrivaMain said:

How will you balance this? 

 

1 hour ago, DrivaMain said:

You can’t just give the single target weapon explosive rounds! That basically made it another Kuva Bramma and kill the weapon’s identity. 

How about giving special effects/utility for headshot kills for 'certain' single target focused primaries and secondaries to compensate for their lack of aoe ? 

Thats a good start . If i can think this with my lazy *ss surely they can come up with something better .