Easiest Possible Fixes to Smeeta Looting (and modding) Meta(s)

[Grav_Starstrider]

If DE baseline doubled all resource acquisitions by either frequency or quantity, but capped Smeeta's Charm buff at being only 1 instance with a stackable duration, and divorced the different doublers so they only added the same amount over again rather than cumulatively exponentially multiplying the pickup, the only people who could be somewhat justifiably upset are those that already busted their backs farming everything without using any of the loot-increasing strategies/equipment/metas.But as someone who's at MR30 and doesn't have too much more leftover to farm for, I'd actually just be grateful at feeling less pressured to use Smeeta for any of the upcoming content, not upset at previous content being made more accessible with less-meta farming methods.

[FrostDragoon]

5 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

It's not outright false. I'm viewing the stats on my 125+ strong friends list (half of them randomly friended after silly/enjoyable conversations or random missions), and the only people I'm seeing without Smeeta as their first or second-most used companion, are the ones that only have 2 or 3 companions mastered total and haven't happened to have gotten any Kavats yet. When Carrier was the only option for Vacuum for ages, and then only Sentinels were, and only recently were pets graced with Fetch, you can't judge just by their percentages, as veteran players have played thousands of hours with Carrier for it's vacuum alone. The only reasonable basis for comparison is within the pet-companion category itself, and then the trend becomes overwhelmingly clear. I stopped looking after seeing 40 that have a Smeeta use it the most out of all of their pet-companions, and they're the only non-sentinel companion that I ever see as their top-used sentinel/companion on their profile highlights.

The same way that players overwhelmingly used Itzal for its reliable mobility, and the ability had to get nerfed/shared-around for players to feel like there wasn't only 1 reasonable choice to use for mobility, I believe Smeeta needs to see some of the same nerfs.

These are fair points. I just wanted to highlight the hyperbole and fallacy of assuming it was as important as he's making it out to be. While it's true that it will often be among the top 3 for non-sentinel companions, I only view 3 of them to be worth anything myself (including Smeeta), and I doubt I'm alone in that, so this should surprise no one.

I don't think Charm is a problem though. What you usually see is the same thing that happens during the end of Thermia events. Once the cred bonus comes online, people stack up their Chromas, Smeeta, boosters, etc for a short burn of intensive farming, then go back to playing normally when they're finished. This makes the exponentially stacking actually okay in my view, because I don't see people running these things in every mission. It's not even that common in my experience. Speaking of which, I'd rather just run 30-day boosters all the time than deal with managing a pet whose buff is inconsistent on a pet that easily dies all the time with no self-revive. It's just way more hassle than it's worth. There's actually an upper limit to how many resources of a given type you will typically need before occasionally supplementing it for other things (new gear that requires it to craft or to feed to the helminth, for example). With just a regular resource x2 booster, you can reach most of those quite quickly if you play a lot. Charm gives the people who don't a chance to catch up in a reasonable time if they are willing to dig into all those stacking buffs. Not only is this not unhealthy for the game, it strikes me as very pro-health for the game, because it affords different players different options to approach managing their time and resources without enforcing some meta. My preference for boosters is purely optional, but that changes quite a lot of Charm suddenly stops being as good, especially given how inconsistent it already is.

[FrostDragoon]

10 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

If I've counted correctly, there's 37 different distinct sentinel/pet companions. Anything above 3% could theoretically be construed to indicate a clear bias for the given pets over others. Sub-10% bias doesn't actually prove a lack of bias, you need to look at it in the context of the missions, or the pet category.

This isn't a good analysis. Players aren't valuing all the things the different pets value equally. Adarza's crazy crit buff through Cat's Eye is immensely powerful. Smeeta's Charm can be quite useful for farm stacking. Crescent Vulpaphyla being immortal is huge QoL. Most of the other non-sentient pets don't offer anything quite on the same tier as these, even if they can be used for some niche purpose otherwise. In fact, most of them not named here were just MR fodder for me. However, as I stated earlier, I do use sentinels a lot too, so their comparative benefits must also be contended with. It might be helpful if we could see the stats DE has on this, but we don't. Looking at player profiles at random is the closest thing we have to any kind of idea about this, even if sentinels had an enormous advantage for reasons you correctly alluded to earlier. The trap you don't want to fall into is thinking that you can discount them just because they have an undue representation. They are still deliberately chosen quite often by many players for many reasons. For that matter, I mentioned Oxylus earlier, but that's a fairly recent addition to the "regular use" category of my arsenal thanks to the Botanist mod from Ceph Simaris.

[Grav_Starstrider]

3 minutes ago, (PSN)Boomstickman98 said:

So from what I understand, OP refuses to understand any opposing viewpoints, only the viewpoints that match their own. In other words, not worth our time.

I'm giving statistical and logical counterpoints to points, and also my own anecdotal evidence and observations, FrostDragon is reasonably engaging in the debate, can you not ad hominem or strawman me?

6 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

This isn't a good analysis. Players aren't valuing all the things the different pets value equally. Adarza's crazy crit buff through Cat's Eye is immensely powerful. Smeeta's Charm can be quite useful for farm stacking. Crescent Vulpaphyla being immortal is huge QoL. Most of the other non-sentient pets don't offer anything quite on the same tier as these, even if they can be used for some niche purpose otherwise. In fact, most of them not named here were just MR fodder for me. However, as I stated earlier, I do use sentinels a lot too, so their comparative benefits must also be contended with. It might be helpful if we could see the stats DE has on this, but we don't. Looking at player profiles at random is the closest thing we have to any kind of idea about this, even if sentinels had an enormous advantage for reasons you correctly alluded to earlier. The trap you don't want to fall into is thinking that you can discount them just because they have an undue representation. They are still deliberately chosen quite often by many players for many reasons. For that matter, I mentioned Oxylus earlier, but that's a fairly recent addition to the "regular use" category of my arsenal thanks to the Botanist mod from Ceph Simaris.

People may switch to specific other companions for specific purposes, but logically if Smeetas are consistently seen as the most-used Pet/Companion (as opposed to the robotics), that still means they're the preferred meta out of the pets. "Players aren't valuing all the things the different pets value equally", you're right, they're clearly valuing Smeeta's Charm over the other Pet's abilities, consistently. We may have to agree to disagree, but I still think that we can't compare companion stats to robotics on any long-term player's accounts. I haven't hardly used a Carrier (Prime) since they expanded Vacuums to be Sentinel-wide, but he's still my top after Smeeta, for example. We'd really need current-player companion usage per MR per a recent timeframe to more authoritatively determine the truth of the extent of "Smeeta Charm reliance".

2 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

These are fair points. I just wanted to highlight the hyperbole and fallacy of assuming it was as important as he's making it out to be. While it's true that it will often be among the top 3 for non-sentinel companions, I only view 3 of them to be worth anything myself (including Smeeta), and I doubt I'm alone in that, so this should surprise no one.

I don't think Charm is a problem though. What you usually see is the same thing that happens during the end of Thermia events. Once the cred bonus comes online, people stack up their Chromas, Smeeta, boosters, etc for a short burn of intensive farming, then go back to playing normally when they're finished. This makes the exponentially stacking actually okay in my view, because I don't see people running these things in every mission. It's not even that common in my experience. Speaking of which, I'd rather just run 30-day boosters all the time than deal with managing a pet whose buff is inconsistent on a pet that easily dies all the time with no self-revive. It's just way more hassle than it's worth. There's actually an upper limit to how many resources of a given type you will typically need before occasionally supplementing it for other things (new gear that requires it to craft or to feed to the helminth, for example). With just a regular resource x2 booster, you can reach most of those quite quickly if you play a lot. Charm gives the people who don't a chance to catch up in a reasonable time if they are willing to dig into all those stacking buffs. Not only is this not unhealthy for the game, it strikes me as very pro-health for the game, because it affords different players different options to approach managing their time and resources without enforcing some meta. My preference for boosters is purely optional, but that changes quite a lot of Charm suddenly stops being as good, especially given how inconsistent it already is.

You're right, and I hope you saw that I agreed that Smeeta is not used "90% of the time". You're right as well, that my observed/presented statistics could in part be due to other pets just being.... Subpar, along with "pet AI" in general, juxtaposed with how the rest of the gameplay and pacing/approaches goes. But if people are choosing it for the buffs in spite of all of the usual Pet-AI system's detractors, and people are so vocally adamant against the "nerfing" of Charm, as far as I can tell that only strengthens the argument that Charm is a meta that people too-readily lean/rely upon.

I personally think that having to switch to specific Warframes and Companions in order to maximize your loot-reward from temporary events should not be needed, or even be an option, personally. I'd far more greatly prefer if they flat out doubled, or quadrupled the base rewards of these events, without letting them be affected by these looting-metas, so that players are free to choose strategic gameplay options rather than looting options. DE doesn't let Chroma get double the credit rewards from Index, I personally don't see why they should allow "Loot Caves" in the form of specific Arsenal choices and mission types be a thing. They already got rid of Gian's point entirely rather than nerf it's loot-cave-like appeal (never abused it, idk what it really even was), and always find ways to reduce the efficacy of certain affinity/focus power-farms (goodby Io/Banshee, my old friend), I really see this "meta-looting-abuse" in the same category. It's not "playing the game with meaningful choices", it's "optimal farming". I would like the most-intentional methods of farming to not be what dictates the resource/credits/currency costs if they're 32x more effective than simply "playing the game".

Smeeta's resource-boosting abilities could have a place, but I think it should be chosen more carefully than the broad degree to which it can trivialize certain farms (even with it's lack of "reliability", when spread across enough missions).

Anyways these are all just points I want DE to consider regarding potential future adjustments to Smeeta, looting, and mission rewards in general. I'm gonna dip out for now, feel free to make your own additional points/counterpoints. No hard feelings, I hope ✌️

[FrostDragoon]

17 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

I personally think that having to switch to specific Warframes and Companions in order to maximize your loot-reward from temporary events should not be needed, or even be an option, personally.

This is our fundamental disagreement in values. I think it's perfectly fine--even healthy--for the game to have certain things in your arsenal that offer these kinds of advantages. One could argue that if they just ran Nekros/Smeeta in everything that they could greatly accelerate their resource farm, but they are paying a price for that. They are choosing not to play other stuff that might be more fun/powerful instead. This is classic asymmetric balance and I'm down for it. I don't feel forced to run these because resource farming isn't the whole game. There's plenty else for me to do and most of the resources these can affect are easily obtained just by playing normally with a booster on instead. The option for someone to run the farming method and the booster is a valid choice too, imo, because it offers a strong catch-up option for those with less time to play than I might have.

21 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

people are so vocally adamant against the "nerfing" of Charm, as far as I can tell that only strengthens the argument that Charm is a meta that people too-readily lean/rely upon.

No, that's not how that works. People are against nerfing Charm because it widens the gap between people who have more time to play and those that don't and there are a few resources where you do want to spend a minimum amount of time in certain modes. I'm against the idea of trying to force people to spend more time in there for extremely arbitrary reasons. I'm also against nerfing it because it represents a reduction in player choice as such a nerf would threaten to potentially reduce Smeeta's perceived viability/utility to Hydroid/Yareli levels. It's good for the game to have powerful options like these to chase (in acquiring them in the first place) and use (because the bigger gains on farming are more exciting). There's already more than enough stuff for people to time sink into with the game. It doesn't need to be more punishing for no good reason.

[FrostDragoon]

21 minutes ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

I'd remove it, I'm pretty sure it wasn't DE's intention for players to (as of now, with the new timer) to wait 5 minutes while doing nothing, and abort the mission if they didn't get the buff. (Previously it was endless waiting)

The situation shows that a lot of farming is just underwhelming at it's core, and instead of trying to beat around the bush, S#&$ty farms should get buffed and reworked overall and the charm resource buff removed.  

--

We have farms that even with the booster from the market and  often even if it's stacked with an event weekend, that're so underwhelming as it can get. 

Keep the random crit buff, make an actual energy buff, keep the reload buff etc. but cut the resource nonsense. 

I'd go the other way on it, actually. Drop all the crap people don't care about and just make it consistent. Move the other buffs onto other pets.

[Grav_Starstrider]

4 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

The option for someone to run the farming method and the booster is a valid choice too, imo, because it offers a strong catch-up option for those with less time to play than I might have.

No, that's not how that works. People are against nerfing Charm because it widens the gap between people who have more time to play and those that don't and there are a few resources where you do want to spend a minimum amount of time in certain modes. I'm against the idea of trying to force people to spend more time in there for extremely arbitrary reasons. I'm also against nerfing it because it represents a reduction in player choice as such a nerf would threaten to potentially reduce Smeeta's perceived viability/utility to Hydroid/Yareli levels. It's good for the game to have powerful options like these to chase (in acquiring them in the first place) and use (because the bigger gains on farming are more exciting). There's already more than enough stuff for people to time sink into with the game. It doesn't need to be more punishing for no good reason.

I'm back. I feel like you've missed the several times where I'm suggesting Smeeta should become a more effective and reliable boost for certain specific resource farms, and for DE to buff their paid boosters to make them more attractive options, and to buff baseline drops, in order to compensate players for my suggested removal of the ability to octuple or x16 or x32 their drops. And you're also missing the part where each of the individual loot strategies, in my scenario, still accelerates your loot earnings. Just not exponentially stacking on each other. Gives people more freedom to only use the loot-boosters they feel like using at the moment, without feeling like they're missing out on exponential earnings by neglecting one or two of the options. Players would still see the most earnings when they run every type of loot-booster, I'm just proposing the gap be narrowed, so that instead of having a range swinging between 1 and 32x the loot, we see something more like 2 or 4 to 8 or 16x the loot. Instead of 'Loot*2^BoosterCount', just '(2*Loot)*BoosterCount'.

And like. DE is already signalling that they consider Charm to be a problem, with their Essence Timers being implemented. I'm just trying to steer the ship in a decent compromise's direction.

If people don't have time to play a grind-heavy game, the entire idea is that they would be spending money instead of time, by buying the boosters, which I'm encouraging DE to boost their effectiveness towards that end. If you have no time to play the game for free, why would you want to feel shoehorned into maximizing your catch-up and looting via playing Frames, builds, and Companions that you don't care for?

Don't assume that the average player's loot is getting nerfed in these scenarios and suggestions I'm making, because they're actually getting a buff. Don't assume the no-time-to-grind players would be getting totally nerfed either, because they can still powergrind a bit faster with the non-paid loot-boosters, and they'd be able to get even more out of a paid booster, if anything it'd just be a sidegrade because these systems could be made more reliable in order to make up for the lack of exponential stacking.

[FrostDragoon]

5 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

I'm back. I feel like you've missed the several times where I'm suggesting Smeeta should become a more effective and reliable boost for certain specific resource farms, and for DE to buff their paid boosters to make them more attractive options, and to buff baseline drops, in order to compensate players for my suggested removal of the ability to octuple or x16 or x32 their drops.

DE isn't going to buff loot, so this is all a non-starter. Asking for a nerf and then hoping for a buff elsewhere is a fool's errand. It's not how they do things and the naive optimism would only end up damaging the game as a result.

6 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

And like. DE is already signalling that they consider Charm to be a problem, with their Essence Timers being implemented. I'm just trying to steer the ship in a decent compromise's direction.

We should actually be petitioning them to make essences less troublesome, but nerfing methods that make it more efficient runs completely counter to this.

7 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

If people don't have time to play a grind-heavy game, the entire idea is that they would be spending money instead of time, by buying the boosters, which I'm encouraging DE to boost their effectiveness towards that end. If you have no time to play the game for free, why would you want to feel shoehorned into maximizing your catch-up and looting via playing Frames, builds, and Companions that you don't care for?

Because the catch up grind can be quite short if you know what you're doing, then you spend the rest of your limited time playing how you want to.

8 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Don't assume that the average player's loot is getting nerfed in these scenarios and suggestions I'm making

It is.

8 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Don't assume the no-time-to-grind players would be getting totally nerfed either, because they can still powergrind a bit faster with the non-paid loot-boosters, and they'd be able to get even more out of a paid booster,

This is a pipe dream based on stuff DE will never do.

 

[Grav_Starstrider]

Whatever you say, insistent pessimist :V

[DrivaMain]

Finally! Someone stands up against this mod!

Though a middle ground for this change is the "Universal Charm" method. By giving this mod available or innate to every companion and remove the RNG from this mod instead include a condition that can be earned in gameplay, a new mechanic can be :

• Every 25 Kills : +100% Extra Loot Drops, not stackable with itself but duration can be refreshed. Guarantees rare resource drop based on planet.
• Every 50 Kills : Critical chance buff.
• Every 75 Kills : Refills energy to full.
• Every 100 Kills : +5 Damage negation charges to player and companion, restores shield to full and grants maximum overshields.

Right now, unfortunately nowadays the slogan for the grind is "Bring smeeta or you're doing it wrong". 

[Darth_Predator]

13 часов назад, FrostDragoon сказал:

I asked region to PM me their usage, just out of curiosity. I cut off their names to avoid privacy issues for those players. I realize this sample size is quite small, but it was randomly pooled.

There is a little problem with that method. You see, my stats are showing Carrier Prime as my most uses companion (or at least that was true last time I bothered to check) and my most used primary was Some Prime. Didn't use any of those for years now (actually I may have used Soma a bit recently). They are in a strong lead just because way back in the day Carrier was the sh*t and there was no better weapon than Soma so I played ungodly amount of time with those equipped. Smeeta and whatever weapons I use as primaries now were released waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay later thus giving me less possible time to rack up usage. It will probably take me another couple of years for that gear to drop from most used position. Probably even more cause now I have several choices when it comes to what I can use in a mission. So if you randomly choose me during your sample collection, your data pool would be tainted by something so inaccurate it invalidates all the work.

For the method to be closer to actual truth, you need to take samples from players of the similar playstyle/time played/account age/etc. So I'm sorry, but I'd consider this evidence not valid.

[FrostDragoon]

2 hours ago, Darth_Predator said:

There is a little problem with that method. You see, my stats are showing Carrier Prime as my most uses companion

For one, I was looking at the overall usage for Smeeta in particular and excluding sentinels when seeing where people were using it compared to the other pets. Two, the points you're talking about were already addressed. I know this method has its limitations, but it does give you a general sense that most people aren't actually considering it as "required" as people in this thread are. Thirdly, popularity doesn't automatically mean it's "OP" or anything. Vacuum was solely responsible for Carrier's popularity, but that sentinel was always far from OP.

2 hours ago, Darth_Predator said:

For the method to be closer to actual truth, you need to take samples from players of the similar playstyle/time played/account age/etc. So I'm sorry, but I'd consider this evidence not valid.

Actually, you'd want to look at people who started after Vacuum/Fetch was made universal. The data isn't invalid, but it's not perfect. Again, compare non-sentinel pets for a better look at people's usage. I see a lot of variety these days.

3 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

Finally! Someone stands up against this mod!

Though a middle ground for this change is the "Universal Charm" method. By giving this mod available or innate to every companion and remove the RNG from this mod instead include a condition that can be earned in gameplay, a new mechanic can be :

• Every 25 Kills : +100% Extra Loot Drops, not stackable with itself but duration can be refreshed. Guarantees rare resource drop based on planet.
• Every 50 Kills : Critical chance buff.
• Every 75 Kills : Refills energy to full.
• Every 100 Kills : +5 Damage negation charges to player and companion, restores shield to full and grants maximum overshields.

Right now, unfortunately nowadays the slogan for the grind is "Bring smeeta or you're doing it wrong"

DE won't ever do this, nor should they. It's too far removed from their general design patterns.

The actual middle ground on this mod is what I mentioned earlier: Remove all the random crap from Charm, make it a consistently reliable buff, and then make it so it can't stack with itself. It's just the x2 and that it, just like Nekros or Khora. Don't have to make it additive either. It would be perfectly fine like this. If it's going to give a pool of different buffs, leave the mod alone. It's not even harming the game and I've already explained why at length.

[Darth_Predator]

11 минут назад, FrostDragoon сказал:

Actually, you'd want to look at people who started after Vacuum/Fetch was made universal. The data isn't invalid, but it's not perfect. Again, compare non-sentinel pets for a better look at people's usage. I see a lot of variety these days.

Yeah, true. Vacuum was the thing, also for me personally built in ammo conversion.

I see your point, probably didn't understand you the first time, cause was reading this thread diagonally. So for me personally Smeeta is not a daily driver, but a tool to use when I know I'll be farming this one thing and want it to be done faster. Playing Nekros 90% of the time may also contribute to not needing Smeeta. I actually switched back to sentinels after I got fed up with cats constantly suiciding into the enemies and standing in fire. Djinn became my new best friend. Probably should switch back to biological companions cause immortal infested pets. Convenience in not loosing vacuum (if only they made it innate to warframes) and enemy radar is key for my gameplay.

I apologize for confusion, I'll be leaving now.

[FrostDragoon]

24 minutes ago, Darth_Predator said:

Yeah, true. Vacuum was the thing, also for me personally built in ammo conversion.

I see your point, probably didn't understand you the first time, cause was reading this thread diagonally. So for me personally Smeeta is not a daily driver, but a tool to use when I know I'll be farming this one thing and want it to be done faster. Playing Nekros 90% of the time may also contribute to not needing Smeeta. I actually switched back to sentinels after I got fed up with cats constantly suiciding into the enemies and standing in fire. Djinn became my new best friend. Probably should switch back to biological companions cause immortal infested pets. Convenience in not loosing vacuum (if only they made it innate to warframes) and enemy radar is key for my gameplay.

I apologize for confusion, I'll be leaving now.

Same. I've always found it to be pretty counter to the game design goals that you had to mod for Vacuum & Enemy/Loot Radar. The QoL on these is so huge that they dictate companion choice more than anything else. I don't know why they weren't just built into base game mechanics 6 years ago, but they should have been. Everything has been skewed around these for this game's entire life. This is why I do understand what the people are saying about Charm. On the surface it does look like a similar situation. However, both in my own personal use and in my observations of other players, this hasn't been the case for Charm in particular, and I suspect that it's precisely because it's so unreliable that many players just can't be fussed over it.

Now if we want to talk about what it would take to put companions on more even footing with each other, that could be a whole other thread. I would start with the Vacuum/Fetch and Radar stuff just being part of your gameplay with no modding required. Compensate the players who have P. Animal Instinct with a Legendary Core. Apply the above suggestion to Charm to just make it a consistent loot buff, move all the other buffs to other pets, make them consistent, and tweak them appropriately (like changing the energy buff to work more like a somewhat stronger Energy Siphon every so often). Like I said, the exact details for everything would need to be its own thread, but we'd be looking at a substantial pass over the pets as a whole, not just Charm. Kubrow in particular need a lot of help.

If we were seriously talking about pets in this context, changing Charm makes sense. If not, leave it alone. No reason to ruin the fun for regular people just because a few are overly attached to getting a few extra resources well past what they actually need for anything.

[p_silveira]

DE could make Charm a universal mod for companions/sentinels alike, and give Smeeta a new unique mod. This way no one in the community is gona go "REEEE, DE nerfing fun again!!" and we could run other companions that not Smeeta if we want to.

I mean, I want to run the new Hounds, or a Vulpaphyla, or my status-freeing Wyrm, or other companions in a lot of missions, but I just can't afford to when I'm farming for Kuva, Steel Essence, Vitus Essence, Scintillants, Toroids, Void Traces or any other rare droppable resource in the game, which is basically all the time.

[FrostDragoon]

4 minutes ago, p_silveira said:

DE could make Charm a universal mod for companions/sentinels alike, and give Smeeta a new unique mod. This way no one in the community is gona go "REEEE, DE nerfing fun again!!" and we could run other companions that not Smeeta if we want to.

I mean, I want to run the new Hounds, or a Vulpaphyla, or my status-freeing Wyrm, or other companions in a lot of missions, but I just can't afford to when I'm farming for Kuva, Steel Essence, Vitus Essence, Scintillants, Toroids, Void Traces or any other rare droppable resource in the game, which is basically all the time.

You actually can, though. I almost never run Smeeta and it's not hard to get enough of what I need of any of those resources. Kuva is like creds, though, so you're always going to spend it all if you engage with the riven system, so you'll never have "enough" per se. If you exclude riven gambling, though, it's easy to have enough to build everything in the game in less than a week. Even then, one way to have more kuva is to stop leveling in Hydron and do it in Taveuni instead.

[Grav_Starstrider]

On 2021-07-30 at 6:46 AM, FrostDragoon said:

Thirdly, popularity doesn't automatically mean it's "OP" or anything. Vacuum was solely responsible for Carrier's popularity, but that sentinel was always far from OP.

"Popularity" is potentially synonymous with "Meta", and sometimes the QoL is so essential that it's a meta regardless of whether you consider those synonymous or not.

On 2021-07-30 at 6:46 AM, FrostDragoon said:

The actual middle ground on this mod is what I mentioned earlier: Remove all the random crap from Charm, make it a consistently reliable buff, and then make it so it can't stack with itself.

I definitely agree that this is the bare minimum, stupid-easy solution that DE should implement. I'd love it if it actually stacked duration, rather than just reset it, as a tradeoff for the stackable potency that we'd be losing. Maybe it'd be easier to get one-time Charm buffs for Kuva Floods, but at least it wouldn't multiply more than the once 😛

On 2021-07-30 at 7:10 AM, Darth_Predator said:

So for me personally Smeeta is not a daily driver, but a tool to use when I know I'll be farming this one thing and want it to be done faster.

Peeeeersonally I think that could/would still be the case if they switched Smeeta to only affect common and uncommon resources (maybe all Loot-Frames too??), and not rares and exclusive/special resources. That way you only break out the loot-frames to power-grind common/uncommon resources back up if you needed a significant sum of them, as opposed to whenever you needed commons OR rares OR exclusives. But if lots of people are disagreeing and super-attached to the current functionality, we might have to agree to disagree about that.

On 2021-07-30 at 7:48 AM, FrostDragoon said:

I've always found it to be pretty counter to the game design goals that you had to mod for Vacuum & Enemy/Loot Radar. The QoL on these is so huge that they dictate companion choice more than anything else. I don't know why they weren't just built into base game mechanics 6 years ago, but they should have been. Everything has been skewed around these for this game's entire life.

Myself and others brought up some of these thoughts in this thread here, actually, before I came back in and checked this one again 😅 lots of things that should be base gameplay (without mods) available to new and old players alike, rather than consistently eating up 2 of our pet's mod slots every time. If we had a limited-ranged or dynamically-reactive baseline loot/enemy radar and vacuum, where the current vacuum/radar mods just improved it even further (either keeping their current additive values, or nerfing them just a bit so that they stack with the newly-built-in-range to slightly beyond their current values on their own), or dear lord would I wish for player-wide vacuum (no more issues with one person being late to a fissure and not getting traces, please), and a small baseline of energy regen (so that you could cast your 25-cost abilities at least once a minute), the experience before you have mods for these things would be drastically improved, and there'd be a genuinely difficult choice to make, between choosing now-slightly-redundant things that nonetheless improve the QoL or DPS or utility of the things further, or choosing other unique DPS/QoL/utility-adding options.

On 2021-07-30 at 3:31 AM, DrivaMain said:

Right now, unfortunately nowadays the slogan for the grind is "Bring smeeta or you're doing it wrong". 

 

On 2021-07-31 at 12:12 PM, p_silveira said:

I mean, I want to run the new Hounds, or a Vulpaphyla, or my status-freeing Wyrm, or other companions in a lot of missions, but I just can't afford to when I'm farming for Kuva, Steel Essence, Vitus Essence, Scintillants, Toroids, Void Traces or any other rare droppable resource in the game, which is basically all the time.

I still think that doubling ALL dropped or mid-mission-received loot, even if it's just intermittently/unreliably, is going to be too good to pass up, for too many people, as seen here (and for myself). Too many of the things that are the real squeeze in the game (until you finally get 100% of what you needed the resource for, which never ends for Kuva and Steel Essence [for Umbral Forma or more Kuva], as @FrostDragoonmentioned) are exactly what you would bring a Smeeta to double thing for it.

If anything, I really do think that DE should make the bottleneck be skewed a bit more in the direction of being the common or uncommon resources in more cases, rather than the rares. If that was the case, my "Charm only affects common/uncommon resources" suggestion would be more ideal, as you'd specifically only run Smeeta for Charm if you were needing to grind up common resources more efficiently. Same could go for Warframe loot abilities as I mentioned. It's really unfortunate, but in the current multiplicative system, there's no strong competitive choices available that make more sense than doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on any possible way of increasing resource gain. Even if we completely ignore all of the other conjecture, and just cap Charm at doubling a single time, I still think that the various ways of increasing loot should be additive instead of multiplicative, with the boosters increased in potency. It only makes sense for the paid track to be really effective, but this way, because it's additive, there's no pressure to use more loot methods than you particularly want to use right that second. Or at least, the pressure is far less strong, because you're not halving your gains with each method you neglect/omit, only losing out on like, a 1/4 or so per method omitted.

Just my thoughts.

[FrostDragoon]

43 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

"Popularity" is potentially synonymous with "Meta", and sometimes the QoL is so essential that it's a meta regardless of whether you consider those synonymous or not.

Other than quoted section, most of the rest of your reply is pretty reasonable. My objection here is that "meta" and OP" are not synonyms, even if you consider "meta" and "popular" to be. You didn't directly state it as such, but it was strongly implied. Otherwise, I think we're more or less on the same page about it.

[Grav_Starstrider]

13 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

Other than quoted section, most of the rest of your reply is pretty reasonable. My objection here is that "meta" and OP" are not synonyms, even if you consider "meta" and "popular" to be. You didn't directly state it as such, but it was strongly implied. Otherwise, I think we're more or less on the same page about it.

I did say potentially. You're right though, sorry, makes a few assumptions there doesn't it? What I meant was that when it's overwhelmingly chosen, it's most likely accurate to call it both popular, and a meta, and that it's likely chosen so often and able to be described this way because it stands out as the undeniably best option among other inferior options. Assuming that it's overwhelmingly chosen. If other options were comparable or attractive by comparison, Smeeta usage wouldn't stand out as so overwhelmingly chosen, simple cause and effect.

I really would LOVE to see stats from DE indicating which companion comes in first, second, and third place (with percentages) in usage per players at a given mastery rank, per given mission types, over the last year or so (ideally month by month, so that we can see how consistently players run Smeeta when new content drops that demand an existing or new resource be re-ground up. My (and other's) assertion that it's a perceived meta that a lot of people can't allow themselves to not take part in for efficiency's sake, would be held up if Smeeta is consistently in the top three for a large sum of mission types overall, or specific mission types of interest like Steel Path equivalents of missions, Arbitrations, Kuva Siphons/Floods, etc.

Of course just speculating this doesn't prove anything at all, but if there were any consistencies observable at all, about early players trying to accrue all of the needed resources, middle-ranking players trying to power-grind to finish getting everything they want, or for late-game players to grind for evergreen resources like Kuva for Riven rolls, it would allow DE to make informed decisions about whether they wanted to reinforce or discourage specific behaviors, by applying some of our suggestions or any brainstormed ideas of their own.

"Do we want to reduce Smeeta-meta in Kuva/Arbitration/Steel-Path missions by excluding certain resources? Or at least cap the double at a single double, rather than a stackable quadruple/octuple/etc?" "Do we intend to have early game players take advantage of Loot-Frames/companions for the accrual and rapid stockpiling of rare resources they don't have any of yet, or just common resources? Do we want to encourage or discourage that compared to Booster purchasing", "Do we intend to push players towards using every possible Loot meta at once?" etc etc.

That last one actually begs for another stat from DE, "most used companion per Warframe per MR over the last year". If Nekros/Hydroid/Khora/Ivara/Atlas/etc-loot-frames all stand out with omni-present Smeeta, that'd confirm whether it's just mine and others' weakness to exponential stacking demanding that we go all in on it, or if it's a universal "Meta" that's being "encouraged" to us. So would "Warframe" and "Companion" "use while a resource booster, drop chance booster, or both boosters, are active".

If nobody at DE thought of using those specific metrics to identify a potential Smeeta meta in order to adjust an over-reliance on it, I guess here it is for their consideration 😅

[FrostDragoon]

I'm not really concerned about it one way or the other. I'm aware of what it does and the ways it could be advantageous, yet I hardly ever use it. It's easier for me to run 30-day double resource booster than to try to micromanage loot frames/pets, then I'm free to play whatever I want and not feel like I'm progressing too slowly. I don't even feel pressured to farm it all at once. Just by playing, I end up with enough of everything, except the evergreen resources, but that's because those are designed to never have "enough," not because I don't get enough to use when I see fit.

The problem isn't the availability of these tools. It's player attitudes and this need to "keep up with the Joneses." Free yourself of that mentality and everything in life (not just this game) suddenly becomes more enjoyable and you find yourself with considerably more agency. It's a mental and emotional trap. Sad to say that DE profits off it, but that's how the MTX game is run. Same deal as FOMO. Just stop caring what other people are doing and figure out if what you're doing is enough for your goals.

 

That said, I personally dislike Smeeta. The buff is inconsistent, unreliable, and I hate having to baby-sit pets who die to virtually anything. The extra resources aren't worth losing the enjoyment of the game.