What do we do with all this power?

[Zarkor]

Hello,

So I recently made a thread about my experience as a new player in 2020. This is part 2, where I want to discuss 'endgame', if one could call it that. 

This is a game where grinding and investing time rewards you with more powerful mods, frames, or weapons. This is also a game where balance updates are a thing, because sometimes weapons, riven mods or abilities are deemed 'too powerful' or 'too underwhelming'. This is common in most games that deal with power upgrades. 

However, recently I've been asking myself... How does becoming more powerful benefit me as a player? Does it make the game easier? Does it make it more fun? Does it allow me to do content that I would otherwise not be able to do?

When I've played other games, becoming more powerful always had a meaningful impact on the gameplay itself. Take MMO's for example. I played WoW for many years, and getting better gear meant I did more damage, or could have an easier time healing, or tanking. I could run content faster, and have access to content that I would not have been able to do without the proper gear. 

In Diablo III, you're always looking for gear upgrades, since the stats on your items are RNG. And having better gear allows you to progress on higher difficulties or even a leaderboard. You're always looking for that 'perfect' upgrade.

This is true for most games that deal with gear acquisition and power upgrades.

However, how does becoming more powerful benefit me in Warframe?

Does it make the game easier? Only to an extent. You can kill enemies faster. However, this benefit is lost on non-endless mission types because of how they are designed. Most missions are trivialized without needing to have anything particularly special. 

For endless missions, all your 'power' does is allowing you to stay longer, which is something that DE has said they don't want to encourage, and with the current rotation system and the way loot is distributed across many many different loot tables, suviving for a long time is not really beneficial.

In fact, the only endless mission type that would be worth running would be a steel path survival to farm steel essence, but even then, you need to stay for a tremendous amount of time to make it worth it by how steel essence drops work, and mostly rely on cheese strategies. 

Excavations are a special case because even though it's endless, you can't actually make the timer go faster.

Becoming more powerful also has a 'cap', meaning that once you have a solid build for your frame or preferred weapon, there's not much you can do to increase that power further. Maybe riven mods, but that's pretty much it. 

Does it allow you to access content that you otherwise couldn't? Not really. Especially considering that the 'hard mode' or steel path, is the same missions but there are more enemies and they have more health. But you can do these missions with a bunch of frames or weapons, and you don't even need a riven or a huge investment in anything.

You also are not always looking for something. Once you have a decent build, that's pretty much it. You can't take it further, there's a cap, which is reached somewhat easily.

If power is not that relevant, then why is power a problem?

If there really is no benefit for being powerful in the game, why is power such a problem? What difference does it really make if a weapon has a riven disposition of 0.8 vs 0.1? What impact would that have on the game? Would that make players be able to stay for 3 hours instead of 2 AFK farming steel essence? Because I don't really see how else it could affect the game. 

At the same time, in a game where becoming more powerful doesn't really have an impact on how you play the game, or the content you can access, what is relevant then? In my own opinion, the fun of the game is in its variety. Variety of weapons, variety of frames, variety of builds. 

What steel path should've been and how to make power matter

Imagine that instead of farming for 2 hours to get some steel essence, you somehow had to 'prove your worth' to be able to get access to it. Many people will say "But DE caters to casuals!". Well, they probably do, but I wouldn't call people farming steel essence 'casuals'. They're the more 'hardcore' players and they do that because it's the only 'hardcore' thing to do. 

Now, how would you prove your worth? By changing how the missions work in Steel Path.

You could have a timer on non-endless missions, and have endlesss missions have a limit but scale accordingly so it'd be hard to reach said limit. Make players actually afraid of failing. Have 'winning' conditions, similar to how bounties bonus work. or some sorties You need to crack vaults? If you get detected at any vault or you trigger any alarm, even outside of the vault, you fail. Have to survive? Make life support drain faster and spawn more enemies. Capture? Make the target escape instantly once they reach a destination. Make boss fights feel like boss fights. You get the idea. There is so much that could be implemented in the existing iteration of missions that would keep players on their toes during missions instead of watching a video on their 2nd screen while bullet jumping to extraction.  This could make every kind of weapon relevant in some form. Silent weapons would be useful. So would AoE and single target weapons. So would crowd control (Maybe Nyx would be relevant, can you imagine?).

Not only would this reward your investment to become more powerful, but it would also reward your skills other than just raw power. It would also reward you for playing a variety of different frames. Hell, if they implemented this correctly, this could even reward teamwork, can you imagine? I would imagine that a lot more people would be willing to take on a challenge of this kind instead of a challenge like a 2 hour afk farm. Maybe it could even reward power, in terms of small upgrades to mods, or frames somehow. How crazy would be if you could forma your mods through some reward item you could purchase that would add something nice to the mod, like survivability for example or utility or even a small % of increase in the stat the mod offers. There are tons of mods no one uses, and those could instead be integrated as part of a system like this, where you consume the 'bad' mod and integrate it into another in a weaker version for example. 

And since we've established that power has a cap in this game, the rewards shouldn't be only about 'more power', but more about 'variety'. Be it in the form of cosmetics or different weapons, or in terms of resources. Feeding the helminth could feel like you worked for it, and you were rewarded with more variety by being able to try different builds and combinations of abilities. What if you could buy, say, helminth 'food' for steel essence that would be rewarded from the steel path in a new iteration of it?  

You could even go further and have some kind of badge for frames with which you are particularly good at something. What if you are a great spy and you almost never get detected? Sure, that would be easier to get on a stealth frame. But what if you wanted to be a Spy Vauban? That could be something you could work for. And it could be tied to specific cosmetics, because after all, real endgame will always be fashion frame. 

Final thoughts

I'm sure there are better ideas of how something could be implemented to improve the state of the game, but the point is that the current state is full of contradictions and those need to be addressed. 

At the end of the day, I don't want to feel like I feel right now. I have these great frames, with awesome builds, and these amazing weapons that deal a lot of damage. Maybe I even have a riven or two for some of them. But... 

What am I supposed to do with all this power? 

Thanks for reading, if you did. And I'd love to hear more ideas about this.

[(XBOX)EternalDrk Mako]

fashion frame

[vanaukas]

With that powe you can do events, like the Nights of Naberus, you should check it out.

[lukasystem]

Not gonna read the whole thing.

Farm

[krc473]

55 minutes ago, Zarkor said:

What am I supposed to do with all this power? 

That's easy: take a break and play other games while waiting for interesting new content. That seems to be what many other people use it for (myself included). 

[(PSN)robotwars7]

7 minutes ago, vanaukas said:

With that powe you can do events, like the Nights of Naberus, you should check it out.

since when do you "need power" to run Deimos bounties and open a store menu? because that's all the event is. 

[Zarkor]

1 minute ago, krc473 said:

That's easy: take a break and play other games while waiting for interesting new content. That seems to be what many other people use it for (myself included). 

That has nothing to do with what I wrote. 

[krc473]

Just now, Zarkor said:

That has nothing to do with what I wrote. 

But that is the answer to your question. There is no reason to have the power in WF until something new comes out. You can only repeat the same missions for so long. Progress is meaningless as it really has no benefit. The point is to farm for things you need, when there is nothing you need what do you do? 

• You can farm things more efficiently, assuming RNG plays along. That's all.

[Hearsay]

The real point to all that power is so you can gloat about doing three hour SP survivals and how that's the only correct way to play.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

29 minutes ago, (PS4)robotwars7 said:

since when do you "need power" to run Deimos bounties and open a store menu? because that's all the event is. 

Since the content dropped and people legitimately asked for it to be nerfed so they wouldn't have such a hard time completing them, perhaps?

 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Nyx is relevant. All frames are relevant, a player's imagination, however, is limited.

People think they have power, yet can't handle 15 minutes in an arbitration. 

It's really common for people that play online games to hit a wall and think "hey, what next?". That's where you realize you bumrushed the games content and take a step back. You can't max focus and get Primed mods maxed in a couple weeks. There's plenty to keep people busy.

If you're a veteran: congrats, you just got a year+ of entertainment for a low cost. You received a great return on investment.

If you're already burned out on the game play loop: find out if you enjoy the game or not because it's not gonna deviate much from this. 

Aren't you the guy that just said you've only played for a few months? 

Is your focused maxed? Can you do a tridolon or profit taker without having to be revived 3 times? 

[vanaukas]

49 minutes ago, (PS4)robotwars7 said:

since when do you "need power" to run Deimos bounties and open a store menu? because that's all the event is. 

was a pun from another thread, I didn't read that wall of text so idk and I don't want to derail this even further

[SpicyDinosaur]

OP, how are you discussing steel path when you have somehow done no missions on either the steel path or the regular star chart, for that matter!

 

I guess if you want to talk about railjack you have experience there. lol

 

OP's Profile

 

For some reason image links have stopped working on the site, but here you go!

[JoJoshuee_DesK]

hace 1 hora, Zarkor dijo:

Hello,

So I recently made a thread about my experience as a new player in 2020

2020? Lmao... also 

[Surbusken]

Dps represents time. Obviously of great importance in this game.

The other school of thought, is trying to put up numbers as your gameplay.

The issue with nerfing after the fact, is people paid for it.

I would have no problems with nerfs, if they offered a refund for everone who spent plat on said item. As it is now they can rotate nerf items and make money off of it, with no accountability.

Then it starts getting hairy, when often times certain mods that fit a popular build cost people resources also.

The frustration of the time wasted and the developers ruining what you worked on building up.

I have no items or builds I am attached to personally but I am royally against nerfs without refunds, no matter how overpowered someone is next to me.

They put in the time, cash, effort/whatever, it just seems so meaningless to disappoint them like that. Everytime I am just sitting there thinking how many players did we lose this time, what was the point really

[AlphaPHENIX]

2 hours ago, Zarkor said:

Make players actually afraid of failing.

PhEwhAhaHaHAHAHaHaha...
...Sorry, I would like that too. But at this point, for it to happen, we would need a Warframe 2.

[Killa_Byte]

I see your original post was moved because you speak the truth

[(NSW)Kirbys-Epic-Yarn]

Get bored and sht post in region chat is end game 

[BDMblue]

I think what DE needs to do is pass the game onto some company to look at and come up with an end game solution. DE has been on this game for years and they can’t do it so let someone else try.  

[lnfine]

6 часов назад, Zarkor сказал:

You could have a timer on non-endless missions, and have endlesss missions have a limit but scale accordingly so it'd be hard to reach said limit. Make players actually afraid of failing. Have 'winning' conditions, similar to how bounties bonus work. or some sorties You need to crack vaults? If you get detected at any vault or you trigger any alarm, even outside of the vault, you fail. Have to survive? Make life support drain faster and spawn more enemies. Capture? Make the target escape instantly once they reach a destination. Make boss fights feel like boss fights.

>You need to crack vaults? If you get detected at any vault or you trigger any alarm, even outside of the vault, you fail

Ivara trivializes this. Wukong probably too. Hell, you could put silence on Titania to do a meme no map alarm spy speedrun without invisibility.

>Have to survive? Make life support drain faster and spawn more enemies

Already does that. More enemies is actually better for survival, since there's a limited amount of enemies that can attack you at any given time, and more enemies means they also block each other (and feed your combo counter and life support meter).

>Capture? Make the target escape instantly once they reach a destination

Worst case you roll to get a favourable map layout where the capture target doesn't get triggered when you enter the room with it. Then you use navigator to glaive it to death from outside capture trigger distance while it's cluelessly flailing around.

>Make boss fights feel like boss fights

How? Design me a good hard boss for warframe.

Why be afraid of failing when you can always try again? This is kinda the core design of warframe. Can't really be afraid of anything if you have nothing to lose.

 

The supposed "hardcore" content we have is killing half a gajillion enemies with a spoon aka grendel farm, and it's zero difficulty and infinite boredom.

[sitfesz]

Quote

What do we do with all this power?

Kill.

[0_The_F00l]

What to do with so much power? like in real life , the answer is get more power :P

 

I would like some more variety with higher level content , but DE has shown an unwillingness or inability to do what you have suggested.

[SpiritTeA]

It’s pointless really, people don’t need harder content. When people get something hard (Grendel missions, RJ enemies at start, Orb Vallis enemies at start and I’m sure many other I cannot remember of, God merciful, how often do you play Lua spy or rescue for fun? Raids designed for 12 people... I was in party that cheesed nightmare raid in 4 faces because it was actually easier... People are starting to scream how “boring” , “stupid” , “long” new enemies/modes are and  than things get nerfed and people whine about how easy it is. And even on SP, people prefer to sit under stairs for 10 hours , where 3 people do nothing and other one has macros. What the point of thinking of hard content for such people? 

[kevoisvevo]

you want challenge but how? when there are frames which literally make steel path a walk in the park simulator. hushed loki, riven whipclaw khora, blood altar nekros, the list basically goes on and on. especially when people can easily copy builds now.

[SpicyDinosaur]

15 minutes ago, SpiritTeA said:

It’s pointless really, people don’t need harder content. When people get something hard (Grendel missions, RJ enemies at start, Orb Vallis enemies at start and I’m sure many other I cannot remember of, God merciful, how often do you play Lua spy or rescue for fun? Raids designed for 12 people... I was in party that cheesed nightmare raid in 4 faces because it was actually easier... People are starting to scream how “boring” , “stupid” , “long” new enemies/modes are and  than things get nerfed and people whine about how easy it is. And even on SP, people prefer to sit under stairs for 10 hours , where 3 people do nothing and other one has macros. What the point of thinking of hard content for such people? 

God, this! And DE keeps bowing to the pressure. Then when something actually needs to be changed they become this unmoveable object.