Refining The Syndicate System

[Phaenur]

I want to start by saying that the mere idea of Syndicates has done wonders for my interest in Warframe.  The two little lines of text attached to each of them have gotten me thinking about the setting and the role of the Tenno in changing it.  I've even written up one of my usual walls of text in the Arbiters of Hexis fan-thread, if anyone's curious just how enthusiastic I've gotten.

 

Thing is, right now that's basically all just in my head.  In a lot of people's heads, true, there are a pretty good number of Syndicate fan-threads over in General Discussion, all focusing on different aspects, but still represented much more in the community than in the game itself.  And as the myriad of feedback threads show, there are still a number of places that need to be shored up and improved. Personally, I like to call that potential, because with a little forethought and some moderate effort this system could really drive the game.

 

1. A Tenno's Reward

First, let's go over some of the things that could stand to be improved right now.  During Devstream 40 today the team talked about bolstering Perrin's rewards to make them more appealing, since they were losing out on popularity.  While DE is looking at rewards, there are two things I'd like to see tweaked, and from what I've read a lot of forumites agree with me.

 

 

A) Enhancing Augment Mods

First, there needs to be some sort of pattern to which weapons and frames get augment mods, something that meshes with the faction's personality instead of just being a game feature.  Red Veil offering Ash's mod is a great example, and I think the Perrin Sequence has the best array of both types of augments in general, but this could use some attention.  Even if the pattern isn't clear yet because there are so few weapon augments out, it would be best to at least have a pattern in mind for each group.  This might unbalance the faction alliances, of course, but they're arguably imbalanced already in favor of the ones with more common weapons and more popular frames, and it would offer a chance to correct that.

 

 

Secondly, the rewards themselves need a bit of looking at.  Not much, and I know this has been said repeatedly, but the weapons in particular seem kind of uninteresting.  Frame augments are actually really awesome, offering unexpected and often quite brilliant new utility to a wide range of powers, and the weapon augments could stand to take a leaf out of that book.

 

 

Off the top of my head:

-Range on beam weapons is decent - not incredible, but certainly a passable option

-Flight speed is pretty much the same for all of the other weapon types

-Raw damage and similar mods are unremarkable; at best, they'll get people to maybe consider using the weapon again

 

 

Things on a similar level to +range/flight speed might be -scatter on shotguns and high-recoil weapons, +RoF on burstfire guns to keep the spread down, and maybe very high-magnitude crit and status mods on weapons with low baselines. It's worth noting that this is what a lot of the existing mods are, assuming the “confirmation” that the status chance mods are finally additive is legitimate.

 

If DE really wants to get creative, they can add new functions to various weapons.  A flux rifle that restores friendly shields, a boltor that carries enemies back a short distance every few good hits, an ogris that leaves behind napalm patches, that sort of thing.  This is pretty much the closest that weapons can come to matching mods like Soul Survivor and Healing Tide for opening up new gameplay options.

 

In short, mods that change the way weapons function are really the target here.

 

B) Okay, You're an Officer, Now Get Out

On a different but still loot-related note, there are far, far too many costs for the limited benefit we can get. Remove the reputation reset on rank-up, provide some sort of free item – sigil, badge, credit bonus, rare resource, let Syndicates offer some sort of immediate reward.

 

Hek, let me brainstorm that right now. Many of these are based on the thread I just linked.

- Remove rank-up reputation cost. It makes it seem like the Syndicate stops caring about us because we get a promotion – I understand the mechanic, but the mechanic itself is contradictory.

- The sigil with the same base cost as the rank is now either provided free on rank-up or can be immediately purchased (because you haven't spent all of your reputation on being promoted).

- Higher-rank sigils provide some passive bonus related to the Syndicate. That could be an increase to affinity gain, a chance for an end-of-mission bonus reward. At first, this could probably a rare resource, maybe replaced with cosmetic skins or the like as DE develops the factions further. I like this one, personally.

- Higher-rank sigils provide some active bonus, perhaps a foretaste of the special mechanic found on the weapon augs.

 

That's just a start. Really, all we want is for there to be something to make it feel like we're not paying to work. Paying is fine, paying that much grinding/waiting time for basically nothing except a fairly hollow gameplay experience is much less so.

 

2. Immersion and Investment

But that's just the mercenary side of things, and while it's a good way to make sure everyone takes an interest in at least something it's not really what's prompting all of the fan-threads.  Like I said up at the top, the two-sentence advertisements and the little handful of lines the factions have offered us so far have kicked a lot of our imaginations into high gear trying to figure out as much as we can from what little we have.  Unfortunately, while that sort of speculation works with things like the Orokin and the nature of the Tenno, it's not nearly enough with something we're actually interacting with on a daily basis.

 

A) Talking Heads

The first and most obvious (to me, at least) change on this front would be to add more than just a single line to each faction's portrait at each level.  This diversity really ought to take off the higher (or lower!) the player's rank becomes, as the factions go from sending you prerecorded recruiting slogans to speaking directly to you.  There are some really excellent lines already in the game – I especially love Steel Meridian – but it just feels too artificial with only one per rank.

 

Dialogue also offers an immediate way to give our offerings some sort of value. Right now the talking heads basically nod and say “much appreciated,” which really feels like a rip-off sometimes. After each rank-up, work one or maybe two lines into that new rank's rotation saying what your donation is helping with. This might appear physically at some point – more on that later – but for now just being told that it's going to a good cause should help guide players to the factions they actually like.

 

The other place where there's just enough dialogue to make us realize it's not all there is, of course, the faction alerts.  Keep the Syndicate officers narrating the whole time, and again have enough options to keep things vibrant for a while.  A similar range of responses to what Lotus already offers us, basically.  Besides, I can't be the only one curious as to what the Red Veil would say if Stalker attacked us in one of their missions!  Or, you know, if a rival Syndicate showed up and interrupted the raid...

 

A quick, sneaky way to add some more dialogue to each faction without it actually being that faction's dialogue would be the police scanner.  The Red Veil already feature heavily in several conversations, so why not introduce snippets about everyone else?  Quick, fairly cheap, and subtle - maybe too subtle, but I still like the idea.

 

B) Moving the Story Forward

With that floor established, each faction can have an internal storyline of some sort, revealed through the way the officers' dialogue changes.  That could be them airing political dirty laundry in front of their trusted agent, opening up about insecurities to their mute ally, revealing the true extent of their vision for the system to their elite warrior, or all of the above - there's a lot of potential here, and DE can take it in many, many directions.

 

The last thing I'd like to suggest from a writing perspective is to take the metrics mentioned in Stream 40 into account.  DE's best storytelling so far has come from their records of player achievements, from us surprising them by annihilating the first Fomorian assault to the grinding Grineer victory in the Gradivus Incident.  Everything that's happened involving Alad V and most of Hek and Bek's stories have drawn on the undecided results of those gameplay events.  That could work out the same way here - if some syndicates are pulling dramatically ahead of others, do their rivals try to intervene?  Does some aspect of their goal for the system appear as an event or new feature? DE doesn't always have to reach in and try to balance the factions if they can create something fun and engaging out of the imbalance instead.

 

With a little creativity, a little interpretation, these six factions could offer a huge range of new characters, motives, and plots to complement and influence the major characters we already have.  I offered my thoughts on where the two faction triangles might lead in the post I linked back at the start, and I'm sure other people have had just as many thoughts in radically different directions.

 

3. Gameplay and Story Integration

And then there's the mechanics side of things.  Honestly, this is where Syndicates are currently weakest, and why a lot of people are complaining about the long haul to victory.  To put it bluntly, there's no sense at all that we're really helping these people.  Better alert mission dialogue would help with that a bit, sure, but that's just a start.  In order to make Syndicates really work, DE needs to iron out ways to tie their systems to existing gameplay without feeling forced.

 

A) Syndicate-Favored Missions

The first idea is one I've seen thrown about quite a few times already.  Faction alert missions really ought to reflect their character.  The Void Key rewards are a great starting point for preferred missions, like the Veil with Exterminate or the Meridian with Defense.

 

As some other examples, and note that we could probably make arguments for each faction liking everything:

- Ceph Suda liking Spy, Excavation, and Interception - recovering artifacts and gaining information on the state of the system

- Arbiters liking Excavation, Defense, and Survival - filling our ranks and cooperating to find new resources and reach new heights

- Steel Meridian liking Interception, Rescue, and Deception – distracting and diverting enemies, figuring out their plans, and bringing their people home safely too

 

And that's just three of them.

 

Giving each faction a predilection for two or three mission types would serve to strengthen their characterization, and their choice of target and area could give other clues.  Where are the Meridian trying to defend, or attack, and whose ships do they send us to intercept more often?  Do the Veil want us to tear down the old Orokin Towers as part of their purge?  You get the idea.  We could find out what they like either immediately or over time - I personally like the idea of getting thank-you calls or letters when we've found a mission or location they want us to fight over.

 

One of the most common proposals I've seen around the forums on this subject is to make these “favored missions” also apply multipliers to reputation gained. This is potentially constraining, saying "if you want to play this faction you're going to have to constantly run these three game types and nothing else," but it adds so much flavor that I think it would outweigh the apparent “limitation” from having three “best” mission types for each faction you're trying to rank up.  Besides, it's still more variety than grinding top-tier Dark Sector and T3/T4 Void Defense missions, right?

 

A variant on the idea, and one I'm less fond of for the moment, is assigning a Syndicate-themed bonus objective to a generic mission. This could work well, but it feels clunky to me, and many of the suggestions seem kind of extreme - “50 scans, no kills, no alarms” for Suda, for instance. Some of the factions would be fairly tricky to come up with special objectives for while staying within existing mechanics, too, and I personally think that just adding context to the standard missions would offer more for less stress on everyone's part.

 

B) Sigils, Revisited

Then there's the more straightforward system: sigils.  Like everyone else on the forums, I would very much like for each sigil to offer a reputation multiplier related to its cost.  Still, they're not very interesting - they can be really cool visually, but they don't offer anything material, just a purely numerical score at the end of each mission.  And on top of that, there's not really anyone in-game or in-lore who's going to be watching your sigil to give that faction a signal boost. Some of the mechanics I mentioned back in the first section could help, but even then I'm not sure how engaging they'd be.

 

Perhaps there could be a different system in play – maybe you could pay DS-type taxes at a rate you choose to the faction whose sigil you're wearing to boost it's effectiveness (definitely keep the dialogue/thank-you notes explaining where the money's going in this case!). I don't know if that works, but it's the only coherent thought on the topic I've had so far. Hopefully somebody with the endurance to read this far will have better ideas.

 

C) Expanding Our Gameplay Options

For other ways to play, I'd love to see Tier 0 and even negative-tier Syndicate alerts, though the Neutral ones could probably come at random like traditional alerts.  They would provide a way for everyone to get a quick boost to a faction they might want to follow, though the material rewards would have to be small enough to keep it from feeling like a forced choice.  This would already go a long way towards making Syndicates more inviting; after all, we're interacting with them from the start instead of only after a couple dozen Wave 40 Sechura runs.

 

Negative-rank alerts would basically be Suspicious Shipment difficulty or so, "suicide missions" that can really help to mend relations with a hostile faction without penalizing our regular allies (mostly because they're too busy picking their jaws up off the floor to be that upset).  That would obviously be another unbalancing factor, so these missions would have to be few and far between - three a week instead of three a day, basically.  This would, again, offer a great opportunity for the faction officers to give us some fun and informative dialogue and shape our understanding of the world.

 

Lastly, while the faction Eximus Platoons and Spectre allies are, shall we say, interesting (looking at you, New Loka, with your pet Ancients...), it would be really awesome and a huge attraction to actually get to see their day-to-day supporters.  The devs talked about hub worlds again during Stream 40; why not have Syndicate hubs?  A Red Veil training camp, a spaceship under Suda's control, New Loka's start-up colony, places like that.  These places could also be test beds for models, animations, and equipment sets if DE wants to introduce Syndicate missions that place us alongside our new allies in person.

 

TL;DR: you're missing a lot of suggestions if you skipped down here, but considering my walls of text (yes, plural!) I don't blame you.  Long story short, Syndicates already have awesome potential and the playerbase is responding extremely well, both through fan-threads and legitimate criticism.  If DE seizes the opportunity to build on that criticism, Syndicates could end up not just keeping players invested but also driving the next stages of the story they're telling, and all for only a modest amount of genuine focus and effort.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Phaenur

[TinFoilMkIV]

Well I gotta say up front this deserves a much longer and detailed response than I have time for right now so I'll be sure to return and add more later on.

 

 

1-rewards

 

Agreed on mod types, this is really the kinda things I want to see as well.

 

As for rep values, I think I'm okay with the values and sacrificing our current rating to go to the next level. My problem is in the area of how we're able to gain our rep (more on this later). Of course I wouldn't be against carrying over rep either.

 

 

2-immersion and such

 

Very much yes.

 

 

3-gameplay

 

By far the weakest and least existent part of the current Syndicates.

 

Not sure on favored missions, perhaps they would have some additional syndicate objectives or items that have higher chances of being found/completeable in missions that lean towards a syndicats style? This is definitely an area I'll have to give more thought on.

 

I like the sigil bonuses, but I don't think they should be tied to the sigil itself. If we go that path we end up with the problem arcane helmets had, where everyone just uses "the best one" if they have access to it. I would prefer we get bonuses for unlocking a sigil that then applies to all sigils of that syndicate. Tax rate idea is interesting and one I'll have to come back to as well.

 

For the gameplay section there's a lot I'd like to say, but just for now something I thought of while reading this is perhaps in future scenarios based on major conflict between two or more Syndicates they could perhaps call for aid from neutral and allied syndicates, so we get participation from everyone without having to specificly ally yourself with an involved syndicate if your preffered one is not directly part of the conflict.

 

 

Something I think gets overlooked at the moment is our methods of gaining rep, altho certainly doesn't cover all options one I would find interesting personally is having syndicate based items that can be acquired in non-standard ways, such as hidden supply rooms and such. Right now our rep gaining activities go along the lines of "wear this sigil, now go do whatever it is you normally do" or "go out of your way occasionally to do heavy affinity farming" which ultimately ends up being the exact same activities we'd do for material/mod/affinity farming anyways so offers next to nothing new.

 

for more on that area I'm going to link something I wrote up a few days ago for now https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/337574-syndicates-feedback-and-thoughts/

 

And again I'll be back when I have more time to go through everything more.

[CrazyCatLad]

Read it all. Too beat to formulate a long reply so in short:

 

I pretty much agree.

[DiabolusUrsus]

To begin with, I think the primary flaw is that for an endgame-oriented idea, Syndicates are intrinsically unfriendly to experienced players. Reputation gain slows down when using maxed gear. I think the first thing that needs to be done (It shouldn't be too difficult) is shifting reputation gain to scale off of bonus affinity. When ranking a weapon or Warframe, the Sigil should siphon off a portion of the bonus affinity gained. The portion siphoned should increase with the status of the Sigil; more advanced Sigils offer higher priority. When using maxed equipment, all of the bonus affinity goes towards reputation gain (obviously not on a 1:1 ratio...) with more advanced Sigils offering minute multipliers. 

 

I don't think Sigils should offer anything beyond cosmetics and reputation bonuses. However, I want to see Sigils acquired in a more intuitive way. "I ground out the most faction missions" doesn't strike me as a substantial status symbol. DE teased achievement-specific Sigils, so I expect them to show up sometime in the future, but I'd prefer them sooner rather than later.

 

One thing I am definitely not a fan of is the "Favored Warframes" system. I don't think we need a Syndicate to shove the fact that Ash is more assassin-esque than Rhino in our faces. Favored weapons are okay; I like the idea of "Tools of the trade," so to speak, and it opens some nice opportunities for faction-specific weapon skins. Syndicates themselves should welcome all comers, though. 

[TinFoilMkIV]

To begin with, I think the primary flaw is that for an endgame-oriented idea, Syndicates are intrinsically unfriendly to experienced players. Reputation gain slows down when using maxed gear. ...

I'm curious as to what you're basing this on. As far as I have found it seems directly tied to raw affinity gains from all sources. It's certainly possible I'm missing something and I haven't run any kind of extensive testing, just wondering what lead you to this conclusion? Possibly related to the wierdness with partial loadouts granting differing ammounts of affinity before the hotfix?

 

...

I don't think Sigils should offer anything beyond cosmetics and reputation bonuses. However, I want to see Sigils acquired in a more intuitive way. "I ground out the most faction missions" doesn't strike me as a substantial status symbol. DE teased achievement-specific Sigils, so I expect them to show up sometime in the future, but I'd prefer them sooner rather than later.

...

agreed

 

...

One thing I am definitely not a fan of is the "Favored Warframes" system. I don't think we need a Syndicate to shove the fact that Ash is more assassin-esque than Rhino in our faces. Favored weapons are okay; I like the idea of "Tools of the trade," so to speak, and it opens some nice opportunities for faction-specific weapon skins. Syndicates themselves should welcome all comers, though.

Yea I don't think it would be great to be pushed too strongly towards a certain frame or frames for a specific syndicate as they can often be the core of how a player likes to play. Same reason I don't think having specifically favored mission types for syndicates would be a good idea either. I do think weapons could work. I feel like there's enough room to do something along those lines with weapons without making players feel pigeonholed into things they don't enjoy.

----------------------------------------------

Gameplay and Story Integration

a) Favored Missions

I'm against the general idea of favored mission types at the moment. I'm not fond of the idea of feeling like I have to run a specific mission type or join a faction I may not prefer for an optimal syndicate experience.

I do think there could be room to indirectly favor mission types if we get some kind of syndicate related objects or events that can spawn that may be weighted towards specific mission types.

b) Sigils

As I've said before, rep bonuses for sigil unlocks is fine, but I'd go with a passive bonus granted to the faction in question on unlock of a sigil and not tied to the sigiil itself.

The tax idea has potential, could be we can make a sacrifice of various things we would gain in a mission between credits, affinity and resources with maximum value allowed to be sacrificed being limited by the level of sigils unlocked (again as above, tied to unlocks not the sigil itself).

c) Gameplay Options

Negative/untiered alerts are an interesting idea. Not really sure where I am with that one, could be neat but not sure they should be necessary with other additions.

Syndicate locations or even just recruiting stations in hubs would be awesome. Also kinda hoping we see a few of their more standard members and possibly in the future getting special units as their spectres/hit squads. Honestly their units could just be reskins with maybe even just some non-standard ability/weapon combos like how capture targets and wardens have some non-standard combinations.

P.S. syndicate themed obstacle courses or otherwise individual challenge areas would be epic

d) Other *wall-o-text warning*

My big deal currently is that syndicates themselves offer little in terms of real gameplay. Basically we got some enemy type specters, and we have rare spawns of a full squad of eximi units. The mods and whatnot don't count in my book because they could be added anywhere and aren't an influence truly tied to the syndicate experience.

The first thing I feel we need to look at is Syndicate based activities. As of right now, the only thing special we can do gameplay wise related to syndicates is their daily reputation missions. Which are basically respawning 24 hour alerts that award reputation. They aren't anything new, although they do add some incentive to mix up mission types even just a little bit for players who might otherwise not. So faction rep missions are a good thing in my book but they are a tiny part of what we could, and in my opinion, should have.

The other problem that compounds with this is that the methods for gaining rep are uninteresting and offer nothing new and can even be viewed as having a negative impact on gameplay options. Currently my understanding is that rep gains are tied solely to affinity gains, which means that more affinity equates to more rep and less affinity to less rep. As the base of a rep system this isn't terrible, and gives easy and automatic scaling with the game. The problem is that this favors methods that are already miles beyond everything else for gaining pretty much anything worth gaining in missions. I am referring here to long term endless mission runs or otherwise high enemy density missions. Looking for rare mods? see above. Need to stockpile resources that aren't readily available from a boss? see above! Power levelling? endless missions away! Credits? sure why not, maybe not the optimal choice, but anyone at this point is probably not overly concerned with credits anyways

Don't get me wrong I'm okay with these methods being in play, but I'm not okay with them essentially being the answer to everything outside of blueprint/part hunting, and the rep system how I understand it doesn't seem to help at all here. The plus side I can say is that the affinity to rep system does to a degree discourage minimum contact speed runs.

Now what I'd like to see from syndicates is some alternative methods to gain rep that don't revolve entirely around obliterating entire armies as fast as possible. Having the option to go out and mass murder everything in sight for your syndicates approval (as well as all the other shiny material gains) is great, but we don't have an alternative at the moment. What about all the things these groups are doing without the assistance of the Tenno? surely these must at some point happen in areas we might pass through on our daily murder sprees.

Ideally we could see some event like spawns with possible ongoing conflict or just stumbling across active operations, and have the option of either working with or against them depending on where you stand. The problems I see with this are mainly mixed allegiance groups of Tenno, as well as technical complexity of building and coding a working and interesting scenario here. I'm not really expecting something like this anytime soon but it would be cool.

Something a bit more reasonable would be coming across evidence of such operations or conflicts without seeing them in progress. While it would bring a lot more life to the syndicates in game the big thing I'm going for here would be obtaining items related to these activities. Whether it be obtaining the ID of fallen syndicate operatives or finding hidden information or even objects of interest to the syndicates. These would essentially serve as exchangeable rep tokens, but would be donated to the syndicate of your choice with varying value depending on which syndicate or activity they relate to. These could also be multi part items with the ability to increase their value by either completing their intended purpose via things like sabotaging equipment or completing data collection.

I would see these objects as uncommon/rare spawns that would have only a very low, if any, chance of spawning in normal combat areas. After all, I would suspect these syndicates tend not to go head to head with the main factions in open combat if it can be helped. But instead these would lend value to the looter and explorer type players who like to find unusual and hidden locations while providing an alternative method of reputation gains. I mean for anyone who's put in time to find some of the really hidden rooms and such in some of the tile sets, there's some really freaking cool areas, but the payoff for finding or opening these areas is only slightly above non-existent.

 

 

A Tenno's Rewards

 

a) mods

While part of me wants everything to be super balanced in faction rewards, I know that won't happen and as long as things don't get way outta whack, having themed/patterned weapon selections for syndicates would be cool and is probably a better method than just throwing weapons into their collection while attempting to keep things even.

 

Pretty much agree on the frame to weapon augment comparison. It gives the impression that the weapon mods were either rushed, or not given anywhere near the time that was put into the frame augments. While the viability of many augments may be debatable they offer options that are simply not possible without them.

 

Also something I'd like to see in the future is weapon categories and families. Now I know it was required for melee 2.0 to happen, but melee weapons have weapon types, why do our guns not have this yet? We sort of have this, altho right now its "shotguns" and "rifles-that-are-really-anything-not-explicitly-a-shotgun" I'd like to see some middle tier syndicate rewards with more generalized but still limited mods, such as things that could be used on any 'braton variant', or things like heavy pistol mods. Heck we have Thunderbolt and Firestorm, we just need actual weapon categories to make these more clear and add more mods like that. Plus we get to clean up things like beam range mods being able to be placed on non-beam weapons

 

The more creative the better in my opinion

Some possibly crazy suggestions of the type of things I'd like to see in the future

warframe - create a decoy for 0.3 sec when performing a wall jump or a sliding jump (because why leave the interesting stuff to just weapons?)

 

daggers - able to perform a special attack on alerted enemies from behind (stealth attack without bonus damage but additional effect such as very high proc chance, possibly increased proc strength or possibility of multiple procs)

 

explosives - significantly decreased blast radius, releases small cluster bomb explosives from the initial blast.

 

snipers - headshots are guaranteed critical hits

 

heavy pistols - stacking damage bonus for every landed shot, increased bonus for a headshot, resets upon miss.

 

shotguns - kill with a critical hit applies status effects on the killed enemy to other enemies within a radius

 

assault rifle - increased reload speed with an empty clip

 

heavy melee - kill causes nearby enemies to take increased damage and have decreased attack speed for a short period of time

 

longsword - front parry/counter special attack becomes a wider range attack capable of hitting nearby enemies as well.

 

b) syndicate rank ups

Rep resets I can live with if we get more methods for gaining said rep. I wouldn't complain if we get rep carryovers either. Free sigils? maybe, not sure on that one. Would be cool to get a title or something we can actually equip. Other sigil bonuses already discussed above.

 

Immersion and Investment

 

a) Yea more lines will definitely be better for syndicate dialogue, especially on the syndicate alerts. Not something immediately needed but in the long term is a requirement in my mind before syndicates can be called anything near complete. Also radio chatter for syndicates in the ship, sure I don't see why not, would be cool.

 

b) Definitely would like to see things happen in the area of story within the syndicate itself. A good starting point would be clips about why we're doing our daily alerts with some hints about potentially important individual goals or ongoing efforts. Doesn't have to be anything major but hints about things going on for us to speculate would be awesome, especially if we get any events or tactical alerts and such that expand on them in the future.

Edited November 8, 2014 by TinFoilMkIV

[DiabolusUrsus]

I'm curious as to what you're basing this on. As far as I have found it seems directly tied to raw affinity gains from all sources. It's certainly possible I'm missing something and I haven't run any kind of extensive testing, just wondering what lead you to this conclusion? Possibly related to the wierdness with partial loadouts granting differing ammounts of affinity before the hotfix?

 

agreed

 

Yea I don't think it would be great to be pushed too strongly towards a certain frame or frames for a specific syndicate as they can often be the core of how a player likes to play. Same reason I don't think having specifically favored mission types for syndicates would be a good idea either. I do think weapons could work. I feel like there's enough room to do something along those lines with weapons without making players feel pigeonholed into things they don't enjoy.

 

Just gonna cut out the stuff that isn't responding to me directly, because believe me, Phaneur will get around to responding to the rest of what you said. 

 

As far as for the basis of slower reputation gain with maxed gear, there was a thread a little ways back (sorry, I can't remember the title) where people had run tests with fully ranked vs. unranked gear. The reputation gain was distinctly higher for the unranked (to start) gear, to the order of at least 2-300 points higher. Unless this has been recently hotfixed, my own experiences align with this information. 40-50 rep on completion of a normal mission with maxed equipment (I don't grind specifically for reputation) and upwards of 100 when using two weapons not fully ranked. I haven't kept a super-watchful eye on these values, though, so perhaps that has been patched out in one of the hotfixes or something. 

 

As for weapons, I'm looking at faction-favored weapons as a way to draw out the use of less immediately popular reasons. Like giving people a reason to dust off their relics if they happen to have them. Things like Cronus, Strun, Ether Sword, Hek, etc. Weapons like the Boltor Prime that see the majority of a player's use should not get the special treatment right off the bat. Eventually, but not to start.

[ArbitUHM]

I like the idea of getting a free sigil when ranking up.  If they had some little bonus attached to the sigil as well (like 1 HP/sec health regen or something), that would be quite cool. 

 

Rep points resetting when ranking up doesn't upset me that much.  Yes, it's a bit odd that rep goes to zero, but you're also higher rank, so I don't see that as the syndicate not caring about you any more.  I think it also keeps the price of the rewards down - if we kept our rep points when going to rank 2 for instance, I don't think think the 5 x T4 keys would only cost 5k rep, since that would mean you could instantly buy 20 keys when you reach rank 2.  Since I plan to endlessly farm T4 ext keys from the Red Veil instead of advancing further, this is good for me. ;D

 

The rate of rep accrual doesn't bother me too much.  I think it could be faster, but I am pretty content to do the high value syndicate missions each day and just not worry about "grinding" rep points through interception missions or whatever.  Thinking about it this way, I'm getting 1k+ rep points in my two allied syndicates for about 20-30 minutes of gameplay and any further rep I earn through normal play is gravy.  I get to fill up my rep bar and get rewards and It's not really "costing" me anything.

 

Honestly, what worries me the most is the negative rep points.  I kinda wish I went with Arbiters of Hexis but I am now 15k rep points in the hole with them (deceiver rank with negative ~10k rep).  It takes a fair amount of time to get to rank 1 (5k rep) without the help of syndicate missions.  If you've accumulated the most negative points possible (-27k effectively, plus another 5k to get to rank 1) that is going to take an ungodly amount of time to accumulate given I don't have any syndicate missions to help with the farming.  That is hours and hours and hours of game time.  Now given my logic above it's not "costing" me anything, but I don't think it's cool that switching syndicates should basically mean that all my rep points should go towards reducing a deficit for months at a time.  If that's the way it's going to be, then I'm basically never leaving Red Veil/Steel Meridian because the opportunity cost is too high e.g. I can switch to Arbiters and burn a lot of rep points over a few months so I get access to different mods/keys, or I can just stick with RV/SM and get probably literally hundreds of T4 keys in that same span of time.

 

(this is assuming they "fix" Viver, which I have a hunch they will since I can't imagine it's intended that one node outclasses every other for rep farming by such a large margin)

[Phaenur]

@DiabolusUrsus:  I'm not sure about the "hitting experienced players harder" point, honestly.  Yes, it's ideal to have non-maxed gear, but really as long as the gear isn't at level 30 it's still leveling up at about the same rate.  Forma can be used to reset that number anyway, and if someone's got every piece of gear in the game maxed where they want it...well, they have to wait a couple of weeks for the next batch of Tenno Reinforcements, or they can build an old gun in the meantime just to have something to do.  Plus, although there are some "gamey" tactics that make (or at least made) nodes like Viver easy reputation, the fact remains that it's still best to do fairly long-term Endless missions at higher levels and/or in Dark Sectors.

 

 

@TinFoilMkIV and ArbitUHM:  I like that thought about smaller passive bonuses to sigils.  My argument for that benefit, or at least part of it, being a rep acceleration is simply that right now it's a huge rep sink for a decal that's honestly fairly hard to see even with the Alpha slider maxed.  Providing a faster return on investment for, essentially, wearing sergeant's stripes instead of a hand-lettered T-shirt just makes sense to me.  That said, providing other benefits on the sigils and tying that rep boost to rank or total purchases made would probably be even more fun and engaging, you're right.

 

Some quick ideas expanding on that...well, hey, here's another chance to give each faction some flavor.  One Steel Meridian badge provides you with a once-a-minute shield restore (like that Sentinel mod whose name I can't recall), another builds up a meter every time you take damage and releases it as a shield when full, that sort of thing.  Red Veil might cloak you when low on health, New Loka could provide healing or energy restoration, that sort of thing.  I might make a more comprehensive list of my ideas later, but the more I think about this the more I'm enjoying the idea.

 

 

Coming back to my brainstorm about end-of-mission taxes - call them "donations," since they're not technically mandatory - I think the idea could work, but it would be extra effort for DE and would probably burn players out even faster because they think they "have" to pour as much as possible into their syndicate.  If I'd put it in from the beginning I'd probably have made the donation level required for the same multiplier go down with each rank (60% for a newbie gets the same reward as 10% for someone who's been helping so much they've been made a general), but honestly I think the rage about the perceived need to give up their credits and resources would outweigh any improvements to immersion.

 

Now, having a "donation box" where players could just make one-time contributions of credits or resources for a rep multiplier could be a lot better, but that runs into a lot of balance issues - how much do syndicates demand, how arbitrary are the numbers, and so on.  Probably best to shelve this idea for now unless someone can figure out a way to overcome all of that.

 

 

But there are other things we could donate, definitely.  TinFoil, I really liked that thread of yours from earlier and your comment about it above - the bit about there being special drops from lockers, excavators, end-of-mission results, or whatever else that could be turned in for either a chunk of rep or a multiplier with specific factions.  In my reply I mentioned adding "mini-quests" to "assemble" more advanced rep drops, and I think we can take that one step further.  Completing one of those items has a chance to trigger a new, special alert or sequence of alerts that let you act on whatever you just found.  In fact, there could be a chance for both a single mission and a short series, just to keep things varied so it doesn't directly become a new grind.  Sort of the equivalent of MMO quests starting from random item drops, really.

 

You also make a very good point about having some of those options be things tied to what the syndicates are actually doing, not just what they want.  Giving the Steel Meridian lady her soldiers' dog tags could be a fairly powerful experience, and if handled well - again, there need to be several possible lines here, not just a single canned response - it would stay that way.  That's just one example, building a little on one you mentioned yourself anyway.  Not everything would have to be a quest, just an item and a little comment about it, but those little things go a remarkably long way.

 

 

I don't really have much else to offer about the weapons and mods and such, though the list of semi-off-the-wall suggestions is fun to read and imagine in action.  I'm just really not enough of a collector or minmaxer to put much thought into it in the first place, so now that we're in a position to come up with genuinely interesting mods I'm actually kind of stumped.  Curious to see how the weapon mod meters work ("+1 Truth" and the like), though, because I think that's the same system I discussed for sigil enhancements at the top of this post.

 

And I do agree that having mods that apply across an entire category would be not only interesting and useful but also very practical.  It cuts down on the number of things DE has to come up with, makes some elements of balancing more clear-cut (like "what counts as a launcher?" a while back), and allows for "specialized" mods that can still work anywhere.  A lot of possibilities from the idea, though it's come up in other contexts a lot of times before without much impact.

 

 

Lastly, ArbitUHM, I understand what you're getting at with faction rep, and it really does come down to picking either the two (Arbiters-Suda, Perrin-Loka, or Veil-Meridian) or three (Arbiters-Suda-Meridian or Perrin-Loka-Veil) you want to stick with.  I went for a triangle from the start, but couldn't decide *which* triangle since I wanted to work with both Meridian and Perrin, and even now that I've stopped waffling I still haven't ranked up with anyone.  That was, unfortunately, part of the stated design goal (Devstream 29, I think), which is why I was actually kind of hesitant to bring up the idea of negative-rep missions.  Basically, they'd help stop you from being completely bottomed out, but you'd probably erase most if not all of your progress from one of those by running regular missions for your usual syndicates.

 

Besides, the idea really is to find the syndicate or set of syndicates you're most comfortable with ideologically or personally and help drive them, though there's nothing right now that actually makes any of them resonate.  Really, I'd hope that if some or all of the suggestions I've seen were implemented, you'd be happy enough with the Red Veil and Steel Meridian that not even the rival rewards could tempt you away from them.  Or, alternately, you'd realize you'd made a bad choice and be able to recover rep in a different set of factions - you'd still have to backfill, but there'd be other methods to get out of the hole than just grinding regular missions.

[TinFoilMkIV]

...

As far as for the basis of slower reputation gain with maxed gear, there was a thread a little ways back (sorry, I can't remember the title) where people had run tests with fully ranked vs. unranked gear. The reputation gain was distinctly higher for the unranked (to start) gear, to the order of at least 2-300 points higher. Unless this has been recently hotfixed, my own experiences align with this information. 40-50 rep on completion of a normal mission with maxed equipment (I don't grind specifically for reputation) and upwards of 100 when using two weapons not fully ranked. I haven't kept a super-watchful eye on these values, though, so perhaps that has been patched out in one of the hotfixes or something. 

 

As for weapons, I'm looking at faction-favored weapons as a way to draw out the use of less immediately popular reasons. Like giving people a reason to dust off their relics if they happen to have them. Things like Cronus, Strun, Ether Sword, Hek, etc. Weapons like the Boltor Prime that see the majority of a player's use should not get the special treatment right off the bat. Eventually, but not to start.

Interesting, sounds like there's some affinity gains that don't get calculated if a weapon is maxed out. In that regards I'd say it more hits upper mid level players more than just generally "experienced players", as you reach a point where eventually you can handle content that hands out rather ludicrous amounts or affinity compared to normal play. Which is one of my basic issues with a purely affinity to rep conversion, as you either ignore it while it slowly builds up or go play the few areas that make everything else look like a joke for affinity gains.

 

Also absolutely agree with weapons. High performance weapons don't really need any shiny new bonuses at least not for a while, especially when currently these bonuses are essentially long term players only.

 

 

Honestly I'd like to see some mid tier rewards from factions, all their rewards really seem to aim towards players who have probably done everything and could have any weapon/gear they want at this point. I mean T4 keys and large restores are one of the lowest faction rewards. Something along the lines of less specialized mods but not completely general like our current mods.

 

 

...

@TinFoilMkIV and ArbitUHM:  I like that thought about smaller passive bonuses to sigils.  My argument for that benefit, or at least part of it, being a rep acceleration is simply that right now it's a huge rep sink for a decal that's honestly fairly hard to see even with the Alpha slider maxed.  Providing a faster return on investment for, essentially, wearing sergeant's stripes instead of a hand-lettered T-shirt just makes sense to me.  That said, providing other benefits on the sigils and tying that rep boost to rank or total purchases made would probably be even more fun and engaging, you're right.

 

Some quick ideas expanding on that...well, hey, here's another chance to give each faction some flavor.  One Steel Meridian badge provides you with a once-a-minute shield restore (like that Sentinel mod whose name I can't recall), another builds up a meter every time you take damage and releases it as a shield when full, that sort of thing.  Red Veil might cloak you when low on health, New Loka could provide healing or energy restoration, that sort of thing.  I might make a more comprehensive list of my ideas later, but the more I think about this the more I'm enjoying the idea.

...

agreed that it would certainly make sense that showing your dedication publicly would be seen as more favorable. Honestly I like the idea of the actual bonuses from the sigils that I've seen around including here, but I feel like these would be better suited for a new equipment slot rather than being tied to the sigil itself. Basically something like what the auras turned into but personal instead of for your whole team and not necessarily a warframe mod but some other not necessarily visible device you can bring to boost your abilities.

 

...

Coming back to my brainstorm about end-of-mission taxes - call them "donations," since they're not technically mandatory - I think the idea could work, but it would be extra effort for DE and would probably burn players out even faster because they think they "have" to pour as much as possible into their syndicate.  If I'd put it in from the beginning I'd probably have made the donation level required for the same multiplier go down with each rank (60% for a newbie gets the same reward as 10% for someone who's been helping so much they've been made a general), but honestly I think the rage about the perceived need to give up their credits and resources would outweigh any improvements to immersion.

 

Now, having a "donation box" where players could just make one-time contributions of credits or resources for a rep multiplier could be a lot better, but that runs into a lot of balance issues - how much do syndicates demand, how arbitrary are the numbers, and so on.  Probably best to shelve this idea for now unless someone can figure out a way to overcome all of that.

...

I was thinking more along the lines of you set your own tax rate, ie: 10% credits, 20%materials, 5% affinity, have those taxed gains be converted to rep, but the maximum percentages (possibly cap per category or capped by total percentage used across all) be determined by rank/sigil unlocks.

 

I think the donation box idea kinda overlaps too much with the sigil rep bonuses, altho maybe a donation box that grants time limited rep bonuses? Either way I agree that these would be less important but still nice features to have.

 

 

...

But there are other things we could donate, definitely.  TinFoil, I really liked that thread of yours from earlier and your comment about it above - the bit about there being special drops from lockers, excavators, end-of-mission results, or whatever else that could be turned in for either a chunk of rep or a multiplier with specific factions.  In my reply I mentioned adding "mini-quests" to "assemble" more advanced rep drops, and I think we can take that one step further.  Completing one of those items has a chance to trigger a new, special alert or sequence of alerts that let you act on whatever you just found.  In fact, there could be a chance for both a single mission and a short series, just to keep things varied so it doesn't directly become a new grind.  Sort of the equivalent of MMO quests starting from random item drops, really.

 

You also make a very good point about having some of those options be things tied to what the syndicates are actually doing, not just what they want.  Giving the Steel Meridian lady her soldiers' dog tags could be a fairly powerful experience, and if handled well - again, there need to be several possible lines here, not just a single canned response - it would stay that way.  That's just one example, building a little on one you mentioned yourself anyway.  Not everything would have to be a quest, just an item and a little comment about it, but those little things go a remarkably long way.

...

I've honestly always thought that not having any kind of special loot or anything in those really out of the way or hidden areas was such a waste of some really nice map design. Rare caches are a step in the right direction but they're way too uncommon and we need something in between "complete waste of time" and "chance at actually good stuff". That and giving syndicates more ways to work than just "wear our logo and go kill things".

 

...

I don't really have much else to offer about the weapons and mods and such, though the list of semi-off-the-wall suggestions is fun to read and imagine in action.  I'm just really not enough of a collector or minmaxer to put much thought into it in the first place, so now that we're in a position to come up with genuinely interesting mods I'm actually kind of stumped.  Curious to see how the weapon mod meters work ("+1 Truth" and the like), though, because I think that's the same system I discussed for sigil enhancements at the top of this post.

 

And I do agree that having mods that apply across an entire category would be not only interesting and useful but also very practical.  It cuts down on the number of things DE has to come up with, makes some elements of balancing more clear-cut (like "what counts as a launcher?" a while back), and allows for "specialized" mods that can still work anywhere.  A lot of possibilities from the idea, though it's come up in other contexts a lot of times before without much impact.

...

I think that some of the more wacky or creative bonuses actually works in favor of non-min-maxers. Ultimately the most efficient build for a weapon is going to be the one that kills the most things the fastest or with the fewest shots. It's going to be all about core stats. Wierd abilities and effects can give players who don't strictly want to just put out big numbers options to do interesting things that still do enough to get the job done.

 

Adding a few bullets to your clips or shaving off 0.1 seconds reload time versus 30% damage isn't even a choice really. Of course that's more of a balance issue but even so, the choice between doing extreme, or just acceptable damage versus shooting somewhat longer or reloading faster isn't a terribly interesting choice and I KNOW that we can do better than that.

 

Also weapon clarity not only makes the game more easy to understand and look more finished, but gives us a lot more interesting options going forwards.

 

 

P.S. By the way does multi quoting you in parts like that give you multiple "you've been quoted" notices or just one per post? if it's spamming you I'll come up with something else.

Edited November 10, 2014 by TinFoilMkIV

[-FV-Wsocks]

If this was a 'soon to come' message from DE I would be pretty hyped. Everything in here is something that I was hoping for when the syndicate system was first introduced. Unfortunately, this is just a suggestion in a sea of other suggestions. People are already at the top of the syndicates and selling their mods as fast as they can. If something doesn't change soon, the syndicate system will be dried up and dead.

[TinFoilMkIV]

I don't think it's that big a rush, as long as syndicates make noticeable progress in a good direction and don't suddenly get sidelined for new projects they should be okay. Ultimately in the future there's going to be plenty of players who will essentially have access to all their syndicate goodies on demand so I don't think that's as big a problem as some might think, especially since I fully expect that our current mod selection and such are just the beginning.

 

Also sure its only a few players ideas among many, but DE does read through these sections a lot more than it seems, and the more we talk about it the more likely they are to see it. Now is the time for this kinda discussion while syndicates are just getting started. It will only be too late if we wait till they already get far enough in to not want to entirely rework syndicates or other big projects take over the development time.

[Lypiphera]

Some interesting ideas here. They really do need to change the sigil system. They discussed in the Dev Streams that we do favors for them (rep) then we turn in the favors (rep) for stuff. How does it make sense that I do them favors and I have to turn in said favors to get a nicer looking sigil that only better promotes them, as a nicer looking sigil would only help promoting their cause even more than a crappy looking one. I can understand having to wait to unlock it as if I am a crappy representative they don't want me to negatively represent them.

[TinFoilMkIV]

Some interesting ideas here. They really do need to change the sigil system. They discussed in the Dev Streams that we do favors for them (rep) then we turn in the favors (rep) for stuff. How does it make sense that I do them favors and I have to turn in said favors to get a nicer looking sigil that only better promotes them, as a nicer looking sigil would only help promoting their cause even more than a crappy looking one. I can understand having to wait to unlock it as if I am a crappy representative they don't want me to negatively represent them.

Valid point, maybe it would be beneficial to switch to a system with combined rep and other resource/credit costs instead of purely rep costs, with things like sigils still having a rep cost but being a small cost in rep with it mostly being credits/whatever else.

 

Also good to bring up that we're supposedly doing them favors, while in the current system it doesn't feel like that at all.

[Lypiphera]

 

Also good to bring up that we're supposedly doing them favors, while in the current system it doesn't feel like that at all.

The daily missions are favors, we are exterminating/capturing/sabotaging their enemies or actively defending them. To me those are favors that we should be able to call upon. What they should do is have more immersive dialogue indicating what this particular favor is for such as:

 

The Arbiters of Hexis are sending me to sabotage one of the Red Veil's weapons manufacturing plant.

New Loka is sending me to capture key scientists of Cephlon Suda.

Steel Meridian is attacking The Perrin Sequence and I must help defend them.

 

These are the kinds of things that should earn us reputation and favors amongst the syndicates. These are all mission types already in the game, they just need  a little text/voice over at the start to really sell it. This would also show why the other syndicates actively hate us as they would be there to see our transgressions, instead of some random mission where we killed people that has no affiliation with that syndicate.

Edited November 12, 2014 by Lypiphera

[TinFoilMkIV]

True dailies I suppose pretty much are favors, they just don't feel that way since they're completely normal missions with a special line of text at the start. Outside of that tho our normal rep gains have no tangible connection to the syndicates in how we gain them.

[TinFoilMkIV]

A new day for new discussion.

 

Anyways I've realized that for the specialty bonuses that were discussed on sigils we can have a separate item that uses the mechanics from dragon keys. An item type that you can only have one of equipped and grants a personal effect except in this case its a positive effect as opposed to the negative effect the keys have. Should be fairly straightforwards and uses an existing system.

[TinFoilMkIV]

So with the devstream and 5.2.2 the Syndicate systems seems to be moving forwards decently. I'ts a lot more reasonable to progress without having to go out of your way and specifically farm affinity now, and it sounds like the medallions are going to be a sort of exploration/looting type bonus for reputation.

 

We're in a better place now and it's certainly looking up, but that doesn't mean all is perfect and that we can't do better than this.

 

 

Affinity gains and daily cap

Making things more reasonable for normal play is all well and good, but I feel this change was more of a quick fix and I hope it's not being considered a permanent answer. While the cap is obtainable through any mission type it still doesn't answer the fact that pure affinity to rep is boring and is still massively skewed towards certain playstyles.

 

The cap is an interesting bonus to mastery rank, and again it's a good answer for short term but I think we can do much better. I don't really have a very good way to improve this at the moment but I've seen a suggestion of a soft cap with diminishing returns after that I feel I would prefer. This is probably one of the changes I could live with easiest but I still feel like it's a pretty bland addition to the system, functional but uninteresting.

 

Overall this works but doesn't make rep gain interesting or really offer much to doing anything out of the ordinary. It's more reasonable and definitely in a better place, but still suffers from just doing whatever it is you'd normally do while wearing a logo.

 

Sigil bonuses

Again I feel like DE went with the quick and easy fix here. It works but I don't think it's okay for long term. This is returning to Arcane Helmets territory where we end up just wearing whats "best" instead of actually getting to use the full selection for personal preference and proper cosmetic customization. Hopefully this is due to time constraints and trying to get everything into an acceptable shape as soon as possible. It works for short term but long term I hope we can seperate the bonuses from actually requiring the highest sigils from being physically equipped.

 

Stuff to come

First off, hubs. Syndicate rooms in hubs look freaking awesome. They may offer little functionality but these things are seriously cool. So not necessary to Syndicate function but good for the overall game experience.

 

Next we have the so called Medallions. My understanding is these are basically generic rep tokens that you either hand in or just give bonus rep at the end of the mission. It's not even clear whether these will be primarily from storage/loot containers or will just be another drop from anything type deal. I'm a bit skeptical here but they sound like a step in a good direction. These seem way too generic for what I'd like to see but again sounds like it's moving in a better direction and I really can't judge till we get more information.

 

 

Overall Syndicates seem to be improving but many of the updates and features feel a bit generic and place holder-y. Functional, gets the job done, but not terribly interesting. Hopefully these are indeed placeholder additions that will be improved as time allows and not overlooked because it "works well enough".

[Phaenur]

Yeah, the devstream left me feeling a lot more reassured.  There's still a lot of open potential and the existing mechanisms do seem like placeholders (...story of this game's life, isn't it?), but the hubs in particular sold me on a faction choice at last.  Sorry, Perrin Sequence, I love you guys but don't want to get anywhere near your allies right now.  That's how you do storytelling without a single written or spoken word, people!

 

One thing I love about the current numbers for the reputation caps is that at the very first level you can join Syndicates at all you can level one Syndicate to first rank right away, and it only takes ten to at most fifty missions to do - as long as you're not puttering around with Earth Exterminates or something you'll get to the faction missions in no time.  Of course, those really need to have their dialogue diversified, but I'm going to let DE have a bit of time on that front.

 

The one thing these changes confirm, though, is that there's nothing "endgame" about Syndicates, and I could probably cite Inigo Montoya at DE whenever they've used it.  It's a process, one that's only somewhat accelerated by being a veteran player with high mastery and access to massive affinity farming sites, and even though it provides a fresh outlet for new mods and loot and the like none of them are likely to be anything truly special.  Right now the game is pretty much preparing us for content that doesn't exist, and I feel another essay on that coming up Soon.

[TinFoilMkIV]

...

• Syndicate medallions coming to give even more Syndicate standing

• Going up in Syndicate rank will have more benefits in the future

 

Let’s take a look at those last two points, since the others are rather straightforward. Medallions, a soon-to-be feature for Syndicates, will be items that players can find scattered throughout various Syndicate missions. Medallions can then be turned into faction leaders, who will grant bonus standing for such exceptional vigilance.

...

Really now? The medallions are unique to syndicate missions? Not cool guys... Syndicate missions already give significant rep bonuses, they don't need the only other interesting rep bonus stacked on top of that with everything else left out.

Edited November 19, 2014 by TinFoilMkIV