In-Game Competition

[SpicyDinosaur]

10 minutes ago, Joezone619 said:

Warframe isn't, wasn't, and likely never will be, a pvp centric game. The game is not balanced enough for competitive scenarios, especially now with a melee/gun rebalance around the corner.

PVP is balanced differently than PVE. The mods aren't even the same and the powers work differently. But it does need rebalancing. Letting it atrophy will make sure it never picks off. For a year or so they did these PvP events periodically. I don't know why they stopped that, they were fun and better than stuff like the Dog Days of Summer event, which is just hell. I hear they are adding new stuff. I guess I will just have to ignore my FOMO on that one.

 

You can have PvP in a game that isn't PvP centric. Elder Scrolls Online is an example (well, upon release, it's been years since I played) where there was a mix of both, and they didn't even balance them separately. 

 

TBH, one of the problems I have with Warframe PvP is I don't want arena content. I want PKing and ESO gave me a taste for siege warfare as well. I want to coordinate, or stealth around to gank some unsuspecting fool who thinks they are safe. I want open world PK/PvP! With a dedicated server. And we all know that's never happening.

 

Capture the Cephalon is as close as I probably could get, but no one plays it, and even if just a friend and I queue up and face off against one another, well 1 person teams aren't very fun.

 

Unfortunately, DE has the attention span of a gnat and no communication with different departments or a willingness to go out on a limb with some of these things. They could do better, but the casual PvE crowd kicks up such a fuss at the slightest change that not doing better may very well be a business decision.

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, Sevek7 said:

Your point here is definitely correct. Warframe's community is overwhelmingly non-competitive, and any player who wants competition is certainly in the minority. However, I think it's worth pointing out that it isn't a coincidence, this happened by design. DE did have competitive Warframe game-modes for a while, but then they removed them (solar rails) or stopped maintaining them (conclave). As a result, Warframe's competitive community dried up and players moved to different games. This wasn't necessarily a bad decision, since it allowed DE to focus entirely on casual PvE content which has obviously been very successful. It does have some downsides, e.g: if you don't have competitive play then there's no urgency to balance anything, which is a problem that the devs have fully acknowledged. 

Please understand that I'm not trying to S#&$-talk here, but I think you're missing a correlation there. It's true that Warframe is a non-competitive game by design, but I'd argue that's largely because competitive game modes just haven't worked out. Either DE aren't good at making them or there just isn't enough of a playerbase to justify them, but they don't. And DE have tried. As you said - there were Clan Wars in the past. There aren't any now because DE discontinued them. There is straight-up PvP, including a bunch of game modes. Hardly anyone plays it. I'm told there are leaderboards. I didn't know such a thing even existed. DE have a habit of throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. They've aborted so many things throughout the years. Removing status immunity on enemies is one of the most recent ones - that seems to have been quietly dropped in favour of making more status-immune enemies. It's only recently that they've even started sticking to major themes.

I just don't really think there's merit in chasing a playerbase which isn't here and - from all evidence - never really was in the first place. That's not to say that NOBODY is competitive or that competitive modes have NO merit. It's just that relative to cranking out more basic grind then selling boosters for money, it doesn't have a lot of return. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." DE seem to be doubling down on retaining the kind of players they have now, rather than trying to attract brand new players. Hell, you've seen the general feedback to Railjack - "what is this space shooter doing in my ground combat game?" But there is a more substantial point I fear gets in the way.

 

17 hours ago, Sevek7 said:

There would be some benefits to this: competitive players will be able to provide much better balance feedback, and competitive play generally helps to reduce the cyclical nature of "content drought."

Balance would be the big problem. I see you noted that later in your post, but to me it's the big underpinning issue. DE seem to have no appetite for balance - not really. While competitive players are generally better at identifying flaws with design, it's not like we have a shortage of people doing that here on these very forums. I went out of my way building mathematical models for parabolic damage dropoff for AoE attacks, to no avail. We still have linear dropoff because who cares, right? We've talked over each other about pet design and balance for months, and what do DE do? Throw away a kludge "fix" as an Augment for one ability for one Warframe then hand-wave it away with "But you can infuse it!" Then there's stuff like armour resistance, enemy scaling, status effect, enemy design and more. Railjack was supposed to be a testbed for a brand new damage system. It was barely a change at all, and now DE seem to have given up on that as well.

Hell, look at the Conclave. That one game mode has had so much balance work across so many systems, including restricted mods and different behaviour and it's still problematic. DE can't be arsed to balance the game for PvE, where tolerances are far looser for what people will accept. I simply don't see them balancing the game for PvE AND PvP. Some kind of speed run or boss rush competitive PvE mode could work, but how long before it develops an insular meta where you either use a specific build or you can't compete? Say people compete purely based on their ESO efficiency. That right there limits you to just a handful of Warframes with one or two exotic builds each. It's not AS bad these days because roughly half the people in ESO are there to leech XP for levelling S#&$ gear and even the over-performers rarely stay beyond 8 waves, but that's without much of a competitive angle.

I personally feel that this game's balance issues are almost entirely of DE's own making. They're the ones who decided that "infinite scaling" would be a thing to challenge high-level players, thus turning it into a game where ONLY the high ends of infinite scaling matter, where mechanics break down and even minor balance issues are magnified. Competition does similar things, where players boil the game down to just what works the very best and nothing else. The weight of balancing for that is I think too heavy for DE to bear. They're a large studio, but they still produce as though they're five people working out of their bedrooms.

[Hobie-wan]

There are plenty of PVP games out there people can go play. There are far less co-op- PVE ones for those of use interested in that type of game. It's like how there are fewer single player offline games one can enjoy at their own pace. So many high profile games are multiplayer, online only, or have some multiplayer component grafted onto them like a tumor, just because.

So I say again, I like chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. It can be nice sometimes, but not everything needs to be neopolitan.

[SpicyDinosaur]

1 hour ago, Hobie-wan said:

There are plenty of PVP games out there people can go play. There are far less co-op- PVE ones for those of use interested in that type of game. It's like how there are fewer single player offline games one can enjoy at their own pace. So many high profile games are multiplayer, online only, or have some multiplayer component grafted onto them like a tumor, just because.

So I say again, I like chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. It can be nice sometimes, but not everything needs to be neopolitan.

what are you on about? There's plenty of all of those, nor is it relevant. There can be aspects to a game you don't like or participate in and it doesn't mean you won't have fun just because someone else is.

[Hobie-wan]

15 minutes ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

what are you on about? There's plenty of all of those, nor is it relevant. There can be aspects to a game you don't like or participate in and it doesn't mean you won't have fun just because someone else is.

So you didn't read any of this thread or other ones where it came up, clearly. Of course there can be parts of the game that not everyone enjoys equally. But when an overwhelmingly large portion of the people playing WF have no interest in PVP, having them spend development time on it, which would slow down all of the other parts of the game that more people enjoy, yet players already complain comes out too slow, it wouldn't make sense for DE to spend tome on them. Especially when, as myself and others have brought up before, balancing for the hundreds of frames and weapons in the game is practically impossible and gets worse with every new frame, weapon, and mod that's added to the game.

[RazerXPrime]

Please no leaderboards. Go play a pay to win phone game and invest 10K dollars in it to be on top and feel special.

[(PSN)FromOtherSpace]

Le 06/06/2021 à 23:48, Sevek7 a dit :

Your point here is definitely correct. Warframe's community is overwhelmingly non-competitive, and any player who wants competition is certainly in the minority. However, I think it's worth pointing out that it isn't a coincidence, this happened by design. DE did have competitive Warframe game-modes for a while, but then they removed them (solar rails) or stopped maintaining them (conclave).

Solar rails have been removed because they were toxic, no?

As far as I remember, "nobody" played Conclave so DE has stop to put effort on it. Maybe I'm wrong.

 

Maybe the fact that's we play in a squad by default have mostly attract people who want to play as a team?

Also, I have read somewhere on this forum that implementing RJ at the very beginning of WF was DE's plan, so the co-op seem the core of WF in DE vision.

[Norburito]

I'm quite disappointed by the feedback on this. Half the people bring up PvP when it's clearly not even the focus of any of this, I deliberately even said not to confuse this post as me advocating for PvP in the name of competition, because I'm NOT. I mean, I would like to do that, but not here, not with this suggestion; this is only for a PvE mode that targets the majority of the playerbase.

The other half of the people are coming up with reasons why not to implement a game mode that targets them and the type of gameplay they play on the game regularly; so at this point I'll just retire myself from this post and prepare my hand for the biggest facepalm that'll eventually land across my face when we get the same old updates (with the exception of lore and story quests, more of those pl0x) and people start realizing that denying every "intuitive" gameplay addition only leads them down a deep rabbit hole of grinding and repetition.

I get that a lot of this game is about grinding, but there aren't too many ways of showing off your strength and all the stuff you spent so many hours on, if any. What's the point of getting rich if you can't spend it at all (or barely), right? Anyway, I hope DE finds a way to please all of us, but if they don't and we can't agree on what we want, we'll never get anything new that we truly enjoy.

[Hobie-wan]

1 hour ago, Norburito said:

I'm quite disappointed by the feedback on this. Half the people bring up PvP when it's clearly not even the focus of any of this

Well, that's tough cookies. You gave feedback on the forum, which means everyone is free to give you feedback. Just because you don't like it doesn't invalidate any of it. Also, if one is competing, then a given player is, wait for it, competing with another player. Some might say... player versus player. That can be who has the bigger number on a leader board, in their profile, or in the mission summary screen. In a lot of PvP games it is who knocked over the other players the most. Everyone likes to see big numbers next to their names in those first 3, but rarely do people actively gloat or make fun of others who have lower numbers. This is a good thing. Most WF players don't care about the multiple times there's been PVP stuff they tried to add into the game. It's unlikely to magically work "next time we try it" any better than the previous attempts.

1 hour ago, Norburito said:

more of those pl0x

Using cutesy slang in your feedback just undermines your position further.

[Norburito]

10 hours ago, Hobie-wan said:

Also, if one is competing, then a given player is, wait for it, competing with another player. Some might say... player versus player. That can be who has the bigger number on a leader board, in their profile, or in the mission summary screen. In a lot of PvP games it is who knocked over the other players the most. Everyone likes to see big numbers next to their names in those first 3, but rarely do people actively gloat or make fun of others who have lower numbers. This is a good thing. Most WF players don't care about the multiple times there's been PVP stuff they tried to add into the game. It's unlikely to magically work "next time we try it" any better than the previous attempts.

I wasn't going to post here anymore, but your "feedback" here have been so hit and miss that I just can't ignore it anymore. First, we're not in a court room, we're on a video game forum, so I use whatever slang I want; if you think having your often dismissive and judgemental tone for feedback is ideal for this place, you need a reality check. Second, you can't re-define a term that has been well put in place for over 20 years; PvP strictly means an environment where people beat on other people in combat, virtually; not a leaderboard, so I will think of it as such when it's mentioned. I don't believe it's hard to spell out what someone really means, so it makes me think people just don't get what this is about when they mention PvP.

Your other point has been addressed multiple times before by multiple people, so I won't bother, shows how you don't want to accept it though and are reluctant to let your opinion go, which will result in the same content you've been getting. That might be fine for you, but not for people who want something different. Amazes me how people fight so hard against change, even if they would never be forced to partake in it in the first place.

I'll leave you with a bit of irony between two of your lines for you to ponder.

Quote

Well, that's tough cookies. You gave feedback on the forum, which means everyone is free to give you feedback. Just because you don't like it doesn't invalidate any of it.

Quote

Using cutesy slang in your feedback just undermines your position further.

 

 

[SpicyDinosaur]

On 2021-06-07 at 7:07 PM, Hobie-wan said:

But when an overwhelmingly large portion of the people playing WF have no interest in PVP, having them spend development time on it, which would slow down all of the other parts of the game that more people enjoy, yet players already complain comes out too slow, it wouldn't make sense for DE to spend tome on them.

They don't though. And if they did, those modes might enjoy more success. But yea, you are imagining resources spent that just aren't being spent at all.

 

They are not a small studio anymore, they could do it without impacting the PvE section of the game if they wanted to.

 

Everyone is suddenly so concerned with where DE puts its resources whenever PvP is brought up without knowing anything about how said resources are divvied up.

[Hobie-wan]

@Norburito

Mild point taken, but using an old turn of phrase isn't in the same league as using a mangled 'pl0x' instead of the word please which is all of 1 more letter to type.

9 hours ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

Everyone is suddenly so concerned with where DE puts its resources whenever PvP is brought up without knowing anything about how said resources are divvied up.

If there is currently no work being done on PVP things and the flow of content, whether it is lighter fare or heaver things like Corpus Liches or the much delayed Duviri Paradox has been slowed more than players and DE would like, where do you think the hours to work on PVP things would magically come from? If they hire more people to work on the game, I'd rather they work on Duviri than PVP stuff. This isn't like artists working on making new skins or recompressing textures because they're waiting on planning for new game stuff, which is something people often complain about when wondering where new content is.

[SpicyDinosaur]

2 hours ago, Hobie-wan said:

@Norburito

Mild point taken, but using an old turn of phrase isn't in the same league as using a mangled 'pl0x' instead of the word please which is all of 1 more letter to type.

If there is currently no work being done on PVP things and the flow of content, whether it is lighter fare or heaver things like Corpus Liches or the much delayed Duviri Paradox has been slowed more than players and DE would like, where do you think the hours to work on PVP things would magically come from? If they hire more people to work on the game, I'd rather they work on Duviri than PVP stuff. This isn't like artists working on making new skins or recompressing textures because they're waiting on planning for new game stuff, which is something people often complain about when wondering where new content is.

There's literally currently 0 resources being spent on PvP. So what, are you objecting to the weighty 0% of DE's resources being used to work on PvP?

 

Also, different teams are going to work on different things. Sometimes having two or three teams working on one thing is a detriment. This should be obvious, as is the fact that not everything you don't like should have no resources devoted to it. Different players prioritize different things.

[Hobie-wan]

1 minute ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

There's literally currently 0 resources being spent on PvP. So what, are you objecting to the weighty 0% of DE's resources being used to work on PvP?

 

Also, different teams are going to work on different things. Sometimes having two or three teams working on one thing is a detriment. This should be obvious, as is the fact that not everything you don't like should have no resources devoted to it. Different players prioritize different things.

Did you even read? Holy crap, the lack of comprehension going on.