Advancement Is The Backbone And Bane Of Warframe.

[Innocent_Flower]

Leveling up in warframe is literally bad for the game. 

 

 

Advantages: 
Gives sense of progression. 

 

Does it? Does it really?

Tier one survival: you fight lancers,crewmen,ancients,heavy gunners, fusion moa, attack osprey, shield-floats and those weak little turrets. 

Tier three survival: You fight lancers, crewmen, ancients, heavy gunners, fusion moa, attack osprey, shield-floats and those weak little turrets. 

 

The start of the game

Do 30 damage against enemies with 300 health. 

The end of the game

Do 3000 damage against enemies with 30000 health. 

 

 

 

Disadvantages 

The game is only "balanced" for low level play. Once you start getting to the extremes with numbers, everything's out of whack. Damage abilities become useless, Frames give out way before weapons leading to instant-death from trash mobs in the extreme late game. Personal note: Best mission I had on warframe? The intro mission where you wake up. Everything's perfectly balanced for you. 

 

Players need to self regulate. If they want a good, somewhat challenging game for a low level planet;They need to go into their loadout and nerf themselves if their gear is too strong. 

 

Playing with other people suffers. A first time player picks a boss, he gets paired with veteran speedrunners here for the resources. They have uber gear so they can kill the boss before he does damage, or even arrive. 

 

Customisation. We got some cool new projectile flight speed mods.They'd be super good to... What? They don't increase my DPS so that I can play late-midgame? Forget em! +damage,+multishot +elemental damage +crit damage is the only way to go. 

 

Endless missions, man, You go "I wanna fight till 40" So you gear up for 40 mins. Naturally you're so powerful that everything up to 35 is too easy and you end up bored for it. Then at 42 everything's too hard and making it to 45 is a matter of running away from anything with hitscan. Out of those 45 minutes you've got about seven that I'd consider enjoyable. ODD ends up being "constant vortex on the pod or we loose instantly" past a certain wave. 

 

 

This isn't saying that I don't like progression in a game. Warframe could do with some Genuine progression. But DE have to put in mind that:

The game isn't linear. Players might be fighting on pluto, see a good reward on venus, play venus. That advancement of theirs should bring them power, but that power shouldn't be instant-kills on bosses with an SMG and a warframe with over Five times the hitpoints. 

 

Difficulty has to be genuine. It's a shooter, not a board-game. It can't be "that same lancer you fought on mercury but now with 10 times the stats"  But rather "here's a mission with 40% more napalms, 100% more helions, 50% of the lancers are elite and you might find that Grineer jackals are a common heavy enemy" Or perhaps "Lancers throw more grenades and behave in a more deadly manner" 

 

You've got to move mods away from DPS.  Look at the archwing mods: 120% Toxic damage in space . It's ridiculous. Get less crazy with the huge numbers. Not to say that you should entirely remove Damage-per-shot increasing mods but if everyone's not using most of the mods available in favour of having all eight mods on a weapon singly targeted at increasing the damage a single shot can do then you're doing it wrong. 
 

Edited December 8, 2014 by Innocent_Flower

[Liminal]

Yes.

 

That's all.

[Necr0Ra1se]

Good point i agree with most of it. This game need some refresh in moding system and weapon redisign becouse sniper and support weapons ( paracyst, mutalist quanta grakata, tysis) is in bad position but DE politics is: "lets do alot of garbage stuff every weak and maybe someday we will fix\buff it but now we must do new accesories!!". 

[Somedude1000]

Infinite scaling tbh is only enjoyable for so long for  me, after some point its more or less stay until your guns cant kill them anymore. I'd like to say more but i don't really have much of an understanding of what advancement really could be or is in the gajme

Edited December 8, 2014 by Somedude1000

[AlphaSierraMike]

I like the idea of randomising the ratio of enemy types. Keep things interesting, but unless they make it completely random, it will just decent to full on farm session.

 

But PvE games are pretty much stuck with focusing on DPS/how fast you can kill the enemy, from my experience anyway. Unpredictability is what makes utility mods worthwhile, like with the flight speed mod, in PvP where players can strafe, make hitting leading shots harder, a faster travel speed will help. But in PvE, the AI can only do so many sets of movements that it becomes predictable, like where and how they would move. Another example, faster reload really only works in PvP modes/games, because human players are unpredictable and at any moment a person can rush while you're stuck reloading, but in most PvE games, ranged AI enemies don't kill as fast as the player or rush/challenge players enough to make it a necessity, they almost always stay in cover. If, for example, a heavy gunner could run right beside you, do the shockwave and gun you down, you might think twice before reloading, but that could still be predictable.

 

Anyway... damage pretty much the bread and butter of PvE games, in summary.

[vaugahn]

Move weapon damage onto weapon level instead of serration. Give heavy caliber a larger accuracy debuff. Make elemental mods convert damage instead of add it. Make enemies scale via unit composition as well as stat increases.

Those are just a few of the ways one could go about solving the issue of progression.

The problem is nowhere near as serious as you're making it out to be.

[StinkyPygmy]

I pretty much agree.

Even little things like higher level enemies having different weapons eg, troopers with drakgoons (buffed one of course) would help massively and make players feel less like they are fighting jacked starting mobs and freshen things up a bit. Dmg mods like serration and the playerbases obsession with DEEPEEEEESSSSS don't help.

 

I'm at the point where all I'm doing is formaing my favorite weapons, seeing how viable they are for T4 despite what the general consensus is, then left wondering what to do with it thats not endless mode till I find a new toy to play with and forma.

Its been a problem with warframe for a long time though. All this progression and then not much to do with all of it except play the scaling game.

[Bobtm]

You're blowing this way out of proportion.  Sure, there are clear issues with how the current progression model plays out, but the way you've listed the "advantages" shows you're purely out to make and prove your own point whilst ignoring anything which goes against it.

 

Towers have no distintion in enemy units, so they're purely about % increases all around.  Other factions though have their specialized units increased in number when you go up in level... literally being exactly what you listed in one part of your "solution".  Playing in Survival against Grineer, and their elite troop and eximus density increases as the mission's length goes onward, in a clearly noticable way.  Against Corpus, same thing, Flux Rifle guys can even start showing up on Venus if you stay there pointlessly long.

 

To speak to that we just need more interesting units in each faction, to continue that side of the trend with more foes who can "shake things up".  It's pretty much set in stone we'll be getting more of just that in the not to distant future as well.

 

The advancement as it stands isn't even done in a bad way necessarily, it's the percentages used that are its flaw.  Just the standard damage mods alone on each weapon type (except shotguns(for who knows why)) more than double the damage of every weapon.  This combined with the way all the bonuses are calculated just exaggerates any differences in the ending damage of weaponry by too large a margin.  Then throwing elemental damage atop it which is handled in a way that just gobs more damage atop, well it does just inflate things too much.

 

Not all scaling is bad, RPG and RPG-esque games have stat based progression as part of their core simply because people enjoy seeing larger numbers to validate their progression in a concrete way.  However inflated scaling is bad, and that's what needs reigned in.

[Innocent_Flower]

Move weapon damage onto weapon level instead of serration. Give heavy caliber a larger accuracy debuff. Make elemental mods convert damage instead of add it. Make enemies scale via unit composition as well as stat increases.

Those are just a few of the ways one could go about solving the issue of progression.

The problem is nowhere near as serious as you're making it out to be.

terrible idea, good idea, great idea, I didn't explicitly say that stat increases should be removed entirely. Though I'l go back to elaborate on that. 

 

The problem IS as serious as I make it out to be. 

[IIISTIXIII]

I would gladly upvote the OP 100 times for simply presenting this as the issue it is. I think there is far too much focus on “balancing”, and the mod-system, when it is clear that the challenge “system”, or lack thereof is underlying all of those problems.

 

I don’t read the OP as intending to remove stats altogether, but certainly, moving quite heavily away from stats as the main challenge-mechanic could improve this game a whole lot. The challenge could be more interesting and skill based, the game could be more balanced overall, and the mod system could see a more varied use. This would of course come down to how it is implemented, it could also take some time, but it will never happen unless its a chosen direction.

 

Evolution not revolution I guess. Forget the 2.0, but rather start moving towards a different challenge system, with less emphasis on stats. 

 

And there are certainly many more mechanics than enemy composition to explore, if DE "force" themselves to rely less on stats; Enemy behaviour is a big one for example. Why are those grineer butchers running in line towards you again? 

[ENIAK_Prime]

A good portion of why the balance is so ridiculous seems to be a lack of faith in the players to even ATTEMPT to use skill and tactics. A lot of high-level content encourages you to cheese with overpowered weapons or PowerSpam builds.

Like you very cleverly pointed out in your spoiler, they basically throw the exact same challenges at you as you faced in the beginning, only they say to themselves "how can we make this harder without doing silly things like changing the AI or introducing interesting new enemies for you?". And the answer is always "fake difficulty" (aka more health and more damage).

[ZayTM]

OP gets it. +1

[Davoodoo]

You're blowing this way out of proportion.  Sure, there are clear issues with how the current progression model plays out, but the way you've listed the "advantages" shows you're purely out to make and prove your own point whilst ignoring anything which goes against it.

 

Towers have no distintion in enemy units, so they're purely about % increases all around.  Other factions though have their specialized units increased in number when you go up in level... literally being exactly what you listed in one part of your "solution".  Playing in Survival against Grineer, and their elite troop and eximus density increases as the mission's length goes onward, in a clearly noticable way.  Against Corpus, same thing, Flux Rifle guys can even start showing up on Venus if you stay there pointlessly long.

 

To speak to that we just need more interesting units in each faction, to continue that side of the trend with more foes who can "shake things up".  It's pretty much set in stone we'll be getting more of just that in the not to distant future as well.

 

The advancement as it stands isn't even done in a bad way necessarily, it's the percentages used that are its flaw.  Just the standard damage mods alone on each weapon type (except shotguns(for who knows why)) more than double the damage of every weapon.  This combined with the way all the bonuses are calculated just exaggerates any differences in the ending damage of weaponry by too large a margin.  Then throwing elemental damage atop it which is handled in a way that just gobs more damage atop, well it does just inflate things too much.

 

Not all scaling is bad, RPG and RPG-esque games have stat based progression as part of their core simply because people enjoy seeing larger numbers to validate their progression in a concrete way.  However inflated scaling is bad, and that's what needs reigned in.

Does he?? heavy units should support weaker ones and provide suppresion fire, but here they are just shocktroopers with missile launchers and gatlings.

 

And them slowly replacing all normal units happens only on endless content and its honestly random without any thought about squad composition done.

Instead of putting 10 man squad of lets say heavy gunner, 5 elites, 2 scorpions, ballista and lets say g3 guy which then try to hunt alone player down, they simply send 9 napalms and 1 lancer which didnt yet get replaced which then run into general direction of player and shoot while they see him.

Truly intelligent AI is years ahead of us so you need to help ai think.

 

De wanted to go cheap so everything is procedurally generated and complete procedural generation can be balanced only by numbers tweaking and these get out of hand too pretty quick.

 

Put some work into it and fine tweak squad compositions, enemy placement, maybe put few rooms which arent procedurally generated with scripted ambushes or miniboss in there. Dont leave everything for rng.

Example?? you go into hangar on grineer ship, enemies pour in from certain entrances then alarm triggers doors close and 2 gunships fly in, ofc hangar doors are open now so you lose hp and need to close them fast. Ambush and miniboss, fully scripted encounter on normally procedurally generated map.

 

Ofc if you dont do something with numbers, you can throw everything above this out, it simply wont work.

Edited December 8, 2014 by Davoodoo

[Eyeless]

You had me at Jackals/Hyenas as a common enemy.