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

[Tesseract7777]

On 2021-03-14 at 7:01 AM, Narcissa said:

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?

It's simple: 

Say you have a game with literally hundreds of choices for weapons, at least several dozen in every category, with almost every unique type of toy you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams at your disposal. You have dozens of choices for your warrior class, which is almost unheard of in most games. 

Now imagine as a developer you spent all that time making all that stuff, and then as people do, they naturally gravitate toward the path of least resistance, and use the "best" few things that seem to stand (unintentionally) head and shoulders above the crowd. You want people to use a lot of the stuff you spent all that time making, so you need to adjust things. 

Do you: 

A) Buff literally everything else in the game, knowing that this may not actually balance them all with each other, but potentially just create a whole bunch of new metas and unintended consequences, because weapon classes are all different and you can't just buff them all at once and expect to have them all be balanced without months and months of player testing and adjusting (especially when you consider how different many weapon classes are from each other even within their own class, and how many unique gimmicks we have and other such things, adjusting all weapons at once is an absolutely Herculean task). 

Or do you:

B) Considering you already have limited development time, and are worried about the law of unintended consequences from big changes, just simply balance that one weapon in a downard direction until it feels more in line with the rest of the options available? 

It's just the most straightforward approach that doesn't waste development time or potentially get them into an entirely different and potentially even worse quagmire they now have to get their way out of. 

It doesn't mean they never buff things either. If weapons are not low tier like mk1 stuff, and they are super low on the useage scale, same with frames, DE will often look at buffs or adjustments for those so they will see more play. It's not always just nerfs. The point is their designers spent a lot of time making a whole lot of varied stuff, and they want us to use all or most of it, not just a handful, and an occasional nerf when something stands out as "king of the hill" is simply way more efficient than trying to regularly "buff all weapons/frames". 

[(PSN)Wil_Shatner_face]

 

9 hours ago, (PSN)Rebel-sonie said:

Because they stopped playing their own game and go off of what YouTubers say. Anytime they talk about “balance” I roll my eyes. 

Nyx is still trash. Countless other frames are used solely in niche situations, but then the more popular frames can do that niche job and more, leaving those niche frames in the dump. Vulpaphyla outclasses every single pet because of their self-revive. Amesha STILL outclasses every single Archwing. None of this is addressed because the YouTubers don’t bring it up, so DE won’t touch it. It’s quite sad. 

Also other mmo’s with simpler systems can’t even balance their own games properly, how can we expect DE to properly balance theirs when they can’t even afford proper servers?

In the running for most clueless post I’ve ever read on this forum.

[ReddyDisco]

17 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Can't enjoy a weapon if the game mode is clearly not designed to facilitate or even allow it, either.

ESO is a pretty prime example of that, but there's also been plenty of examples of content in recent history that's used different scaling (often for health and damage) or other aspects that's been restrictive to or even openly hostile to a large chunk of the equipment available or even entire playstyles, randoms or no randoms.

And even then, playing with randoms being a miserable experience is an indictment in and of itself, since it demonstrates that the baseline rules of the game are broken. I mean, imagine if you had to play Fortnite or Among Us exclusively with pre-made lobbies. They'd be/have been nowhere near as popular. The 'Random Lobby' casual play is a tremendously important aspect of online games and by your own admission, it's broken in respects to Warframe. That alone is a pretty major indicator that something needs doing

something needs doing yes, but what?

the game is about powerfantasy and a looter shooter, each year DE has to release more powerful weapons than the last to sustain its populace which lead to the situation that is tday, a trivial grindfeast of a game. 

I hope for harder content someday, been hoping for that for years now

[Loza03]

11 minutes ago, YUNoJump said:

Power creep isn't just about players getting stronger compared to enemies, it's about new gear making old gear worthless. The Scindo, Galatine and Gram Prime are all equally difficult to get, but why would you bother getting the Scindo when the other two are pretty much objectively better? Why would you bother with almost any Prime weapon released more than a year or so ago if you're looking for a good weapon, when newer Primes are statistically better and actually easier to get?

This is power creep in action. When newer gear is designed to appeal to players by being objectively better than older gear, the older gear becomes worthless. Then you have a game where the majority of available gear just isn't worth considering, which is where we are now. Outside of maxing out your MR, there is literally no reason to build a good portion of weapons, because there are objectively better options, even within each MR bracket.

New releases should appeal to players with unique mechanics or gameplay. This usually happens, as most weapons have a special alt-fire or reload system or something, but there are places where that isn't the case, most obviously Primes.

I agree with this, but to add -

There are games that make this work, including other looters. However, Warframe has a pretty fundamental difference, which makes power creep something much more important to control. That being that its entire progression system is different.

For example, a Diabloid has a constantly recursive loot system of random rolls with ever-increasing thresholds. Items are effectively designed to be replacable, and individually unimportant. Other games with similar mechanics have this to a greater or lesser extent. You could think of this as a scale, with a Roguelike such as Dead Cells all the way at the 'replacable' end (since every item you get in that game will be replaced because you'll lose it on death or game clear), and a collect-a-thon or other such campaign-based game at the other, where every new item is custom-curated to serve a very specific purpose. Games in the middle would be the likes of Destiny or Outriders where items are replacable and use random rolls but you can invest in individual items to take them with you, or Monster Hunter where each item has pre-made statistics, but there's also plenty of replacability (nearly every low rank armour, for example, has 2-3 armours that are in the same place but for high or G-rank).

Warframe is unusually close to the latter end for a looter - there's some degree of innate replacability to some items, but when you get a weapon, it's not fundamentally designed to be replaced by an identical one with a higher 'level' unless it has a variant (and even then, cases like the Opticor vs the Opticor Vandal exist), but even a variant is explicitly a better version of that weapon - as opposed to something like Destiny where two purple 120 hand cannons that can roll the same perks are basically the same. Warframe tries to offer more horizontal growth, which is to say, it tries to offer you more options rather than better versions of the same options. It doesn't always succeed, and there's plenty of examples of vertical growth, but it's ultimately nowhere near as foundational as some other games.

This makes managing power creep substantially more important, since it's pretty vital for the Horizontal branches to be similarly powerful to each other.

[IggySnow]

Devs from pretty much every game nerf or change things that are meta because something thats meta is either powerful, or it becomes stale if left unchanged for too long. Im not saying that's the proper approach for warframe or anything, but just look at any hero shooter/ moba that's out there. Take overwatch for example. pretty much every season theres a meta comp that every team will use. if the devs didn't change things up with the heros then there would just be a permanent meta comp that every team would be using for the last 2 years, which becomes both boring to play, and to watch

[killerJoke66]

On 2021-03-14 at 2:01 PM, Narcissa said:

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?

The harsh truth is that by shifting (or trying to) the meta other less used stuff gets to get bought from market mainly by early to mid game players or increase overall plat income into the game because once the meta settles it stays for a long time thus plat flow into the game stays low .... i can understand where they come from but personally i would rather prefer them sticking in one meta path and not screwing over some late game builds that people sank lot of time to perfect , aka we need fine tuning instead of change for the sake of change (cough hot cash) 

In other words they need to make their hands dirty by understanding why things are the way they are by playing it IN DEPTH and not just doing few bounties in open worlds , they need to speak with end game players or/and with big clan leaders  and even with the trade chat etc. and not just look at statistics from far away not going into the meat of the stuff and hoping it works . Someones gonna come and say the classic 'its their game waaaaah ' im not saying its not otherwise . Anyways i hope this post could make you understand certain things , have a good day teno .

[Teljaxx]

Balance is not just about making every weapon relatively equal in power. That is a big part of it, but its also about making sure that each system is relatively equal with every other system. Guns vs. melee, player survivability vs. enemy damage, that sort of thing. Every piece to work together across the entire game, like a jigsaw puzzle.

And that's the main problem with powercreep, and only ever balancing in one direction. It makes one piece constantly change size, while the rest stay the same. To make an easily quantifiable example: Lets say the enemies in the game are balanced around a power level of 10. Currently, all the weapons are also around a 10. But then, an update adds a weapon that's level 15. How do you fix this? If you buff all other weapons up to 15 as well, now everything is far too powerful compared to the enemies, which are still designed around level 10 weapons. The enemies would then also have to be brought up to level 15, meaning you'd just create far more work for yourself to only end up achieving basically the same result. The better option would be to simply reduce the one outstanding weapon to around level 10 as well.

DE has done a ton of things to increase player power over time, but they have barely changed anything else in the game to match. So enemies are still level 10, but we have slowly crept up to level 100.

But, it goes even further beyond that. Because its not just about the maximum power we can achieve. The sheer difference between the minimum and maximum player power in this game is absurd. Compare an unmodded Skana to a catalyzed, forma'd, fully modded, godly riven'd Stropha. Their stats and capabilities aren't even in the same galaxy as each other anymore. And yet, there is absolutely nothing stopping any two players that are using either of those things, or anything in between, from playing exactly the same missions at any time. So how is DE supposed to balance around that?

One of the main reasons this has been able to go on for so long without anyone really caring until now, is the infinite enemy scaling in endless missions. DE has always been able to hide behind that as their "endgame" to make powercreep seem like it has some kind of purpose. Every little power increase we get just means that we get to survive longer in those missions. But, you cant balance an infinite scale, and you can't have an endgame if there is no end.

I know everyone hates Captain Hindsight, but that's really what has happened here. DE should have dealt with this stuff back when this game was in closed beta. They should have decided on a specific point to balance everything around, and come up with a plan to keep things there. And they should have never let powercreep become so normal. But they never did any of that. They never bothered to make sure the foundation was secure before they started building on top of it. But now that they have piled so much stuff onto that faulty foundation, the entire thing is falling apart. And, its far too late to go back and fix the foundation, because that would mean tearing down everything they have built on top of it first.

Honestly, at this point, I think the only feasible way for Warframe to ever be properly balanced, is if DE were willing to shut it all down, and make a sequel. Then they could actually take the time to plan all this stuff out from the very beginning, and take the necessary measures to avoid ever reaching this state again. But, of course, that would also drive a ton of people away, since it would mean abandoning all the "hard work" they put in to grinding for stuff in the current Warframe. There really is no good option at this point.

[GEN-Son_17]

On 2021-03-14 at 4:01 AM, Narcissa said:

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?

Nerfing is not as frowned upon as the loud voices suggest. In reality, the difficulty versus ultra power fantasy groups constantly counter each other to the point that DE usually ends up making the right calls. Even the Khora issue was more of a level design challenge to overcome than a bad nerf but, let's be honest, NO weapon should have the strength to stand still and destroy for hours, even if the game is a power fantasy. 

I thought about how DE introduces weapons into the game and it looks like the balance between "needs nerf" and "needs buff" is based on more factors than considered:

Which Warframe will exceed with this? 

Which load-out complimenting this weapon/ability would OP the new weapon/ability?

What team of Warframes, powers, load-outs, augments would OP the new weapon/ability?

Which Tenno school...? 

Most importantly - Which youtuber is going to immediately, day one, promote a build that most players will instantly gravitate to? 

That last one gives DE, and all of us, a clearer picture of how the weapon is going to be viewed and most likely be used. The lemming effect is still data to consider 

[(PSN)Unstar]

On 2021-03-14 at 4:01 AM, 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?

I started a reply writing an earnest explanation, but I've decided that you probably don't need that.  I think you're smart enough that you can arrive at it yourself.  Instead, I want to ask you to perform what I hope is a simple exercise.

DE has been making Warframe for nearly a decade now, so let's assume they are good at what they do.  Giving them the benefit of the doubt, and not imagining them as some kind of ignorant collective that isn't as smart as you, I want you to give me the best, most convincing guess you can about why DE made the decision they did.  I guarantee if you genuinely engage with this exercise, you will come away with a better understanding of the situation.

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, (XBOX)Big Roy 324 said:

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.

Agreed. Far too much "gameplay" in Warframe is won or lost in the Arsenal, with mission success a foregone conclusion and our actions largely superfluous. I took a pretty lengthy break from Warframe recently, filled mostly with Payday 2, Vermintide 2, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. - all four-player co-op games. If I seem to have a harsh opinion on Warframe right now, it's because I was reminded of how fun video games can be when they let me actually play them. Now that's not to say of the games I mentioned are DA BEST EVA, but they are a decent counterpoint. DRG especially impressed me with the "physicality" inherent in constructing paths, laying pipes and exploring unfamiliar spaces. It's similar to the reasons I'm so fond of Railjack, despite its lack of content.

Warframe has the potential for very fun gameplay. As you say, however, far too much of it comes down to just "stats." Gear checks. Do you have the necessary items? Then you win. Go collect your prize. If not? Then don't bother trying. You won't succeed. While there's nothing fundamentally wrong with "math" and "stats," they're supposed to be the tools by which a game is put together, not the goal of playing in themselves. You need proper damage scaling, you need proper armour calculations, you need proper buff stacking and stat tracking. However, there has to be a GAME built on top of all of these systems - some kind of core gameplay loop which both uses them and obscures them. Ideally, players should base their choices not on "stats," but on "feel." Practically, it's always a combination of both, but well-balanced gameplay always leans more strongly towards feel, using stats only to inform choice.

This is why I keep bringing up Corpus shield gating. Despite it being a system entirely built around damage resistance and negation, what weapons work well and what work poorly against it can be derived entirely through first-hand experience, common sense and cursory understanding of the game's weapons system. If a shotgun or sniper rifle doesn't work great against them, most players should be able to intuit why and intuit what to do to fix it - what other weapons to use. To me, that's a system working pretty damn well and how more of Warframe should work. Instead, so often we're tasked with finding the right numbers to throw at the game in order to make gameplay disappear. That's a fundamentally self-defeating approach to game design.

As a parting thought: The core issue with relying too heavily on "math" is that you turn what should be a gameplay challenge into an optimisation problem with a discrete set of solutions. More often than not, someone's already figured out either all of the solutions or at least the most practical subset thereof, so all that's left for players is to check the Wiki or ask on the forums and skip the process entirely. Building your game around "challenge" which can be beaten by a single person and then shared with the rest of a community is a dead-end approach to game design. Not only are you denying most players the experience of actually solving the challenge, you're fundamentally robbing them of the chance to develop the skillset needed to defeat it. Ideally, you want the player to defeat challenges given themselves, in real time, based on their skill with and understanding of the game. I spent a lot of my time in Vermintide being told HOW to use the block system, but it wasn't until I put those suggestions into practice and experimented on my own that I actually managed to use it properly and "git gud." Nobody could solve blocking for me, because it can't be "solved." It's a tool that I need to apply properly in real time as I play.

Warframe really ought to lean more in that direction, I think.

 

18 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

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.

Well... I don't think people making this points are being dishonest. Like I said in my opening post - I'm willing to accept the OP's assertion that they genuinely don't see the issue. Many people don't. You ARE right that a large portion of players treat games like optimisation challenges, where the goal is to break the game more than anything else, though. I remember a time in my own life when I felt similar, myself. I'm trying to pick my words very carefully here in an effort to avoid openly slagging other people's preferences, but to me this does seem like a wrong-headed approach to video games. It's a variant of my favourite dichotomy of treating games like a sport vs. treating them like a toy. Many developers sell their game like a "challenge" and many players buy into the narrative, seeking to "beat" the challenge even if that results in undercutting the overall experience. To each his own, but when video games train their playbase to treat them this way, the entire game and its associated community suffer in the long run.

The attitude you're alluding to is real, though. People will demand "more challenge," but then either complain when it arrives because "it's the wrong kind of challenge" or seek ways to trivialise it anyway. To me, it fundamentally misses the point - or at least the potential - of video games. It's a bit like enjoying professional wrestling, or indeed writing fiction. It works best when you're aware of and acknowledge the back-stage machinations, but agree to play along with them anyway. I know that wrestling matches are rigged, but I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of good drama. I know the fictional characters I create could be and do anything, but I deliberately restrict them for the sake of a good story. I could break most video games entirely, but I deliberately choose not to for the sake of a good experience. For years people told me that automatic weapons in Warframe suck, and I could even see that plain as day in my own experience. I kept using them anyway, because my fantasy as a machinegunner was more important than my efficiency as a farmer.

I know some people like the grind, some like the power-gaming, etc. Like I said - to each their own. With all of this said, however - I still feel that games do better when they sell us a fantasy and an experience than when they sell us spreadsheets. It's not always possible, but I still believe that video game developers have a responsibility to their own community to at least try and convince us to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the experience as present it, rather than trying to "beat" it. Ideally, you want players to WANT to be challenged. Warframe's core design and over-reliance on "extrinsic rewards" does the exact opposite. It encourages us to disbelief, disregard the fantasy and focus purely on the mechanics. Because DE appear to have given up on giving us a compelling experience, they can only ever give us a transactional experience, instead. We pay with our time or money, we receive compensation in return. When a relationship is purely transactional, then it's only natural that players will try to "pay" as little as they can get away with but "earn" as much as the game will let them.

In short, I believe Warframe itself and DE's development strategy in particular breed a purely transactional view of the game in their players, which results in players equating "fun" with "efficient" and "high stats" while sidelining actual gameplay entirely. But we've spoken about this before and you know just how depressing I find it :)

[Teljaxx]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Agreed. Far too much "gameplay" in Warframe is won or lost in the Arsenal, with mission success a foregone conclusion and our actions largely superfluous. I took a pretty lengthy break from Warframe recently, filled mostly with Payday 2, Vermintide 2, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. - all four-player co-op games. If I seem to have a harsh opinion on Warframe right now, it's because I was reminded of how fun video games can be when they let me actually play them. Now that's not to say of the games I mentioned are DA BEST EVA, but they are a decent counterpoint. DRG especially impressed me with the "physicality" inherent in constructing paths, laying pipes and exploring unfamiliar spaces. It's similar to the reasons I'm so fond of Railjack, despite its lack of content.

Warframe has the potential for very fun gameplay. As you say, however, far too much of it comes down to just "stats." Gear checks. Do you have the necessary items? Then you win. Go collect your prize. If not? Then don't bother trying. You won't succeed. While there's nothing fundamentally wrong with "math" and "stats," they're supposed to be the tools by which a game is put together, not the goal of playing in themselves. You need proper damage scaling, you need proper armour calculations, you need proper buff stacking and stat tracking. However, there has to be a GAME built on top of all of these systems - some kind of core gameplay loop which both uses them and obscures them. Ideally, players should base their choices not on "stats," but on "feel." Practically, it's always a combination of both, but well-balanced gameplay always leans more strongly towards feel, using stats only to inform choice.

This is why I keep bringing up Corpus shield gating. Despite it being a system entirely built around damage resistance and negation, what weapons work well and what work poorly against it can be derived entirely through first-hand experience, common sense and cursory understanding of the game's weapons system. If a shotgun or sniper rifle doesn't work great against them, most players should be able to intuit why and intuit what to do to fix it - what other weapons to use. To me, that's a system working pretty damn well and how more of Warframe should work. Instead, so often we're tasked with finding the right numbers to throw at the game in order to make gameplay disappear. That's a fundamentally self-defeating approach to game design.

As a parting thought: The core issue with relying too heavily on "math" is that you turn what should be a gameplay challenge into an optimisation problem with a discrete set of solutions. More often than not, someone's already figured out either all of the solutions or at least the most practical subset thereof, so all that's left for players is to check the Wiki or ask on the forums and skip the process entirely. Building your game around "challenge" which can be beaten by a single person and then shared with the rest of a community is a dead-end approach to game design. Not only are you denying most players the experience of actually solving the challenge, you're fundamentally robbing them of the chance to develop the skillset needed to defeat it. Ideally, you want the player to defeat challenges given themselves, in real time, based on their skill with and understanding of the game. I spent a lot of my time in Vermintide being told HOW to use the block system, but it wasn't until I put those suggestions into practice and experimented on my own that I actually managed to use it properly and "git gud." Nobody could solve blocking for me, because it can't be "solved." It's a tool that I need to apply properly in real time as I play.

Warframe really ought to lean more in that direction, I think.

I did the same thing a while ago. A little after PoE came out, I stopped playing Warframe for nearly a year straight. And during that time, I caught up on many other games that I had completely ignored while playing Warframe almost exclusively for the preceding couple years. And once I did that, it felt like a veil had been lifted from my eyes. I had quite literally forgotten what it was like to play a game with actual well designed mechanics because I had played nothing but Warframe for so long.

This is also why I always use Dark Souls as my "anti-Warframe" example. Its almost exactly the opposite in terms of stats vs. skill. In Warframe, there is basically no challenge that cannot be overcome by simply bringing bigger numbers, no matter how bad you are at actually playing the game. But in Dark Souls, every new challenge can really only be overcome by actually becoming a better player. Sure, you can potentially grind souls and titanite for a long time and boost your stats to help out, but pure stats can only take you so far.

But whenever I mention Dark Souls, the assumption is always that I just want Warframe to be super hard. But the difficulty is not what makes Dark Souls so much fun. There is a difference between difficulty and challenge. Warframe already has plenty of difficulty, but there is rarely any challenge to actually make it interesting. For example: Rolling a D20, and calling out the number you think it will land on is difficult. There is only a 5% chance you'll be right. But it isn't challenging, because simply saying a number and rolling a die isn't exactly complicated. The determining factor between success or failure is never your skill at executing the actions, its just pure mathematics.

And that's basically all there is to make Warframe "challenging". Its just numbers vs. numbers, and player input barely matters. By comparison, Dark Souls is more like throwing the die into a shot glass on the other side of the room while doing a backflip. Instead of just relying purely on math to determine success or failure, its entirely your skill at executing the necessary actions that determines the outcome. This makes it challenging, and that challenge is what makes it so much fun to play, despite its difficulty sometimes feeling like you're slamming your face into a brick wall repeatedly.

This is why the suggestion I see so often that simply nerfing yourself, by bringing less mods or weaker weapons, or whatever, doesn't actually make Warframe more fun. Simply lowering your stats doesn't do anything to make the gameplay more engaging. It just makes fights take longer, which can make it more difficult, but not more challenging. You still have to do exactly the same simple things, you just have to do them for a bit longer. Hitting an enemy with your sword four times isn't much more exciting than hitting them twice.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I know some people like the grind, some like the power-gaming, etc. Like I said - to each their own. With all of this said, however - I still feel that games do better when they sell us a fantasy and an experience than when they sell us spreadsheets. It's not always possible, but I still believe that video game developers have a responsibility to their own community to at least try and convince us to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the experience as present it, rather than trying to "beat" it. Ideally, you want players to WANT to be challenged. Warframe's core design and over-reliance on "extrinsic rewards" does the exact opposite. It encourages us to disbelief, disregard the fantasy and focus purely on the mechanics. Because DE appear to have given up on giving us a compelling experience, they can only ever give us a transactional experience, instead. We pay with our time or money, we receive compensation in return. When a relationship is purely transactional, then it's only natural that players will try to "pay" as little as they can get away with but "earn" as much as the game will let them.

In short, I believe Warframe itself and DE's development strategy in particular breed a purely transactional view of the game in their players, which results in players equating "fun" with "efficient" and "high stats" while sidelining actual gameplay entirely. But we've spoken about this before and you know just how depressing I find it :)

This is the main problem I have with pretty much all "AAA" games these days. Along with any other game that has a heavy focus on grinding, microtransactions, loot boxes, battlepasses, limited time events, or any other similar mechanics. All those things transform an otherwise fun piece of entertainment into nothing more than a product. A soulless means for the creator to make money. Because there are far too many ways that they have to intentionally remove some of the fun from the game in order to make it profitable. They quite literally give you less fun up front, just so that they can sell it to you later for even more profit.

Warframe may be one of the least egregious examples of all this, but its still far from innocent. Its over reliance on extrinsic carrots on sticks, and endless treadmills of grinding as the only encouragement to keep you playing being one of the worst parts. Its the main reason I basically never play anymore. The intrinsic rewards all either simply wore out their welcome a thousand hours ago, or have been ruined by some change over time. And the extrinsic ones are simply not worth spending time to get, because they will either be statistically inferior to something I already have, or so overpowered they break the game even further. So what's the point?

Especially because there are still so many other games out there that don't have these "necessary evils" built into their systems.

[CoalitionOfGears]

Can't help but notice that ever since the crowd that kept boiling everything down to the ridiculous 'stop whining and go play other games' argument took their own advice, the overall depth and quality of discussions on pinpointing Warframe's flaws and maybe offering a solution have skyrocketed.

 

As much as I agree with many of the posts and points here, I think the 'everything flows' nature of this game, that nothing is ever written in stone, is the main culprit here, btw. It's not as simple as just tweaking the stats of stuff, but rather the general concepts. I've played since 2017 and there hasn't been one feature introduced in this time that didn't require an overhaul on release day... with each overhaul taking literally years to complete. Even back in 2017 most of the already existing systems seemed in a dire need of a revisit, tbh. Add to that the fact that whenever a new feature is announced to be in the making, it's hyped up by DE themselves beyond any sense (or - and I'm sorry to say this - as experience shows, credibility), and you get a bunch of genuinely spoiled players willing to trade WF for the next game as soon as they get inevitably disappointed at one point or another, because marketing based solely on emotions can only get you so far. You just can't run a game on hype and not expect some salt.

Not even the original premise of this game has been written in stone. Unless what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an example of space ninja warfare, I guess. Warframe just tries to be so many things at once, it just isn't really good at any of them at this point. And why take risks and attempt to make something good, when you can just make something passable and hope to tweak its stats to perfection some time in the next two to six years, amirite?

[(XBOX)Big Roy 324]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Warframe is won or lost in the Arsenal, with mission success a foregone conclusion and our actions largely superfluous. I took a pretty lengthy break from Warframe recently, filled mostly with Payday 2, Vermintide 2, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. - all four-player co-op games.

I have done the same relatively recently but with the division 2, Verm 1/2, Destiny 2, Anthem, a few others.  I am also playing gears 5 now.

Your post is how I have felt about Warframe recently.  If it had the gameplay loop of something like an Anthem but with all the ridiculous options that exist now. It would be the ideal game for me. I'm a really casual player by most standards only playing for an hour at most per day. As I approach every new piece of content that exists that either I've held off or have been locked out. I am met with one of two results. I don't have the right weapons or mods to do it and am instantly frustrated with difficulty. Or I breeze through it like I was barely trying but realize I need to do it again several times just to get the reward that shows everyone I did it. Sometimes it's a combination of both if a particular frame or weapon trivializes it. 

[Teljaxx]

1 hour ago, CoalitionOfGears said:

Can't help but notice that ever since the crowd that kept boiling everything down to the ridiculous 'stop whining and go play other games' argument took their own advice, the overall depth and quality of discussions on pinpointing Warframe's flaws and maybe offering a solution have skyrocketed.

 

As much as I agree with many of the posts and points here, I think the 'everything flows' nature of this game, that nothing is ever written in stone, is the main culprit here, btw. It's not as simple as just tweaking the stats of stuff, but rather the general concepts. I've played since 2017 and there hasn't been one feature introduced in this time that didn't require an overhaul on release day... with each overhaul taking literally years to complete. Even back in 2017 most of the already existing systems seemed in a dire need of a revisit, tbh. Add to that the fact that whenever a new feature is announced to be in the making, it's hyped up by DE themselves beyond any sense (or - and I'm sorry to say this - as experience shows, credibility), and you get a bunch of genuinely spoiled players willing to trade WF for the next game as soon as they get inevitably disappointed at one point or another, because marketing based solely on emotions can only get you so far. You just can't run a game on hype and not expect some salt.

Not even the original premise of this game has been written in stone. Unless what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an example of space ninja warfare, I guess. Warframe just tries to be so many things at once, it just isn't really good at any of them at this point. And why take risks and attempt to make something good, when you can just make something passable and hope to tweak its stats to perfection some time in the next two to six years, amirite?

This is exactly what I was talking about with DE never bothering to plan anything out. They like to claim that they have had a grand plan all along, like "always intending" to have something like Railjack in the game, but their overall behavior shows that this clearly isn't true. They have basically spent all their time just throwing things at the wall, and seeing what sticks. And, unsurprisingly, its mostly just made a mess.

Most of the time, they tend to add things just because they seem cool. But that doesn't usually make for good game design, especially if you want any kind of longevity to your game. As @Steel_Rook said earlier, they're always creating solutions in search of a problem. There are a ton of mechanics and systems in this game that exist for no specific reason. And many of those mechanics actually let us ignore more interesting parts of the game. Like how bullet jumping isn't ever actually necessary for anything, but it also lets us completely ignore almost all of the wall running paths throughout the tilesets. And why would anyone ever spend the time to do any slow wall running, when you can literally just fly over everything in a second?

And, of course, they also commit the all too common sin of the "live service" game. Everything is rushed to release, because they can just finish it later, right? But when has DE ever actually finished anything they set out to do? The Corrupted void enemies, which were added all the way back in update 8, still have their placeholder weapon models! And when they got their new voices, it was only the male ones. The female ones still use the same placeholder voices they always have.

This is why I never get hyped for anything DE announces anymore. They simply can't be trusted until they actually deliver, because they so rarely actually manage to deliver anything even remotely close to what they promised. Like with Railjack. They claim the next big update is "Railjack 3.0". But really, it might finally actually be Railjack 1.0. But, I expect it to be more like Railjack 0.8 or so. And if we're lucky, maybe the next update might finally get it to 1.0.

1 minute ago, (XBOX)Big Roy 324 said:

I have done the same relatively recently but with the division 2, Verm 1/2, Destiny 2, Anthem, a few others.  I am also playing gears 5 now.

Your post is how I have felt about Warframe recently.  If it had the gameplay loop of something like an Anthem but with all the ridiculous options that exist now. It would be the ideal game for me. I'm a really casual player by most standards only playing for an hour at most per day. As I approach every new piece of content that exists that either I've held off or have been locked out. I am met with one of two results. I don't have the right weapons or mods to do it and am instantly frustrated with difficulty. Or I breeze through it like I was barely trying but realize I need to do it again several times just to get the reward that shows everyone I did it. Sometimes it's a combination of both if a particular frame or weapon trivializes it. 

This is a perfect example of what I meant when I said you can't balance an endless scale.

For combat to be satisfying, there needs to be a proper way for it to work. Enemy X should take Y shots from gun Z, and so on. This is your point of balance, that you design every other part of the game around. In a game without any kind of leveling system, this is super easy. And usually, even in a game with leveling, its still easy to figure out, since you can just match player level to enemy level. But there isn't any way to do that in Warframe, because player level, or even weapon level, has no direct relation to your actual power level. There is no way to figure out exactly how powerful you should be to deal with any particular level of enemy.

Another thing that usually happens in other games, is that players are guided to areas that match their level. But again, DE never put anything like this in Warframe. Almost anyone can play any mission at any time. And in fact, we are often encouraged to play missions that are outside of our power level, like constantly having to do Lith relic runs for Prime gear. Or having to fight a super tough boss for a Nightwave challenge.

And, on top of that, we have randomly spawning bosses, like the Stalker, that can show up without warning in any mission, and be a completely different level from whatever normal stuff you're fighting.

All this has just ended up creating complete anarchy, with stats going all over the place, and no effective way to organize or quantify any of it. The result is that most people simply follow the META all the time, and bring their best gear to every mission, even if they don't actually need to. Because at the very least, doing that makes grinding more efficient, even if it isn't a very engaging way to play.

[(PSN)DoctorWho_90250]

On 2021-03-14 at 4:01 AM, Narcissa said:

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?

Because this game doesn't have much to it honestly. Mission in, mission out we do the same things and fight the same enemies over and over and over again. So when players get bored they blame the frames, the weapons etc. etc., they blame power creep etc. etc. and DE, being the very selective listeners that they are, follow suit and nerf away. Then players celebrate thinking the game will finally be like Dark Souls and all missions will take "hard work" and "effort" to complete, with "meaningful rewards" at the end of every mission...forgetting or plainly not realizing that Warframe isn't meant to be difficult (it's meant to be replayed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in order to keep players grinding away) and that it doesn't have much else to it. I don't support nerfing. I have fun with what I have and if I want to be OP I choose to do so. At the same time, when put in a mission with players who are using meta frames or weapons I enjoy the ride, not ask for stuff to get nerfed.

[(PSN)DoctorWho_90250]

14 minutes ago, CurseOfFilth said:

Nerf guns, buff melee. Then nerf melee, buff guns. Repeat cycle.

Pretty much.

[ChaoticEdge]

Energized Mutation is bazaarly op, use twin grakata plus arcane that uses Arcane Pistoleer then you use Energized Mutation then you get absolutely infinite ammo cuz it's spray and hit the head for it can be meta in some point.  Got a nuke gun?  Yes use that with Energized Mutation then use Mirage and nuked the town firing more then 6 shots, use energized mutation with archwing gun, freaking work as a charm.  As we know, Meta say that "I am everywhere rather you like it or not DE for I exist because you built me and now fear your own creation"

Now other meta exist in frames, as we stroll down how many meta, meta is everywhere.

[Teljaxx]

4 hours ago, (PSN)DoctorWho_90250 said:

Because this game doesn't have much to it honestly. Mission in, mission out we do the same things and fight the same enemies over and over and over again. So when players get bored they blame the frames, the weapons etc. etc., they blame power creep etc. etc. and DE, being the very selective listeners that they are, follow suit and nerf away. Then players celebrate thinking the game will finally be like Dark Souls and all missions will take "hard work" and "effort" to complete, with "meaningful rewards" at the end of every mission...forgetting or plainly not realizing that Warframe isn't meant to be difficult (it's meant to be replayed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in order to keep players grinding away) and that it doesn't have much else to it. I don't support nerfing. I have fun with what I have and if I want to be OP I choose to do so. At the same time, when put in a mission with players who are using meta frames or weapons I enjoy the ride, not ask for stuff to get nerfed.

That definitely is one of the main problems with the game. It has very little mechanical depth. And this isn't actually a new problem, either. Even from the very beginning, it was fairly simple, and somewhat shallow. Really, the main reason it gained any traction at first was because of its competition.

Eight years ago, there was very little variety to the shooter genre overall. Pretty much everything was either a CoD clone, or a Gears clone. Everything was flat, slow, and full of waist high walls. And maneuverability consisted of jogging, and maybe jumping, if you were lucky. So a game that offered any kind of extra speed and agility to the player was guaranteed to stand out. And that's what Warframe had. Its combination of shooting, melee, and parkour was a breath of fresh air in a very stagnant genre.

But, at this point, the competition has changed. There has been a shooter "revolution" over the last few years. The most obvious being Doom 16 and Eternal. But there has also been that whole retro revival going on in the indie sector too. Games like Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Fury, and Ultrakill now offer what was once nearly impossible to find. They have filled in the gap between the slow shooters, and Warframe. And many of them do it better than Warframe, too, since they don't have any of those Necessary Evils that F2P "live service" games need to have. And, most relevant to this thread, they are actually well balanced.

And, of course, there are the other "live service" grindy looters that have also come out since Warframe. Destiny 2, Borderlands 3, Godfall, and even Anthem and Avengers are now direct competition that DE has to deal with. And, since they added Railjack, they now have to compete with space games as well, like Elite Dangerous, and No Man's Sky.

So, what does Warframe really offer anymore? Now that there are so many other games that offer the same kinds of things, many of which do them better, what is the point of sticking around here? Warframe is outdated. And the sad part is that many of the games that make it outdated are actually even more outdated than it is.

But hey, that's what happens when you try to keep a single game relevant for almost a decade. Especially one that started with as shaky a foundation as this one did. But, that also doesn't mean that ignoring the imbalance, and never nerfing anything is going to help. Really, it will just end up making things even worse. Because now that DE can't rely on simply being unique, they have to try even harder, and make the game even better than ever before, if they want to maintain their niche in the market. And huge flaws, like terrible balancing, will very quickly ruin that for them.

[vegetosayajin]

btw it's logical why they do it from the outside perspective and from a early to mid-player perspective, but...
Players that played this game for a long time know every mission painfully, they know how to kill every enemy, no matter the level, survive no matter the level etc. When you reach that modding/gear state you play for...fun only, to help other tenno etc.
For an "advanced" player perspective nerfing a weapon or a system, but not changing the game to be harder/more engaging or more fun becomes just annoying. Even more annoying when you know a new meta will surface with the systems currently in place so it's just an inconvenience that doesn't make sense when you don't change the game itself but just "balance" one meta to be replaced by another meta so every time it get's to the same point but annoys long time players in the process.

[Soy77]

On 2021-03-14 at 6:01 PM, Narcissa said:

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?

Lol this is a normal decent post until it said "dev mentality" like DE are some sort of evil skums that solely exist just want to make people sad.

META stands for Most Efficient Tactics Available. And -not just in warframe but in any game, if a tactic has become "too good" it makes every other tactics not worth player's time, then it will be game dev's responsibility to make player's time worth it again. Or players will never touch 90% of the game that are outside of the meta.

Since humans are not as effective as future androids, the most painless way to achieve it is by making the meta not as efficient as it currently is. By nerfing it.

 

It's not ideal. But that's how gaming works so far. Hopefully in the future humans develop an a.i that can automatically calculate outputs of every single weapons and each of their interactions with every single enemies in videogames so game devs can balance every single contents without sacrificing one specific meta.

[Dunkelheit]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb Teljaxx:

That definitely is one of the main problems with the game. It has very little mechanical depth. And this isn't actually a new problem, either. Even from the very beginning, it was fairly simple, and somewhat shallow. Really, the main reason it gained any traction at first was because of its competition.

Eight years ago, there was very little variety to the shooter genre overall. Pretty much everything was either a CoD clone, or a Gears clone. Everything was flat, slow, and full of waist high walls. And maneuverability consisted of jogging, and maybe jumping, if you were lucky. So a game that offered any kind of extra speed and agility to the player was guaranteed to stand out. And that's what Warframe had. Its combination of shooting, melee, and parkour was a breath of fresh air in a very stagnant genre.

But, at this point, the competition has changed. There has been a shooter "revolution" over the last few years. The most obvious being Doom 16 and Eternal. But there has also been that whole retro revival going on in the indie sector too. Games like Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Fury, and Ultrakill now offer what was once nearly impossible to find. They have filled in the gap between the slow shooters, and Warframe. And many of them do it better than Warframe, too, since they don't have any of those Necessary Evils that F2P "live service" games need to have. And, most relevant to this thread, they are actually well balanced.

And, of course, there are the other "live service" grindy looters that have also come out since Warframe. Destiny 2, Borderlands 3, Godfall, and even Anthem and Avengers are now direct competition that DE has to deal with. And, since they added Railjack, they now have to compete with space games as well, like Elite Dangerous, and No Man's Sky.

So, what does Warframe really offer anymore? Now that there are so many other games that offer the same kinds of things, many of which do them better, what is the point of sticking around here? Warframe is outdated. And the sad part is that many of the games that make it outdated are actually even more outdated than it is.

But hey, that's what happens when you try to keep a single game relevant for almost a decade. Especially one that started with as shaky a foundation as this one did. But, that also doesn't mean that ignoring the imbalance, and never nerfing anything is going to help. Really, it will just end up making things even worse. Because now that DE can't rely on simply being unique, they have to try even harder, and make the game even better than ever before, if they want to maintain their niche in the market. And huge flaws, like terrible balancing, will very quickly ruin that for them.

 

You need to ask yourself: What is Warframe and do I fit in?

Warframe is going strong for 8 years now, so believe it or not, but they have done something right along the path. I have come back after a very long break. I took the break, because I felt like you do now. And I was absolutely marvelled by the experience: Open World, Mechs, Railjack, Quests with actual lore and so much more. And I know that if I put another 1k-2k hours in the game, it will feel stale at one point again. But once I reach that point, I can still see Warframe for what it is: A looter shooter for a very broad playerbase. It will never have the difficulty of Ninja Gaiden or Dark Souls, like others are demanding. It won't happen, ever, period. If you wait for that, you are doing it wrong.
It will never have the balance of chess.
It will never have as many ghosts as PacMan.
And every single internet game has a "meta". And you won't ever have balance over all weapons of an 8 year old game.

Warframe is a game that gives challenges which are overcome with gear. Same as Diablo, same as World of Warcraft, two other super famous games. Are you demanding more difficulty in Diablo as well? Then you are in the wrong game again.

But to be honest and this was the point when you really lost me, if you honestly compare Warframe with Doom, Amid Evil (lol), Anthem (lolol) or No Man's Sky, I don't know what to say to you. I have stalked your profile as well: You have put 1,7k hours into the game. How many other games have interested you for that long? I personally love Witcher 3, but I have no more than 100 hours in the game.

Please put 1700 hours into No Man's Sky or Anthem or Avengers and then come back and tell me how they compete with Warframe.

 

 

[DrBorris]

19 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Far too much "gameplay" in Warframe is won or lost in the Arsenal, with mission success a foregone conclusion and our actions largely superfluous.

The core issue with relying too heavily on "math" is that you turn what should be a gameplay challenge into an optimisation problem with a discrete set of solutions.

You've said a lot of right things, but I think that you are throwing out a major part of Warframe for a lot of people when you make the arsenal meta-game out to be the bad guy. For all of the failures of the Grendel missions there is one part of them that, in my opinion, was absolutely fantastic... the five minutes I spent in the arsenal before I started playing. Much like a CCG where you build a deck of synergistic cards to creates something greater than the sum if its parts, putting together a good team of Warframes and weapons to compete with the horse-poo of the Grendel modifiers was engaging and rewarding. Warframe isn't just the gameplay, Warframe is also a puzzle game, in a weird way not unlike a CCG. Finding the right tool for the job, combining tools for different effects, these are perfectly valid forms of "gameplay" that exist in the arsenal.

Just because something can be solved it doesn't make it bad. Puzzles have almost always been part of video games yet they all have the same weakness of being "solved" after the first go. Where I think you are missing some of the bigger picture is how the number crunching in the arsenal can have impacts on how you use your loadout. Recently I made a build where I used Titania's Lantern augment that increases melee damage, Proboscis Cernos, and -insert fun melee weapon here-. I had almost as much fun theory-crafting the parts to put together, the build for Titania especially, as I did using it. I actually enjoyed the gameplay (Steel Path Survival) more because I made it in the arsenal. I know you aren't saying that meta-gaming arsenal stuff is all bad, but it feels as though you are dismissing it as valid "gameplay". It isn't a bad thing that your decisions in the arsenal have a major impact on your mission success, it isn't bad that Warframe is heavy in math, just because these things aren't used in other games you like it doesn't mean they don't have a place in Warframe.

You have a problem with being able to solve a mission before it starts. I personally don't see this as an inherent problem, and we have seen a lot of content in the past that has broken the notion of a "one build does it all" (except melee recently, melee has been on a long win-streak). Warframe, in my opinion, is at its best when the gameplay is lead by the arsenal. When you are solving a problem prior to a mission then being rewarded in said mission by having an easy time. This line of thinking does NOT excuse a lot of what goes on in Warframe at the moment, but I don't think vilifying the arsenal is fair to the gameplay it offers nor the players that enjoy that gameplay (there is a fairly large group of Warframe players that are big into CCGs).

 

This is not me justifying the state of the game or power creep. But from a lot of your posts I think you have flipped a bit too far and have lost sight of the strengths some of Warframe's systems have. You are viewing Warframe in the light of only a gameplay experience despite it not being that for four plus years. I wish I had kept a diary of my opinions on the state of the game for the past six years. My opinion has been everywhere, and the only consistency is change. Over the past year what I have been trying really hard to do is attempt to appreciate everything right with Warframe and build up on concepts that exist rather than throw them away. While I would be down for a nuclear explosion to the core systems in place I have come to the conclusion that Warframe can fix many of its problems without it.

Now I need to work on my rebuttable to your "Warframe has too many elements."

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

This is exactly what I was talking about with DE never bothering to plan anything out. They like to claim that they have had a grand plan all along, like "always intending" to have something like Railjack in the game, but their overall behavior shows that this clearly isn't true. They have basically spent all their time just throwing things at the wall, and seeing what sticks. And, unsurprisingly, its mostly just made a mess.

My impression of DE's development process is that they do indeed have plans for what they want to do with Warframe and where they want to take it, but they almost never seem to have a practical implementation planned out. It reminds me of what I used to do way back in the day when I wrote fictional short stories - jot down a few plot points that I wanted to happen, then figure out how to move characters between them later on when I had to bridge the gap. There's a very good documentary in Digital Extremes and Warframe by NoClip on YouTube, which goes into how the game came to be, what DE wanted to create as far back as Dark Sector, Hayden Tenno, space pirates and more. Take Free Roam maps, for instance - they stick out the side of Warframe like a sore thumb, a content island which clashes with the rest of the game. You'd think this were some random idea someone had and threw together, but it isn't. Since before the game launched, DE had the fantasy of designing an open-world MMO, and it took them until Plains of Eidolon to actually try their hand at that.

Warframe was DE's swan song when it launched - a last, desperate effort to keep their company solvent with whatever little content they could put out. The limited, small game it started out with is all they could do at the time. Any ambition they may have had beyond "don't lose our jobs" would have to wait until the game could pay for itself. As the game goes on and generates the money needed to develop it, they implement more of the ideas they had 10 years ago that they couldn't put into Dark Sektor. In essence, we're playing a game WHILE it's being developed, even still after all these years. It's like Star Citizen, in a way, though I'd argue more playable and content-rich. That's why you get these half-baked, "we thought it was cool" additions like Free Roam and Railjack. The version we get on release is easily the WORST, least polished version we're going to see of them because most of this stuff is quite literally proof of concept.

I've mellowed out on my dev-bashing recently, so this doesn't bother me quite as much. What's started bothering me more of late is that DE don't seem willing to take full advantage of this "Early Access" situation. Rather than using their status as a perpetual "Open Beta," DE seem to have succumbed to status quo. The longer they don't change a system, the less willing they are to change it for fear of upsetting people who've grown used to it. But that's kind of missing the point. Warframe remains relevant today because it's THE most widely-supported Live Service out there, with World of Warfract and its millions of subscribers maybe being a close-ish second. Warframe has changed so much even in the time I've played it since 2018, let alone since launch in 2013. It manages to look good, run well and keep reinventing itself. This game does no benefit from conservative development. It benefits from radical reinvention. Letting the experience grow stale and the player base grow stagnant is about the worst this game can do.

With all of that said, though...

 

13 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Most of the time, they tend to add things just because they seem cool. But that doesn't usually make for good game design, especially if you want any kind of longevity to your game. As @Steel_Rook said earlier, they're always creating solutions in search of a problem. There are a ton of mechanics and systems in this game that exist for no specific reason. And many of those mechanics actually let us ignore more interesting parts of the game. Like how bullet jumping isn't ever actually necessary for anything, but it also lets us completely ignore almost all of the wall running paths throughout the tilesets. And why would anyone ever spend the time to do any slow wall running, when you can literally just fly over everything in a second?

Yeah, there's a lot of that. While its changing nature is one of Warframe's primary strengths, it wouldn't hurt DE to plan out their content additions a bit more in advance. Even if integration doesn't come at release, you can still do a lot to future-proof it. Take Necramechs, for instance. For one thing, they were absolutely pointless when first introduced - barely a notch above K-Drives. Maybe think about what role they're supposed to serve or when players might want to use them? But more specifically, consider Necramech melee. Right now, we equip melee mods (Pressure Pint, Fury, Reach) directly into the Necramech, rather than its melee weapon... Because it has no melee weapon. On the Dev Stream following the release, DE were almost caught off-guard with questions about Necramechs using Archwing melee weapons. But... Why? They were already working on Bone Widow who has an Exalted melee weapon.

The argument went, as I recall, "Yeah, but we'd have to make new animations for some of them." OK, fair point. Can't use the Knux with the same animation as the Veritux. Launch Necramechs now with no melee weapons (could have luanched with "some" but OK), add melee weapons later. Except you didn't future-proof the system AT ALL. What happens when Necramech melee weapons come out? Do we slot Pressure Point in both? Why not give Necramechs a dummy melee weapon called just "Necramech Melee" and let us upgrade the arm? It could still suck, we could still have no reason to mod it, but at least the system for modding melee weapons on Necramechs would be there. And even if you never end up releasing Necramech melee weapons, it doesn't hurt to have that system. But no - they've failed to plan for Necramech melee which people were obviously going to ask for (we never stopped asking for Operator melee), so now they're going to have massive balance issues when said Necramech melee does come out. And for what?

Archwings, K-Drives, Railjack, hell Operators themselves - all of these systems get thrown into the game no defined use or purpose, they're all objectively worse than legacy options but for the one event which requires them. It's only years down the line and several Revised redesigns later that we have even a tangential use for these things. I don't know if this is because DE don't ever plan ahead for implementation or because they're so quick to give up on a system if it doesn't see IMMEDIATE adoption, but this keeps happening. And it frustrates me personally, because for so many of these new additions, there could have been such interesting uses. Operators could have let us be in two places at once, solving multi-person environment puzzles. Only a single one of these exist (Cooperation Drift) and that isn't solvable by a single person. Maybe with Warframe + Operator + Necramech + Spectre it might be. Archwings finally got some use as travel and combat tools in Free Roam maps but DE don't want us doing that. First Launchers were charge-limited, and even now we keep getting hit with anti-Archwing homing missiles that ignore defensive abilities. Necramechs are just worse Warframes, but at least we could have used them in Railjack to fire into enemy ships and pilot remotely so we don't have to leave ours. Doesn't seem like that's what we'll be doing with them.

I'm frustrated because DE keep doing stuff that's really cool in principle, but doesn't actually DO anything in practice since the support infrastructure for it just doesn't exist. And yeah, I get it - new functionality isn't trivial to programme. Fair enough. Speaking as a software developer myself, though - it's a HELL of a lot harder to do when you never leave hooks for it. Even if you're not planning to give Necramechs melee weapons, leave hook for it. Doesn't hurt to have. Even if you're not planning to have two-player environmental puzzles with the Operator or Necramech, leave a hook for it. Don't build Glide into Aim. Build them as separate systems and bundle them together. That way you can separate them later if you want to. As Adam Savage so cleverly put it - "If you can't make it perfect, make it adjustable." If you can't perfectly plan ahead for all possible future content, leave hooks for new content into existing content. It'll save you a MASSIVE amount of development time in the long run.

 

  

17 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

This is also why I always use Dark Souls as my "anti-Warframe" example. Its almost exactly the opposite in terms of stats vs. skill. [...] But whenever I mention Dark Souls, the assumption is always that I just want Warframe to be super hard. But the difficulty is not what makes Dark Souls so much fun. There is a difference between difficulty and challenge.

Agreed. I actually wrote about this a long time ago, but my take is similar to yours. Difficulty can sometimes challenge players to more extensively interact with a game's core mechanics, but it very often does the exact opposite. It reduces the options available to players and forces them into an easy "meta," turning what could otherwise have been a complex game into a simple, cheesy experience. This is precisely where Warframe sits, where the game gets simpler and more basic the harder it becomes. The bigger the enemy stats get, the more emphasis shifts to player stats and away from player actions. We end up sleep-walking through content because the only reliable way to play it is to fundamentally undermine all danger and entirely circumvent all complexity. After all, why bother trying to be fancy? All it does is reduce your farming efficiency. I mean, it's not like we enjoy most of the stuff we do anyway. Best get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible.

I'm of the opinion that actual challenge lies elsewhere entirely. I feel that a game can only truly have satisfying challenge if it both has complexity of some kind that we can interact with, and also succeeds in getting us to engage with it. That means the game needs to prevent us from circumventing complexity, but also successfully convince us to want to actually bother. Part of this comes down to game balance. Ideally, a game's critical path - the path of least resistance, most efficient progression and most entertaining gameplay - will go through it's more complex, more compelling systems. If it's faster to Tether enemy fighter craft together and punch a button to make them blow up than it is to dogfight them individually, players will choose the former option even if the latter is more compelling from a gameplay perspective - to refer back to the OP.

Part of fostering complexity, however, also comes from selling players on the overall fantasy that the game's theme presents. Warframe has a glorious parkour system, but it barely factors in aside from shortening travel times. The Jupiter tileset actually features a few tiles which really benefit from parkour and actually sell the fantasy of a space ninja who can scale any mishspahed structure. But that's it - it's the only tileset in the game which does this, and it doesn't do that very well either. Most of the "jumping puzzles" in Jupiter are just to get from door to door, and most people just use their Void Dash instead. There are no actual puzzles to solve. You'd think maybe we could use our Parkour for superior positioning, get up on a catwalk and rain death from above, but it hardly seems to matter. Enemies will teleport/superjump up to us, and most of them fire hitscan weapons anyway. In theory, the fantasy of Warframe is to play a Space Ninja Wizard Pirate, but we get so few opportunities to actually be ninja...

Or pirates, for that matter. One of Warframe's earlier concepts featured us as raiders - hitting Grineer and Corpus ships for supplies, robbing them then disappearing back into the night. The game's grown since then, obviously, but there's so much mileage to this concept at least as an optional mission game mode. We have all the mechanics - carryable cannisters, the Moltacoil, hackable consoles, defence objectives, etc. You could have the entirety of Payday inside Warframe. But nope. Our objectives are almost always dirt simple - rush to the waypoint, rush to the exit, repeat. No wonder people stick to speedrunning when the game fails to offer anything more compelling. We typically care absolutely nothing for anything in the mission beyond whatever the waypoint's pointing to.

I honestly think that Railjack may be the last bastion of complexity in Warframe, just because the central framework around which the game mode is built has some amount of physicality and segmentation to it. You need to worry about where you leave the Railjack and what you do with it, the game world is split into multiple small spaces scattered around a large open space, it supports multiple dissimilar concurrent objectives, it promotes exploration. I'm sure some people will still speedrun it, but at least it HAS complexity and a fantasy surrounding it.

As you say - Warframe lacks challenge not because it lacks difficulty, but rather because it lacks complexity for the most part, and lacks reason to bother with what complexity it has. For a game of this size, that's a cryin' shame.

 

18 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

This is the main problem I have with pretty much all "AAA" games these days. Along with any other game that has a heavy focus on grinding, microtransactions, loot boxes, battlepasses, limited time events, or any other similar mechanics. All those things transform an otherwise fun piece of entertainment into nothing more than a product. A soulless means for the creator to make money. Because there are far too many ways that they have to intentionally remove some of the fun from the game in order to make it profitable. They quite literally give you less fun up front, just so that they can sell it to you later for even more profit.

This is an issue specific to the Live Service game model. Like the MMOs of old, Live Services have a concurrent operational cost, which requires them to keep players paying concurrently, as well. Subscription fees are no longer tennable, so publishers need to monetise in other ways. What they seem to have settled on is... Well, it's a hugely self-defeating system. Basically, they're designing their games to appeal almost exclusively to burnt-out players. The expectation is that most players will burn out on a game within 30-60 hours, or within a few weeks. Ideally they'd have spent this time with the initial progression system - story mode, star chart, theme park content, etc. Past this point, a number of habit-forming mechanics are used to keep players playing despite being "done" with the game. The idea isn't to make the game fun, but to force it into that player's daily schedule. A player "hooked" on a Live Service may finish with their chores and then find themselves having no idea what to do with their spare time outside of the game they play habitually, so they log into the game and potentially spend more money.

To me, this model is ultimately highly self-defeating. I have a history of video game compulsion, I've played a fair number of MMOs and Live Services, I'm ostensibly a whale (probably €600-700+ into Warframe at time of writing). I can tell you one thing for a fact - I'm much more likely to spend money on a video game I'm enjoying and want more of than on a video game I resent and want to make go away. What happens when I want to make a game go away is I don't play it. This is what caused me to bail on Warframe over the winter. Trying to hold onto burnt-out players is not good. You're generating a fundamentally unpleasable fanbase (because they're burnt out and not having fun), you're stressing players out and you risk them rage-quitting forever. It's so much easier to let players leave the game when they've had enough, then call them back in with the next major content release. A player who left satisfied feeling they've gotten their money's worth is much more likely to come back and spend more money than a player who reached their breaking point and rage-quit, swearing to never do business with the development studio again. SOME of these players will come back, but many won't.

I don't know if it's DE upper management or Leyou interference or just bad judgement, but Warframe's approach to player retention is just... Toxic. The game doesn't want you to play it for hours and hours, even if it seems that way sometimes. No, it wants you to play it a little bit every day until it becomes part of your routine the same as breakfast, brushing your teeth or hugging your family and pets. The game would rather you go through the motions of playing it than actually engage you with content. Honestly, it makes no sense to me. This might be anecdotal, but I personally feel a lot better-disposed towards Warframe after a long break than I've had for over a year.

Live services are built around sucking players dry of their will to go on. It seems to me that letting players leave and come back is the healthier option.

 

53 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

You've said a lot of right things, but I think that you are throwing out a major part of Warframe for a lot of people when you make the arsenal meta-game out to be the bad guy. For all of the failures of the Grendel missions there is one part of them that, in my opinion, was absolutely fantastic... the five minutes I spent in the arsenal before I started playing. Much like a CCG where you build a deck of synergistic cards to creates something greater than the sum if its parts, putting together a good team of Warframes and weapons to compete with the horse-poo of the Grendel modifiers was engaging and rewarding. Warframe isn't just the gameplay, Warframe is also a puzzle game, in a weird way not unlike a CCG. Finding the right tool for the job, combining tools for different effects, these are perfectly valid forms of "gameplay" that exist in the arsenal.

True - there is value to an RPG system. My issue with the Arsenal isn't that it exists, but rather that it has a tendency to displace the entire rest of the game. I understand the appeal of min/maxing in the abstract, but all too often this results in perfunctory gameplay. When the result of a mission is a foregone conclusion and the intervening activity all but irrelevant, what purpose is there to me even playing it? If the game can play itself for me like a screensaver with roughly the same result as if I were at the controls, is it really a "game" at that point? As with all things, proper balance lies somewhere in the middle. I'm obviously biased in this regard, as my affinity for RPG systems has steadily eroded the older I get, but you have to admit that there is such a thing as "too much RPG." Specifically, I'd argue that point occurs when RPG mechanics are used to circumvent entire gameplay systems, leaving nothing in their place.

I often use Inaros as my go-to example. I use Inaros because he lets me entirely disregard enemy damage. It kind of doesn't matter what my enemies do, how many of them there are or what level they are. They can't kill me. I can clock out for lunch and come back to them wailing on me still. Entirely circumventing survivability in Warframe does make my game "more fun" in comparison, but that's only because all the alternatives the game gives me are less fun themselves. Ideally, I would enjoy a system which doesn't permit me to just disregard survivability but instead challenge me to survive through gameplay, ala Division 2 or Vermintide 2, but that's not what Warframe presents. I'm of the opinion that modern video game mechanics are sufficiently advanced to model most of what would typically go into min/maxing into actual moment-to-moment gameplay.

I'm not against "theorycrafting" itself. What I try to limit is both granularity and impact of it. If you've seen me post, you've likely heard me say something to the effect of "I'd rather have fewer but more meaningful choices than many smaller ones." I believe that every choice we make should have some directly tangible gameplay effect in isolation, regardless of what cumulative effect it might have. I need to be able to feel it through gameplay, not just when looking at average stats. I believe that even choices which impart a substantial advantage should never trivialise the game or circumvent entire systems. We should still need to be at the controls, acting and reacting appropriately in real time. Where players consistently and persistently feel compelled to try and circumvent entire game systems, those systems should immediately be tagged for either removal or redesign. The Arsenal should still matter, but I'm of the opinion that its primary purpose should be to personalise our experience to work how we enjoy it, rather than to solve problems directly.

When it comes to number-crunching - you've likely seen me post this before so I'll keep it brief. My criticism isn't that a problem - a "puzzle" if you will - only needs to be solved once. It's that said problem only needs to be solved by a single person, who can then share it with the rest of the community. This might be fun for the few outstanding individuals who brainstorm these solutions or else stubborn fools like myself who refuse to listen to advise, but it breeds a community of players who sleep-walk through the game with no knowledge or understanding, simply following whatever the latest guide says. In a game as transactional as Warframe, there's no incentive to come up with YOUR solution. As long as you have A solution, you'll do just fine.

I understand that you're driven to experiment with builds. However, I also ask that you understand that those like you and myself are outliers. We go looking for weird builds or insist on using non-meta options, or doing our own research despite the game not incentivising this in any way. Indeed, despite the game DISincentivising this, I should say. I'm of the opinion that Warframe needs to do a lot more to encourage people to personalise their loadouts and make work the options they actually enjoy, rather than feeling compelled to pick the "meta" option with no knowledge or understanding of why they're doing it or how it works. By definition, this requires "simplifying" the system, excising options and bundling choices until their results are directly observable through cursory testing. This is the only way I can see to retain the RPG mechanics while ALSO having a game to actually use them on.

As a parting thought, I want to leave you with this: When I was much younger, I used to make Warcraft 2 maps for myself where the enemy were boxed in a corner and unable to do anything, just so I could build all the structures and experiment with all the units. Eventually, however, I found this hollow. I was making and upgrading all of these large armies of elite units that I didn't have anything to actually DO with. I never played that game "for real," so I never figured out what - if anything - I might have been doing right. To me, the point of "min/maxing" isn't and shouldn't be self-serving. "The numbers" should not be the goal. We min/max in order to create tools which will then be fun to actually use. If the game lets us min/max so hard that we optimise the gameplay out of the game, then I argue that's a failure of game design, through-and-through.

By all means, keep the Arsenal as an important part of Warframe. Just don't let it be the ONLY part of Warframe.

[(XBOX)Big Roy 324]

 

This is three hours long and likely no one has time for that.  But as opposed to removing mods like I suggested earlier. I think this would be a viable solution to shake up the talk of META in warframe.

 

Tldw:  Change weapon modding to how things are handled via railjack/parazon.  Where weapons have fixed power slots without capacity requirements.  then break up the regular mod spaces to a teir 1 (conditional power boost) and an extended exilus/utility teir 2. So all starting weapons can be made usable while leveling and mod slots actually modify how weapons perform to play taste. 

 

 

[TeaHawk]

On 2021-03-14 at 12:15 PM, Dhrekr said:

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.

Warframe is a game about farming. And the main goal of every player after first 50 hours is to optimize farming.

You want to make this game challenging by nerfing stuff to oblivion so that every mission takes longer to complete — then remove dull redundant and neverending farming.

You want to keep farming — make it freaking rewarding. After farming dozens if not hundreds of hours to complete build with umbral formas, perfect rivens, arcanes and so on I actually expect to be able to clear the room within a second. And if I don't, I probably would not have invested all this time and effort in that S#&$. I would probably go play some raid in Destiny with its complex mechanics.

 

I like warframe mainly because of how rewarding farming in this game is. To me it's one of the single games where power-creep is actually a fundamental feature. Maybe the way to fix the problem is not to nerf guns or buff enemies, but add some complexity in overall game mechanics, that would actually require team-work and thinking?