New Player Experience Is Bananas.

[Drakontis]

So, I decided to make a new account to test a theory of mine in regards to things like mods and progression and WOW. This is just BS the way things are right now. 

I'm almost to the second boss, Jackal, and I'm having quite a bit of trouble with the Corpus. I have no Hornet Strike, no Serration, and my damage output is paltry in comparison to theirs. Especially since they seem to spawn in quite an abundance. It's just... ridiculous. I tried to do the rank 1 mastery test and I failed. I remember this being a JOKE when I first started on my original account. It might help that it was also GRINEER instead of CORPUS. So I have to whittle through SHIELDS AND HEALTH with NO serration mod. In fact, the only damage multipliers I have are Pressure Point and North Wind which are both for melee. And good luck doing that with the amount of enemies spawning. 

Sheesh. This is just... bananas. I don't like it. I'm trying to do this vanilla. No help from any specific people, no asking for mods from friends or anything. But damn... I have no idea how I'll be able to beat the jackal with a public group because if they're in the same boat I am... then might as well not even try. 

Let me just say, I really don't like how mods are dropped now. Yes, it takes a LITTLE bit of the RNG out, but not nearly enough. Especially since when you're just starting, you're in DIRE NEED of certain mods. And you can't get them due to how the system works. 

I simply don't like this. But I'll suffer through to prove my points.

[michaelwii]

It's terrifying to be honest. I didn't really understand how bad it was until I also made a new account.

 

When people complained about a bad beginner's experience, I thought bad in the sense of how mine was back in closed beta. But of course, that was closed beta, and the game being where it is really should have a better beginner's experience. If you don't have a good experience at the beginning, you turn off a lot of players before they get to the real fun of warframe, and stop around Venus or Mars.

 

New beginner experience lasts way too long as a result of not being able to get essential mods. I didn't get a redirection or vitality for the longest time a year ago, making it extremely hard to build my warframe.

 

EDIT: Maybe introduce a wing of the Hub Lobby System for beginners, where they can find NPCs of some kind that provide them with helpful stuff, a buddy up system with a more experienced player, clan recruitment (focused on helping new players) and general beginner stuff? Once they reach a certain mastery, they don't have access to this wing. 

 

That's probably too complex. There wouldn't be a need for that if the game had a good beginner's experience. The fact that I started in closed beta meant that it was ok that the beginner's experience was bad, stuff all over was bad, and it also meant that I got an absurd amount of fusion cores when the skill tree system got kicked out, which was also extremely beneficial towards helping me in open beta. 

Edited March 19, 2014 by michaelwii

[Dtexas]

I can confirm all of this. Just got my PS4 and started over again as a newer player. Its completely bogus. The first mastery test has you go against corpus and theres a chance you may never even have faced them by the time you get to the first test, so its extremely easy to die especially since they do quite a bit of damage. Died 3 times doing the first mastery test successfully. Failed it once also.

 

Mercury should be the training planet. DE should set it up so that after every mission you get an invaluable such as serration, hornet strike, redirection vitality etc. 

[Drakontis]

I can confirm all of this. Just got my PS4 and started over again as a newer player. Its completely bogus. The first mastery test has you go against corpus and theres a chance you may never even have faced them by the time you get to the first test, so its extremely easy to die especially since they do quite a bit of damage. Died 3 times doing the first mastery test successfully. Failed it once also.

 

Mercury should be the training planet. DE should set it up so that after every mission you get an invaluable such as serration, hornet strike, redirection vitality etc. 

Fortunately, you DO get Redirection from the intro mission. And Vitality is an early drop from Mercury. But I've not seen Hornet Strike, nor Serration yet. In fact, the only mods I DO have for my firearms are

Point Strike, Fast Hands, Ammo Drum and Magazine Warp for rifle. 

Quickdraw for Pistol. (Which, by the way, is a VERY recent drop...)

 

And as I said before, I'd go with melee, but that's almost suicide when I'm running Loki for this. It's just... frickin' bonkers. 

[Amazerath]

What did change? I saw you mentioned mod drops, but what exactly did change about mods? The drop rates?

 

One more question, for anyone who has made a new account to test new player experience: is the lack of infested missions a good thing or bad thing? I'm asking this because it's something I remember very clearly from when I started playing. I had to do the infested missions over and over again because every time an Ancient Toxic showed up, I died. I managed to complete those missions by getting out of range and sniping Toxics with my Lato. But it didn't always work.

[Luminati07]

I did the same back when Alad V was buffed up to level 35 (or whatever).

 

Made a new account with the intent of creating a video of how the buff to Alad V was unfair to players who were supposed to be around that level of progression

 

Never made it to Alad V (due to real life business), but I got a glimpse of how horrible the new player experience is.

I don't really need to go into detail. Anything wrong with the new player experience is already common knowledge.

[KoshLovesYou]

Yeah, I've always enjoyed helping out new players by taking time and hanging out with them, but I've seen secondhand how they're suffering. And I've been surprised how frequent the request for 'common' mods have become, with me realizing that they've become significantly LESS common.

 

Elemental mods in particular; the current way electric rifle mods and other similar mods drop is NUTS.

[Anatolius]

Poor babies can barely get past earth now due to interceptions

Edited March 19, 2014 by Anatolius

[Sixty5]

tbh I actually enjoy jumping on my newbie account and facing that stuff. Given that I am so starved for a challenge on my main account.

 

But sticking said challenge in front of people with little to no experience with this game is just a bit much.

[Digitalon]

I've been hearing the same thing for quite some time from a lot of people. They really need to figure out a simple and straight forward way for new players to acquire the important mods like serration and hornet strike consistently and quickly. Maybe make it so every new player starts with one of each type of basic damage mods (Serration hornet strike and pressure point) in their inventory. Would that be so hard to set up?

[Pleiada]

I was lucky because i finished my first mastery rank before they implement the damage 2.0 and before they changed the tests and i finished easily the first tests. But i can agree with this stuff now for nbies is a painful and one of my friend who have a rank 10 account tried also do as newbie and he failed the first test three times ago  2 times because the mobs not spawned once because all spawned behind him and time is out. So this is not really okay for beginners and tennos who haven't any special mod to survive. 

[Guest]

I see many are suggesting new players receive the damage mods free or almost free to alleviate the problems with enemy scaling, and it feels like it's a good idea at first, but... I can't shake the feeling that the fact those mods are so utterly necessary means something went wrong somewhere.

[-HAKUNA-YOUR-TATAS-]

Strangely enough... When I first maxed a magnum force it got me thinking (of course I'm not thinking about having newbies try to fuse a rare 10) about that small 66% bonus damage...

What if there were "baby mods" or newbie mods? Like a "newbie serration" that only goes up to 75% damage and requires 7 fusion energy, etc. similar mods would exist for health and shields. (I'm no balance guru, so please focus on the idea here, rather than the numbers of my example.)

These mods would be gained as mission rewards for the first five missions played by new players and since they only have 3 ranks, they'll be easy to rank as well.

I mean it's true that I found my first serration a couple weeks after i started and just kept building it up, but I feel these "newbie mods" could be a good way for new players to learn about modding earlier on, while doing better than running around simply doing base damage for weeks, without killing anything.

Edited March 19, 2014 by sushidubya

[CY13ERPUNK]

+9999 OP

the new player experience in Warframe is far MORE punishing now than it ever has been before

DE has made many changes to enhance the long-term health of the game for vets who have several hundred hours into the game, but newbies have been getting the shaft for about a year now

OP's post is just another drop in the bucket for why the base dmg mods like serration/hornet/etc all need to be removed and instead have all weapons gain +5% dmg per rank 1-30, give previous mod holders who spent creds/cores to rank their mods up more legendary cores or a bunch of rare 10's or something

but whatever DE does, they NEED to give weapons dmg gain scaling from ranks 1-30 INSTEAD of requiring mods to be functional, MODS SHOULD BE FOR MODULAR BUILDS, NOT REQUIRED, ie encourage build variety, not the "ONE TRUE BUILD" symptoms we still have too much of atm (considering DMGv2 main purpose was to combat this, it has failed on that account)

[Guest]

Strangely enough... When I first maxed a magnum force it got me thinking (of course I'm not thinking about having newbies try to fuse a rare 10) about that small 66% bonus damage...

What if there were "baby mods" or newbie mods. Like a "newbie serration" that only goes up to 75% damage and requires 7 fusion energy, etc. similar mods would exist for health and shields. (I'm no balance guru, so please focus on the idea here, rather than the numbers of my example.)

These mods would be gained as mission rewards for the first five missions played by new players and since they only have 3 ranks, they'll be easy to rank as well.

I mean it's true that I found my first serration a couple weeks after i started and just kept building it up, but I feel these "newbie mods" could be a good way for new players to learn about modding earlier on, while doing better than running around simply doing base damage for weeks, without killing anything.

 

I was thinking about something similar. "Training mods". Though, perhaps, it could cause problems when higher level players slap both together for an extra boost on their weapons for little cost.

 

There is another way around this problem: bring back passive weapon stat increases with level. EDIT: I'm throwing the idea out with little thought; it's probably got holes, so bring the flames down on it.

Edited March 19, 2014 by Guest

[Rakosta_Kai]

I posted this back in February in another thread.

The only updates I have for this was that this character was rank 3 when it acquired Hornet Strike and Rank 5 when Serration was acquired. Still no Split Chamber or Barrel Diffusion. It's the account my wife runs around on now so I haven't looked closely at it since.

 

I did something similar in the last week or so and experienced much the same things.

 

My issues go back a little further though.

 

1. Warframe Selection: Excal gets knocked out by Vor with the Vault Key and the screen immediately switches to Warframe selection. Excal , Mag, And Loki are the option with brief descriptions of the powers. For a new player, this would be very daunting as you don't know what these powers are really good for and there's no gratification of seeing what the abilities do later game to sell you on what you will need to work up to. 

YouTube has PlayWarframe Videos for each of these frames. Shouldn't they be viewable from that selection screen to help the new player make a wise choice?

One of the larger complaints I heard from new players was that they wish they hadn't chosen Loki as he dies too much. That "advanced players" line has sucked one more new player into a frame that will only frustrate the bulk of them.

 

2. The Rest of the Tutorial: There is no "rest"... That's a problem. Ideally new players should immediately get to:

Finish the Intro Movie which, ideally, should be changed to star Loki, Mag, Rhino (those are some of the first frame parts you see), and Excal.

Then they should be switched back to play mode to run to extraction. Concepts like use of crouch, cover, melee blocking, weak points and Factions should be covered. Have the Corpus begin invading to scavenge Orokin and/or Tenno parts and a hallway portion showing Grineer and Corpus becoming members of the Infested and attacking them. Lotus should be explaining origins strengths and giving direction to exploit weaknesses throughout.

3. The Starter Weapons: You've hit the nail on the head completely. My personal opinion is that the MK-1 needs to be removed outright and Braton and Burston moved into its' place.

 

4. Foundry: Another option would be to make the player build their own weapon, catalyst or reactor after some point of progression on Mercury or Mastery Rank test completion. A selection of these things and the components to build them should be provided as first time completion rewards for new player missions on Mercury.

"Why" is twofold. It's easy to say a frame sucks when it doesn't have a potato. Likewise a weapon. The game's enemies are balanced assuming you have them equipped. Providing the first one free (yes... I know about the free plat. We'll get to that) eases the new player experience and creates a dependency. DE wants the players to have that dependency. In truth, so do we. Because the game is balanced for their use, it puts the new player at an immediate disadvantage and can discourage them from playing by increasing frustration. 

 

Have The Lotus walk players through to the market, explain the difference between Credits and Platinum and help them make their first purchases.

 

5. Mercury: Way Too Short! Ideally there would be another 3 or 4 additional sites on Mercury that would need to be run though to allow more character and level progression before hitting Jupiter. One of them should have an invasion of Infested. new players need those levels for Jupiter. Jupiter for new players is a horror movie.

 

6. Jupiter: Ouch!!!  The pure carnage! I remember my first days as being farm more jarring on Mercury than they were on Jupiter. The matchmakig system then allowed vets to appear in the missions then too though.

Taking the MK-1 to Jupiter is the functional equivalent of trying to "saw through stone". So many new player deaths, so many times screaming "Can you Shield Polarize?", "Shoot The Flying things", "You want to not stand in that hallway", "Get some cover", "Jump the Shockwave".

Lotus currently gives you 25k when you Defeat Vor for the first time which, with Mission bonuses, is enough to get a player the Sicarus (which is much improved) and the Braton. The problem is that both are unranked, so players that I saw gravitated to what had some ranks and possibly mods (whole other story there). higher level must be better, right?

 

7. Mods: Without damaging the drop pool for mobs, I'd ask that a selection of elemental mods be awarded to player by lotus on mercury. Call it a "care package" or whatever, but they need it. This would also be an ideal point for Lotus to explain the Damage 2.0 system. The system is convoluted and needs some level of explanation. Have The Lotus explain it verbally or put a detailed explanation in the Codex.

 

8. Codex: The Lotus really needs to introduce this function along with the Gear Slot and assign them a mission to analyze with the Scanner for a bonus.

 

9. Rank Testing: Quite painful with the starter weapons. Any purchased weapons have little in the way of ranks to be helpful either. Mastery Rank rewards would be helpful and appreciated across the board.

The current Mastery Rank setup will leave new players wondering what it is and why it matters. Likewise, with no prior explanation, I have no doubt that new players will just be confused about why that blue bar is blinking and buzzing at them. This would be another good point for The Lotus to intervene, make explanations, and give some mods/potatoes/ or swag. 

 

10: Starting 3 Frames: My personal opinion is that either Loki or Mag (or both) needs to be removed and replaced with someone different. Loki is Mod dependent. Mag's Pull is a trifle OP in low levels. Who to replace them with?  Perhaps Ash who's play style in low levels is a bit more balanced. I can't really suggest a female frame, they all scale so ridiculously well and offer huge amounts of utility from level one ( with exception of Banshee which is a specialty acquisition and beastly as well). I'd suggest a brand new female frame for the starting 3.

 

There's tons of other take-a-ways I noticed from my recent jaunt with a new account, but those were the things that stood out most to me for the tutorial and the first 2 planets.

Edited March 19, 2014 by Padre_Akais

[Nampoosh]

I have at least 75 hours of in game play time, mastery level 4 and still no serration mod :(

I also feel like there should be at least 3 weapons other than the starters that you can actually build before finishing earth. Yeah there are the ones you can buy with credits but it really hurts new guys to have such a limited arsenal.

[Rakosta_Kai]

I was thinking about something similar. "Training mods". Though, perhaps, it could cause problems when higher level players slap both together for an extra boost on their weapons for little cost.

 

There is another way around this problem: bring back passive weapon stat increases with level. EDIT: I'm throwing the idea out with little thought; it's probably got holes, so bring the flames down on it.

I think one of the problems is the advent of multiple +dmg mods in conjunction with +elemental damage and +physical damage.

It's a min/maxers dream come true, but for the average or new player. It's a headache.

 

Another issue that I never really thought about that my wife brought up was the controls...

The controls are great for a Shooter... But they are almost backwards for an MMO'er though.

That's taking a bit of re-training for her and has led to some frustrating moments.

Coming up with some alternate control schemes might be a good idea as well.

[Nerevar22g]

as far as I remember, nobody can rush through all planets in 1 evening, it takes time, do what everyone does, repeat missions to levle up and get better mods, its not that hard

[Drakontis]

as far as I remember, nobody can rush through all planets in 1 evening, it takes time, do what everyone does, repeat missions to levle up and get better mods, its not that hard

A slightly flawed idea because enemies will ALWAYS drop the same combinations of mods. X will always drop 1, Z will always drop 2, etc. Leveling up does nothing if your damage goes nowhere. I could level 30 all of my weapons I have right now and still have no way of getting to advanced content. Point strike is next to worthless on the Mk1 Braton. Oh look, +100% crit chance... yay, 1 in 10 chance with a puny multiplier and crappy damage. Woo...

[DJ_Redwire]

I just came here to say that the thread title made me smile.

 

That is all.

[Drakontis]

I just came here to say that the thread title made me smile.

 

That is all.

A lot of what draws attraction to a thread is the title itself. Glad mine caught your eye. XD

[Arlayn]

I've been hearing the same thing for quite some time from a lot of people. They really need to figure out a simple and straight forward way for new players to acquire the important mods like serration and hornet strike consistently and quickly. Maybe make it so every new player starts with one of each type of basic damage mods (Serration hornet strike and pressure point) in their inventory. Would that be so hard to set up?

instead of giving them so easily they could... I don't know... make the enemies easier on Mercury, and Venus instead of making them so insanely hard, and make the first instance of interception missions on earth be easier... Even Saturn is easier than earth. Its crazy.

Edited March 19, 2014 by Arlayn

[Guest]

A lot of what draws attraction to a thread is the title itself. Glad mine caught your eye. XD

 

You won't believe how the new player experience is!

 

New players are having trouble with WHAT?

 

Can you guess the 3 mods new players need but just can't get?

[DisOrd3r]

Hm, interesting! I will probably make a newbie account too. Just to test how hard the game is atm ^^