Squad full map pickup loot is a must

[stormy505]

On 2024-05-04 at 5:35 PM, trst said:

I don't think we need yet another reason to incentivize AFK/leeching "strategies" in the game. Besides the reasons universal pickup was added to Medallions and Railjack aren't present in the rest of the game. You don't have to worry about failing a mission thanks to someone/multiple players running off to find collectables in the rest of the game*. Nor does anything else have the issue with Railjack in having areas that become inaccessible on top of being designed for players to intentionally separate to tackle objectives on the opposite side the map.

All I could imagine it having a reason to exist in would be Reactant pickup but being that Primes are part of the monetization system I doubt DE is eager to make Prime farming even easier.

 

*This is an issue in Open Worlds however there is the key difference of the side activities not being tied to bounties. Meaning players running off to do that are effectively the same as players who AFK/leech off a mission, which is a reportable offence.

It can and is used sparingly and in specific instances it's really useful. Like, in the zariman and Albrecht's Laboratories where medallions are shared, it's often worth it to have 1-3 ppl doing the objective while the rest go looting since most of the objectives can be very easily solo'd and the important loot is shared.

I usually play xaku in these missions with golden instinct farming medallions, I have the guns capable to solo it just fine but if the squad is doing fine I focus on loot. Especially in objectives where my involvement doesn't speed up the job.

I think this should have been used in open worlds with fishing and mining. And if resource sharing is too much too fast, you can make it so it's 1/4 the loot shared from fishing and mining.

Although to be frank, that grind has been talked about a couple times as needing a touch up to reduce the grind for newer players cause open worlds are a high quit point.

People hate leeching cause they get nothing of value from them. But if they actually got a portion the rewards from ppl working split activities in open worlds they wouldn't mind and it's not really leeching anymore.

 

[PrideB4TheFall]

I'd love to see this on the ending tally screen:                       

Total Mission Resources dropped:        *PlayerName* Gathered:
______________________________________________________________
Credits:                                    5,310            2,326
Polymer Bundles:                        430            251
Alloy Plate:                               1,102            872
Rubedo:                                      572            341
Athodai Barrel                                1            0

 

Being present and active is rewarded. Not standing on my bridge and zoning out. 
 

[Zakkhar]

On 2024-05-05 at 5:17 AM, Hexerin said:

On 2024-05-05 at 2:35 AM, trst said:

I don't think we need yet another reason to incentivize AFK/leeching "strategies" in the game.

You don't design your game to counter abuse at the expense of legitimate players. That doesn't do anything about the abusers, it just hurts the legitimate players. Instead, you discourage the abusers by taking action against them. Publicly, with full intent to bring great shame on them.

Actually, I do not understand why people always concentrate on the negative. For me it promotes using parkour and movement freedom as opposed to plenty of other shooting games that at most have double jump. 

Railjack has certain roles (engineer/defender, away crew, pilot) and the distances between players doing those roles are often too big and need to loot everything individually defeats the purpose of having those roles. Also you already share a ship, so why not share the loot.

Normal maps want to encourage people to stay and work together as well as keep moving and having minimap/map overlay awareness, so here individdual loot is fitting as a way to reward players who stick together and are active on the map.

Edited May 7 by Zakkhar

[PublikDomain]

1 hour ago, Zakkhar said:

Normal maps want to encourage people to stay and work together as well as keep moving and having minimap/map overlay awareness, so here individdual loot is fitting as a way to reward players who stick together and are active on the map.

Aside from wait-for-the-timer missions (Defense, MD) and race-for-the-exit missions (Exterminate, Capture), many parts of the game encourage the exact opposite.

Survival encourages roaming as players spread out and follow spawns. Interception is by design four players standing far apart from each other. Excavation encourages splitting up and defending multiple excavators at once. The entirety of the Zariman and Entrati Labs encourage players to split up and look for medallions or hunt for enemies like the Angel or the Whisper, not to mention modes like Cascade which ask the squad to handle multiple objectives at once. The open world zones are expansive and have side activities like hunting and fishing and mining, and Duviri is crammed full of little events to do. Spy missions encourage splitting up to raid multiple vaults. Modes like Sabotage encourage splitting up to find caches. Defection encourages splitting up to protect different survivor groups. Jupiter has the hidden labs, as do many new tilesets like the Entrati Labs. Railjack splits people up by design. The lack of overall balance encourages splitting up so people aren't stomping on each others toes since there aren't enough enemies to go around. Rare containers, sculptures, and so on and so forth.

Players sticking together aren't rewarded in many cases. If anything, right now it's the players that roam that are most rewarded. I can run off and roam in Survival and get my loot, and then drop by whatever tile the rest of the squad is idling to scoop up all of their loot too. They, on the other hand, lose out on all of mine. The same is true even for modes like Capture or Exterminate. If I run off and produce loot off of the critical path, my squad probably isn't going to pass through.

And "working together" doesn't need to mean "sticking together". Squads can work together even without being near each other. Which squad is cooperating more, a squad delegating tasks to execute in parallel split up over a 20km³ Railjack map, or a squad nipping at each others heels as they run in a line towards Extraction after one of them clicked on the Capture target? Proximity isn't cooperation.

Edited May 7 by PublikDomain

[PollexMessier]

Things that require an input to pick up I think should all be universal (which iirc the only things like this which are not rn are ayatan sculptures and stars). But things that can be sucked by vacuum I think shouldn't. Changing that I think alters a very core part of the game's identity. and it's really not too much trouble to just bullet jump to the vague vicinity of a loot mark on your map and hoover it up.

With a few exceptions for special loot like arcanes, vitus essence, steel essence, riven slivers, and boss and assassin drops. Stuff like this should be universal cus a player could cause them to drop hundreds of meters away from someone else, and literally everybody has to pick that stuff up so it makes the mission take an extra 3 minutes as the whole squad needs to backtrack or take a detour off to some random branch of the map to pick it up. And missing a boss drop is just frustrating.

With a special mention to void traces which I think picking up should count towards mission progress for everyone in a way that players joining mid way though still have the same amount of traces as everyone else, cus it's going to the mission itself, Instead of having individualized counts. There's several other mission-critical drops that act like this, traces should too.

[Zakkhar]

9 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Survival encourages roaming as players spread out and follow spawns.

Following spawns is faulty action and will only lead to worse outcomes. The reason spawn evenn moves is because players disable current spawn. Anyone who can read the map and add 1+1 can see that and that the mission completely discourages that. Enemies spawn: Near player(s), Out of line of sight, In next Tile. It is not exactly rocket science.

12 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Interception is by design four players standing far apart from each other.

It has high downtime between rounds, where you are able to collect stuff from pretty much every point (depending onn yyour movemennt abilities you may want to start at 95%). But the mission progression is clearly visible. Also it doesnt seem to discourage players from leaving their point completely unmanned while they chase kills.

14 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Excavation encourages splitting up and defending multiple excavators at once.

Again exact the opposite due to how battery spawn. Spreading thin while enabling too many excavators at once only leads to battery drought and actually increases the time spent on the mission.

16 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

The entirety of the Zariman and Entrati Labs encourage players to split up and look for medallions or hunt for enemies like the Angel or the Whisper,

Except medalions are shared and Angel and Wisper are imidiately marked on the map. Also it does not encourage this. It is entirely player agency.

17 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

not to mention modes like Cascade which ask the squad to handle multiple objectives at once

Objectives which usually spawn near each other. Again spreading thin on those may lead to actual fail on the mission.

18 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

The open world zones are expansive and have side activities like hunting and fishing and mining

Neither is done within bounds of mission and is not shared/sharable activity.

19 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Duviri is crammed full of little events to do

But the spoils of those events (Decrees) are shared, just like in Railjack.

20 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Spy missions encourage splitting up to raid multiple vaults.

That is the only one I can agree on so far. Having multiple people in single vault always leads to chaos.

21 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Modes like Sabotage encourage splitting up to find caches.

Optional objective, entirely up to player agency.

21 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Defection encourages splitting up to protect different survivor groups.

And this one I can agree on (but people rarely want to stick to their point and click console to strip 45s on timer and than click on the defectors to make them run).

[PublikDomain]

1 minute ago, Zakkhar said:

Following spawns is faulty action and will only lead to worse outcomes.

And twiddling your thumbs because there's nothing to do is boring. Roaming is more enjoyable for many people, and it's only a worse outcome for the people staying in one place. Anyone roaming gets their loot plus your loot. You just get your loot.

5 minutes ago, Zakkhar said:

Also it does not encourage this. It is entirely player agency.

3 minutes ago, Zakkhar said:

Optional objective, entirely up to player agency.

Yes, the optional objectives encourages players to exercise their personal agency and split up.

4 minutes ago, Zakkhar said:

But the spoils of those events (Decrees) are shared, just like in Railjack.

I wonder why that could be... 🤔

[Zakkhar]

32 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

And twiddling your thumbs because there's nothing to do is boring. Roaming is more enjoyable for many people, and it's only a worse outcome for the people staying in one place. Anyone roaming gets their loot plus your loot. You just get your loot.

But you will get less loot altogether because less ennemies spawn. If a gamemode is boring to you, do not play it. Do not claim it encourages something when it clearly doesnt.

[PublikDomain]

6 minutes ago, Zakkhar said:

But you will get less loot altogether because less ennemies spawn. If a gamemode is boring to you, do not play it. Do not claim it encourages something when it clearly doesnt.

The mode isn't boring, the way you're saying to play it is. So I do exactly what you suggest: I don't play it that way. I roam and follow the spawns and I have fun, which I'm very much encouraged to do. After all, what do you think is being encouraged by having the Life Support towers spawn all over the place?

[Psianide73]

4 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

The mode isn't boring, the way you're saying to play it is. So I do exactly what you suggest: I don't play it that way. I roam and follow the spawns and I have fun, which I'm very much encouraged to do. After all, what do you think is being encouraged by having the Life Support towers spawn all over the place?

He's probably the sort of player that throws a fit if the team doesn't stand in that one corner he marked. Such boring 'gameplay'. 

[Oldskinzz]

Shared loot would be a nice QOL improvement. Particularly useful given the godawful reactant spawn system in place. As for the other resources, many players probably wouldn't care one way or another given most of us start accumulating millions upon millions of extra resources after awhile. But as a new player, I did very much appreciate other players marking rare drops such as orokin cells and argon.

 

For those concerned about leeches, there already is an inactivity timer where any player inactive or dead for more than a minute loses all end of mission rewards. So no abuse.

 

 

[Packetdancer]

On 2024-05-04 at 8:17 PM, Hexerin said:

You don't design your game to counter abuse at the expense of legitimate players.

As a counterpoint, though, you should approach each design decision with some eye towards how it might get abused. If you don't, walking back a change to stop it being abused after rolling it out is often way less popular than not making the change in the first place would've been.

(You'll never get it 100% right, of course... but there's a whole lot of ground between "absolutely perfect" and "why bother thinking about this.")

That said, I don't think "this could be abused" necessarily means you shouldn't make the change... just that you should think about how to address the abuse, as well. After all, there's perfectly reasonable ways to make something like this work while also trying to minimize the abuse potential.

One system design I toyed with in the past to allow folks to split up and tackle things in parallel was basically an invisible counter behind the scenes; every time you did something which progressed a mission objective, or healed a teammate, or took out an enemy, it added a certain amount to the counter. The counter value would then steadily decay; if you were still moving and doing stuff, it decayed slowly; if you stayed motionless doing nothing it would start to increase the rate of decay. As long as the counter stayed above a certain minimum level, you also received anything a teammate would pick up. If you weren't contributing despite trying—like in a mission where the person with heavily modded gear tears through and kills everything before you have a chance to—the loot would just drop for you to pick up yourself, meaning even in that case as you followed along behind them you'd still be getting the loot.

I never ended up using the system in a final design, but it worked reasonably well in testing.

I don't know if that specific system would be right for Warframe—quite possibly it wouldn't be the right choice—but I hope it illustrates what I mean. Even if something can be abused, you don't necessarily need to throw out the idea, you just need to figure out how to address the abuse case (or cases).

If there's no viable way to address those abuse cases and still have the change be useful, that's when you go "well, this won't work" and discard the idea.

[Packetdancer]

11 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

Defection encourages splitting up to protect different survivor groups.

Defection encourages not playing Defection in the first place. :P

(I kid. Mostly.)