Nightwave and how to fix it

[ixidron92]

The Original Idea

---

Nightwave is DE's version of a battle pass. The idea behind a battle-pass is to keep players logging in regularly and replaying old content. This is what most games with battle passes do (plus the cash-grab part which DE isn't doing, so kudos to them). It's not a bad idea. It keeps the community alive and populated, with more regular players than games not having a battle pass.

However, the concept was implemented poorly in Warframe. 

Warframe vs...

---

Warframe is not like other games. Most games that implement this type of mechanic have a set and narrow gameplay, such as match-based PvP games, or have a well-defined set of daily tasks and/or regular content that players should normally be doing anyway or the entire battle pass is thematic and based on seasonally-released content. So, normally, battle passes incentivize normal gameplay by adding time-limited rewards, and this is normally aimed at casual/lazy people to either:

• a)Get them to pay money so they can still play the game at their pace; or
• b) Get them to play more

In any case, it's a win-win. If you get money, that's a plus. If people play more, your game is alive, so you get more money eventually.

What went wrong

---

The problem is that Nightwave doesn't fit any of those archetypes and neither does Warframe. Releasing seasonal content failed because it was too much work and took resources away from normal scheduled warframe releases and expansion packs, and trying to link a Nightwave to one of those regular releases means increasing the workload even further. So, we got the bargain bin version of a battle pass.

The first thematic Nightwaves were really nice, but as usual, they suffered from the classic Warframe issue of being islands of content decoupled from everything else. So you ended up having to grind unrelated regular content to advance the thematic plot.

Eventually, people get tired. I participated in the thematic Nightwave, but I've skipped every single one of the Nora's Mix Nightwaves because the rewards weren't worth the time investment in my opinion. The thematic Nightwaves added lore, stories, game modes, and boss fights, which is hard, real playable content. I love the mechanics of the emissary game mode and its lantern, but honestly, random cosmetics are not enough to tempt me into investing hours and hours or repetitive grinding of old content I've already finished.

How to fix it

---

Again, Warframe is not like other games. The concept of having this pseudo-battle pass in its current form is a misguided idea in the first place, but the idea of getting people to play more and replay old content isn't. Simply put, the current Nightwaves fail to achieve this objective. There's an easy and simple way to achieve this and keep everyone happy at the same time. Don't try to keep it as 1 single objective, split it into two. 

Currently, weekly and daily tasks might guide players toward old content, but that's only temporary. Once you do 4 bounties or the few missions the Nightwave asks of you, you'll simply never bother coming back until the next time the task pops up.

So, split it.

• Reward players for playing normally.
• Reward players for revisiting old content.

Get rid of tasks entirely. Make everything award Nightwave reputation, and I mean everything. Crafting, subsuming, killing, mining, fishing, finishing missions, beating sortie, killing an archon, beating a lich, doing Khal's missions, earning Duviri decrees, downing an Eidolon, earning intrinsics, leveling up a weapon, using a forma, etc. This is how you reward players for playing normally.

And to get them to replay old content?

Daily and weekly bonuses: Each week, select a random piece of content to get a weekly bonus that will award double reputation and will have boosters enabled (credit, affinity, drops, resources), and each day, do the same with another piece of content. This way, players will be incentivized to play the content because they'll have extra rewards.

Overall players will be able to play normally and earn rewards simply by playing and playing more and they'll be rewarded for replaying old content if they choose to. This will also help new players get stuff they have missed from content nobody plays anymore.

Edited December 19, 2023 by ixidron92

[Armadillidium_vulgare]

What is this formatting.

More constructively, how does your proposed solution really change how Nightwave works? We already get rewarded for playing normally with the new Weeklies, and boosting rewards for old content for a week is simply another way of accomplishing the "get people to do old content" tasks.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Armadillidium_vulgare

[ixidron92]

hace 2 minutos, Armadillidium_vulgare dijo:

What is this formatting.

I think the formatting broke for some reason. I'm fixing it

hace 3 minutos, Armadillidium_vulgare dijo:

What is this formatting.

Ok, it's fixed now. I dunno what happened to the forum. I literally just copy&pasted the text again and it fixed itself. 

[Armadillidium_vulgare]

4 minutes ago, ixidron92 said:

I think the formatting broke for some reason. I'm fixing it

Ok, it's fixed now. I dunno what happened to the forum. I literally just copy&pasted the text again and it fixed itself. 

Yeah, that was odd. I like the idea as a next step for Nightwave, but I'm not sure it really changes Nightwave in any fundamental way. I wouldn't expect DE to put in the extra effort to recode everything suited to this proposal in comparison to the "good enough" version we have now.

[ixidron92]

hace 13 minutos, Armadillidium_vulgare dijo:

What is this formatting.

More constructively, how does your proposed solution really change how Nightwave works? We already get rewarded for playing normally with the new Weeklies, and boosting rewards for old content for a week is simply another way of accomplishing the "get people to do old content" tasks.

Right now, the Nighwave only rewards players for doing something random and specific, something someone might like but someone else might hate or might have already finished, so it offers no reward beyond the reputation.

With my idea, no matter how you play, what your warframe is, or what you like or dislike, you'll always be rewarded for doing what you'd normally do. You can always finish the Nightwave your own way. it might be slower, but it'll be your way and your decision, investing the time you want in the activities you want. 

Like I said, I didn't bother with Nora's mixes. That doesn't mean I didn't play the game. I simply didn't bother doing any task on purpose. Yeah, sometimes I passively finished one, but at the end of the season, I barely got past level 10. I couldn't care less, mind you. Playing my way and having fun was more important than random cosmetics.

In contrast, with the thematic Nightwaves, I played every day because I wanted the new content. I wanted the story. I wanted to fight the bosses. All of that is absent from Nora's Mixes, and I doubt the Nightwaves will ever revert to bringing new content. it was simply too work-intensive for them, and now they have fewer people. 

So, I offer a way to keep players playing more and revisiting old content without resorting to these brief spikes every Monday when the new Weeklies arrive. Rather than having players crunch it on a single day, you can keep them interested every single day.

[trst]

Except Nightwave was added specifically to solve the game's largest source of contention: Alerts. And NW succeeded in that by lacking every fault the Alert system had on top of only getting more lenient with every update to it.

 

That aside the problem with your suggestion is that NW would suddenly have to become IMMENSLY grindy for it to function with allowing any and all content to award rep. As well it helps the old content issue far less than the current system. Since making it something optional means players won't bother (more rep isn't a bonus if you get nothing else of value out of it) while "forcing" players to go into a hyper specific thing or skip the act that week gets players to flock to that specific thing that week.

Also Nightwave already awards players for playing normally. The system is so lenient that many, if not most, players can finish an entire season while rarely actually looking at the weeks acts and completing them on accident. And it's now even more lenient than that with the latest season as every week has the same three acts that're impossible not to complete unless you're literally not playing the game.

[MaxTunnerX]

52 minutes ago, ixidron92 said:

Overall players will be able to play normally and earn rewards simply by playing

Thats what NW is doing already. Besides, the biggest reason to do NW is nitain, everything else is just a bonus.

[GrimMyfanwy]

Nightwave is one of the really sore spots for me, and one of the major issues it has is something you missed in the post: Consistency in updates. The original reason we were given for nightwave dropping the story aspect was that it took too long to do and if they dropped it it would get rotated more frequently. But it has been just as bad or worse (what, maybe once or twice a year it gets changed?) which utterly goes against the whole point of a battle pass system.

What good is it to encourage players to do old content when your schedule only really incentivises that 3-6 months out of the year (3 months being a reasonable mount to hit rank 30). They say it's such a long rotation so no one misses out, but that misses the whole point that FOMO it what makes the battle pass system work.

Then they keep adding ways to catch up and be able to get through it in shorter amount of time, but they still keep the incredibly slow rotation schedule which means now it only really works as intended for maybe 2-4 months out of the year.

What they really need to do is set a reasonable updated schedule of 6-12 weeks (putting nightwave in sync with incarnon rotation with it changing once every full rotation of incarnons or once every 2 rotations), rather than sloppily treating it like the afterthought it is.

[(PSN)Unstar]

I disagree with the idea that Nightwave isn't encouraging players to play, and I'd be willing to bet money that DE has analytics that show as much.

Personally, I think Nightwave right now is great.  It gives players more carrots to chase, introduces players to parts of the game they may not know about or have forgotten about, and it's extremely lenient and chill in its pacing.  All around a solid addition to the game.

[(PSN)Joylesstuna]

3 hours ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

I disagree with the idea that Nightwave isn't encouraging players to play, and I'd be willing to bet money that DE has analytics that show as much.

Personally, I think Nightwave right now is great.  It gives players more carrots to chase, introduces players to parts of the game they may not know about or have forgotten about, and it's extremely lenient and chill in its pacing.  All around a solid addition to the game.

Nightwave was fine when it come out. The story parts, though not always executed well, was very welcomed. We were not bogged down with many, many weekly objectives. Now, it's just yet another thing that requires us to do arbitrary things weekly. It's just a slog at this point. When we are stuck chasing carrots all week, we have little time to do fun stuff.

[trst]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

Nightwave was fine when it come out. The story parts, though not always executed well, was very welcomed. We were not bogged down with many, many weekly objectives. Now, it's just yet another thing that requires us to do arbitrary things weekly. It's just a slog at this point. When we are stuck chasing carrots all week, we have little time to do fun stuff.

Then just do the fun stuff. Sure that was less of an option with NW released since the margin for hitting rank 30 was tighter. But now it's so lax that you could hit 30 without even realizing it and still have time to spare. While at the same time those who either want to squeeze as much as they can out of NW or just finish it faster can focus on finishing every act while having reasons to return to older content.

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

7 hours ago, ixidron92 said:

The Original Idea

---

Nightwave is DE's version of a battle pass. The idea behind a battle-pass is to keep players logging in regularly and replaying old content. This is what most games with battle passes do (plus the cash-grab part which DE isn't doing, so kudos to them). It's not a bad idea. It keeps the community alive and populated, with more regular players than games not having a battle pass.

However, the concept was implemented poorly in Warframe. 

Warframe vs...

---

Warframe is not like other games. Most games that implement this type of mechanic have a set and narrow gameplay, such as match-based PvP games, or have a well-defined set of daily tasks and/or regular content that players should normally be doing anyway or the entire battle pass is thematic and based on seasonally-released content. So, normally, battle passes incentivize normal gameplay by adding time-limited rewards, and this is normally aimed at casual/lazy people to either:

• a)Get them to pay money so they can still play the game at their pace; or
• b) Get them to play more

In any case, it's a win-win. If you get money, that's a plus. If people play more, your game is alive, so you get more money eventually.

What went wrong

---

The problem is that Nightwave doesn't fit any of those archetypes and neither does Warframe. Releasing seasonal content failed because it was too much work and took resources away from normal scheduled warframe releases and expansion packs, and trying to link a Nightwave to one of those regular releases means increasing the workload even further. So, we got the bargain bin version of a battle pass.

The first thematic Nightwaves were really nice, but as usual, they suffered from the classic Warframe issue of being islands of content decoupled from everything else. So you ended up having to grind unrelated regular content to advance the thematic plot.

Eventually, people get tired. I participated in the thematic Nightwave, but I've skipped every single one of the Nora's Mix Nightwaves because the rewards weren't worth the time investment in my opinion. The thematic Nightwaves added lore, stories, game modes, and boss fights, which is hard, real playable content. I love the mechanics of the emissary game mode and its lantern, but honestly, random cosmetics are not enough to tempt me into investing hours and hours or repetitive grinding of old content I've already finished.

How to fix it

---

Again, Warframe is not like other games. The concept of having this pseudo-battle pass in its current form is a misguided idea in the first place, but the idea of getting people to play more and replay old content isn't. Simply put, the current Nightwaves fail to achieve this objective. There's an easy and simple way to achieve this and keep everyone happy at the same time. Don't try to keep it as 1 single objective, split it into two. 

Currently, weekly and daily tasks might guide players toward old content, but that's only temporary. Once you do 4 bounties or the few missions the Nightwave asks of you, you'll simply never bother coming back until the next time the task pops up.

So, split it.

• Reward players for playing normally.
• Reward players for revisiting old content.

Get rid of tasks entirely. Make everything award Nightwave reputation, and I mean everything. Crafting, subsuming, killing, mining, fishing, finishing missions, beating sortie, killing an archon, beating a lich, doing Khal's missions, earning Duviri decrees, downing an Eidolon, earning intrinsics, leveling up a weapon, using a forma, etc. This is how you reward players for playing normally.

And to get them to replay old content?

Daily and weekly bonuses: Each week, select a random piece of content to get a weekly bonus that will award double reputation and will have boosters enabled (credit, affinity, drops, resources), and each day, do the same with another piece of content. This way, players will be incentivized to play the content because they'll have extra rewards.

Overall players will be able to play normally and earn rewards simply by playing and playing more and they'll be rewarded for replaying old content if they choose to. This will also help new players get stuff they have missed from content nobody plays anymore.

I cannot agree with you on this one. NW is already passively rewarding, it rewards exploration into the game, it rewards hardcore play and chill 0lay, all at the same time. It covers all of the basis and I even hit rank 30 last season without even realizing it. 

To me, it's the best battle pass system in gaming. Every credit and nearly every reward you earn can be put to good use and having Kuva, catalyst and nitains always available to purchase just means there's always an incentive for new and old players alike. I see no reason to change any of that.

[(PSN)Unstar]

16 hours ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

When we are stuck chasing carrots all week, we have little time to do fun stuff.

That's the great thing, you're actually not stuck chasing carrots all week because just passively playing the game will generally net you more than enough points to finish the season well before it ends. 

For example, the previous Nightwave ran for 26 weeks.  Every week there's an opportunity to get 43,500 points, totaling in 1,131,000 possible points you can earn during the course of the entire season if you did every challenge.  But you in no way need to go that far, as you only need 27% of those challenge points to gather the 300,000 points required to complete the entire season.  And once you realize that, it's very easy to just pick and choose, to just passively get points for things you were doing anyway, or to get some quick and easy points from the low-hanging fruit challenges.

And that was before the introduction of permanent weeklies.  Now every single week, if you're just playing Warframe, you're going to get more than enough points to complete the season.  Because simply doing missions, getting kills, and killing Eximii now give you 13,500 per week, for an estimated total of 351,000, which alone is more than you'll need to complete the season.

If you genuinely felt like you were stuck chasing carrots all week, I hope that this breakdown helps you understand that there's no need for that and that you can just relax and play the game.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

There's nothing to fix. Players should be more well rounded and occasionally do something else in the game. 

Most missions take less than 15 minutes and nightwave rewards you for taking 15min out of your day, when you were just going to sit in front of the computer for hours anyway.

[(PSN)Joylesstuna]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

That's the great thing, you're actually not stuck chasing carrots all week because just passively playing the game will generally net you more than enough points to finish the season well before it ends. 

For example, the previous Nightwave ran for 26 weeks.  Every week there's an opportunity to get 43,500 points, totaling in 1,131,000 possible points you can earn during the course of the entire season if you did every challenge.  But you in no way need to go that far, as you only need 27% of those challenge points to gather the 300,000 points required to complete the entire season.  And once you realize that, it's very easy to just pick and choose, to just passively get points for things you were doing anyway, or to get some quick and easy points from the low-hanging fruit challenges.

And that was before the introduction of permanent weeklies.  Now every single week, if you're just playing Warframe, you're going to get more than enough points to complete the season.  Because simply doing missions, getting kills, and killing Eximii now give you 13,500 per week, for an estimated total of 351,000, which alone is more than you'll need to complete the season.

If you genuinely felt like you were stuck chasing carrots all week, I hope that this breakdown helps you understand that there's no need for that and that you can just relax and play the game.

Archon hunts, kahl missions, daily standing cap for new syndicate, and nw all compound into a chase that isn't engaging. If your ok making no progress, sure you can just relax. It's not just nightwave anymore. Hence why I said on release it was fine but DE chose to keeping adding weekly requirements.

[(PSN)Unstar]

5 hours ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

Archon hunts, kahl missions, daily standing cap for new syndicate, and nw all compound into a chase that isn't engaging. If your ok making no progress, sure you can just relax. It's not just nightwave anymore. Hence why I said on release it was fine but DE chose to keeping adding weekly requirements.

I think the key is to figure out what you actually want to do in Warframe, and ignore the stuff you don't want to do; if you look at it all as stuff you need to do, it gets overwhelming pretty fast.  But I've found that when I take a step back and remind myself that there's no real need to do any of it that I'm able to happily engage with the parts I enjoy.  I never do Kahl missions because I don't like them.  I generally don't do the weekly SP Circuit either, and when I do I never go higher than rank 5.

I do like Archon Hunts, so I'm happy spending the 30-60 minutes each week it takes to do that.  At MR26, it takes me about 30 minutes to cap my 29,000 Cavia standing by just doing the highest fish mission (I wanted to I could make it go faster by turning in the rep items, but I find the missions to be chill and fun).  I also like these new Netracell missions, so I'm doing my 5 per week.

If you genuinely don't want to do any of that, you have my condolences; I can see how that would make Warframe feel less like a fun activity and more like homework.

But if there is anything you find yourself enjoying in the game, my overall point is that Nightwave finishes itself as long as you're just playing missions.  Missions get done and Eximus die, and I just keep progressing along the track despite not having even looked at the challenges for a given week.