The "Hrmm that has become the META ... lets break it!" mentality of Devs and how did you come to that?

[Narcissa]

I genuinely want to understand this... just being a humble casual player and all I don't understand this logic. From my perspective anyways something becomes META because its good.... either its strong or feels good to play, right? So why do you constantly feel the need to destroy these things to elevate the things we don't like to use. I mean, we aren't not using them because we are being mean to them or whatever, we don't use things... be it guns, frames, railjack mods (I mention because of the impending tether nerf), etc because quite frankly compared to the meta they feel bad to use. So making the meta items worse to use by nerfing them into the void so we can diversify into the crap we didn't want to use anyways seems like a poor logic choice to me. I would think logic would be to elevate the things that are hot garbage to the level of the things people enjoy would be the more logical route, yes?

[Dhrekr]

9 minutes ago, Narcissa said:

I would think logic would be to elevate the things that are hot garbage to the level of the things people enjoy would be the more logical route, yes?

 

Is there absolutely any difference between the two strategies aside from absolutely devastating power creep?

I mean, sure, DE can elevate all guns and pistols to the point that they clear rooms filled with level 200 enemies within a second. And you know what you get with that? A game that is mindnumbingly boring and easy.

 

You say that nerfing is a poor logical choice, but the alternative that you suggest is honestly ghastly, so I don't know.

Which doesn't mean I agree with DE. Their strategy should revolve around a continuous nerfing of OP items and buffing of underpowered items so that every weapon/strategy becomes viable and the power creep doesn't shoot through the roof.

[Famecans]

Main reasons why META equipment is nerfed:

* Some Players hated META equipaments.
* Tier 4+ enemies in game are fragile.
* The equipment does not have a Tier Level.
* The equipment, mod and quests has no functional account level restriction.

[Narcissa]

Yeah that would be great if it was remotely what they did but history proves its not remotely true. They nerf the crap out of things to the point they become broken and then give at best a marginal, and frequently no real buff to the other stuff in return so the game becomes more of a slog because you are forced to use mediocre gear until the next meta comes along and they nerf that too. In fact the DE approach to balancing something seems to literally be break it utterly and they slowly edge it back up till its usable but not especially interesting. Besides that we shouldn't need level 200 enemies in the first damn place but because they can't balance and instead use that break to elevate mentality we ended up with steel path and duration runs (which by no means should they be balancing the game towards) as an excuse for content.

[Jem991]

10 minutes ago, Narcissa said:

Yeah that would be great if it was remotely what they did but history proves its not remotely true. They nerf the crap out of things to the point they become broken and then give at best a marginal, and frequently no real buff to the other stuff in return so the game becomes more of a slog because you are forced to use mediocre gear until the next meta comes along and they nerf that too. In fact the DE approach to balancing something seems to literally be break it utterly and they slowly edge it back up till its usable but not especially interesting. Besides that we shouldn't need level 200 enemies in the first damn place but because they can't balance and instead use that break to elevate mentality we ended up with steel path and duration runs (which by no means should they be balancing the game towards) as an excuse for content.

If they don't do that you say enemy is to easy to kill please add hard endgame mode. I play this game 7 year. I see countles balancing(nerfing on your view) and continue to play. I enjoy play warframe different weapon and warframe combo. your balance is not balance. you want to 1 shot 1 kill content. DE balance idea open the new possibility.

[Xaero]

1 hour ago, Narcissa said:

So making the meta items worse to use by nerfing them into the void so we can diversify into the crap we didn't want to use anyways seems like a poor logic choice to me. I would think logic would be to elevate the things that are hot garbage to the level of the things people enjoy would be the more logical route, yes?

Ok, let's use your logic with Tether avionics example.

Right now Tether makes turrets absolutely redundant when you're dealing with fighters (excluding the need to shoot the bubble). Why? Because Tether just instantly blows up all fighters in a huge area. So how do you buff turrets to Tether level?

[Bakaguya-sama]

Because DE have spent years doing what you said, and it does not work. 

When you only buff and don't nerf, you end up with a runaway powercreep. I know you guys like to whinge about how DE nerf more than buff, but that is objectively false. Look at what we have now: we clear rooms with a couple of clicks, dealing millions of dmg, we are basically immortal, we have ways to cheese through virtually any gimmick DE throws at us. Challenge and engagement is non-existent, unless I handicap myself or am willing to sit a minimum of 4 hours in a Steel Path survival. The players is simply far too powerful compared to the game. 

I know some of you like to think PvE just means the devs should let you roll over their game and press 1 button to get everything, but that's not how it works. When you roll over the game in 2 minutes, you get bored, you find something else to play, you whine about lack of contents. Thats why Warframe has to have like 30 different kinds of grinds instead of being focused on a few. When the difficulty is non-exsistent, the only way to incentivize playtime is add more and more grind. 

Tldr: No nerfs and all Buffs makes Warframe a dull game.  

[Reidenshi]

2 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

Because DE have spent years doing what you said, and it does not work. 

When you only buff and don't nerf, you end up with a runaway powercreep. I know you guys like to whinge about how DE nerf more than buff, but that is objectively false. Look at what we have now: we clear rooms with a couple of clicks, dealing millions of dmg, we are basically immortal, we have ways to cheese through virtually any gimmick DE throws at us. Challenge and engagement is non-existent, unless I handicap myself or am willing to sit a minimum of 4 hours in a Steel Path survival. The players is simply far too powerful compared to the game. 

I know some of you like to think PvE just means the devs should let you roll over their game and press 1 button to get everything, but that's not how it works. When you roll over the game in 2 minutes, you get bored, you find something else to play, you whine about lack of contents. Thats why Warframe has to have like 30 different kinds of grinds instead of being focused on a few. When the difficulty is non-exsistent, the only way to incentivize playtime is add more and more grind. 

Tldr: No nerfs and all Buffs makes Warframe a dull game.  

I agree completely.

Honestly, I really dislike DE's excessively careful policy of nerfing. Nerf-hating part of community hates your nerfs anyway, so why bother with half measures? If you introduce LoS treatment for AoE abilities, do it for all AoE abilities. If you replace multiplicative damage buffs with additive ones, do it for all damage buffs. And so on.

[Drachnyn]

The only thing that would make people stop using current tether would be a cheaper version of tether with more range (blackout pulse for early earth missions is that). It is too strong in a fighter context but I disagree that it's actually a big problem because as long as fighter combat is the main thing we do in Railjack the game mode is a failure at bringing together the whole game in railjack.

Another question however is why do we even have the side turrets? They are only functional if most/all of the crew is still on the ship. If everyone is still on the ship we arent doing ground missions at the same time as fighting in space, which means the connection between railjack and the rest of the game is still lacking.

[Zexal]

3 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

Because DE have spent years doing what you said, and it does not work. 

When you only buff and don't nerf, you end up with a runaway powercreep. I know you guys like to whinge about how DE nerf more than buff, but that is objectively false. Look at what we have now: we clear rooms with a couple of clicks, dealing millions of dmg, we are basically immortal, we have ways to cheese through virtually any gimmick DE throws at us. Challenge and engagement is non-existent, unless I handicap myself or am willing to sit a minimum of 4 hours in a Steel Path survival. The players is simply far too powerful compared to the game. 

[...]

Tldr: No nerfs and all Buffs makes Warframe a dull game.  

That's not entirely and objectively true.

They did nerf the scaling, slide attacks, collisions, eidolons and all end-game related strats because of their ideology of making the game more accessible and breaking every META.
But I agree with you, they kept nerfing the good stuff while buffing melee mods (when it wasn't necessary at all), and now primary+secondary mods. 

[DrivaMain]

Why DE or any game developer nerfs something in a video game? This qoute is enough to give you a good perspective why nerfs sometimes are justified :
 

“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of your game”

I know DE always put “half assed nerfs” but they are doing that because they don’t want the backlash to be so big it makes them start loosing money. DE is playing very carefully with their player base here. The “no nerf” crowd is very big and vocal. 

[Narcissa]

45 minutes ago, Xaero said:

Ok, let's use your logic with Tether avionics example.

Right now Tether makes turrets absolutely redundant when you're dealing with fighters (excluding the need to shoot the bubble). Why? Because Tether just instantly blows up all fighters in a huge area. So how do you buff turrets to Tether level?

You are crossing your issues. Its not about "making the side guns useless" the point is tether is strong because quite frankly all other options are weak. I don't even like tether but I use it because the ability I do like ... seeker volley.... does a fraction of the damage even though it costs more to use. But the solution isn't to remove the damage burst from tether, its to make skills like seeker volley comparable. "But that means we kill too fast" .. so what? Warframe at its core is a game about grinding. No matter what you do you will have to repeat those missions tens if not hundreds of times to get anything meaningful .. why do you people want it to be a slog? If Warframe is about the grind ... and it is ... then anything that slows the TTK ... time to kill ... makes the game worse not better for the average player.

As for sideguns .. well, honestly they have been a bad idea in every space sim game ever to begin with, but the problem with them isn't what the pilot is doing, its that they have no utility. Make it so turrets have their own avionic abilities and the guns might become relevant though honestly I doubt it even then. The problem is the railjack is zooming around making high speed maneuvers and that makes door gunning unpleasant at the best of time and downright tedious at the worst. I can, and indeed do get more kills just going archwing as crew in railjack missions as a well modded mausolon will kill just as fast and I can control my aim better plus use my archwing abilities and its alt fire.

I will say it again... Warframe is not a game about hardcore challenge. Not the way its built. Go and play a soulslike if that is what you are after. Warframe is at its core a loot grinder and one that right now doesn't even reward you for putting in extra time. So TTK is everything in this game and when you "nerf to balance" you ruin that.

[Xaero]

18 minutes ago, Narcissa said:

Make it so turrets have their own avionic abilities and the guns might become relevant though honestly I doubt it even then.

Avionic abilities... for guns? Can't imagine how it's possible. Maybe you mean some additional passive effects from shooting turrets? Unless these effects include a huge nuke, turrets won't be able to compete with Tether. Ok, let's give turrets a huge nuke effect. Shoot a fighter, all fighters in couple hundred (thousand?) meters area are instantly destroyed. Does it sound like a good solution?

If yes, Particle Ram is next in line. How do we buff it to Tether level? Make it the size of a planet?

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, Narcissa said:

I genuinely want to understand this... just being a humble casual player and all I don't understand this logic.

Fair enough. In the following response, I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that you really don't see the issue and attempt to explain it. Do note that I may use harsh language in the process, but it's unavoidable.

 

3 hours ago, Narcissa said:

From my perspective anyways something becomes META because its good.... either its strong or feels good to play, right?

Wrong, extremely so. Something becomes "meta" because it's objectively superior to most if not other options, either in terms of performance or ease of access. "Feels good to play" is entirely irrelevant. If you look through the history of not just Warframe but MMOs / Live Services in general, you'll note that players will disregard the quality of their own experience every single time, if given a practical advantage. It's an old developer adage that "players will optimise all the fun out of your game if you let them." Players as a community will act against their own self-interest and undermine their own experience if the game permits them, which is why video games need restrictions.

"Strong" is relevant, but only tangentially so. Something doesn't become "meta" merely because it's powerful, but rather because it's powerful to the exclusion of all other options. The issue isn't absolute power, but relative power. A choice with 1 right answer and 9 wrong answers isn't a choice - it's a sucker trap. All too often, a choice with just 2 equally right answers is superior. This is why you'll see Live Service games lose complexity and enforce structure the longer they remain under active development - because developers prune or bundle force choices into more meaningful such. Well... Smart developers, anyway.

Your central premise is wrong on its face. Nerfs aren't being applied to "things that are fun." Nerfs are applied to obvious outliers because they DISPLACE things that are fun. I don't like Tether. I would much rather use Seeker Volley because it's just cooler-looking and a much better fit for a mass destruction ability. However, Seeker Volley occupies a slot with better options in it, costs more and does less. You have, therefore, put me in a position where I have to choose between what's fun for me and what's undeniably more powerful. That's simply never a good choice to give to players, because it's a lose-lose proposition. Do I pick the thing I like that I won't enjoy because it's weak? Do I pick the thing that's powerful that I also won't enjoy because I don't like it? There is no right answer here. Not to mention that Tether fundamentally undermines to the point of irrelevance the core gameplay loop of Railjack combat, which is the gun dogfights.

Point being this: Just because it's fun FOR YOU doesn't mean it's fun for everybody. For ever overpowered meta option, there will be fans - either accidental or power-gamer. That doesn't insulate it from needing to be balanced.

 

3 hours ago, Narcissa said:

I would think logic would be to elevate the things that are hot garbage to the level of the things people enjoy would be the more logical route, yes?

You would be demonstrably wrong. I say "demonstrably" because Warframe is pretty much the best, most obvious example of power creep in video games. I'd go as far as to argue it's a case study in all of the things not to do when managing a video game with a long tail. Warframe's overall balance is - and I don't think I'm using exaggerated language here - absolute dogS#&$ across the board. Right now, the game is in such a dead-end state that it's simultaneously completely unable to provide challenge of any kind and being completely unbeatble. The difference between a min/maxed build and an average build is so astronomical that no balance can exist. Hell, the difference between meta options and practically anything else is astronomical to nearly the same extent. Stats scale off of so many stacked modifiers that even an absolutely minor change to base values can alter final values by multiple orders of magnitude. Finite stats like damage resistance already operate so near their literal caps that there isn't anywhere for them to go. Grineer armour in particular already sits at 95% and more, giving them dozens to sometimes hundreds of times more EHP than any other faction, yet they're still wet tissue paper to the right build. And that's just off the top of my head.

Constantly buffing underperforming items to match over-performing ones and never nerfing anything is always the wrong way to go. Proper balance exists in the middle. Proper game design includes buffing underperforming outliers AND nerfing overperforming outliers, as well. More to the point - proper game balance involves keeping stats within reasonable ranges and ensuring that mechanics don't undermine the core gameplay loop.

Energy in Warframe is actually a pretty good example of this. The game's original design seems to have been based around standard MMO "mana," but has been rendered entirely irrelevant by this point. Energising Dash, Arcane Energise, Rage and Squad Energy Restores (off the top of my head) render Energy a non-issue. That was DE's solution. Rather than trying to balance Energy, they just let us make it irrelevant. That way we don't complain and the MASSIVE RAMPANT BALANCE ISSUES with it don't need to be addressed. Except it's still utterly oppressive to new players still forming their opinion of the game, because they don't have access to any of these. I fondly remember criticising the Energy system in first hours of the game and being told "Relax and stick with it. It won't matter later." You could excise the Energy system entirely and very little would change.

Digital Extremes have a really bad habit of throwing out ways for players to render their own gameplay systems irrelevant in lieu of actually improving them. Countless Warframes suffer from underperforming abilities, but DE keep releasing Augments that do little more than fix those. Rhino's Ironclad Charge, Inaros' Negation Swarm and more are good examples. Hell, the mere existence of Vaccum/Fetch and Animal Instinct is a pretty good example of this, as well. Rather than implementing those as a game system, just make them mods... Except every new vehicle that comes out isn't going to benefit from them and will need its own version of the same mods. Time and again, DE will give us a mod, an item, an ability, something that lets us skip large portions of their own game in lieu of proper balance changes, then they end up having to power-creep the entire thing up to the new levels.

During a community interview, Scott McGregor spoke about "breaking those bones" in reference to enacting a number of large-scale, sweeping balance changes. He knows - as do we all - that Warframe is in dire need of major systemic changes which will end up upsetting a plurality of people by reducing or removing their abilities. That never ended up happening, and may never happen still. It's easy to buff things because players like that. It takes a lot more strength of stomach to nerf things across the board, but the latter is how you achieve actual balance, rather than the house of cards they're working with now.

To make a long story short: Buffing underperforming things without nerfing overperforming things is precisely how we got into this mess. I applaud DE for having the nerve to actually do their job as developers, even if that's not going to be popular with the playerbase in the short term.

[Zeddypanda]

9 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

In the following response, I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that you really don't see the issue and attempt to explain it.

I nodded a lot reading all of that. What's fascinating with Warframe is that you can observe various states of powercreep within Warframe itself, because it just has to many things.

Example 1: Energy, CC, abilities

Observe Vauban. His kit is amazing. Dude has so many cool things he can do! I used him constantly clearing star chart, and a big part of the appeal was that all of his abilities cost nearly nothing. He had some Vortex thing that cost a hundred energy to use are you mad? I didn't really touch it. Just slap a tether coil here and there, get my flechette orbs to deal very solid damage. Deploy the squad to sniff out remaining enemies It was great.

Then I got Zenurik + repelling bastille.

My favourite frame died, a complex kit reduced to hold-casting one button. I had to replace 4 with Barrage before the frame became fun again for me.

Example 2: I own a Kuva Nukor

Every time I deploy to difficult content, I have to fight off an inner demon that tells me to just bring it. Sometimes I succumb, and the next few hours reduce to a blur of just hearing grineer screams without really looking at the screen.

Example 3: Nechramechs

The current trend these days is debating melee vs guns. Melee is overpowered, they say. Some say buff guns, some say nerf melee, and you have to look no further than Warframe to see what would happen in both cases. Wanna play with nerfed melee? Hop into an archwing mission or enter archwing from your railjack and spam E to win. No cheating and going for your gun!

But the much bleaker option is buffed guns. Here's how to try this out right now:

• Make Voidrig
• Slap on fury, streamline, and flow.
• You seriously don't even need to mod your exalted guns, but do it anyway.
• Press 4.
• Every single, ultra-spammable click will delete a map quadrant with hundreds of thousands of damage.
• Yes, even against Eidelons. I still see people talking about sniper builds but I don't really understand how that's supposed to compete with rapid-firing down their weak spots in half a second without really bothering to aim while sitting in a status-immune tank?
• You can maintain this form for, like, several minutes, and then just pick up all the resulting energy orbs, ready to do it again next bounty phase.

I bring Voidrig everywhere, because obviously I use the option to clear a bounty in 3 minutes rather than 10 minutes when it's available, but I'd really like to see Arquebex nerfed to a state where it's still a good ability that performs its job while not making the rest of his own kit and all of bonewidow's kit irrelevant.

[Bakaguya-sama]

2 hours ago, Zexal said:

They did nerf the scaling, slide attacks, collisions, eidolons and all end-game related strats because of their ideology of making the game more accessible and breaking every META.

Of course I'm not saying DE never nerfs because that would be false. But remember the melee rework came with a universal nerf to enemy armor scaling at the same time, so that can be considered a very large buff in the player's favor. Overall, in the grand scheme of things, DE buffs far more than they nerfs, which results in the huge power creep issue we are having now.  

 

2 hours ago, Narcissa said:

Warframe is not a game about hardcore challenge. Not the way its built. Go and play a soulslike if that is what you are after. Warframe is at its core a loot grinder and one that right now doesn't even reward you for putting in extra time. So TTK is everything in this game and when you "nerf to balance" you ruin that.

It doesn't have to be that way. Grind is all Warframe is right now, because the grind is all that's left. Without any difficulty, engagement, and risk of failure, you have a loot timer where you watch numbers goes bigger without any meaningful effect. You see the symptoms, but you fail to recognize the core issue. Warframe doesn't reward you for putting in extra time because it's already so easy to begin with. Grind must be validated by an increase in power, and its hard to notice an increase in power when everything already dies in seconds. Why do you think some people (not me) are willing to sit 4-5 hours or more in a Steel Path mission? Because they seek some kind of validation for the time they put in.  Does it matter if you deal 2000 damage or 2.14 billion damage? Not really because the enemy is already dead all the same. You can chase after big numbers all you want, but you will never feel rewarded for it.  

So maybe if the game becomes a bit harder, you will feel more rewarded for the time you put in. You don't have to worry about Warframe becoming a Soulslike game. Because right now it is as far from being a Dark Souls game as it can get. It's much closer to being Cookie Clicker in its current form.  

PS: Railjack guns aren't necessarily bad. I can easily clear Gian point in ~5 minutes just using the guns, with no battle avionics. You know, the standard length of mission of Exterminates of Mobile Defense. It's not a slog. Your perspective is just warped by how ludicrously out of line Tether is. Guns are gonna look useless when Tether can do the same in 2 minutes. Frankly Warframe is already a very broken game, and Tether is even more broken by Warframe's standards.   

 

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

-snip-

Reading your posts is, simply put, cathartic. Well done.

[Althaline]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

To make a long story short: Buffing underperforming things without nerfing overperforming things is precisely how we got into this mess. I applaud DE for having the nerve to actually do their job as developers, even if that's not going to be popular with the playerbase in the short term.

Honestly, I'm not sure that Warframe's balance is salvageable at this point, at least not without such dramatic changes that we'd lose all the "casual" (read: cookie clicker) players and 2 years of full-time development. Any method of balancing the energy economy is a unique effect on something or other, and AoE is so prevalent that there's no purpose to the majority of the roster. Any frame that's not literally immortal out to an hour of Steel Path is deemed "unusable" because there are so many ways to avoid dying. On top of all of that, nothing can compete with us for speed and maneuverability (not that this is one I want changed). There is no challenge in Warframe because no enemy can possibly challenge us in any field, ever. Even the act of obliterating an enemy is barely satisfying anymore, and dying has gone from "well, that wasn't great, but how can I improve?" to "how could I possibly fail that badly? Am I drunk? Am I high? Did I have a stroke? All of these simultaneously?".

Now that they're dumbing Railjack down to the same point... I've grown somewhat disillusioned with DE's ability to create fun, meaningful content. The one tool I thought they'd finally use to break out of this endless spiral has been thrown down that very flight of stairs headfirst.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, Iamabearlulz said:

Honestly, I'm not sure that Warframe's balance is salvageable at this point, at least not without such dramatic changes that we'd lose all the "casual" (read: cookie clicker) players and 2 years of full-time development. Any method of balancing the energy economy is a unique effect on something or other, and AoE is so prevalent that there's no purpose to the majority of the roster. Any frame that's not literally immortal out to an hour of Steel Path is deemed "unusable" because there are so many ways to avoid dying. On top of all of that, nothing can compete with us for speed and maneuverability (not that this is one I want changed).

That's what you get after years upon years of resisting systemic, structural change, I guess. When you build flawed systems upon flawed subsystems, fixing anything becomes difficult. I do still think there's hope, though. DE appear to have learned their lesson, especially with Railjack. We might disagree on the quality of the changes (I like most of what's proposed), but the fact that they held off building systems on top of the fundamentally flawed core gameplay is a good sign. Fix the systems first before you set them in stone.

You bring up a lot of valid points of criticism, and I agree here. However, I do believe all of them CAN be addressed if DE were willing to accept what is guaranteed to be a massively negative initial reaction. I mean, look at AoE - they tried to implement some amount of balance to AoE weapons, but backed down immediately as soon as people realise that... Well, AoE weapons are being reduced in power so they don't dominate the meta. I understand the concern, though, because AoE weapons are always on the razor's edge between being overpowered or being worthless. If they do too little damage, we take single-target weapons, instead. If they do too much, we take AoE weapons over single-target weapons. There's very little middle ground. DE tried using a damage falloff mechanic. There are other options, as well, such splitting damage between all targets hit (so they're still worth using against single targets), etc.

I don't even want to get into Energy with any real specificity because it's a massive topic we've discussed before. I'm typically fairly radical in my balance/redesign suggestions so my opinion on the matter is "get rid of it, don't replace it with anything." But there are other options, from reimplementing Energy Regen into the combat system (say building it off damage dealt for all builds and Warframe) to replacing it with per-Warframe resources (like Nidus, Grendel, Hyldrin, etc.) to going for cooldowns (like Lavos), etc. This is what I mean. Rather than implement a game-wide fix, DE implement a single weapon, a single Warframe, a single item of some description which has the fix... Then never touch it for years. How long was it between Hyldrin and Shield Gating? Having played Lavos, I can tell you for a fact that I'd LOVE for all of my Warframes to work like that, but even that's just one option. There are many.

I catch a lot of heat on the forums (or used to, anyway - traffic seems to have slowed here) for making radical suggestions. However, one doesn't need to go quite that far. If you're willing to get your hands dirty, you can usually get away with fundamental changes to only a few major systems at a time until you're able to deliver a standalone product. Get rid of energy and you have an issue with Warframe abilities. Well, those have their own issues anyway (poor scaling for damage-dealing abilities), so reimplement those as Exalted Weapons that we can mod using the existing modding system. Buff/debuff abilities can work with either no cost or a minor cost of some kind, mobility abilities can straight-up work with no cost. Maybe redesign a few Warframes while you're at it so they don't have a bunch of redundant or listless abilities and you can ship that as a self-contained patch without needing to tweak much of the rest of the game.

Now, I'm not saying that my proposition is necessarily GOOD. In fact, I strongly suspect that at least a few people are already angry before even getting to this point and I don't really blame you. There's no possible proposition that's going to appeal to all players and they're ALL going to impose new, much stricter requirements, restrictions and mechanics. Even if DE don't go with my idea (and they won't), any idea they go with would have to "break those bones" as Scott McGregor said, or it's not going to do anything. There's no way to improve this game without upsetting a large chunk of the population. The job of a developer, however, is not to be friends with players. It's to manage the game for players. Sometimes people need to swallow changes they don't like for the long-term good of the game.

DE have been slightly better about this recently, but they keep introducing new systems still with no future-proofing. Railjack is the perfect example of a "solution looking for a problem" - an entire system launched solely because DE thought it was cool (and it IS!), but with no plan on what to actually DO with it, how to build sustainable content for it or how to retain players. And sure - they rushed the system two years before it was ready for whatever reason so some of that is understandable, but it's a good example regardless. Sometimes you need to break the system to fix the system, and hope that players will calm down then give it an honest try. I hope Railjack is successful. I look forward to trying it. But this level of intrusive, destructive, heavy-handed change is needed everywhere across the game and the same level of "You took my fun!" is going to happen every time.

I'm personally willing to lose power, utility and learned systems if it means that the overall gameplay experience improves and leaves room for future development.

[Teridax68]

On 2021-03-14 at 3:00 PM, Steel_Rook said:

To make a long story short: Buffing underperforming things without nerfing overperforming things is precisely how we got into this mess. I applaud DE for having the nerve to actually do their job as developers, even if that's not going to be popular with the playerbase in the short term.

I'll echo the feeling that this was a cathartic read from start to finish. Your response is the most well-constructed rebuttal to the "never nerf, only buff" mentality I've seen to date, and lists out everything wrong with it using facts and examples. It annoys me that so many people on the forums seem to adhere to that rhetoric, because it not only fails to hold up to scrutiny, but flies in the face of a state of balance that can easily be experienced by just logging onto the game and playing for a few minutes. One practically needs to shut off one's capacity for observation and reasoning in order to believe that Warframe couldn't possibly benefit from some degree of targeted nerfing.

There isn't really that much I can add after that, except maybe the following in response to the OP: feeling powerful and being powerful are different things. The naïve assumption is that more power equals more fun, but the reality is that a well-crafted power fantasy balances our power against a degree of challenge. If we're too strong to experience any challenge, then the fantasy becomes boring. If we can do the absolute coolest thing one can do in a game all the time and without much effort, e.g. clearing a room full of enemies in moments, our most exciting moments become banal, and anything less exciting is no longer worth our time. This is why many advanced players get bored with Warframe, because we're too strong for the game to challenge us, and our metagame is such that something is only considered good if it can let us kill as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible, with other, potentially more interesting bits of gameplay discarded. I can definitely agree that the game should make us feel powerful, and could improve on that in certain ways, but pumping us full of power I think has ultimately had the opposite effect, in that it's made all but our top-tier options feel weak. Balance and a power fantasy are not mutually exclusive, and in Warframe's case, trying to improve upon one would almost certainly benefit the other.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I'll echo the feeling that this was a cathartic read from start to finish. Your response is the most well-constructed rebuttal to the "never nerf, only buff" mentality I've seen to date, and lists out everything wrong with it using facts and examples.

Thank you :) It genuinely surprises me that that post generated as much traction as it has, but glad to be of service. I'm concerned about DE's reluctance to nerf things straight up, because the system we find ourselves in can really benefit from it.

 

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Feeling powerful and being powerful are different things. The naïve assumption is that more power equals more fun, but the reality is that a well-crafted power fantasy balances our power against a degree of challenge.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I try to remind people of the basic fact that the relationship between player and developer is not an adversarial one. The developer's goal isn't to stop players from enjoying the game, the player's goal isn't to break the game and cheat the developer. Ideally - when things work right - the relationship is a symbiotic one, because both parties inherently benefit from an enjoyable gameplay experience. To me, games work best in the sweet spot where they're just difficult enough to justify engaging in their mechanical complexity without it feeling like a waste of time, but not so difficult as to render portions of said complexity impractical or unviable. Warframe's combat system can benefit from a lot of additional complexity in enemy design... Or would, if enemies didn't all vaporise to our weapons unless they employ invulnerability mechanics.

Stats can only go so far. All properly-balanced stats can do is get us to use all the tools at our disposal. This, however, presumes there exist tools we can lean on in the first place, and that these tools have some sort of practical use. The reason "nerfs" feel so frightening in Warframe is because there just... Isn't a lot to fall back on if our overpowered weapons are taken away. There isn't a lot we can do with skill to make up for that, due to simple enemy design and simplistic combat. Think about how we solve issues in Warframe for a moment. Either we throw stats at the enemy to make it go away, or we throw stats on our Warframes to make the objectives go away. We have a whole host of ways to break the game, but what we achieve by doing this is just... Playing less of the game.

Enemy weak points is one of my personal pet projects, because we could get so much mileage out of that. Being able to shred Grineer armour and expose weak points, being able to snipe Corpus shield emitters and shut down their shields, being able to blast guns out of our enemies' hands (or at least force them to reload) is just the beginning. Imagine being able to damage enemies in such a way as to alter their behaviour, disabling their abilities or mobility, or even causing them to explode or otherwise hurt their allies. Imagine being able to kill enemies in specific ways to ensure they drop combat resources, like health and ammo. There's so much we could do... But none of it matters when the "meta" is to kill everything before it has a chance to respond.

We need nerfs to players such that at least some enemies can afford to have complex mechanics we could exploit, making us feel smart. We need player nerfs such that enemies can afford to have some more complex attacks that we need to dodge, deflect or interrupt, making us feel powerful. Sure, simply out-DPSing enemy EHP has its charm, but it's a fleeting sort of charm and fundamentally misses the point of Warframe as an action game. We have pretty decent combat and movement. It just makes no sense to me that so much of both ends up feeling like a foregone conclusion to a mission won or lost in the Arsenal.

[Teridax68]

50 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I try to remind people of the basic fact that the relationship between player and developer is not an adversarial one. The developer's goal isn't to stop players from enjoying the game, the player's goal isn't to break the game and cheat the developer.

I wonder if the hostility certain players have to nerfs has to do with powergaming: many games drill into our heads this drive to maximize our numbers, and some players take to it so much that they do absolutely everything in their power to maximize their numbers, to the detriment of everything else. This often happens in tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, where some players' approach to powergaming is to not only do everything within the rules to max out their numbers, but sometimes even try to change the rules to their benefit, or outright cheat. Everything conducive to bigger numbers becomes a valid strategy, including pressuring the developers not to reduce those numbers under any circumstances. We may therefore be faced not simply with a simple aversion to perceived harm done to one's agency, but with players attempting to use the forums as part of their game strategy.

[(XBOX)Big Roy 324]

On 2021-03-14 at 1:10 PM, Steel_Rook said:

That's what you get after years upon years of resisting systemic, structural change, I guess. When you build flawed systems upon flawed subsystems, fixing anything becomes difficult.

I think this is the biggest problem.  The system/ structure of warframe is very flawed. I noticed relatively recently that almost every interaction in warframe is all about numbers and equations.

AI, Stats (weapons, warframes, enemies), RNG drops, Spawn rates, mods, and etc.

A game this unique requires systems that aren't left to a simple formula based mechanic.  When so many of them are and with the very nature of math.  An ever changing meta is unavoidable.  That's why bosses and interactions that require strategy or involved mechanics are considered better than ones that don't (sergeant vs jackal). The modding system is probably the largest offender. As it's a system that at it's core is just adjusting numbers for the players to what they feel are better. So many games have figured out that this system only works well when the values are tightly held by the developers.  (I don't know many games where things like critical/status chance are easily moddable for over 100%). 

The fix though is way too large and requires a lot of changes.  Like remove a majority of the mods in the game that increase basic necessary stats. Damage, crit chance, status chance, health, shields, power strength, and energy max.  Then you buff everything that can use these mods to what would be considered a post modded value. Next reduced slots but not by a lot like 6 instead of 8. So then players are choosing mods that alter the way something plays and not sacrificing necessary mod space for a gimmick. 

If no AI changes you increase their ability to resist warfame weapons and abilities.  But reduce the amount that spawn in missions.  effectively slowing down gameplay and time to kill.  Without actually slowing down the player.

[Aldain]

I was going to post a response, but Rook basically said everything I wanted to say and more.

But I'll distill my opinion down to a single sentence.

A one button meta that deletes gameplay as a whole isn't healthy in the long run, it dilutes everything down to a constant meaningless grind and rewards always have to be just a bigger one button, that is why we're at a point where DE could just put in a Debug gun that kills everything in the tileset and people would STILL want more power.

[(PSN)Yggranya]

1 hour ago, Aldain said:

DE could just put in a Debug gun that kills everything in the tileset and people would STILL want more power.

Hey, it's not powerful enough if you need to press a button. Enemies need to die from shooting at you, or better yet, instantly when they spawn, and their drops need to be added to your inventory as soon as they hit the ground. Or so some people would prefer warframes "gameplay".