A not-so-simple change to disincentivize Draco

[KaeseSchnitte]

Suggestion:

Missions that are not often played compared with all other missions in the game should become harder, spawn more enemies and award more loot and XP up to a cetain point (x1.5?) than their often played counterparts.

Likewise, often played missions should become easier, spawn less enemies and award less loot and XP.

 

Expected impact:

This would lead to missions that are often played becoming unattractive, while missions that are played less often becoming more attractive.

If done right, this could make missions shifting in and out of "the meta", based on how often they have been played in the recent past. The multiplier should be displayed on the star chart, to show players which missions are harder and which are easier.

 

Q&A:

Q: Draco is not a problem, that is just your opinion!

A: The devs have said that they want to disincentivize Draco, so Draco's fate has already been sealed.

 

Q: Your suggeystion is too complicated, just nerf X or buff Y!

A: There will always be one best way of getting something as universally aviable as experience. If you just nerf Draco, or buff something else, that something will become the "new Draco" and you have not fixed, but shifted the issue onto another mission or gametype.

 

Q: Then just make something else as good as Draco!

A: You'd need the perfect balance to make something as rewarding as Draco. And you know what they say about perfection. But even if they'd manage to make another mission as rewarding as Draco, it would either be ignored or it would become old after a while too. And you can't just make all the missions equally rewarding, since you alos need some sort of progression in the game and progression means that there will always be one best way to get what you want.

 

Q: It will be too much micromanagement to find out which mission is the most rewarding!

A: As I said earlier, I want the multiplier to be openly displayed. They could even go as far as coloring the nodes based on their multiplier, ranging from red if the multplier is at its lowest to green when it's at its highest.

 

Q: Your suggestion wont work! There will be only a hand full of missions being played, since the others are just not worth it!

A: You are probably right, in the beginning, there wont be many missions phasing in and out of "meta". But then the devs could look the missions that are left out and try to make them more rewarding, so that even the mission that is unrewarding with a x1 multiplier is more rewarding with the highest multiplier than the most rewarding mission with a low multiplier.

 

Q: Your suggestion wont fix the "lootcave" issue!

A: Yes and no. On the one hand, there will still be a mission that is the most rewarding one. On the other hand, this mission wont always be Draco but hopefully many different missions which are alternating each other over time.

So while there will still be one best place to farm experience, that place wont be tied to a location or a node, but to a high multiplier.

 

Q: Wouldn't early missions with high multipliers get too hard for new players?

A: That could very well be. To circumvent that the devs could use a lower cap for those early missions. So if normal missions could have an up to x3 multplier, early missions would only have an up to x1.25 multplier for example.

 

Q: Your suggestion would lead to all missions giving the same rewards, since any outliers would be farmed until their multiplier dropped to the same level of all other missions, defeating any progression in the game.

A: This might be a valid concern, but there are many ways to circumvent this, some of which I will list here:

• Different, cyclic changing base values for the multipliers: This would ensure that every cycle another mission would come out ahead of all the other missions in terms of reward.
• Sluggish multipliers: Often farmed missions would "overshoot" the perfect balance, becoming less attractive than other missions.
• Having the factions apply different strategies: When the rewards of different missions run the risk of being too unified, the factions could focus their efforts on a few missions, letting the multipliers go through the roof.

Mutlipliers in generla would work pretty well with the systems currently in place, alerts or invasions for example could boost the multiplier, making those missions even more rewarding.

 

Q: Your sugestion would nerf Draco, since no other mission, even with higher multipliers would be as rewarding as Draco!

A: Draco is an outlier when it comes to XP rewards and the devs have declared that they are not happy with those outliers. So yes, it would nerf Draco and it would nerf any other mission that gets "abused", but that is in the dev's interest. I'd also like to note that the devs don't want to "destroy our fun", they just want to make sure that the players don't get burned out playing the same mission over and over again. My suggestion would easily allow them to incentive players to play certain missions by artificially raising their multpiliers.

 

Q: Would that affect item drop chances aswell?

A: Indirectly yes. I'd suggest, if that isn't already the case, that certain item drops are mainly tied to certain enemy types. So if a mission as a low mutiplier, less of those enemies would spawn and thus your chances of getting the items you want are lower than average. On the other hand, you would benefit from high multipliers aswell, since those would lead to more enemies of said type spawning, giving you more chances to get the item you want.

 

Q: Why are you still defending your suggestion? It would require new systems that the devs have to develop and it bears many uncertainties, at worst leading to a totally unbalanced system and unhappy players?

A: The title already displays that this system would require some work, but I still think that it would be worth it in the end. Not only makes it sense from a lore perspective, the different factions reacting to being pressured to different amounts on different missions, but it also allows the devs to "dictate" the meta, without having to drastically nerf or buff some missions. They could emphasise certain missions by giving them high multipliers, they could spread the playerbase out by giving different missions custom multipliers, they could tweak the algorithm that manages the mutipliers to subtly or drastically change the meta and ultimately finetune it to ensure that there are no outliers in terms of reward, in both directions.

At last, I think it benefits the player, since the player is able to experience more of Warframe's universe without being annoyed of not being efficient enough.

Edited April 7, 2016 by KaeseSchnitte

[akira_him]

too complicated

just revert the excavation changes they did, give us back old kiste, and improve the stealth counter, suddenly a lot of people will get away from Draco

[KaeseSchnitte]

But they will find a new best way to get XP. My change would ensure that players will use more than just one mission.

Edited April 2, 2016 by KaeseSchnitte

[akira_him]

2 minutes ago, KaeseSchnitte said:

But they will find a new best way to get XP. My change would ensure that players will use more than just one mission.

we need no shifting meta, we need no meta at all, make everything equally good

[KaeseSchnitte]

That wont happen. It even is empirical impossible.

[GrimAtrament]

well rip draco when starmap 3.0 is released ;)  also iv never need to use draco to level and im rank 16 and at my rank up stage

[Fifield]

2 hours ago, KaeseSchnitte said:

This would lead to missions that are often played becoming unattractive, while missions that are played more often becoming less attractive.

If it were up to me, I'd implement this in a patch tomorrow.

It's not the neatest idea and it makes no sense from a Tenno perspective...
But it would fix the problem and could be programmed in about 20 mins.  Steve's been working on Star Map 3.0 for 6 months already and we probably won't see it in the next 3 either.

[BlackCoMerc]

Get. Rid. Of. Forma. Reset. Period.

That's it. Thats all you have to do to get rid of Draco farming. Forma resets are tedious, frustrating and show complete lack of respect for players' time and efforts. So players seek to shortcut the grind. 

If you get rid of Draco players will find the next best loot cave. Because - say it with me - there will always be a loot cave. Always. Players will simply gravitate to the next best spot for farming. You base your entire game around the need to farm and a subset of players will always seek out the best, most efficient method to do it. 

Edit: One other question: Why does it matter so much to some people how others want to play a game? If people want to farm efficiently it isnt hurting you. Stop trying to force everyone to play your way.

Edited April 2, 2016 by BlackCoMerc

[Fifield]

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Get. Rid. Of. Forma. Reset. Period.

That's it. Thats all you have to do to get rid of Draco farming. Forma resets are tedious, frustrating and show complete lack of respect for players' time and efforts. So players seek to shortcut the grind.

Rubbish, players will still hit Draco to level weapons.

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

there will always be a loot cave.

This is like saying "there will always be crime so let's not bother with police".

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Stop trying to force everyone to play your way.

How dare we make suggestions on how to improve the game?  In a suggestion forum.

[Sylviee]

6 hours ago, akira_him said:

too complicated

just revert the excavation changes they did, give us back old kiste, and improve the stealth counter, suddenly a lot of people will get away from Draco

I never understood why they removed kiste, it was a good place to get EXP without the need to go viver, stephano or draco. 

[KaeseSchnitte]

3 hours ago, Fifield said:

If it were up to me, I'd implement this in a patch tomorrow.

It's not the neatest idea and it makes no sense from a Tenno perspective...
But it would fix the problem and could be programmed in about 20 mins.  Steve's been working on Star Map 3.0 for 6 months already and we probably won't see it in the next 3 either.

Ignoring the huge typo I have made in that statement, it would actually make some sense. If the Tenno are focussing their attacks on one region of the map, the enemy presence in that region would decrease. A smart enemy would then use the time while the Tenno are busy camping that one region to overrun other regions with less Tenno presence.

[motorfirebox]

3 hours ago, BlackCoMerc said:

there will always be a loot cave.

That's really not a good argument. The question isn't whether there's a loot cave, it's how much better the loot cave is than everything else. If the loot cave is insanely better, it leads pretty directly to players burning out on doing the same stuff over and over. If it's only a bit better, players can do other stuff without feeling like they're missing out or wasting time.

[Tritanya]

50 minutes ago, KaeseSchnitte said:

Ignoring the huge typo I have made in that statement, it would actually make some sense. If the Tenno are focussing their attacks on one region of the map, the enemy presence in that region would decrease. A smart enemy would then use the time while the Tenno are busy camping that one region to overrun other regions with less Tenno presence.

You're not wrong.  Let's consider for a moment how this would play out gamewise if it was implemented.

What kind of missions do players tend to focus on?  Endless ones, right?  Where they can sit in the same mission and rack up the rewards constantly?  So - and I'm assuming here that the entire starmap would share a multiplier - you'll /tend/ to see lower multipliers on endless missions, and higher multis on things like exterminate, spy, capture.

Would the multiplier instead be per-planet?  Because not all planets have all types of nodes.  (And it would make sense for enemy presence to shift on-planet significantly, instead of diverting resources from other planets.  Or maybe there's two sets of multipliers, one for 'this planet compared to others' and one for 'this node compared to others on this planet'.)
Would it take into account how long the players spent in the mission, instead of just how many times the mission was completed?
Would you weight solo runs as heavily as two-, three-, four-Tenno runs when considering how to adjust the multiplier?
What about Dark Sector missions?  How do you factor them into your equation?
From a gameplay perspective, will Corpus multiplier shifts affect Grineer multiplier shifts or will it all be one generic 'enemy strength' concept?

Just some thoughts.  I dig this idea; it would add a little depth to the game simply by tweaking some numbers, and break up monotony to boot.

[KaeseSchnitte]

Well, the same multiplier would work for different factions aswell. If the Grineer see that the Corpus are being pressured, they'd start expansions and the other way around. If the Grineer get pressured, they might decide to lay low for a while, cutting their losses.

I don't think that there should be multiple multipliers, just one for the entire solar system. I don't want you to have to "study" the system every time you want to play a mission, but rather just scrolling through all missions to see which one has the highest multiplier at the moment.

Edited April 3, 2016 by KaeseSchnitte

[BlackCoMerc]

12 hours ago, Fifield said:

Rubbish, players will still hit Draco to level weapons.

This is like saying "there will always be crime so let's not bother with police".

How dare we make suggestions on how to improve the game?  In a suggestion forum.

Except...you arent trying to improve anything. You're just trying to force everyone else, to do things your way. Just because Fascism sometimes results in a lower crime rate, to continue your metaphor, doesnt mean its right. 

As for Draco, fine - take it away. And players will flock to the next best place. Viver and E-Gate prove that. Those were the caves, until they werent and Draco became the place to go. 

What I think is really funny, is that the very system that is supposed to drive players out of these missions - the enemy scaling - is the system that instead allows them to sit there and gain ever more XP. If a Rank 20 mission started with rank 20 enemies, or close to, and they STAYED there, that mission would not offer ever increasing amounts of XP. It would instead offer XP for around rank 20 - the entire time.

Truth be told though, Endless missions are bad for the game. They have almost completely replaced well thought out content. Some still comes down the pipe now and then, but even that's a grindfest more oft than not. You cant balance around eternity. Where do you cut players off? There's nothing satisfying about the lore shattering manner in which enemies become literally too tough to kill. If the enemy has troops like this, why not just deploy them from the start? 

The game would be better off and healthier if Endless missions didnt exist. Replace the fourth/20 minute/20th wave with a boss or mini boss encounter, or an Eximus squad that fits the level, at lower levels. Provide an extra reward for defeating them. Then let us leave the mission victorious. This eliminates the need for ridiculous enemy scaling and all the problems that come with it.

Edited April 3, 2016 by BlackCoMerc

[Fifield]

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Except...you arent trying to improve anything.

Clearly wrong.

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

As for Draco, fine - take it away. And players will flock to the next best place. Viver and E-Gate prove that. Those were the caves, until they werent and Draco became the place to go.

And Viver and E-Gate were nerfed.  And the game became better*.  QED.

Plus Kaese's suggestion fixes this.

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Replace the fourth/20 minute/20th wave with a boss or mini boss encounter, or an Eximus squad that fits the level, at lower levels. Provide an extra reward for defeating them. Then let us leave the mission victorious. This eliminates the need for ridiculous enemy scaling and all the problems that come with it.

I have made similar suggestions myself but more to do with camping.

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/494645-camping-how-to-get-players-to-stop-being-cub-scouts-and-go-be-space-ninjas/

Endless is a solution for problems that shouldn't be there: lack of challenge, lack of balance and power creep.  In addition to Kaese's suggestion, I'd introduce T5 tomorrow -- again not a permanent solution.

* for everyone who doesn't think pressing a single key periodically for 30 mins = a good game

Edited April 3, 2016 by Fifield

[KaeseSchnitte]

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Except...you arent trying to improve anything. You're just trying to force everyone else, to do things your way. Just because Fascism sometimes results in a lower crime rate, to continue your metaphor, doesnt mean its right. 

As for Draco, fine - take it away. And players will flock to the next best place. Viver and E-Gate prove that. Those were the caves, until they werent and Draco became the place to go.

If there were only a system that would leave Draco mostly untouched while making sure that there is not just one way to farm effective... Oh right, there is one, I wrote it down in the OP.

Edited April 3, 2016 by KaeseSchnitte

[BlackCoMerc]

2 hours ago, KaeseSchnitte said:

If there were only a system that would leave Draco mostly untouched while making sure that there is not just one way to farm effective... Oh right, there is one, I wrote it down in the OP.

Because forcing players to run missions they might not enjoy just to get XP is better? Better how? In what way? That's right: it's better for your personal preference, and that is clearly all that matters here.

There will always be a Draco. Under your system, it will be the current least popular node. When people flick there for loads of XP you would be back here again, asking DE to not disclose which missions are least or most popular in order to prevent farming.

You cannot prevent efficient farming in a game. People will find a way. The needed eGate; people found Viver. They needed Viver; people found Draco. Nerf Draco, and you know people will just move to the next best place.

Let people play how they CHOOSE. If you don't want to farm, fine. Don't farm.

Now, all that said: rewards need to be increased for ALL non-endless missions. Dramatically. Exponentially. Because the only right way to solve this is to work WITH human nature, as opposed to against it, and offer incentive for running other missions.

People like progress. People like to feel as if they are getting away with something. Beating the system. How do we work WITH this?

Forma Resets to Mastery Rank. If you are MR15, your Forma reset only resets items to Rank 15, not Zero. Beating the system through progression.

Completing non Endless missions without dying grants +50% Affinity bonus. Beating the system through skill. Completing without alarms? Another 25% bonus. How about without using Consumable items? Another 25% bonus.

Get all 3 Spy Vaults without alarms? Defend all MD terminals without dying? Another 25 - 50% Affinity bonus.

Let's offer incentives to run other missions, and play them skillfully, as opposed to requesting Endless Nerfs.

[Fifield]

1 minute ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Because forcing players to run missions they might not enjoy just to get XP is better?

Forced how?

2 minutes ago, BlackCoMerc said:

There will always be a Draco.

How many times does this bad argument have to be shot down in the same thread?

[BlackCoMerc]

4 minutes ago, Fifield said:

Forced how?

How many times does this bad argument have to be shot down in the same thread?

Forced by the ever changing XP rewards you propose. The which would add extra tedium just to keep up with.

And you have not shot down anything. Not with facts. Not with data. You just enjoy claiming otherwise.

History has proven people will find a way to farm efficiently. In EQ it was AI pursuit boundaries in a certain map area. A loot cave has already been found in The Division. In Warframe it was eGate and Viver and then Draco. And it will ALWAYS be somewhere, that place being the current most efficient spit, wherever it is. Simple logic.

Unless you work WITH human nature. Incentives to do something else will work far better than punishments for NOT doing something else. Every time.

[BlackCoMerc]

14 hours ago, motorfirebox said:

That's really not a good argument. The question isn't whether there's a loot cave, it's how much better the loot cave is than everything else. If the loot cave is insanely better, it leads pretty directly to players burning out on doing the same stuff over and over. If it's only a bit better, players can do other stuff without feeling like they're missing out or wasting time.

Basically, this. Other missions should be brought on par with Draco. Through bonuses based on skill or just numeric tweaks. Either way, it needs to happen.

[Tritanya]

'There will always be a Draco' isn't an argument to be shot down at all; it's simply a statement of fact.

Put more accurately, it would be 'There will always be a preferred location to farm <resource/affinity>'.  I don't think anyone would argue that.  However - and forgive me if I'm putting words in anyone's mouth here - @KaeseSchnitte's issue is not that statement of fact by itself, but the actual argument that follows (often implied), namely 'therefore, we shouldn't try to fix Draco, just leave it alone and let people farm'. 

I feel like people are talking past each other here.  The idea of a shifting multiplier that reacts based on how frequently a node is visited might solve the problem of '<node> is the meta for farming and will be until the next patch', and as mentioned, I dig that.  It's not that there wouldn't be a Draco, but that the best node would be different from day to day - even hour to hour.  And creating that kind of variability in an otherwise static star chart (alerts and invasions notwithstanding) is, to me at least, an exciting concept that wouldn't require a Herculean effort to code, compared to other 'solutions' to the 'Draco problem'.

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Now, all that said: rewards need to be increased for ALL non-endless missions. Dramatically. Exponentially. Because the only right way to solve this is to work WITH human nature, as opposed to against it, and offer incentive for running other missions.

People like progress. People like to feel as if they are getting away with something. Beating the system. How do we work WITH this?

Forma Resets to Mastery Rank. If you are MR15, your Forma reset only resets items to Rank 15, not Zero. Beating the system through progression.

Completing non Endless missions without dying grants +50% Affinity bonus. Beating the system through skill. Completing without alarms? Another 25% bonus. How about without using Consumable items? Another 25% bonus.

Get all 3 Spy Vaults without alarms? Defend all MD terminals without dying? Another 25 - 50% Affinity bonus.

Let's offer incentives to run other missions, and play them skillfully, as opposed to requesting Endless Nerfs.

And this?  This I also dig, hugely.  Particularly the Forma reset to MR equivalency; MR could definitely use some more relevancy beyond being a locking mechanism.  You might have to adjust some of the numbers in here (how much time is usually spent per mission and how much should it award, etc.), but all of these are fantastic ideas.  (Though frankly I'm not sure how many people actually die during MDs, but any boost to underplayed missions is a good thing, skill-based boosts even more so.)

The only thing I would really worry about with all these suggestions is inflation, in the sense we see in the Focus system.  If affinity is easier to come by everywhere you go, then it would 'make sense' (sigh) to increase the affinity cost for everything - which is what we're getting with that.

[KaeseSchnitte]

1 hour ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Because forcing players to run missions they might not enjoy just to get XP is better? Better how? In what way? That's right: it's better for your personal preference, and that is clearly all that matters here.

 

My proposed system isn't forcing you to do anything. Even if you are after the most XP gain, you still would have multiple options. My personal preference wouldn't tell you what to play, not even my proposal would tell you what to play. It would just give incentive to play missions that haven't been played much in the precent past.

[BlackCoMerc]

7 minutes ago, KaeseSchnitte said:

My proposed system isn't forcing you to do anything. Even if you are after the most XP gain, you still would have multiple options. My personal preference wouldn't tell you what to play, not even my proposal would tell you what to play. It would just give incentive to play missions that haven't been played much in the precent past.

You complain that the artificial popularity of Draco makes finding people for less popular nodes too hard. It's bad for the game. Something with which I agree, to be honest.

However, under your system, you create another form of artificial popularity. Yes, yours changes over time. But it just creates the same problem in a different way.

Let's say...Jupiter missions get real popular. So they begin to reward less. So people go to Saturn to chase higher XP.

But I need Neural Sensors. And would appreciate help or company running Jupiter missions. Except...I cannot get any, because your system has everyone running missions elsewhere because they are currently more efficient.

Just like Draco.

I appreciate your thought and effort. However, I think the better solution is to increase rewards from ALL Non Endless missions. Adding skill based multipliers would be method; straight number tweaks are viable, too. A combination of the two is even better.

We DO need to do away with A aco. But we need to be careful that we don't create the same deeper problem in another way.

[Fifield]

5 minutes ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Except...I cannot get any, because your system has everyone running missions elsewhere because they are currently more efficient.

They still need Neural Sensors.  You just group up, decide on a node and go farm.

Just like you do already.