Survival Change - It's Raining Life Support

[NogginMasher]

Hey fellow tenno, I wanna bounce an idea off you guys, see what you think. If you remember way back when survival was first introduced as an event, you may recall it was quite different from what we currently have today. Maps were tiny, enemies dropped tons of life support and Mrs. Lotus only gave you 3 big life supports then left you to die (not really, but you get the point). While I do enjoy our current survival mission, I miss the old life support system. Please note, this thread isn't about rewards, just the life support aspect.

 

Summary -  It's become less "kill everything" and more "run the boston marathon while people shoot at you". I want to change it back.

 

(It might get a boring and sound like I'm rambling now, but I'll try to keep it entertaining and informative)

 

When survival was first introduced as the event, life support was a very common drop from enemies, giving the usual +4% life stuff, and the Lotus only dropped 3-5 life support modules that gave +30%. You started out at 100%, Lotus dropped 5 modules within 10 mins, then you killed every single thing in sight to survive. Typically, the big modules were left alone and only used in dire situations when life support levels had plunged to <15%. The idea was, if you could hold your own and kill the baddies, you survived. If you couldn't kill them, then they either gunned you down or you ran out of life stuff.

 

And I loved that idea! It was an awesome blood bath by massively violent space ninjas murder-lating every single thing in sight because they had to survive. If you had the firepower and the energy, the mission was a whole lotta fun. But if your peashooter ran outta bullets and your ult has drained you dry, it's time to leave. Brilliant idea in my opinion.

 

But now (not really now, rather the past several months), you can blast through as many enemies as you want, but unless you have a nekros doing nothing but desecrate and a huge number of meat bags, odds are you will die if you don't run over and grab that dastardly life support module. PS, the map is now massively huge and that darn life support is on the opposite end of the friggin planet and your pokey rhino is barely gonna make it. And there is no guarantee there's going to be any enemies waiting there at life support to play hot potato with your bullets, and the room with life support might just be the most boring room in the entire map.

 

My main beef with this current survival style is that you basically have to run around the map to survive, and the chief source of life support are the big boring life support modules, not the wee little life support packs you have to beat the enemy to death over.

It almost seems to me that it has become a game of run to the next module and kill the minimal amount of enemies with a bored nekros spamming desecrate to survive, not whip out your big shiny gun, weld you finger to the trigger and blast every single thing in your face to kingdom come. What was wrong with the first idea when survival first came out?

 

Nowadays, if I fail survival missions, it's because I ran out of oxygen, not because the enemy was overwhelming me. I don't like this.

This game starts get interesting when your tenno starts getting seriously challenged in terms of overwhelming amounts of firepower pointed at you. And survival is a great place for this, since it's a gradual increase in baddies coming at you. You're feeling that it's a cake walk for the first fifteen minutes when you can kill everybody with your 1,2,3 abilities. It's a little more interesting in the 20-35 range when your ult starts losing effectiveness, and then its time to see how far you can really go when you hit 40 and got more heavies than you've ever seen in any other mission and forgot the last time your shield was fully charged and your ammo clips topped off. That's assuming you or your faster friend has run from life support to life support and your nekros has pushed the 3 key on his/her keyboard so many times he/she doesn't know which will break first, his/her finger or the keyboard. The all to often outcome is that you prematurely ran out of life support and had to ditch the mission early, even though you're more than capable of whipping the tar out of those mobs.

 

Now that you (the reader) have made it this far, I should probably make some sort of point to rap up this long winded thread. I propose that the life support system is reverted back to it's previous form, where you could kill the enemy and they would drop bucket tons of life support, and Mrs. Lotus gave you 3-5 modules max and that was it. No more boring desecrate spamming, no more running all the way across the map, no more leaving when your gun just started to warm up. I want the arena of death to come back, paint the floors with the enemies blood and deck the halls with empty clips and 4 metric tons of brass casings.

 

And on a side note, this would make a whole lotta sense lore wise.

Mrs. Lotus has sent you on that mission over a thousand times, and expects to send you life support module after life support module after life support module, and not give you a friggin SCBA tank (land version of SCUBA)? And sure, only 10% of the enemy is running around with life support of their own? How does that make sense? And don't even get me started how we are supposed to believe we can run out of life support on a planet's surface that we just did a mission on 5 mins ago. That's just ridiculous.

 

Congratulations, you made it to the end! And the moral of the story is, enemies should drop personal life support modules up the wahzoo, and Mrs. Lotus shouldn't have to send you big ol' modules to survive.

[PixalatedVortex]

I like this

[Calayne]

This would be awesome. 

[Ninjamander]

I admit I prefer those old survival...good old time...

[N7Arthur]

Read all of it, and I agree. Current survival is a bit silly if you think about it. I loved survival when it first came out, would love to have at least an option to play those types of survivals again. +1 to you OP.

[Cleesus]

Yeah i like the old verison better, you cant even focus on having fun now because you are constantly watching the life support bar waiting for lotus to bless you with another drop and hope the life support doesnt run out while your waiting.

[Zero.No.Hikari]

I like this idea I  have played survival but it really bores me how slow it is and having to wait for the good stuff to start isn't all that great if you have to break game parameters to get a challenge in a mode that's about challenge then yeah it's boring maybe having the enemy spawn rate coincide with amount of peeps in a team would be great maybe even having LS drop near the group so no one has to run off and die while trying to keep life support on, sure it'd dent nekros desa duties but that guy needs a pass on some of his skills(really a enemy cap on Terrfiy what that guy is scared to death and the other just laughs? Nah man make them all S#&amp;&#036; their pants and run away)

[Noble_Cactus]

Supported.

 

I was thinking of ideas to make Survival more interesting the other day, and I was thinking that perhaps the Lotus supports currently in place would instead become some kind of mutator or bonus while life support drops would be boosted. Pick up the support, start a combo counter wherein the enemies you kill in that amount of time multiplies your experience by a certain amount, or grants you points that would turn into credits or would count some sort of token system if that were implemented. A powerup that would boost fire rate, crit chance, add a fun effect to your arsenal, etc. Anyone who's played RE Mercenaries will understand what I'm taking about with the bonus combo multiplier.

 

But my ideas, while novel, are fraught with balancing issues, and they only address the grind to get to 'the good stuff,' rather than shortening that time altogether. Your idea accomplishes that in a much simpler way, and one that I know many players would enjoy experiencing.

[Pizzarugi]

I wasn't around for the original survival when it first came out, and I can already say I support this. The only time the game actually gets challenging is when the game finally throws countless powerful enemies at you and if you try and play solo without Nekros, the chances of you ever reaching that point of difficulty is slim, because not enough enemies are dropping oxygen canisters to keep you going.

 

You want to know how many times I've wanted to see how long Nyx can outlast powerful waves of enemies all on my own? Way too many times! And I can't find out, so long as the o2 drops remain as abysmal as they are.

[syle]

I made at last 2 threads about bringing the original survival back

and in each the white knights show up and say that they like chasing around the map more instead of killing stuff

even though there shouldn't be a problem of heaving both of those survivals one on the current maps and the other on defense maps with limited oxygen capsules and more oxygen dropping from enemies

 

but this is why we cant have nice things in warframe

[Metronome]

Definite +1 

[Guest Shibboleet]

I would like to see Nekros unneeded to run survival, such as increasing the overall droprate of life support and removing desecrates chance at giving it.

On the other hand, a few days ago I was doing a solo Survival using Saryn and made it to 43 minutes mostly afking.

Edited May 5, 2014 by Shibboleet

[Starender]

i don't like life support.

[ReiganCross]

The idea of the Life Support is silly on itself especially after so many "unexpected people trying to choke you out", but once i saw a perfect justification for it.

 

It's like an edge you purposefully give to the enemy so that he believes he has a chance of killing you, because if he doesn't come at you full force the agent that never finds me a Rhino Prime Chassis might as well be with us killing baddies. I agree that we should be able to keep on going as long as the thing we hold on our hand can still turn whatever is looking at us funny into a selection of meat cuts, but i kind of agree with the evolution that Survival took.

 

Think of it as initially the enemies just tried to choke us out when they saw the chance at killing some sweet Tenno bum, then every soldier started carrying a Life Support pack. Then they noticed that choking those murder-hobo bastards was pretty much useless if your dead buddy keeps on feeding them precious life-gases, so they started rationalizing them, only a select number of them would carry the all precious life-farter. Then the Lotus noticed that it was pretty much impossible for you to survive on those rationalized bits of gas so she started dropping more Life Support capsules, but now in secluded locations because she can't keep on piling them up or else she'll give away that the Tenno are basically unkillable machines and the distraction would fail.

 

What i would agree the S#&amp;&#036; out of is to increase the value those drops are worth. Following that logic, it would make sense that the little life-packs that the soldier started carrying became a lot bigger then they originally were, so say you can recover 10% of Life Support with every little one of those green bastards you pick up on the floor. After all, since there are still as many of them as it were before, you'll need the same amount of life-gas to support them all, hence you would carry bigger amount on smaller individuals in order to actually feed the troops.  And since Lotus has to essentially pack more life-goo into the big capsules, then those things should recover like 50% of Life Support minimum, maybe even 80%. And keep them coming in the same rhythm, because it provides a valid approach to Survival that is to have an always cloaked friend that can pretty much fly to the room leagues away to pop that sweet life-aerosol can.

 

Oh yeah, another thing, don't give me that crap where the cretin that is shooting me is magically unaffected by a complete absence of life support. Dude is right there, with me, on the same environment that somehow became so hostile that my shields are crying in pain and my Iron Skin is melting, he BETTER be dying as well! And no i don't buy that they can use some sort of Life-Support shield of magical gadgets that makes them invulnerable to the environment that is currently killing me worse then if i had popped open a window on a regular everyday corpus ship run!

[Unibot]

The whole idea with oxygen and life support is bloody stupid.

It should be just waves + waves+ waves of enemies, litteraly tons of enemies against you and no stupid life support.

Edited May 5, 2014 by Unibot

[Pizzarugi]

The idea of the Life Support is silly on itself especially after so many "unexpected people trying to choke you out", but once i saw a perfect justification for it.

 

It's like an edge you purposefully give to the enemy so that he believes he has a chance of killing you, because if he doesn't come at you full force the agent that never finds me a Rhino Prime Chassis might as well be with us killing baddies. I agree that we should be able to keep on going as long as the thing we hold on our hand can still turn whatever is looking at us funny into a selection of meat cuts, but i kind of agree with the evolution that Survival took.

 

Think of it as initially the enemies just tried to choke us out when they saw the chance at killing some sweet Tenno bum, then every soldier started carrying a Life Support pack. Then they noticed that choking those murder-hobo bastards was pretty much useless if your dead buddy keeps on feeding them precious life-gases, so they started rationalizing them, only a select number of them would carry the all precious life-farter. Then the Lotus noticed that it was pretty much impossible for you to survive on those rationalized bits of gas so she started dropping more Life Support capsules, but now in secluded locations because she can't keep on piling them up or else she'll give away that the Tenno are basically unkillable machines and the distraction would fail.

 

What i would agree the S#&$ out of is to increase the value those drops are worth. Following that logic, it would make sense that the little life-packs that the soldier started carrying became a lot bigger then they originally were, so say you can recover 10% of Life Support with every little one of those green bastards you pick up on the floor. After all, since there are still as many of them as it were before, you'll need the same amount of life-gas to support them all, hence you would carry bigger amount on smaller individuals in order to actually feed the troops.  And since Lotus has to essentially pack more life-goo into the big capsules, then those things should recover like 50% of Life Support minimum, maybe even 80%. And keep them coming in the same rhythm, because it provides a valid approach to Survival that is to have an always cloaked friend that can pretty much fly to the room leagues away to pop that sweet life-aerosol can.

 

Oh yeah, another thing, don't give me that crap where the cretin that is shooting me is magically unaffected by a complete absence of life support. Dude is right there, with me, on the same environment that somehow became so hostile that my shields are crying in pain and my Iron Skin is melting, he BETTER be dying as well! And no i don't buy that they can use some sort of Life-Support shield of magical gadgets that makes them invulnerable to the environment that is currently killing me worse then if i had popped open a window on a regular everyday corpus ship run!

Either your suggestion or OP's would work. A simple 1-2% increase in oxygen per drop would make a significant difference just the same as massively increasing its drop rate.

[Tsukinoki]

@Unibot

Without life support it would be stupidly easy to find a spot no AI could ever path to and sit there for literally hours until you get all the rewards you could ever hope for. Then you can easily leave with absolutely no challenge.

It would be nearly impossible to lose those missions.

The life support is needed to stop everyone from just AFKing their way to victory.

[Liminal]

I'd prefer it if the justification was "kill them so they don't breathe your air", and each and every kill added +X seconds of air. No drops, no RNG.

[Pizzarugi]

@Unibot

Without life support it would be stupidly easy to find a spot no AI could ever path to and sit there for literally hours until you get all the rewards you could ever hope for. Then you can easily leave with absolutely no challenge.

It would be nearly impossible to lose those missions.

The life support is needed to stop everyone from just AFKing their way to victory.

Possible long-term goal idea to fix this: New tilesets in survival that blocks off all areas players can hide in.

 

Probably won't happen though, its just easier to have o2 implemented to keep players mobile. Still, o2 cans can either have raised o2 amounts per drop or they simply drop a lot more. Would allow players to be more trigger happy while keeping the fear of running out of air in the mission.

Edited May 5, 2014 by Pizzarugi

[Tsukinoki]

@Pizzarugi

I have absolutely no problem with the idea of increasing O2 drops at all, and/or making them restore more O2. It would actually be a pleasent change.

They could also slow down the rate that O2 is used up. They sped it up a while ago for some reason and it could do with being used a bit slower as well.

[ReiganCross]

I'd prefer it if the justification was "kill them so they don't breathe your air", and each and every kill added +X seconds of air. No drops, no RNG.

 

Well... Y'know, i think Tenno are considered evil enough already. I can't imagine what they would do if an active mechanic would be "Stop breathing my air!!"

[Liminal]

Well... Y'know, i think Tenno are considered evil enough already. I can't imagine what they would do if an active mechanic would be "Stop breathing my air!!"

Tenno don't care about your irrelevant morals! Now hand over the oxygen ...

[Shackram]

Just do away with O2 and increase the enemy spawns so it'll be proper survival instead of "find air canisters minigame".

[KoshLovesYou]

That WOULD help with the problem in some of the maps where the oversized map doesn't give you enough spawns (usually at the 10-15 minute mark) to actually drop cans, where it's less "I can't handle this" and more "I'm surviving and killing fast enough,  but you're not giving me what I need". That does get really boring and frustrating.

 

A possible reason DE might not want to do this? That'd also make it a bit easier for us to get Survival related drops, and futs with whatever "hey we have an economy we're trying to build here" digits. But I'm not sure how strong of a counterpoint that is for them. Trying to run a business while keeping a game fun is something to consider...but a lot of the drops from Survival are non-market items, so. Hmm. Plat equivalence maybe?

Edited May 5, 2014 by KoshLovesYou

[Cybernetix]

Going to do something that may be slightly heretical and look to CoD for an idea of how survival should be done.

 

CoD zombies is how survival should have always been done. Life support is a totally pointless mechanic that detracts from what 'survival' should be. It shouldn't be a lack of air that kills me, it should be a hail of bullets/lasers/infested claws that put me down.

 

I've had a few occasions where the whole team is caught up enjoying the 'MURDER EVERYTHING' aspect of survival only for the air to run out.

This is boring and anti-fun.

If you absolutely insist on keeping the whole oxygen gimmick then at least make it so that killing an enemy puts oxygen straight into the meter, rather than relying on RNG to give us life support packs from enemies.