A Simple Content Padder.

[BramBlackmon]

Not everyone has this problem, so don't get defensive when I say this, but a lot of people are getting bored with the sparse content. This isn't really DE's fault. They're new to the MMO market. A lot of their impressive video game design skills that work well in games that are inherently meant to be a limited experience didn't transfer over so well. MMOs are meant to be a near endless experience. They'll learn as they go along, no big deal there. 

 

But, in the meantime. there needs to be something here to keep people interested in the game between content updates so they don't eventually wander off into the ether and never come back. There also needs to be some form of end game for players who have maxed out gear and mods. Defense was a good try at this. It has a lot of good things working in it's favor. Which is why on any given day, the majority of players are in defense missions, farming for mods. 

 

Two big issues with defense though. The Defense object's health doesn't scale with the waves. Which means that eventually you reach a point where it only takes one un-noticed enemy sneaking in behind you while you're dispatching the rest of the enemies to wreck it, this is how most defense missions end from what I've noticed. Nobody is down. Nobody is out of health, still ripping through the mobs. But that one little moment where you aren't paying attention, you lose. This feels a little cheap to me. Because it feels as if there was nothing I could do to prevent mission failure.

 

Second issue, it gets repetitive. At a certain point you've seen every enemy variation a faction has at it's disposal. The only way to make the mission more difficult is to increase enemy stats and the amount of enemies that spawn. It's great for the farmers but it forces everyone to huddle near the defense object, partially because, as I've stated eventually mobs get so powerful they can destroy it while you're not looking, but also because it's the optimal strategy. All of the enemies are heading towards that point, all of your allies are huddled near that point. You simply let the enemies funnel in and blow them away, only moving out of the way to let your shields recharge and to refill your ammo.

 

This is why we need a survival mode. 

 

Here's how this would ideally work so that the Devs can put as little effort as possible into it. We take the large maps from the defense missions, make it so that defense objects are inactive ((don't have to remove them. Just make them inactive)) Have every possible enemy type spawn here, have the types that spawn be completely random. Sometimes the players would be facing off against corpus, sometimes grineer or infested, and sometimes a combination of all three. After every 5 waves. Random Boss fight. Sometimes just 1 boss. Sometimes even more than that. But completely random. After defeating the boss, in lieu of dropping blueprints. they would drop a large amount of replenishing items ((health, ammo, power orbs))

 

After the boss wave, comes the reward screen ((similar to defense)) giving players an option to exit out or continue for greater reward.

 

Ideally this mode would be set off to the side, rather than integrated into the existing planets. To ensure that new players don't use it as an easy automatic leveling system, it would be locked until Rank 3. ((which would help give ranking a use besides unlocking a weapon you might not even be interested in))

 

The Benefits to this- 

 

When new content is added into the game in the form of bosses, enemies variants, and new defense mission maps. That content can be easily integrated into this mode to give it more longevity.

 

Because of it's completely random set up. This mode has infinite replayability. No two runs will play out exactly the same. This helps to keep players engaged by removing the predictability present in every other game mode. It also prevents specialization. Forcing players to adapt their loadout and tactics to a wide variety of situations.

 

Would be an excellent clan based Co-operative activity. while random groups would definitely be doable, there's much more benefit to doing this mode with friends who won't just leave when they get what they want. The same could be said of every mission in the game, but it's especially applicable here.

 

If the mode catches on, then DE might have an easier time getting players to refill their free revives with platinum instead of waiting or switching to a new frame.Which is more money in their pockets. Not really a player benefit, but still worth mentioning.

 

The Negative side-

 

This would more than likely replace defense mode for most players once they reached the required rank to play. Which  could potentially affect a small number of new players trying to advance to new planets. Though defense mode itself has already done the same thing on a greater scale by becoming the go to place for farming of any type.

 

Matches could potentially drag on for well over an hour before the players failed the mission. Also an issue in Defense missions with highly geared players, but it's mitigated somewhat by the presence of a vulnerable item that needs to be protected. Ultimately this issue could be resolved with a bit of post introduction content balancing. 

 

If Bosses are changed to have special stages and attacks that rely on their Boss arena, then it would be harder to update this mode without accommodating their new animations. Though this could be resolved simply by keeping the older boss models as unique variants for this mode.

 

And I'm sure there's some other benefits and downsides that I'm not thinking of here. So I think now is a good time to open this up to forum response.

Edited April 19, 2013 by BramBlackmon

[ReiganCross]

+1

[Guest]

+1

[zerojs]

Yeah all seems good to me,hopefully de might already be considering adding more mission types with u8

[BramBlackmon]

Yeah all seems good to me,hopefully de might already be considering adding more mission types with u8

 

All depends ultimately on how many people like the ideal.

[Pearlspade]

I would absolutely love a survival mode having to defend an object feels like being chained to it and forced to play babysitter. Fighting for my life every wave however would be very interesting.

[blargian]

 

+1

 

Edited April 19, 2013 by blargian

[CrazyCatLad]

Survival mode, i.e. Killing Floor but with options to go past a 11th (boss) wave.

I'm in.

[Alcatraz968]

+1

[Kantazo]

I hate survival mode, I play the game to have fun not to work at it.

[flunkymomo]

it sounds like, kantazo, that in this game, choice, is your weapon

[Scuura]

Sounds nice, I'd play it.

[BramBlackmon]

Sounds nice, I'd play it.

Tell your friends in game who don't usually post. The more people who speak out in support of the ideal, the more likely it is to be taken into consideration by the dev team.

Edited April 19, 2013 by BramBlackmon

[Fjarri]

Running survival. If the extra factions are actually scary freaky to deal with, this would be awesome.

[Steemship]

<p>+1</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Also, you could upgrade to Master and get in on that developer console thing they were talking about :p</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Advantage</p>

<p>Would also be good for a ranking board because it is completely random, so it could go strengthen the community as players compete to be the best. The board could also be subdivided based on ranks and number of players so we don't get end-game players that dominate the score board for months on end. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>The random aspect of it would probably prevent it from being too grind-y while giving it a wide variety of rewards in-game.</p>

[BramBlackmon]

<p>+1</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Also, you could upgrade to Master and get in on that developer console thing they were talking about :p</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Advantage</p>

<p>Would also be good for a ranking board because it is completely random, so it could go strengthen the community as players compete to be the best. The board could also be subdivided based on ranks and number of players so we don't get end-game players that dominate the score board for months on end. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>The random aspect of it would probably prevent it from being too grind-y while giving it a wide variety of rewards in-game.</p>

 

I'm working on Master status as they've extended the deadline, but I don't think design consul members can do anything besides vote on new ideals.

 

And when they introduce leaderboards,I would hope they add some kind of scoring system rather than basing it on completion time alone . Would do a lot to remove the repetitiveness of the game/

The post mission stats could act as score multipliers, while a player could work on building their score by chaining enemy kills in a given time limit, scoring extra points for pulling off especially tricky moves in combat ((Dispatching enemies with head shots would be a basic example)) 

 

But Ultimately that would be something that needs to be implemented in general, rather than being specific to this mode. It would definitely add another angle of interest to this mode though.

Edited April 19, 2013 by BramBlackmon

[Imbuo]

This would be a great new addition.

[BramBlackmon]

bump

[TheTenthDoc]

This would be really, really cool. Even as a solo player this seems like it would be tons of fun.

[BramBlackmon]

This would be really, really cool. Even as a solo player this seems like it would be tons of fun.

didn't think of it before, but with no Defense object to protect this would definitely be something a skilled player could solo.

[Brasten]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBe-MO6Eq0c'>Retro Active: Alien Solider, a.k.a the boss beatdown game.

 

Something in this modes favor would be the scaling of bosses. Look at the Jackal and Hyena, more or less same model just different scale ratio. They Hyena is supposed to be the refined version of the Jackal and deployed in packs. We only fight 1 Hyena at a time. Dropping more then one Hyena into some of the larger map tiles would be a very different challenge then currently exists.

 

Additionally, this kind of mode would be an excellent base into building something like a Tetris Attack competitive mode. Many of these kinds of game modes can actually be found from the days of Warcraft 3. Legion TD is one that comes to mind, where 2 teams of up to 4 defend against waves of enemies. The kicker is that the other team either adds to the waves or directly selects what spawns in some fashion. This is different then something like modern incarnations of Line Wars and other Tug of War style games.

 

This is one way to add player competition without having to rebalance the game.

 

=====

 

Road map to 'Good' competitive PvE play. (Not e-sport competitive mind)

 

1) Survival mode against multiple enemy types.

 

2) Split players into pairs in different and separate sections in the same game. Pair that survives the longest wins

 

3) Give pairs a way to influence the spawns of the other pair

 

4) Increase the number of players

Edited April 21, 2013 by Brasten

[Cinderain]

DE updates way, way more quickly than Nexon, they listen to us and they're not money-grabbing pay2win jerks with terrible support and tons of hackers and people are still bored of "sparse" content.

 

A lot of that was superfluous to the point, but they update way more quickly than Vindictus and you're still bored, Bram?

 

Haha.

[BramBlackmon]

DE updates way, way more quickly than Nexon, they listen to us and they're not money-grabbing pay2win jerks with terrible support and tons of hackers and people are still bored of "sparse" content.

 

A lot of that was superfluous to the point, but they update way more quickly than Vindictus and you're still bored, Bram?

 

Haha.

 

Honestly yes. Though my beef with Vindictus was not so much about the content release. Up until they got to episode 9 they were very good about putting out large chunks of content. It was more about the horrible RNG and grinding they employed to pad the hell out of what was perfectly fine replayable content. they could have simply relied on the huge HUGE variations between how characters play to keep people hooked on the game. That was fantastic potential ruined by poor decisions on the executive level.

 

at any rate, I'm very bored in game. Not really their fault. I'm not being nearly as vindictive and belligerent as I would have been on any other game forum. Because as you said they're trying. and they already have a Meta in place. It's just not one that's very appealing to me right now. Lots of effort and time to obtain new warframes, and the last two I built were not at all suited to my playstyle, even though they were the only ones that appealed to me besides Rhino and Excal, so I kind of put that aside until they release one more appealing to me.

 

slightly less effort and time to obtain weapons, but still more than I'm willing to put in for most of them ((though, for the record, I do in fact collect and use a lot of the weapons in game that have market blueprints)) Because I'm not interested in what they do. 

And they add in new tile sets, and every so often they add in a couple of new bosses and a few enemies subtypes. Which is awesome. The new snow maps made me rock hard because I absolutely love cold weather and snow. But the majority of the action is still the same mission types with little variation.

And the mod system does have it's fun points as a Meta aspect of the game. But with the current line up there's very little variation to be had. You're usually using a basic set of mods for each weapon and then changing a few cards out to support a specific aspect of that weapon that it excels at. the same can be said of warframe Mods.

 

And yeah, someone's going to say it's a beta in defense of all that. but here's the thing. I'm not attacking any of that. It's the groundwork on a system that has tons of potential in the future.not there right now, but I'm not expecting miracles. in the mean time I'm bored with the game. I could just not log in until the next update ((Which is what I'm doing)) but I tend to only get 3 or 4 days out of an update before the grind sets back in. Eventually, I'm just not going to bother with it anymore. Doesn't hurt me, only hurts DE if a lot of people ((who actually spend money)) feel that way. 

 

And whatever to all of that. Maybe you don't share that opinion. It's certainly a very biased one. But, If something can add enjoyment to the game, and it matches the game's overall theme, and it can be done with minimal effort and remain completely optional, why not add it in? There's a lot of fun and interesting ideals that wouldn't require completely new assets and coding to accomplish, if they don't fit into missions, put them on the side as an optional thing. Nobody is really harmed by it. 

 

At least not from my perspective. Nobody has really stepped up and pointed out a reason why this proposition of mine wouldn't work in game. 

[Reemer]

Superb idea. +1

[BramBlackmon]

And just going to bump this once more. If it dies after this I'll let it go quietly.