Retaking Origin - A Suggestion For A Perpetual Endgame

[Dieson]

Harmony and Cells would be especially good together because the high level cells would be hard to complete if you don't have a solid grasp on how to utilize the different warframe abilities, which includes things like wallrunning, dash attack etc. Both of these then added to Phaenurs Sector influence system would add a great deal of depth and replayability.

[Enomic]

Bump for attention!

[shygddt]

If DE can work out a balance to prevent players from curb stomping everything, this is a SOLID idea. +1

[Ariarch]

What about the ability to get a rare weapon blueprint? Something unique. Also, what about adding the ability to go to new places when the current area  

has been captured. Like on Earth, the moon or vice versa. For Mars, the asteroid belt, for mercury, solar orbiters. These missions would have extremely high level enemies and special mods and rewards. Plus exclusive bosses. 

The universe is the limit.

And I do want to leave the Sol system to explore it. ASAP.

[[DE]Draice]

There are a lot of really good ideas here. I can't promise anything, but I'll forward this topic to Steve and Scott and ask them to look it over if they haven't already.

[notionphil]

oops, i just realized I had not upvoted. Fixed :)

[Lluid]

Hey guys, what a jubilant discussion, from the ideas to how they are presented to how they are discussed.

Thanks for the hour of pleasant reading. :)

 

There's one particular thing that caught my eye :

Lastly, have some events like planetary invasions or assaults nigh impossible to overcome so that this system doesn't simply devolve into "grind when we tell you to," and instead creates an atmosphere of the Tenno actually fighting a desperate fight.

This is the most delicate question, but also the most promising. Here are my thoughts :

Players should not have the feeling that the "garrison" (enemy influence bar presented in the OP) is just unbeatable in some occasions. As was said, the most important is to avoid frustration !

• For this, players should be able to see at the end of each mission what was their own contribution (as well as their team's) to the garrison reduction.
   
• They should also have real-time info about the whole tenno effort : how many of tennos are contributing to the fight, what percentage of connected players, maybe even clans' efficiency (something like "sum of contributions" divided by "sqrt(number of members)").
   
• In the case the garrison bar seems too hard to beat, tennos who lose too often should be able to retreat to other missions in the planetoid screen and build defenses here. Every map would have a defense percentage bar. If enemies win in the main battle map, they would lock other maps of the planetoid, following normal paths, until they meet defenses that were successfully built. The important point is that even the less experienced players could participate to the defense without having a negative effect due to their loss in the main battle, and being frustrated. Meanwhile, hardcore gamers would stay in the main battle to gain time for others to build defenses. Cooperation, cooperation...
   
• What would determine enemies strength ? Only their lvl ? I feel uncomfortable with the idea of a defense starting with lvl 120 enemies. I mean, experienced players would handle them but for many it would be just frustrating. On the contrary, enemies could have a normal lvl, but with a real advantage. For example, Corpus would be immune to any ability, Infested would be immune to anything except fire, Greener would have a better armor that ignores... even armor ignore. :-p
  This advantage, of course, could be countered by a special artifact (or even a mod, or something not permanent) that would have to be found in a unique quest, or even in a Cell ! With such a system, tennos would have a real advantage since last battle when they come for a revenge.
   
• Players losing a defense should have a secondary objective : reach extraction. That would add more depth to the battle (actually, it's true for all the defenses), and would allow the team to say : "We'll $%ing come back!"
  If they reach extraction, they lose less points than if they die. Simply.

I hope you'll comment that :)

[Phaenur]

Hey, look, I'm finally back.  I'll still be posting very infrequently for another week or so, but I'm glad to see that there are still people interested - especially in the wake of the big "Ticking Regret" thread currently on the main page.

 

Wow, I have a lot of posts to review here.

 

First, my reaction to the Artifact Defense event, which was pretty much the last time I had a chance to play.  All throughout, I was wondering if DE had been reading this more than they were letting on, because I'm certain the idea has come up in some form or another repeatedly between this thread and Notionphil's.  Defense missions with chaotic numbers and levels of enemies scattered throughout the entire solar system with tangible rewards?  Yes please!  Even small things like this vastly increase gameplay enjoyability, and add/demonstrate the mechanics that can be used to build on top of it.  My only gripe (aside from little things like the Galleon map or the sheer firepower Napalms can deliver) was that the rewards were entirely personal, and because of the exhilarating difficulty the missions delivered I was always hesitant to commit to another run if I already had the mod.  It wasn't really a community event, and I just battered my way through with DiabolusUrsus and a few of my other contacts.  I didn't make a public run at all the way I did with the Fusion MOA event, and that was a tragic missed opportunity.

 

As to the forums - I will unrepentantly plug my thread as a possible solution to the problems raised in "Ticking Regret."  Lluid's recent-ish comment really seemed to focus strongly on the concept of teamwork and beneficial rivalry between statistical comparisons and ways for understrength/inexperienced/unlucky players to contribute to the concentrated war effort.  I absolutely love the idea of rear-echelon fortification, to the point that I would suggest scrapping sector influence  to replace it with "secure all missions and eliminate the garrison" as the win condition.  Unfortunately, it would be much harder to implement with existing mechanics - maybe some variation on the alert system?  I'm not entirely certain - and, to be honest, fortifications don't seem very Tenno beyond our independent dojos.  I like the idea, but I'm not certain how it would work.  Thoughts, anyone?

 

Also, DE has stated a distinct interest in establishing sector storylines, and that would take some doing to mesh with this idea (although Notionphil is probably dancing a jig at the acceptance his Cells idea has gotten).  I'll definitely add my more detailed thoughts on how to mesh this with a planetary plotline once I have them, internet access permitting, but hopefully someone else has some ideas in the interim.  For now, all I can really think of is that the two systems are seperate-but-equal (and I never thought I'd be using that phrase seriously), where the first run or whatever DE decides the conditions are tell the story and everything after that switches to the more general war effort.  It might work, but if there's a way to integrate them more tightly I'd like to find it.

 

And that's about all I'm coherent enough to type just now.  Once again, I'm gratified to see the positive response here, especially (no offense to everyone else) Admin Draice a few lines up.  Hopefully my internet and wakefulness will line up again soon for long enough for me to read and reply to everything else interesting I've seen - if nothing else, Warframe has a very good community when it comes to ideas and feedback.

[DiabolusUrsus]

Hey guys, what a jubilant discussion, from the ideas to how they are presented to how they are discussed.

Thanks for the hour of pleasant reading. :)

 

There's one particular thing that caught my eye :

 

 

This is the most delicate question, but also the most promising. Here are my thoughts :

Players should not have the feeling that the "garrison" (enemy influence bar presented in the OP) is just unbeatable in some occasions. As was said, the most important is to avoid frustration !

• For this, players should be able to see at the end of each mission what was their own contribution (as well as their team's) to the garrison reduction.

   

• They should also have real-time info about the whole tenno effort : how many of tennos are contributing to the fight, what percentage of connected players, maybe even clans' efficiency (something like "sum of contributions" divided by "sqrt(number of members)").

   

• In the case the garrison bar seems too hard to beat, tennos who lose too often should be able to retreat to other missions in the planetoid screen and build defenses here. Every map would have a defense percentage bar. If enemies win in the main battle map, they would lock other maps of the planetoid, following normal paths, until they meet defenses that were successfully built. The important point is that even the less experienced players could participate to the defense without having a negative effect due to their loss in the main battle, and being frustrated. Meanwhile, hardcore gamers would stay in the main battle to gain time for others to build defenses. Cooperation, cooperation...

   

• What would determine enemies strength ? Only their lvl ? I feel uncomfortable with the idea of a defense starting with lvl 120 enemies. I mean, experienced players would handle them but for many it would be just frustrating. On the contrary, enemies could have a normal lvl, but with a real advantage. For example, Corpus would be immune to any ability, Infested would be immune to anything except fire, Greener would have a better armor that ignores... even armor ignore. :-p

  This advantage, of course, could be countered by a special artifact (or even a mod, or something not permanent) that would have to be found in a unique quest, or even in a Cell ! With such a system, tennos would have a real advantage since last battle when they come for a revenge.

   

• Players losing a defense should have a secondary objective : reach extraction. That would add more depth to the battle (actually, it's true for all the defenses), and would allow the team to say : "We'll $%ing come back!"

  If they reach extraction, they lose less points than if they die. Simply.

I hope you'll comment that :)

For the most part, this is an excellent idea. I can't say that I'm certain about the idea of falling back to defend. It'd be tricky to implement effectively - how exactly would a player designate that they were contributing to fortification? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head would be contributing resources (very moderate amounts, of course) to construction projects that finish in say, 10-15 minutes. However, then players would be forced to choose between contributing to the war effort... and saving up for their new toys. In a game that currently draws a lot of its enterainment value from new toys, that's a risky business proposition.

So, allow me to provide an alternate suggestion: Lines of battle. Have the defense split into say, 3-5 lines, where the front lines are the most difficult, but have the most influence on the overall outcome, with lines further back getting both weaker enemies and weaker influence. It's kind of a half-baked idea at the moment, but any alterations/improvements people can make should hopefully make it easily workable. That being said, I'd still love it if DE or someone else in the community could come up with the perfect way to implement defense construction. That'd be pretty cool.

Now to address your concerns about defense difficulty:

I am completely on board with you and your sentiment that higher level = higher difficulty is not the most fun means of creating a challenge. So, how about this: Sector bosses/ minibosses will appear during the defense, and focus on attacking the players, rather than the defense objective. This happens in conjunction with the current wave, so players are forced to walk a tight rope between making sure the cryopod/power core/artifact/etc. isn't being swarmed, and surviving the attacks of the boss character while working towards taking them out. I think this would fit in nicely with the idea that the sector bosses are actively fighting against the player.

[Lluid]

OK, I was talking about "building defenses" but it could be anything, as long as everybody can be useful. As you both underlined it's far better for space ninjas to actually act as commandos (to weaken the enemy at precise spots) rather than just "building" defenses and wait for an attack. :p

So if there was an attack, say, on Callisto (Jupiter), it could simply look like that (but much better of course):

In this sketch the percentages just represent the overall enemy influence in each map (if you prefer we could rather represent tennos influence), with the global garrison being calculated from the points you get in missions and alerts in that zone. Note that the garrison is not a mean of the enemy influences. They are quite independant. Let's give details.

Garrison and enemy influences would start at 50%. Then :

 - Enemy influences and garrison increase with time.

 - every kill or successful mission reduces the garrison (with a weight depending on difficulty) and reduces enemy influence in the current map only.

 - successful alerts reduce the garrison only.

 - if an enemy influence reaches 100%, nothing special happens. It just stops increasing but we still can decrease it.

 - If an enemy influence reaches 0%, this map is secure for 1 day.

 - if garrison reaches 0%, we won !

 - if garrison reaches 100%, we lost. All maps starting from the main attack are locked, except those that were secure and those after them following blue paths.

 

In summary tennos would have to fight in maps around callisto, with difficulty decreasing with distance to the main attack spot.

[JimmyThreeNut]

Excellent Suggestion, you get a bunny :D

 

(\_/)

(*-*)

(vv)

[DiabolusUrsus]

OK, I was talking about "building defenses" but it could be anything, as long as everybody can be useful. As you both underlined it's far better for space ninjas to actually act as commandos (to weaken the enemy at precise spots) rather than just "building" defenses and wait for an attack. :p

So if there was an attack, say, on Callisto (Jupiter), it could simply look like that (but much better of course):

In this sketch the percentages just represent the overall enemy influence in each map (if you prefer we could rather represent tennos influence), with the global garrison being calculated from the points you get in missions and alerts in that zone. Note that the garrison is not a mean of the enemy influences. They are quite independant. Let's give details.

Garrison and enemy influences would start at 50%. Then :

 - Enemy influences and garrison increase with time.

 - every kill or successful mission reduces the garrison (with a weight depending on difficulty) and reduces enemy influence in the current map only.

 - successful alerts reduce the garrison only.

 - if an enemy influence reaches 100%, nothing special happens. It just stops increasing but we still can decrease it.

 - If an enemy influence reaches 0%, this map is secure for 1 day.

 - if garrison reaches 0%, we won !

 - if garrison reaches 100%, we lost. All maps starting from the main attack are locked, except those that were secure and those after them following blue paths.

 

In summary tennos would have to fight in maps around callisto, with difficulty decreasing with distance to the main attack spot.

 

This looks good to me. Maybe a few more alert segments of the battle thrown in, but otherwise I can't find much fault with it. Quick suggestion - if all territories past the main point of attack are locked on failure, it should be that the more territories the enemy attempts to acquire at once (say, if the Infested were to attack Amalthea in an attempt to close off the rest of Jupiter, they should be less powerful, as their forces are spread more thinly. However if they're only coming after say, Themisto, they should be much stronger as a result of a concentrated attack. Rewards for success of course improve proportionally to difficulty. \

 

Does anyone have any thoughts on the inclusion of bosses in defense alerts as a means of increasing difficulty without defaulting to generic level increases?

[Phaenur]

I figure it's well past time for a summary of the ideas and refinements from across the thread

 

1.  Alert missions are the core element that affects sector control values.  Standard missions are mostly there to give players access to more alerts.  As an extension of this, simple failure to participate in an alert can slow the process down - regardless of whether or not the players could reach it in the first place.  This would put the brakes on the various conquests and give an incentive to expand your territory access, but no existing game mechanics allow this just yet.

 

2.  Enemy forces can lock down missions around a given planetoid, probably with a defense alert.  While this adds dynamism and ties in well with 1., the "lockdown" method again does not have any parallel in demonstrated game mechanics.  DiabolusUrsus and Lluid in particular have proposed methods for handling this.

 

3.  Use the various factions' reactions to defeat to characterize them.  This will hopefully tie in with DE's stated intention to add at least some story elements to the map (starting with Mercury).

 

4.  Implement Notionphil's Cell idea as a method of gaining control/reward for gaining control/showcase for story elements/just do it because it's amazing.  It might be difficult, but the idea has taken off even more than this one has, and the two would mesh very well.

 

5.  Controlling a planetoid doesn't drop the spawn rates (although other methods of generating difficulty are always welcome) but instead merely boosts the item and especiall resource drop rates.  Right now the combat and the flashy abilities are the big draws for the game and limiting combat isn't necessarily a good "reward" for coordinated effort.

 

6.  Although we've been crying for transparency, hide the specific effects of victory and defeat beyond general progress bars but by the same token, give enough of an indication that players can make an educated guess.  Reducing alert decisions to a mathematical priority makes the system less organic, but on the other hand it's rarely a bad thing to give players genuine dilemmas like "Do I go for the high-value alert that only carries 2K credits, or the one that barely affects the bar but gives me the blueprint I want?"

 

I'm finally back online, so I can reply more promptly than I have been.  I look forward to seeing what else people come up with.

[RegularGamer]

The two concepts, Phaenur's System Conflict and the Cell mission arcs work really well together. Would also be cool if certain Cell rewards could even contribute to the System Conflict bars. Or certain System Conflict rewards were Cell Dossier BP's about that system's backstory :D

 

This needs to happen.

[VeronikaStripper]

This is a lot of work, but I think it has SO much merit. I endorse this!

[Aerensiniac]

Aerensiniac started an impressively large thread elsewhere on the Gameplay Feedback forum, "This Isn't the Kind of Feedback You're Looking For...", that made several good points about the current design model – “grinding for grinding’s sake,” I believe the phrase was.  Now, personally I’ve found it easier to adapt than most of the people on that thread but that draws almost entirely on my circle of RL friends that play with me and on my instinctive tendency to set “storyline” goals for myself and roleplay against even the least fitting background.  Obviously, that won’t help everyone – but there might just be a way to make it viable as a game model and provide at least the illusion of progress instead of just spinning our wheels as we farm to gamble for chances at chances.

 

Now that I’m getting to my actual suggestion I’m almost inevitably going to ramble, and this is hardly fully formed, so I welcome additional comments and refinements.  In particular, I have no idea where to start on numbers and rewards, but I'm sure there are people out there with good starting points.  In any event...

 

What I propose is some system to measure enemy control and Tenno influence over a given planetoid.  My personal model, considering the zerg rushes we tend to face in game, is a simple numerical counter, almost like a health bar for the dominant faction.  The number decreases for every enemy killed at the end of a mission – just subtract the total kills from the big number – and refills at a certain rate per hour.  Let’s call this the “garrison.”  Now, the refill rate is enough to prevent Tenno from winning a war of attrition – Grineer clone, Corpus manufacture, and Infested…er, infest, quickly enough to replace the losses they’d suffer in occasional random incursions.  But then, there are also prime targets that can cause greater casualties or interfere with their reinforcements – Sabotage, Capture, and Assassinate missions reduce the refill rate gradually with each successful run.  Meanwhile, the Tenno need to build their own forces in the sector as well, with a second counter that fills slowly for each success and has a gradual decay rate.  Mission failures and player deaths drain this “influence” number, while Defense and Rescue missions give it a sizable boost (and an equally sizable penalty for failure).  The Datamass missions (Spy, Deception, MobDef) might boost the kill count and influence gain from future missions by a percentage point or so.  Alerts in general follow the same patterns as their mundane counterparts, but have higher bonuses and penalties in addition to offering the credit and item bonuses like normal.  Once the influence and garrison numbers start to meet, the sector goes from enemy-controlled to contested and this boosts the rate of hazards – particularly boarding actions – in future runs as enemy ships take damage, fall out of supply, or get pounced on by the other factions.  I’d love to see individual missions change control as the bar shifts, but that would be needlessly complex.

 

If the garrison can be reduced to below, say, 10% of default and Tenno influence pushed through the ceiling - this should take days if not weeks to accomplish barring coordinated action - then we manage to take de facto control of the planetoid.  This should give a guaranteed reward of some sort to all players who participated in at least the last few days of the conquest (blueprint, resource cache, potatoes/forma, maybe at least one prebuilt part for the sector’s Warframe – I’m sure someone has a reasonably balanced idea), and will reduce enemy spawn rates in missions while boosting drops to keep them consistent – we’re mopping up and seizing assets while we have the chance, not painfully inching our way through the enemy hordes.  Within 48 hours or so, that sector will get a Fusion MOA-style event that resets the spawn rates – victory here allows us to retain control for another few days and nets us fresh rewards, defeat signals a reset to the original garrison size and a hit to Tenno influence all across the system.

 

There might even be bonus objectives in controlled sectors, something like the build-up to WoW's Ahn'Qiraj way back when.  We could try to rebuild the Outer Terminus relay on the off chance we can hold Pluto for long enough, for instance, although I strongly doubt that DE is quite ready to let us out of Sol just yet.  Of course, if you remember the Fusion MOA event there were dozens of people claiming that the devs were manipulating percentages to ensure that we won, and they could easily do the same in reverse to give us an endgame objective while also buying themselves time.  That’s only a suggestion in the end, though, and there are plenty of other things they could do with the same concept that wouldn’t require extrasystemic maps or new tilesets.  In fact, while we're thinking small, each "capital" world (Earth, Neptune, Eris) could allow investment in a public Tenno lab.  It would grant access to research even to people outside of clans, with the drawback of only being accessible while the sector is secure and requiring a large initial investment to establish in the first place (granted, since this comes from everyone and not just an interested clan, the cost is definitely defrayed somewhat).  Again, suggestions and speculation, and I'd love to hear yours.

 

On top of this, there would be a strong incentive for clans to coordinate not just internally but with one another to lock down either specific sectors or even go for a complete reconquest of Origin, and adding some form of leaderboard for this would be wonderful.  That said, my experience with leaderboards is marginal at best, so I’d particularly welcome commentary here.  We’re already hearing major backlash against the “enforced” large clans, though, so giving some sort of per capita average as well as blanket stats would probably make them feel more fair for small clans and soloists.  If done well this would create the sort of friendly rivalry, the “indirect PvP” I’ve seen mentioned, that would inspire the entire playerbase to devote more energy to the game – and maybe pay into it along the way.

 

Hopefully that wall of text didn’t damage anyone’s eyes.  Again, this is hardly the system I feel “must” be implemented – but some form of tangible goal to all of our grinding would make the game vastly more palatable to those who are feeling burnt-out right now, and give some sense of purpose beyond “I want this cool-looking gun/suit/room” to basically everything we can do in game.

 

After all, didn’t the opening scroll promise that it was time to retake Origin?

 

 

Hi. My name is Aerensiniac, im late and i approve of this message.

Edited August 28, 2013 by Aerensiniac

[Tri2killme]

They implemented part of this idea in arid fear didint they? Still this needs to happen over the long term :) It would make the game so much more interesting. I love the planetside 2 side of it as in factions battling for control and I have to say I love that idea. If i could I would plus 100 you but I can only plus 1 so +1!

Btw personally I think we need a feature like this for example that can alert us to the vast warframe community in-game but seeing as we only see 3 others for every other match its quite hard to imagine.

Edited August 28, 2013 by Tri2killme

[MageMeat]

Oh my.

Somebody has reached into the collections of thousands of posts and drew this back up to the front page.

Whoever did so, bless you.

[alocrius]

This seems like a good systemic integration of what DE is already doing with the events.  I could see it as a good foundation for adding expansive game-wide content.. but by itself I don't see this as perpetual endgame.  I think gameplay needs over-hauled before something like this would be meaningful or appreciated by the community, or at least by me.  Think how many veterans there would be by the time they implemented something like this who would be b-ching that it was just more of the same ol' same ol'.  I'm not belittling the idea at all but I strongly feel DE  needs to grow some huevos and start innovating new content before re-mixing stuff they have already done.  Just my 2 cents.  +1

Edited August 28, 2013 by alocrius

[M4g1kz]

They are adding the reputation system which could feasibly be a building block to this kind of set-up, very nice post sir.
+10 Internets