Dojo Thoughts From Someone Not Interested In Large(R) Clan Play

[Dragovich88]

I agree i have no interest in clans or pvp. But there are energy weapons which can only be researched through the dojo and i want them like everyone.So i made a dojo access key and the cost to make it on my own will take me over a year what a joke.

[BinoAl]

What I feel is the bigger issue isn't necessarily the cost, but that it's very hard to build up your clan. Posting to the forums, people tend to ignore smaller clans and go straight to the larger ones, for good reason. In-game, most people I've run into are already in a clan. That makes it advantageous to, instead of build up your clan, simply drop it and go join a large clan, since it's your only hope of getting anywhere. That completely takes away the point of clans, to me. You're not playing with friends at that point, you're just using the system to get the clan's advantages

[Cypherdiaz]

I too am in a small clan, of 3. All three of us are Hunter Grade Founders and I am seriously considering upgrading to Master, or I was.

Its not for the plat, its not for the weapon *Cringe*, it was for two simple reasons.

 

1)I wanted to be a part of the 'design process' which was one of the major things of the Master/Grand Master Founder's

2)I wanted to further support the game. I havent had this level of fun since SWG and ive played many many many games since then. (Fallout is a different game genre entirely! so don't lynch me fellow fallout fanboys)

 

And now the dojo. Wow.

After reading this thread I have only a few thoughts..

 

1)Im very hesitant to upgrade to Master if DE isn't listening to the small clans in the design of things.

2)Im very hesitant to upgrade to Master if DE is going to basically say "Go big or go home", Ive gone big enough (Rhino with Gorgon and Gram). I don't like big clans, I used to run them ffs. I was one of the leaders for one of the top 3 Clans in SWG on the Corbantis server. 200 People. Im not going through that again (loved my clan, loved the game, but the drama and stress sucked).

3)I read somewhere (From a dev no less) about how they plan to offer "Plat To Credit Bundles" Dafuq? I don't mind Micro Transaction games but a pay to win is another story. This seems to be what it is turning towards. I am half expecting a Resource Booster to sit alongside the Credit & Affinity Boosters in the store before too long due to these dojo resource costs.

4)DE has said they need better tutorials. Yep. How about when you release a new feature..you take your own advice and explain it a bit better.

 

For now, I am just going to sit back, slaughter some mobs and see how DE reacts. Their reaction will determine many things.

 

EDIT: Just a thought, a bunch of the smaller clans could assimilate into one but keep apart. IE: They still run their S#&$ as they wish and they are still technically separate but they can combine resources for the big stuff (like the dojo). Totally goes against my desires to remain in a small clan but that might be an option.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Cypherdiaz

[Slaskia]

Ouch, those costs hurt. I'm in a small clan of four people (friends and family only), and only two of us play with any frequency (I play the most). I'm already starting to suffer from burnout a bit, so I've been only playing a couple of missions at a time (all I can stand in a play session right now).

I don't want to be in a large clan: be there, done that, don't want the drama and the 'clan of strangers' syndrome again. But I'm also not one of those that 'want it now': I understand some things need to take time. However, the costs here is just too high for a causal small clan like mine, which would like to be able to do all the content.

[Jedriden]

I agree completely. We shouldn't be essentially locked out of parts of the game just because we don't want to join a huge group of people we don't know.

[alocrius]

What I feel is the bigger issue isn't necessarily the cost, but that it's very hard to build up your clan. Posting to the forums, people tend to ignore smaller clans and go straight to the larger ones, for good reason. In-game, most people I've run into are already in a clan. That makes it advantageous to, instead of build up your clan, simply drop it and go join a large clan, since it's your only hope of getting anywhere. That completely takes away the point of clans, to me. You're not playing with friends at that point, you're just using the system to get the clan's advantages

This cuts to the heart of the argument, pun intended.

Edited May 24, 2013 by alocrius

[Thrain856]

What I feel is the bigger issue isn't necessarily the cost, but that it's very hard to build up your clan. Posting to the forums, people tend to ignore smaller clans and go straight to the larger ones, for good reason. In-game, most people I've run into are already in a clan. That makes it advantageous to, instead of build up your clan, simply drop it and go join a large clan, since it's your only hope of getting anywhere. That completely takes away the point of clans, to me. You're not playing with friends at that point, you're just using the system to get the clan's advantages

 

I'm not sure if this idea has been suggested yet, if not: 

 

A clan alliance system could be put into place, something that permits multiple smaller clans to 'ally' with each other, and share resources across their alliance. This way all of us small clan guys can still get the benefit of having a 'large' group gathering resources, but we can also remain in our individual clans. 

If this idea gets enough +1s I'll try making a topic for it. (this is not an attempt at getting more reputation, I just don't want to waste my time..) 

[ASH_PRIME]

I have a small clan of New Zealand gamers, so we get good ping, are up at the same times etc..

We are nearly all founders and have all put alot of time into the game because we love it..

The first time i emailed everyone with the Dojo news everyone was thrilled...

Now we realise that we have NO chance at all in creating our Dojo...  really..really disapointing...but...in space..no one can hear You CRY

[Thrain856]

I have a small clan of New Zealand gamers, so we get good ping, are up at the same times etc..

We are nearly all founders and have all put alot of time into the game because we love it..

The first time i emailed everyone with the Dojo news everyone was thrilled...

Now we realise that we have NO chance at all in creating our Dojo...  really..really disapointing...but...in space..no one can hear You CRY

Don't give up hope yet! They only just released the Dojos, and will without doubt be changing them up a bit in the coming weeks. There is also the upcoming live chat when new info might come up. As it is now, the Dojo is still possible, just on a much bigger time scale than is desirable for a fast paced ninja game like Warframe. 

 

[liavalenth]

^As Thrain856 said, don't give up just yet. As they have said they will be working with the community to get these kind of problems worked out.

 

If they decide not to fix it, then you can get angry.

[Cypherdiaz]

I'm not sure if this idea has been suggested yet, if not: 

 

A clan alliance system could be put into place, something that permits multiple smaller clans to 'ally' with each other, and share resources across their alliance. This way all of us small clan guys can still get the benefit of having a 'large' group gathering resources, but we can also remain in our individual clans. 

If this idea gets enough +1s I'll try making a topic for it. (this is not an attempt at getting more reputation, I just don't want to waste my time..) 

I had that thought after i did my post, and edited as such. But yeh, thatd be the jist. Let the small clans be small but pool their resources for those big things that they all will benefit from, such as the dojo. DEN is 100% behind this idea and i prefer an alliance system (Take EVE Online's Alliance system for example) over all the small clans having to merge and yet staying isolated just to do the dojo. And then also the issue of too many cooks in the kitchen.

 

^As Thrain856 said, don't give up just yet. As they have said they will be working with the community to get these kind of problems worked out.

 

If they decide not to fix it, then you can get angry.

Hence why i said what i said. Not happy right now, very much was a kick to the gut. Now to see if they 'apologize' and fix it or if I get a punch to the face to pair with the kick. We shall see

[Galmech40k]

I'm in the same boat.  I mostly play solo unless I'm playing with my one friend that also plays Warframe... so... Clan of 2... go team power.
And he rarely plays... and is still trying to build his Akboltos... so yeah... I'd even pay plat in place of resources to build rooms.

[Arcalane]

The dojo system is pretty cool and has a lot of potential, but the current pricing is excessively punishing for smaller clans of actual-friends. I play with a small group of people, most of whom cannot devote lots of time to the game. We could eventually scrape something together, but the grind is going to be murderous towards motivation.

 

Large clans may have to fight the inherent issues of 'design by democracy' (which is almost always a bad idea -- imagine if DE based tons of new features off what all of the community wanted without filtering it all through the lens of 'does this fit the game'/etc.) and apathy (are these people actually going to check out the dojo and vote with their resources) but they still have a huge leg up over smaller clans.

 

Personally, I would axe the 'Forma for everything' part. Either make it so they're only required for key rooms (the science labs, maybe the grand hall, etc.) or simply aren't a part of the process at all -- because you're also going to have plenty of people who want to use their Formas for, you know, Polarizing, and don't care about the dojo development. If they're on the order of Banshee/Vauban part rarity and only drop one at a time, then... those are some pretty hard decisions!

 

I also feel a couple of key alterations need to be made to the design of the planner;

 

1) Allow us to expand the top-right preview window so we have a better overview of how much space a room adds. The Grand Hall is way off the page.

2) If a room adds doors/nodes to the dojo layout, the door/node locations should be marked on the preview/expanded preview with a circle similar to the design that shows up on the red doors themselves. There's no way of judging how much -actual- space a room adds or subtracts. Are we building dead-ends or not? This is especially important for larger clans that can afford to plan ahead.

 

Other potential improvements; instead of having most of the cost in the rooms themselves, make it in furniture and improvements to the room.

 

Let's say I want to set up a Bio-Research Lab. This is clearly noted as being a Level 1 Bio-Research Lab. Okay, so I set that down and come back once it's done. My Bio-Lab has a panel in the center. From this panel, I can do two things;

 

1) Choose various makeovers for the room - I could give it a more Grineer or Corpus-themed set of furnishings, for example. Or maybe I want to drive home that this is a lab that's studying the T-Cyte Plague, so I add a bunch of containment tanks with chunks of various infested, maybe with a big tank with an Ancient in it as the centerpiece.

2) Improve the level of the lab, up to a maximum of say three, or five. This would reduce the time and costs for all research projects conducted in the lab by an appreciable amount.

 

So, my small clan can at least have the ability to conduct our research and - at some point - improve our labs later on. Bigger clans can improve their labs sooner, and have prettier, fancier dojos with different furnishings and so on.

 

Ed: That was a lot more wordage than I thought.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Arcalane

[Galmech40k]

The problem is if they were wanting it to be difficult for bigger clans to build what they need it won't work... 350+ people in some of the larger clans... they'll have everything they want instantly.  But for solo players or two to ten Tenno Clans it will take months to possible years.

[plznohurtme]

I'm just a fan of keeping things simple which is why I'm a fan of just making it a base system with longer build times, but with reasonable material requirements and allowing that build time to be lowered by adding more materials. I'm still looking forward to the future of Warframe as DE has been doing a good job of looking at game systems and making adjustments to things that are out of whack.

[dukelego]

My only suggestion for this idea is that the multipliers don't stack if I have to half the cost for three of the materials I would prefer the build time to not be 100 hours or something

And the multipliers should be different per room, hallway as apposed to oracle(build times may be different so this may not matter or maybe it should anyway)

But it is alpha so this current system could be a place holder to get it out this week

Edited May 24, 2013 by dukelego

[Countess_Hapmuhr]

Really, when I read many mentions about Dojos requiring lots of stuff, I assumed that everybody was QQing because there's a lot of that going around these forums.

 

But really, I did a quick calculation and unless you have like 10-15 members in your clan, you might as well not bother with this at all as the grind is going to take 600-700 hours if you're just a four man clan. (this is extrapolating numbers from my own resources at the moment)

 

The question that I'm wondering most about is wether or not you actually NEED any of this to get any gear. If gear is involved, then it's just plain unfair to hand this boon over to big clans and stick it to the people playing solo (or as in our case) a small clan. If it's just optional stuff you can get in any other way, fine, then our clan will just ignore the Dojo and enjoy the rest of the content in the game.

 

Edit: Also, assuming that one would actually want to pay for a dojo with IRL money, the prices for forma and plat are so out of tune that it's again unfeasible unless you're truly nutty about the game. (and I mean that in the crazy sense of the word)

 

Edit2: I'm also hoping that there'll be some sort of solution to the problem in a new patch, we want to invest, but there's no way we're going to invest time AND money at the same time.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Hap-muhr

[Tahlen]

I would usually enjoy such a large challenge, but a 3 man clan will take a LONG time to finish.

Still going to give it a shot though. :)

[ArsVampyre]

Between the real world cost due to Forma, and the amount of materials, I'd say small clans may as well accept they either need to disband and join bigger clans, or go without much of the added material from Update 8.

 

Lots of update 8 is behind a de facto paywall.  Buy keys, buy forma, buy buy.  Or you can farm it, maybe, if the RNG ever generates it at a convienent time.  It can drop from random mobs or chests or payouts on raid and spy missions!  but it won't.  

 

Glaive was the first clue, then Voubon.  Now it's readily apparent.  Rather than being free to pay, this is going to be expensive to play.  I can't see new people buying in.

 

I'll keep playing for a while and see what DE does, but if their past fixes are any clue to what they're going to do about this, you can expect prices to rise and things to get more difficult, not better.

[dukelego]

Between the real world cost due to Forma, and the amount of materials, I'd say small clans may as well accept they either need to disband and join bigger clans, or go without much of the added material from Update 8.

 

Lots of update 8 is behind a de facto paywall.  Buy keys, buy forma, buy buy.  Or you can farm it, maybe, if the RNG ever generates it at a convienent time.  It can drop from random mobs or chests or payouts on raid and spy missions!  but it won't.  

 

Glaive was the first clue, then Voubon.  Now it's readily apparent.  Rather than being free to pay, this is going to be expensive to play.  I can't see new people buying in.

 

I'll keep playing for a while and see what DE does, but if their past fixes are any clue to what they're going to do about this, you can expect prices to rise and things to get more difficult, not better.

You can get keys from defense missions Neptune wave five I got one (hope they don't nerf)

[Tsukinoki]

I have an idea that will allow small clans to enjoy the content WITHOUT making it something exploitable:

The cost of the rooms scales with how large/small your clan is BUT if you move up to the next bracket in clan size you have to make up the difference in materials.

An example would be:

A random room (all made up numbers) takes 7.5K of X, 5K of Y and 13K of Z for a clan of 1 to 10 members. In a clan size of 11 to 20 it can take say 10K of X, 6.6K of Y and 17.3K of Z. If you start in a small clan you make it for the lower cost. You then increase your clan size to 12 people. In order to keep using that room in the new clan size you have to make up the difference in materials, eg 2.5K of X, 1.6K of Y and 4.3K of Z. After you pay those costs then you can continue using that room.

That way small clans can still build everything without spending months and months without being able to exploit the mechanics. Larger clans can still build a lot more things a lot faster than a small clan can, even with the price differences.

[Jedi]

Clan Dojo should be crafted in Tiers, Each time you increase the Tier the yield required increases. The very 1st tier should cost a low ammount of materials something  that 2 guys can farm in a couple of days. Every time your dojo goes in up tiers you get bonuses added to that dojo or perks.

These perks or bonuses could range from a whole load of things, Tier 1 dojo, Tier 2 dojo, Tier 3 dojo All the way up to a Masters Dojo.

 

This is just one way to implement starting cheap and not totaly eradicating the need to farm vast ammounts for your clan dojo etc etc.

 

I know the DEteam encourage people and want the community to group up in clans for the game, but casual players make up a huge part of the of the income and statistics will plumit if they dont apeal to the care bears at some point in the future.

 

 

edit: btw op thanks for the math, I was actually just going to go with the flow me and my mates, those figures have just stumped me in my tracks.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Jedi

[webkilla]

As one who sees Warframe mainly as a casual game I can play a little when I get home after work for an hour before I make dinner...

 

Way to completely miss the casual market devs.

 

Mind you, I don't have any numbers on how many players aren't in clans - but I'm not - meaning that I'll never get to see this content. Great.

 

 

I love the idea of finally introducing some PVP - but... not if you're not in a clan that farms 24/7 for a hundred years apparently.

 

For a game that, in my opinion, was made to appeal to casual players (Since there never was any real endgame content) then I'm really disappointed at this.

 

What they should have done, is make PVP something you pay maybe a 100plat or a million creds or something to enable - if they want to make it challenging for players to get into - but don't block it completely to non-clan players.

 

As for the void towers - well... rare drops that open up super hardcore runs? Now this sounds like what I'd expect and want from this game.

[Cypherdiaz]

The dojo system is pretty cool and has a lot of potential, but the current pricing is excessively punishing for smaller clans of actual-friends. I play with a small group of people, most of whom cannot devote lots of time to the game. We could eventually scrape something together, but the grind is going to be murderous towards motivation.

 

Large clans may have to fight the inherent issues of 'design by democracy' (which is almost always a bad idea -- imagine if DE based tons of new features off what all of the community wanted without filtering it all through the lens of 'does this fit the game'/etc.) and apathy (are these people actually going to check out the dojo and vote with their resources) but they still have a huge leg up over smaller clans.

 

Personally, I would axe the 'Forma for everything' part. Either make it so they're only required for key rooms (the science labs, maybe the grand hall, etc.) or simply aren't a part of the process at all -- because you're also going to have plenty of people who want to use their Formas for, you know, Polarizing, and don't care about the dojo development. If they're on the order of Banshee/Vauban part rarity and only drop one at a time, then... those are some pretty hard decisions!

 

I also feel a couple of key alterations need to be made to the design of the planner;

 

1) Allow us to expand the top-right preview window so we have a better overview of how much space a room adds. The Grand Hall is way off the page.

2) If a room adds doors/nodes to the dojo layout, the door/node locations should be marked on the preview/expanded preview with a circle similar to the design that shows up on the red doors themselves. There's no way of judging how much -actual- space a room adds or subtracts. Are we building dead-ends or not? This is especially important for larger clans that can afford to plan ahead.

 

Other potential improvements; instead of having most of the cost in the rooms themselves, make it in furniture and improvements to the room.

 

Let's say I want to set up a Bio-Research Lab. This is clearly noted as being a Level 1 Bio-Research Lab. Okay, so I set that down and come back once it's done. My Bio-Lab has a panel in the center. From this panel, I can do two things;

 

1) Choose various makeovers for the room - I could give it a more Grineer or Corpus-themed set of furnishings, for example. Or maybe I want to drive home that this is a lab that's studying the T-Cyte Plague, so I add a bunch of containment tanks with chunks of various infested, maybe with a big tank with an Ancient in it as the centerpiece.

2) Improve the level of the lab, up to a maximum of say three, or five. This would reduce the time and costs for all research projects conducted in the lab by an appreciable amount.

 

So, my small clan can at least have the ability to conduct our research and - at some point - improve our labs later on. Bigger clans can improve their labs sooner, and have prettier, fancier dojos with different furnishings and so on.

 

Ed: That was a lot more wordage than I thought.

The cosmetic stuff is nice (Big fan of cosmetic upgrades to structures), but the scaling up is what I really love about your idea. That's brilliant actually. Have it reduce the speed. Im willing to sit and wait an extra day or two for a BP versus..NEVER. If the current resources can be considered Level 3, then simple math of thirds gets us to a much more reasonable amount. Still expensive, but much more reasonable. Now if you decided instead of going equal thirds to do exponential math (which this game seems to be fond of) then Level 1 would be 1/6 the current cost, Level 2 would be 2/6, and (technically) Level 3 would be 4/6, but we can say 3/6 for the time being. Point is, scaling would be brilliant.

 

Really, when I read many mentions about Dojos requiring lots of stuff, I assumed that everybody was QQing because there's a lot of that going around these forums.

 

But really, I did a quick calculation and unless you have like 10-15 members in your clan, you might as well not bother with this at all as the grind is going to take 600-700 hours if you're just a four man clan. (this is extrapolating numbers from my own resources at the moment)

 

The question that I'm wondering most about is wether or not you actually NEED any of this to get any gear. If gear is involved, then it's just plain unfair to hand this boon over to big clans and stick it to the people playing solo (or as in our case) a small clan. If it's just optional stuff you can get in any other way, fine, then our clan will just ignore the Dojo and enjoy the rest of the content in the game.

 

Edit: Also, assuming that one would actually want to pay for a dojo with IRL money, the prices for forma and plat are so out of tune that it's again unfeasible unless you're truly nutty about the game. (and I mean that in the crazy sense of the word)

 

Edit2: I'm also hoping that there'll be some sort of solution to the problem in a new patch, we want to invest, but there's no way we're going to invest time AND money at the same time.

Yes you need the dojo to access the new stuff.

Just to give you an idea. They added 22 Weapons with this update.

Lets reverse the math.

3 new Stalker Weapons and the 2 new prime weapons (from the void), thats 5. So from 22 down to 17.

Cleaver, Dual Cleaver, Machete, Vulkar. That brings it down from 17 to 13.

Kunai, Dual Broncos, Single Ether Sword. That brings the total down to 10.

 

So 22 weapons, 12 are available through various means not related to a dojo (Market, Killing the Stalker, Void, Market/BP Building)

That means 10 weapons are Dojo Research ONLY.

From a friend in a bigger clan, I know what 2 of those are: A flamethrower and a rocket launcher. YEP! No dojo, you get neither of those..EVER.

 

So to answer your question Hap: Without a dojo, there are 10 weapons you will never see. Thus, there are 10 weapons that the smaller clans can wave goodbye to unless they fix this system so it doesn't poop on the smaller clans.

 

That is one of the things that pisses me off most. My small clan has been going "Oh man i hope they add a flamethrower for infested" and when we found out they did..oh man did we get excited. But wait, because we are 3 players and don't feel like running endless defense ad-naseum..we will never see these new weapons? WTF.

[dukelego]

This is the alpha dojo right now guys so don't be so hasty to flame them

I do however agree if this is how they pretty much leave it