Why I've Lost Trust In De

[BETAOPTICS]

While I agree with what has been brought up here, I have to say that  as a player who was active since the start of open beta, now the last two weeks I haven't really played that much. And it doesn't even have much to do with these changes, but about an issue which the OP brings up which is the mod tables and how ridiculous they have gotten over time to the point that it is a chore and annoying to hunt mods, when originally it was fun to obtain them relatively reliably.

While I have been absent, the changes to the Blithering Swarm surely must annoy a lot of active players exactly because it is a poor mans band-aid to the issue and even that is being actively nerfed and the actual issue gets ignored as to why so many players abuse these sort of abilities that maximize loot gains. The same was with Mag's Greedy Pull in combo with Mesa Peacemakers. Or the rest of them before. The only reason why they are abused is because of an underlying, yet ignored issue within the core aspect of the games foundation.

I will not partake on that Exalted blade conversation because I don't know its influences other than that people don't like it. And so I do not see any point talking about something I don't have any idea off of. But in any event I wish DE would address the issue of loot tables because it is putting away even the most dedicated fans away from the game. The core is rotten if I might so call it, and it needs some attention.

[Haldos]

Cleaned a few posts up.

 

Lets keep the feedback on topic and constructive, and the antagonism to a bare minimum of nonexistent.

[Eyeless]

It's not Augment nerfs that are the issue, it's when DE pitches a bad Frame change or New Frame concept experienced players will know has scaling issues or lack of utility, that DE needs to listen and pay attention but they never do. Same with incoming weapons and game-type changes. 

 

I'll never understand this, but thankfully as a whole, good Frame abilities that scale and don't require an arm and a leg to make work is something getting done better with every pass. 

 

It's the loot distribution I'm always worried about. 

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

Basically, you're saying that you'll only give DE money if they do what players want.

 

There might be some kind of logic there, but it's escaping me.

Why would you give DE money to get an item that does "X" when you can't trust DE enough to believe that it will still be doing "X" tomorrow?

 

How many people do you think spent REAL MONEY on Mag Prime + Greedy Pull + a slot + a reactor or spent REAL MONEY on a slot for Excal + a Reactor + BP + a prisma Skana + a catalyst + weapon slots only for them to be immediately changed by DE as soon as DE had the majority of the profits they would receive for it.

 

If I see an item I want, I am not going to spend real money on it, because tomorrow it might not be the same item that I purchased. 

 

I don't want to hear your "itz steel gud" excuses. That's not the point. The point is that it's not what I chose to buy.

[(PSN)awesomelaw128]

so what people hated it when coptering was removed but overall removing coptering was a good change.  Dont get me wrong DE should listen to the community but the community arent experts in game design.

[Marthrym]

Why would you give DE money to get an item that does "X" when you can't trust DE enough to believe that it will still be doing "X" tomorrow?

 

How many people do you think spent REAL MONEY on Mag Prime + Greedy Pull + a slot + a reactor or spent REAL MONEY on a slot for Excal + a Reactor + BP + a prisma Skana + a catalyst + weapon slots only for them to be immediately changed by DE as soon as DE had the majority of the profits they would receive for it.

 

If I see an item I want, I am not going to spend real money on it, because tomorrow it might not be the same item that I purchased. 

 

I don't want to hear your "itz steel gud" excuses. That's not the point. The point is that it's not what I chose to buy.

Pretty much.

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

so what people hated it when coptering was removed but overall removing coptering was a good change.

Uh, no.  Coptering removal being good or bad is debatable, but the wall running/hopping we have now is terrible.  If not for listening to the massive backlash from the community, we wouldn't have bullet jumping and such which saved the trainwreck that was Parkour 2-point-slow.

[(XBOX)BAMMM Lightning]

Why would you give DE money to get an item that does "X" when you can't trust DE enough to believe that it will still be doing "X" tomorrow?

 

How many people do you think spent REAL MONEY on Mag Prime + Greedy Pull + a slot + a reactor or spent REAL MONEY on a slot for Excal + a Reactor + BP + a prisma Skana + a catalyst + weapon slots only for them to be immediately changed by DE as soon as DE had the majority of the profits they would receive for it.

 

If I see an item I want, I am not going to spend real money on it, because tomorrow it might not be the same item that I purchased. 

 

I don't want to hear your "itz steel gud" excuses. That's not the point. The point is that it's not what I chose to buy.

 

I have to agree with this. I'm developing the habit of not buying anything for fear of it being nerfed. I was REALLY close to switching to New Loka from my maxed Arbiters of Hexis for that skana mod and getting ready to potato the prisma skana, until I heard of the EB + syndicate mod change. Needless to say, I didn't make the switch.  

 

I'm still not sure the reasoning behind gpull nerf, as I don't main my Mag. Just hope it wasn't overused = overpowered, because we can argue that about skills like snow globe, iron skin, and radial blind and desecrate. I way I saw it, a Mag and Mesa gpull combo needed just that, a COMBO. One doesn't work without the other, justifying the cost to me. I limit my forma and reactor purchases to frames that have been standing tall and true and that I feel confident they won't be messed with. Right now, I don't hear too many reasons to forma or potato my Mag Prime. Oh well. 

[Marthrym]

Uh, no.  Coptering removal being good or bad is debatable, but the wall running/hopping we have now is terrible.  If not for listening to the massive backlash from the community, we wouldn't have bullet jumping and such which saved the trainwreck that was Parkour 2-point-slow.

I had hoped bullet jump could be the new and improved copter. I mean the new animations combined with old the physics, without the need for specific melee weapons. Unfortunately, horizontal bullet jump kinda sucks. If it were closer to the vertical bullet jump, which is quite good IMHO, with of course the added speed coptering provided, bullet jump could maybe alleviate the traversal speed loss. Maybe. Except in rooms with a low ceiling lol.

Edited August 27, 2015 by Marthrym

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

I had hoped bullet jump could be the new and improved copter. I mean the new animations combined with old the physics, without the need for specific melee weapons. Unfortunately, horizontal bullet jump kinda sucks. If it were closer to the vertical bullet jump, which is quite good IMHO, with of course the added speed coptering provided, bullet jump could maybe alleviate the traversal speed loss. Maybe. Except in rooms with a low ceiling lol.

You can move almost as fast, but it takes way more button presses. Ironic considering less button presses was part of the justification for removing coptering.

 

 

I have to agree with this. I'm developing the habit of not buying anything for fear of it being nerfed. I was REALLY close to switching to New Loka from my maxed Arbiters of Hexis for that skana mod and getting ready to potato the prisma skana, until I heard of the EB + syndicate mod change. Needless to say, I didn't make the switch.  

 

I'm still not sure the reasoning behind gpull nerf, as I don't main my Mag. Just hope it wasn't overused = overpowered, because we can argue that about skills like snow globe, iron skin, and radial blind and desecrate. I way I saw it, a Mag and Mesa gpull combo needed just that, a COMBO. One doesn't work without the other, justifying the cost to me. I limit my forma and reactor purchases to frames that have been standing tall and true and that I feel confident they won't be messed with. Right now, I don't hear too many reasons to forma or potato my Mag Prime. Oh well. 

I was about to switch syndicates as well, but I would need 2 reactors.  I am not even going to bother now.

[Marthrym]

You can move almost as fast, but it takes way more button presses. Ironic considering less button presses was part of the justification for removing coptering.

 

Yeah it is pretty fast, especially with the new mods, though I wouldn't say "almost" (that "near-teleportation" with some weapons lol). But my gripe is more the fact that half the time I bonk my head on the ceilings if they're low, or hanging cables, etc. I hated how clunky coptering looked, but the horizontal coptering was actually horizontal, whereas bullet jump has this slight arcing thing. But I'm sure it's more an adaptation thing than an actual issue, I'll get the hang of it eventually.

[Liminal]

You do realize the main reason we can't have rebalanced grind is in large part because of the abusive loopholes used to skip grind?

The "loopholes" are the response to playing 25 missions and not getting a single Tellurium or Neural Sensor, for example.

If those "exploits" are fixed the awful grind (it's not a "grind" though, it should be called "begging the heavens") should be fixed as well.

 

I half-agree with the OP. I do think balance is necessary and healthy for the game as a whole, but while our tools to make the game not as heavy on the burn-out front are promptly stomped (as they should ideally be), the brain-killing farming remains.

 

 

Also, sort of on the farming topic: the Knux. That cost. It doesn't bode well for future research items.

[FelisImpurrator]

If those "exploits" are fixed the awful grind (it's not a "grind" though, it should be called "begging the heavens") should be fixed as well.

That's literally exactly what I've been saying for months.

 

But. People always rush like a swarm of Infested toward the next bypass as fast as humanly possible, and DE evidently can't keep up (and if they fix the grind without also slamming the bypasses, everyone has 5000 Orokin Cells and every piece of gear they have 7-forma'd before they can hotfix out Draco or Mesa or whatever the hell else), so it ends up being the ridiculous arms race we're stuck in right now.

 

I keep saying they should slow down, not touch anything, work on a big update behind the scenes that totally overhauls rewards AND nerfs all the exploitative methods at the same time, and launch it. But I don't know how a dev cycle works, so I'm not entirely sure that's feasible by DE's schedule structure.

[Liminal]

That's literally exactly what I've been saying for months.

 

But. People always rush like a swarm of Infested toward the next bypass as fast as humanly possible, and DE evidently can't keep up (and if they fix the grind without also slamming the bypasses, everyone has 5000 Orokin Cells and every piece of gear they have 7-forma'd before they can hotfix out Draco or Mesa or whatever the hell else), so it ends up being the ridiculous arms race we're stuck in right now.

 

I keep saying they should slow down, not touch anything, work on a big update behind the scenes that totally overhauls rewards AND nerfs all the exploitative methods at the same time, and launch it. But I don't know how a dev cycle works, so I'm not entirely sure that's feasible by DE's schedule structure.

I guess we agree then! I know an overhaul surely is no easy task, but both things have to be tackled at the same time anyway, only nerfing the "exploits" without addressing the farming at the same time leaves players in a bad spot and leads to what we have now in the forums (discontent, frustration, doomsaying, etc.).

 

And if the nerf can't wait ... well, neither can the fix: they are both sides of the same coin.

[FelisImpurrator]

 

Pretty much this, although I'd love it if we finally ran out of cheats to squash and DE could actually get around to buffing drop rates for us poor buggers who don't spend half their playtime on Draco. Especially in solo!

De doesn't seem to participate in the community as a whole the way they used to, and maybe it's an issue with how flagrantly toxic and confrontational the community has become (something that will likely get worse as the playerbase grows). Maybe they don't have time. Or maybe it's like OP said and they just don't care most of the time.

 

It's gotten to the point where I see more developer interaction with Warframe players on Twitter rather than the actual Warframe forums and I think that's really weird to me. I see people like DE_Steve respond to more scathing comments and structured criticism on Twitter than the forums nowadays. It's just seems like the forums are a place where the community gets to run wild and argue at each other while DE periodically checks in to make sure nothing gets too out-of-hand or to drop some information and leave.

 

It just brings back memories of the older times a couple years back when you could see a very real connection between the community and the devs.

Now this is an interesting perspective and a very good read.

 

My conclusion that they do read feedback to some significant extent (maybe not ALL of it, unfortunately, but quite a bit) is based on observing their patching behavior. Especially when it comes to implementing heavily requested features and fixing very recent bugs as of... even Update 17 alone. And of course we have things like [DE]Glen's stream. So the idea that they don't care is, simply put, not very likely.

 

But at the same time, the lack of open acknowledgment most times has led me to think of the other possibilities that you mentioned - one, that they might not have as much time; two, that the forums have become so deeply associated with toxicity and non-constructive posting that the devs don't particularly like checking in on it anymore. It may very well be that they're mostly communicating on Twitter because Twitter gives them less crap for everything (relatively speaking) and it's a lot faster to use.

 

I would very much like a return to these old days you talk about. I was never around, but it sounds like a blast.

[FelisImpurrator]

I guess we agree then! I know an overhaul surely is no easy task, but both things have to be tackled at the same time anyway, only nerfing the "exploits" without addressing the farming at the same time leaves players in a bad spot and leads to what we have now in the forums (discontent, frustration, doomsaying, etc.).

 

And if the nerf can't wait ... well, neither can the fix: they are both sides of the same coin.

Exactly this - but of course, it has to be noted that all the rage threads flooding the forums all the time are actively slowing down this process. They're turning DE off, making the forums less and less credible as a source of feedback - if you logged in and all you saw was people insulting you mindlessly for pages upon pages without offering their ideas for real solutions, and you had to dig through dozens of pages' worth of threads to find the few gems of good discussion buried amidst the crap, wouldn't you say "Screw this, I'm just doing it my way instead"? It's as if very few people realize that DE is also comprised of human beings, and human beings do not generally feel charitable when other people constantly subject them to pure, distilled vitriol and wild conspiracy theories.

[MagPrime]

I went back and re-read the first post. While it may be argued that it was not accurate, I agree with it. I think that DE is not listening to the majority of players. I have seen too much nerfing in reaction to player comments from a small portion of the community. 

 

-snip-

 

I'd like to respond to just this portion.

 

While I agree that DE is pulling away from the community I fully believe that it is a result of how the community has been handling their interactions with DE.  Like has been mentioned already, the DEvs are people, and how many people do you know that would willingly jump into the toxic, elitist, self important mess that is the forums?

 

Yes, DE has done some 'kneejerk' reactions to some things, but after (light) poking around the 'Community Hot Topics' sub-forum, I found that some of the kneejerk stuff was put up for a vote and further discussion, but the people that needed to weigh in on those, were no where to be found.

 

DE puts the information out there for us, the majority are too wrapped up in making amusing and self gratifying snarky comments to each other to actually do what we're supposed to as beta testers - provide feedback in a civil and constructive manner.

 

The best way to fix this would be for the community to take a look at it's own behavior and see what can be adjusted, same for DE, but it has to be from both parties and not just one.  Otherwise, one group will be trying to fix things while the other is simply taking gleeful advantage of the other.

[Liminal]

DE puts the information out there for us, the majority are too wrapped up in making amusing and self gratifying snarky comments to each other to actually do what we're supposed to as beta testers - provide feedback in a civil and constructive manner.

 

The best way to fix this would be for the community to take a look at it's own behavior and see what can be adjusted, same for DE, but it has to be from both parties and not just one.  Otherwise, one group will be trying to fix things while the other is simply taking gleeful advantage of the other.

I do agree we have to be civil and behave properly, and if we do give feedback it needs to be in a polite manner, but I do not agree we are beta testers. Not after all these items and Prime Access. It's a beta in name only.

 

Also, while I do believe many people are A******s online, as a business you only have yourself to blame for anything that happens with your product: any excuse is a failure in understanding your customer base. Even if you are 100% sure you are right there are ways to handle things that will work better than others.

[MagPrime]

I do agree we have to be civil and behave properly, and if we do give feedback it needs to be in a polite manner, but I do not agree we are beta testers. Not after all these items and Prime Access. It's a beta in name only.

 

Also, while I do believe many people are A******s online, as a business you only have yourself to blame for anything that happens with your product: any excuse is a failure in understanding your customer base. Even if you are 100% sure you are right there are ways to handle things that will work better than others.

I'm a fairly literal person, so for me the game having the beta tag means it's still in beta, regardless of cash shop/PA, etc. 

 

I'm not saying DE is blaming us for the current issues, I'm saying that they are playing it safe by avoiding unnecessary interaction and they are giving us the place to weigh in on impending changes, a place that the majority of people that should be weighing in, aren't.

[Empiren]

 Dont get me wrong DE should listen to the community but the community arent experts in game design.

 

Ok DE hasn't shown expert game design.

 

The fact that this game  is in perpetual beta,  with mechanics and stats being changed by huge amounts all the time.

 

 

What I find most concerning outside of FoTM content is the amount of patch notes for conclave.

 

I'm looking at almost half the actual changes to stats and it's conclave changes.

 

 

Conclave should not be a focus. Ever. It's incredibly low population,  ridiculously clunky gameplay, and mods don't even transfer over.

 

Ugh. DE is just clearly not great at game design when it comes to priority.

[Liminal]

What I find most concerning outside of FoTM content is the amount of patch notes for conclave.

 

I'm looking at almost half the actual changes to stats and it's conclave changes.

 

Conclave should not be a focus. Ever. It's incredibly low population,  ridiculously clunky gameplay, and mods don't even transfer over.

I'm pretty sure it's a different group of people working on it. Those guys probably do a lot of balance because they are not working on new content.

[Empiren]

I'm pretty sure it's a different group of people working on it. Those guys probably do a lot of balance because they are not working on new content.

 

That is my thought as well, but I still can't see this as priority.

[Tyrian3k]

I'm pretty sure it's a different group of people working on it. Those guys probably do a lot of balance because they are not working on new content.

 

I don't want to keep players from having PvP, even if I don't care about it myself, but when I see how much effort they put into balancing that compared to PvE, it's really frustrating me.

 

Fact of the matter is that we see tons of balancing for PvP and almost none for PvE.

 

Shotguns being reworked is nice, yes, but it took them how long?  Half a year? More? I don't even remember how long it's been. Technically a buff was needed since Damage 2.0 was introduced in U11 19 months ago.

 

Balancing in PvE happens so painfully slowly that it makes me wonder if there really is no one but Scott himself working on it.

 

And don't even try saying that the balancing changes in PvE are better and had more thought. Just look at how they went with the Rakta Ballistica. First do some minor tweaks and then they suddenly go nuts and triple the damage without even making it OP in the process.

 

The shotgun buff is also part of that. Suddenly we have quintupled damage on the Tigris and about tripled damage on the Hek.

 

Or when the Kohm was released in a completely broken state where the numbers alone obviously told everyone that it's completely useless in that state. A shotgun that doesn't deal any more damage per shot than other shotguns while consuming ten times the ammo while having horrible accuracy. Sure, put that out. Seems good enough to me.

 

Not all changes are bad, mind you, and as negative as all this rambling is, I still like DE and Warframe.

 

Those things just very often cause

kind of reaction in me.

[MagPrime]

Ok DE hasn't shown expert game design.

 

The fact that this game  is in perpetual beta,  with mechanics and stats being changed by huge amounts all the time.

 

 

What I find most concerning outside of FoTM content is the amount of patch notes for conclave.

 

I'm looking at almost half the actual changes to stats and it's conclave changes.

 

 

Conclave should not be a focus. Ever. It's incredibly low population,  ridiculously clunky gameplay, and mods don't even transfer over.

 

Ugh. DE is just clearly not great at game design when it comes to priority.

Where is your proof of FoTM content?  Give me a list of items and stat changes.

 

No generalizations, no 'look for yourself' bs.  Pony up the proof.  I'd really like to see this for myself.

[Liminal]

I don't want to keep players from having PvP, even if I don't care about it myself, but when I see how much effort they put into balancing that compared to PvE, it's really frustrating me.

 

Fact of the matter is that we see tons of balancing for PvP and almost none for PvE.

 

Shotguns being reworked is nice, yes, but it took them how long?  Half a year? More? I don't even remember how long it's been. Technically a buff was needed since Damage 2.0 was introduced in U11 19 months ago.

 

Balancing in PvE happens so painfully slowly that it makes me wonder if there really is no one but Scott himself working on it.

Again, if they are not the same guys it's to be expected. If you want to make it an "us vs them" thing we do get a lot more content for pve than for pvp. I guess they have different priorities.

 

I'm not saying everything is perfect: I want more pve balance too, but comparing the work of people making guns, frames, maps and more to a team dedicated (mostly) to balance isn't really fair.