Conclave actually fun!? Just wish it was easier to get into

[KillifishPrime]

Well me and a few friends in my discord decided to mess around in conclave for the first time last night and man did we have a blast. It was mostly just the four of us taking a tour through all the gamemodes and trying out the daily challenges but we did match with a few randoms, one of which directed me here where I said I'd leave some thoughts.

I had a lot more fun than I expected to. WF isn't inherently bad for PVP and I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with any of the modes, conclave itself doesn't actually suck the way I'd always heard it did. A lot of that fun for us came from trying new things and working out what weapons and frames had the most useful abilities for each situation with the minimal mods and experience we all had.

And what absolutely crushed our fun were the times a random dropped into the match and try-harded the crap out of us. It didn't matter if we had the mod restrictions on, just the fact that they were so much more experienced in the parkour style and map layout and gear meta made it easy for them to pick us off over and over while we couldn't even find them to fight. We would explain in chat that we were in a discord playing casually and could they please stop and they would just ignore us.

And I think that's really been the main deterrent for me ever getting into conclave before now. It's not that it didn't look fun to me, it's just that I knew the only people who play are the people who really play. And as someone who isn't into really hardcore pvp and has no interest in reaching that kind of skill level, let alone how to get there, that's pretty much a solid turn off from ever touching conclave. I'm not sure what the fix would be. In any other game I guess it would be a split between a casual and ranked system, but I doubt there's enough conclave players for that, particularly split across all 4 modes.

Anyway, I did have a great time, I'm stoked to do more :)

[Sevek7]

1 hour ago, KillifishPrime said:

I had a lot more fun than I expected to. WF isn't inherently bad for PVP and I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with any of the modes, conclave itself doesn't actually suck the way I'd always heard it did. A lot of that fun for us came from trying new things and working out what weapons and frames had the most useful abilities for each situation with the minimal mods and experience we all had.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it! Conclave is awesome when playing with others around the same skill level :)

1 hour ago, KillifishPrime said:

And what absolutely crushed our fun were the times a random dropped into the match and try-harded the crap out of us. It didn't matter if we had the mod restrictions on, just the fact that they were so much more experienced in the parkour style and map layout and gear meta made it easy for them to pick us off over and over while we couldn't even find them to fight. We would explain in chat that we were in a discord playing casually and could they please stop and they would just ignore us.

Yup. DE's decision to skip the necessary skill-based matchmaking used in PvP games is a really weird one. Certainly a big contributing factor to the unpopularity of Conclave. 

 

[Tyreaus]

1 hour ago, Sevek7 said:

Yup. DE's decision to skip the necessary skill-based matchmaking used in PvP games is a really weird one. Certainly a big contributing factor to the unpopularity of Conclave. 

That and, in this experience and my own, the tie-in of standing to kills. It creates an incentive not just to play the mode, but to play to the best of your ability. If you're looking to gain standing, there's little to no room for mucking about or going easy.

Which is kind of a shame because the most fun I've had in Conclave is doing exactly that: casual mucking about. Like a match spontaneously devolving into bows only.

[Loxyen]

3 hours ago, KillifishPrime said:

And what absolutely crushed our fun were the times a random dropped into the match and try-harded the crap out of us. It didn't matter if we had the mod restrictions on, just the fact that they were so much more experienced in the parkour style and map layout and gear meta made it easy for them to pick us off over and over while we couldn't even find them to fight. We would explain in chat that we were in a discord playing casually and could they please stop and they would just ignore us.

Yup... sadly there are some individuals who grind rc and won't give any #*!%s about other people... just for the ez standing or kd farm (when kd in this game means nothing... the really top notch players usually have something around 2.x to 1.x kd which comes naturally from facing off other players of the same skill lvl or even better ones from when they did the climb)

[squidd]

Hey, I and a lot of my friends try to help people enjoy Conclave with us and have fun with it, so I'm glad to hear you were enjoying it! Little bit of something different from the game's standard flowchart and more like other styles of games, yet still perfectly within the boundaries of Warframe's world and capabilities. I hope you and your friends keep enjoying it.

If you really don't want someone else interrupting you and your friends having some fun trying new things out, you can try running a match just between your group via invite-only mode. That way, no one could join way outside your skill/experience level unless you invited them. Otherwise, a public match is exactly that, public. So its hard to place blame on someone else for enjoying it too, even if what they are doing is maybe less fun for you.

That being said, if you do want to try to match with some others who may be of similar skill level in public lobbies, the Conclave Discord server has a lot of guys around pretty often who will be happy to get in a match and enjoy it the same way you are with your friends, similarly with less super good "veteran" players popping up. We even have teaching/learning sessions that include lots of newer and generally more casual players to simply have fun, learn some things, try some things, and walk away with a smile on their face. If you or your friends wanna check that out, you might find it easier to get into! :)

[KillifishPrime]

On 2021-09-26 at 9:52 PM, squidd said:

If you really don't want someone else interrupting you and your friends having some fun trying new things out, you can try running a match just between your group via invite-only mode. That way, no one could join way outside your skill/experience level unless you invited them. Otherwise, a public match is exactly that, public. So its hard to place blame on someone else for enjoying it too, even if what they are doing is maybe less fun for you.

That being said, if you do want to try to match with some others who may be of similar skill level in public lobbies, the Conclave Discord server has a lot of guys around pretty often who will be happy to get in a match and enjoy it the same way you are with your friends, similarly with less super good "veteran" players popping up. We even have teaching/learning sessions that include lots of newer and generally more casual players to simply have fun, learn some things, try some things, and walk away with a smile on their face. If you or your friends wanna check that out, you might find it easier to get into! :)

Part of the reason we were running public is one of our group is a bit of a collection nut and wants some of the conclave mods, and we don't get any standing on invite only, and can't complete the dailies. If we were really just mucking around we probably would have done that but we were actually trying to play most of the time, albeit at a much lower skill level than they were. I can't imagine running even a dozen matches on private would be enough to close that gap and get us into fighting form against those guys

I'll probably check out the discord though, sounds like a good time :)

On 2021-09-26 at 7:05 PM, Tetraspace said:

Try-hard you say? Perhaps you can elaborate on who the culprit you're describing in terms of the arsenal that the player in question is using? Curiously speaking.

Uhhh I didn't note down everyone's arsenal but there was a real pain of a chroma that popped up a few times as well as some volts? A hydroid? The weapon spread was pretty wide, burston, kronen prime, mire, rubico prime, synoid simulor, dual cestra, good ol' telos boltace (even I know that's broken as hell). It wasn't so much the loadout choice that made them tryhard as the continuous full tilt leaping around the rafters and sniping us midair every time we respawned.

[Kontrollo]

7 hours ago, KillifishPrime said:

Part of the reason we were running public is one of our group is a bit of a collection nut and wants some of the conclave mods, and we don't get any standing on invite only, and can't complete the dailies. If we were really just mucking around we probably would have done that but we were actually trying to play most of the time, albeit at a much lower skill level than they were. I can't imagine running even a dozen matches on private would be enough to close that gap and get us into fighting form against those guys

I'll probably check out the discord though, sounds like a good time :)

Discord invite link is https://discord.gg/0o35sDMUR9RSWTWz and an easy to remember redirect is here: https://discord.me/conclave

Yes, sadly there's only the distinction Recruit Conditioning (RC) on or off. If you turn it off you're likely facing players with months to years of experience. And because the game is very fast, it takes a lot of practice and muscle memory to be able to keep up with that.

If it gets too hard, you might just want to leave it be for a bit, switch to private for a game or two for something less stressful, or you can also switch regions and/or game modes as an alternative. It's easier to learn when facing people that are about on your level, too.

 

7 hours ago, KillifishPrime said:

Uhhh I didn't note down everyone's arsenal but there was a real pain of a chroma that popped up a few times as well as some volts? A hydroid? The weapon spread was pretty wide, burston, kronen prime, mire, rubico prime, synoid simulor, dual cestra, good ol' telos boltace (even I know that's broken as hell). It wasn't so much the loadout choice that made them tryhard as the continuous full tilt leaping around the rafters and sniping us midair every time we respawned.

I do see another problem here, however: It's not only Telos Boltace, some equipment is wildly imbalanced and some has been like that for years despite all our feedback & reports. I see Telos Boltace, Mire, Dual Cestra, Rubico Prime (in that order), although Rubico Prime's stats are only a bit too high imho, it probably doesn't matter except in high level play. Not sure about Synoid Simulor, haven't seen that in forever.

But there's a long list of other things that are problematic these days, it's not obvious at all when you're new to it.