User-Unfriendly To New Players

[vaugahn]

The tips in the loading screens are awesome. They're an excellent guide to some of the less obvious things in the game.

 

You should be able to peruse all these tips at your leisure in the codex. That would be a good next step.

[Caine2112]

The tips in the loading screens are awesome. They're an excellent guide to some of the less obvious things in the game.

 

You should be able to peruse all these tips at your leisure in the codex. That would be a good next step.

 

Yep.  This is the sort of thing I'm advocating.  Includes the weapon elemental effects tips that are randomized below the weapon stats.  I would much rather have a detailed tooltip popup when you hover your mouse over the row headers, such as Heat, Slash, Status, etc.  That would be far more useful and very easy to program.  Would go a long way to helping out players, new and vets alike.

[fatpig84]

Syndicates also were very broken expirience. If only somebody told me that i can buy all syndicates usefull stuff from people like for 200p in total - i would never mess with them, because it not worth it - the price in ranking is too high and the profit is so little, and now i have those nasty eximuses squads hunting me for nothing from 4 opposing fractions - while i only made few maybe 4-5 of unimportant missions for Veil and Meridian. I was very fkn suspicious about those syndicates and started progress in them only when i turned like mr 7-8 - i was a fool doing this, and i cant even undo my progress with them.

 

You can level up 4 syndicates if you know how to calculate the standings correctly.

But there is no way to be absolutely immune once you start doing syndicate stuff.

 

There will always be 2 hostile or only 1 hostile but being friendly to 5 syndicate is practically a chore.

 

[TheGunSlanger]

Hello everyone.

 

TL;DR down below.

 

As a new player, I have quite a lot to learn and understand about this game.  First of all, let me just say that this is a gorgeous game, and for a new player like myself, the missions are a lot of fun (although I can see it getting old and repetitive as I continue to play).  Regardless, my brother and I are enjoying ourselves a lot and that's what counts in the end.  The graphics are stunning, the mechanics work very well for the most part, the weapons feel genuine and the entire concept of a Warframe is breathtakingly unique in its implementation.  I readily admit you devs have created quite a beautiful work of gaming art, and I just love the sci-fi zen feel to the game.

 

Now, veteran players, please keep in mind that my post targets new players, and although I fully appreciate veteran players commenting, do keep in mind what I'm currently going through as a new player and my short experience thus far.

 

As the topic title states, this game is very far from being user friendly in relation to information.  There is a plethora of information missing from the game, to the point where I'm finding myself constantly alt+tabbing out and reading on the Warframe Wiki for even the most basic information, such as Gas or Radiation effects.  (And please don't refer me to the randomized tooltip below the weapon stats; that's just a terrible way of doing things.)  Even though I'm in my early 40s, and fully understand that this game is still carrying its Beta tag and lots more development is forthcoming, I'm rather quite disturbed at the fact that there is next to no in-game tooltips or codex entries for basic information.  I did go through the few tutorials, and they don't offer very much.

 

Examples of such information missing: 

1. What does Radiation damage do and who does it affect?  Same goes for all elemental damage types for that matter.  Little symbols on the various enemies in the codex don't clarify what icon is what damage.

 

2. I've maxed out my Loki warframe (my choice last year when I tried out the game).  What do I do next?  Every other warframe is out of reach either in pricing or crafting or both.  There's no information or tutorial to let you know what your options are.  Am I stuck playing the same warframe for weeks or months?  Maybe Lotus could send an email or a communique telling you what your options are at this point.  I dunno.

 

3. All the warframe and weapon stats could use either tooltips or a codex entry to tell you in depth what they do, although some are self explanatory, most are not.  I had to look up what Status meant in the wiki.

 

4. A clanmate had to tell me that Revivals refresh daily.  I did not know that, and I let a lot of good drops go by forfeiting missions because I did not want to waste them.  There's no information in the game that tells you this.

 

AND, quite possibly the most frustrating is understanding which areas you can do missions on based on the level of the sector compared to your own level.  I still don't understand where I can reasonably go, and what is out of my reach.  I'll enter a sector with a mission type of Excavation Level 1-6 on Mercury, and get my butt kicked royally within a few minutes, but then I can go to Venus and beat an Extermination mission of 6-8.  It's challenging, yet quite reasonable in being able to complete the mission.  Yet there is NO information in the game, or even the wiki for that matter, to help you understand where you can reasonably go.  Would it be possible as an idea to include under the Level # - # something along the lines of Easy, Moderate, Difficult, Very Difficult, Impossible based on whatever parameters you use to determine difficulty level of a mission?  This would go a LONG way in helping a new player to better understand the situation said player will encounter should he/she choose mission X over mission Y and such.

 

And this is just the forefront of what I'm going through right now.  There's quite a lot more to understand but no information in the game to help you do just that.  Now as a man in my early 40s, I took it upon myself to ask questions in the clan I joined and look through the dedicated wiki for information, but this stuff and a lot of other things should be in the game.  No need to make fancy splash screens with heightened background music, just put it in the codex as a page of info or something, or use tooltips at your discretion.  Keep it simple and clean, and I'll love you for it.

 

An unrelated thing to add that boggles my mind is respawns.  It happens on occasion that I cleared out a room, proceed to the next, get in a firefight, and I get respawns BEHIND me in the very room I JUST cleared.  WTF??  This seriously defies logic and needs to be looked at.  I'm usually doing very well in said mission, and stuff like this is what ends up killing me.  Now, being a mature player, I've taken some licks, and got back up, and now I check my six often enough that whenever I get in a firefight, I'm seldom surprised, and I have my thumb on my mouse button 4 with Invisibility ready to go just in case.  This newly developed instinct has kept me alive when I should have been wiped off the face of whichever planet I'm on, but to a new player, this is the sort of thing that can make or break a game for that person.  Missions should be challenging, no doubt about it, but logic-defying respawns need to be fixed.

 

But I digress from my original train of thought.  I had to put it up there because this is one thing that really flabbergasts me to no end.

 

I seriously could spend another 2-3 hours listing everything that requires information, including more detailed information on when to join a syndicate, or getting an invitation to go to the Larunda Relay on Mercury.  I found it just by accident, thinking it was some story mission.  Dojos are another area which are sorely lacking information.  And that's just more examples of what I'm referring to. 

 

Please address this issue.  I believe putting this information in the hands of new players will go a very long way in helping to retain them.  You guys have a great game going, and everyone knows information is power.  So please put that power in the hands of your players.  They will love you for it.

 

Anyways, the TL;DR version is thus:

New players are thrown into this game with very little information, including the basic stuff.  Tutorials, tooltips and expanded codex entries detailing each facet of the game would go a very long way in helping new players better understand this great space ninja game and potentially keeping player retention.

 

Thank you for reading my post.

Caine

 

 

Edit:  Spelling errors and grammer.  I'm also positive I have the name of the Mercury relay wrong LOL.  Can someone please correct me?

 

Edit 2:  Larunda Relay.  Thanks BlueMadness for correcting me.  =)

On some of your points.

 

A: Positives and truth - The tutorial system is a bit lacking. It introduces you to the barebones basics, but doesn't go over things such as revives and how to obtain other frames, as you said. Just imagine the lore speculation and debate if revives somehow became cannon, it just excites me, the thought!

 

As for things such as syndicates, and relays, I believe you should indeed get some sort of notification when you are able to initiate into them.

 

As for things such as Simaris and Teshin (the conclave master) in the relay, those can be worth your time if you simply explore, as long as you know that the relays exist.

 

B: The negatives and my counter opinions - First off, there is actually tooltips in your modding section on what certain elements do, and how to combine mods to create that element. In your defense though, they are unnervingly hard to notice at first. On which enemies they effect, that's why we have the codex.

 

 I feel that levels on nodes should remain, but also give a realistic level of difficulty for your new player.  Although enemies may be level 1-6, if there are 15 of them on the map vs 45, that can be a huge difference, so again, opinion and in your defense.

 

It's hard to tell what you are exactly mad about in your player reviving in the same spot/room he/she died in. Why is that a big deal? I simply did not understand it.

[(PSN)magnumcrowe]

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Just last week I found out that you can switch your shoulder camera to the other side by pressing H, and that was after 1000+ hours of gameplay.

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See, if we can do that on PS4, I don't even know how O_O

[(PSN)magnumcrowe]

-snip-

 

It's hard to tell what you are exactly mad about in your player reviving in the same spot/room he/she died in. Why is that a big deal? I simply did not understand it.

He's talking about enemy respawns, not our respawns. To be more prescise, he's talking about enemies spawning behind him in an adjacent room he cleared just moments (read: seconds or very, very few minutes) ago, which is a pain on stealth.

EDIT: Thinking on it, I realise this is a common complaint, and being relatively new to the forums, I can't recall any suggestions being made on how to fix this to everyone's satisfaction. How abaout a bit of programming that prevents enemies from respawning within Xdistance of player (might not be feasable in multi-player unless this program is focused on Host player), Xdistance being sound detection range of ranged weapons? Might also be satsifactory if Xdistance was a set number of tiles away, but would be more variable.

Edited June 21, 2015 by (PS4)magnumcrowe

[Caine2112]

I'm seeing this often, especially on Spy missions, where when the alarm is sounding, you have enemies respawning in closets.  You clear it out, and a minute later, more of them come out of those little closets with lockers in them.

 

Baffles logic to no end.

[Davoodoo]

Tbh i dont feel like shoving everything newbies throat is an answer.

 

The problem is that they cant really experiment and discover new stuff.

Nowadays they have a single path through all planets, they need to farm specific enemies, game difficulty relies entirely on your mods so its unnecessarily hard at the beginning of progression where player should actually have easy time to learn the game,  they need to farm since they wont acquire stuff while playing anymore.

[Caine2112]

Tbh i dont feel like shoving everything newbies throat is an answer.

 

The problem is that they cant really experiment and discover new stuff.

Nowadays they have a single path through all planets, they need to farm specific enemies, game difficulty relies entirely on your mods so its unnecessarily hard at the beginning of progression where player should actually have easy time to learn the game,  they need to farm since they wont acquire stuff while playing anymore.

 

The main pitfall and trap of F2P games.  Make it more hardcore so that folks who want things easy buy what they need to accelerate the process and limit the grind.  Thankfully, this game isn't Pay-to-Win, so any money you do choose to spend on this game is to make your own life a little easier, not obtain a big red Easy button to conquer every other player.

 

I've played a couple of Pay to Win games, and this isn't one of them.

 

But this is digressing from the main topic at hand:  making the new user experience more informative.

Edited June 24, 2015 by Caine2112