Stuff Aquired While Playing, Goes Away On Crash :(

[rksk16it]

Title says it all, due to the RNG nature of the reward system in this game, its a royal pain in the rear to have rare mods, blueprints etc go away due to crash.

 

I would like to point out that this game, while an amazing one, crashes way too often. I read about ways to avoid crashes everywhere, like disabling Dx11, running 32-bit mode, disabling windows desktop composition, etc.

 

Thing is, games with similar graphics like skyrim (with enb mod), witchers 2 enhanced edition dont crash that often. I also play Smite, a new third person moba, which is like warframe currently in open beta, it runs fine. What I want to say is, I dont think there is anything wrong with my hardware.

 

But this is a PvE game (yet), so I dont mind it crashing, I can always start a new mission. But why not all the acquired stuff is instantly added to our inventory ? I mean that already exists in almost all online games I have played (MMORPGs mostly). Why in warframe it has to be different ?

 

Btw, I think the reason for that is similar to the reason why this change :

"- Aborting missions now forfeits any obtained credits, mods, resources or blueprints, earned XP is still rewarded"

 was introduced a few patch ago. (https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/31722-update-780/)

 

Reading furthur on that update page, I found few reasons. One of them is people logging out after getting loot from the boss, and not bothering to finish the instance. That can easily be fixed by putting some decent random reward for finishing boss missions, which are in terms of value, a bit less than boss loot (ie no blueprints), but a bit more than loot what you get by slaying usual mobs (like maybe a higher than usual chance to get an uncommon mod, or lots of credits, etc).

 

Of course, you can argue, that players who are rushing the boss purely for boss loot will not bother about those petty rewards at the end of mission. Well, if that player is new/low-level, he will be missing something. If the player is high level and/or well equipped, then he will simply rush past the existing mobs anyways, without bothering about anything. IMHO, that is almost as bad as aborting the mission, cuz you are just looking at minimap and running paying no attention to whatever attacking you or your teammates. And that cannot be prevented.

 

Another reason, I found here https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/31624-upcoming-balance-changes-april-19th/, which is host just rushes to boss, kills it, loots the stuff and dumps the connection. Again, why not just treat it as a regular disconnection of host and do host migration.

 

I know I can make support tickets if I lost some extremely rare blueprint etc. But I dont think its a good idea to make a support ticket every 3-5 games, about some rare mod, resource etc.

 

Or maybe, introduce a new currency which can ONLY be awarded on completing boss missions (not every mission, just boss ones). I call it XYZ for now. Say, 10 XYZ are rewarded for every completed boss missions, maybe scaling with level of boss. And add an item in market which costs like 100 XYZ, and buying that will give a random reward which can be one of :- a rare mod, a blueprint or an artifact. But this is entirely new idea and not intended topic of this thread/post.

 

All I wanted to say is, with the given rate of crashes, it would be much better for rewards to be instantly added to inventory as they are aquired in the game.

[Aramahn]

If you're getting a lot of crashes you may want to list what gear you are using. That way maybe they can help you better. After just over 100 hours of gameplay, I've yet to have a crash, and I'm on a 3 year old Dell with 2 year old graphics card. Nothing special. Just saying the more info they have on your problem, the better.

Other than that, the loosing of loot due to a crash is a nasty side effect of the changes DE made to stop folks from rushing to a boss and then just abort. Causing a ton of host migration headaches. So a fix to fix a bigger issue.

Edited May 9, 2013 by Aramahn

[Baigan]

Clocking at 200+ hours of gameplay, I've crashed about 10 or 15 times. I've had some weird bugs, where after a mission, a connection lost to host would not make me go back to the solar system screen, but after i closed and came back the stuff I got was there.

 

I'd really look into whats making you crash so much if i were in your shoes... :c

[liavalenth]

crashing is not the only problem. While rare I have been in 4-5 missions in the last 2 weeks that became impossible to win. Either there was no exit point, or the doors locked and there was no terminal to use to open them, etc. Before the patch that made losing a mission give you no reward this was not a problem, as it just lost completion reward. Now, you lose everything acquired.

 

EDIT: except experience, I suppose.

 

EDIT2: Really, all they need to do is make it so that the "- Aborting missions now forfeits any obtained credits, mods, resources or blueprints, earned XP is still rewarded", but losing, disconnecting, etc. does NOT forfeit obtained credits, mods, resources, or blueprints. Make the Abort button remove the items, not have it automatically removed if you did not complete the level. I do not know how difficult that would be, but the way they did it fixed a problem but caused a problem that is a lot worse (IMO).

Edited May 9, 2013 by liavalenth

[Pizzapie]

I think what would be a good idea would be like the Dota 2 crash system, where if a person crashes, they have maybe 4-5 minutes to connect back into the game, just a thought.

[rksk16it]

...

Other than that, the loosing of loot due to a crash is a nasty side effect of the changes DE made to stop folks from rushing to a boss and then just abort. Causing a ton of host migration headaches. So a fix to fix a bigger issue.

 

And how just aborting at boss is different from blindly running towards exit looking at minimap, occasionaly stopping to hack if ship is locked, or from laser barriers (not all warframes, some can just use their abilities to rush past them).

 

Players wanting to abort after finishing a boss is quite natural, as many other games provide a fast exit after a final boss. Psychologically beating the boss (or final boss in case of multiple bosses), is "job done", its quite natural to assume that after that point, unless a significant possibility of furthur reward exist, most players will try to quickly end the mission however possible. I have seen players rushing so madly after killing a boss, that they dont even bother to notice the "module" waypoint if some mob dropped a module, which can be THE mod you are looking for desperately.

 

A more natural fix, ie a fix without breaking some other things or worsening some other aspect of online experience, would be to actually place a reward at end, or provide a fast exit. The current implemented fix, IMHO is a band-aid fix to the issue, though I am a relatively new player (just made it to rank-3, only single warframe, lvl 30 ofc) and I dont know how easy it is to rush past mobs after beating boss on higher difficulty missions like on pluto etc, but what I have seen, it just adds one extra minute of running, hacking/elevators/laser-beams as a little icing on that "one-minute-rush-to-the-extraction-point-cake".

 

 

Clocking at 200+ hours of gameplay, I've crashed about 10 or 15 times. I've had some weird bugs, where after a mission, a connection lost to host would not make me go back to the solar system screen, but after i closed and came back the stuff I got was there.

 

I'd really look into whats making you crash so much if i were in your shoes... :c

 

Well, a crash at bad time (you had some really good stuff) hurts much more than 10 crashes otherwise :/

 

In the meantime I am trying disabling every graphic option except anti-aliasing (cant stand jagged lines all over the place). I may re-enable them later if I get most of the stuff I want.

 

Its not my intention to solve my specific problem of crashes in this thread, which may be apparent by the title. All I wanted to say is, I am kindda amazed that an online game with random (and rare) looting system, a random crash can destroy all the loot you have aquired. Its good that missions are relatively small (what I have seen yet) in this game, imagine a MMO 10-man raid with 4 hour average length, and you lost your loot just because your client (not server) crashed just before exiting a portal AFTER killing the boss.

 

Crashes are part of any game, you gotta give players some measure to safe-guard against that, without resorting to putting support tickets. Suport tickets is an expensive way to handle a situation, which IMO should be used when problem is very severe. A rare mod lost (my particular problem), might be a big problem for me, but apparently not big enough for the support team to spend time on it, I believe they have much bigger issues to handle.

 

Single player games give us option to save our games. If you crash often, you can circle around the problem by saving often, until the game is patched, or you get your hardware fixed if you got hardware problems or whatever. Multiplayer games usually save the progress in real-time, so whenever you crash, the server still remembers what you got, so whenever you return you have your stuff. Warframe is probably one of very few games I have seen in which I feel defenseless against random strokes of bad luck !! :O

Edited May 9, 2013 by rksk16it

[Aramahn]

Wait, but there is a reward for making it to extraction after killing a boss. You get to keep your loot. The losing your stuff for aborting was to curb aborting to lower the odds of host migration. Not be the end all be all fix for rushing.

[tvih]

EDIT2: Really, all they need to do is make it so that the "- Aborting missions now forfeits any obtained credits, mods, resources or blueprints, earned XP is still rewarded", but losing, disconnecting, etc. does NOT forfeit obtained credits, mods, resources, or blueprints. Make the Abort button remove the items, not have it automatically removed if you did not complete the level. I do not know how difficult that would be, but the way they did it fixed a problem but caused a problem that is a lot worse (IMO).

 

All they need to do? That'd remove the whole point of abort penalties, because crashes/DCs are easy to "manufacture" if you really want to.

 

I think what would be a good idea would be like the Dota 2 crash system, where if a person crashes, they have maybe 4-5 minutes to connect back into the game, just a thought.

 

Connecting back is something that should always be possible, but alas a lot of games don't have it. In this case since it's based on player hosts it is trickier - what if you crash while you ARE the host or playing solo? Hard to resume in such a case.

[rksk16it]

Wait, but there is a reward for making it to extraction after killing a boss. You get to keep your loot. The losing your stuff for aborting was to curb aborting to lower the odds of host migration. Not be the end all be all fix for rushing.

 

Hmmm, apparently I was not very clear on what I wanted to say.

 

Let me state the problem in a different way. If the developers/players/community want players NOT TO abort after killing a boss, and only plausible solution is to give rewards at the end, then why not just generate rewards at the end. That way, if the game crashes, its much less frustating because you dont know the reward.

 

But when boss/mobs/etc drop something, you KNOW the reward, you have seen it. Now if the reward is good, a crash after that is MUCH MUCH more annoying than one where you dont know. But that wont work in warframe because sometimes reward from a random mob can be more valuable than the boss loot (ie a good rare mod).

 

Crashes will happen, beta or not, its not possible to build a true crash proof system given the myriad complexity invovled starting from your keyboard to the processors installed at server. And I am not mentioning genuine real life situations, when player cannot continue because of no fault of his/her own, eg : power failure which is common in some countries.

 

I give a little example from WoW to present my point. I havent played it, a friend told me about this case. They used to handle accidental item deletion from inventory via support tickets. It went good for a while, but when their player increased, it quickly became implausible to allocate a support employee for every little case of "oh !@$#, I accidently deleted my epic sword !!!", so they made an automated system, with which any player can get a deleted item back within certain amount of time. Ofc it can be exploited in a way to increase your inventory slots temporarily, that is, delete an item, put another item in it, and then come to your stash location/bank/whatever it is, store the new item in it, and then go to website and get that deleted item back.

 

All I want to say is, they should provide some preventive safeguard against all sorts of random crashes to a player. Support may look manageable at this point, but it is bound to go out of hand and uneconomical when player base rises. And given the development rate of this amazing game, player base WILL increase.

 

Or alternately, add some non RNG way of obtaining desired items, which may involve lots of time-sinking/farming, but 100% chance of getting whatever particular item a player wants. But this may go against the core philosophy of this game, I am not sure about this. This can be, albeit a very bad one, a fallback method to obtain lost items cuz of crashes.

Edited May 9, 2013 by rksk16it

[liavalenth]

All they need to do? That'd remove the whole point of abort penalties, because crashes/DCs are easy to "manufacture" if you really want to.

That is an argument, but punishing players who do not do anything wrong, who do finish their missions and not just exit, because other people were abusing the system (of sorts) is not the solution to this issue. I am being punished for others, and I suspect when all is said and done it is why I will eventually stop playing this game.

[rksk16it]

That is an argument, but punishing players who do not do anything wrong, who do finish their missions and not just exit, because other people were abusing the system (of sorts) is not the solution to this issue. I am being punished for others, and I suspect when all is said and done it is why I will eventually stop playing this game.

 

This.

 

Punishing a whole group of people because only some of them were actually culprits is not a good idea, and it will always create problems. That being said, I do agree its quite easy to manufacture a fault rather than actually clicking "abort" button. I can plug out my modem cable, press the restart button on cpu, kill the warframe process via task manager, disable network device and then re-enable it after a minute, and about ten thousand more ways...

 

The only solution is to place an "extra" reward at the end. A little something which is useful even at end game, something which makes a player think that a one minute marathon to extraction is worth it.

 

Allowing players to recieve their loot if they end is not a reward, its just "not punishing". There is a slight difference.

[tvih]

Hey, I'm all for not losing the rewards, myself. I never quit missions willingly. Even when I was grinding Vor in 7.7, I always ran to the extraction. Current system indeed punishes "legit" players, but same would be true of any alternate system that also punishes lame players.

[rksk16it]

Hey, I'm all for not losing the rewards, myself. I never quit missions willingly. Even when I was grinding Vor in 7.7, I always ran to the extraction. Current system indeed punishes "legit" players, but same would be true of any alternate system that also punishes lame players.

 

IMHO there can be alternate systems which does not punish legit players, though will require more work than the current "disable-rewards-till-finish" system. The current method is best only in one regard : ease of implementation from development point of view, requires no special additions to game, just a few tweaks in code.

 

The current solution is probably not a solution at all of a very genuine problem : There ARE NO REWARDS for completing a mission, besides very small probability of rare mod drops of a pathetic little side mob who will die by just looking at its direction. The current solution can be viewed something like... to prevent road accidents, what you do is destroy all vehicles and declare them illegal. No vehicles = no road accidents !!!

 

I already stated one solution near the end of my first post in this topic : make a new currency only available via reaching extraction point, and make that currency useful, unlike the in-game credits, which are waste beyond certain point AFAIK. Again I am a new player, I dont know how useful those credits are, its just I have lots of them and I see no way to make them useful. I end up buying ammo and health restore from market, but rarely ever I have to use them.

 

If the reward, just for ending a missiong is well worthy of spending extra 1 or 2 minutes, then players will do it. They wont abort after killing a boss.

 

The problem is in a way similar to problem of rushing in this game as I can see multiple threads (which I havent read yet) to solve rushing problem. If you pause for a moment, and think.. why players are rushing at all ?? They are rushing because there IS no reward for killing a stray mob.

 

Other games also face this problem, and they all solve it in a more or less same way. They provide a guaranteed reward in addition to random rare loots. Again I will point out WoW here, in the instances there, everytime you kill a trash mob, there are two kinds of rewards :

1. A rare chance of some epic loot, its actually RARE though, you wont get it everytime, just like mods in warframe

2. A guaranteed reward of reputation towards some faction. And you need that reputation to purchase gear.

 

A guaranteed reward, however small it may be, can be a HUUGE incentive to do a required task. Just look into warframe itself, when you are farming for resources or levelling up a new weapon, you break all those little containers. But when your weapon is fully levelled up and you dont need any resource from that planet/system, you will just ignore them, saving your ammo and time.

 

Again, all those fancy solutions will require more work, unlike the current "fast-and-brutal" solution.

[liavalenth]

I have to agree with Rksk16it above, but I believe there are other solutions than the one he suggested.

 

The easiest solution that does not punish people who did not cause a problem is having the abort button be the only thing that causes you to lose stuff. No, this is not completely effective, however in order to get around it they have to disconnect from the game improperly, reload the game and sign back in. If they want to do all that they can get away with it.

 

With this solution you would decrease the number of people doing it, penalize the people who do it by waisting their time, but not penalize the people who were not a problem in the first place. The third part of that is the most important, not penalizing people who weren't causing a problem to start with.

 

His solution would be better, but harder. My solution would be less effective, but much easier to emplement. The current solution is very effective at solving the problem, in exchange for creating a much worse problem.

[rksk16it]

Also, on second thought, the current solution can actually promote rushing. As soon as I get a good loot from anything, be it some trash mob or boss, I would like to rush to end the mission ASAP, because things beyond my control, like genuine network disconnection will result in losing ALL those items.

 

I dont like rushing at all, I like to kill more mobs just for the sake of it (which is all this game is about). I often like to give myself stupid but fun little challenges, like taking out sniper rifle against a horde of infestation charging at me, my objective being to take out as many of them with sniper rifle before they reach me. But now, fear of losing my items will take away that fun, after getting my stuff all my attention will go to worrying about how far is the extraction point =.=

[rksk16it]

Another game, where 4 of us accumulated lots of mods. The map had two objectives, first was collecting data from 4 terminals, and then capturing the target. After capturing, the player carrying data had to go. It turned out, unfortunately that :

1. He was host, so host migration occurred.

2. He didnt warned us or said anything, its just suddenly everything froze and then host migration started

 

After that happened, the remaining 3 of us tried to finish the game, but it kept telling us to bring all 4 datamasses, and we tried to search all over the map to find it but gave up. We had to abort, and lost like 10 mods.

 

Am I going to make support ticket for that ? Nope, the lost mods are hardly a concern for me at this point. The troubling fact is that my well earned rewards are snatched from me for absolutely no fault of me or my hardware. Game didnt crash and we REACHED extraction point after completing the mission legit way.

 

This feature of awarding rewards at the end is EXTREMELY frustating. It is my request to devs, that if they want to keep this feature atleast make the mods earned while playing the mission added to inventory immediately, such that no matter what happens after that, whether its a disconnection, a crash or world gets destroyed, i get to find those mods in my inventory when I log back in.

[magnaar]

yeah happened to me 2 times I completed the mission right at the end when I see the statistics bam crash all gone

[ZWarhammer]

If you're getting a lot of crashes try turning the anti aliasing off i heard it has the biggest hit on the system.

[rksk16it]

If you're getting a lot of crashes try turning the anti aliasing off i heard it has the biggest hit on the system.

 

Its not about crashes I am worried about, its the fragility of this system. No matter whatever you do, there will ALWAYS be crashes/disconnections, this is how any software in real world works.

 

There is absolutely no way to reliably get stuff (especially mods) in the game, even if you are ready to spend platinum for that (mod packs are still random). That makes it very important that any rare mod you get shouldnt get lost to a minor unfortunate incident, cuz it may take weeks (or months) to get that again.

 

They should do one of this :

 

1. Add items to inventory the moment they are aquired, regardless to what happens afterwards to the client software (my game) running on my machine. This feature is present in every loot based online game I have encountered so far.

 

OR

 

2. Allow me to continue the mission when I relog back in with exact status (items I have aquired) before crash/disconnection. This is done in every MOBA I have heard of.

Edited May 12, 2013 by rksk16it