Survival Spawning

[Monolake]

Glen is the best! 

[Seanjuju]

It's comforting to know that this is being worked on.

[7grims]

All that I have read, is all that was broken and needed a fix.

Past fixes never mentioned thise details, nor fixed any of it.

This is great news ;)

Edited November 21, 2014 by 7grims

[taiiat]

*teary eyed*

 

i'm glad progress could be made.

if it's more reliable, maybe i can hate the Gamemode less. and start to be able to actually have fun in it.

 

 

i might still see no justification for Desecrate to be involved with Oxygen Drops, but if the Gamemode is made more reliable, then it'll be just a tiny bit more possible to play without it and not end up quitting 8/10 Missions early.

 

It could have a large impact on the way people play if the XP changes significantly in either direction.

Enemies being more reliable in their AI Pathing basically means theoretically you can fight more Enemies per N time(or atleast the same, improved AI Pathing can't make Enemies come less). depends on how Tenno are using Aggro and if they're Killing them as fast as they spawn, Et Cetera.

 

overall there probably won't be a large difference, just less Enemies getting stuck away from Objectives, less Enemies taking a casual stroll instead of going towards Tenno, Et Cetera.

[TrinityPrime]

I just wish we could hack consoles or something to increase the threat level or frequency of enemies for when we have less than max amount of players or are running solo.

[Kontrollo]

Thank you for the hard work Glen.

It should be said that it's not me that made the changes -- I'm just the passionate advocate for the game-type -- the real work was and is being done by a much broader team!

 

Thank you for the hard work "a much broader team".

 

On a sidenote, you're clearly using Enemy Radar Prime. When can we expect that to be included in the game?

 

;)

 

 

 

Edit: looks like I'm unable to correctly nest quotes..

Edited November 20, 2014 by Kontrollo

[[DE]Saske]

On a sidenote, you're clearly using Enemy Radar Prime. When can we expect that to be included in the game?

 

Never ;) That's global  enemy radar for testing (seeing spawns and movement).

[Kontrollo]

Never ;) That's global  enemy radar for testing (seeing spawns and movement).

 

I figured as much :(

 

Why must thou taunt us so, DE? WHY??

[UltimateSpinDash]

YES!

 

I hope this fixes survival so it no longer requires nekros for long runs (at times it's difficult even with nekros).

[SethSamson]

I hate Survival...

 

cause nobody are playing other missions types 

[Thundervision]

Oh. Now i got it what was the meaning of this table

 

Well, all i can say is «can't wait for this», hah. Haven't played Survs for 2 months, but Grineer ones (ooouch, watch out! Aim-bots!), can't believe i can enjoy the other Survs now \o/

[nickelshark]

Thank you! Survival is my fav mode to play in and any improvements me and my arsenal of goodies welcome!

Edited November 20, 2014 by nickelshark

[TennoSimons]

Great to hear. Thanks to Glen and everyone who volunteered for improving my favourite game mode. 

[(PSN)Crackle2012]

This sounds amazing Glen!  TY for the heads up on this!!!  

 

I am assuming all of these improvements will be put into the NEXT update for consoles. (meaning 12.5 or whatever hits consoles AFTER Archwing) - Can't wait to try it out though!

[inthephonebox]

Nice attention to detail. I had noticed this low-level enemy spawn problem and simply chocked it up to my atrocious rng luck. Nice to see its a problem that will be fixed. I'm also looking forward to enemy AI improvements across the board. 

[Sixty5]

Thank you based Kickbot.

I'd almost forgotten how fun solo survival is.

[Kev292]

Awesome!

 

EDITED!

 

Well I'll stick to one important thing, and that is, how will the tweaks to survival missions spawning coincide with the recently introduced improved enemy accuracy? It's often a pain to play against enemies as is on solo survival, especially now hat they have (100 %?)  accuracy

 

Enemies are now able to target you from sizable distances and fire at you with near perfect accuracy unless you are using a mobile frame, and the biggest issue here is simply that Tenno Survivability is absolute rubbish in its current form, to a certain stage you can rely on vitality + redirection, then later Rage and Quick thinking.

 

 

However, after a certain point when the accuracy simply becomes unbearable, more of the game ends up being, "kill the enemy before they even see you" as even a single enemy has the capability to potentially drain your health / shields to 0 with their newfound accuracy rather quickly. This makes players have the tendency to run along with frames / weapons and builds packing massive DPS so that they can;

 

1. Initiate ability, stun / daze / stop everyone in the room

2. Fire While enemies cannot react

3. Repeat

 

While these increases may be minute, the aforementioned problem is that there is no engagement with the enemy that allows you to "tank" and take their shots, and I am afraid that this will only get worse with larger volumes of enemies spawning. Am I overthinking this?

 

Or is there something in the pipelines right now to allow us to actually take a single bullet without going down?

What we need is balance to defense against damage (along with the accuracy fix) and increase defense mods effectiveness as shields are still the only viable option. Maybe even have a new corrupted mod that increases defense a lot, but decreases speed or damage output.

[Ska-boo]

 

I love playing Survival; it is definitely my favourite game-type because it is dynamic, active, and challenging.

 

I'm so not sure if this is serious. It's a game mode that makes player to fight RNG! What's so challenging and dynamic about it? Drop chance procs - you're good, it does not, you choke to death. I don't think that slight tweak of numbers in RNG is what what we need. Besides, I just ran solo T2 to check it and still ran out of oxygen before 20 minutes mark. The changes were simply not noticeable to me.

 

What I have notices tho, is that success of mission depends highly on map architecture. If system generates you a map with lots of chokepoints where you can bottleneck spawning enemies and kill whole pack almost immediately, the game will be quite easy, while if map generator favors excessiveness of huge halls in which enemies spread out and make you move long distances to fully clear wave, you may as well leave before minute 5.

 

This shows the general flaw of this gamemode: the ideal survival looks like Viver, so hated by you. You must dispatch enemies in a rate much faster that reasonable, preferably the moment they spawn to fasten the appearance on the next wave, to reliably accomplish the mission with success and G-d help you if you don't bring weapon or frame that is not absolute overkill for the mission. If your loadout makes you actually fight enemies and not butcher them and it takes you longer than an eyeblink to kill a creep, then it's going to be a very short run.

 

This, ofc, may not apply to high level survival mission, as enemies can tear you apart just as fast as you can do that to them, but then again, every time I tried more or less long T3S, I, or we, had to bail because of oxygen and not because enemies were owning. I could still kill them, but just not as fast as it was necessary to maintain life support level. That's why I hate this game mode, try to never play it and dream that you would replace it back to raid or something.

Edited November 20, 2014 by Ska-boo

[dethkittin]

attention was also given to the higher-difficulties as well. Historically we compensated for various pathing and spawning problems by increasing the enemy counts but this is not healthy for performance on low-end machines. Since there have been quite a few small tweaks and improvements to how spawns flow towards players the more extreme counts should not longer be necessary and were reduced

 

What if we LIKED having more enemies? :(

 

City of Villains had a great setting for their mayhem missions where you could set a difficulty slider to +X levels and

to make it harder, more risk and rewards, but this seems to be going against that kind of idea and instead homogenising it into lower spawns for everybody which seems to be a bit going backwards :(

[[DE]Saske]

What I have notices tho, is that success of mission depends highly on map architecture. If system generates you a map with lots of chokepoints where you can bottleneck spawning enemies and kill whole pack almost immediately, the game will be quite easy, while if map generator favors excessiveness of huge halls in which enemies spread out and make you move long distances to fully clear wave, you may as well leave before minute 5.

 

Those hugh halls actually make the spawns better and of course you will not get past 20 min in a survival if you play it solo, this is a team game, find friends or a clan to run stuff with,  if you want crazy long runs.

[Archistopheles]

A very welcoming change. My frustrations will hopefully now be a distant memory.

[fadeinlight]

 

What if we LIKED having more enemies? :(

 

City of Villains had a great setting for their mayhem missions where you could set a difficulty slider to +X levels and

to make it harder, more risk and rewards, but this seems to be going against that kind of idea and instead homogenising it into lower spawns for everybody which seems to be a bit going backwards :(

I think he was saying that when enemies weren't finding the players, they would just increase the number of enemies spawned.  You know how sometimes you don't see anything, then suddenly you go into a room and it's filled with enemies?  That's probably where it comes from--if you never find that room, or don't find it for a long time, it won't make any difference how fast the spawn rate is because they can't figure out to get to you (and vice versa).

 

Regarding the update:  I just got out of a T4 Survival, and it seems to be working well.  Action was near continuous, life support was adequate.

[Ska-boo]

Those hugh halls actually make the spawns better and of course you will not get past 20 min in a survival if you play it solo, this is a team game, find friends or a clan to run stuff with,  if you want crazy long runs.

What, 20 minutes is a crazy long run now? I can run past 20 and even past 40 sometimes in solo mode, if I'm lucky with drops. But I don't see a single reason why should my progress depend on luck.

 

Also, I think we talk about different halls. Large hall with white tree and hall with sloping floor and a basin of water are perfect places to camp, as you can sweep all entrances from one position. Halls with glass floor and a hall with 2 spheres on ceiling with secret containers in them are the ones I was talking about, as first is just a bloody labyrinth in which creeps lose themselves and force you to run around both floors of it and seek them out and the second has too many covers and obstacles that prevent you from shooting everyone on sight from one place

[SpookyDodger]

Why not see how fast enemies are being killed, and then dynamically adjust the rate?  You then could make the level of adjustment vary based on mission difficulty or even participant conclave rating.  Low-level difficulty with relatively new players?  The lower limits of spawn spacing could be very low, allowing a lot of time between spawns, inversely giving a high drop rate of supplies.  Higher level missions or a higher overall conclave rating would see the fudge factor greatly reduced or gone all-together.

 

If you want to get really fancy, do a node-tree structure where local spawns are tied to local activity of players.  New, poorly equipped player in an area with a few spawns?  Those areas spawn slower or with less numbers / level than others with better geared or more experienced players.  If a more experienced player enters the same local node area of a novice player, the weighted average would shift to accomodate that player.

 

It seems like a lot of checking, but really the logic only is called on AI death.  AI logs its death time relative to its spawn time.  AI checks its death order.  If it is, say, within the last 3, it triggers a calculation of relative kill speed to see if it needs to hit the gas on spawns, or the brakes.  The calculation is triggered once, so any race conditions would be largely mitigated by not allowing it to run multiple times simultaneously.  Oh, and the death-time might need to be calculated with unit difficulty factored in.  A mixed squad of grineer with a lancer versus a commander, the commander dying within 10 seconds of spawn versus the lancer dying within 10 seconds of spawn have different meaning.  Higher survivability units (based on armor, hitpoints, level) would weight the player "danger" threat differently to account for the difficulty in killing them.

 

And please don't take it as me being critical.  I like to speculate on more dynamic code to give more tailored experiences.  I don't pretend to know anything about how your backend is setup, the capabilities of the frameworks, or any such thing.  I love this game and would like to see it thrive even more.

 

 

We also found that in the easiest missions there were not quite enough enemies to keep a full squad busy -- the missions seemed a bit too quiet especially compared with our fond memories of T4S! Although there were concerns about novice Tenno having difficulty it was decided that we would increase the spawn-limits slightly for lower-difficulty missions.

 

 

[Ailith]

Awesome!

 

EDITED!

 

Well I'll stick to one important thing, and that is, how will the tweaks to survival missions spawning coincide with the recently introduced improved enemy accuracy? It's often a pain to play against enemies as is on solo survival, especially now hat they have (100 %?)  accuracy

 

Enemies are now able to target you from sizable distances and fire at you with near perfect accuracy unless you are using a mobile frame, and the biggest issue here is simply that Tenno Survivability is absolute rubbish in its current form, to a certain stage you can rely on vitality + redirection, then later Rage and Quick thinking.

 

 

However, after a certain point when the accuracy simply becomes unbearable, more of the game ends up being, "kill the enemy before they even see you" as even a single enemy has the capability to potentially drain your health / shields to 0 with their newfound accuracy rather quickly. This makes players have the tendency to run along with frames / weapons and builds packing massive DPS so that they can;

 

1. Initiate ability, stun / daze / stop everyone in the room

2. Fire While enemies cannot react

3. Repeat

 

While these increases may be minute, the aforementioned problem is that there is no engagement with the enemy that allows you to "tank" and take their shots, and I am afraid that this will only get worse with larger volumes of enemies spawning. Am I overthinking this?

 

Or is there something in the pipelines right now to allow us to actually take a single bullet without going down?

My thoughts, you speak them with such accuracy.