Random Concept: "The Casual Meta"TM

[Dar.Karon]

So, I've brought up, from time to time, a concept I've come to call the Casual MetaTM. This is a thing I've been thinking about for a long while, but I'm curious what the general consensus about its existence is.

What is the targeted area of the game that envelops it? What is considered the meta to the casual player? What IS casual in this game?

If anyone has any input they'd like to discuss, this would be the place!

[Galuf]

Except content creators we all are casuals, and lots of content creators are bad at the game on top of that. There is a finite amount of content in this game, nothing is out of reach. There are ladder boards but honestly the game is not balanced well enough for them. As the game is all over the place(it has always been ^^') and balanced from the bottom, each player has his own meta and it makes absolutely no difference on what he/she can achieve or not, the only difference would be on platinum income for free to players(there is a meta for that as well ^^').

[(NSW)Greybones]

2 minutes ago, Galuf said:

Except content creators we all are casuals, and lots of content creators are bad at the game on top of that. There is a finite amount of content in this game, nothing is out of reach. There are ladder boards but honestly the game is not balanced well enough for them. As the game is all over the place(it has always been ^^') and balanced from the bottom, each player has his own meta and it makes absolutely no difference on what he/she can achieve or not, the only difference would be on platinum income for free to players(there is a meta for that as well ^^').

Seems fair.

🤔 What’s “Balanced from the bottom” mean? The phrase strangely resonates, and I’m wondering if I’m interpreting right

[Dar.Karon]

9 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Seems fair.

🤔 What’s “Balanced from the bottom” mean? The phrase strangely resonates, and I’m wondering if I’m interpreting right

It probably means that the game is balanced in regards to the most common denominator- In this case, new-ish players and the Star Chart.

[Dar.Karon]

18 minutes ago, Galuf said:

Except content creators we all are casuals, and lots of content creators are bad at the game on top of that. There is a finite amount of content in this game, nothing is out of reach. There are ladder boards but honestly the game is not balanced well enough for them. As the game is all over the place(it has always been ^^') and balanced from the bottom, each player has his own meta and it makes absolutely no difference on what he/she can achieve or not, the only difference would be on platinum income for free to players(there is a meta for that as well ^^').

Well, there are still a good number of strategies around 95% of players use in everyday practice.

The Melee Meta of Condition Overload and Viral/Corrosive+Slash, for example.

What say you of these?

[ZeroX4]

36 minutes ago, Dar.Karon said:

MetaTM

Hold left alt and on numeric keyboard input 0153 then release left alt ™

Have fun ©®
https://www.alt-codes.net

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

I find this topic interesting but I don't know how I can contribute to it.

Been playing the on and off game as a MR 6 Pre-Quills player ever since I started back in 2017. I play the game in the various endless modes and enjoy them as is.  I even taxi on over to help people on Steel Path occasionally. I have a favorite load-out so I'm not playing for more equipment since I'm content (happy) with the content (stuff) that I have access to.

[Yamazuki]

 

11 minutes ago, Dar.Karon said:

Well, there are still a good number of strategies around 95% of players use in everyday practice.

The Melee Meta of Condition Overload and Viral/Corrosive+Slash, for example.

What say you of these?

Viral/Slash isn't relevant in the vast majority of situations, even in SP, the relevance of viral/slash is non-existent if you're using a weapon that kills enemies before slash gets to even do anything or viral doing anything. Warframe abilities can also instantly kill enemies. Some of the more durable enemies are already immune to either Viral or Slash [/both]. Something being 100% ineffective can't be "meta". This is why before people were opting to use Corrosive 100% of the time, the elements put on your weapon don't matter the overwhelming majority of the time. They only matter for specific weapons that aren't used often.

The game consists of mostly non-durable enemies, so after a point the amount of damage per shot/swing/per ability cast stops mattering, and you're better off giving up the overkill damage for other stats that allow for an additional frequency to the damage being applied.

This also ignores the fact "95% of the player base" and "uses melee" is incorrect. Most people use ranged damage, and some content already denies the usage of melee as a form of damage without using a "melee" that fires a projectile. If most people actually used melee, then melee wouldn't have received the changes it did a while ago, nor would DE have taken an eternity to fix the accidental charged attack issue when that existed, nor would the changes all around have been purely from the perspective of people who mainly used guns at the expense of melee primary users. Heavy attacks existing is also mostly a beneficial thing for non-melee use, and is why they are over tuned.

DE even stated melee use being dominant was within a small portion of the player base when addressing the "issue" of guns being "weak".

As to casual vs non-casual, it would mainly come down to whether the individual actually cares about efficiently killing enemies or not. Warframe isn't a game that really rewards min-maxing TTK. A lot of the game's rewards are tied to rotations or running to extract after a 5 second objective, with other missions having the same duration regardless of skill or loadout. Take the events SS and OV. During SS, some people were complaining ground missions took too long and were taking 2-3x as long as an efficient group would take. Then came OV and forced the long duration on everyone with an irrelevant scoring system.

Steel Path had its reward changed to daily alerts that are enough to get things, with the way to farm them being tied to a sort of rotational system, rather than before where it required sitting in a mission for over an hour and you needed to be efficiently killing enemies in the tens of thousands rather than just hundreds/thousands. This is why at the time, some people would get a handful of drops in a 3 hour period while others could get over a hundred even with poor rng.

[DrivaMain]

We and DE know this game is meant for the casual. It's a consensus at this point.

In short, The casual gameplay is a "Stress free and Chill Experience". No challenge required, players are not forced to use something they do not like, and it requires "minimal" brain use.

However the game still fails to fulfill "players are not forced to use something they do not like". On the contrary, DE is still keep pushing players the opposite of this goal.

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

5 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

We and DE know this game is meant for the casual. It's a consensus at this point.

In short, The casual gameplay is a "Stress free and Chill Experience". No challenge required, players are not forced to use something they do not like, and it requires "minimal" brain use.

However the game still fails to fulfill "players are not forced to use something they do not like". On the contrary, DE is still keep pushing players the opposite of this goal.

The content gating is quite annoying. I hope when they fully release the game there will be alternate paths to work with. 

[Kaiga]

The bulk of the missions in this game involve fraggin' mobs, basically speedclearing.

The fastest way to do this in regular gameplay is with AoE explosions that wipe those mobs out as you run past them to the next one.

This means a lot of bramma, ogris, wukong, mirage, or frames with abilities can do something similar: blow up the mob quickly.

Yes, that's viral/slash/etc, but outside specialized boss hunts or high level endless missions, the game is played most efficiently like that, and there is no reason to use anything single-target. 

That, is the meta.

[Dar.Karon]

42 minutes ago, ZeroX4 said:

Hold left alt and on numeric keyboard input 0153 then release left alt ™

Have fun ©®
https://www.alt-codes.net

Two words: Cell Phone.

[ZeroX4]

13 minutes ago, Dar.Karon said:

Two words: Cell Phone.

[Dar.Karon]

1 minute ago, ZeroX4 said:

Yeah, I know. It hurts me just as much as it hurts you.

Unfortunately, I brought this topic to life on the work clock, so rip in die, me.

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

21 minutes ago, Dar.Karon said:

Two words: Cell Phone.

Oh? Don't know if you're using Apple but on Android there's a ™ when you press on the keyboard  ?123  then  =\<

[quxier]

37 minutes ago, Yamazuki said:

Viral/Slash isn't relevant in the vast majority of situations, even in SP, the relevance of viral/slash is non-existent if you're using a weapon that kills enemies before slash gets to even do anything or viral doing anything. Warframe abilities can also instantly kill enemies. Some of the more durable enemies are already immune to either Viral or Slash [/both]. Something being 100% ineffective can't be "meta". This is why before people were opting to use Corrosive 100% of the time, the elements put on your weapon don't matter the overwhelming majority of the time. They only matter for specific weapons that aren't used often.

Still there is lot of statuses that are less useful hence not use that much. Even with Lavos there are few statuses that I haven't used even I could (blast).

41 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

We and DE know this game is meant for the casual. It's a consensus at this point.

In short, The casual gameplay is a "Stress free and Chill Experience". No challenge required, players are not forced to use something they do not like, and it requires "minimal" brain use.

However the game still fails to fulfill "players are not forced to use something they do not like". On the contrary, DE is still keep pushing players the opposite of this goal.

It depends how much "power" you want to use. With enough power everything is "stress free & chill experience" but it's start to get boring. Like Xaku. Put range/duration/strength on it and Grasp of Lohk kills "everything". Everything becomes boring. On the other hand, just put strength but negative duration (~80%) and you can have much more fun (of course it's subjective) playing with void status & disarming part of GoL.

[(NSW)Greybones]

Hrm. This topic is making me think, but before I put my thoughts to the questions down, I’d like a little clarification, @Dar.Karon; what’s meant by “Targeted area of the game that envelops it”? My first thought was “Ah, so it’s what Warframe as a whole is targeting”, but then after a bit, I thought “ 🤔 Lichs are a part of the game that envelops a targeted area (players who have the ability to fight them and win without obliterating them, I’m thinking)”, so now I’m not sure if I’ve interpreted correctly

[(PSN)thowed]

Wukong + AOE weapon=all the answers.  If you play him glad you're having fun.  Still doesn't change anything.

[Galuf]

Il y a 4 heures, (NSW)Greybones a dit :

Seems fair.

🤔 What’s “Balanced from the bottom” mean? The phrase strangely resonates, and I’m wondering if I’m interpreting right

Everybody can engage on any content in the game by design, so nothing should be too hard. The toughest contents we got in the game are profit taker and eidolons because it requires a strategy and good enough loadouts.

 

Il y a 4 heures, Dar.Karon a dit :

The Melee Meta of Condition Overload and Viral/Corrosive+Slash, for example.

Hybrid melee builds are self explanatory, it's the "obvious" spanking setup for high end weapons, there are not enough mods in the game to make it not obvious. It's so obvious that I wouldn't even call it meta

For the guns meta, it's on DE, they made greener scalling tough enough so your greener setup will rekt anything else anyway. So you end up with things that deal with ehp scalling on your loadouts and that's it ^^'. But it's fully on DE, the 3 factions are not balanced what so ever...

[(NSW)Greybones]

Just now, Galuf said:

Everybody can engage on any content in the game.

Ah, cool cool. There's some limits on when someone can engage with some content, but I can agree that it feels like someone can engage with all of the content a lot lot earlier than the point that they'll have finished the game.

[Dar.Karon]

1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Hrm. This topic is making me think, but before I put my thoughts to the questions down, I’d like a little clarification, @Dar.Karon; what’s meant by “Targeted area of the game that envelops it”? My first thought was “Ah, so it’s what Warframe as a whole is targeting”, but then after a bit, I thought “ 🤔 Lichs are a part of the game that envelops a targeted area (players who have the ability to fight them and win without obliterating them, I’m thinking)”, so now I’m not sure if I’ve interpreted correctly

I mean, like, at what point does the game go from being "casual" to being "meta"?

We all know Condition Overload is a... Notably strong mod, so is that meta? Or is it casual?

[(NSW)Greybones]

13 minutes ago, Dar.Karon said:

I mean, like, at what point does the game go from being "casual" to being "meta"?

We all know Condition Overload is a... Notably strong mod, so is that meta? Or is it casual?

Ah, okay.

🤔 That one's a little harder, and I may not be able to give it my personal thoughts without a crazy-long post going through my thinking (though I'll try the others in a bit). I was playing with the Fragor recently and leveling it up, and the only mod I bothered putting on was Berserker Fury as I was fighting through the Lua spy mission, because while I love the weightyness of the standard animations, I thought it'd be kind of fun to swing faster after a kill. Kind of like I'm getting more and more angry the more and more I smash enemies with my hammer 😋.

I never delved much into the whole META thing since it sounds boring-as (and it was when I was absolutely overpowered for much of the content, even if I wasn't over-powered for something like Steel Path), but I know Berserker was a bit of a hot topic at one point in time, yet here I am fighting level 25 - 30s with it as the only thing I had equipped, and I wouldn't expect to be able to comfortably kill level 50s with that hammer as it was.

edit: Hrm. 🤔 Though I haven't actually tested that. I might do that later

[Aldain]

13 minutes ago, Dar.Karon said:

I mean, like, at what point does the game go from being "casual" to being "meta"?

We all know Condition Overload is a... Notably strong mod, so is that meta? Or is it casual?

It's not really a solid point all things considered, almost anything can clear the star chart but things start to get muddy once you get past level 50ish for most players.

The point where there is very little feedback as to what is being done wrong or not in my opinion has to be the gap between level 50 and 100 though.

Some people will (loudly) note that we can delete enemies with levels up to the thousands with certain loadouts, but by the time level 100 anything starts showing up the gaps in effectiveness tend to become far more pronounced, both in weapon selection and mod choices.

Most of this having to do with the Grineer, because as we all know, if it can smash level 100 Grineer, chances are it can smash level 200 Corpus/Infested just as easily.

Though there's also the aspect of enemy damage scaling which also ramps up markedly at around those same levels, which also causes confusion because in the blink of an eye durability for several types frames takes a nosedive off a cliff with basic durability options commonly used elsewhere.

The biggest problem is, once you get past that questionable range, you're basically in the "meta" territory even when you're a brickheaded clown like me, the moment you discover anything that trivializes that gap, it all tends to fall apart.

So if I had to pick the general range of where "casual meta" would fall, it would have to be at the point where level 50-100 is still challenging but before the discovery of one of the MANY things that wind up just pushing for more hard "meta" decisions.

[Dar.Karon]

2 hours ago, Aldain said:

It's not really a solid point all things considered, almost anything can clear the star chart but things start to get muddy once you get past level 50ish for most players.

The point where there is very little feedback as to what is being done wrong or not in my opinion has to be the gap between level 50 and 100 though.

Some people will (loudly) note that we can delete enemies with levels up to the thousands with certain loadouts, but by the time level 100 anything starts showing up the gaps in effectiveness tend to become far more pronounced, both in weapon selection and mod choices.

Most of this having to do with the Grineer, because as we all know, if it can smash level 100 Grineer, chances are it can smash level 200 Corpus/Infested just as easily.

Though there's also the aspect of enemy damage scaling which also ramps up markedly at around those same levels, which also causes confusion because in the blink of an eye durability for several types frames takes a nosedive off a cliff with basic durability options commonly used elsewhere.

The biggest problem is, once you get past that questionable range, you're basically in the "meta" territory even when you're a brickheaded clown like me, the moment you discover anything that trivializes that gap, it all tends to fall apart.

So if I had to pick the general range of where "casual meta" would fall, it would have to be at the point where level 50-100 is still challenging but before the discovery of one of the MANY things that wind up just pushing for more hard "meta" decisions.

Such as?

I'm curious as to what sort of meta things you mean.

Like Hildryn's Blazing Pillage augment combined with maximized Strength and Range being absolutely busted as frick?

Or maximum Strength Gloom being equally stupid because of 95% slowdown?

Or perhaps the Melee Meta, where Condiuon Overload, Weeping Wounds, Body Count, and Blood Rus are commonplace?

[Aldain]

23 minutes ago, Dar.Karon said:

Such as?

I'm curious as to what sort of meta things you mean.

Like Hildryn's Blazing Pillage augment combined with maximized Strength and Range being absolutely busted as frick?

Or maximum Strength Gloom being equally stupid because of 95% slowdown?

Or perhaps the Melee Meta, where Condiuon Overload, Weeping Wounds, Body Count, and Blood Rus are commonplace?

Mostly damage stacking and access to things like Arcanes and rarer mods (assuming one doesn't use plat to bypass things).

Also getting over the Endo/Credit wall that inhibits maxing out even basic mods like Serration which many new players will run into.

There's also things like Forma costs and getting access to Reactors/Catalysts over time as well as getting a bigger suite of Warframes to work with and getting up the ranks in any of the standing grinds for augments like you mentioned.

So basically you can hit level 50-100 content fairly quickly, but once the tools widen you can work better, but many of those tools are out of the way or even worse, something you'll only learn from other players or the wiki.

Most of the more common and technically meta things we run into though are things we often take for granted, like rank 10 damage mods and the Forma in weapons to make those usable, as well as access to things like 60/60 elemental mods...really the list is very long on paper but when you boil it down a large amount of the meta gap stems from getting the things any long term player has long since had.

Hell even something as basic as Vitality, a common mod takes 10,230 Endo to hit rank 10, which for any fresh player is a ton of endo, and Uncommon mods like Serration take twice that. That's not even touching the Credit costs which is even bigger of a drip fed resource than Endo for a newbie.

So ironically the biggest meta defining things many longer term players have up until you hit Steel Path levels/modifiers; some of the most basic mods out there, along with the MR requirements for better weapons and plat requirements for slots and potatoes. The only time you really run into the commonly discussed "meta" builds is well past the point I'm talking about when I speak of the 50-100 level range.