Proposed Starchart Changes [Megathread]

[(PSN)DrHildibrand]

How is it a step backwards? It's simpler and quicker to get a game going.

 

My goal is to play the game, not look at the UI to get me into a game.

 

The problem withe the starchart is its too slow and clunky.... And it can be very hard to find a quick game.

 

What about people that just want to solo survival though to get that particular resource they want, and they don't want to do any thing else? The new changes will make it a lot harder.

[(PSN)WiiConquered]

How is it a step backwards? It's simpler and quicker to get a game going.

 

My goal is to play the game, not look at the UI to get me into a game.

 

The problem withe the starchart is its too slow and clunky.... And it can be very hard to find a quick game.

But the starchart should serve a purpose. In the past, it did. It offered a sense of wonder for new players, a clear sense of progression, goals (follow these missions to get to the boss), and didn't take more than a few seconds to navigate.

The problem with the starchart isn't speed, it's that DE balances node rewards like they balance weapons; aka not at all. Thus people gravitate towards the best rewards (which can be many times better than other missions, and I'm not even talking about Draco-esque farming), and the rest become empty. Moreover, they repeat missions with zero variation, giving people no reason to choose specific missions over others. Thus efficiency is the only thing they look at, and looking elsewhere for a game becomes a struggle as people don't desire nodes without rewards.

What about people that just want to solo survival though to get that particular resource they want, and they don't want to do any thing else? The new changes will make it a lot harder.

Our conversation has strayed from the DE proposed changes. He's suggesting a simple drop-down menu instead of a starchart.

[(PSN)DrHildibrand]

Our conversation has strayed from the DE proposed changes. He's suggesting a simple drop-down menu instead of a starchart.

 

ok. I see now. I wouldn't be opposed to that as long as I can get what I want.

[Galuf]

Imho what should happen imho is very simple:

 

1) go back to first starchart for newer players and remove void keys/coordinates(derelict) from the droptables SO players can still loot theirs mats, frames, do the archwing mission they want etc. The old starchart was a freaking bomb, I would never have stayed in this game without it, it had a sense of progression etc, and the game wasn't even as polished as it is now, it was really #*($%%@ up mechanics wise but still, for a new player, having this kind of progression was a bless.

2) once pluto boss killed > loot a ship module thingy.

3) with that ship module in place players can see new types of invasions; could be named whormeholes.

 

Whormholes should be rotations of planets with a straight path of maps. The faster you progress into those, the faster and longer you can profit from maps like draco, coordonates and void keys have better loots than actual loots. And end of path maps are kind of like T4 and loot T4 keys. No more need to farm interceptions, clearing faster(like ninjas) is more rewarding, and the loot is inverse proportionnal to the number of players in the groups, making good tennos better looters, hence they can clear content like bosses :). A whormhole should last roughly 2 or 3 hours, and a new one should be opened every hour or something, so you can try your chance easily each night if you want.

 

Also exterminates, captures, deceptions etc should reward +/- as much as at least 5 waves of def wich is not the case atm. And rotation B and C loots should be reworked. (like in non void maps should go A A B B C C C ... or A A A B B C C C C in order to reward proper teamplay, creating incentive at going through "real" endgame consitently when farming for void farming or Archwing parts xd)

 

In my very Humble Opinion, the only game mods that aren't broken atm are Spy AND Excavation(wich is a REALLY good game mode, an extremly good design) and to some extent vault runs. Spy because there are speedruns components with nice twists(that gets older fast but we'll get new mazes soon I'm sure), Excavation because it's mobile, it rewards spliting and reactivity, punishes mistakes and is very intensive in mob spawn so it's also violent enough. Vault runs are imho what was needed to put capture/spy missions to another level of decenseness.

 

Whormholes should bring a kind of "ladder-ish" feel to the game, I'm sure it would fit perfectly into the game and make average players better. With proper design and balance, it would even make Warframe a game actively streamed while in the other hand solving permanently the starchart issues and draco abuses.

Edited May 26, 2015 by Galuf

[torsoreaper]

My suggestions in no particular order:

 

Archwing should be completely optional assuming we are still going to be able to deploy extractors

 

Smaller star chart WOULD be better and would help new people get into the game, I have new friends who hate to miss alerts because they don't have X tile

 

Agree with above suggestion to fix the rotation from AABCAABC to AABBCCCCCC or something like that.  Right now there's no point in staying past C.

 

Should be clearer reward/drop system for each planet so people know where to grind if that's what they're doing and fix stupid drops that dilute the table.  2500 credit cache isn't a reward, it's a kick in the nuts.

 

Fix the bug where people spawn in the wall in OD.  I know this has nothing to do with the star chart but please just fix this.  PLEASE.

Edited May 28, 2015 by torsoreaper

[Invalid_Infinity]

 

New Starchart

• Hoping to appear in U17

• 300 nodes are being condensed to 20 nodes

• There may be time-based instances, such as Vor appearing temporarily, dropping different things each time

• Similar to Alerts, but hopefully not something that punishes players for sleeping

• There will be some removal of player choice - you will no longer be able to select whichever mission type you want, whenever you want; hopefully this will be better for the game overall

• Re-viewing player made quests again and designing the starchart so that these will be able to fit into it; hopefully this will be the answer to players that resent the removal of choice

 

This is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard. WHY would you want to limit players' choice to such an extent? I would understand reducing the number of nodes so that each planet has only one mission type so there wouldn't be multiple instances of the same missions on one planet. Since all planets will most likely get different and unique looks eventually this would make sense and it wouldn't isolate so many players trying to clear the star chart.

 

Randomly dropping into a random mission on a random planet should be a feature for those who just wish to have a random challenge and not a mandatory dice roll for those who wish to play a defence mission on Jupiter or a mobile defense on Kappa.

 

I know it's too early to start complaining since we know so little but I want to throw it out there for DE to see - limiting player choice so much is not going to work well in your favour.

 

Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop.

 

 

SERIOUSLY!? This is freaking horrible! How can anyone call this a good thing!? Don't make me regret supporting this game DE!

[bubbabenali]

Wait, so every warframe will be optained like Vauban then?

Damn, better rush through the starchart now.

 

And how can a set of 20 random missions be more interesting than selecting the mission one want to play?

[Nightfallen]

   Story time boys and girls.... and dev team.

 

   There once was a small dev team who had the basis for a fantanstic game. It was an TPS\FPS open world MMO. It had ALL the hype in the world and a small army of dedicated beta testers. The communtiy was much like Warframes, dedicated passionate and ready to even buy founders packs to help out. The devs were open and took community feedback and had a good transparent communication.

 

   Then came the fateful day of adding an economy and trading. Instead of adding an auction house and letting the players sort out the economy as it would, they decided almost on whim they were going to BASE the rest of the game around said economy. The  wanted to change everything from rarity of resources to durability and permanent item destruction. They wanted to change the time and difficulty of resource gathering. They wanted to change the crafting and even the way the "classes" progressed all in favor if this new economy based game ala EVE online. 

 

The community almost as a whole rallied immediatly and started with logical arguments, point for point, disputing and completely disproving the expected results. Over and over again every argument the dev team made was proven wrong not only with logic but simply players saying NO thats not what they would do. The beta tester literally cried and screamed for them NOT to make these changes as it would destroy the game they were trying to make. And yet, the CEO came on and much like Starmap 3.0 said these change were going to happen, he knew people were not going to like it but it would make the game better and deeper.

 

  Fastfoward to patch day. Bam in a week they lost about 10% of the beta testers that had been there over a year. in a month they had lost 25% of the total player base including me. They announce open beta in hopes to infuse new player base and lie about the numbers. 3 months after open beta I log in just to see whats happened and its a ghost town shards are empty almost no one still playing. The hype had been lost, the magic gone. The once fantastic potential for a great game thrown away ignoring 1000's of players trying to keep the game on track.

 

   Many of you probably know this story, and which game and company I am talking about. But the moral of the story is when 1000's of your players are telling you that what your are doing isn't going to work you should LISTEN. When point by point the player base has shown you WHY it wont work and offered dozens of ideas that mixed and matched together could fix the issue, you should LISTEN. Don't follow in the foot steps of company X above, listen, learn, and make a better game for everyone.

[Urlan]

Thanks for sharing that Nightfallen, that is exactly what I am afraid of happening with Warframe.

[S.T.M.P.D]

Hours till we get an incredibly open discussion of how this will work, and everyone's still screaming about what they heard from AM-Bunny - who, mind you, is not DE_Adam?

Wow. Gues the forums really are a hivemind: even after a thing has been said to death people will still find new ways to say it over and over again. Kinda silly, really.

[KvotheTheArcane1]

Hours till we get an incredibly open discussion of how this will work, and everyone's still screaming about what they heard from AM-Bunny - who, mind you, is not DE_Adam?

Wow. Gues the forums really are a hivemind: even after a thing has been said to death people will still find new ways to say it over and over again. Kinda silly, really.

Only because DE's official communication is incredibly lackluster. Wanna know how fast this discussion would be die if say, DESteve posted "Alright, it was a stupid idea, we'll think of something else."?

 

Almost instantly. It'd go from "Man, this is a stupid idea, it might cause me to stop playing," to a short period of "huzzah!" to dead.

 

And are you talking about the devstream? Please, if you believe that'll be any different than the previous ones, you're either way overly optimistic, or deluding yourself. Or, who knows, maybe they'll change and it'll be a decent stream for once. I'm always up for a surprise.

[-Anomaly-]

I just came back to this game after a long hiatus. I love the current star chart and system we have in place. I am in the process of gathering/exploring weapons and warframes right now. I will play this game as much as I can until this change gets added, but when it does no more money will be coming to DE and I will be uninstalling Warframe and it will at that point be a fond memory of a once great game. I await the fanboi's retort.

(I'm not threatening, just showing DE that they will lose one more customer over this, is all. /flameretardant)

[-Anomaly-]

   Story time boys and girls.... and dev team.

 

   There once was a small dev team who had the basis for a fantanstic game. It was an TPS\FPS open world MMO. It had ALL the hype in the world and a small army of dedicated beta testers. The communtiy was much like Warframes, dedicated passionate and ready to even buy founders packs to help out. The devs were open and took community feedback and had a good transparent communication.

 

   Then came the fateful day of adding an economy and trading. Instead of adding an auction house and letting the players sort out the economy as it would, they decided almost on whim they were going to BASE the rest of the game around said economy. The  wanted to change everything from rarity of resources to durability and permanent item destruction. They wanted to change the time and difficulty of resource gathering. They wanted to change the crafting and even the way the "classes" progressed all in favor if this new economy based game ala EVE online. 

 

The community almost as a whole rallied immediatly and started with logical arguments, point for point, disputing and completely disproving the expected results. Over and over again every argument the dev team made was proven wrong not only with logic but simply players saying NO thats not what they would do. The beta tester literally cried and screamed for them NOT to make these changes as it would destroy the game they were trying to make. And yet, the CEO came on and much like Starmap 3.0 said these change were going to happen, he knew people were not going to like it but it would make the game better and deeper.

 

  Fastfoward to patch day. Bam in a week they lost about 10% of the beta testers that had been there over a year. in a month they had lost 25% of the total player base including me. They announce open beta in hopes to infuse new player base and lie about the numbers. 3 months after open beta I log in just to see whats happened and its a ghost town shards are empty almost no one still playing. The hype had been lost, the magic gone. The once fantastic potential for a great game thrown away ignoring 1000's of players trying to keep the game on track.

 

   Many of you probably know this story, and which game and company I am talking about. But the moral of the story is when 1000's of your players are telling you that what your are doing isn't going to work you should LISTEN. When point by point the player base has shown you WHY it wont work and offered dozens of ideas that mixed and matched together could fix the issue, you should LISTEN. Don't follow in the foot steps of company X above, listen, learn, and make a better game for everyone.

This happened with FireFall.

[yakuza963]

I came up with something the other day I thought might work pretty well.

 

So, when you walk up to the Navigation panel you would still be greeted with the big wheel-o-planets. But after you pick what planet you want to play on. instead of then picking a node to play, you pick what type of mission you would like to do on that planet. It then makes a room with a random, but applicable tileset, and away you go. Which could also open up some tilesets that I don't believe support some of the game modes. (Like Spy 2.0 on the Earth tileset?) While also getting rid of the predictable nature of what tileset is on each node. For example if you go to Europa, one mission you could be on an orbiting Corpus ship. Then the next time you could be on the planet surface. Even if you do the same mission type both times.

 

And this would, IMO, make it easier for matchmaking too. Instead of needing people on particular nodes, which as we know, most of them are vacant 90% of the time. It just has to look for combinations of planets and mission types and filling in open spots.

 

And in regards to Archwing/Invasions/Alerts, those could all still work too.

 

Archwing could also be opened up to allow different modes to be played on planets where they might not be currently able to. For example, Earth's Archwing node is Interception. Well maybe you don't want to do Interception on Earth, maybe you just want a good 'ol Exterminate. Now you could have the ability to do that.

 

Invasions and Alerts could also just be added as a seperate gametype in the list when one is going on.

 

I can even touch on the whole solar XP being tied to the nodes. Since now it's tied to the number of nodes on each planet, with this it could be set in such a way that you would just need to complete 'X' number of missions on a planet to 'finish' the planet and get the XP and be able to put Extractors on it. And to prevent people from just running the same mission type, make it so you have to at least do a set number of some different gametypes. So maybe for example, have it set where you need to do 1 Sabotage, 2 Spies, 1 Rescue and 5 Exterminates. The rest could be up to the player.

 

The level of the enemies on the planet could also be manually picked too possibly. So you're not stuck on the same planets for high-level play.

Edited May 29, 2015 by yakuza963

[Urlan]

I could see the craft a one time mission node or craft a starchart option being put in the Dojo observatory since its largely just a decorative room right now with a large star map panel in the center of the room. I think removing choice and reducing the nodes to a random alert type missions is a bad idea that will both cost current players and potentially stop new players from staying with the game.

[Kashuken]

   Story time boys and girls.... and dev team.

 

   There once was a small dev team who had the basis for a fantanstic game. It was an TPS\FPS open world MMO. It had ALL the hype in the world and a small army of dedicated beta testers. The communtiy was much like Warframes, dedicated passionate and ready to even buy founders packs to help out. The devs were open and took community feedback and had a good transparent communication.

 

   Then came the fateful day of adding an economy and trading. Instead of adding an auction house and letting the players sort out the economy as it would, they decided almost on whim they were going to BASE the rest of the game around said economy. The  wanted to change everything from rarity of resources to durability and permanent item destruction. They wanted to change the time and difficulty of resource gathering. They wanted to change the crafting and even the way the "classes" progressed all in favor if this new economy based game ala EVE online. 

 

The community almost as a whole rallied immediatly and started with logical arguments, point for point, disputing and completely disproving the expected results. Over and over again every argument the dev team made was proven wrong not only with logic but simply players saying NO thats not what they would do. The beta tester literally cried and screamed for them NOT to make these changes as it would destroy the game they were trying to make. And yet, the CEO came on and much like Starmap 3.0 said these change were going to happen, he knew people were not going to like it but it would make the game better and deeper.

 

  Fastfoward to patch day. Bam in a week they lost about 10% of the beta testers that had been there over a year. in a month they had lost 25% of the total player base including me. They announce open beta in hopes to infuse new player base and lie about the numbers. 3 months after open beta I log in just to see whats happened and its a ghost town shards are empty almost no one still playing. The hype had been lost, the magic gone. The once fantastic potential for a great game thrown away ignoring 1000's of players trying to keep the game on track.

 

   Many of you probably know this story, and which game and company I am talking about. But the moral of the story is when 1000's of your players are telling you that what your are doing isn't going to work you should LISTEN. When point by point the player base has shown you WHY it wont work and offered dozens of ideas that mixed and matched together could fix the issue, you should LISTEN. Don't follow in the foot steps of company X above, listen, learn, and make a better game for everyone.

TBH the story of a promising game being made by devs and supported by a strong community which then goes up S#&$ creek due to bad decisions even though the community has put forward valid points on why X is bad is becoming more and more common.

 

I can think of several games in which this has happened in the last 5years.

[x_Soulframe_x]

cool changes really glad i just spent 50$ on this game FML

I spent $180. So now is the time to shoot myself.

[Avenwing]

I spent $180. So now is the time to shoot myself.

They back-pedaled pretty hard during this most recent devstream so I wouldn't be too worried, yet.

[motorfirebox]

Well, if by "backpedaled" you mean they said "Guys, we're still throwing ideas around"—same thing they said last stream, with less detail—then yeah, they backpedaled.

[Avenwing]

Well, if by "backpedaled" you mean they said "Guys, we're still throwing ideas around"—same thing they said last stream, with less detail—then yeah, they backpedaled.

Pretty sure they said that those changes they talked about weren't going to happen. I'll have to rewatch that part I guess.

[--.B.--HARDCOREDAVE-]

They finally listened to us and said that they were afraid of angering the player base so they will not push through with the 20 node thing good job guys! But they will consider other options probably streamlining duplicate nodes and other stuff they have not disclosed.

[RoboDoge]

Thought to myself, why not include mission failure rate in rewards process. Higher % of finished missions ( % from profile ) gives some additional rewards.

 

 

Would prevent people from dropping missions if they dont spawn on desired tileset, hence battling camping.

[Guest khk6]

Im not gonna read 64 pages of discussions but Ill just say im looking forward to the change.

At this point (atleast for me) anything is better then having to play the same map over and over and over again for what you want.

 

Alert missions were good to play just for fun because you can usually find other players there with a random tileset/enemy/mission type. Its what I was doing before I decided to take a break from this game.

[DzeraDragonbane]

Idk bout you guys but if there should be changes to starcharts ....... I would love for each planet to have all the mission types but only 1 of each kind and for each planet's mission types to have different drop tables ....... This way, atleast the planets wont feel like being abandoned ........ 

 

For example:

Planet: Earth

 Hollywood: Exterminate [ Ammo Drum will only drop in this instance/planet ]

 The Great Divide: Sabotage [ Power Throw will only drop in this instance/planet ]

etc. etc

 

BASICALLY

Different drop tables for each mission type for each planet which sounds like alot of work and dividing ......... So it will be like you can only get Frostbite on Spy missions on Mars and no other planet ......  

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

Hopefully with the drop down menus in the new Starchart UI they include your loadouts, I hate standing up and having to run to the back of the ship in order to change out, and jumping into your menu to access the arsenal is pretty much the same thing sans the initial run to the back.

I'd like to see your loadouts right after the syndicate quests where you can just scroll through them. Not having control on what mission type is going to get old fast when you gotta keep switching out to match that enemy haunting it.