Arbitrary Timers: The Importance of Engaging the Player Beyond "Doing Nothing"

[Zeke]

TL;DR: Many missions recently have been a copy-paste of vanilla mobile defense, Essentially the bare minimum of player engagement when there are ways in game to make the mission type beyond sitting around waiting out a timer. Here I present the notion where this stale game mode that's been extremely prevalent as of late can have a mechanic that will provide engagement ten fold over "doing nothing". Because vanilla mobile defense shouldn't be the answer to most missions as it's stale and repetitive.

-As of late, many missions have taken the vanilla mobile defense route, you press X, then wait... A mook might come and thwack the objective but it wouldn't be hyperbolic to say you do nothing and wait out a timer. This mission type has plagued many bounties and objectives in a game with unhinged freedom of movement. Asking for almost nothing of the player and basically telling you to use a service like Netflix because you're told to sit and stay.

-Is there a way to mitigate it? Absolutely and it has been done before, if anyone remembers, Orb Vallis bounties can have an objective that requires you to break out Solaris residents in a cell, it's essentially a mobile defense but with the slight but very impactful twist of occasional enemies that drop data, collecting that data will reduce the timer. That right there is engagement, going around the area and eliminating marked targets to alleviate the timer.

-Devstream 150 had a segment showing off corpus railjack, where they literally transitioned past a minute and a half mobile defense in the clip. It's almost insulting with how many arbitrary timers have been implemented lately when there are mechanics in game that could justify more than "doing nothing".

While not all missions have taken this creatively deprived route, it's apparent enough where seeing a timer that can't be influenced is infuriating when there's a robust and fun movements system that isn't being taken into consideration. If you have thoughts regarding this please send them and spread the awareness, in hopes to have these missions given mechanics to alleviate the equivalent of dead air.

[Dauggie]

yea i legit hate MD types, too much of them. atleast have something like kill 100 robot enemies to Recharge something for corpus / infested in deimos already has that for summoning that assassination target / something for grineer. such little things where situation can be longer or shorter depending on player style. that's better than waiting for next phase. Also anything more than 2minutes is #*!%ing painful like previous iso bounty's stage 2. Same S#&$ in plain's bounty. unnecessary 3-4 minutes MD 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

I'd say I have to agree. Steel path at least made regular starchart MD more active because of the dense spawns.

But I have a feeling they do it just because they can't have people spamming a 30 second mission otherwise. It's artificially drawn out, which is a staple of online games.

[Oorel]

Its my understanding that DE is deliberately hobbling player progress with the permutations of Mobile Defense. They want to avoid players getting through new content too quickly, but they have been doing so in the simplest way possible and its definitely frustrating. all of Scarlet Spear was mobile defense, a lot of Deimos bounties are as well, the most egregious example is the changes to Deimos excavation, were they just add another round at the end for no good reason. 

Gamemodes that feel good will let the players set the pace to some degree. To me the best example is Disruption. a round can be extremely quick with good preparation and team-work, or it can drag on in unexperienced squads. You can look at disruption being tuned time-wise to be close to survival on average, but some squads will take longer while some will be able to push the round time way down. With some actual design work from DE's part modes could be tuned to an average time they desire, while allowing players to get good and be more effective at it if they are so inclined. Its always possible to limit the higher end of efficiency by design as well. 

[FooldudeDalis]

While the problem with mobile defense is sitting around and waiting, the source of the problem is really the extremely low chance of failure.  When that timer hits zero, the player should be thinking "Thank god, I/we couldn't last much longer", not "Finally, I/we can move on".  The lack of tension makes it boring, but making the game harder is...controversial, for some reason.  Not to mention the disparity of certain frames for this mission type, like Frost having a shield that basically nulls enemy action would be hard to balance against without screwing every other frame that doesn't have a barrier.

The most fun a mobile defense mission gets is on lich nodes when a high-level lich spawns in and you have to balance taking it out, luring it away, and going back to kill the grunts before they can take out the console.  Really gets the heart racing.

On a side note, does that Orb Vallis bounty even have a fail-state once you initiate the hack?  I've never intentionally done nothing to see what happens, but it feels like you can overextend on those targets at no risk at all.

[taiiat]

Gamemodes that are about waiting suq, ye.

but the real solution there, is just to make Gamemodes that are hinged on the Player, rather than Timers. it progresses based on YOU doing things, first and foremost.
Gamemodes like Disruption sit atop that Ladder, but others like Excavation are sorta close, depending on how well Enemies Spawn.

 

that doesn't mean that Gamemodes can't have a timespan goal, but it's about balancing the Timer with the actual Objective so that what the Player actually has to do should be more of a limitation to them than the Timer.
the Player should always feel like their own performance was what determined how long it took them to complete their task. even if there ultimately was a Timer mostly governing it, as long as the Player gets the positive feedback of putting effort into doing the Gamemode better, they'll be a lot happier.

[TheMostFrench]

22 hours ago, FooldudeDalis said:

While the problem with mobile defense is sitting around and waiting, the source of the problem is really the extremely low chance of failure.  When that timer hits zero, the player should be thinking "Thank god, I/we couldn't last much longer", not "Finally, I/we can move on".  The lack of tension makes it boring, but making the game harder is...controversial, for some reason.  Not to mention the disparity of certain frames for this mission type, like Frost having a shield that basically nulls enemy action would be hard to balance against without screwing every other frame that doesn't have a barrier.

The most fun a mobile defense mission gets is on lich nodes when a high-level lich spawns in and you have to balance taking it out, luring it away, and going back to kill the grunts before they can take out the console.  Really gets the heart racing.

On a side note, does that Orb Vallis bounty even have a fail-state once you initiate the hack?  I've never intentionally done nothing to see what happens, but it feels like you can overextend on those targets at no risk at all.

I agree with this. There is something about having a clock ticking down that makes it very boring. Making the game harder is controversial because based on what I read DE tend to just scale up enemy health, armour, and damage, so you end up with situations where you need specific builds to fight enemies, or you get something like a Nox who dies on top of the objective and kills it with their gas cloud.

However, I made a thread earlier today about changing Survival so that people wouldn't just stand in the same room for hours, and one very serious reply was 'You have to understand that some people prefer not to play, they just want to stand and collect items' - So it was the total opposite opinion of this thread: that the game should be less engaging.

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Off the top of my head, here are some ways to make a Mobile Defense type more varied:

- Change it from a countdown timer to a total number of enemies killed. This means squads can move on sooner if they kill faster (people will inevitably complain about enemies not spawning fast enough). They already have something like this in PoE with the 'maintain control of the area by killing enemies' objective - something like that might actually work better indoors, because in PoE enemies get stuck or spawn too far away causing you to fail randomly.

- Players get opportunities to hack the objective which reduces time to completion (it might cut 1 minute off the total time). Failing the hack just makes the timer continue as normal, but the opportunity is there.

- Similar to above, but certain enemies drop items which you can plug into the objective to make the timer countdown faster.

- The enemies can't destroy the objective with manpower alone, instead they are bringing in some kind of weapon, or assembling a system to destroy it from a distance. You need to stop enemies from approaching the objective and getting target info or identifying weak points in the objective. You also need to destroy the enemy system before it is ready to activate. So there is a time limit to kill an enemy objective instead, and enemies who touch the defense objective make that timer count down faster to destruction. It is like an inverse defense where you DON'T want the timer to reach zero.

[FooldudeDalis]

17 hours ago, TheMostFrench said:

- Players get opportunities to hack the objective which reduces time to completion (it might cut 1 minute off the total time). Failing the hack just makes the timer continue as normal, but the opportunity is there.

This...is actually brilliant.  If you can manually hack it the shave off even a few seconds (probably no less than 5, and no more than 10) anytime you want, it adds a new layer of depth: in a group, it's dealing with four people's worth of spawns with only 3 people while one person continually hacks (or let two people do it at a time so the other two have to handle more for faster clearing), and solo it's a test of situational awareness, to see if you can shave off a few seconds without getting yourself or the console killed.  The only issues would be Ciphers, which I think could be disabled in this scenario and people wouldn't complain too much (or maybe I'm underestimating the amount of people who spend resources on ciphers), and certain Parazon mods; while Untraceable wouldn't be an issue since the console would still be visible, Live Wire might be a bit much, and Auto Breach might be too strong as it is currently, though I guess it depends on how fast one can complete a hack vs initiating and cancelling a hack chasing that 30%...Maybe a penalty for failure?  Though this only works for basic mobile defense, some of the bounty ones don't have a computer as the defense objective.