The Holokeys grind is awful

[CephalonCarnage]

13 hours ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

C) You get chump change credits. If you want credits there are much quicker ways of getting them. I think your definition of a "but ton of credits" is off, try Index for worthwhile credit farming.

Earth proxima gives you 35k credits as a bonus. Saturn and Veil even more (I don't do corpus RJ). Sover Strait can be done in less than a minute, probably takes longer to start a new run. That's a lot of credits, all you have to do is stick with the repetition. I've come away with a million credits in a single session of RJ.

 

As for holokeys, I think (not tested) Earth would be better - it is quicker, though not by that much once you have the base objectives to deal with, but the vagaries of the RNG would drop more often because you're running more missions, even though you only get 2 at a time. Not getting 2 per run is better than not getting 4, so you run more often in the same timeframe you have a greater chance of getting somethin.

[(PSN)zj0ker20]

Here's a thought:  add Holokeys to the Granum Void reward pool, or make it so that a Sister of Parvos has a rare chance of dropping them

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

The fact that holokeys are random is bad, and the fact that you gain parts of Sevagoth instead, that I already farmed twice, is also not good.

Railjack is very specific mode that require much more teamplay than your typical void fissure extermination, and railjack is still a bit buggy.

So I got my railjack with good stats, i got my penta carmine, nautilus, sevagot twice (and thx to holokeys I have a few spare now), the epitaph, 161 holokeys, and I won't touch railjack until a mate need some help.

I heard that the ambassador was a chore to farm too, I'll wait for DE to come back from their vacations to see if it changes.

[Schwitzer]

3 hours ago, (PSN)zj0ker20 said:

Here's a thought:  add Holokeys to the Granum Void reward pool, or make it so that a Sister of Parvos has a rare chance of dropping them

I'm a fan of both of these suggestions. 

3 minutes ago, MonsterOfMyOwn said:

I heard that the ambassador was a chore to farm too, I'll wait for DE to come back from their vacations to see if it changes.

Yeah, I'm not even bothering with Ambassador until they improve it. I've endured some pretty awful grinds, but that one is too foul for me to engage with.

[Leqesai]

The current holokey and tenet melee situation is pretty darn bad. Sisters of parvos had a couple very poorly executed aspects.

Personally i would suggest holding off on running these missions because, just like most other horrible grind fests de has implemented it will be made much easier in a month or two. 

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

Brozime saying the exact same thing: 

 

[TaricTheAncient]

I think it goes pretty fast to get holokeys if u just farm hardest skirmishes takes like 10 min a skirmish and i kinda think they are fun to do. Though RNG can mess with certain people but its always been like that.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

On 2021-07-27 at 9:57 PM, gbjbaanb said:

Earth proxima gives you 35k credits as a bonus. Saturn and Veil even more (I don't do corpus RJ). Sover Strait can be done in less than a minute, probably takes longer to start a new run. That's a lot of credits, all you have to do is stick with the repetition. I've come away with a million credits in a single session of RJ

Try Index. Minute for minute you'll make maybe 4-8 times as many credits.

Or Profit Taker, ½mill every speed run.

RJ credits are good compared to basic star chart, weak compared to credit farms.

And, like most players grinding end game weapons with a maxed railjack I have many millions. We don't need credits.

On 2021-07-27 at 9:57 PM, gbjbaanb said:

, I think (not tested) Earth would be better

I have tested. Nu Ga is the highest level mission where you won't get slow extra objectives (like waiting for hacking drones or shooting external radiators) - 1-2 unsheilded crewships, 1-2 security nodes, then speed run exterminate. 

Earth isn't really any quicker.

Pluto, Saturn or the Veil adds objectives. A 4p squad with the right kit can do the grineer Veil in the same time, which gives more keys, but still painfully slowly.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

1 hour ago, TaricTheHealer said:

I think it goes pretty fast to get holokeys if u just farm hardest skirmishes takes like 10 min a skirmish and i kinda think they are fun to do

With ⅓ drop chance that's average 30 mins per 6 keys, or 5 mins per key.

10 hours for a basic set.

Come back to me after 10 hours of repeating Railjack skirmish missions and see if you till think they're kind of fun to do.

[(PSN)thorfinn01]

On 2021-07-27 at 6:25 PM, Wolfchild07 said:

They should drop 100% of the time. That's the whole reason people have jumped back into these missions.

Yes, and while the keys don't drop, DE middle management get to artificially inflate the playing stats for railjack. It's the exact same reason the 'sisters' go through the granum void.

 

[Oorel]

On 2021-07-26 at 1:47 PM, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

...

 

Doing this is Public squads is probably making it worse as well.

I hate this farm, but I got some keys farming the new parazon mods in spy fissures, enough for one of the weapons. I got another 40 casually testing stuff in the voidstorms.

I recently did a big farm, doing a few full rotations of Nu-Gua mines solo. it took about 4h to get to 80.

I was at the exit at around 2:40 usually. Very optimized RJ loadout and arsenal.

at the time it was relatively enjoyable to just crack random relics and collect some garbage parts, some forma. since the mission is unusually fast it doesn't drag on too badly.

I think this situation would be alright if voidstorms were also go-to relic cracking missions, then you would have a nice situation were you are probably going to do them anyways, so hey, you get some keys every once in a while. Because people don't run relics in voidstorms casually, and most players in my experience are not very effective at RJ in general random squads its become a sad mess and its best to optimize the hell out of the corrupted key farm, solo, to roll the dice as often as possible.

I'm interested in getting the weapons, though they not worth the farm. I'm waiting for some good elements with decent %, I'm not maxing these out, but I'd prefer them to be functional at least.

[AntawnMary]

Il y a 2 heures, (XBOX)KayAitch a dit :

With ⅓ drop chance that's average 30 mins per 6 keys, or 5 mins per key.

10 hours for a basic set.

Come back to me after 10 hours of repeating Railjack skirmish missions and see if you till think they're kind of fun to do.

Hi,

Skirmish missions are the Grineer ones, I don't know if it can help but I got all my hundreds of holokeys only doing Extermination missions so the Corpus ones.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

DE have responded: 

 

It's nowhere near enough. Missions are still tedious with ⅔ of them giving you nothing. Adding to Sisters is nice, but it isn't going to make any significant difference, especially as many of us have already killed 20 or so Sisters and don't want to do that particular loop for a little while.

Instead of a ⅓ chance of 10 Holokeys please can we have 3 Holokeys that always drop?

 

[Highasafly]

Lotsa white knight hereabouts.

[sitfesz]

On 2021-08-05 at 10:56 AM, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

DE have responded: 

 

It's nowhere near enough. Missions are still tedious with ⅔ of them giving you nothing. Adding to Sisters is nice, but it isn't going to make any significant difference, especially as many of us have already killed 20 or so Sisters and don't want to do that particular loop for a little while.

Instead of a ⅓ chance of 10 Holokeys please can we have 3 Holokeys that always drop?

 

I wonder why does it take them more than 10 days to change the number of amounts.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

On 2021-07-26 at 7:47 AM, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

Maybe optional objectives always give you some

I've been suggesting optional objectives for years now.  Many others have as well.  DE doesn't want engaging grind where the more you do the more you get or guaranteed drops from longer more involved missions, they want drawn out RNG grind with the mechanics being as simple as possible to eliminate labor on their end and increase engagement numbers through mindless grind.

It's not even a point of argument, the evidence is downloaded to your PC or console because that's what is in the game.  Layered RNG through the same simple mechanics on repeat forever.  They get away with it because the core gameplay is a lot of fun, even though the mission mechanics are almost universally bad.  More engaging mission mechanics that take longer but have higher drop chances or give guaranteed drops would also increase their engagement statistics/player counts/etc but it would require more labor on their part.  

Devs are all about as little work as possible for maximum return on player count, play time and revenue.  This will not change.

[Yamazuki]

4 minutes ago, (XBOX)TehChubbyDugan said:

Devs are all about as little work as possible for maximum return on player count, play time and revenue.  This will not change.

At least until AI starts replacing them, as is about to happen with jobs that require far more skill.

I personally would prefer missions that took a little more time than the basic 1-5 minutes if it rewarded more.

Although, DE kind of misses the point on time vs reward often. A lot of missions, regardless of completion time, reward the same amount. It was one of the issues with Void Storm vs Void Fissures. Railjack is longer but wasn't given better rewards, and DE's solution is just to add a one and done grind, but due to it being largely get each weapon once, they had to artificially extend it with a fairly low drop chance on the keys.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

2 hours ago, Yamazuki said:

At least until AI starts replacing them, as is about to happen with jobs that require far more skill.

I personally would prefer missions that took a little more time than the basic 1-5 minutes if it rewarded more.

Although, DE kind of misses the point on time vs reward often. A lot of missions, regardless of completion time, reward the same amount. It was one of the issues with Void Storm vs Void Fissures. Railjack is longer but wasn't given better rewards, and DE's solution is just to add a one and done grind, but due to it being largely get each weapon once, they had to artificially extend it with a fairly low drop chance on the keys.

I've never sat down and fully written out the changes I'd like to see because it would be wasted effort and no one would read it anyway (I am apparently semi-infamous for only leaving negative feedback on the forums.  It's because the only feedback that does any good is starting a riot to get them to change something small.  They don't listen to good ideas from anyone, and a bunch of positive "Thank you, DE.  We love you DE.  Everything is perfect!" only serves to increase the size of their head in proportion to their ears.) but the ideas I have are essentially what you just said.

Longer, more engaging missions that rewarded you for engaging with them.  The majority of base mission types right now don't even have a goddamn reward table for them to improve.  You get literally nothing.  They need to drastically increase the rewards for the base mission primary objectives and then add in a slew of optional objectives that were actually worth going after.  No one cache hunts because there is nothing in the caches. 

Imagine a star chart where there was more than Hydron to efficiently level things.  Where resources could be farmed effectively in more than a handful of nodes, and you could do so without corner camping the horrible enemy AI.  Where relics and rewards were spread out enough and missions rewarding enough that the whole starchart was populated so new players' introduction to the game wasn't a solo slog through missions that barely drop anything worthwhile, but instead were full of experienced players for them to learn from.  Imagine people actually engaging with the entire map for a mission instead carving a straight line through it.

More than one of the lead devs has openly complained about how fast we run the missions.  I've said it before and it bears repeating:  If you want us to engage with the missions then making them engaging.

There's so much potential for this stupid game and the only thing they add to it is grind and more layers of RNG.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

7 hours ago, (XBOX)TehChubbyDugan said:

Devs are all about as little work as possible for maximum return on player count, play time and revenue.  This will not change.

Isn't every job? Maximum return for minimum effort, sounds entirely reasonable. It's how I approach my job too.

In this case a load of effort was put into these new folding attaché weapons.

Meanwhile whether we always get a set number for mission completion or horrible RNG where you can play for an hour and get none can be changed with tweaks to drop tables.

This isn't a question of developer effort.

7 hours ago, Yamazuki said:

At least until AI starts replacing them, as is about to happen with jobs that require far more skill

This is laughable.

Software development doesn't just require skill, it requires creativity. Bots are not remotely close to anything requiring that level of skill, the closest we have is probably something like GitHub Copilot https://copilot.github.com/, but even that tends to common bad practices (like a spell checker that can't correct "secretary" because most people in the source data it was trained with can't spell it either).

Machine learning can just about train a bot to recognise an image, or output an image that kinda looks like something else

7 hours ago, Yamazuki said:

personally would prefer missions that took a little more time than the basic 1-5 minutes if it rewarded more

Yes, but they'd have to reward more too.

I'm fine with a 15 minute Void Storm that lets me crack 3 relics, but I'm not going to spend 15 mins on one relic when a 5 min Survival gives the same reward.

It's the inconsistency I hate here. If bonus objectives always gave Corrupted Holokeys then I'd have a reason to do them.

[sitfesz]

10 hours ago, (XBOX)TehChubbyDugan said:

Devs are all about as little work as possible for maximum return on player count, play time and revenue.  This will not change.

That's exactly why players start to say "I like the game but not the devs". Don't you come here saying warframe is a perfect scheme of free to play mobile games that is "free" but always constricts you into payment as soon as it could.

That is why players communities exist, to step up when something is bad. The whole game is pay-to-skip and yet a lot of people buy plat, buy prime access and who do you think test all their stuff? EVERYONE. It's not just the f2p players complaining. Most of the times it's the paying users complaining, because the feel righteous to not be stood in front of all that S#&$.

Developers want players to pay as much attention to their game as players could (and/or literally pay as much as we could), and players want to enjoy the game without the least inconveniences.

They would be okay with that if we just sneezed and paid for that. It's the endless war of supply and demand. The devs are always against players and players are always against devs. Why? Because of what you have already said. Yet players always have to tell them about their discomfort, or nothing will #*!%ing change. If a lot of players are against a change, the devs can/have to rethink, revert that change. Like the vacuum within: #*!% that, #*!% whoever thought it would be ok and #*!% the person who thought it would be fine to implement. Also #*!% whoever thought that a global less-ranged vacuum would be fine instead of the regular one, because the players will rather accept that instead of the 3 companion mod bullS#&$. Yeah #*!% particularly you at DE, because you at DE let no other choice to players.
This is manipulation and DE goddamn loves manipulation.

I love the song, but not the artist. They are upside down compared to their early self and at my and other players expense, so #*!% them.

They already announced the holokey change at august 4-5. The changes are about increasing every fissure tier by +1 and veil by from 6 to 10. Also adding 1 to each sister of parvos vanquish/convert. What the #*!% does it take to change these to more than 10 days? I killed sisters and I played railjack fissures too and now I'm at least 30 holokeys shorter. Why, though?

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

10 hours ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

Isn't every job? Maximum return for minimum effort, sounds entirely reasonable. It's how I approach my job too.

No, it's not.  Some of us have to actually care about our work.  I build pressure vessels as a welder and solderer.  If I don't care and leave a defect and the person doing the testing doesn't care and the defect gets through and one of these things makes it out into the world and gets put in use with that defect people could very literally die from an explosion.  This is often what happens when there's a pipeline leak that creates a chemical spill, or a massive sign on the highway falls.  People didn't care, other people suffered for it.

Now games aren't life and death, but they are how I choose to spend my limited free time.  The people that make those games should care enough about their players to respect that time.  Also, there was an era of video games where fun and not a bunch of shareholder's bottom line was the main objective and those games still stand the test of time.  Being as low effort as possible when you're making a product for others to enjoy, and caring more about manipulation tactics to keep people using that product rather than the quality of the product standing on its own is an absolute tragedy among modern games.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

3 hours ago, (XBOX)TehChubbyDugan said:

13 hours ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

Isn't every job? Maximum return for minimum effort, sounds entirely reasonable. It's how I approach my job too.

No, it's not.  Some of us have to actually care about our work

I'm not talking about professionalism. Yeah, you should complete the work to whatever standard is required.

If you had two tasks you could take on, they both pay the same but one takes much more effort which would you choose?

Would you do anything for free?

11 hours ago, sitfesz said:

That's exactly why players start to say "I like the game but not the devs".

Warframe is the devs. I definitely disagree with plenty of the choices they've made, but everything I love about this game is also by them.

Warframe isn't good despite of DE. It's good because of DE.

The bad Holokeys grind is not because DE are malicious, or lazy, it's because Warframe is now crazy complicated and sometimes they get the balance wrong. It's very hard as a developer (who can summon anything on the command line) to really understand what level of grind is acceptable and what isn't.

[Skaleek]

20 hours ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

it's because Warframe is now crazy complicated and sometimes they get the balance wrong. It's very hard as a developer (who can summon anything on the command line) to really understand what level of grind is acceptable and what isn't.

They have all the numbers. Rebecca loves her metrics graphs. They know exactly what they're doing everytime they introduce a back breaking grind like ambassador or holokeys.

Don't let DE off thinking they are ignorant. This is all very deliberate I assure you.

The ridiculous grinds are DE testing player limits and monetization schemes.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

14 hours ago, Skaleek said:

The ridiculous grinds are DE testing player limits and monetization schemes

Only you can't buy Holokeys or tenet melee weapons.

Someone really messed up if this grind was supposed to be monetised.

14 hours ago, Skaleek said:

They have all the numbers

They don't, yet. They want to hit a certain acquisition rate, which is certainly measurable, but the feature is new and the initial weeks of a new feature are not a good indicator.

They always do this: they don't want to burn through new content, they make it slightly too grindy to acquire, then scale that back.

That's why Isolation Vault drops got better, why Railjacks became cheaper to build, why every time things start grindy and get more balanced as they get the stats.

It's already happening - since I started this thread they've added new ways to get holokeys and more keys in veil drops.

I'm keeping on at them because it isn't enough.

[Skaleek]

34 minutes ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

Only you can't buy Holokeys or tenet melee weapons.

Someone really messed up if this grind was supposed to be monetised.

When i said they are testing monetization i was referring to the ambassador grind. In the case of holokeys they are simply testing how far they can push us before we push back, or just don't bother to engage with the content at all.

34 minutes ago, (XBOX)KayAitch said:

They don't, yet. They want to hit a certain acquisition rate, which is certainly measurable, but the feature is new and the initial weeks of a new feature are not a good indicator.

They always do this: they don't want to burn through new content, they make it slightly too grindy to acquire, then scale that back.

That's why Isolation Vault drops got better, why Railjacks became cheaper to build, why every time things start grindy and get more balanced as they get the stats.

It's already happening - since I started this thread they've added new ways to get holokeys and more keys in veil drops.

I'm keeping on at them because it isn't enough.

They do have all the numbers. They're the ones who set them. They know how long it takes to do rail jack exterminates and skirmishes (fastest and average), and they know its a 1/3 drop rate. It's just math. They know exactly what kind of time investment they've asked for.

You're wrong about why things are balanced. Iso vaults drops got better because people stopped engaging in the content. Railjacks became cheaper because not enough people owned Railjacks. They pushed players too hard.

They havent added the holokey changes yet, its been a long time since they announced the proposed changes. It's not some grand test. You can forecast time investment before playing in the system, we do it here on the forums all the time.

They make it slightly too grindy to acquire on every patch? They sure do. People are learning not to play their new content because the early adopters always get absolutely massacred by this design philosophy. I don't grind anything in a new Warframe patch for at least a month after launch and even that has proven too early. You yourself are even saying they release content that is too grindy, implying what I'm saying, that they know exactly what they're doing.