Nullifier Units, Their Impact On The Lore And Monetization (Real Talk)

[Jukantos]

Sooo, time for me to drop my 2 cents on the matter.

I won't really adress the problems of balancing the unit itself or the consequences it has for gameplay, those 2 topics have been adressed from all angles i can imagine already.

What impacts me here is how they fit into the Warframe Lore and why they were added in the first place, as in why DE could've felt the need to introduce such a mechanic to begin with, which i suspsect to be in the area of monetization, which could have very, VERY critical consequences.

Let's start with the Lore. The Tenno were asleep for thousands of years. They are vastly outnumbered, have to scrap back together their own old fragmented but vastly superior technology and fight with what's around right now, trying to keep the solar system from completely falling into the hands of the warring factions of the Grineer and the Corpus, while the Infested have also made a return.

Among all that Chaos, an iconic figure stood out. The Stalker. Having hunted Tenno for literally thousands of years, his ability to deny their technology and powers was legendary, frightening and adrenalin-inducing every time he came after me to avenge what i had done in the name of balance. He's one of the biggest badasses in the Warframe Universe and probably my favourite character out of all of Warframe, because he invokes those questions about balance and wether or not the course of the Tenno is a righteous one, or if we are just following a Blind Justice, just like him.

And now? Suddenly, almost every faction has a way to completely deny abilities. The Ancient Healers Damage Reduction aura makes Infested almost immune, while the Corpus and now the Corrupted literally have become immune to all bullets and all Tenno Technology. How? Did they buy Stalker's Stuff?

Which brings me nicely to the second point, why i think these mechanics were introduced. Let's be honest here, Warframe is still very much in development and heavily relies on repeatedly iterated skinnerbox systems to keep the game interesting. You have tons of weapons to go through, a lot of tile sets to explore, lategame equipment and prime stuff to hunt for, massive clan dojos to build, syndicates to allign with...

Eventually a "Loot Cave" (Destiny Thingy) had to appear. People will always maximize their progress in games like these. It wasn't a surprise Viver was found, nor Cerberus, nor Draco. And people will still continue to try and find the best ways of leveling their gear as quickly as possible, afterall that's one of the main objectives of the game.

But and this is where it gets critical, it's also one of the main pieces of DE's monetization. Prime Accessories are sold with 90 day double exp boosters, at an effective rate of ~15 dollars a month (while also including a credit booster, so lets say effectively they are asking 10 bucks a month for the exp)

Therefor, DE can't really allow players to level their stuff from 0 to 30 in an hour without such a paid booster and while i can completely agree on that (as it does somewhat eliminate the feeling of progress), they have gone down the wrong path to do so. The recent development just seems like they're trying to slap the community in the face. It's like you're developing the game AGAINST your playerbase, to extend the skinnerboxes more brutal than ever and to enforce monetization.

I mean come on, i was THRILLED when i found out Syndicates would offer T4 Void Keys without having to farm ~20 minutes of interception for every single key. And i loved being able to consistantly play T4 Survival to see my 10-rank mods go up in power. But once it became obvious just how]/b] long it would take to grind Syndicate Standing, people starting defecting to the exp exploits like Viver and Sechura Vauban in mass, maybe for the first time ever, Region chat was literally all about it.

Maybe DE panicked. Maybe they realized they had gone too far with the Syndicates, they did soften the system up quite massively indeed, considering the outcry (while also lessening the impact of the people who had gotten to run viver before it magically turned into a hive) . And ever since, i can't help the feeling anymore that the game has starting being developed and patched AGAINST the community.

I'm not the guy to stand up and say i want Cerberus back. Hell no, pressing a single button isn't what makes Warframe great. But from a mechanical standpoint you are risking the enjoyability and playability of 90%+ of your endgame content to fix a single exploit loophole. That is not the way to go about it. I'm not saying bring back Excaliburs Line-Of-Sight. I'd say limit the number of targets he can have, or make his ultimate not affected by power range at all (same for Saryn btw). THAT wouldve been the way to go about it. Fix the exploit at the source of the exploit, don't destroy the rest of the games balance in an attempt to make it look to the founders as if their exclusive prime toy was still intact. Do you see how enraged the community is?

You have gone and subsequently literally attacked the best ways of farming experience in your game all over your endgame content. Dark Sectors? Enjoy getting onehitted by long range artillery slime within the first 10 waves. Corpus Planets? Have fun not using abilities and having to empty hundreds of bullets into magical bulletproof spheres (not even the tenno shields are that effective, LOL). Void? Just got its own Nullifiers, there goes my T4 Survival Core-Farming and i wasn't even using kill-button methods. You are negatively affecting everyone playing the game legitimately and it feels like you're just doing it to comfort the founders by saying "look you're not the only ones suffering a necessary nerf".

I don't want Warframe to become a generic third person cover shooter where i have to hide behind corners to avoid being oneshotted because Loki can no longer disarm the endgame instakill enemies because they've been hiding in a magical bubble. Adress your balance problems at their root damned.

Oh and while we're on the subject of anti-player development, this may sound entitled but i HAVE to mention Nova Prime. Look, i was willing to forgive the Hikou Prime Pouch Thingy, the "bugged" droprate that magically pretty much prevented an item you needed twice to show up more than once every 100 runs for roundabout the first week after it was added. I know you need a selling point to prime access.

But now, placing Nova Prime's 4 items in 2 derelict missions and 2 Sabotage Missions just to ensure everyone's collected keys as well as the syndicate connections are completely worthless because no syndicates offers T4 Sabotage keys, COME ON, that's not even subtle anymore, that just feels like you're bludgeoning me over the head with "You want this fast? Pay up!"

I understand you need to make a living off this game, i love it, i invested more than a thousand hours into it for crying out loud, and i've more than happily put aside 50 bucks that i'll invest into keeping this game going as soon as one of those precious 75% Tokens shows up (i can't help myself, i have to wait for that one, as it literally doubles the amount of plat i get over using a 50% sale like black friday and 50 bucks is the most i can come up with this year). But you are going down the wrong path. Do not concern yourself with how to prevent lategame veterans from quickly advancing in their gear without a payed booster. That is NOT what you need to build your game's balance around. If Abilities like Loki's Disarm, Nova's Molecular Prime or the kill-buttons on Saryn and Excalibur need some counteraction, introduce that to the game, but do it by adressing these abilities, not creating overly powerfull enemies that have to be dealt with in a very specific way, and completely break lategame gameplay by making enemies which do oneshot warframes immune to warframe abilities.

"There will always be a loot cave", as the wise community member Mogamu said (his video on the topic is a little outdated but here you go:

)

Do not develop your game against the community, in an attempt to reinforce skinnerboxing and the necessity of affinity boosters. The higher you build these brick walls against lategame equipment and frames, the higher the chance you will drive your players enjoyment of the lategame content and subsequently their passion and love for the title against one of the brick walls you built.

As i said, i love this game and i'm more than willing to support it. That money is waiting for that Token, it's going nowhere else. But if you keep developing the game "against me" (or if you give me the feeling that's all your doing), i would have to withdraw it, just to not support that policy. Because again, let's be honest, the thing that impacts Free2Play Titles the most, is when the community / costumer base stops spending money on it, to protest against a development development (or whatever they may object). For your own sake, as well as the game i love, cut it out. I really don't want to see another great Free2Play game i've intested so much on go down this road.

TL;DR: Not only do Nullifier Units conflict with the lore (why haven't the tenno been wiped out of the factions have this kind of stuff available to them) but i also suspect they were introduced for the completely wrong reasons (maintaing monetization on affinity boosters while catering to founders by not directly nerfing their precious excalibur prime). It's a bold accusation to make, but it's just too plausible.

Edited December 17, 2014 by Jukantos

[Halser]

Nice thread, but deep down you know it's going to be completely ignored by the people making these decisions. They know the harm they're doing to the game, and they don't care. DE's idea of monetization is "make player suffer until player pays to not suffer". Making a decent game is too hard specially when most of the community ends up accepting these childlike kneejerk reactions to understandable methods of reducing the grind.

[Genoscythe]

This is a really interesting point of view on the matter and I can only agree that DE has to change the skill mechanics (radial damage abilities, they should be wiped completely from the game).

 

At the moment every "fix" is causing more problems, multiplying leaks in the game design and decimating playing fun.

 

I hope they already started working on a complete skill overhaul, however this would need to change a lot of things, like all survival and interception spawns, enemy health and damage, well everything.

 

Its a big problem DE created and they have to deal with now, its late already, but I hope they wont make it worse by waiting even more.

[Rexlars]

TL; DR 

 

I want to. I really did. Just don't have the patience right now. 

 

Edit: Just saw the TL; DR section. Lore wise, it's more than easy to say the corpus aren't able to mass produce this technology. Simple as that. It's likely fairly new tech & they don't currently have the means to supply every Corpus unit with one. 

 

Also, even if they did, you act like the Tenno are completely helpless without their powers. The weapons we use are arguably more used than our powers (not talking about actual gameplay here). In every trailer we have guns & swords ablazin' with a faint dash of pew pew from our hands. 

Edited December 17, 2014 by Rexlars

[Jukantos]

 

TL; DR 

 

I want to. I really did. Just don't have the patience right now. 

 

I did edit in a TL;DR Section just for you ;P

[Enepttastic]

 

At the moment every "fix" is causing more problems, multiplying leaks in the game design and decimating playing fun.

Tends to happen when said "fixes" focus more on symptoms than the problem.

 

 

I hope they already started working on a complete skill overhaul, however this would need to change a lot of things, like all survival and interception spawns, enemy health and damage, well everything.

Eh, survival deserves a complete overhaul anyways. It's more about fighting RNG than actually trying to survive. 

 

TL; DR 

 

I want to. I really did. Just don't have the patience right now. 

F2P games have two mindsets they can go with:

"How do we make players want to spend money?"

 

or

 

"How do we make players want to spend money?"

 

DE's design is seeming to be based more and more off the second mindset.

[Aspari]

You're addressing the Nullifier Crewman from a lore standpoint which is the only real issue I have with it. Lore-wise, hek even logic-wise, they don't make any sense.

 

I think DE should actually look back at their previous games (darkSector, Bioshock 2, The Darkness 2) and see what made those games challenging and fun. I blame a lot of the problems we have on shoved-in RPG elements and the introduction of mods that completely screw with any sort of balancing that was there. Instead of those issues being rectified or at least addressed, the design team put a bandaid on it with stuff that only the Stalker should be able to use/do.

[Archistopheles]

I am a little upset that you, Jukantos, said in one thread what I've only hinted at in 10,000 posts. But I recognize when I've been bested, and you have my respect and admiration. I'd like to highlight my favorite part:

But now, placing Nova Prime's 4 items in 2 derelict missions and 2 Sabotage Missions just to ensure everyone's collected keys as well as the syndicate connections are completely worthless because no syndicates offers T4 Sabotage keys, COME ON, that's not even subtle anymore, that just feels like you're bludgeoning me over the head with "You want this fast? Pay up!"

I've been saying this for awhile. Little things add up. Tiny tweaks like Argon, or Oxium, or Orokin Derelicts seem innocent at first, but they are tools to wring the player's neck and choke them of resources/loot/fun.

The worst part? "This isn't even their final form" This too will get dismissed and downplayed until one day we wake up and we are running 100s of missions to get one orokin cell.

[skeleten]

The worst part? "This isn't even their final form" This too will get dismissed and downplayed until one day we wake up and we are running 100s of missions to get one orokin cell.

 

They'd rather introduce a new resource - so those with orokin cells saved will also have to farm..

 

I agree with Jukantos though. It just get's a little to obvious why those changes were made.

[Archistopheles]

They'd rather introduce a new resource - so those with orokin cells saved will also have to farm..

I agree with Jukantos though. It just get's a little to obvious why those changes were made.

Welcome to the forums.

Yeah, I just used Orokin cells as an example because they made it rare just so that they could add it to the reward pool of Void missions without people getting upset.

[Halser]

I am a little upset that you, Jukantos, said in one thread what I've only hinted at in 10,000 posts. But I recognize when I've been bested, and you have my respect and admiration. I'd like to highlight my favorite part:

I've been saying this for awhile. Little things add up. Tiny tweaks like Argon, or Oxium, or Orokin Derelicts seem innocent at first, but they are tools to wring the player's neck and choke them of resources/loot/fun.

The worst part? "This isn't even their final form" This too will get dismissed and downplayed until one day we wake up and we are running 100s of missions to get one orokin cell.

 

and you have even forgot about drop table obfuscation. The one thing that allows DE to make drops as insane as possible without anyone being able to complain about it, because without evidence, people will just shout "oh ur just unlucky lol"

 

It pisses me off how accepting the community as a whole is about these things. DE keeps raising the bar on grind, and every time people just forget about it. Then it happens again.

 

DE's utopia is a Warframe where we need to pay 5 dollars(not platinum) per mission, and everyone accepts it. Slippery slope and all that, but if you told me how much grind this game would have a year ago I wouldn't have believed it.

[HalotroopermanX7]

Nice thread, but deep down you know it's going to be completely ignored by the people making these decisions. They know the harm they're doing to the game, and they don't care. DE's idea of monetization is "make player suffer until player pays to not suffer". Making a decent game is too hard specially when most of the community ends up accepting these childlike kneejerk reactions to understandable methods of reducing the grind.

It's sad really... DE "cares" about us... but the question is; how're they caring about us? By adding more content to grind for to keep us here for you guys to come up with more stuff for us to grind for? Who knows... 

you ever see a person like DE_Steve comment on threads like these? No, cause they don't give a flying turd... 

[Aspari]

and you have even forgot about drop table obfuscation. The one thing that allows DE to make drops as insane as possible without anyone being able to complain about it, because without evidence, people will just shout "oh ur just unlucky lol"

 

It &!$$es me off how accepting the community as a whole is about these things. DE keeps raising the bar on grind, and every time people just forget about it. Then it happens again.

 

DE's utopia is a Warframe where we need to pay 5 dollars(not platinum) per mission, and everyone accepts it. Slippery slope and all that, but if you told me how much grind this game would have a year ago I wouldn't have believed it.

Most of the people who I've seen posting on this forum don't even know what real grinding is either. They mistake the gambling which is the huge majority of Warframe's earnable content with grinding. Every kill is a roll of the dice, every five minutes in Survival is a roll of the dice. DE has taken gambling way too far. We don't earn our weapons, our resources, our mods (except for the select ones for Syndicates), or our prime parts. We win them. The only time we do earn them is off of Alerts.

 

I don't know why, but the way DE has been handling Warframe it seems like "earning" has very little place in Warframe. They might as well call the Void the Orokin Casino.

[Halser]

It's sad really... DE "cares" about us... but the question is; how're they caring about us? By adding more content to grind for to keep us here for you guys to come up with more stuff for us to grind for? Who knows... 

you ever see a person like DE_Steve comment on threads like these? No, cause they don't give a flying turd... 

In a way I hope he doesn't, because any time he says anything everyone seems to stop caring about the issue, even if what he said doesn't actually solve anything.

I'm still miffed about "sorry we obfuscated the drop tables after people proved we were making sub 1% drop chances on items and some items didn't even exist at all. For the second time. Here, have some plat and forget about it, we'll do it again later".

[Jukantos]

 

Edit: Just saw the TL; DR section. Lore wise, it's more than easy to say the corpus aren't able to mass produce this technology. Simple as that. It's likely fairly new tech & they don't currently have the means to supply every Corpus unit with one. 

 

Also, even if they did, you act like the Tenno are completely helpless without their powers. The weapons we use are arguably more used than our powers (not talking about actual gameplay here). In every trailer we have guns & swords ablazin' with a faint dash of pew pew from our hands. 

 

Looking at the technology the Corpus and even the Grineer (Magnetizing Doors) have at their disposal already, as well as logic overall pretty much demands you are able to build something stationary and at an increasing size WAY before you are able to create a portable version of it, let alone one that can be strapped to the back of a soldier without killing them via radiation (especially considering it projects a freakin bullet, spear, poison, shock, frost and disarm-prove bubble that absorbs hundreds of hits before collapsing and can replenish itself over time if hit not again!!!).

How would they EVER get their hands on such a thing without being able to build a much stronger stationary version, large enough to cover their entire freakin bases with it. Energy Drain Nightmare Mode shouldve been a permanent thing anyway. Even the Grineer are able to scan for void echos to detect tenno ships or if their ships have been infiltrated (although they rely on dumb personal to press an alarm button that nobody comes to check on it it's disabled again, LOLS).

[skeleten]

Most of the people who I've seen posting on this forum don't even know what real grinding is either. They mistake the gambling which is the huge majority of Warframe's earnable content with grinding. Every kill is a roll of the dice, every five minutes in Survival is a roll of the dice. DE has taken gambling way too far. We don't earn our weapons, our resources, our mods (except for the select ones for Syndicates), or our prime parts. We win them. The only time we do earn them is off of Alerts.

 

I don't know why, but the way DE has been handling Warframe it seems like "earning" has very little place in Warframe. They might as well call the Void the Orokin Casino.

 

Having to roll a lot of times because of low chances is comparable with having to do the same thing with small progress repeately though.

Because in the end, if you have a 1% chance of dropping a specific item, you will, on average, have to do that action 100 times to earn one item. Of course there are fluctuations, but the empirical law of big numbers still works.

[DSkred]

Really, really well said, Jukantos.

 

I deeply hope DE isn't trying to do these things on purpose. I have great appreciation for all the work and effort they've put into the game, but ever since Mesa's update I really cannot defend the choices they've made. 

[Renegade343]

Then again, one could make Derelict Keys very easily, so that is one minor flaw in your argument. 

 

And Nullifier units never conflicted with lore. I mean, the Corpus have been salvaging and collecting Orokin technology for thousands of years. The chances that they would stumble upon something like this (be in a blueprint or the original thing) is quite high, and they would have just made it to be less energy-consuming for personnel use (but is still in its experimental stage). 

[skeleten]

Really, really well said, Jukantos.

 

I deeply hope DE isn't trying to do these things on purpose. I have great appreciation for all the work and effort they've put into the game, but ever since Mesa's update I really cannot defend the choices they've made. 

 

Well, it seems very likely that nullifiers were designed around  a certain issue at hand. Of course, I could be wrong, but the whole concept of an ability-immune unit seems odd given the farming methods that were popular at the release point of the given unit.

[Halser]

Having to roll a lot of times because of low chances is comparable with having to do the same thing with small progress repeately though.

Because in the end, if you have a 1% chance of dropping a specific item, you will, on average, have to do that action 100 times to earn one item. Of course there are fluctuations, but the empirical law of big numbers still works.

read up on binomial distribution, it's good to know if you're gambling or playing warframe.

 

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n%3D100%2C+p%3D0.01

 

 

in short, doing 100 runs of a thing that drops a 1% chance item only gives you about 63% chance of getting it.

[Aspari]

Having to roll a lot of times because of low chances is comparable with having to do the same thing with small progress repeately though.

Because in the end, if you have a 1% chance of dropping a specific item, you will, on average, have to do that action 100 times to earn one item. Of course there are fluctuations, but the empirical law of big numbers still works.

Comparable but I'd rather do something 50 times and know that I'm going to get the thing that I want than go in only having less than 1% of a chance to get something.

 

I understand the need for RNG, and I agree that it should be here, but we sorely lack a way to actually earn what we want.

 

I had to get roughly 200 kills with this rifle to get that attachment for it. That grind was perfectly acceptable. Other mods that aren't at all necessary but very useful nonetheless are only won through gambling at the end of the mission. That's also perfectly acceptable. There needs to be a happy medium between farm/grind and gamble. Warframe is nearly all gamble and hardly any legitimate farming/grinding.

Edited December 17, 2014 by Aspari

[Halser]

Well, it seems very likely that nullifiers were designed around  a certain issue at hand. Of course, I could be wrong, but the whole concept of an ability-immune unit seems odd given the farming methods that were popular at the release point of the given unit.

it's no secret. 

 

DE releases The One Grind to Grind them All.

People find a method to make it less painful.

DE does a kneejerk reaction, nerfing frames to uselessness.

People(thankfully) complain enough that DE goes back on those changes(vivergate was the one day with the most threads in the history of this forum)

 

And while everyone thinks the storm has passed, DE goes into their hidden labs and crafts an enemy type specifically tailored to kill any fast grind.

And then makes them incredibly common everywhere where people grind.

[Phatose]

Lore concerns:  Completely invalid.  Explain where exactly stalker got his abilities, or how they function, then we can talk about how the corpus duplicated it.  Arguing about what something can or can't do in lore while having precisely zero lore about how it actually functions is not merely silly, it's an exercise in absurdity. 

 

Blaming the founders for Line-of-sight changes being reverted:  Trinity was affected by those changes too.  Remember?  And regular Excalibur, a starting frame too. 

 

Well, it seems very likely that nullifiers were designed around  a certain issue at hand. Of course, I could be wrong, but the whole concept of an ability-immune unit seems odd given the farming methods that were popular at the release point of the given unit.

 

It's not exactly as if "Press 4 to win" was a brand new issue, nor as if using abilities to play the game with the absolute minimum amount of effort was new either.  This wasn't new behavior, just a continuation of the same player mindsets that made AFK farming Infested with Vauban popular for ages - especially back before the Bastille target limit.

[skeleten]

read up on binomial distribution, it's good to know if you're gambling or playing warframe.

 

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n%3D100%2C+p%3D0.01

 

 

in short, doing 100 runs of a thing that drops a 1% chance item only gives you about 63% chance of getting it.

I won't challenge you on this, I guess you are right. The main point on my argument though was, that having a small chance on a repeated action or having a small progress on that same action are comparable in some kind.

 

Comparable but I'd rather do something 50 times and know that I'm going to get the thing that I want than go in only having less than 1% of a chance to get something.

 

I understand the need for RNG, and I agree that it should be here, but we sorely lack a way to actually earn what we want.

I actually agree. I like having a small progress over having a small chance of success. Those two are still comparable though, which was my point.

[Rexlars]

Most of the people who I've seen posting on this forum don't even know what real grinding is either. They mistake the gambling which is the huge majority of Warframe's earnable content with grinding. Every kill is a roll of the dice, every five minutes in Survival is a roll of the dice. DE has taken gambling way too far. We don't earn our weapons, our resources, our mods (except for the select ones for Syndicates), or our prime parts. We win them. The only time we do earn them is off of Alerts.

 

I don't know why, but the way DE has been handling Warframe it seems like "earning" has very little place in Warframe. They might as well call the Void the Orokin Casino.

 

But see, those are all assumptions. You are trying to find a way for this to not make sense when I gave a perfectly viable reason. We don't know why the situation is the way it is, but the fact of the matter is that it's here. Again, I provided a perfectly sufficient lore friendly proposal. We don't know where they got this resource from, how it works, or any other details. Maybe they have so little of this resource that they can't power anything larger than a backpack. All we know for a fact is that there are Crewman called Nullifiers who have been given some new tech that disables our powers. 

 

Edit: edited for clarity. 

Edited December 17, 2014 by Rexlars