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[Survey] on the 'ClosetFrame' playstyle in Survival Missions


SenorClipClop

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Over the last few years I've noticed a very common trend in Survival missions: ClosetFrame. Players spawn into a small dead-end room at the start of the mission, activate alarms in the adjoining room, head back into the spawn closet, and stay there for the entire mission. Enemies are funneled into the narrow space, they drop enough Life Support packs to make the LS towers around the map redundant, and the squad is quite safe as they spam damage out the single doorway to their spawn closet. This practice has become so common that most squads assume this is how every Survival mission will be played, and players will often harass other players or immediately leave a mission when one or more of them venture outside the starting area, even when using Public matchmaking.

I'm interested in your opinions on this, so I've made a quick survey on how players feel about this tactic and how players use it. If you take the survey, thank-you in advance. If I get a high numbers of answers, I'll post the results later. For more detailed thoughts and opinions, please leave comments below.

Thank-you!

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I said this in the survey, but I don't care one way or the other mostly, but would take closetframe over people running around and splitting the spawns between 5+ rooms any day, especially when relic cracking.

Survival isn't flawed because Closetframe exists, Closetframe exists because Survival is flawed.

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I've been playing public game survival arbitrations for the past month and I am almost always seeing the opposite: Disorganized FFA randomly-wander-about-the-map play style.

Only in one instance did someone camp... and that was a Dark Sector survival with a Vauban endlessly casting Vortex and someone else with Dispensary... because Ancient Disruptors cheat.

Another reason for camping: Spawn patterns... the disorganized FFA style apparently thins spawns in normal games. Staying together helps! What better way than to stay in one place (not necessarily in a dead end room either!)?

EDIT: P.S. The camping Vauban wasn't in a dead end room. He was in a relatively large area with lots of places for enemies to spawn and get sucked up into his Vortex.

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12 minutes ago, nslay said:

Another reason for camping: Spawn patterns... the disorganized FFA public game apparently thins spawns in normal games. Staying together helps! What better way than to stay in one place (not necessarily in a dead end room either!)?

Plus, hunkering down in a room gets the loot in one place rather than it being scattered throughout the map. One way to possibly change this is by allowing players to share loot so if, say, players A, B, C and D are scattered throughout a map. Player A gets tellurium then so do players B, C and D.

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6 minutes ago, (PSN)DoctorWho_90250 said:

Plus, hunkering down in a room gets the loot in one place rather than it being scattered throughout the map. One way to possibly change this is by allowing players to share loot so if, say, players A, B, C and D are scattered throughout a map. Player A gets tellurium then so do players B, C and D.

Yeah well... public game survivals (surprisingly even 1 hour arbitration survivals!) are usually this disorganized FFA style where everyone is off doing their own thing. Everyone eventually meets up again and then they do their disorganized FFA patrols again and again until everyone decides to extract.

Sometimes in a public game, you get this one guy that wants to do the "closetframe" style. They'll put a waypoint and scold everyone in chat... and then leave when everyone continues to randomly wander the map.

Seriously, I've never really seen "closetframe" in action in random public games!

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disorganized team is worse than camping in the starting room. scattered spawn makes CC less efficient. Survival modules in SP require high kill per minutes so funneled mobs is better.
If you play against anything else than grineer in SP survival past 15min the game becomes very punishing (nullifier spam, grenade spam, parasitic eximus + ancien disruptor, yellow goo / tox cloud, ancient toxic grappling hook), which makes 'closetFrame' less efficient.

tbh there is no need to "punish" players from camping, but for example a few tweaks could make it worth it to move :
- increased life support module drops when killing mobs near the last spawned life support towers
- add a new enemy type in grineer mission that either gives grineer immunity/resist to CC and nuke or decast in a small AoE (and rebalance nulli spawn / parasitic spawn to be a bit less punishing and tune the new enemy spawn rate so that it doesn't narrow that much the meta past 1h of survival).

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I always called them corner kids. 

Pub survival is cancer, you got the corner kids trying to camp and that one guy half a map away meanwhile I've found a few good rooms close together where we can all kinda do our own thing but not pull spawns all over the map. No one cares what everyone else is doing so I just solo and forever test stupid SP endurance builds. 

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It doesn't really matter if you camp or not in terms of spawns. Spawns are generated where you do not have vision plus within a certain distance of a frame. Sometimes sticking to a room can be disadvantagous and sometimes roaming around can be. Depending on the map design. Funneling into a room makes things easier to focus, but it does not affect any spawning in general. You're not going to end up with more loot or some such.

Certain frames perform better in tight spaces, some are better walking around. In the end choosing what's most entertaining is always best, but playing to your frames strengths is also good.

Also, people that complain how others play the game in a public game are just poor players themselves. You're better off playing by yourself than with those fools.

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i usually do solo survivals for 40-60min average and just run around like a madman with limbs falling all over the place, staying in one place is terribly boring for me and i pity the pub survival squad who are forced into such a playstyle for the sake of efficiency 

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If the squad roams, I roam

If they camp, I camp

I don't really care either way

I mostly play survival fissure. It's the matter of spawn and reactant acquisitions for me. It's harder to gain LS and reactant when players spread around the map (being nekros for LS helps tho...), so I understand why tennos camp. 

 

Wouldn't mind some changes for survival, especially the enemy spawn rate. 

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PUG survival squads are usually either campers, Hallway Heroes, or a mix of both. it amazes me that all these years later and people still don't know that you can just stick together in a room that's not a chokepoint, and enjoy the thrill of fighting at multiple angles without compromising the spawn rate.

solo survival is the way to go, one frame vs. the entire army, overwhelming numbers vs godlike powers, for that bada$$ superhero/villain feel!

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16 hours ago, Aldain said:

I said this in the survey, but I don't care one way or the other mostly, but would take closetframe over people running around and splitting the spawns between 5+ rooms any day, especially when relic cracking.

I do that only when the squad has the 10 reactants to loot the level and potentially find some rare cache depending on the location, when the clock is reaching the next wave I'll try to get closer to a good spawn room or where the other players are and I mark the reactants. Since I only play void missions to crack relics, the results are pretty good honestly. I wish people understood the spawn mechanics better than just camping in 1 spot or just playing scattered around the map, both playstyles can coexist in the right time depending on the mission objective.

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It doesn't seem more or less common to me.  I'd call it fairly rare as always.  Although for me 45 minutes is a really long mission.   It's probably much different in genuinely long runs.

As far as liking it goes, camping in a dead-end alcove bores the hell out of me very quickly.   I understand why people do it, but grinding out rewards more efficiently and effortlessly is less important to me than having fun.  It probably makes me some sort of weirdo deviant but the main reason I play Warframe is to run around and shoot things.

However, my favorite survivals are where the squad sticks together in  large rooms with at least a few entrances.  This doesn't seem to disrupt spawns and  tends to give everybody something to do--sometimes -too much- to do, but that's fun too.  But most importantly, it can be really interesting seeing the what four random people playing together can do. 

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If I play with a group, I stay within affinity range, so usually the same room, so stuff doesn't get strung out everywhere.

Solo play? I tend to spend the first few minutes roaming to find a good spot while ayatan hunting. Once I've found a decent room to settle down in I'll just stay there until I need LS, because the mob drops are sketchy (even doing 150 kills/minute the game decides you just don't get drops).

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23 hours ago, SenorClipClop said:

Over the last few years I've noticed a very common trend in Survival missions: ClosetFrame. Players spawn into a small dead-end room at the start of the mission, activate alarms in the adjoining room, head back into the spawn closet, and stay there for the entire mission. Enemies are funneled into the narrow space, they drop enough Life Support packs to make the LS towers around the map redundant, and the squad is quite safe as they spam damage out the single doorway to their spawn closet. This practice has become so common that most squads assume this is how every Survival mission will be played, and players will often harass other players or immediately leave a mission when one or more of them venture outside the starting area, even when using Public matchmaking.

I'm interested in your opinions on this, so I've made a quick survey on how players feel about this tactic and how players use it. If you take the survey, thank-you in advance. If I get a high numbers of answers, I'll post the results later. For more detailed thoughts and opinions, please leave comments below.

Thank-you!

It is the most efficient tactic.

Drops are not scattered all over the maps, enemies are concentrated in one spot instead of got split to chase players in 4 different directions, which results in more efficient time management. And as you said, risk are mininal, and fewer buttons are pressed. So why would anyone not do it?

with that said, i despise players who take for granted how others should play the game. If you want to do something specific, make some friends or go to recruit chat. Other than that, people on pubs cannot be blamed for doing whatever they want. From both perspectives.

 

Lastly, i mostly play solo so some of your survey questions kinda make little sense. Like "how often you see others do this?" I play like one pub survival per week, so 100% (very often)??

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if you run all over the map enimys have to chase you resulting in enimy density being meh but if every one stays in one spot or room you get a constant stream of enimys so you feel the never ending hoard and you always have something to kill if thats not engaging enough pick a different room to camp pick a spot thats less defendable and pretend that this is the last stand just dont leave the room as that will cause gaps in the enimy spawns

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Put simply, camping is just smarter than roaming based on the missions design and affinity range.

Back in the forever ago, a team camping a passage meant that someone could get rez'd if they died and everyone got the affinity and drops equally with the mobs eventually becoming dangerous enough to kill the average roamer regardless.

Power creep has basically removed that need (for most content) but the mission's design still makes camping a smarter (more lucrative) option compared to roaming.

The only things I can think a roamer wants is to either:

  • Actually contribute individually (attributes don't have DR and ranges can get insane to the point where a enemies die on sight across the room)
  • Pump up their mission complete stats  

Either way, it amounts to the player potentially being one of the biggest detractors to the fun of doing Co-Ops in the first place.

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On 2021-05-22 at 12:26 AM, SenorClipClop said:

This practice has become so common that most squads assume this is how every Survival mission will be played, and players will often harass other players or immediately leave a mission when one or more of them venture outside the starting area, even when using Public matchmaking.

For whatever it's worth, I've never seen this kind of harassment on PS4.  However, there's also much less communication in general on PS4 because it's an absolute pain to chat even if you have a keyboard due to they layers of slow menus you have to go through before typing.  Which is just to say, the PS4 sort of has its own innate anti-harassment technology in that it discourages players in missions from communicating entirely.

To answer your question, I personally don't think there's a right way to play Survival missions.  If someone wants to play closet-style and asks nicely, i'll probably go along with it just to humor them and have a change of pace.  If they don't, I'll probably just run around like an idiot trying to kill things because that's more fun and less tedious. (I do try to stay grouped with my squad, but more often than not they don't group together so I just choose which players I'm vaguely near)

But the big thing is that if you play a multi-player game, you have to accept that your goals and fun aren't more important than someone else's goals and fun, and vice versa.  As long as you are in some way doing the mission, nobody has the right to expect you to do the mission their way.  If you for some reason need to have a mission done a certain way, you should skip matchmaking and instead make your own squad of people who want to play the way you do.

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6 hours ago, lowgrav said:

if you run all over the map enimys have to chase you resulting in enimy density being meh but if every one stays in one spot or room you get a constant stream of enimys so you feel the never ending hoard and you always have something to kill if thats not engaging enough pick a different room to camp pick a spot thats less defendable and pretend that this is the last stand just dont leave the room as that will cause gaps in the enimy spawns

This is part of the problem. Enemy density has always been too low in every mission. The reason people spread out is because there is never enough enemies to kill. 

I think this play style is only going to work with low level gear or extremely long endurance. Regular players are always going to out-dps the spawn frequency which results in spreading out and playing "where tf are all the enemies?" 

The fact that there is a playstyle attempting to manipulate spawning for increased efficiency is a clear sign that spawning and density is broken. 

 

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I recall when scorpions and disruptors were introduced specifically to fight camping.

I've don't really get hooked while camping, but they get me all the time while I'm on the move.

Enemies just have no way to fight stationary players, but plenty of ways to fight an exposed Tenno. Could easily be "solved" by having enemies with mortars, etc.

Survival also have a built in mechanic for making Tenno move around, it just also has a built in mechanic for defeating it. Life support tower reward consistently and without RNG for moving around the map, while life support capsules reward you for killing and looting as efficiently as possible, which can only be done by camping. The capsules support is far larger, and as such survival is engineered to be camped.


If we want a survival balanced around doing both, it's simple:

- All life support comes from towers only.

- Towers give considerably more oxygen each use.

- Towers spawn over time, but spawn time is shortened consistently with every kill.

- Only 2-3 towers at a time, so they're less likely to just reappear in the same spot.

- Most importantly fix enemies so they don't get lost and need several minutes to catch up to you, punishing mobility further. That goes for excavations too.

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2 hours ago, IIDMOII said:

The fact that there is a playstyle attempting to manipulate spawning for increased efficiency is a clear sign that spawning and density is broken. 

This I think sums it up pretty well: clearly, people don't enjoy camping a room for an entire mission, but people still choose to do so instead of far more interesting forms of play, because camping is how one games the spawning algorithm into delivering a consistent stream of enemies. In Survival, the real opponent isn't the enemy, but the game's flawed enemy spawning system: we can deal with crowds of enemies so easily we kill them far quicker than they normally come in, which is why the regular flow of enemies when we're moving around or split up feels like a slow trickle. This is why we have to crowd into a single room with a specifically low number of entry points, so that enemy spawns get concentrated enough to be considered acceptable. If this is to change, enemies probably need to die a little less quickly, though there is also something to be said about the game's spawning algorithm, as it could surely use some significant improvements so that enemies don't spawn either miles away or right beside us.

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