Ciphers Too Easy?

[aMannus]

So, I was browsing through my stats and stumbled upon my cipher stats, and realised they really are more of a nuisance than anything else in the game. I get it that they aren't intended to be difficult, but most of the time (and I'm sure this goes for all of us), I have like 10 seconds or more left to finish it.

Would be more intense if the minigame was somehow slightly more challenging or atleast with a lower time limit. I know it's a small part in the game, but it could make that small part slightly better. No clue how to make it more difficult while keeping it simple though.

Also, while browsing through those same stats, I noticed my Braton Vandal has officially reached 1337 status. That's totally offtopic though, but it made me laugh for a second or 2.

[Dr-Jelly]

The reason you think ciphers are easy is probably you never been locked in a room with a lot of enemies.

[Naed]

Would be more intense if the minigame was somehow slightly more challenging or atleast with a lower time limit. I know it's a small part in the game, but it could make that small part slightly better. No clue how to make it more difficult while keeping it simple though.

Hmm, one possible way of doing it is changing the shapes so that there are puzzles with straight lines and have those lines be different colours at the ends, so that the puzzles need to be matched in colour too.

If the above doesnt make much sense, just wait, ill upload a picture after ive slept :)

[Probta16]

To me they are good enough the way they are now, i mean, can be solved faster so don't bother me doing it so many times.

The XP is increased after you reach level 30, never realized it . -.

[aMannus]

The reason you think ciphers are easy is probably you never been locked in a room with a lot of enemies.

I have, actually. Plenty of times too. Yes, there's some situations where the room being locked proposes an extra challenge, but almost all rooms still hold enough wiggle room to hide or just kill them all. Not to mention that in those situations you won't even have the ability to reach the hacking panel, which makes the minigame itself irrelevant anyway.

Hmm, one possible way of doing it is changing the shapes so that there are puzzles with straight lines and have those lines be different colours at the ends, so that the puzzles need to be matched in colour too.

If the above doesnt make much sense, just wait, ill upload a picture after ive slept :)

Always happy to see new ideas. I'll check back at the thread tomorrow or so as well then.

To me they are good enough the way they are now, i mean, can be solved faster so don't bother me doing it so many times.

The XP is increased after you reach level 30, never realized it . -.

Yes, I agree with you they should stay short, but that doesn't mean they can't be made slightly more interesting. It's just so mind-numbing easy right now that all it does is let you without control over your character for roughly 6-8 seconds. I know that's the whole point in the first place, but still.

Edited March 11, 2013 by aMannus

[Dr-Jelly]

I have, actually. Plenty of times too. Yes, there's some situations where the room being locked proposes an extra challenge, but almost all rooms still hold enough wiggle room to hide or just kill them all. Not to mention that in those situations you won't even have the ability to reach the hacking panel, which makes the minigame itself irrelevant anyway.

2-3 shockwaves spamming you in a locked room while your friend is being pressure to hacking the lock while your other friends are guarding him. Unless you experince that you can't say that you mastered warframe(this is irrelevant).

[Kadishia]

Shockwave moas will stop you from hacking a panel.

[Katakuna]

Yeah, the only times I've ever "failed" a cipher was when I was forced to exit them, like when a shockwave somehow snuck up on me or when a grenade insta-killed me. Could stand to be at least a tad bit more challenging, like a lower time limit as suggested.

[Dr-Jelly]

A heavy enemy appears if you fail a cipher that way people can level up faster.

[aMannus]

2-3 shockwaves spamming you in a locked room while your friend is being pressure to hacking the lock while your other friends are guarding him. Unless you experince that you can't say that you mastered warframe(this is irrelevant).

Haha, I had some of those experiences, and I have to admit, died a couple of times because of that as well. Especially when a friend trolls you and shoots the window outside the actual room, making you get stuck with all the enemies alone, with your health decreasing and plenty of Shockwave MOA's stunlocking you. Man, I hate those guys I play with. :D

Edited March 11, 2013 by aMannus

[Dr-Jelly]

Haha, I had some of those experiences, and I have to admit, died a couple of times because of that as well. Especially when a friend trolls you and shoots the window outside the actual room, making you get stuck with all the enemies alone, with your health decreasing and plenty of Shockwave MOA's stunlocking you. Man, I hate those guys I play with. :D

Brother?

[aMannus]

Brother?

Nah, playing with guys from my gaming community through Teamspeak. Luckily, I got around 4 or 5 people hooked to the game so pretty much every evening we have a 4 man team to do whatever we feel like doing... which sometimes is just plain trolling each other through shooting windows or using Loki Switch Teleport or Mag's Pull on each other.

We TOTALLY didn't go off topic.

[FierceRadiance]

Eh, I'm not thinking the ciphers are there for any purpose beyond adding a modest level of complication (not challenge) to levels. They're supposed to be quick 'n easy to solve. It's not how long they take once you're at the panel, it's the fact that you can't proceed until you (or somebody) runs to the panel and performs the unlock dance.

For that purpose, I think they're just fine as-is. IMHO.

[aMannus]

Eh, I'm not thinking the ciphers are there for any purpose beyond adding a modest level of complication (not challenge) to levels. They're supposed to be quick 'n easy to solve. It's not how long they take once you're at the panel, it's the fact that you can't proceed until you (or somebody) runs to the panel and performs the unlock dance.

For that purpose, I think they're just fine as-is. IMHO.

Yes, I know this. As I said before though, even though they're there to root you in place, they could've been atleast slightly harder. As I mentioned before, even lowering the time you have before you fail a cypher would increase the suspense when you're hacking one with a few enemies around. I have around 8-10 seconds left almost every time. Decrease the time limit by 5 seconds and you bet it's going to be a slightly more interesting situation trying to hack a console. I did have a couple of times where I didn't even pay attention or misclicked 5 times in a row, and it did get more tense whenever I was nearing the 2-3 seconds left mark. I just think this experience should be occuring more often.

It's a slight thing and I'm sure I'm the only one that remotely cares. It's just that those small things give just that extra layer of thrill in the right situations.

[zyraconne]

Would be fun if it was:

"37 x 62 = ?" or "13 x 89 = ?"

10 seconds.

j/k, but I actually agree that it's currently just a nuisance and not a challenge, which is what I think it's supposed to be. Though a little less time would do just fine, too.

At this point, cipher items are almost useless.

Edited March 11, 2013 by zyraconne

[Naed]

Always happy to see new ideas. I'll check back at the thread tomorrow or so as well then.

And that time is now :)

What im trying to show here is a possible system that could work as a more "advanced"/"random" puzzle system

There is also the added "benefit" of harder cipher-puzzles being a possible credit-sink. (This is also something ill address later)

Its based on the "chance of something random" (which is the concept i would like people to keep in mind when looking at it)

The current cipher system has the following "choices" when you are trying to solve it.

Left or Right, both done with a single "correct" orientation in mind.

Thats it.

There isnt (in the current version of it) any chance of having a given tile be able to solve a puzzle by being oriented in 2 different ways.

What im proposing here is a system that can be solved in a number of different ways.

And yes, the current picture/model ive included is way too complicated (especially if you go all-in on the complexity of it) for a "normal" cipher puzzle, but for showing the system and a bit of the possible "depth" of it, the model ive uploaded is imho the easiest way of doing that.

The 4 "base" colours ive used could be anything, they could be symbols or dancing space-unicorns. Although i do believe that symbols/colours are the easiest to work it.

Figure 1:

This is the solution that you as the player would need to enter in the console.

Figure 2:

Here is what you see when you enter the console to try and solve the cipher/puzzle

It should be rather obvious that this is a way more time consuming cipher system AKA you will need a lot of time to solve what is shown here.

Reason: way more options/possible "right" moves with the tiles.

And as i mentioned, this is too complex a system as the system is right now.

But how about if you are given 30 seconds to solve it ?

Or given the choice of using a cipher-solver/tile-solver to solve the rotation of 1 tile per tile-solver ?

This would make it so that solving this specific puzzle would require 9 "keys" (if any of the tiles are orientated the "right" way from the start, that number would ofc go down)

Figure 3

Possible ways of making low level/less complex would be to make it so that there are only 2 colours used, a slightly more advanced one would be with 3 colours used.

There is also the option of using other shapes, fx the currently implemented T-shape could work nicely in that regard.

Or how about a L-shaped version but with 3 colours?

Or a O-shaped one with 8 active tiles ?

Figure 4

And it even works with the current "split" puzzle.

The added twist ofc is that the colours/shapes will add a bit of distraction to the puzzle solving in this specific case, Simply because the blue in the bottom tiles is also used in the top tiles.

EDIT: changed image host, imageshack was behaving odd

Edited March 11, 2013 by Naed

[Mebhin]

Hells bells dude you might as well just replace the hack panels with a game of freecell, minesweeper or hearts at that point.

[Naed]

Hells bells dude you might as well just replace the hack panels with a game of freecell, minesweeper or hearts at that point.

:)

The "detail" about what im suggesting is that it can scale, the current version really cant (in imho any meaningfull way) do that at all.

Fx, lets take the example of having a lockdown that is caused by a miniboss or something like it. That unlock would normally be considered somewhat more "complex" than a "only 1 mob left in an exterminate mission"-lockdown.

As the system is right now, there wont/cant really be any difference between the two.

With the colour system it could be a full 9 tile (4 colour) puzzle with the mini-boss and a simple 4 tile (2 colour) puzzle for the exterminate lockdown.

But at the end of the day, what im the most stoked about is the possibility of scaling the challenge.

[Bennyworld]

Yeah, I do agree that they need to be tweaked. Defiinitly a +1 from me XD

[Arlayn]

I ceased bothering with it I buy and carry 5 cipher unlockers at a time and I always stock up when I run out usually at least 100 of them so I can do missions in succesion. Yeah I agree its far too easy to do them (I am just lazy and prefer sticking a key in to speed it up lol) I would like to see something longer, bigger, harder, and for the love of all things PLEASE DON'T COPY Dystopia. I hated the whole Tron hack thing.

[Naed]

I ceased bothering with it I buy and carry 5 cipher unlockers at a time and I always stock up when I run out usually at least 100 of them so I can do missions in succesion. Yeah I agree its far too easy to do them (I am just lazy and prefer sticking a key in to speed it up lol) I would like to see something longer, bigger, harder, and for the love of all things PLEASE DON'T COPY Dystopia. I hated the whole Tron hack thing.

Just checking here, the system/concept i suggested is that a copy of what you said not to copy ?

[DetergentPod]

You say it's easy yet your average time is 6 seconds. Try to get 7 or higher.

[Katakuna]

You say it's easy yet your average time is 6 seconds. Try to get 7 or higher.

Why would he want to take longer to do a cipher? A low cipher time implies that it's easy. Unless you're saying that, as a player-created challenge, he should purposefully take longer to finish them; which would be rather silly.

[Arlayn]

Just checking here, the system/concept i suggested is that a copy of what you said not to copy ?

Dystopia had a system where when you hack you entered a digital world and then had to float around messing with random programs in weird ways... that took too long, and youd get lost if you were new to the maps in that game. It was irritating for me.

[Naed]

Dystopia had a system where when you hack you entered a digital world and then had to float around messing with random programs in weird ways... that took too long, and youd get lost if you were new to the maps in that game. It was irritating for me.

Ah!, Gotcha, that does indeed sound rather cumbersome.