De's Development Model

[Sasquatchias]

@OP - Good post! :) I definitely agreed that they seem more intent on adding more, rather than improving what they have. I think most people are agreeing with that these days.

Just to chime in quickly regarding my thoughts on the discussion on balance:

I'd say the main culprits are a combination of:

1) Weapon damagemods being too strong.

2) Power efficiency being too efficient.

3) Endlessly scaling enemies + enemies scaling too fast.

All these problems go hand in hand and scale very differently.

1) Weapon damage scales absurdly fast once you get the essential mods. Too fast imo, to make balancing an actual thing.

2) Power efficiency is absurdly good as well, especially on CC frames. At the cap, you can cast your abilities 4 times more often than before. That's not 75% efficiency, that's an efficiency of 300%!!!

3) Endlessly scaling enemies causes the extremely powerful weaponmods and power efficiency to be "necessary". The very fast scaling of enemies (due to #1) is also the reason why damaging Warframe powers become useless so quickly. Even on the solar map!

If all these 3 things were scaled down, we wouldn't view damagemods and power efficiency as nearly as "necessary", but more neat upgrades. More raw numbers on this:

* If a mod like Serration only had 5% bonus per rank, it would give 55% at max rank. Good bonus (especially when stacked with other mods), but far from a necessity either. And similar with other similar mods of course. Doing so would make people less prone to just use damagemods all the time. The underpowered mods would also get indirectly more powerful and thus also used more (sure, a few still needs some buffing, but still).

* If power efficiency used its old CORRECT formula, we would only "spam" powers for emergencies (+ a hardcap wouldn't be necessary either). Note: With the old formula, 100% efficiency means we would cast abilities 100% more often (aka, abilities cost 50% of their original cost). This nerf could also allow all abilities to be buffed (specially to become more "AoE"-ish), as a lot of them are extremely underwhelming right now (Freeze, Soul Punch etc).

* If enemies didn't scale as quickly either, the above nerfs would be justified as well. Damaging Warframe powers would also last way longer. It would also make Warframe survivability mods (like Vitality etc) be less necessary and could even be nerfed down a bit, similar to Serration (although less severe of course). It would MASSIVELY help the newcomers too, as mods would not be as necessary to them, while still helpful of course. The whole concept of "Broken/Damaged mods" could even be scrapped in that case.

TL;DR: A good start for balancing, regardless of what you have as a guideline, is to tone down all the extremely scaling numbers, mainly on weapon damagemods, power efficiency and enemy scaling (both their damage done and their tankiness). Then people would start taking the more underpowered mods more seriously (of which a whole bunch of them still need some buffing of course) and we would see far more modding variety, something this game sorely needs!

I agree with everything you have said. Actual numbers would require lots of tweaking, but I agree with the general idea.

(Also you should think about making a new thread over this.)

Edited September 21, 2014 by Sasquatch180

[xethier]

hm btw about that, the problem is that the base isn't defined

 

base 18

18* 1,66 = 29,88 (+ 11,88) level 30 bonus

18* 1,99 = 35,82 (+ 17,82) serration bonus

 

level 30 + serration with base 18

18 + 11,88 + 17,82 = 47,7

 

that's assuming that the base never changes and that all damage applied by scaling the weapon to 30 is additive with serration, instead of multiplied. it would work. (and i assume this was what fatpig84 had in mind when he advocated it and it was my misunderstanding which lead to those numbers)

[Wurdyburd]

Came back to read the responses, and looking over this thread, I think that there's one common conclusion that veteran players who are concerned about this game have come to.

 

This game's development is/was too fluid, in the wrong places. Development fluidity is good, in terms of continued development, because now we have things like Archwings in development, which nobody would have predicted a year and a half ago.

The problem is, that fluidity was also present in the development of the mod system, the initial releases of weapons, the buffs/nerfs to those weapons, player development, melee 2.0, and so on. Normally in a game's development, somebody sits down and figures out all the mechanics like this, they receive some tinkering along the way, and then they're published. Warframe's mechanics are being done off the top of DE's head, even with months to work on them, and what we're left with is a system that leaves many players concerned.

 

This is mostly what I meant a couple days ago when I stated that before DE decides to introduce new content in an attempt to keep this game as shiny and brand new as possible, they need to go back and re-evaluate the game as it currently exists. Major balancing and player progression NEEDS to happen, or they'll keep digging a hole for themselves that will become increasingly more difficult to fix.

[xethier]

-snip-

This game's development is/was too fluid, in the wrong places. -snip-

 

I wouldn't go that far, but I agree with your sentiment.

I think that it boils down to some things that should be re-evaluated, haven't been. Specifically the mod system.

As we continue further and further down the path, the mod system continues to be a major sticking point for scaling.

I believe that the system can be modified to resolve the problems and that scrapping it entirely isn't necessary. The thing that's going to be difficult (and probably the reason why it hasn't been done yet) was hinted upon earlier in the thread. The fact that mods & platinum have been exchanged. I made my feelings clear on it, but I can guarantee that many at DE don't wish to rock the boat when it comes to major overhauls to the mod system.

 

I think it's time that some of the core systems be totally re-evaluated. (mods 3.0?) With the last year of development taken into account.

[Wurdyburd]

I wouldn't go that far, but I agree with your sentiment.

I think that it boils down to some things that should be re-evaluated, haven't been. Specifically the mod system.

As we continue further and further down the path, the mod system continues to be a major sticking point for scaling.

I believe that the system can be modified to resolve the problems and that scrapping it entirely isn't necessary. The thing that's going to be difficult (and probably the reason why it hasn't been done yet) was hinted upon earlier in the thread. The fact that mods & platinum have been exchanged. I made my feelings clear on it, but I can guarantee that many at DE don't wish to rock the boat when it comes to major overhauls to the mod system.

 

I think it's time that some of the core systems be totally re-evaluated. (mods 3.0?) With the last year of development taken into account.

 

Though I never explicitly said that the mod system needs to be scrapped, it does need heavy re-evaluation, yes.

However, the exchange of mods and platinum shouldn't be such a heavy factor in this, even though it's greatly appreciated. Though this might sound ridiculous, I will try to explain.

Firstly, to use the groan-worthy excuse "this game is in beta", there is a notice somewhere stating that the game can change at any time. U7, which introduced the mod card system, blew a lot of things out of the water, including what some players spent platinum on. Granted we've come a long way from then, but changes are still occurring.

Secondly, every time DE shuffles the void drop table to make room for new content, old content is knocked down a peg in value. An example of this is how Rhino Prime is semi-easy to farm for now, compared to when he was released, he was much more difficult. Loki Prime is following that trend, as is Nyx Prime. But what about the players who spent platinum on those parts? Should they be given something because of how they chose to spend their money? No, because they chose what to spend in a system not regulated by Digital Extremes. It's comparable to if I sent money through paypal to a player who would then trade me a fully upgraded Serration.

Lastly, player progression in mods. Some mods in the game are laughable, included because "they offer a choice to the players based on their playstyle" -DESteve. When was the last time anyone used Maglev? Or Warm Coat? Inversely how common is a simple build for casters where you throw one of every power-related mod on, and have no room for anything else except health or shields? The system advertised to promote player choice and variety is broken, since a choice nobody would make is not a choice.

 

Personally I would be glad to know that the money I spent on this game was funded toward changing the system to make it even better.

[vaugahn]

Personally I would be glad to know that the money I spent on this game was funded toward changing the system to make it even better.

 

I think more transparency in the dev process would help with this.

 

Based on comments they've made about focus (working on it but unhappy with it), about Arcwings and U14 stuff (working on it alongside other things for a long time) and about those radial blind changes (devs play around with stuff for balance),  it seems like they're probably working on many of the things pointed out in this thread behind the scenes. If they talked about what they were doing more people wouldn't feel like nothing is being done.

[Arron_Rift]

Didn't read it all, but yes, I'd rather them think things through rather than popping out shovelware for the sake of speed.

 

My $0.02

[Wurdyburd]

I think more transparency in the dev process would help with this.

*snip*

 

It really seems to me that DE's transparency fluctuates wildly as months pass. At some points, they're very open, giving clear insight into what they intend to do with the game, as well as estimates on when we can expect it. At others, they'll spring wild surprises on us, that are [increasingly] often not met with appreciation. Lately, it seems that they're in the valley of this graph, and the community is grumbling to let us back in the loop.

 

Regarding the Focus system, it's a start, but it's going to turn into a very, very large bandaid. I mentioned previously that DE needs to stop introducing systems built on the broken foundations it currently employs, and Focus builds on the broken progression and mod system. Furthermore, it'll only introduce more grinding into a game rife with grinding, which is what the community is tired of, rather than introduce a true endgame that will offer replayability. Like I also said before, once Focus is in place, it'll only help to cement the broken system, and discourage any dramatic changes in the future, regardless if they're for the better or not.

As interesting as the Archwings seem; they're not what this game needs right now. We don't need a brand new system, we need to fix the old ones. I'm personally disappointed with how irresponsible DE's perspective on what new/fixed content should be; I understand it from a business perspective, I do, but sometimes we need serious and not shiny. A reliable machine that lasts years is much more satisfactory than a brand new one with shiny chrome that breaks in six months.

[Llyssa]

I'm not sure what OCE is, and this is quite a wordy little thread, but something I must interject:

 

The DE development model has multiple teams of multiple people working on multiple parts at once.

 

There isn't a set number of X equivalent man hours that are then divvied up amongst "fix" and "create". There are people who are hired to "create", and they are very skilled specialists at "create". There are people who are hired to "fix", and they are very skilled specialists at "fix".

 

The only way to comply with your demand is for DE to FIRE all of the "create" people, and then attempt to use their now freed wages to hire new "fix" people.

 

Worse, they suffer from the microcosm--any fix that looks good on paper and tests well with 100 people in the office can find bugs that happen in 10% or fewer cases. However, when you get 10,000,000 people playing, bugs that only happen 0.001% of the time now screw up 100 people. So they have to fix something, release it, WAIT for us to find if anything is wrong with it, and then fix the next thing. They fix many things at once, but there's a critical mass of how much they can fix at once before it becomes an endless merry-go-round of fixing and then re-fixing because the last fix wasn't quite the fix you'd hoped it be.

 

So the process wouldn't actually be much faster than it is right now, but they'd have giddily fired off 1/2 of the employees to try and squeak out a miniscule speed increase, if there were any increase at all--figuring out the problem requires thinking and re-coding, and having 1,000,000 people code for 1 second does NOT produce the same amount of work as 1 person coding for 1,000,000 seconds.

 

Again, I'm not really sure what OCE is, and I'm *definitely* confused on why you'd think that people from other platforms would show up on your recruiting channel, given that you cannot play with them, but I will remind you(although, I'm sure it's already been said) that recruiting only displays the names of people who've said something since you joined the channel. You notably never said anything yourself, so we don't know whether you were watching that for seconds or hours.