Updates From a Players Perspective

[Traumtulpe]

When you release an update, I expect 4 things:

1. Bugs. Lot's of bugs.
2. Balancing so bad, it makes me wonder how nobody at your company takes one look at it and says "we cannot do that, it's ridiculous".
3. Grind, padding, stupid low drop chances/stupid high costs/both.
4. Nerfs. If anything, by chance, turns out popular.

You will usually address 1-3 after the update (to varying extends). It is still disheartening to see, the balancing in particular.

The worst thing however are the nerfs, and the reasons why may surprise you:

• Players spend time on that stuff. They spend it grinding and farming and dealing with bugs. You invalidate our efforts.
• You seem perfectly content with broken, useless and bugged things. Permanently. Why do you only find motivation to break, hardly ever to fix?
• Your nerfs regularly suffer from the before mentioned abysmal balancing - not making things balanced, but adding them to the garbage pile.

There is no shortage of things to fix, never has been. But you look the other way. It is frustrating, in particular if you completely break one of the few, hard earned, toys a player finds enjoyable.

Just some random feedback, have a nice day.

[TheLexiConArtist]

You know balance can go awry on any new update. It is disheartening to see balance gone awry.

Yet you are upset when some balance is addressed, justification being someone jumped the bandwagon and invested in something. (Despite the fact they still got to make (ab)use of it while it lasted.)

Seems a tad bit contradictory to me. Energy should be spent on explaining why low-outliers are too low, instead of being upset over them fixing high-outliers you could clearly tell were too high.

 

On the other hand, I will say some changes aren't qualifiable as mere 'nerfs', they're abject breakages of mechanics. Support abilities on defense targets as a prime example. Absolutely ruined to the point of non-function.
There are exceptions to the rule, but generally, people need to suck it up and accept that their three quadrillion damage 'toys' are mistakes bound for a fix, or non-interactivity methods to circumvent gameplay probably won't survive forever.

[Sevek7]

53 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

You seem perfectly content with broken, useless and bugged things. Permanently.

I've noticed this too, and honestly I cannot understand the logic. Here's my example that comes to mind:

Telos Boltace has a passive that ragdolls enemies. This can be used in Conclave to ragdoll other players, basically incapacitating them for a few seconds. This is obviously extremely overpowered, but not necessarily broken in a fundamental sense. However, on several maps, you can ragdoll players off the map itself, so that they end up falling through the skybox. The problem is that this does not trigger a respawn. So players end up falling through the map for several minutes before being able to play again. This is obviously broken, and any other developer would fix it ASAP. 

What confuses me is the following: In several recent updates (over the last year or so), new weapons have been accidentally enabled for Conclave with their PvE stats. This clearly made them super overpowered, and players were quick to inform DE of the problem through the forums. Typically, players made posts like "Hey, these new weapons are available in conclave, can you remove them please? Also, please remove Telos Boltace." To their credit, DE then did quickly disable the new weapons, but always kept the Telos Boltace. So, it's clear that they're perfectly aware of the broken problem, but for some unknown reason, they prefer to have this particular broken thing in the game. 

In short, DE are making emergency conclave fixes, but willfully ignoring the biggest problem, even though the time required to fix it is exactly the same as the fixes they are doing. 

The rest of the stuff you mentioned is par for the course. DE discovered long ago that they don't have to actually balance the game if they just make it absurdly easy. Of course, absurdly easy games don't retain their playerbase ... unless you also pad it with a tonne of grind and collectibles. They also only nerf things after enough twitter likes / reddit upvotes. So, I understand everything except the logic of willfully keeping some broken things. 

[Traumtulpe]

59 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Yet you are upset when some balance is addressed

I was upset when they nerfed one variant of the primary Tombfinger by 50% and buffed another one to be more than 2x as strong. Because it made no sense, it just broke my toy and wasted my time.

I was upset when they made the Xoris unusable as a stat stick for no reason, with a really unsightly bandaid-nerf no less. I didn't even use it, because glaives had been bugged for half a year anyway.

These changes actively made the balance in Warframe worse, while at the same time giving players the middle finger.

They do sometimes get a nerf right. Did they put in some effort then, or is it just a matter of a stopped clock being right twice a day? Either way, I supported, for example, the nerf to the Catchmoon - because I was hardly using anything else. It was just too good. And had decent Rivens.

[LuckyCharm]

Me when theres a new update : is there anything to keep my interest? No? moving on then. 

Honestly in some ways some nerfs have been needed to keep the meta changing. Thats okay. The issue however comes when the nerfs are coming about purely to stop players farming to quick, getting through content too fast, or to boost item shop sales which i feel has been a major trend these days. It majorly sucks when something you find fun gets hit purely because someone found a niche use for it that breaks one particular mission in one particular game mode. Take for example the trinity self damage nerf for link, because people were using a niche build to farm eso quickly for the lato vandal etc parts. It was no better than saryns current kill potential, was incredibly niche, and yet it was nerfed into oblivion, along with hitting every other instance of it like chromas self damage etc.  In a game focused lately ENTIRELY around grind and item collection the nerfs do nothing but extend how long people have to farm for and it feels like artificially increasing gameplay just by making things more tedious. Much like the changes to the hydron map, repurposing of the Draco node, nerfs to Akkad and infested exp gain in general and many other nerfs in the past. 

Warframe as a looter shooter rarely feels like a looter shooter these days when the loot doesnt come all that often and the grind islands are massive