Stat Squish through Inflation to Curb Power Creep

[(NSW)Greybones]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

The goal has been the same, including for Survival missions, as building optimally increases the number of resources you can get out of enemies. I recommend you try out an Arbitration or Steel Path Survival mission for a few hours and see for yourself what I mean. The fact that this game is multiplayer by design also means that, by your own admission, one is pressured to build optimally anyways. Also, if you treat the symptom and not the cause, the symptom will continue to appear; that is what makes it a symptom. As per the above quote once again: "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game". It is up to the developer to make sure that opportunity does not arise, by making sure that the optimal way to play the game is as closely aligned as possible with the most fun way to play the game. This alignment need not be perfect, but it could certainly stand to be improved from what is the case now.

I know what an optimal build looks like and why it’s used, just not why the value of the optimal build is so high. In multiplayer, the lawless realm, maybe. But that’s not the only way to play the game (I have lamentations that a lot of the game’s story quests don’t do multiplayer).

And I dunno; I’m pretty sure that players will make their own opportunity. Have you seen the pride players have around optimising? If the game’s options were completely squished so that everyone is close to experiencing what I’m experiencing, it wouldn’t affect me so much, but I don’t think it’s going to play out like expected for the rest of the playerbase

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

I have, and have not found doing so fun, which is why I'm asking you those questions. Rummaging through my mod setup every time I want to alter my build for a specific level range also sounds like needless hassle for what so far only appears to be a negative effect, so you're going to have to convince me why I'd want to do that.

The game that you’re looking for is here; I’m pretty sure it’s about what it’s going to be anyways if DE balanced to prevent players optimising their own fun out of the game (it just has more options at the moment). Make different builds and practice fighting, and it will open up a side of Warframe that you may never have seen (depending on initial approach to the game).

It’s not hard either; start from the beginning and start with level 20-ish, then add damage and survival and anything else you want and as you need once you’re certain you can do no better after a few tries. It doesn’t take much to start developing a sense of what’s required, it just takes some practice

If however you didn’t find it fun, that’s that; that’s about the best I can offer.

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

Serration.

🤔 Argonak. Hammershot, Shred, Stormbringer, Fast Hands, Serration, Eagle Eye, Twitch, Amalgam Argonak, Rifle Aptitude

Take it against Corpus; Hammershot benefits both firing modes, Fast Hands to reload faster (always nice), Serration for a damage boost, Eagle Eye to benefit semi-auto mode aiming, Twitch to switch to secondary (maybe Bronco/Prime for high close-range damage since mid-long is covered via assault rifle?), Amalgam Argonak because fun, Rifle Aptitude for electric procs (Argonak hurts fleshy Corpus, but struggles against robotics, and electric procs are nice damage and minor CC). I want to say level 40-ish Corpus, though I haven’t built this and tried it across the level 40-ish corpus content. And as the player climbs, there are options for increasing damage in different ways as they want and as needed.

And this isn’t the only way to build for level 40-ish corpus with an Argonak (not even sure if everything will fit); if the damage is sufficient, everything else is player choice. And it doesn’t need to be Serration or Stormbringer; what about magnetic and multishot? Now the Argonak is a shield shredder, still killing fleshies but needing assistance from the rest of the kit that’s been brought (which will be customised to around the same tier of power)

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

It appears you have completely misunderstood the point. I brought up Grendel's missions to indicate that it is perfectly possible (and, to many players, easy) to fight level 50 enemies with no mods. However, what those missions indicate is also that doing so isn't fun, because combat in those missions is a slog. I don't see why levels 20 or 30 are more valid than level 50, and more generally I am having a hard time relating to your vision of the developers' intended design, so you're going to have to explain that a bit better as well.

I get that it’s perfectly possible to fight with no mods; you’re choosing crunchy enemies to fight though, and then pointing at it and saying “This represents the game”. Level 40 are crunchy for a no-mod weapon; they may do an okay job of threatening a rank 30 Warframe, better than level 20, but our weapons are treated differently when it comes to increasing necessary stats. Warframes need less of a stat boost

I don’t know why it is that way, but I can hazard guesses

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

You could give a reasonable explanation for why your proposed course of action would be more fun to the average player. The average player is likely, for example, to appreciate more valid choices and the greater diversity of gameplay that brings about, so advocating that shouldn't be hard. The fact that you are incapable of providing even that suggests that you have only your subjective opinion as the basis for your stance, which makes you ill-equipped to argue your case on a forum to people who do not already share your opinion.

How am I going to explain that a course of action is fun? Am I to assume a player even knows how to play the game and hasn’t just ridden  the high-level build through lower level content for the entirety of their playtime? Do they know what a fight looks like or has their entire experience been multi-coloured confetti?

You make it sound like I need to justify doing anything other than be bored; why is “Here’s a thing to try” not enough? If the player likes it, great! If they don’t, that’s fine too.

Am I to tell them that nearly everything the’ve been asking for is here already? That AoE doesn’t need to be the end-all be-all answer? That Ancients are a high-priority target? That Nullifiers aren’t so scary? That abilities have a purpose? That every weapon is useable? That positioning and dodging and listening and knowing where enemies are is a thing? That bulletjump is for more than just moving through a level faster; it’s a valuable repositioning tool? That it’s possible to know how a player died? That it can get hella hectic in a mission and that Lichs showing up can turn it around? That Warframe looks like an actual game? That DE are balancing for non-SP? Do I even know what DE are balancing for? Because without certainty, mostly all I can work with is with my perspective and some “X factor has equaled sufficient for me across hundreds of missions”

I can bring all of this up, but will it even be understood? 

And if they insist on playing the game for not-fun, what are the odds that they’ll even have an interest? By this point I’m honestly wondering if that’s actually a thing; playing the game but not really wanting to play it.

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

And you mention "Not lead to gameplay most would consider enjoyable". @Steel_Rook hinted at something along those lines as well, something about how the combat doesn't hold up without mandatory mods.

You misunderstand. Warframe combat fails to hold up regardless of the use of mandatory mods. The use of mandatory mods simply papers over the underlying cracks by rendering a majority of the broken systems irrelevant. Take energy management, for instance. I remember being a new player and asking for help with it on the Steam forums. The overwhelming feedback I got was to the tune of "Don't worry about it. It won't matter in the high levels." This turned out to be true. I'm a "Veteran" player now, and I don't even consider energy any more. Between Rage and hundreds of Energy Restores, who cares? It doesn't matter how bad the game's energy system is when I can entirely circumvent it.

The same goes for shields. Warframe's take on shields is awful because - as I mentioned - they take damage far too quickly relative to how quickly they recover. The Shield Gate helped, certainly, but it just turned the game into shield gate meta. Run around with a dragon key, stay in constant shield gate, be invincible most of the time. Nobody bothers to take cover or maximise shields. Just cheese the shield gate and circumvent the entire system.

Success in Warframe isn't the result of playing well. It's not even the result of making powerful builds. Far too often, success in Warframe is the result of fundamentally undermining core game mechanics and removing the "game" portion of it. For me, it was Inaros. I personally find most enemy designs in Warframe to be cheap and cheesy, dealing far too much damage in an attempt to create artificial "challenge." So I picked Inaros - the Warframe who doesn't die. I no longer need to care about undodgable tracking rockets from Bombards or Leeches draining my energy through walls, or Elite Shield Lancers one-shotting me before I even know they exist, etc. I can go AFK in Steel Path and just about nothing will kill me, so it doesn't matter how badly enemies are designed.

Combat itself doesn't hold up. At that point, the only real difference between using mandatory mods and not using mandatory mods is how long everything takes. Use mandatory mods and you blow through enemies easily. Don't use them and you mag-dump into each individual enemy for 15 minutes. It's the same gameplay loop, except the former is just more practical and less unpleasant. These mods are only "mandatory" because there's no incentive to equip anything else and there's substantial disincentive to not equipping them. It doesn't matter what DE "meant" for us to do, because we as players derive intent from how the mechanics play together, not from how developers wish they would.

 

13 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

What happens when a player thinks and asks themselves “Am I… doing this right?”. When the game is no longer fun where once it was, does a player not explore other options? Is maximum power the right way to play? Is grind the right way to play? Is customisation the right way to play?

Then that player will leave. That player will leave long before ever bothering to explore other options or find additional depth. This is why the new player experience matters, and why you can't just tell people to not worry because it gets good 100 hours in. I've lost friends (as in they stopped playing the game, we're still friends) for this exact reason - the game didn't tell them S#&$ and just expected them to make their own fun until Uranus where the story picks up.

This is also why player feedback is so vital. So often in Warframe, I've found myself asking "Am I doing this right?" The game offers no answers. As a mathematician, I would then visit the Wiki, ask on the forums, grab the necessary formulae and do my own models. Eventually, I'd get a bunch of numbers that tell me "OK, so this approximate stat is much higher in this build that in that one. I did, in fact, do this right." Then I'd pick the better build, play and still feel basically no difference. Alternately, I'd play a mission and fail. What did I do wrong? No idea. What could I do better? No idea. I'd ask on the forums and get as many different opinion as I get responses. Eventually, I just blindly stumble through the options until I find something that works. OK, cool! I succeeded! What did I do right, though? No idea. What if I need to do it again? Sucks to be me.

You can't expect players to do the developers' work for them. You can't expect players to house-rule poor balance in an effort to eke out the fun which might theoretically exist if the game were made better. Sure, some people might do that. Despite your accusations, I'm typically one of them. I'm the sort of person who goes to forums asking questions, dives through technical documentation to deduce mechanical implementation, does their own mathematical models and tries to keep some semblance of balanced gameplay. And even I eventually had to give up on doing that in Warframe because it simply doesn't work. There's no balance to be found in the current system unless I stick to Star Chart level ranges. Except I also want to do Lich content and Railjack content and maybe the occasional Sortie, so that's not an option.

That's the issue - there are no other options for players to explore. No viable such anyway. Any other options besides min/maxing are ostensibly the same option just with lower stats. I guess there are meme builds, like that machinegun Opticor or the framerate-destroying fireworks from a -98% projectile flight speed grenade launcher or that Gauss space programme thing. Those are funny for a while, but they're not funny enough to keep most people around for hundreds of hours, let alone thousands of hours. The majority of the playerbase is going to go along the path of least resistance. In Warframe, that leads to a really boring experience. That's on DE, and something they need to fix.

 

13 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

In fact, fast grinding was actually disincentivised for me at least because a.) the game got boring, and b.) RNG. I see players complain about these things; they don’t sound incentivised

There's no polite way to say this, but - if those people don't sound incentivised to you, then you aren't listening to them. They ARE being incentivised to do things they don't enjoy. That's the problem, and the source of their discontent. This dissonance between what the game incentivises players to do and what's actually fun to do is why so many veterans are jaded and unpleasable. There's a good game underneath all the progression grind garbage, but one has to dig so deep and work against so much pressure that it's ostensibly not worth it. Warframe is a mobile game that walks like a PC shooter. It might have been a good action game at one point. These days, it exists as a storefront for microtransactions - a glorified Raid: Shadow Legends or Mafia Wars or whatever the kids play on their phones these days.

The action-adventure core of Warframe is being eroded by degrees with every update because monetisation demands an escalation of rewards. Every new drop has to be better than the old ones so people want to grind for it. Every new system has to be psychologically manipulative so as to condition players into acting against their own self-interest. Everything has to be lootboxes, because gambling is a powerful motivator. You end up with a toxic transactional relationship where players resent playing the game but still feel psychologically compelled to keep playing it for the dopamine hit of loot drops. There's a reason a lot of us were pissed at Nora Night for joking about how "the sweet tingle of rewards" tickles our "lizard brains." Yes, DE. We know you're conditioning us. Can you not also be glib about it?

Live Services haven't used "fun" as incentive for a very long time. It's simply not effective. It requires good design and careful balance in return for an experience which is only subjectively enjoyable. Why bother, when you can keep cranking out more powerful loot, hiding it behind glorified slot machines and relying on the pull of literal gambling to exploit your customers' psychology? Players have to enjoy your game in order for fun to be a decent incentive. Players can absolutely hate your game, you and everything you stand for - they'll still play it for the gambling. The reason so many veterans are jaded is because they stopped having fun a long time ago, burned out hard, but stick around for the sunk cost and the slot machines. That's really as complicated as "incentive" gets in this game.

The reason I'm jaded is because I'm naive. Every time I watch a Dev Stream, every time we discuss possible balance and systems changes, every time I sit down to play... I can't help but think about how great this game could have been... could still be. But it never happens. DE promise structural changes (how long have pets been in the works), but it all we get is more loot. Here and there, we get some decent updates like the New War, but... what happened with Scarlet Spear? What happened with the Operator redesigns? Or the pets, like I said? They were going to experiment with damage types and that didn't happen. There's always something new in the store, yet the core experience remains unaddressed. Balance issues I remember from 2018 still persist to this day.

Playing Warframe the way the mechanics push you to play it is boring and disenfranchising... and that's by design. The game doesn't make money off you having fun. It makes money off you hitting the lever on the slot machine, because that's what keeps you coming back and spending money on items you don't actually want. At that point, what incentive do DE have to ever mess with damage buff stacking or Grineer armour? It'll just annoy people and cost them money. Easiest to leave it like it is.

 

13 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Do players not know what to do with a game that gives them options like Warframe does or something, @Steel_Rook? Do they draw upon other games to establish their expectations of what Warframe is, and then adhere to those ideas?

"Yes to all." This is, in fact, one of Warframe's biggest weaknesses. It throws a tremendous amount of choices at players right from the start, explains nothing and offers no real feedback on anything. Of course people are going to fall back on prior knowledge from other games. What else is there to do at that point? When nothing makes sense and nothing we do seems to have a measurable effect, one's only venue is to blindly try what they're already familiar with and cross their fingers. There obviously is more complexity to Warframe than what I give it credit for, but that's a bell curve. A new player has access to nearly none of the complexity. An experienced player begins to experience a drastically increasing level of complexity. But a veteran quickly realises that most of the complexity is hollow and irrelevant, so they once again converge towards what few options actually work well.

I'll say this again - if a developer wants players to experiment and explore, then the game needs to push players into experimentation and exploration. A game which consistently rewards players for finding the few builds which work disproportionately well and consistently penalises players for doing anything else is never going to foster either experimentation or exploration. And lest you want to argue about how that's, like, my opinion, dude... Look at the playerbase. Look at the forums. Look at virtually any venue of player feedback available. It's not just me.

[(NSW)Greybones]

I’m done.

I’m going to play Warframe.

[PublikDomain]

13 hours ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Well uh....good luck with that I guess. 

Not sure how well that's going to go over with people, but I hope you get what you want.

So far it's mixed, I just need to work on my delivery and make some better graphs. This is an older thinking about enemy scaling values (half HP/Shields, linear Armor, no S-Curve) but it still shows what I mean about enemy changes. More enemies line up when Armor isn't so exponential. Ta-da! More enemies are more even.

What I mean for scaling/non-scaling damage sources is the same. Make more stuff spread out more evenly, now more stuff is more equally good against more equally good enemies.

[--END--Rikutatis]

21 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

There's a good game underneath all the progression grind garbage, but one has to dig so deep and work against so much pressure that it's ostensibly not worth it. Warframe is a mobile game that walks like a PC shooter. It might have been a good action game at one point. These days, it exists as a storefront for microtransactions - a glorified Raid: Shadow Legends or Mafia Wars or whatever the kids play on their phones these days.

The action-adventure core of Warframe is being eroded by degrees with every update because monetisation demands an escalation of rewards. Every new drop has to be better than the old ones so people want to grind for it. Every new system has to be psychologically manipulative so as to condition players into acting against their own self-interest. Everything has to be lootboxes, because gambling is a powerful motivator. You end up with a toxic transactional relationship where players resent playing the game but still feel psychologically compelled to keep playing it for the dopamine hit of loot drops. 

I'd upvote this 100x over if I could. It's so fundamentally true. I came back for New War, LOVED the story quest, decided to check on Caliban and the new weapons, played one narmer bounty and realized I'd be gated by pool rotations (cant even grind the parts I want when I want), enormous resource costs with isoplast that are also RNG gated at pitiful amounts of 1-3, etc. I could pay plat to bypass the whole thing (which is clearly the goal) but I just uninstalled WF again and am currently downloading Elden Ring.

Maybe Angels of Zariman's new game modes will actually be fun gameplay that is worth playing for the joy of it, and not just to  begrudgingly slave over reward dopamine hits like an addict. 

[PublikDomain]

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

As per the above quote once again: "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game". It is up to the developer to make sure that opportunity does not arise, by making sure that the optimal way to play the game is as closely aligned as possible with the most fun way to play the game.

I did want to chime in since this stuck out (haven't had a chance to read the rest yet). The adage that "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" is often treated like some inevitable outcome, but really it's a cautionary tale. It's not "players will optimize the fun out of a game, so there's no point in trying to stop them", it's "players will optimize the fun out of a game, so don't let them" - like you say. Players will optimize, yes, but they can only optimize using the tools the developer has given them. If the developer is careful about the tools provided, the amount of optimization can be controlled and optimization to the point that fun is removed can be largely avoided. Players can and will optimize, but they should be optimizing within boundaries that still allow the game to be fun.

[LuckyCharm]

Im definitely all for a stat squish but after having spent a few months playing other games for lack of content, i would like to say that regardless of how a stat squish is done  you should always be able to pick enemies off with headshots. Feeling weak is fine so long as you have a weak spot somewhere to aim for. And that weak spot is pretty obvious. Of course may take more bullets for fully auto rifles and the like, but guns that are supposed to be one shot one kill, should be one shot one kill when aimed correctly. Almost like if the old covert lethality was a headshot based thing for snipers and other semi auto guns. 

And yeah as mr rook said, theres more than just stat changes that needa be done, enemy ai definitely needs improvement once theyre able to survive longer than a second, and energy sources and gains need evaluation. Having no risk to yourself in missions is fine for some but really makes for a boring game. Like farming by sitting in one room all game firing down a corridor

[Steel_Rook]

16 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

I did want to chime in since this stuck out (haven't had a chance to read the rest yet). The adage that "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" is often treated like some inevitable outcome, but really it's a cautionary tale. It's not "players will optimize the fun out of a game, so there's no point in trying to stop them", it's "players will optimize the fun out of a game, so don't let them" - like you say. Players will optimize, yes, but they can only optimize using the tools the developer has given them. If the developer is careful about the tools provided, the amount of optimization can be controlled and optimization to the point that fun is removed can be largely avoided. Players can and will optimize, but they should be optimizing within boundaries that still allow the game to be fun.

Completely agree. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with letting players optimise or min/max. A well-balanced game should, however, ensure that gameplay persists even for the most min/maxed. This is achieved by both limiting how much players can optimise and ensuring that optimisation doesn't render gameplay systems irrelevant. Just for the sake of being thorough, I feel the same way about difficulty, as well. Properly-balanced difficulty should require players to interact with a larger portion of the game's systems, not make certain systems pointless as they don't offer enough benefit. Players' success of failure should be determined by their actions, with min/maxing serving to either improve their chances or alter their experience. I know this sounds vague and non-specific, but it's a good rule of thumb to check for bad balance.

 

24 minutes ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

Maybe Angels of Zariman's new game modes will actually be fun gameplay that is worth playing for the joy of it, and not just to  begrudgingly slave over reward dopamine hits like an addict. 

I hope so as well. Despite being overall negative, I don't mean to suggest everything is bad. Warframe has had very good updates, even in recent years. The Jovian Concord, the Deadlock Protocl - hell, Empyrean itself. These were all awesome because they renovated old, forgotten parts of the game, adding brand new mechanics. I enjoyed the various Revised updates, as well - often more so than the new content ones. DE have promised some kind of Operator revisit, and BOY do Operators ever need that. I hope to see something on the level of Railjack Revised.

I often get the feeling that the actual developers - Steve Sinclair, Scott McGregor and other others - are doing their level best to deliver as good of a game as they can. It's why their streams are so heartening. It's easy to tell that these guys are passionate about their work. I often get the feeling, however, that they don't have much of a say in how the game develops. I've seen enough of this relationship between hard-working developers and bottom-line publishers. "Make more microtransactions, make more gambling, increase engagement, don't upset people or they might stop paying, etc." Warframe feels very much like that to me.

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, PublikDomain said:

I did want to chime in since this stuck out (haven't had a chance to read the rest yet). The adage that "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" is often treated like some inevitable outcome, but really it's a cautionary tale. It's not "players will optimize the fun out of a game, so there's no point in trying to stop them", it's "players will optimize the fun out of a game, so don't let them" - like you say. Players will optimize, yes, but they can only optimize using the tools the developer has given them. If the developer is careful about the tools provided, the amount of optimization can be controlled and optimization to the point that fun is removed can be largely avoided. Players can and will optimize, but they should be optimizing within boundaries that still allow the game to be fun.

I completely agree. The entire point of that quote is that designers need to be aware of the consequences of their design choices, which is what most game developers - including Digital Extremes - strive to do. When the optimal way to play a game isn't as enjoyable as it could be, that should be a sign for the developers to change their game so that optimal play and optimal enjoyment align better, something DE clearly wants to do with balance despite balking at the complexity of the problem and potential player pushback.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

I know what an optimal build looks like and why it’s used, just not why the value of the optimal build is so high. In multiplayer, the lawless realm, maybe. But that’s not the only way to play the game (I have lamentations that a lot of the game’s story quests don’t do multiplayer).

And I dunno; I’m pretty sure that players will make their own opportunity. Have you seen the pride players have around optimising? If the game’s options were completely squished so that everyone is close to experiencing what I’m experiencing, it wouldn’t affect me so much, but I don’t think it’s going to play out like expected for the rest of the playerbase

You have just had the high value of optimal builds explained to you by now several people, so I don't see how one can fail to see the point here without being wilfully ignorant. Maximized damage output means one can kill enemies quicker, which means one can progress through missions quicker and farm more enemies at a time, which makes us reach our objectives more efficiently. In multiplayer, which the vast majority of this massively multiplayer game's playerbase play, having a build that isn't deliberately suboptimal is a common expectation.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

The game that you’re looking for is here; I’m pretty sure it’s about what it’s going to be anyways if DE balanced to prevent players optimising their own fun out of the game (it just has more options at the moment). Make different builds and practice fighting, and it will open up a side of Warframe that you may never have seen (depending on initial approach to the game).

It’s not hard either; start from the beginning and start with level 20-ish, then add damage and survival and anything else you want and as you need once you’re certain you can do no better after a few tries. It doesn’t take much to start developing a sense of what’s required, it just takes some practice

If however you didn’t find it fun, that’s that; that’s about the best I can offer.

As pointed out already, my gameplay experience was not made more enjoyable by deliberately tanking my build. Clearly, not only am I not alone in this, it appears you are in fact in the distinct minority in enjoying playing with suboptimal builds, if you are to be believed. Thus, I and others have not found what we've wanted by following your advice. It is time you listened to others as well.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

🤔 Argonak. Hammershot, Shred, Stormbringer, Fast Hands, Serration, Eagle Eye, Twitch, Amalgam Argonak, Rifle Aptitude

Take it against Corpus; Hammershot benefits both firing modes, Fast Hands to reload faster (always nice), Serration for a damage boost, Eagle Eye to benefit semi-auto mode aiming, Twitch to switch to secondary (maybe Bronco/Prime for high close-range damage since mid-long is covered via assault rifle?), Amalgam Argonak because fun, Rifle Aptitude for electric procs (Argonak hurts fleshy Corpus, but struggles against robotics, and electric procs are nice damage and minor CC). I want to say level 40-ish Corpus, though I haven’t built this and tried it across the level 40-ish corpus content. And as the player climbs, there are options for increasing damage in different ways as they want and as needed.

And this isn’t the only way to build for level 40-ish corpus with an Argonak (not even sure if everything will fit); if the damage is sufficient, everything else is player choice. And it doesn’t need to be Serration or Stormbringer; what about magnetic and multishot? Now the Argonak is a shield shredder, still killing fleshies but needing assistance from the rest of the kit that’s been brought (which will be customised to around the same tier of power)

Serration contributes literally no gameplay to this build, your build clearly violates your claim that one can take a build full of mandatory mods and rearrange them to make them more interesting, which was the purpose of this entire mental exercise, and the only mod in this bunch that arguably alters the weapon's gameplay at all is Amalgam Argonak Metal Auger. To top it all off, your build appears tailored to level 40-ish Corpus, so according to this I can only enjoy myself on Pluto. Your suggestion not only fails to insert any meaningful improvement to diversity of play relative to meta builds, it is even more restrictive.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

I get that it’s perfectly possible to fight with no mods; you’re choosing crunchy enemies to fight though, and then pointing at it and saying “This represents the game”. Level 40 are crunchy for a no-mod weapon; they may do an okay job of threatening a rank 30 Warframe, better than level 20, but our weapons are treated differently when it comes to increasing necessary stats. Warframes need less of a stat boost

I don’t know why it is that way, but I can hazard guesses

You may not realize this, but level 40 enemies are extremely low-level in terms of what there is to fight in Warframe. Steel Path enemies go into the level 100s on top of having stat modifiers added. Even Sortie enemies start out at level 50. If even low-level enemies turn into bullet sponges the moment we start tanking our builds in the name of "fun", there isn't going to be any fun had in slogging through most of the game's content, which is why most players don't follow your advice.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

How am I going to explain that a course of action is fun? Am I to assume a player even knows how to play the game and hasn’t just ridden  the high-level build through lower level content for the entirety of their playtime? Do they know what a fight looks like or has their entire experience been multi-coloured confetti?

You make it sound like I need to justify doing anything other than be bored; why is “Here’s a thing to try” not enough? If the player likes it, great! If they don’t, that’s fine too.

Am I to tell them that nearly everything the’ve been asking for is here already? That AoE doesn’t need to be the end-all be-all answer? That Ancients are a high-priority target? That Nullifiers aren’t so scary? That abilities have a purpose? That every weapon is useable? That positioning and dodging and listening and knowing where enemies are is a thing? That bulletjump is for more than just moving through a level faster; it’s a valuable repositioning tool? That it’s possible to know how a player died? That it can get hella hectic in a mission and that Lichs showing up can turn it around? That Warframe looks like an actual game? That DE are balancing for non-SP? Do I even know what DE are balancing for? Because without certainty, mostly all I can work with is with my perspective and some “X factor has equaled sufficient for me across hundreds of missions”

I can bring all of this up, but will it even be understood? 

And if they insist on playing the game for not-fun, what are the odds that they’ll even have an interest? By this point I’m honestly wondering if that’s actually a thing; playing the game but not really wanting to play it.

I have outlined to you a reasonable way of explaining yourself in my prior reply; clearly, that appears to be asking for too much. "Here's a thing to try" is not enough because you're not just making idle suggestions, you are using your "advice" as a weapon against valid criticism of the game by trying to blame players for what is ultimately a series of major balance and design problems. You constantly lament and complain about how nobody listens to you, but given that you've offered no convincing reason why people should change their mind and do what you want them to, people have no reason to listen to you. You haven't really been listening to anyone else in these debates you've had over this, either, so I don't see why you're expecting to be treated differently from how you're treating everyone else.

[(NSW)Greybones]

6 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Serration contributes literally no gameplay to this build, your build clearly violates your claim that one can take a build full of mandatory mods and rearrange them to make them more interesting, which was the purpose of this entire mental exercise, and the only mod in this bunch that arguably alters the weapon's gameplay at all is Amalgam Argonak Metal Auger. To top it all off, your build appears tailored to level 40-ish Corpus, so according to this I can only enjoy myself on Pluto. Your suggestion not only fails to insert any meaningful improvement to diversity of play relative to meta builds, it is even more restrictive.

You may not realize this, but level 40 enemies are extremely low-level in terms of what there is to fight in Warframe. Steel Path enemies go into the level 100s on top of having stat modifiers added. Even Sortie enemies start out at level 50. If even low-level enemies turn into bullet sponges the moment we start tanking our builds in the name of "fun", there isn't going to be any fun had in slogging through most of the game's content, which is why most players don't follow your advice.

The….

The diversity of gameplay comes from when enemies don’t immediately die and they have a chance to fight back. What is this crazy limited notion you have of interesting gameplay? You think it’s only the build that makes it interesting? That’s only part of it; the rest comes from what the build does and how the player uses it. And this isn’t meant to be a “One size fits all” build, this is a build that gives gameplay and fits everything level 40 and below; which means level 20 corpus while be easier, and it can now kill level 20 Grineer. It’ll be the same for a level 80 build, it’ll be the same for a level 140 build. If you don’t like the gameplay at a certain level, drop the build lower or take it higher

The difference between those level tiers and this one is that there may well be a reward at the end of this fight that’s not so available elsewhere, but the idea is that there’s game to play

Yes Serration gives nothing more than a stat boost; it’s a mod that lets weapons fight in higher content. Hell I barely use Serration unless I really need to

 

 

Argh, I can go on. I want to go on, responding to all of these points, but like I said I’m done. Part of being done is because I figured you’ve got so little interest in alternative thinking, I might as well press you (and Rook and anyone else) for more info on what makes you so stubborn, and then I got sick of it. I can assure you I don’t care whether I’m listened to or not, because you and the others clearly have the game figured out and know how to play, so you’re free to… suffer, I guess.

What I’m a little mind-blown about is that you can’t try an alternative approach and seeing if you can make it work; whatever puzzle-solving and build testing mentality permeated your theorycrafting number crunching meta builds as you searched for ultimate grind, that’s gone the moment it’s turned from “How to grind fast” to “How to have fun”. If the game stopped being fun, there’s alternatives. It doesn’t matter if anyone else is a grind addict metaslave who ruins their own fun, your noble intent to save players from themselves with your extensive “Fix the game” posts is noted, but why not make those suggestions, then let the other players burn and see how else Warframe can be played for yourself?

edit: Assuming you even want to keep playing, which if you’ve moved on that’s fair too; a game won’t always hold attention, no matter what was tried. If everything you tried resulted in absolute no-fun, then there’s near-certainty that the game will never be adequately changed, so might as well move on. It doesn’t sound like you’ve tried more than the Grendel missions and maybe some difficult newbie experiences before deciding the game’s not worth playing

[Teridax68]

2 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

The….

The diversity of gameplay comes from when enemies don’t immediately die and they have a chance to fight back. What is this crazy limited notion you have of interesting gameplay? You think it’s only the build that makes it interesting? That’s only part of it; the rest comes from what the build does and how the player uses it. And this isn’t meant to be a “One size fits all” build, this is a build that gives gameplay and fits everything level 40 and below; which means level 20 corpus while be easier, and it can now kill level 20 Grineer. It’ll be the same for a level 80 build, it’ll be the same for a level 140 build. If you don’t like the gameplay at a certain level, drop the build lower or take it higher

The difference between those level tiers and this one is that there may well be a reward at the end of this fight that’s not so available elsewhere, but the idea is that there’s game to play

Yes Serration gives nothing more than a stat boost; it’s a mod that lets weapons fight in higher content. Hell I barely use Serration unless I really need to

So effectively, you have no diversity of gameplay to offer. I might as well strip my weapon of mods entirely and obtain the same "diversity of gameplay" as I would with that mediocre build you brought up, simply because I'd be killing enemies slower. This is a strange attempt to shift the goalposts in this discussion, particularly as you're also forced to admit that the only situations in which this would apply give players no incentive to pursue them, other than to follow your own very specific notion of fun.

2 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Argh, I can go on. I want to go on, responding to all of these points, but like I said I’m done. Part of being done is because I figured you’ve got so little interest in alternative thinking, I might as well press you (and Rook and anyone else) for more info on what makes you so stubborn, and then I got sick of it. I can assure you I don’t care whether I’m listened to or not, because you and the others clearly have the game figured out and know how to play, so you’re free to… suffer, I guess.

What I’m a little mind-blown about is that you can’t try an alternative approach and seeing if you can make it work; whatever puzzle-solving and build testing mentality permeated your theorycrafting number crunching meta builds as you searched for ultimate grind, that’s gone the moment it’s turned from “How to grind fast” to “How to have fun”. If the game stopped being fun, there’s alternatives. It doesn’t matter if anyone else is a grind addict metaslave who ruins their own fun, your noble intent to save players from themselves with your extensive “Fix the game” posts is noted, but why not make those suggestions, then let the other players burn and see how else Warframe can be played for yourself?

edit: Assuming you even want to keep playing, which if you’ve moved on that’s fair too; a game won’t always hold attention, no matter what was tried. If everything you tried resulted in absolute no-fun, then there’s near-certainty that the game will never be adequately changed, so might as well move on. It doesn’t sound like you’ve tried more than the Grendel missions and maybe some difficult newbie experiences before deciding the game’s not worth playing

Word of advice: when you say you're done, following up with a paragraph of response, let alone several, undermines your posture. I'm not sure why you even continued with this rant other than to insult people who gave you reasonable responses. You accuse people like Steel_Rook and I of wanting a static situation, when the reality of the matter is that they and I, among several others, have been the ones to give feedback advocating for positive change, and you the one opposing this feedback on the grounds that anybody who chooses not to have fun by your own bizarre stipulations is "a grind addict metaslave who ruins their own fun". You accuse me of not trying to see things from your point of view and of not wanting to keep playing Warframe, but the fact is that, as you should be able to verify by checking my profile, I play Warframe regularly, and enjoy the game very much even if I think it can be improved. As I've told you already, I've tried tanking my builds in the name of fun, and observed from my own experience that this did not in fact make the game more fun. You need to actually internalize this.

At the end of the day, the only person here being stubborn is you, with your deliberate refusal to understand that not everyone thinks in the same way as you, nor needs to. The only person arguing from a position of static frustration is you, with your aggressive advocation of apathy, strange hostility towards anyone advocating change, and mistaken belief that Warframe is an unchanging game, despite being a game that changes massively and frequently. The only person who needs to make an effort to see things from a different point of view here is you, who refuse even to comprehend the words of a seasoned game developer, let alone heed them. If you really were satisfied with finding your own fun with deliberately suboptimal builds, you would not be evangelizing so hard on the forums and trying to bash everyone else over the head with personal notions of fun that clearly are not universally shared. If you really were done with discussion, you wouldn't be coming back to it again and again, repeating the same things, often to the same people. Clearly, something's not working out for you with Warframe, and you're going to have to be honest with yourself and ask whether that really has anything to do with any of the many people you've been arguing with.

[(NSW)Greybones]

31 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

So effectively, you have no diversity of gameplay to offer. I might as well strip my weapon of mods entirely and obtain the same "diversity of gameplay" as I would with that mediocre build you brought up, simply because I'd be killing enemies slower. This is a strange attempt to shift the goalposts in this discussion, particularly as you're also forced to admit that the only situations in which this would apply give players no incentive to pursue them, other than to follow your own very specific notion of fun.

Word of advice: when you say you're done, following up with a paragraph of response, let alone several, undermines your posture. I'm not sure why you even continued with this rant other than to insult people who gave you reasonable responses. You accuse people like Steel_Rook and I of wanting a static situation, when the reality of the matter is that they and I, among several others, have been the ones to give feedback advocating for positive change, and you the one opposing this feedback on the grounds that anybody who chooses not to have fun by your own bizarre stipulations is "a grind addict metaslave who ruins their own fun". You accuse me of not trying to see things from your point of view and of not wanting to keep playing Warframe, but the fact is that, as you should be able to verify by checking my profile, I play Warframe regularly, and enjoy the game very much even if I think it can be improved. As I've told you already, I've tried tanking my builds in the name of fun, and observed from my own experience that this did not in fact make the game more fun.

At the end of the day, the only person here being stubborn is you, with your deliberate refusal to understand that not everyone thinks in the same way as you, nor needs to. The only person arguing from a position of static frustration is you, with your aggressive advocation of apathy, strange hostility towards anyone advocating change, and mistaken belief that Warframe is an unchanging game, despite being a game that changes massively and frequently. The only person who needs to make an effort to see things from a different point of view here is you, who refuse even to comprehend the words of a seasoned game developer, let alone heed them. If you really were satisfied with finding your own fun with deliberately suboptimal builds, you would not be evangelizing so hard on the forums and trying to bash everyone else over the head with personal notions of fun that clearly are not universally shared. If you really were done with discussion, you wouldn't be coming back to it again and again, repeating the same things, often to the same people. Clearly, something's not working out for you with Warframe, and you're going to have to be honest with yourself and ask whether that really has anything to do with any of the many people you've been arguing with.

I don’t… know where most of these accusations are even stemming from. I’d ask, but then I’d have to continue sitting in the forums clarifying whatever misunderstandings you may have, so eh (like, what are you talking about where I think Warframe is static and should never change? Warframe’s constant evolution is one of my favourite things about it)

But that’s besides the point; you’re right, clearly I honestly don’t know how to convince players that there’s an alternative approach to the one that’s currently not working for them, nevermind convincing them that it might be worth exploring for more than a handful of missions before passing judgement that it’s no good. I’m being pitted against the very players I want to ask that question, and some of them sort of have and decided they already know the answer, so that’s like… “This is starting to get into subjective territory, right? It’s no longer a case of not even reading the same book, but more that we’re almost on the same page, but some things just aren’t lining up (like thinking 20 is no different to 50)”

To that end? I’m really dropping out

[Steel_Rook]

14 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

The diversity of gameplay comes from when enemies don’t immediately die and they have a chance to fight back.

Not quite. A balance of enemy durability and player offence is a prerequisite for diverse gameplay, this is true. Asserting that more enemy durability unilaterally means more diversity, however, is false on its face. That is, in fact, the primary failure of Steel Path. While SP enemies are much tougher and much less likely to go down in a few hits, that doesn't actually make the mode any more fun. All it does is make it tedious, slow and unpleasant to engage with. Let me explain.

Diversity of gameplay in terms of enemies requires actually diverse enemies - that is to say, the player is required to recognise what enemy they're fighting and either figure out or remember how best to approach said enemy, as distinct from any other enemy. Yes, this does require that enemies live long enough for the distinction to matter. It also requires that said distinction exists in the first place. Without said distinction, all you're accomplishing by making your weapons weaker is making everything take longer while playing out the exact same way.

Warframe almost entirely lacks said distinction. Enemies break down into maybe 3 or 4 general categories and mostly act the same. Pretty much all shooting Grineer and Corpus act the same way. Pretty much all melee enemies across all factions act the same. I can barely tell the difference between a Lancer, a Trooper or a Crewman. If I don't pay attention to the visual, they all "feel" the same. Reducing my DPS (or increasing their EHP) changes nothing. There are no hidden unique interesting mechanics that my overwhelming DPS is ignoring. These are effectively Quake level enemies who run at the player and shoot at the player and do little else.

And even if we assume that nerfing player DPS is going to make the game more fun - that's something Digital Extremes need to do. It's not up to each individual player to rebalance the game on their end, especially in a multiplayer title where said players will need to play together. If I have a Nightwave challenge to do, say, Nightmare missions and I turn up with my end game build to your level 40 mission, I'm going to ruin the experience for you. And it's not something I can "decide" to do, since matchmaking doesn't care about player builds or player intent. Having such a massive gulf of performance between even basic high-level builds and low-level builds is bad for the game, because it ensures that no content can ever be balanced for even a fraction of the population.

 

11 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

But that’s besides the point; you’re right, clearly I honestly don’t know how to convince players that there’s an alternative approach to the one that’s currently not working for them, nevermind convincing them that it might be worth exploring for more than a handful of missions before passing judgement that it’s no good.

You can't - that's what we've been trying to tell you. This isn't Gary's Mod. We're not here exploring a sandbox looking for ways to make our own fun. This is a professionally-designed video game, and we engage with it as such. We're presented with challenges and given tools with which to solve them. You assert that we should selectively not use the obviously correct tools for the job which we already have access to, because it will in some non-specific way generate "fun." That may be fun for you and the minority of players who enjoy self-imposed challenges. Most of us, however, don't enjoy playing amateur game developer. Most of us expect - or at least hope for - decent balance.

I'll give you an example. I've been doing quite a bit of Snowrunner recently. I personally feel that that game is balanced pretty badly, as the map designers keep routing players through paths that player equipment just isn't suited for. I don't want to go through the deepest blue snow, but all other paths are blocked by cliffs and trees - so I try to drive through the snow and get stuck. Eventually, I got so tired that I modded my game to increase tire grip across all of my vehicles... and completely ruined the experience by going overboard. Now they can drive through any terrain without slowing down, including deep water. I'm crossing areas that I'm not supposed to be able to cross and driving outside the map.

So now I'm having to do balance of my own. Reduce grip, but by how much? And for which vehicles? I don't have access to the source code so I don't know exactly how grip interactions work. My only option is trial and error, since Vanilla balance is bad and I can't really use it. In order to have fun with the game, I need to do the sort of work that developers would normally be paid for. Call me crazy, but I'd rather developers got it right in the first place.

So no - you can't convince players to deliberately gimp themselves. You can't convince players to experiment with doing things wrong in the hope that one of the wrong approaches will be more fun than any of the right ones - even if that's the case. You can't convince most players to do the development team's job for them. If players are put in a position where the optimal way is not fun and the fun way is not optimal, most would quit and look for a different game where that's not the case. You're trying to sell Warframe like an acquired taste - like something that's objectively bad, but you can learn to love it if you just try hard enough. You will not succeed.

 

20 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Serration contributes literally no gameplay to this build, your build clearly violates your claim that one can take a build full of mandatory mods and rearrange them to make them more interesting, which was the purpose of this entire mental exercise, and the only mod in this bunch that arguably alters the weapon's gameplay at all is Amalgam Argonak Metal Auger. To top it all off, your build appears tailored to level 40-ish Corpus, so according to this I can only enjoy myself on Pluto. Your suggestion not only fails to insert any meaningful improvement to diversity of play relative to meta builds, it is even more restrictive.

Slightly sideways of the discussion, but this is what annoys me the most about Warframe. We have this gigantic modding system, yet nearly nothing we do to our weapons actually makes any tangible difference. The stats change, but the experience doesn't. I often liken Warframe to Clicker Heroes. Yes, you may start out doing 5 damage and end up doing 5e54 damage, but you're still fighting the same slimes with a higher level attached and you're still doing the same action - clicking on the enemy. Or using an auto-clicker, because why not? Warframe feels the same. From level 10 to level 100, the way I play remains unchanged. Run around, click heads, optionally spam abilities. The mods I have access to change, but only because I get better versions of what I already had.

Serration, Split Chamber, Vital Sense, Point Strike - these mods do nothing but change the numbers that pop up when I shoot. The gun behaves the same anyway, it just performs better. I'm not "modifying" my weapon, I'm just adding stats to it. If our weapons had meaningful recoil or spread we could build for, maybe if reload and magazine size were more meaningful... perhaps it might matter? But the Warframe "meta" is more damage. That's what we're encouraged to do, that's what the system expects us to do. Even for things like rate of fire and magazine size, mods exist that add that AND more damage. Sure, I could get +30% magazine size... or I could get +20% magazine size and +40% damage. Obviously I'll pick the latter.

By this point, I'm convinced that RPGs work better when you don't let players mod for damage at all.

[Teridax68]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Slightly sideways of the discussion, but this is what annoys me the most about Warframe. We have this gigantic modding system, yet nearly nothing we do to our weapons actually makes any tangible difference. The stats change, but the experience doesn't. I often liken Warframe to Clicker Heroes. Yes, you may start out doing 5 damage and end up doing 5e54 damage, but you're still fighting the same slimes with a higher level attached and you're still doing the same action - clicking on the enemy. Or using an auto-clicker, because why not? Warframe feels the same. From level 10 to level 100, the way I play remains unchanged. Run around, click heads, optionally spam abilities. The mods I have access to change, but only because I get better versions of what I already had.

Serration, Split Chamber, Vital Sense, Point Strike - these mods do nothing but change the numbers that pop up when I shoot. The gun behaves the same anyway, it just performs better. I'm not "modifying" my weapon, I'm just adding stats to it. If our weapons had meaningful recoil or spread we could build for, maybe if reload and magazine size were more meaningful... perhaps it might matter? But the Warframe "meta" is more damage. That's what we're encouraged to do, that's what the system expects us to do. Even for things like rate of fire and magazine size, mods exist that add that AND more damage. Sure, I could get +30% magazine size... or I could get +20% magazine size and +40% damage. Obviously I'll pick the latter.

By this point, I'm convinced that RPGs work better when you don't let players mod for damage at all.

I do agree a fair amount, I think the issue is that damage, despite being perhaps the most basic of all stats, carries a deceptively large amount of knock-on effects: more damage means you kill enemies faster, so you get the benefits of an attack rate boost. More damage means you kill enemies using less ammo, so you get the benefit of greater magazine size. More damage means enemies get less time to damage you before you kill them, so you get a defensive benefit from that too. Straight-up increasing more damage carries the benefits of multiple stat increases in one, and Warframe compounds this problem by also making damage boosting mods incredibly potent.

I also agree with the problem that most of Warframe's mods don't change our gameplay. In particular, increasing our status and critical chances doesn't actually alter what we do with those weapons, it just gives us more damage in a manner that isn't even all that random, given how we can increase those chances beyond 100% and fire lots of attacks very quickly. However, some mods I think do present valid models for gameplay enhancers: Argon Scope for example at least incentivizes us to aim and headshot, whereas some sets encourage us to switch up our play a little bit, such as Proton mods rewarding us for shooting while wall latched. Given appropriate framing, even a pure damage boost can be made into an interesting effect, and there are some mods like those in Warframe even now. It's just a shame that those mods are a small minority out of all of our options, and are so much weaker than the meta options to boot. Not only would I like mandatory mods changed or removed, I'd like the healthier mods brought to the forefront so that if there is to be a meta, it would revolve around stuff that would actually alter our play.

[Steel_Rook]

16 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I do agree a fair amount, I think the issue is that damage, despite being perhaps the most basic of all stats, carries a deceptively large amount of knock-on effects: more damage means you kill enemies faster, so you get the benefits of an attack rate boost. More damage means you kill enemies using less ammo, so you get the benefit of greater magazine size. More damage means enemies get less time to damage you before you kill them, so you get a defensive benefit from that too. Straight-up increasing more damage carries the benefits of multiple stat increases in one, and Warframe compounds this problem by also making damage boosting mods incredibly potent.

Right. And the inverse is also true - modding for anything else carries downsides that modding for damage doesn't. Increasing my weapon's rate of fire, for instance, is a double-edged sword. Yes, my DPS increases, but I consume more ammo and experience more recoil. This very thing is why I was never able to use the Kohm sustainably. It shoots too slow, but speeding it up just drains my ammo pool. Modding for magazine size can have the effect of increasing the reload time for shell-loading guns - and there are a fair few of those. The Kuva Zarr is the most recent example.

That's not true all of the time, sure, but... What reason do I have to mod for rare of fire when I can instead just add more damage? "Fun?" Well... yes, actually. I like rapid-firing weapons, I like high recoil guns, I like the limitations that powerful weapons impose. But what's "fun" drastically diverges from what's "effective." So I have a choice. Do I go with what's fun and end up with an unenjoyable experience fighting deliberate bullet sponges? Do I go with what's effective and play in a way I don't enjoy? There is no winning move here.

I know we've discussed this before so I'll keep it short, but: I don't believe that modern video games benefit from heavy RPG elements or min/maxing. This is not a tabletop RPG where our interaction with the world is limited. This is an action game where we control our characters directly. This level of interactivity should allow the game to simulate our actions, rather than abstracting them to stats. Our "builds" should determine what we can and can't do, not how high our stats are.

 

24 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

However, some mods I think do present valid models for gameplay enhancers: Argon Scope for example at least incentivizes us to aim and headshot, whereas some sets encourage us to switch up our play a little bit, such as Proton mods rewarding us for shooting while wall latched. Given appropriate framing, even a pure damage boost can be made into an interesting effect, and there are some mods like those in Warframe even now. It's just a shame that those mods are a small minority out of all of our options, and are so much weaker than the meta options to boot. Not only would I like mandatory mods changed or removed, I'd like the healthier mods brought to the forefront so that if there is to be a meta, it would revolve around stuff that would actually alter our play.

While I'm not necessarily a fan of those specific mods, I see your overall point. There do exist some mods - and even some builds - which drastically alter how we play. I have a friend who tends to go for high-maintenance, high-risk builds. He has a Gara built to maintain and stack Shatter Armour. Most of what he does during a mission is fight, Vitrify, shatter, recast. It's effective and he has a ton of fun doing that. I would personally suffer a nervous breakdown with such a build, but to each his own :) More importantly - this fundamentally alters how he plays.

Warframe selection is one of the few things in this game that actually really matters, because a Warframe's kit can define a playstyle. Gauss wants to stay on the move and run long distances. Grendel has a lot of enemy control to him (I should try his new augment). Baruuk spends time baiting enemies into shooting him. Frost can turtle. Sure, a large number of Warframes are dull as dishwater - part of DE's push to constantly release new ones, even if they don't have great ideas for how they should play. But there's enough variety there. Unfortunately, very little of that is found in the actual modding system. You can make bespoke exotic builds, to be sure, but the vast majority of them are either samey or pointless.

And then we circle back around to the same thing. I'd rather the game gave me a small amount of meaningful choices than a large amount of stat tweaks. I've found more variety in tweaking my Titanfall 2 and For Honour characters than I have tweaking my Warframes a lot of the time - not because those games have more customisability or variety, but rather because the choices they offer me actually matter.

[Tyreaus]

On 2022-02-28 at 12:57 PM, Steel_Rook said:

None of these tools are good, though. Damage gates are a generally awful mechanic which nobody actually likes. At best they're imperceptible, at worst they turn combat into an ugly meta of breakpoints. Calculate where the enemy's damage gates are, ensure that none of your weapons deal more damage than that. It shifts the back-end Arsenal min/maxing around, has little effect in actual practice and ensures that certain weapons simply have no use. Specifically, high-damage sniper rifles which could typically easily hit harder than damage gates permit.

My talk on those tools was in the context of quests, however. Repetitive gameplay loops beget leans to a meta and optimization—where most fixes for damage numbers fall apart. If you're going through a questline, there's a different time tradeoff: you can take the time to optimize, but because you're running through the quest only once (maybe a few times), the payoff isn't as easily made up. Take a minute to shave off 2 seconds in a Capture run and 30 runs later, you've made back that time. In non-repetitive situations, you have to shave off as much time as you put in toward optimization. That means a smaller incentive to buckle down and figure out the absolute best path.

I agree, completely, that those forms of damage mitigation and pace control don't work in standard gameplay, as optimization tends to nuke them. But standard gameplay and quest gameplay have different considerations. Regular gameplay doesn't have to work with a narrative pace, for example, and so can play looser with how fast we blow things up.

On 2022-02-28 at 12:57 PM, Steel_Rook said:

No balance method is truly "future-proof" if you expect developers to be stupid and undermine their own design. However, a stats squish allows for a fresh start where massive power creep isn't necessary solely to make new items in any way relevant. Realistically speaking, most power creep isn't the result of developers being dumb, though. It happens because developers have little appetite for public backlash when they make necessary changes. Easier to buff everything than to nerf the few things causing the issue. The longer you do that, the harder it is to fix. And DE seem to have been doing this for 8 years.

I've mentioned this in another thread: I see Warframe as behaving like an idle game, where it's a pursuit of constant increases and bigger numbers and optimization. The issue being that it doesn't want to be that. It doesn't create a clean progression hierarchy (see many Prime weapons after Bramma just not competing with the latter), or develop well-scaling benchmarks alongside content releases—practically, everything is at the same level as it's ever been, and everything keeps getting put at that same level in lieu of clear, upwards progression.

The problem, to me, is less about the stats, and more about the overarching game not actually having an honest design that can work with those stats. Like I said: a stat squish gets undone as soon as more buffs come about. That's a major problem: the fix to a problem shouldn't be undone by the same design that identifies it as a problem. It's literally creating its own issue.

[Steel_Rook]

26 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

The problem, to me, is less about the stats, and more about the overarching game not actually having an honest design that can work with those stats. Like I said: a stat squish gets undone as soon as more buffs come about. That's a major problem: the fix to a problem shouldn't be undone by the same design that identifies it as a problem. It's literally creating its own issue.

But what you're describing there is a conundrum. For "stat squish" to even happen, DE would need to acknowledge and comprehend the issue of power creep first. Without that, no stat squish can happen because the game appears to be functioning as intended. With said acknowledgement and comprehension, though, stat squish is unlikely to happen again - not unless the developers in charge are stupid or the entire team gets replaced by fresh people. Power creep is a self-perpetuating thing. The developers have to keep releasing more and more broken things, because otherwise nobody will use them. Solving power creep - or at the very least substantially mitigating it - has the knock-on effect of also mitigating the cause for future power creep.

What leads you to believe that a stat squish will be followed by more power creep? You keep saying that as though it's supposed to be self-evident, but it doesn't seem to follow from where I'm standing.

 

31 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

I've mentioned this in another thread: I see Warframe as behaving like an idle game, where it's a pursuit of constant increases and bigger numbers and optimization. The issue being that it doesn't want to be that. It doesn't create a clean progression hierarchy (see many Prime weapons after Bramma just not competing with the latter), or develop well-scaling benchmarks alongside content releases—practically, everything is at the same level as it's ever been, and everything keeps getting put at that same level in lieu of clear, upwards progression.

Warframe has a wealth of issues above and beyond power creep, sure. I've gone on at length about it in this very thread. Unfortunately, power creep is the nexus around which everything revolves - the root of all the surrounding issues. You can kinda-sorta mitigate some of them, but you can't really solve any of them while stats are so far outside their ideal brackets. Throwing in more complicated, conditional stats isn't future-proofing system. These are specific fixes for specific problems. If you assume that DE can't do balance at all, then even fixes like damage gates and damage resistance will lose their relevance once numbers go even higher.

Few if any systems in this game scale linearly. They're only really balanced against each other within specific stat ranges. Go outside those ranges and some systems scale harder than others, with everything falling out of balance again. Grineer armour IS a source of level-dependent damage resistance, and that spectacularly does not work. The Armour -> Resistance -> EHP calculation is quite as a means of creating a linear relationship... which is why DE had to scale armour exponentially with enemy level. They had to break their own clever math once stats got out of hand. Not only does this make the Grineer drastically tougher than anything else (to the point that Corpus and Infested have started using Grineer armour here and there), but it creates massive differences in survivability just between the different Grineer. Minuscule differences in resistance are magnified horrendously when resistance approaches 100%.

And that's just off the top of my head. You can't future-proof everything. Sometimes, discipline in design is necessary.