The game has far too many unreasonable fail states

[TheReaverOfDarkness]

Sometimes the mission parameters are very specific, and you have to follow them to the letter or you will fail. Other times, you follow the mission parameters to the letter and you fail anyway. Meanwhile, plenty of missions are more lenient. It is often very difficult to tell what you actually can and can't do, other than by trial and error. Much error. I would like to give some examples, and please keep in mind that there are many more and this list is barely scratching the surface.

Mission inactivity fail timer - as far as I can tell, the way it works is that any mission which has not moved toward completion within the last 30 minutes will give the player a 1 minute timer to finish the mission. Not only is this often way too short for the player to actually reach the end (especially if there are still objectives to be completed), but it also doesn't respond to player actions, such as completing mission objectives. It is get out in one minute or you fail. This is an absurdly short timeframe to thrust onto players who are often active within the mission, simply doing things other than what is on the objectives list--you know, because of the multitude of insanely difficult treasure hunts we're sent on? Are we just supposed to not do them? Because we're getting punished for participating!

Defense objectives dying all of a sudden, or defense missions seemingly failing when the defense target was fine - it seems to me that these fails are actually always caused by the defense target being destroyed, however it often does not seem like that is or should be the case. Several times I have seen a defense target be fine one moment and then mission failed mere seconds later while players were guarding it the whole time. I don't know what causes this. Some hard-hitting enemy? Radiation status on party members? An NPC designed to destroy the objective that doesn't stand out from the rest?

Sometimes the defense objective simply has too little HP relative to the enemies in the area. This is particularly common in the Cambion Drift, where defense targets will often be surrounded in such a storm of attacks that you can barely tell what's going on. Enemies will die the moment they spawn. And yet, the minuscule amount of damage they manage to lay onto the objective is often enough to kill it anyway. Or it'll be under attack from long range enemies such as Deimos Carnis, which will often attack from outside of render distance. It can be difficult to tell that it is even being attacked, let alone where from, and its pitifully tiny HP means it'll just die even though you actually did a good job guarding it.

A similar issue happens commonly in excavation missions, especially higher level. In the level 40-60 range, excavators get destroyed by enemies in such a short amount of time that you often can't leave it to go anywhere or do anything. So what do you do when it runs out of power and no power carriers are coming? If you run lightning fast to grab the nearest power core, it'll be dead by the time you get back. If you stay and wait, and kill enemies, they will just whittle it down with splash damage since it can't regenerate itself without power. Although, while excavation missions are horrible and awful, nonetheless you don't fail the mission simply from losing a few excavators.

Survival missions do not fail you the moment life support reaches 0%, which makes perfect sense but based on DE's game design decisions in the rest of the game, this utterly surprised me. Still, what we have is not a lot better. So when life support runs out, you start taking health damage. Fine, totally makes sense. But then other things happen which don't make sense: immediately the mission timer stops counting, all life support pickups and canisters vanish, enemies stop dropping life support, enemies stop spawning, and the mission fails after 5 minutes even though it doesn't give you a warning or countdown timer that this will happen. It seems to me to make perfect sense that none of these things should happen, that in fact if you can survive long enough to collect more life support, you should be able to continue the mission. To prevent people from just ignoring life support needs by healing themselves, simply make the health damage effect gradually scale up. Or stop fussing about non-issues and let people play how they want.

Orphix missions are really difficult because the sentient control meter climbs too rapidly to reasonably deal with. But what makes it worse is that the things you have to shoot are often positioned in places which are not only stupidly difficult to find but moreover virtually inaccessible to necramechs. If you're going to force us into operator mode to complete the mission, then don't surround us with enough enemies to kill a necramech. That's not fun, it's just pain. And don't even get me started on Void Cascade.

Spy missions - they vary a lot in terms of just how stupid they get, but I think most people will agree with me that the Uranus spy areas are among the worst. There are too many areas where you have some ridiculous expectation, like climb a big tower and somehow not get seen by the multiple Grineer alarm drones cruising the area which have 360º field of vision. How do you get past them? Well, at lower levels, you can simply kill them in one hit. But they are always eximus units which have a bizarrely huge hit point pool in which its only weakness is void damage, and they don't have a head, so past a certain level, killing them in one hit becomes virtually impossible. So how do you get past unseen? I have to this day not yet found a way. How do I complete the mission? Run in really fast and try to grab the data before the timer runs out of course! And I'm not alone, this doesn't appear to be a skill issue on my end, because that's how most other players do it as well on these...players who breeze through most spy missions like it's a cakewalk.

I would like to congratulate DE on doing such good work with rescue missions - every time the rescue objective is bleeding out, they call out to you and they get a usually easy-to-see marker helping you to locate and revive them. It would be nice if this was carried over to syndicate mission helpers or Clem--they have the marker but do not call out when they fall. As they have a very short bleedout timer, it is very difficult to keep them alive because you have to notice them going down basically immediately. Giving these NPCs a longer bleedout timer would also be nice, and very easy to implement. However the lack of warnings is particularly egregious in the case on railjack missions. This isn't so much of an issue when playing with a full group (oh there are full-group problems, just not this one specifically!) but it becomes very problematic when trying to solo any railjack missions. Any time you are not inside the railjack, you will receive an alert if there is a hull breach or if a crewmember goes into bleedout. However, you will not hear an alert when the ship is boarded or gets a hazard. Furthermore, while a good gunner crewmember with a good turret will easily shoot down incoming ramsleds all day without fail while you are inside the railjack, the moment you are gone all of the crew just seem to stop doing their jobs and they let the ship fall apart rapidly in your absence. I tested this once: I could stand in the railjack doing nothing and all of the fighters and ramsleds were always getting shot down, there was never a hull breach and never a boarding party. But I leave the ship, and barely after I get inside the station, there will be a hull breach and my engineer will be bleeding out. I rush back to the ship and it's a complete mess, enemies everywhere, alarms blaring.

While we're on the topic of unreasonable mission fail states, I'd like to mention interception missions. It took me some getting used to them, but I finally figured them out. I like them now. But at first, it was very frustrating that the enemies could take control of a radio tower while I was present in the radius, but I could not take it from them while they were within the radius. I figured out that this only happens if one of them can reach the console, but I still think it shouldn't happen if a player is within the capture radius, or at least it should be stalled. Or if they're able to take a tower from me while I am defending it, then I should be able to take a tower from them when they are defending it. Let me hack the console in order to bypass needing to wait on the progress meter, even if there are enemies present. That would also make for a good source of hacking practice (or a cipher sink).

And when the mission does fail, it takes all of your items and bonus affinity away. Much of that I can agree with, but there are items which should not be taken away, such as codex scans, scanned plants, affinity pickups and any other mission-surpassing consumables, fish or ores from open roams, and perhaps some other basic things like that - I think these items should be transferred to you immediately and should not rely on mission completion for you to obtain them. Also, I think that in many mission fail states (not all) it makes sense that you would evacuate and take some of your stuff with you, such as basic enemy drops or container pickups. Obviously you shouldn't keep mission critical items such as syndicate medallions or boss loot, as that can lead to some unsavory cheese tactics. But, say you find an ayatan sculpture, just as a random object in a mission, not related to the mission parameters? You should get to keep it. Or maybe you lose some fraction of the stuff you looted, and you keep the rest. And then I think it makes sense that you should be able to quit the mission from a "correct" spot (say, either the entrance or the exit), and keep ALL of the loot (minus certain mission-specific objects of course). But more importantly, I would be less bothered about losing stuff on mission failure if the fail states were less annoying and more sensible.

[lukinu_u]

I think it's the opposite, there is not enough missions that you can fail.

Aside from the examples you gave which are completely fair, the only way of failing is for the whole team to die 4 (+2 with arcanes) without being resurrected. This is honestly absurd because as long as you can stay alive, you can complete any mission regardless of the time and failure become a rare occurence rather than a casuality on difficult content.

I don't know about other people but for me when I was starting the game, the main reason for failure wasn't actual failure, but just too long to kill enemies that made ME leave to switch loadout to finish it faster, but in practice I could have finished them if I was patient. I don't think this is a good way of presenting difficulty.

To talk about the one you mentionned specifically :

• Mission timer : If you spend 30min in a single mission that isn't endless, you are just not doing it right and it's a fair punishment to end it. The only problem is the lack of informations. Maybe it should start at 25min and be a 5m timer instead.
   
• Defense / Mobile defense / Excavation : Enemies damage ramp up faster than cryopod health to encourage (and at some point force) the player to actually defend it. Yes it become literally impossible with some loadouts at a certain level, but you have many tools available and it's good to have at least one mission that force you to use them. And it's not even true because there is no earnable content that is locked behind that difficulty, so it remain a choice.
   
• Orphix : It's finally a gamemode that work like survival but actually force you to be fast if you don't want to fail and it's been one of the funniest gamemode in the entire game for me. Also, just in case you didn't know, the mission actually ends after a certain Orphix kills, so it's been designed and tested to end.
   
• Spy : You just have to be careful and watch carefully, this is just real spying. I have nothing more to say.

As mentionned earlier, I think you are just not used to failure in the game and it's not your fault, it's just how the game is designed and it's sad because many people would enjoy hard content is failure was a part of the experience. I think you just have to keep in mind failing just mean you did it wrong and you need to either improve or try a different approach, because everything you mentionned here are just the very few gamemodes that need a different approach.

[(XBOX)Rez090]

2 hours ago, TheReaverOfDarkness said:

Spy missions - they vary a lot in terms of just how stupid they get, but I think most people will agree with me that the Uranus spy areas are among the worst. There are too many areas where you have some ridiculous expectation, like climb a big tower and somehow not get seen by the multiple Grineer alarm drones cruising the area which have 360º field of vision. How do you get past them? Well, at lower levels, you can simply kill them in one hit. But they are always eximus units which have a bizarrely huge hit point pool in which its only weakness is void damage, and they don't have a head, so past a certain level, killing them in one hit becomes virtually impossible. So how do you get past unseen? I have to this day not yet found a way. How do I complete the mission? Run in really fast and try to grab the data before the timer runs out of course! And I'm not alone, this doesn't appear to be a skill issue on my end, because that's how most other players do it as well on these...players who breeze through most spy missions like it's a cakewalk.

Congratulations on misrepresenting how that Uranus spy vault goes. Maybe should study that vault in more detail.

[(XBOX)Rez090]

2 hours ago, lukinu_u said:

Mission timer : If you spend 30min in a single mission that isn't endless, you are just not doing it right and it's a fair punishment to end it. The only problem is the lack of informations. Maybe it should start at 25min and be a 5m timer instead.

OP misrepresented this too, If he's spending 30 mins in a mission and the failure countdown starts, then he hasn't been doing anything in the mission, e.g. completing objectives or killing enemies.

[TheReaverOfDarkness]

9 minutes ago, (XBOX)Rez090 said:

OP misrepresented this too, If he's spending 30 mins in a mission and the failure countdown starts, then he hasn't been doing anything in the mission, e.g. completing objectives or killing enemies.

This is blatantly false.

[(XBOX)Rez090]

5 minutes ago, TheReaverOfDarkness said:

This is blatantly false.

It is not, I can very easily spend 30 or more minutes in a mission and not receive a failure countdown.

[TheReaverOfDarkness]

On 2023-05-24 at 9:48 AM, (XBOX)Rez090 said:

It is not, I can very easily spend 30 or more minutes in a mission and not receive a failure countdown.

So can I. There are some ways to make the timer reset. But there are plenty of types of activity which do not. And there is no indication in-game of which activities will or won't--in fact the game does not even indicate that such a timer even exists until it is sprung upon you. So as I said, that is blatantly false. Even making kills does not seem to always reset the timer, though it is probably the best way to do it.

[Frendh]

On 2023-05-24 at 3:39 PM, TheReaverOfDarkness said:

Spy missions - they vary a lot in terms of just how stupid they get, but I think most people will agree with me that the Uranus spy areas are among the worst. There are too many areas where you have some ridiculous expectation, like climb a big tower and somehow not get seen by the multiple Grineer alarm drones cruising the area which have 360º field of vision. How do you get past them? Well, at lower levels, you can simply kill them in one hit. But they are always eximus units which have a bizarrely huge hit point pool in which its only weakness is void damage, and they don't have a head, so past a certain level, killing them in one hit becomes virtually impossible. So how do you get past unseen? I have to this day not yet found a way. How do I complete the mission? Run in really fast and try to grab the data before the timer runs out of course! And I'm not alone, this doesn't appear to be a skill issue on my end, because that's how most other players do it as well on these...players who breeze through most spy missions like it's a cakewalk.

Spy is mostly knowledge based. I would say 70% knowledge and 30% skill. You can decrease that to 5% skill and 95% knowledge by just picking a frame that either bypasses the defenses or is too quick/mobile for the timer to count down in time.

Veteran players will often trigger alarms because it takes longer to sneak past them with a regular frame then just brute forcing everything.

At the moment the only spy that I can recall that is really hard to brute force is the Spy on Lua. And maybe the one in Kuva fortress when you have to triple hack.

[Grommile]

On 2023-05-24 at 2:39 PM, TheReaverOfDarkness said:

There are too many areas where you have some ridiculous expectation, like climb a big tower and somehow not get seen by the multiple Grineer alarm drones cruising the area which have 360º field of vision. How do you get past them?

Once you know the trick it's fairly easy to do.

There are breakable glass windows in the walls. If you shoot all the windows on a certain level of the room, that level floods with water, destroying the drone without triggering an alarm.

You did bring a stealth frame, a nonviolent companion with enemy radar, and a silent (naturally or through a maxed Hush/Suppress mod) ranged weapon, right? 🙂

 

[Pakaku]

So how exactly are you getting stuck on a mission for half an hour, again?

[TheReaverOfDarkness]

On 2023-05-26 at 1:16 AM, Grommile said:

Once you know the trick it's fairly easy to do.

There are breakable glass windows in the walls. If you shoot all the windows on a certain level of the room, that level floods with water, destroying the drone without triggering an alarm.

You did bring a stealth frame, a nonviolent companion with enemy radar, and a silent (naturally or through a maxed Hush/Suppress mod) ranged weapon, right? 🙂

 

I don't own a stealth frame and in fact I was on the Steel Path prior to even being aware of how to obtain one. Well I do have a Wukong but its stealth abilities leave much to be desired. It goes invisible very briefly so I have to know where I am going before I fade and run. In many of these places I cannot see from one hidden spot to the next one, even if I have to fly to get there (which Wukong can). I always bring enemy radar and often a silenced weapon.

Most spy missions I was able to figure out after failing it and inspecting the now-cleared area. But they typically seem almost impossible to decipher prior to failing without looking them up online, because most of the important stuff you need to find is hidden out of sight. The giant window they frequently provide looking into the data terminal room virtually never reveals any details about gaining entry into that room. Everything is hidden just around the corner. I don't feel like I have a chance to flex my intelligence on these "puzzles", rather they seem like memory tests as you simply fail it until you can remember how to beat it.

But often I can't even figure out how to beat it after it has been failed. The lasers and detectors shut off (except ceiling cameras), and the locked doors all get unlocked. Often enough even if I can see all of the tunnels and explore the whole room, it still isn't clear how to get through before it has been set off. The deep sea Grineer tower is one of these cases. I spent some 10-15 minutes analyzing every detail of the place that I could see safely without setting it off. I even entered the room at the ground floor multiple times and looked around at it from various angles. I caught sight of ledges and a lift. But only after it had been set off did I discover the tunnels, as they are fairly well hidden from view from the ground level of the tower. I then assumed those tunnels may have something to do with getting through, but was unable to decipher it from several minutes of analyzing those tunnels, so in a subsequent few attempts I tried to get into those tunnels but could not find a way to shut off the detector grids which covered them up. To date, I have been in this room some 10-20 times and have explored it a combined amount of time exceeding an hour, and yet I have never seen anything to make me believe that it is possible to shoot windows and let water in. I'll take another look, but my point stands that the puzzles are not built to be solved, but only memorized or brute-forced. That's not fun.

 

On 2023-05-26 at 2:25 AM, Pakaku said:

So how exactly are you getting stuck on a mission for half an hour, again?

Easter egg hunts, mostly. The type I have sunk easily the most time into personally is the syndicate medallion hunts. Early on in my time in this game I did not know about using loot radar to find them, and so I spent a lot of time exploring every nook and cranny for them. Using loot radar made it far easier to find them, but I have also started to memorize the spawn points, so that I know where to look. I recently ran a syndicate mission, realized I forgot my loot radar, and I didn't bother to restart as it was pretty easy to find the medallions with my existing experience on that particular tileset.

But upon discovering their locations, I did discover several times that errors in the way I explore had been precluding me from finding some of them. So that was helpful in building my explorational skills. But I also found at least a few which were in spots hidden in such a way that the game was more-or-less communicating to the player that it wasn't even a valid place to check. I can't think of a specific example off the top of my head, but you know how there are various places such as cliffs and ledges where you can see into a place that you can't go--going into it will not make you hit a wall but instead makes the view fade out and then you appear back on the ground. You lose time even testing these places while risking falling through the map and possibly putting your mission into an unwinnable state (yes this has actually happened, and no it does not always place you back on solid ground). But sometimes hidden objects are in places either designed to look off-limits or which actually are adjacent to a "bottomless pit" threshold. I do have an example with a plant: I once discovered a jadeleaf on the map block consisting of a series of pipes going over wetlands (bottomless pit) and you traverse the pipes to get from one end (stairs going up) to the other (a tunnel). This jadeleaf was positioned beyond the edge and underneath the ledge, only within view from a small margin between hanging off the edge and falling. If it hadn't been for me searching for plants with the scanner, I would not have found it. I often hunt for things (plants especially) with the scanner because the shape of terrain and the places where the plants are positioned makes it so that I'll miss some half of the plants simply due to not being able to obtain a line of sight to them without already knowing where to look.

But more importantly, I'm not getting stuck on these missions for a long time so much as choosing to enjoy myself for greater than a half hour. I do this solo (because almost nobody else wants to play at my pace) but I am active the entire time save for the occasional 3-8 minute break. Even if my preferred playstyle is uncommon, I don't see why it is considered incorrect. We all play to have fun, and many of us have one or more unconventional ways in which we achieve this fun. It should only be considered wrong if our fun is coming at someone else's expense, as mine clearly is not.

[(PSN)Nierou]

The only type of mission that needs looking at is Survival, it shouldn't be mandatory to bring a nekros just to stay 30+ minutes. It is incredibly random how much air you get and I have been in several where despite cleaving through 100s of enemies only 1 drops while other times the floor is littered with them. The same for survival void fissures, sometimes reactant just doesn't drop and you can't wait too long for them to turn or you run out of air.

I'm not even talking steel path level, just normal starchart so it is certainly not due to killing speed. 

Basically they just need to be more consistent, Other than that the missions are fine. If you are doing long excavations or defense you should need to bring a defense frame to y'know Defend.  Most excavations that i join it's wukong, excalibro or titania any mix of those is all i really see in EVERY mission. My khora does fine for infested but corpus will shred excavators and i don't have enough potatoes for Gara yet so I am stuck just doing short excavations.