Excavation Feedback Megathread

[Egg_Chen]

Excavation

- Map way too big, by the time I found the scanner I was already bored (after hotfix).

- UI too messy, what am I looking at? What needs power? Where is it? Why?

- Activating a digger by walking into the circle is messy, frankly.

For example, playing Solo, want one digger at a time, but there is a power core in another diggers circle, or a Scorpion drags you in...

 

It is just confusing, an overcomplicated mash-up of Mobile Defence and Survival, both of which are more enjoyable.

 

Above all, please do not remove all Survival Nodes on a given planet.

Give us a ship in orbit around Earth, Phobos and Europa, that still has Survival on so we can farm those mats.

Why should every node of Phobos, Europa or Earth be the same tileset?

Mix them up a bit, we can see the Galleons and Cruisers in orbit when on our ship.

 

I have played this new mode twice, and probably never will again by choice, much like Interception.

Yes I know, inevitably Tenno Requirements will require the resource in everything.

I enjoy running around shooting stuff, not running around micro managing digging machines, capture points, etc, etc.

 

Edit: Totally agree with Vaze, why are these machines under attack?

Keep them powered, fine, but why are they a target?

Not talking logic of enemies stopping us getting the resource, talking from a gameplay perspective.

Why do we need to power and defend? When one of the objectives (power) often makes us leave the other (defence).

Edited August 29, 2014 by Egg_Chen

[Shehriazad]

Dose that include the Gas City tileset? Its Sort of outdoors.

Probably a better idea to match the tileset for that particular survival node to not feature an "outside" bit.

[CptFaustas]

What i feel that is very much a priority is a clear failure state. 4 people dying is not enough. Limit the number of excavators we have available, set a time limit when we have to get power cells (when enemies will spawn at a decent rate though) or something similar. This is a great event, and current system works great for this, but when it will be a regular mission we need a failure state :/

[TrinityPrime]

 

:/

[arKRazor]

I would just like transmissions from Lotus to stop covering vital UI info for the drills. Not sure if it's an issue at higher resolutions but at 1366x768 (gogo-budget-laptop) it becomes impossible to see excavator HP and progress.

[http404error]

Most of the problems and bugs that I've had have been mentioned already.

 

 

I really enjoy Excavation. I like how it can't be failed by losing objectives, only by dying. I had a lot of fun soloing the event, and digging for treasure like a space ninja pirate.

 

Powering the Scanner felt like a chore, and it felt like a false parallel with the Excavators - that is, it's similar enough to make the differences confusing.

 

Being able to only carry one power module felt like a chore, too. It didn't make it notably harder, only forced me to run around like an errand boy more (as a solo player, anyhow).

 

It was mentioned on Prime Time that the drop table rewards might go down in frequency. I don't think that's necessary- you can just fill in the drop tables with more 'junk' like credit caches, and it will have the same end result. A better question would be what makes players feel more accomplished, and I think that a drop every dig, even if rare loot is at a lower chance, feels better than the alternative.

 

Frost shouldn't be required for it to be fun and soloable, though. There needs to be a better way to cover and protect the Excavators from distant enemy fire. I have the same issue with older Defense maps. Newer maps tend to address this issue by putting the objective on high ground so distant enemies can't fire on it. That's great, but the issue with Excavation is that it makes more sense for drills to be down low. Consider implementing some sort of projected shield or some other protection mechanic. Alternatively, increasing the Excavator's shields and decreasing its recharge delay would work as well.

 

Overall, very good work. I caught myself surprised at how smoothly it went for an initial game mode release (that one bug aside). I thoroughly enjoyed the event and I look forward to grinding Excavation in the future.

[Llyssa]

What i feel that is very much a priority is a clear failure state. 4 people dying is not enough. Limit the number of excavators we have available, set a time limit when we have to get power cells (when enemies will spawn at a decent rate though) or something similar. This is a great event, and current system works great for this, but when it will be a regular mission we need a failure state :/

Many other missions(extermination, spy, deception, assassination) have no failure mechanic, and your proposed ones would be horrific.

 

Having 1 person able to single-handedly destroy a mission(imagine someone always activating the furthest possible excavation points, and always failing to defend them)  is absurd. I have had quite a few missions where I never even saw some of the extractors, no matter how fast I ran.

 

I don't think adding more failure conditions would be an improvement.

[CedarDpg]

You don't.

 

But adding Excavation to a gas giant planet makes zero sense.

 

Maybe they're mining the small rocky cores.

[Llyssa]

Most of the problems and bugs that I've had have been mentioned already.

 

 

I really enjoy Excavation. I like how it can't be failed by losing objectives, only by dying. I had a lot of fun soloing the event, and digging for treasure like a space ninja pirate.

 

Powering the Scanner felt like a chore, and it felt like a false parallel with the Excavators - that is, it's similar enough to make the differences confusing.

 

Being able to only carry one power module felt like a chore, too. It didn't make it notably harder, only forced me to run around like an errand boy more (as a solo player, anyhow).

 

It was mentioned on Prime Time that the drop table rewards might go down in frequency. I don't think that's necessary- you can just fill in the drop tables with more 'junk' like credit caches, and it will have the same end result. A better question would be what makes players feel more accomplished, and I think that a drop every dig, even if rare loot is at a lower chance, feels better than the alternative.

 

Frost shouldn't be required for it to be fun and soloable, though. There needs to be a better way to cover and protect the Excavators from distant enemy fire. I have the same issue with older Defense maps. Newer maps tend to address this issue by putting the objective on high ground so distant enemies can't fire on it. That's great, but the issue with Excavation is that it makes more sense for drills to be down low. Consider implementing some sort of projected shield or some other protection mechanic. Alternatively, increasing the Excavator's shields and decreasing its recharge delay would work as well.

 

Overall, very good work. I caught myself surprised at how smoothly it went for an initial game mode release (that one bug aside). I thoroughly enjoyed the event and I look forward to grinding Excavation in the future.

I don't know... most of the drops I've gotten so far are rather mediocre(t1 keys, mods I have 50 of, a few credits...).

 

The fact that extractors can die(and aren't particularly hardy things) seems like a balance versus the certainty of merely not-dying in survival, which can take longer(depending on how well you do at scanning and delivering cores), but allows you MUCH more freedom of choice(In survival, I can spend a minute hiding on a shelf AFK regenerating and I'll still get my next reward at the 5 minute mark).

 

It's a more-profitable, but heavier-invested version of mobile defense, really. The current rate seems good, as it keeps a reasonable pacing--slower excavators or scanners would make it feel tedious. There's a lot of teamwork options to be had, and the speed dynamic is good.

 

My actual suggestion for a change would be a tier table, with more-rare artifacts available, but at a reduced rate, chance, and increased difficulty--if you're digging up a credit cache, it only takes so long and only attracts so much attention, and is pretty common, but if you're digging up a stack of rare5 cores, it's going to happen quite infrequently(perhaps only 5% of excavators are so lucky)need to dig much deeper(more shallow ones were mined out long ago), and attract a lot more attention(if an excavator is taking forever, the enemy is going to spread the word that you've found something pretty valuable, and break out some heavier-than-average troops to help!)

 

This would allow more interesting dynamics in the game and how we play it--if you want to get the rare stuff, you can really press for it(and have the lotus announce that "this site seems a bit unusual" or something, so you know), or if you know you're going to get stomped, you can just abandon the site altogether("yeah, we're at level 50 enemies standard, mr. unusual site is a lost cause)

[Guest Tehnoobshow]

Just to clarify, Excavation will eventually be replacing On-Planet Survival missions. Meaning, any Survival missions that occur 'outside' will become Excavation, but Survival will remain for those node tilesets that are enclosed(ships). 

When will this be happening exactly? I mean, we still haven't gotten Rescue 2.0 on all the nodes yet.

[MDarkR]

OK, so you buffed mobs' defence. Now while playing event mission on Europe, you have to shot 180 lvl mob 8 with maxed brakk insted of 2. Reaching socre 10000 in hour is now impossible. 

 

Can i ask you a question? Why players can win your events only when they made it before hotfix?

[Babellon]

OK, so you buffed mobs' defence. Now while playing event mission on Europe, you have to shot 180 lvl mob 8 with maxed brakk insted of 2. Reaching socre 10000 in hour is now impossible. 

 

Can i ask you a question? Why players can win your events only when they made it before hotfix?

If  you can get 10,000 points in an hour, you've won the event. While I did note some odd behaviors of mobs today, I can still clear 2k on phobos, 3k on europa, running solo. Not sure what it is, you're referencing here, could you be more specific?

[[DE]Momaw]

In general I prefer Excavation to Survival because the mission-failing aspects of RNG are removed.  You may run out of power at a site due to RNG, but that doesn't mean the mission fails. Rather it just stalls. This is a large improvement over Survival where you outright fail completely when there isn't enough support tanks randomly dropping.

 

Agree with Glen, being able to carry only 1 power cell is a good thing. This forces players to stay mobile, and even makes an argument in favor of somebody on the team being the "power gopher" to hunt for cells while other players guard the drill itself. If players were allowed to carry as many cells as they wanted, it means the group can load up on cells in relatively safe stress-free areas, then go to the excavation site and dig in. Changes the dynamic away from more-static "capture and hold".

 

However I do have a criticism, and it's this...I don't think it should be possible to actually start up multiple drilling sites simultaneously. I'm sure some super-hardcore teams will hate this idea because if each player can successfully finish a drill site it's more efficient to spread out and do multiple sites in parallel rather than work together at a single one. But what I am constantly seeing in this mission is less-than-hardcore teams getting scattered to the winds and completely out of their depth. Failed excavations are a waste of mission time, and the way the mission is set up right now, individual team members can too easily start and fail new sites.  Even just walking past a site accidentally can open a new front on the battle that you might not be ready for. My opinion, mission would be better if active drill sites was limited to 1 to keep everybody on task.

 

Also extractor defenses do not scale well to enemy level.  Sure our goal is to defend the drill, but fact is, in a longer game of excavation enemies can just on-shot the thing with a thrown grenade.  It might be worth trying an experimental variation where enemies don't SHOOT at the drill, rather, they try and run up and activate a console.  If they are left at the console for a few seconds then drill shuts down.

[Momoynator]

My only complaint so far with the excavation game mode is 3 out of 7 times I've played it, I've gotten DC back to log-in screen with no discernable reason why. It said "Connection to host  lost" then "Returning to main menu" or whatever it says, then back to the log in screen I go.

 

It might be worth mentioning that I think all the times I get DC was when I was in the lowest level Excavation map.

[fallenangel33]

Feedback:

 

I really love the new gamemode, and this is the sort of thing that I wish Mobile Defense was. It's nice that you can control when they spawn, as opposed to having to defend it when you're told to.

 

Rewards seem to be bugged, since I only seem to be getting T1 keys. Not sure if you want that or not.

 

One of my problems with it is that you aren't told how many extractors you have left. I only found out after seeing all the letters, and then losing one and never seeing it again. Perhaps a counter that shows you how many are left?

 

Also, two small things with the new tileset:

1. In the large chasm room, enemies seem scared to jump down to the floor. This causes nothing to spawn, and makes things really easy.

2. It looks amazing :)

[ROSING]

One thing that I would like to suggest is regarding the readouts of the different excavations when friendly transmissions come up. Sometimes precious seconds where you need to know the status of an excavator are lost when the lotus tells you of another site found.

[Kemanorel]

Map so large, I wonder if I will actually run my frame out to orbit when I extract, and it has taken what felt like 10 minutes to traverse from one set of dig sites back to the scanner. Hostile NPCs are running into issues finding us resulting in insane packs of who knows how many minutes of spawns all in one place, and excavators in distant, dead-end corridors face two problems: first problem is that if the excavator is guarded, no hostiles will ever come find us, second is that the moment no one is present in the room, it becomes a spawn for hostiles that instantly attack the excavator.

 

Suggestions:

 

Condense the map, it seems like a very linear end-to-end layout mostly now, if that was condensed into a smaller area by intersecting more, or by having more crossroads than straight path connections, it would help.

 

Remove excavators spawning in dead end tunnels. Since reworking enemy spawn code is too universal to tamper with, why not limit the excavator locations to larger rooms similar to the places we'd expect a life support cannister?

 

Give players some way of knowing when they're out of chances to find excavator sites, one run we were at zero scanned digsites, and the scanner was behaving as if we had reached the maximum simultaneous digsites available (had power, scan timer not counting down)

 

Give us a choice to trigger an excavator. Later on, it becomes frustrating to have some tenno knocked into the radius of a dig site and have an unitended and unprepared for excavator come down to be destroyed in a moment simply because 4 tenno can only do so much against massive hordes of 170+ level enemies at that point.

 

Rewards for higher score? I know this is an event, but getting the same tower 1 void key at 8000 as we did our first excavator is kind of disheartening.

[WERElektro]

I love it!

It's probably the most difficult mission type we got by now.

 

Well... The fact that I love it isn't exactly relevant... hmm

oh.. 1 thing though:

 

1)

I understand that the excavators and the scanner have a certain pickup radius for energy deliveries - But that radius is too large, it seems to me.

I want to deliver energy to B, run past A, and A takes the energy.  ._.

 

Now okay... you could just say "better watch out, dumba**" but the issue is- I already do pay attention and it still happens.

It would be great if the radius was shown on the ground as a..... glowing circle or something around the excavator. So we know"okay, If I get inside that line, the excavator takes that energy-thing I carry with me"

 

oh something else:

 

2)

Of course you'll rather deliver energy to excavator E Who has ...60seconds digging time remaining and 10% energy left than to D who has9 seconds remaining and 40% energy left. Sometimes the excavators are in the same area- You always have to look at the minimap to know which excavator is which, than at the map, and back again to make sure-and so on.. a bit complicated

 

Wouldn't it be great to have the Letters hovering over the excavators on the actual map?

 

 

Other than this, Excavation might be my new favourite :)

Edited August 29, 2014 by WEREsandrock

[MDarkR]

If  you can get 10,000 points in an hour, you've won the event. While I did note some odd behaviors of mobs today, I can still clear 2k on phobos, 3k on europa, running solo. Not sure what it is, you're referencing here, could you be more specific?

I'm talking about best scores. Those who played event before hotfix could easily kill every 180 lvl mob, so thay reached like 18000. Now it's impossible to beat their score, even when you work harder than them.

[jjpdn]

So the rewards don't increase?

[Llyssa]

If  you can get 10,000 points in an hour, you've won the event. While I did note some odd behaviors of mobs today, I can still clear 2k on phobos, 3k on europa, running solo. Not sure what it is, you're referencing here, could you be more specific?

Clan scores are cumulative of "who has the most points per person". So if someone pre-hotfix has their clan score 18k(which they did), and now it's impossible to pass 10k(which it supposedly is), the clans that got 18k per person automatically win, because it's no longer possible to score anywhere near 18k/person.

[Variatas]

I'm really enjoying Excavation so far.

Pros:

-Multiple simultaneous objectives requires more complex teamwork, and is generally a lot more interesting than previous mission types, where the strategies are usually "Kill all beaches" or "Defend the thing, then kill all beaches"

-Larger play spaces are actually used heavily enough to allow styles of play / loadouts that don't work very well in the "Corridor Shooter" missions or tilesets

-Different objectives cater to different frames, allowing a little more specialization to a given task

Cons:

-Occasionally the map is just TOO big, and objectives are placed very, very far apart; especially on the new Europa tileset.

-Europa tileset can be difficult to navigate due to how some of the long passages out of tiles are blocked and you can't tell as easily without going down them; as well as just sheer size.

-Simultaneous objectives can be too complicated for match-made teams.  Not a big problem, but tweaking things to better educate players mid-mission might help.

-Extractors are so fragile that there's often very little warning between them taking fire and them exploding.  It might be cool if they highlighted nearby enemies occasionally or they had a bit tougher shields.  Mostly annoying when you get a huge map like on Europa, where enemies can spawn in the middle of tunnels behind you.

-Gigantic swarms of enemies heavily favor quick-firing or area of effect weapons.  Not a huge problem, but for other multi-objective missions it might be nice to have more of a role for long-range precision weapons; mostly adding this because with the big areas it feels weird to not want to use something with longer range.

All in all I think this is a great new gametype that will keep me busy for awhile.  I really hope to see more varied stuff building off this, it's fantastic.

[AerinPierce]

My biggest issue is that both me and my boyfriend have on th new tileset exclusive to excavation on Europa occasionally tosses someone out of the level at the beginning of the match and won't let them in with no real way of getting out either as the stange void your put in won't let you open the esc menu.

[TrinityPrime]

What if you decided to stop feeding the scanner? Do enemies keep increasing their level or do they become good fodder for leveling weapons?

 

Are we gonna see dark sector excavations?

[Nervara]

I think it adds a bit more variety to the game. + some logic (no more airless planets). As fore the new tileset, it's beautiful.