Survival revamp

[(PSN)M00n_Slippers]

As we all know, while Survival is a very popular game mode in warframe it has a lot of problems:

- Not spawning enough enemies to keep up life support at times even with the use of the life support towers, especially at lower levels where spawn rates are low as large amounts of enemies can overwhelm new players at the beginning of the game.
- The spawn locations becoming scattered when a party splits up across the tileset in search of enemies or life support towers, further exacerbating the problem.
- This problem contributing to issues with fissure missions and reactant drops, as the void fissure/reactant follows only one player.
- Camping and monotonous gameplay encouraged to properly keep up spawns, which is in opposition to the players desire to move throughout the map and increase the pace.

The question is how can these issues be addressed in a way that requires as few of the developers resources as possible. Essentially, changing the way enemies spawn is probably not something DE is capable of doing at this point. The goal is to use as many of the existing assets as possible. Here is a personal suggestion, please comment on these suggestions or add your own suggestions on how to fix survival to address these issues.

Suggested changes:

- Life support is always 100% in a room with an active life support tower, and last about the same length of time as a kuva survival tower's defense time, and then quickly degrades to 0%.
- Outside of this room, health and shields degrade very quickly, as there is 0% life support.
- As a drop, "Life support" is either removed or heavily decreased. It should be something to help one get from tile A to Tile B, not to survive outside the active tower.

What this accomplishes:

- Players are encouraged to stay in the room with active life support, allowing the existing spawn system to work properly, as leaving the room for long periods makes it difficult to keep up health and shields.
- Players are forced to move from tile to tile quickly as life support is drained, in order to activate the next life support tower. This Encouraged the players movement to different tiles throughout the map without camping in any one tile for the entire mission.
- This addresses spawns without significant changes and without requiring significant amounts of development, using existing mechanics and assets already within the game.

Thoughts?

[MURKWORKS]

A pretty cool idea...! 

[iHaku]

i agree that survival should inherently be more focused around staying together in a certain location, to encourage the "team" to stay grouped to not ruin spawn rates.

a slight tweak to your approach would be to have a main room, in which "life support" (represented as a personal bar) slowly fills up, all directly connected rooms simply halt the bar, and staying in a room that's further away increases the drain per second. once the bar is empty, shields/health rapidly deteriorate. this, however, can be reverted even after the bar hits zero by entering the main room again.

this lets you fill up a buffer which is needed to  a:  move from main room to the next, since  it should change and players need a certain amount of time to get there, and b: players need to get to extraction if they want to leave, leaving them exposed to no support rooms.