On the topic of nerfs, balancing and expansions

[Draelocke]

Could we keep massive and sweeping balancing changes to their own patch? Releasing what amounts to an expansion at the same time as you rebalance isn't exactly fun to come back to. I'd rather see a balancing patch, adapt to it, and then see entire new systems, but not both at the same time. I've found it very hard to care for quite awhile now and I'm sure I'll be flamed, but you have to give people time to adapt and not just shove 20,000 things in their faces at once. 

[SDGDen]

NGL, "please do balance patches separately" is a pretty solid take. i'd also like to see them roll out more rapidly and more often. 

[Steel_Rook]

I don't see the point, personally. People are going to come back for the major content releases. Even if a balance patch launched earlier, the first time a returning player is likely to encounter it is whenever the next big shiny comes out. This accomplishes very little. What it does do, however, is pull nerfs into their own updates, with only "negative" aspects to look forward to. DE deliberately bundle what are sure to be unpopular but NECESSARY balance changes with events, rewards or content updates, in the hopes of less starkly negative reactions.

Players are not good at game design, more often than not. Players don't like having their power reduced, even if it's objectively better for the overall experience. There's no world in which a nerf isn't going to rile people up. Pulling it out to its own patch is not going to help.

[(PSN)gadgaurd]

I don't see what's stopping anyone from adjusting to changes, you certainly have time to. 

[(XBOX)Shodian]

The changes weren't even that severe. Really didn't take long at all to get it right.

[ChaosSpectre86]

On 2022-09-18 at 7:57 AM, Steel_Rook said:

I don't see the point, personally. People are going to come back for the major content releases. Even if a balance patch launched earlier, the first time a returning player is likely to encounter it is whenever the next big shiny comes out. This accomplishes very little. What it does do, however, is pull nerfs into their own updates, with only "negative" aspects to look forward to. DE deliberately bundle what are sure to be unpopular but NECESSARY balance changes with events, rewards or content updates, in the hopes of less starkly negative reactions.

Players are not good at game design, more often than not. Players don't like having their power reduced, even if it's objectively better for the overall experience. There's no world in which a nerf isn't going to rile people up. Pulling it out to its own patch is not going to help.

Rebalancing doesn't always have to be nerfs, I think DE should try to balance out underpowered content with overpowered content in these kinds of patches. Which, they sorta did for the starter frames, as well as spoiler mode switching and weapon swapping which has been a huge help in general gameplay, that and the syndicate pledging system. The changes in this update were just much bigger because of the dominant strategy players use, so the backlash was kind of expected when you are telling afk farmers, which is probably most of the veteran community because it is such a prominent strategy to use, that their process of standing still and getting all the things and not actually playing the game is no longer going to be viable. Sure the bat may have swung a bit too hard on ammo, but we have ammo pizzas, so it's whatever.

As for the point of what OP is talking about, on one hand dropping balance patches prior to content patches would result in smoother update cycles. If it was cyclical, like content patch is a flat number update and balance patch is the #.5 version of that previous content update, then I think it might work out better. Players get time to play with new balance and some of the rougher bugs get worked out, then when the next content drop happens, the harder to find bugs can be tackled more due to a population burst, but it ends up being a bit smoother on each content update and lets the semi-frequent players experience a cleaner game each time. On the other hand, getting all that data out the gate with the current methods they use might be how their system works for tackling bugs, so its easier to drop in large bursts like this for them, even though the game technically suffers for it.

Personally, I'd rather a cyclical system where content updates are just that, content, and major gameplay shifts like rebalancing drop before the content update so the players and DE have time to adjust for the incoming content. For example, if they redid armor with the release of the Duviri Paradox, it would be a horrid mess, as players would have to change their builds completely for any incoming content that isn't part of the Roguelike, and even the Roguelike would most likely suffer pretty bad balancing issues because of a lack of larger scale testing. Same goes for the recent patch, most people could have adjusted their builds ahead of time and gotten their frustration out of the way, then when Veilbreaker dropped more effort could have been put into feedback for the update rather than the rebalancing. Frankly, the anger over the rebalancing has probably drowned a lot of the Veilbreaker feedback out, which cannot make tackling these issues easier.

[Steel_Rook]

26 minutes ago, Jareson said:

Rebalancing doesn't always have to be nerfs, I think DE should try to balance out underpowered content with overpowered content in these kinds of patches. Which, they sorta did for the starter frames, as well as spoiler mode switching and weapon swapping which has been a huge help in general gameplay, that and the syndicate pledging system. The changes in this update were just much bigger because of the dominant strategy players use, so the backlash was kind of expected when you are telling afk farmers, which is probably most of the veteran community because it is such a prominent strategy to use, that their process of standing still and getting all the things and not actually playing the game is no longer going to be viable. Sure the bat may have swung a bit too hard on ammo, but we have ammo pizzas, so it's whatever.

The problem here is the game's overall state. DE have been asleep at the wheel for years - since before I started playing, and I've been around for 4-5 years now. They've let power creep spiral out of control to such an absurd extent that there's quite literally no way to do balance without taking halligan to people's builds. Yes, the new system improved starter Warframes and weapon switching and actually improved ammo for a majority of weapons, when all is said and done. Doesn't matter. All people care about is their fire-and-forget launchers are no longer viable. That's the response you can expect to any actually meaningful balance change, and it really annoys me. These changes are GOOD. Not only do they address power creep, but they refurbish an AWFUL old system into a far better one.

DE's approach as far back as I remember has been to try and help us swallow our bitter pills with a bit of sugar. Nerfs... but also new shiny! Angry veterans... but also a new grindwall! It keeps people placated and takes the edge off the worst of the responses. Warframe is an old game. That's not a comment on its quality, but rather on its community. So, so, SO many veterans appear to fundamentally not like the game, but keep playing it out of a combination of spite, habit and conditioning. An update that's just a nerf with not much else to it is going to be the yet another "last straw" for those who were already discontent to begin with. Look at Railjack 2.0 (3.0? I've lost track) and how negatively that was received despite actually bringing playability to an otherwise half-assed broken system.

I honestly think that DE have painted themselves into a corner. They need to constantly placate the playerbase or risk a world of trouble.

 

36 minutes ago, Jareson said:

As for the point of what OP is talking about, on one hand dropping balance patches prior to content patches would result in smoother update cycles. If it was cyclical, like content patch is a flat number update and balance patch is the #.5 version of that previous content update, then I think it might work out better. Players get time to play with new balance and some of the rougher bugs get worked out, then when the next content drop happens, the harder to find bugs can be tackled more due to a population burst, but it ends up being a bit smoother on each content update and lets the semi-frequent players experience a cleaner game each time. On the other hand, getting all that data out the gate with the current methods they use might be how their system works for tackling bugs, so its easier to drop in large bursts like this for them, even though the game technically suffers for it.

I don't know. I still don't see it. It's not like there's all that much we can even do to adapt to the ammo changes which we didn't already have before. Use ammo mutation, carry back-up weapons, use different weapons. Those in position to be spamming the problematic high-level AoE guns would have access to other tools and the rest likely weren't doing that. I'm speculating, obviously, but it's not like the game itself got any harder. I don't see how more time would have helped people adapt to it - more than a few days, anyway.

More to the point, though - the problem remains as above. Warframe survives in large part on hype. As significant as content infusions are, they have the standard MMO problem - people blow through them far faster than DE can make them. No matter what they release, it's never going to be particularly big. The New War was certainly cool, but it amounted to a few hours and a few guns. The Zariman is incredibly impressive, but it amounts to one tileset and two mission types. These are NOT small things, don't get me wrong. I LOVE the Zariman tileset and the more exploration-focused dynamic. But it can't be denied that players burned out on it in a few days, if not a few weeks.

You need the hype. As negatively as nerfs are taken, they still generate hype. They generate conversation. They add to the "weight" of the event. I don't care about Duviri one bit. I'm back posting on these forums precisely because I like the ammo changes :) Obviously, that could just be me. You clearly disagree and I can't fault you for that. I just don't feel that DE have the capacity to drop large enough updates to carry themselves. The mechanics changes ARE a major part of the update's contents. At least I think so, anyway.

 

I'm not saying that this separation is necessarily WRONG. I just don't think it'll accomplish its stated goals, while risking giving people more to complain about.

[ChaosSpectre86]

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

The problem here is the game's overall state. DE have been asleep at the wheel for years - since before I started playing, and I've been around for 4-5 years now. They've let power creep spiral out of control to such an absurd extent that there's quite literally no way to do balance without taking halligan to people's builds. Yes, the new system improved starter Warframes and weapon switching and actually improved ammo for a majority of weapons, when all is said and done. Doesn't matter. All people care about is their fire-and-forget launchers are no longer viable. That's the response you can expect to any actually meaningful balance change, and it really annoys me. These changes are GOOD. Not only do they address power creep, but they refurbish an AWFUL old system into a far better one.

DE's approach as far back as I remember has been to try and help us swallow our bitter pills with a bit of sugar. Nerfs... but also new shiny! Angry veterans... but also a new grindwall! It keeps people placated and takes the edge off the worst of the responses. Warframe is an old game. That's not a comment on its quality, but rather on its community. So, so, SO many veterans appear to fundamentally not like the game, but keep playing it out of a combination of spite, habit and conditioning. An update that's just a nerf with not much else to it is going to be the yet another "last straw" for those who were already discontent to begin with. Look at Railjack 2.0 (3.0? I've lost track) and how negatively that was received despite actually bringing playability to an otherwise half-assed broken system.

I honestly think that DE have painted themselves into a corner. They need to constantly placate the playerbase or risk a world of trouble.

 

I don't know. I still don't see it. It's not like there's all that much we can even do to adapt to the ammo changes which we didn't already have before. Use ammo mutation, carry back-up weapons, use different weapons. Those in position to be spamming the problematic high-level AoE guns would have access to other tools and the rest likely weren't doing that. I'm speculating, obviously, but it's not like the game itself got any harder. I don't see how more time would have helped people adapt to it - more than a few days, anyway.

More to the point, though - the problem remains as above. Warframe survives in large part on hype. As significant as content infusions are, they have the standard MMO problem - people blow through them far faster than DE can make them. No matter what they release, it's never going to be particularly big. The New War was certainly cool, but it amounted to a few hours and a few guns. The Zariman is incredibly impressive, but it amounts to one tileset and two mission types. These are NOT small things, don't get me wrong. I LOVE the Zariman tileset and the more exploration-focused dynamic. But it can't be denied that players burned out on it in a few days, if not a few weeks.

You need the hype. As negatively as nerfs are taken, they still generate hype. They generate conversation. They add to the "weight" of the event. I don't care about Duviri one bit. I'm back posting on these forums precisely because I like the ammo changes :) Obviously, that could just be me. You clearly disagree and I can't fault you for that. I just don't feel that DE have the capacity to drop large enough updates to carry themselves. The mechanics changes ARE a major part of the update's contents. At least I think so, anyway.

 

I'm not saying that this separation is necessarily WRONG. I just don't think it'll accomplish its stated goals, while risking giving people more to complain about.

Oh I'm actually in the same boat as you on the changes, I think they were necessary and I'm really happy to see them, it is actually what brought me back. I'm a Founder, been on and off this game since I had access to it in 2012, but I left last time because the lead up to railjack was a mess, I was fed up with the relentless delay in promised content, ignored promises that piled up higher than any game I know (they once said we would be able to use melee combat to influence stance drops or unlock stances on said weapon, that never happened lol), and the one that actually set me off was how completely hostile the vocal minority of the community was for a balanced universal vacuum/fetch system so our pets don't need to have those mods forced on. If anything, the community at the time drove me away, but I've come to learn the forum and reddit communities are NOT the same as the in game people, who tend to be super chill and helpful.

As for the hype, I actually do disagree on that cause Warframe lives in a PR vacuum where unless you are playing the game, you tend to only hear good things about it. Nothing ever gets outside of that bubble unless it is particularly negative, like the moderator issues a couple years back. Once I stopped paying attention to Warframe, I only remembered it when Tennocon would happen, its a weird space many f2p games end up in when they survive way longer than expected. Hype may increase player numbers for a bit, but Warframe has survived safely around 30k-50k players average for a long time now on steam, and the number really does not shift much. Even when they do shift, the biggest monthly increase I can see on steam charts was 24k players in October of 2017, and the biggest reduction was 17k in September of 2018. Over the past year, they have lost about 11k players, but the year isn't over and Duviri will probably swing those numbers again in favor. Overall, the numbers don't change much, Warframe is definitely not living on the edge like people seem to think, its a pretty established and profitable game honestly. I only recently realized this, so I don't fault anyone for thinking otherwise, but those numbers are definitely not bad numbers, and that doesn't even include non-steam players. 

I do think the content they put out is too easy to burn through. While I don't mind chilling and doing cosmetic farming and stuff now that I'm not so hardcore on gaming anymore, I was gone for like 2 years and I finished most content within the first week. I know Steve said a long time ago, when he revealed Railjack, that it was intended to unify "the whole" game, which a lot of us assumed meant we were going to be using Railjack to navigate the star chart instead of the current navigation, but most of the Railjack "promises" didn't happen, and stuff like that is why the content burns too easily. Most content is in islands, it does not generally contribute to the whole, but with Zariman and now Veilbreaker, thats not the same case. Zariman may have been its own place, but it became a defacto focus-farming place and it improved my experience with the focus system, which I largely ignored before. Veilbreaker added in a system to make older, weaker warframes capable of being stronger and more valuable, letting people have a higher chance at using their favorite frames in all content. Even if the content of Veilbreaker might be a bit meh for some (I love Kahl personally), the impact improves the underlying game in the end, and thats more of what we need, rather than another open world with disconnected loot. 

Based on timeframe, those patches were under the direction of Rebecca, and that's part of why I came back because as much as I loved Warframe, it had been being built on a crumbling castle for years and I was tired of waiting for the castle to fall or fix. Now with new direction, the castle seems to be getting a lot of repairs while still building, and I for one am happy about basically all of it. I just also feel it might be more stable if we didn't just slap down another layer of bricks at the same time, and instead laid them in sections to make sure each section fits better. If they ever figure out how to get the test cluster functioning in a useful manner, this might still happen, but in a public beta space instead of in on live servers.

[Steel_Rook]

6 minutes ago, Jareson said:

the one that actually set me off was how completely hostile the vocal minority of the community was for a balanced universal vacuum/fetch system so our pets don't need to have those mods forced on.

Don't remind me... This one blows my mind. While I know it's not the same people, we have a community that will simultaneously decry even the perception of "power creep" in quality of life while review-bombing the game over reversing preexisting power creep. Far as I'm concerned, stuff like Vacuum, Radar and those locker-opening mods (that no longer seem relevant since new tilesets don't have lockers) need to either be made universal or moved to the Parazon. Think about it - the mod to open locked lockers is an Exilus, but the mod to sometimes auto-unlock alarm/door consoles is a Parazon mod. One is a better fit than the other.

 

9 minutes ago, Jareson said:

I know Steve said a long time ago, when he revealed Railjack, that it was intended to unify "the whole" game, which a lot of us assumed meant we were going to be using Railjack to navigate the star chart instead of the current navigation, but most of the Railjack "promises" didn't happen, and stuff like that is why the content burns too easily.

Railjack was (and still is, really) such a S#&$show... I love the concept, I kind of like the implementation but GOOD GOD DE dropped the ball so hard on that. I played it on release. I've never faced so many crashes, hard-locks, soft-locks, progression loss, bugs, glitches and jank in any game I've ever played - and I've played pre-alphas off of Kickstarter. That thing was simply completely unfinished on release, even with the week-long delay stringing us along with 24-hour crafting timers for components. It was an utter disgrace, and they knew it. The developer streams following Railjack were grim.

And honestly, I could live with an awful release. It's a start, it's laying the foundation... if they'd had ANY plans for what to do with it next, or even any idea what to do with it now. And if it hadn't come bundled with Liches - easily the worst, grindiest, most exploitative system we've ever seen on release. Awful content bundled with relentless grind. It was so bad that they had to do not one but two major redesigns of the entire system, stumbling in the dark for some kind of cohesive design and some kind of gameplay loop that didn't suck.

And that was what? 2 years ago? 3 years ago? What's happened since then? Don't get me wrong, integrating ground missions into Railjack was awesome, but to what end? It still lives in its own content island where I keep forgetting about it. Railjack could have revolutionised the entire game, but instead it sits ostensibly abandoned while we focus on other things.

 

Tell you what - here's a compromise. How about whole-number updates be content updates, and .5 updates be Revised updates? You know, Warframe Revised, Railjack Revised, I forget what else? You can bundle the major mechanics changes in there. This could have easily launched as Ammo Revised. That, I think, is strong enough to carry itself. Because Lord knows Warframe needs more of those.

[ChaosSpectre86]

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Don't remind me... This one blows my mind. While I know it's not the same people, we have a community that will simultaneously decry even the perception of "power creep" in quality of life while review-bombing the game over reversing preexisting power creep. Far as I'm concerned, stuff like Vacuum, Radar and those locker-opening mods (that no longer seem relevant since new tilesets don't have lockers) need to either be made universal or moved to the Parazon. Think about it - the mod to open locked lockers is an Exilus, but the mod to sometimes auto-unlock alarm/door consoles is a Parazon mod. One is a better fit than the other.

I didn't engage with Liches much when they dropped so I didn't even pay attention to the Parazon, but now that you mention it yeah I 200% agree with you. It's really weird that it has its own mods that benefit in the same way as mods on other gear, but the other gear has no true use for it because it is effectively wasting a mod slot. Mods have needed a rework since 2.0 honestly, which I think that happened in like 2014, so we are still working with a system that has little to no tutorial for about 8 years now lol. I don't necessarily think mods are bad as an idea, but the current implementation with all of the content bloat for said system has made it exhausting to use, whether you are new or returning, and I'm sure it's grating on those who stuck around. Theres just too many mods and now would probably be one of the best times to go through and clean it up, much like those quick holster mods got redone with the holster speed increase. 

Glad I missed the launch of railjack though, cause oh boy when I heard it went live at the game award I knew it was gonna be a disaster and it was rushed lol.

 

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Tell you what - here's a compromise. How about whole-number updates be content updates, and .5 updates be Revised updates? You know, Warframe Revised, Railjack Revised, I forget what else? You can bundle the major mechanics changes in there. This could have easily launched as Ammo Revised. That, I think, is strong enough to carry itself. Because Lord knows Warframe needs more of those.

I actually think this would be the perfect cadence, especially right now. New War felt like the ending of a major arc, and the fact that there was a change in leadership around the same time also feels like a perfect time to try to refine Warframe into a better overall package. It does feel like that is the intent to some degree at least, even if the start of it is rough. With the mention of bringing Trials back as well, I do get the feeling that the beginning of Rebecca being in charge will be marked by a variety of system changes to hopefully make the future easier to handle overall. That last devstream was full of hope to clean up the game, especially from Pablo, and it has me very hopeful, even if it will probably take a year or two just to clean up everything major from the past 10 years. 

Side note, I work as a developer and the concept of "Devops" has taken hold pretty hard these days, though slowly in the game industry. Devops is essentially a process by which development companies create easier systems to create, test, and push out content that involves all necessary teams (Developers and Operations teams used to be really disconnected, this was the solution the industry started adopting). Butterscotch Shenanigans did a great talk on it for GDC, and it makes it pretty clear why the game industry as a whole is such a mess when it comes to product performance on release, especially with crunch culture being the polar opposite scenario of proper Devops. If you hear a dev team suffered crunch, immediately point fingers at leadership for letting that happen, as it is entirely on them for having poor to no organizational team building skills. I'm hoping that Rebecca and whoever is working with her is helping organize and clean up the underlying bones of Warframe and their development structure so they can start pushing cleaner, more refined patches. I've yet to hear the term "devops", but as someone who swears by it, I'm noticing a lot of things that look like a shift in cleaning up their development process, which is much better than kind of feeling like it was burning the candle at both ends by ignoring past content and dropping buggy content regularly.

[CoffeeElemental]

I wish DE released balance patches to public test server first.
They tried it only one time in my memory - and it actually helped to find a lot of bugs and balance problems (it was the Deimos Arcana test release).

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, Jareson said:

I don't necessarily think mods are bad as an idea, but the current implementation with all of the content bloat for said system has made it exhausting to use, whether you are new or returning, and I'm sure it's grating on those who stuck around. Theres just too many mods and now would probably be one of the best times to go through and clean it up, much like those quick holster mods got redone with the holster speed increase.

I don't think mods themselves are a bad idea, either. It's the way they stack and the selection we get which cause the biggest issues. If given the choice, players will always build for more damage because that's almost always going to perform better than faster reload or larger magazine. What that does is we end up filling the majority of our slots with various flavours of damage and displace everything else. Hence, the "mandatory mods" of base damage, multishot, critical chance, critical damage, 1-2 elemental damage, maybe more. That's 6 slots out of 8, if not more. And what makes it worse is that most of the mod types I listed are multiplicative with each other, so damage balloons to utterly ridiculous levels.

Modding is a good system in practice. I wouldn't want to scrap it. However, I do want to take sledgehammer to its balance. The one thing I've proposed nearly every time this topic comes up is "make everything additive". Make base damage, elemental damage, critical damage, headshot damage, damage buffs - EVERYTHING!!! - additive. That'll still give us significant increase over base damage, just to the 10-ish times, rather than multiple hundreds of times. If we want to go farther, then I'd say scrap multishot altogether, change elemental damage mods to transform part of weapon damage into an element rather than adding more and roll all the "like" damage mods together into a mutually-exclusive group. Either Serration OR Heavy Calibre, but not both - as an example.

That would both take a massive chunk out of our damage creep, as well as open up mod slots for more interesting things than "MOAR DAMAGE!!!"

 

14 hours ago, Jareson said:

I'm hoping that Rebecca and whoever is working with her is helping organize and clean up the underlying bones of Warframe and their development structure so they can start pushing cleaner, more refined patches. I've yet to hear the term "devops", but as someone who swears by it, I'm noticing a lot of things that look like a shift in cleaning up their development process, which is much better than kind of feeling like it was burning the candle at both ends by ignoring past content and dropping buggy content regularly.

Rebecca and Pablo, from what I've heard but I'm not sure. And yes, I hope so too. Warframe has a rich history of releasing new systems, giving them maybe one major patch, then shelving them for 5 years to focus on new shinies. In the meantime, Pets 2.0 has transitioned from joke to straight-up meme at this point. Combine this with an utter refusal to upset players to a significant degree, and you get a stagnant zombie game. Content keeps coming out, but the rot becomes harder and harder to overlook. Let's hope the change in leadership addresses this, at least to some extent.

The last update is good. Ammo was a dreadfully awful system, now it's a lot cleaner and smarter. I would have hoped to see wider availability of both ammo capacity and ammo pick-up mods, but I guess those would have made people even angrier. "You took away my ammo, and now I have to mod to get it back!" But that's the thing, though. If you want a system that's not just "10 sources of damage", you need to let players mod for accuracy, stability, ammo pick-up, etc. Sadly, most weapons in Warframe are already accurate enough and have no recoil, while ammo pick-up is fixed and ammo capacity is only available through auras.

What worries me, personally, is that we might see a focus shift to greater monetisation, gamification and grind. Grind in particular has been getting worse with increasing severity of late. "Extrinsic rewards", it seems. But eh - it helps to be hopeful, rather than pessimistic :)

[Erubian_Warlord]

On 2022-09-19 at 7:28 PM, CoffeeElemental said:

I wish DE released balance patches to public test server first.
They tried it only one time in my memory - and it actually helped to find a lot of bugs and balance problems (it was the Deimos Arcana test release).

same if they actually tested things and i mean really tested them then things like overguard might have been implemented in a better state