Invasion Battlepay And Affinity Nerf

[Angius]

Ok, topic wa splitted in two, so I'll split also my post.

Regarding Invasion changes:

 

With this information now clarified, we can focus on feedback around the issue and make changes where necessary. 

Ok, feedback. Let me quote you (DE):

"We want to reduce grind"

"We want to buff things instead of nerfing them"

 

Reduce the grind, by buffing the rewards. I mean, that's pathetic, that you can get more credits from an alert, than you can get from 3 (three) Outbreaks. And don't you even think about nerfing the alerts.

 

Buff the rewards. If the Corpus is losing make them pay more. Make them be like "Sh*t guys, we're losing! Come on, give us our personal money, we need to give them better rewards!" and maybe slightly nerf Grineer rewards: "You know, they are fighting for us because they want that Detron stuff... We don't even have to pay them that much."

[Xylia]

Buff rewards depending on what planet it is on.

 

The current Pluto Invasion?

 

25k Credits vs ONE Orokin Cell.

 

For Pluto.

 

NO THANKS.

 

Higher Level Planets should give better Invasion Battlepays on all possible Battlepay rewards except for Potato/Forma Blueprints.

 

For example:

 

Invasion on Mars: Resource x2, 25-50k credits, Clan Tech x1

Invasion on Sedna, Phobos, Europa, etc: Resource x3, 50-75k credits, Clan Tech x2

Invasion on Eris/Pluto: Resource x5, 75k-100k credits, Clan Tech x3

 

And do similar things with Infested Outbreaks.

[Seamur]

It would be logical for losing faction to give out better rewards and winning faction worse. Up to the point where both factions become equal in terms of power. Same for Outbreaks. Detron parts seem like logical idea for reward. Problem is fact that some conflicts die out before you can complete 5 runs needed for battle pay...

Edited February 18, 2014 by Seamur

[Xylia]

It would be logical for losing faction to give out better rewards and winning faction worse. Up to the point where both factions become equal in terms of power. Same for Outbreaks. Detron parts seem like logical idea for reward. Problem is fact that some conflicts die out before you can complete 5 runs needed for battle pay...

 

Which is why they need to make all Battle Pay 3 missions.

 

Let's face it, 5 missions where you have to kill 150+ enemies (especially if you want to fight against the Grineer) is incredibly tedious and takes the better part of an hour if you're not in an uber 'murder everything in the room in 2 seconds' frame.

[Regar]

With this information now clarified, we can focus on feedback around the issue and make changes where necessary. 

invasions and ifnestations are boring, doing 5 times in a row the same mission for a reward is worth it only for a catalyst or a forma ...and those mission get cleared in a blink of an eye without letting neither the 5% of the community to aquire the prize... 

 

Invesion coutner should be lowered to 0/3 as for the infestations, and the tiles used in the invasion should change everytime that you play it, don't select one tile for each node that get invaded, it's boring

 

not to mention infestation that are even more annoying because even if they requires 3 times to aquire the reward they are mostly survivals and defenses and instead of playing a survival or a defense as the other missions (trying to survive more) people just exit at 5min and 5th wave becasue of the reward, defense and survivals should have a 0/1 counter on the reward (0/3 might be fine for exterminates, but not for defense/mobdefense/survivals), so people will care less about the infestation reward and will be playing it for fun.

 

another problem with invasions is that there are some nodes that garant rewards that nobody wants and they stand there for entire weeks without being cleared, the 2 factions should higer their rewards if 1 day passes and the node doesn't get cleared.

 

infestations minimap are messed up, most of the times you can't see anything but allies

 

 

that's it

[Namacyst]

The questioning of XP being nerfed can be debunked as it was not touched.

 

The main concern here has shifted to the topic of 'Communication'. Yes, some things fall through the cracks and we have to dig to recover them, but in no way are we attempting to hide them. This was an unfortunate error on our side that resulted in mass confusion because the necessary information was not clear. 

 

With this information now clarified, we can focus on feedback around the issue and make changes where necessary.

 

What about the Latron Prime damage revert/nerf without communication.. the reduce in Carrier Vacuum frequency, the Shade cloak nerf, changes to Lato damage.. to name just a few... that must have been a hell of a crack that so much could fall through.

Edited February 18, 2014 by Namacyst

[KvotheTheArcane1]

What about the Latron Prime damage revert/nerf without communication.. the reduce in Carrier Vacuum frequency, the Shade cloak nerf, changes to Lato damage.. to name just a few... that must have been a hell of a crack that so much could fall through.

Wrong thread

[Xylia]

What about the Latron Prime damage revert/nerf without communication.. the reduce in Carrier Vacuum frequency, the Shade cloak nerf, changes to Lato damage.. to name just a few... that must have been a hell of a crack that so much could fall through.

 

Wait, they nerfed Vacuum?

 

I thought something was..... strange.

 

WTF did they do that for? *sigh*

 

We have something nice and then they nerf it. I was wondering why my Carrier was floating there doing nothing for several seconds causing me to miss all kinds of junk laying around.

[Detheroc]

The questioning of XP being nerfed can be debunked as it was not touched.

 

The main concern here has shifted to the topic of 'Communication'. Yes, some things fall through the cracks and we have to dig to recover them, but in no way are we attempting to hide them. This was an unfortunate error on our side that resulted in mass confusion because the necessary information was not clear. 

 

With this information now clarified, we can focus on feedback around the issue and make changes where necessary. 

But the affinity gain without booster is broken, or the booster is just quadrupling the affinity. https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/180766-affinity-distribution-without-booster-is-a-joke/

[WhiteCopain]

The re-balance of the Invasions (Battle Pay & Resources) was mentioned in the Update 12.1.2 notes:

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/179717-hotfix-1212/

 

"- Tweaked enemy strategies in invasions for factions that are on the ropes in the Star Chart."

 

On Friday we deployed an attempt to get the Factions being pushed out of the Star Chart back on track (Corpus right now), but this also included an ecosystem of different value that was part of the same integration. 

 

Unfortunately we didn't communicate this change in necessary detail at the time of deployment and it has caused confusion. We did some digging and have information to clear up:

 

Frequency of invasions combined with the weighting of goods was becoming a saturation problem. The Orokin Cells and perceived higher value items need to be used more strategically by Factions on the ropes. As with all-things-invasions, there will always be a winning side which brings the need for balance. 

I think the problem have isn't what's being given, but how much is being given. It's a way lower incentive to do something if I'm not going to get something worth my time out of it. If I get three or five of an item, that's worth it. If I get one of an item, there's plenty of missions I can farm faster then five times for more then one of that item.

[Tails-san]

I definitely have to agree with those saying that the overall nerf of battle pay is simply reducing motivation to do invasions at all, rather than actually balancing them out between the factions.

 

The infestation outbreaks hardly needed to be touched, other than adding Detonite Injectors now that there's substantially more use for them. Reducing their credit rewards to a consistent 10,000 pretty much just makes them not worthwhile, though I suspect that this aspect may be an unintended bug as a result of the new reward deciding algorithm, since the paying side is ALWAYS the winning side, so it may be reducing their reward as an attempt to "tip the balance" toward the infested, despite not being able to fight on their side. 10,000 credits is also substantially less than the effective value of a single clantech research item, which cost 30,000 in credits alone, between their single-use blueprint and crafting cost, which are both 15,000, and then there's the component requirements on top of that, and a 12-hour construction time.

 

Similarly, the blanket reductions in battle pay for faction invasions really reduces the motivation to run them. Not only do faction invasions require 5 runs instead of the 3 in Infestation outbreaks, but the levels themselves generally show significantly less variety, to the extent that I sometimes feel like the level is actually EXACTLY THE SAME each time I run that invasion (this is particularly the case in the ship vs. ship encounters). On top of that, Faction invasions, unlike Infestation outbreaks, are ALWAYS Exterminate. The end result is that the faction invasions are substantially more repetitive. Reducing their reward overall without reducing the number of runs needed to complete them just really kills all motivation to actually run them at all.

[Relkin408]

The questioning of XP being nerfed can be debunked as it was not touched.

 

The main concern here has shifted to the topic of 'Communication'. Yes, some things fall through the cracks and we have to dig to recover them, but in no way are we attempting to hide them. This was an unfortunate error on our side that resulted in mass confusion because the necessary information was not clear. 

 

With this information now clarified, we can focus on feedback around the issue and make changes where necessary. 

Evidence against this has been posted - now it may not be intentional.  It wouldn't be the first time DE has accidentally broken crap like this (remember the drop table incident?) so it may be worth having somebody check it out.

[Othergrunty]

Frequency of invasions combined with the weighting of goods was becoming a saturation problem. The Orokin Cells and perceived higher value items need to be used more strategically by Factions on the ropes. As with all-things-invasions, there will always be a winning side which brings the need for balance. 

 

Or how about just reducing Invasion to an event only thing or use it very sparingly when you want to increase player activity rather than messing up the entire star chart constantly?

 

I know everyone must have felt very proud after Gradivus how their new experimental game mechanic worked (though since they never realised how tedious running 5 missions of extermination in a row can be that's a liberal use of "worked), but was that really a good reason to throw it into the game without ever thinking about the mess players could create?

Wasn't Martialis example enough of how insanely stubborn the players can be?

 

I say reduce Invasion to a rare event, set back the solar system dominance to it's post Gradivus setting and keep the high rewards from both sides when the rare invasions happen.

[(PSN)ShadowDancing-]

I understand what you mean and am in the same boat as you so I know where you are coming from, the reality of the situation though is this is a grinding game so there will always be a large grind to it.  They are working on the drop tables as is evidence of the recent change (and will in all likelihood continue to work on them for the life of the game).  To be realistic, the 3 cells for battlepay was rather generous when it can take 20 to 30 min just to get 1 cell and you were getting three.

 

your math is wrong.  3 cells for 5 x 15 minute missions = 75 minutes.  3 cells for 3 x 20 normal missions = 60 minutes.  3 cells is the opposite of generous.  And I'm on U11.5  Battle pay is not generous compared to running equally high level missions in better places.  Running the invasion missions 5 times is absurdly grindy.  I love my Penta, but doing the same mission 5 times in a row, as quickly as possible because if the invasion ends before you complete you get jack squat is NOT FUN.  I lost out on 3 cells because I only did 4 / 5 missions in time.  That's an hour of wasted time for which I got ****.  There is "this game is grindy for fun by design" and then there is "this mission sequence is NOT FUN".

 

And the credits are nice, but for running the mission 5 times you already get slightly less than half the supposedly huge battle pay (~20K cr total followed by a 50K cr battle pay).  That's nice, but not awe inspiring.  If you have a credit booster, the invasion battle pay isn't worth the effort.

 

There is no justifiable reason for invasions to require 5 missions to qualify for battle pay.  The rewards should for 3 missions, and the scaling should be comparable to 3 missions.  3 cells for 3 mission runs would be normal, not generous.

 

Alert missions pay far better / unit of time.

[Axterix13]

Frequency of invasions combined with the weighting of goods was becoming a saturation problem. The Orokin Cells and perceived higher value items need to be used more strategically by Factions on the ropes. As with all-things-invasions, there will always be a winning side which brings the need for balance. 

The problem is where else I can get said items.  An invasion offering 1 Orokin Cell as a reward isn't one I'm going to bother doing, no matter where it is.  In the same time investment, there's another mission I can run and most likely walk away with multiples.

 

On top of that, there's another core issue, that being that invasions are, in their current implementation, not much fun.  They're repetitive, requiring running the same mission 5 times.  That might be fine, if your core audience was Daleks, but it isn't.  And even worse, the type of mission doesn't vary from planet to planet.  Sure, sometimes I fight on the Grineer side, other times the Corpus, but beyond that, the only variation is basically which of the three maps I'll get (pod, space walk, or force fields).

 

What that means is that I don't see the rewards as a nice bonus for something I'd be likely to do anyway.  Instead, they function as an incentive to do this content instead of other stuff that offers more variety (and better rewards per mission), and through that, more enjoyment for myself.  25k for five missions?  A single resource?  Just nope.

Edited February 18, 2014 by Axterix13

[(PSN)ShadowDancing-]

I agree honestly-- I play on ps4 but I sure as heck wont be running the same exterminate mission 5 times for 35 k credits. You can get 25-30k from 3 invasion runs at the moment-- the only time it was worth it to support corpus was if they offered a reactor or catalyst or 50,000 over the grineer's 3 fieldron samples "unless you needed fieldron samples.

If anything the losing faction could have said ok-- we will double triple your battle pay if you decide to come back to our side "which would require 10 runs after the initial 5-- or offer up a catalyst/reactor as a a last resort and even still - I need to do other things than run operations all day :/. As it is on ps4 these operations - certain ones are taking days to complete. I did a operation 2 days ago - and so did everyone else apparently because it just had to sort of-- ride its time out for 48 hours before I got payed.

agreed.  If they really wanted to fix balance in the universe, the losing side would make counter offers.  Also, have I mentioned escrow ?

[Cyrionn]

I have to agree there, and even if all I'm gonna say has been said before I guess the more people do it the more chances we have to make DE understand.

 

So about the communication problem, this is an akward job I'm sorry to say this. Not giving players clear informations on changes with true numeric values feels really harsh for the community. I am still waiting for DE to give some values to the new Hysteria formula, players found it more or less by themselves but it would be a token of appreciation towards the players that were waiting for this (how disappointing) change for so long.

We are your beta testers and you guys wait for us to give you proper and accurate feedback to help you in the game developpement, if we have to guess by ourselves approximatively what are the changes you made it won't help us to give you accurate feedback and in the end, won't help your job.

 

Now about Infestations battle pay changes...well in the first place why changing them ? It's not like it's influing any faction there so I really don't see the point in this, except making it less attractive than it was before, and it wasn't already.

 

Then the invasion changes, how can lowering the prizes for both sides help one of them ? Maybe you wanted people to just ignore those invasions, other than that I see no logical explanation there. What broke the balance between Corpus and Grineers is the farming of the overrated Detron. What about taking away the Harvester until it gets its grineer counter part ? You can lower the reward as much as you want, as people stated earlier the rewards weren't attractive enough to make us fight for anything else than fun or lack of anything else to do, and that was before the changes.

Now spending 15 mins for 5k credits sounds like a big joke. And it's not like we have too much credits, upgrading 10 ranks mods to their max is a matter of millions for each. If the platinum sales are the problem here, if there are more credits for the players they will tend to rank more mods to their max for a trading purpose, which means more platinum involved in trades and more platinum sold in the long run.

 

Just to say that I don't understand what is the strategy behind those moves, and not stating it clearly makes us think that you don't know where you are going at all.

Edited February 18, 2014 by Cyrionn

[NikolaiLev]

The main concern here has shifted to the topic of 'Communication'

 

Uh?  How about the complete pointlessness of Invasion as a whole, and the increased grind that comes with the reductions in battlepay?

 

Why can't the more desperate side have increased rewards instead?

[Zhoyzu]

I'm levelling a Cernos, Akstilleto and Hate all at once and if anything, I've felt like it's going faster than usual. So I'll have to trust that affinity is the same.

it was changed awhile ago but the xp per enemy is the same

[Metalbawkses]

Personally i think its the weapon exp requirement that went up, not less exp. But for the invasion reward table, i really do hope it gets reverted or tweaked. One orokin cell on pluto or 25k isnt exactly my definition of worth it, given we can do just do t3 for money, but then what would be the point of doing the invasion if the only attraction is no longer there? Have a list of these invasion that the faction cant even finish by themselves? Instead of outright reducing the credit and resource amount, why not do reward variety? Lets say credit + resources or resource + clan tech or clan + credits. 

[Novocrane]

Perhaps the entire invasion system should be reworked.

 

 Imagine if, instead of grinding the same node / mission 5 times for a specific reward, you simply do missions at any invasion node in a given planetary system.

The first time you select an invasion mission, it gives you a range of rewards to choose from based on how well the faction you chose to support is doing (invasion %, and nodes held) and then any invasion mission done counts towards that reward for you. You can't change the reward once selected, but when you are rewarded, you must choose another before continuing to fight in the invasion - and may switch faction before you do so.

 

Pretty sure it would resolve ongoing issues with playing the same mission five times over, and if DE threw in roaming boss fights (bosses that last longer than 5 seconds, and definitely not infested ancients) that count for two missions instead of one, I'd consider that a winning outcome.

Edited February 19, 2014 by Novocrane

[dethkittin]

Xylia post 2116458

Namacyst post 2116414

[DE]Megan post 2116113

The questioning of XP being nerfed can be debunked as it was not touched.

The main concern here has shifted to the topic of 'Communication'. Yes, some things fall through the cracks and we have to dig to recover them, but in no way are we attempting to hide them. This was an unfortunate error on our side that resulted in mass confusion because the necessary information was not clear.

With this information now clarified, we can focus on feedback around the issue and make changes where necessary.

What about the Latron Prime damage revert/nerf without communication.. the reduce in Carrier Vacuum frequency, the Shade cloak nerf, changes to Lato damage.. to name just a few... that must have been a hell of a crack that so much could fall through.

Wait, they nerfed Vacuum?

I thought something was..... strange.

WTF did they do that for? *sigh*

We have something nice and then they nerf it. I was wondering why my Carrier was floating there doing nothing for several seconds causing me to miss all kinds of junk laying around.

Is this a genuine change? I don't see anything in the patch notes I just went and had a look...

I thought the carrier thing was a bug? It seems to just yeah, do what you described just forgetting to pick stuff up sometimes, it's wonky like it's detection breaks or however it works I don't know...

And yes, the Shade sentinel's cloaking is worse than useless, I really don't see why they don't just remove the sentinel altogether if it's actually MEANT to be like that, unless no one tested it at all o_O

[Leorion]

The re-balance of the Invasions (Battle Pay & Resources) was mentioned in the Update 12.1.2 notes:

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/179717-hotfix-1212/

 

"- Tweaked enemy strategies in invasions for factions that are on the ropes in the Star Chart."

 

On Friday we deployed an attempt to get the Factions being pushed out of the Star Chart back on track (Corpus right now), but this also included an ecosystem of different value that was part of the same integration. 

 

Unfortunately we didn't communicate this change in necessary detail at the time of deployment and it has caused confusion. We did some digging and have information to clear up:

 

Frequency of invasions combined with the weighting of goods was becoming a saturation problem. The Orokin Cells and perceived higher value items need to be used more strategically by Factions on the ropes. As with all-things-invasions, there will always be a winning side which brings the need for balance. 

 

Wow... Is it so hard to, IDK, just give better rewards to a losing faction? Instead of REDUCING OVERALL PAYMENT?

 

From what I understand, you want to use more needed items to tilt the balance... That doesn't mean you should reduce the rewards.

50k vs 5 Orokin Cells and people would easily go for the cells.

Instead you guys whent

25k vs 1 Cell.

 

See the problem here?

[Prepoznator]

Bah just rework this whole system, make the invasion rewards go directly into clan vault,make it a clan thing so clans have something to do, we all know why wars even occur its all about taking the stuff from people you dont have but u need ....Around 60% percent of my clan is semi-active because they get evrything they need like real fast and basicly play when update brings new weapon-frame for mastery level.U gotta make clans mean something more than getting new blueprints.

[NikolaiLev]

Wow... Is it so hard to, IDK, just give better rewards to a losing faction? Instead of REDUCING OVERALL PAYMENT?

 

From what I understand, you want to use more needed items to tilt the balance... That doesn't mean you should reduce the rewards.

50k vs 5 Orokin Cells and people would easily go for the cells.

Instead you guys whent

25k vs 1 Cell.

 

See the problem here?

 

Decreasing the grind isn't as profitable as just increasing it, and DE cares more about profits than its players.  That's what their actions so far say, anyway.