Tenno Clock, Discussions Of The Community [Youtube] (Ep 89)

[MDRLOz]

Sadly I have not had that much chance to play so I am pretty low syndicate wise. 

 

We were discussing this last night and I don't like the Viver situation. 

 

Now you say that it is bad that it takes so long to get these factions to max but that is the point. It is DE attempting to add worth and value to the rewards we get. 

 

The sad thing about all this situation is the way DE adds one thing at a time. We have nothing else to do at present but archwing and syndicates so we want to achieve that content and move on. For a new player it will feel like there is more content to work toward while playing 

[Xenogelion]

So I was going to upload Episode 56 today however due to 7zip not liking to create an archive and having the OS dump that archive on the USB stick at the same time, over half the archive files got borked. As a result it'll be going live tomorrow instead, sorry for the delay.

[bejuizb]

No worries Xeno.

 

And what you said ix exactly what I mean Loz. For those who have been playing for a very long time, this feels like a slap in the face.

[Sixty5]

In regards to Viver farming, I have no problem with just running it.

When we were doing runs for 500 per wave we were actually playing the game. Power farming there is what really ruins it.

Sitting in one spot pressing a single button is no fun at all imo, yet the xp and rep gain you get from it is insane.

One possible solution might be to give enemies spawn protection, so that they cannot be damaged by powers for the first 10 seconds after they spawn.

That would go a long way to curb killspeeds in powerfarm runs.

[Xenogelion]

So finally episode 56 is actually up. It can be viewed here if this post goes onto page 19 or on the first post.

 

 

 

 

Reason this has taken so long is I'm trying to up the video quality. Typically the other videos are at 6Mb/s but this one was at 40Mb/s, as such the file went from 2GB to about 8GB. As the size as dramatically increased I couldn't upload it via home to work on my piddly 100KB/s up. As such I needed to break it up onto less 2GB 7zip files because my USB is FAT32 and when I did that initially yesterday it corrupted. Blah blah blah. So hopefully the picture quality for this episode should be something on part with:

 

 

 

However I wouldn't be surprised if youtube ends up dropping the bitrate like a stone and it goes to the horrible granny faff. I could look into generating 1080p versions of the footage at better quality BUT that would make the videos 16GB+ and it's already taken 3 hours to convert this one into HD. I'd love people's thoughts to know if what I'm doing is appreciated or just a waste of time.

 

That said, enjoy the episode and we await (eagerly) you're opinions on these matters.

[Xenogelion]

Episode 57 is up, we have special guest: Merastius. It can be viewed here if this post goes onto page 19 or on the first post.

 

 

 

 

Additionally the resolution has been upped to 1080p in a hope to increase the bitrate that YouTube is so determined to nerf. Also that's a thing that should be a trinity nerf: "YouTube dropping the bit rate of the community channels? Better nerf trinity" ;). Anyway I apologise for the fact that this episode was recorded between the mad rush of Viver on the forum, we recorded it on Thursday before the revert of the ability nerfs so please take it into consideration that we're aware that the nerf has been reverted.

 

[MDRLOz]

Wait so you increased the video quality from 6mb/s to 40mb/s?  Because of this it makes the video file size huge. 

 

Do people really need to see your random messing around in super super quality? Seems a bit odd to me seeing as the audio is supposed to be the important thing. Also I though most people just listened to us while playing the game. Its not like they need those prettier pics? 

[Xenogelion]

Actually, though experimentation, I've found that if a video is 720p by default then YouTube will re-encode at 6Mb/s regardless of the original, however if it's 1080p they'll re-encode at 8Mb/s. This means that if you watch a video, that supports 1080p at 720p it'll do the 720p at 8Mb/s. This video episode is 1080p at 8Mb/s so it was about 3.5GB as opposed to the 8GB for just 720p BUT rendering at 1080p takes over 5 hours as opposed to under 3.

 

TL;DR - basically I've been experimenting on footage quality and there are some people out there that have said to me they won't watch less the video quality is improved.

[Mattac0n]

Seems like weird logic on their part IMO. I see this more as a podcast with pretty bonus background footage than a video that happens to be a podcast.

Now on the main topic, I find it rather interesting that DE's solution in part with rep gain was to put a global daily cap that can be raised by Mastery (not the same as you guys' suggestions, but seems to be in the same spirit).

[MDRLOz]

TL;DR - there are some people out there that have said to me they won't watch less the video quality is improved.

 

Not to point out that the minority should not increase your time and workload without a pay off. 

 

Is there really people out there who say they wont watch your videos unless they are in uber quality? Is the footage of you, randomly playing game  that important to them that it has to be as close to the original footage as possible?

 

If there are even tens of people saying this to you then fine. If its one or two people have voiced some opinion then I would say do not make this more effort than it should be to appease a couple of people.  

[bejuizb]

Video quality has never bothered me personally, so I'd suggest not investing much time into it here on. Most of the time, I generally alt tab and do something else while listening to the podcast anyways.

[Xenogelion]

It is interesting to how DE have actually changed it to a daily cap. As Merastius stated, the strategy of Viver belittles the purpose of the daily missions; having the idea of a rep cap per day may not remove the belittlement of the dailies but at the same time it doesn't belittle the concept of the strategy itself. Even though this doesn't fix the belittlement, it does make the daily missions important solely because the rep you get from them do not count towards the daily cap.

 

I'd like to see how this plays out further and hope that the community will calm down a little with regards to syndicates.

 

Actually what I've changed now is next to no extra work. The only hard part was the experimentation to determine what YouTube actually does but that's all done now.

Edited November 18, 2014 by Xenogelion

[Sixty5]

The thing is, power farming still hasn't been fixed.

The current cap means that you won't max out syndicates in a day, but if you know what you are doing you can still easily max out 3 weapons in 20 minutes.

The problem is that these tactics are rather hard to prevent, and the things that will stop/hamper them won't go down too well.

[Xenogelion]

Could you list me some of the methods of hampering power farming?

 

Also Sixty5, I'm chatting to peeps on the twitters and I just want to confirm from your master perspective, do Grineer hurt more since U15?

[bejuizb]

Yeah, Grineer are an absolute pain to deal with. Stupid amounts of status chance, damage and CC.

[Sixty5]

Could you list me some of the methods of hampering power farming?

 

Also Sixty5, I'm chatting to peeps on the twitters and I just want to confirm from your master perspective, do Grineer hurt more since U15?

Line of sight on powers

Cooldowns between power use

Longer animations

Spawn delays

Power nerfs

Mod nerfs (fleeting and blind rage)

And nerfing energy recovery through, siphons, energy vampire, limbo, energy restores and stacked Sahasa Kubrows.

As for the Grineer, they do seem to be hitting me more, but that just means that I need to move smarter.

[Xenogelion]

Because the warframe forums have borkd embedded youtube links,

!

 

Discuss, I'm mostly interested in people's opinions of PVP like stalker missions. Also free plat giveaway!

[Mattac0n]

The first time I watched this, I was against the idea of this sort of PVP in Warframe. It would have defeated the purpose of navigating the Solar Rail, making it too close to cutthroat Dark Souls-style PVP (especially for the brand-new players), but in retrospect it could work out nicely. We just have to make a dedicated space for Syndicate PVP to happen.
I actually like the idea of having "home worlds" for each Syndicate, and I think I know how that could work out. Instead of planting this PVP in the main map, specific planets could house a string of 3-5 new nodes similar to the Dark Sectors.

These new node strings would be controlled by a particular Syndicate. Earth = New Loka, Phobos = Steel Meridian & Red Veil, new Void section = Arbiters and Cephalon, Jupiter = Perrin Sequence. Each node within each string will have enemy level ranges between 20 and 32, mostly catering to the more experienced players.
The nodes would work similarly to the Dark Sectors, but are permanently controlled by each respective Syndicate and have no taxes. Instead these nodes would require the player to wear either the appropriate or enemy Sigil to enter. All of these nodes will be either Defense or Excavation.
Allied players will be able to play the missions as normal, with the benefit of a small reduction on the amount of daily Syndicate reputation consumed per run. Ememy Syndicate players could also enter those nodes, but take on the Stalker/hunter-type role as the source thread had outlined. If the hunter player succeeds at capturing or killing everyone, then they get a reputation payout (as you have outlined again).
Each team could only be invaded once per mission. As fun as it possibly is to be able to stave off a steady wave of would-be party hunters, it would have too much grief potential in the hands of a malicious, well-equipped, coordinated hunter party.
Matchmaking would consider the matched player's average equipment Conclave and Mastery Rank- hopefully that means you can't just take an unmodded frame + fully-modded 8-forma [insert uberdamaging weapon here] or, likewise, a fully modded-out 6-forma damage frame + a Mk1 Braton to squash very low Conclave teams. The PVP damage would take on the ruleset of the Dark Sector Conflicts to further even things out (otherwise everyone would be instantly downing each other with Ash ultimates and Shruikens).
I'd prefer this specific style of Syndicate PVP primarily to avoid it devolving to "Dark Souls with a Warframe theme." (*I do think DS1 and DS2's style of PVP is extremely compelling and engaging to watch and play, but its take on multiplayer would end up far too taxing and theme-breaking in the universe of Warframe.)

I know this part isn't the intended talk that you want, but I have to get this out of the way- I do agree that the big issue with how new features are percieved is indeed caused by overhype. Having excessive hype on anything absolutely guarantees mass disappointment (and, as you said, what actually works 100% on day one these days), and it has consistently happened outside of Warframe - at a worrying rate - in these last couple years. (Even more worrying is how much media-generating power the huge publishers have been amassing over this time, but that whole discussion could be reserved for another day...)
Hype is a two-way street- the developers/publishers push forward media attention of their products & updates to their own sites and media outlets, while the fans/audience echo back & forth their excitement for said product.
In the case of Warframe, I can't really say much for DE. I think the team is doing an adequate job of managing how much pre-release media they eke out before major updates drop- most of the pre-release happens in their Dev Streams, and their major update-related sites are a nice touch as well. Overall I don't feel that DE does too much with their media releases. Now the fanbase is a different story. They as a whole appear too impatient and hype-hungry, all things considered. I myself fell in the hype pool before U14, but kept in mind that such a massive change definitely meant that things will break on Day 1 of U14. I feel afterwards that I don't fall too quickly for hype on future content in the aftermath. My honest suggestion is to just exercise some patience, but I'm at a loss over how they specifically could grasp this at a satisfactory level.

Edited November 30, 2014 by Mattac0n

[Mattac0n]

Line of sight on powers

Cooldowns between power use

Longer animations

Spawn delays

Power nerfs

Mod nerfs (fleeting and blind rage)

And nerfing energy recovery through, siphons, energy vampire, limbo, energy restores and stacked Sahasa Kubrows.

As for the Grineer, they do seem to be hitting me more, but that just means that I need to move smarter.

DE has started datamining Grineer accuracy ever since that has been brought up to them. Hopefully they can make something (anything really) out of this - https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/349978-psa-enemy-accuracy-and-you/

Edited November 26, 2014 by Mattac0n

[Xenogelion]

Episode 59! Winners of the PC and PS4 plat giveaways are mishO and (PS4)littleblondewolf respectively.

 

@Mattac0n

Though I'd like to target the stalker like PvP I actually enjoyed your comments about Hype so I'm going to tackle that instead. Hype is literally only controllable by those experiencing it, it's unfortunate that any company can't just turn around and say "STOP GETTING SO WORKED UP!". This is actually a clear as crystal for DE when it came to Melee 2.0, initially DE said that Melee 2.0 would come out by X but it came out months late and it was because they saw on the forum how people were getting super excited about how Melee 2.0 would impact the game to allow for different kinds of attack blah blah blah when (behind the scenes at DE) all was just different Melee animations. Let's face it, (absolutely) nothing can survive hype, you will always come away from something going "I feel disappointed".

 

My clear case for this was Crysis 3, I loved 1 & 2 and I was so looking forward to 3 but when it came out and had a total play time of like 6 hours I was disappointed. I enjoyed the gameplay and the plot but it was too short compared to 1 or 2.

 

There was another clear case of this which was Duke Nukem Forever, everyone got super hyped at the game and when it came out everyone butchered that game as if it was literally 12 years in the making. I mean come on people (not you guys), it's been said time and time again that Forever had been restarted multiple times over the 12 years and when GearBox finally released the game it was the one 3D realms had last been working on, GearBox didn't deserve that flak.

 

(They did deserve the flak for Alien: Colonial Marines, they shouldn't have subcontracted that and SEGA shouldn't have been so pushy.)

 

[Traeyze]

Long and kind of aimless episode. About sums up Warframe recently, though.

Hubs - Look okay. Another on the long list of 'why is this a priority over metagame' ideas. To be honest after coming from a bunch of MMOs I liked that Warframe was all menus and you didn't have to run around towns looking for stores. I am not sure what the rush towards that is meant to be achieving.

1st Person - GTAV and MGS3 are two games that really benefitted from allowing first person. I feel Warframe would do pretty well, the sense of speed would be nice and movement tends to flow well as is. Only issue is that I'd imagine helicopter animations would have to be changed.

I see why they are hesitant to do it, though.

New Infested - Honestly the most irritating one for me is that cloud of ash and ember, I have no idea which spews it. It is just a really irritating effect and when a lot of stuff is on screen it completely overloads my laptop and I drop frames pretty bad. Admittedly the game has not been running well in general since the last couple of updates, though. Regardless I've not come close to being one hit but I have been overwhelmed, which I didn't have a problem with.

Unlocking Mesa - Those coordinates are enough to put me off the game. I really like the Mesa design and concept but my god, this is the most transparently frustrating wall yet. It is particularly disappointing after the last couple of frames were done via quests.

Voting on Designs - Honestly, just a little feedback in the process might help. I am not as critical as the themed designs as some people but even I acknowledge that Limbo was a lost cause.

Hype - To be honest DE does a lot of this to itself. It uses hype to keep people on the train with constant teasers, talking up delays as if it is them actually improving the content, focussing on new new new instead of going for depth. The result is that we have expanded the basics of the game, the on paper specs of the game, but it is a very shallow and frustratingly slow process. Every time they add a new gimmick, especially one that doesn't have any impact on the standard missions, we know it is at the cost of true progress. Say what you will about their fun factor but kubrows and archwing were tacked on too soon. They should have dealt with the actual game first.

[Mattac0n]

I actually don't think Steve said 2014 was the year of endgame, as everyone thought it out to be. Wasn't it NEXT year (or even 2016)? I just have this weird feeling that people are stuffing words in Steve's mouth about the "Year of Endgame"... Though I do understand the frustration and impatience of basically the players who have literally completed the whole game already (basically the current MR18 players). There's still absolutely nothing to cater to and satisfy those "true endgame" players- even Archwing ended up feeling like it ran out of steam too quickly despite the massively satisfying alternate gameplay that it had offered.

What I feel is, if anything, this is the "Year of New Content," not "Year of Endgame" as it was supposedly made out to be. DE dedicated this whole year on pumping out new content and nothing else. They definitely have plans for improvement and refining, but they won't get to any of those until all of their schedule has been cleaned out (hopefully concluding with Hubs).

Perhaps it's also a case of end-of-the-year blues. I wouldn't feel surprised (but I'd feel quite sympathetic) if a portion of the employees feel entirely burned out by a straight year of Warframe development on top of (what you've mentioned) all the incessant player complaints/criticisms that they have to shoulder as well. What sort of feelings would one have when they get to their desk to continue work on a new feature and all they get to see are "This sucks, nerf/change it" over and over for what they had previously worked on?

Edited December 1, 2014 by Mattac0n

[MDRLOz]

A quick raid of the Design Council archive finds the feburary thread by DE_Steve entitled:

END GAME PROJECTS FOR 2014

This is a quick post about three "End-Game" projects we have in the works for 2014

 

 

It was also mentioned in a devstream back in Jan/Feb and then joked about in a dev stream around september. 

They always called this the "year of endgame". However as you point out these projects are more new game than end game. 

 

Once again they produce content that is to be completed endlessly without any progression or challenge. 

 

I don't doubt that some Devs might be burnt out from so much content. However what they could do is make an update just a balance pass of all those weapons and frames. This would be a low content patch that would allow the devs time to paly their own game and decide on what they feel needs buffering and balancing. However that will never happen because they are a company and need to keep players hooked and keep reeling in new players/old players that left. So the company will have to focus on new content. If they could be allowed to take some time and reflect o nthe stuff they make I am sure they could make a lot of people happy. However they don't get such time as the next big thing but be implmeneted and all the other stuff they released can gather dust and cause players to complain.  

[Mattac0n]

On the brighter side, I definitely see the positive impact of Hubs. I felt that before the Vesper Relay was made "testable," Warframe could become a very solitary (if not lonely) experience. The most amount of social interaction that any one player can get on a consistent basis, outside of chatrooms and Dojos (if they had membership), would be with three total strangers in a mission (and that's if they were willing to socialize at all). Interacting in the Relay finally allows one to put a memorable "identity" to any Tenno's name (...even though it's just by current frame at that point). Understandably the Relay is very basic and just-functional right now; acceptable given it is still very much in a WIP state. What I wish to see at this point is a rough dev sketch of the Trading section's floor plan.

...holy moly, it's December now. Full steam ahead?

Edited December 3, 2014 by Mattac0n

[Mattac0n]

I've actually been noticing a ton of players donning the Prime armor all over the solar system, implying that they only purchased the standalone Prime Accessories Bundle up to this point. Although the armor itself is absolutely stunning to look at, I'm starting to feel worried that having Prime accessories this readily available at a (relative) discount price would terribly deflate the value of owning such exclusives. Do you think you can squeeze in a topic related to Prime accessories for this upcoming Monday, or is there just not enough depth to this trend to warrant much discussion time?

Edited December 6, 2014 by Mattac0n