Speed Up all Endless Mission Scaling to match Cascade/Disruption

[Voltage]

Title. Survival takes 8 whole hours to get to level cap. That's a full work day for many people, an entire day of a weekend, or an unhealthy venture into the night to see level-cap enemies outside of Disruption/Cascade. Endless Missions past 20/30 minutes aren't very popular in this day and age of the game, so dramatically scaling enemies after 60 minutes or so worth of objective time for the next hour or 2 (2-3 hours capping enemy level) in these old endless modes would make them a bit more engaging and practical to achieve for the average adult with responsibilities.

Last night I was 7 hours into Survival when I received a host migration. I force closed the game to attempt to rejoin, and I was not met with a reconnect prompt. I was annoyed, but in the end it made me realize how ridiculous it is that I wasted the entire time I had with this Affinity booster weekend trying to just get to that level and maximize Affinity (outside of Adaro/ESO in shoehorned loadouts). It took quite literally my entire remaining Saturday just to reach that point.

Re-evaluating the time it takes to scale endless missions needs to be retroactively applied to old modes. Disruption and Cascade are both on the newer end of endless mission types and both have this design in mind. The thing with Warframe endurance is that there is a large black hole in matchmaking. People are either doing a few rotation C for rewards, or level-cap for endurance. Nobody is doing "5 hour runs" or "3 hour runs". People are either doing ~20-60 minutes, or level-cap. Giving players the ability to reach the high end in a more reasonable fashion would be a more welcoming and pleasant experience for everyone, either those already doing these missions for 8 hours or those who literally don't have the time but would like to.

[Lutesque]

Yes.... force everbody to play on the Level you do.... and risk people complaining and having your idea nerfed....

Ooooooor.

Suggest a Level Selector/Slider ?

 

[lukinu_u]

This sounds obvious, but"level cap runs" aren't meant to be a thing in the way the game is designed.
They provide nothing interesting regarding difficulty or rewards, and as you can see, the time it takes show how ridiculous and unintended this is.

What is needed isn't a faster scaling, but a complete rework to the way difficulty scale to be meaningful (in the case DE want to go that route).

And until some proper changes are done to this stuff, I really think the recent decisions of making the scaling less meaningful and provide "high level" starting missions (Bounties, Steel Path, Arbitration, etc...) is the right things to do.

[Leqesai]

15 minutes ago, lukinu_u said:

This sounds obvious, but"level cap runs" aren't meant to be a thing in the way the game is designed.
They provide nothing interesting regarding difficulty or rewards, and as you can see, the time it takes show how ridiculous and unintended this is.

What is needed isn't a faster scaling, but a complete rework to the way difficulty scale to be meaningful (in the case DE want to go that route).

And until some proper changes are done to this stuff, I really think the recent decisions of making the scaling less meaningful and provide "high level" starting missions (Bounties, Steel Path, Arbitration, etc...) is the right things to do.

Well said.

The game is not, nor has it ever been, balanced around long endurance runs. If we are to see some balance done for endurance players it should be more meaningful difficulty added so players aren't pushing enemy levels to 9999.

[NezuHimeSama]

Mission scaling for old missions is garbage though, and has been for a very, very long time. Waiting through 20 minutes of boredom for a chance at a drop sucks a lot.

[--END--Rikutatis]

I 100% agree with OP. 

Endurance and eidolon speedrunning are the only two things (other than now defunct trials) that offered some sort of meaningful long lasting endgame activity and even spurred entire communities dedicated to these activities. Endurance has been a staple of Warframe (even if a niche one) since the days of void keys at least. It's always been around, whether people like it or not. DE seemed to have realized this and even decided to encourage it around the time they started investing in Arbitrations and made new endless modes scale faster (Disruption, Zariman Void). 

That said, I do think there's probably spaguetti code issues preventing DE to do the same fast scaling for older endless missions like survival and defense. It might require more time invested into it than simply turning on a switch, so I doubt this will be a priority any time soon. 

[Voltage]

On 2022-05-22 at 3:12 PM, Lutesque said:

Yes.... force everbody to play on the Level you do.... and risk people complaining and having your idea nerfed....

Ooooooor.

Suggest a Level Selector/Slider ?

 

 

On 2022-05-22 at 5:31 PM, lukinu_u said:

This sounds obvious, but"level cap runs" aren't meant to be a thing in the way the game is designed.
They provide nothing interesting regarding difficulty or rewards, and as you can see, the time it takes show how ridiculous and unintended this is.

What is needed isn't a faster scaling, but a complete rework to the way difficulty scale to be meaningful (in the case DE want to go that route).

And until some proper changes are done to this stuff, I really think the recent decisions of making the scaling less meaningful and provide "high level" starting missions (Bounties, Steel Path, Arbitration, etc...) is the right things to do.

Neither of you sound like you fall into the category of people who want to do hours in a mission. I never claimed it is balanced around this or something people have to engage with. All this proposal would do is make endless modes more consistent with scaling in a way where those who do want to do a long mission don't need to stay 8 hours to see a max level enemy. The people who only do an hour or so wouldn't see a change at all. I asked for a delayed ramp up, not some global difficulty shift from mission start.

[(XBOX)AMONGTHEWEAK]

We should have challenge rifts we can open where we choose the enemy difficulty/level like in Diablo with the greater rifts. No scaling up though, you choose a set point and the enemy stays at that level until you leave the rift. Rewards yielded are based on the level chosen. 
 

Greater rift 150 in Diablo being so hard you could only run through it with modded gear. 

 

No more wasting hours to reach level cap. 
 

 

 

[lukinu_u]

il y a une heure, Voltage a dit :

Neither of you sound like you fall into the category of people who want to do hours in a mission. I never claimed is balanced around this or something people have to engage with. All this proposal would do is make endless modes more consistent with scaling in a way where those who do want to do a long mission don't need to stay 8 hours to see a max level enemy. The people who only do an hour or so wouldn't see a change at all. I asked for a delayed ramp up, not some global difficulty shift from mission start.

What you say is contradictory.
You say we don't understand because we don't want to stay in missions for hours, but at the same time you want the level cap to arrive sooner, so you need to stay for hours in said mission.

And regardless of the reason you stay long in missions, what is the point of reaching level cap if said level don't mean anything ?

• If you just enjoy playing the same mission for a long time, the enemy scaling rate have no influence.
• If you enjoy difficulty and want to push the limit of your loadout, the way enemies scaling currently work is just meaningless, and you agree with the fact they would benefit from a rework.
• If you just want to reach level cap for some reasons, you're a very specific type of player that look for something... weird ? And the game shouldn't be designed around that to be fun for the vast majority of players.

[Frendh]

Having variety is better than making all the missions scale the same.

[Voltage]

3 hours ago, lukinu_u said:

What you say is contradictory.
You say we don't understand because we don't want to stay in missions for hours, but at the same time you want the level cap to arrive sooner, so you need to stay for hours in said mission.

And regardless of the reason you stay long in missions, what is the point of reaching level cap if said level don't mean anything ?

• If you just enjoy playing the same mission for a long time, the enemy scaling rate have no influence.
• If you enjoy difficulty and want to push the limit of your loadout, the way enemies scaling currently work is just meaningless, and you agree with the fact they would benefit from a rework.
• If you just want to reach level cap for some reasons, you're a very specific type of player that look for something... weird ? And the game shouldn't be designed around that to be fun for the vast majority of players.

Level-cap enemies make your weapons feel a bit more strained, you gain way more affinity, and it's kinda cool/fun to see that level.

Feedback in nature is given from a personal perspective. That's just common sense. My post gives the upsides to ramping up scaling a bit without changing the mission too much. It would literally be 1 formula change vs. reworking entire mode(s). Obviously the latter would benefit the game the most, but I wanted to give a bit more realistic feedback that I (and obviously a minority of others) would enjoy.

I know I am in the 1%, in the niche of niches, and probably one of the least profitable players with an account. I still (somehow lol) feel sharing my thoughts in writing to be read by others is more valuable than just going with the flow.

1 hour ago, Frendh said:

Having variety is better than making all the missions scale the same.

Well that is what various gamemodes are for. Variety is definitely a good thing, but I don't think it's really fair for DE to expect players to sit in one mission for 8 hours to see max level enemies when other modes where you aren't focused on the same type of objective only take a fraction of that. It's not like changing enemy scaling after a grace period really changes how players farm the game. I feel like even less people do 3-6 hour endurance missions than the people doing level-cap. I've been playing a long time and through observation, I see a void in matchmaking between 1-2 hours and level-cap meaning a change to enemy scaling to be a bit faster after some time wouldn't hurt the game.

[NezuHimeSama]

2 hours ago, Frendh said:

Having variety is better than making all the missions scale the same.

Does anyone actually want to have to spend more minimum mission time for the same loot chance and enemy level?

It would actually be pretty cool to be able to just drop into a game starting at any wave, and then redo drop tables to get rid of rotations. Does anything good even drop in a and b? c is the only rotation DE uses anyway, may as well just weight droprates as common, uncommon, and rare, and skew favor towards uncommon/rare at higher levels, and then let the player set the scaling themselves, to what they can handle.

[Frendh]

1 hour ago, Voltage said:

 

Well that is what various gamemodes are for. Variety is definitely a good thing, but I don't think it's really fair for DE to expect players to sit in one mission for 8 hours to see max level enemies when other modes where you aren't focused on the same type of objective only take a fraction of that. 

"Fair" is subjective and it is fine if you believe it to not be fair. But if you have not read previous posts by others, I am going to mention that there are players who do not want survival with harsher scaling. There are two modes with faster scaling and that is enough.

 

34 minutes ago, NezuHimeSama said:

Does anything good even drop in a and b? c is the only rotation DE uses anyway, 

For a lot of players B rotation is the most desirable one for some disruption missions. I do not have all drop tables memorized for all modes.

[NezuHimeSama]

And disruption scales fast and doesn't follow aabc, so the only time B is desirable is when the mission type is already doling out better balanced and faster paced drop tables.

Looking at the tables, it should only be applicable situationally to mars, uranus, and lua, the first of which is because C rotation disruptions never drops lith relics and someone might want to farm those, and uranus and lua are both for slightly more optimized relic farming, mostly because universal medalians are so universally reviled.

In all the games i've been in, though, I've only seen anyone going for b rotations specifically once on lua.

[Jackdarsan]

As of today there isn't any reward for spending 8 hours to reach level cap, the only reward is getting to see those crazy levels and trying to not get 1 shot.  

If rewards matched the level of the enemies, then I am 100% with you. Otherwise as you said, hardly anyone do more than 1hr runs. 

Much like steel path, why not add the option to start closer to level cap.  That would of been a nice reward for completing steel path star chart.