An Open Letter to DE on Balance

[MokutoBunshi]

"What are players SUPPOSED to do to defeat this content?"

The answers should be in my opinion:

Strategize and utilize in-game tactics(stealth, flanking tactics, and divide and conquer strategies etc).

Form a cohesive team (not just a meta team) if its a raid.

Invent one of many possible methods to fight the enemy effectively.

Use skill, speed, smarts, or even pattern prediction to be able to (or rather need to) out think the enemy, traps/ tactics/patterns/ formations/AI.

 

Just to name a few.

 

]\'[

[Flirk2]

18 minutes ago, MokutoBunshi said:

Strategize and utilize in-game tactics(stealth, flanking tactics, and divide and conquer strategies etc).

Use strategy and people will call you out for ''cheesing'', ''camping'' and so on.

Stealth - not an option in a game where everything spawns everywhere.

Flanking tactics - not an option where you have to shoot them in the face to get a head shot. Because if you shoot them in the back of their heads you don't get the damage multiplier.

It's difficult to divide and conquer a hoard spawning all over the place, you know.

 

19 minutes ago, MokutoBunshi said:

Invent one of many possible methods to fight the enemy effectively.

And in the latest dev stream we hear that as soon as players do that and find some new way to use in-game things, it's seen as a problem by the devs...

22 minutes ago, MokutoBunshi said:

Use skill, speed, smarts, or even pattern prediction to be able to (or rather need to) out think the enemy, traps/ tactics/patterns/ formations/AI.

No way to out think enemies that spawn and rush you while having more armor then you have EHP... Or a stream of homing missiles (that can do a 180 degree turn) from a bombard while you are rooted in place using those Regulator pistols...

All this ''git good'' gets old pretty fast. Especially considering that all the counterarguments are just getting ignored.

[P0TAT0CANN0N]

6 hours ago, Fifield said:

I agree with what you're saying but it comes across a bit arrogant.  I'd tone it down if you want DE to listen.  I'll remove this paragraph if you do so.

You highlight the bonkers nature of the game design for all but the newer players.  It really is a tragic waste of an awesome game engine, fantastic graphics artists and a wonderful original premise (co-op horde shooter).

DE are wilfully oblivious to this.  It would be a piece of cake for another company to come along, copy almost everything, fix this core gameplay and steal all DE's customers.

It's not about enemy EHP or damage.  It's about the ridiculously OP powers that were in the game from the beginning and heavily buffed with the corrupted mods.  The high level enemies have resulted from that to provide us with some kind of half-assed challenge.

What [DE]Steve said in the Devstream yesterday seriously concerned me.  I paraphrase but he doesn't want enemies to be as strong as us (not that anyone is asking for that) and so he wants us to be OP.  He must really want us to be OP if he's using a straw man argument.

Thing is, once the mass CC powers are fixed, DE can provide challenge easily.  It's literally adding one more planet, making up some node names, putting a few numbers in a table and giving us a reason to go there.

Why won't they do it?

I do not agree, I think OP was very clear and concise. 

They did not sound arrogant, they sounded confident. 

 

[Sonic_Mobian]

5 hours ago, Huone said:

They also need to buff/rework all the useless MR fodder weapons and frames. This is a PVE game. The computer-controlled enemies aren't going to complain.

What if the npcs did complain? Dun-Dun-duuun!

[Hidaru.]

12 hours ago, Zilchy said:

They need to create a team of players that will rigorously test all changes before releasing it to the public so that they realise more often when they make a really stupid change.

Agreed.  If they actually play tested all the changes like they claim they did they would know that Oberons passive takes too long to trigger to be considered a "useful passive" or that Volts Discharge is bugged to the point where enemies can break free of the CC before the duration is up.  They try to balance frames like they did with Mirage/Excal and Trin but Mag now has the awesome Magnetize ability that can shred level 100+ corrupted gunners/bombards with 1 shot from an unranked weapon! 

[MajorTom]

I am also done giving them money until scaling gets fixed. Fast. I gave them a lot of money.

Good thing overwatch is out.

[Sonic_Mobian]

They can do like Cryptic Studios, Host a Testing Server, But keep Market Disabled on that server only and the ability to transfer are warframes or gear to that server without adding a Debugger NPC that gives instant leveling to discurage people from using the Test Server as a Live one and regulary do Test Server wipes to clean out Warframes and Gear even mods.

Second way is just only open the test server at a certain peroid then close it until is needed again.

The last thing I want is for Warframe to not end up like Champions Online did. It was already in a bad state and there trying to slowly climb out of the hole to get things back in order again, I don't want warframe end up like Champions Online.

CO (Champions Online) had the oppeset side of Warframe's Problems, Enemies are too easy and Players are over the top powerful. While in Warframe its in reverse and the enemies are the ones powerful.

Was saying to myself a day ago "So what if they made bad changes, It's not like it's completely perment like it will never change. Oh no we are doomed!" Beacuse things can change.

Even Guild Wars 2 had some bad changes by ArenaNet and some players are unhappy about it, Players complained that ArenaNet Killed the RP Playerbase and further destroyed it with there Mega Server.

So DE is not the only people around the block making bad choices.

Edited May 28, 2016 by UltimateGrenninja

[5HV3N]

Double posting on reddit and here takes special mindset that I can't really approve.

In short op, you promise to :
"  I'm going to help you bridge the gap between player's-eye viewpoint and dev's-eye viewpoint. "
Yet you don't deliver.
It's perfectly legit rant, and well written while we're at this, but it's nothing more.  Whole that wall of text can be summarized in: "Scaling is unfair. Abusing broken mechanic is legit. Gibe moar rewards for being a tryhard."
On top of that you claim that cheezy mechanics abuse is direct result of skewd chances in droptables.

 

It's not working like that. Not even close.
And you not being supposed to beat that content is perfectly viable argument.
There is no need to stay beyond first C rotation in endless T4, it's just your choice.

Problem roots are pretty deep. I recall steve saying in one of streams that in begining they estimated playtime on warframe on around 50-something hours. They did not expect people to hang around for longer, and core gameplay is still circling around that.
Exept for focus, but time will tell how this one'll turn out.

People stay for shiniez.
Mostly.

Not like there is really much more to do than obraining even more shiniez.

Current endgame (sorties) is just bandaid, thrown in bit that desperately tries to answer rampart powercreep festering the game. And will (would) continue to do so, because of how players pretty much won't ever bother to do anything unless there is reward at the end, and this reward needs to be good. And for the same reason people will keep trivializing content whenever they can. To not actually play the game, but play the game, and get shiniez. And finally play the game.

but i digress...

WHAT IS DEVS-EVE VIEW POINT OP? WHAT IS IT?1?!

Edited May 28, 2016 by 5HV3N

[(PSN)N7PaladinN7]

Honestly, yes. The enemy scaling and tactics in the game can be rough. Ever seen a walking train of nullifiers in a excavation sortie? or how about a high jack mission where a single osprey will deploy a bomb the second you start the vehicle and it be instantly destroyed? yeah rough lol. but, DE's decision making can be terrible like 'oh, will this have any negative results? Should we test it? ah well lets just do it.' For example, tennogen, they could have waited and found a way to make a single program to work on your own terms with your community, but, they rushed that out the door and guess who paid for that :P haha but no there will always be problems and as said it's up to us to test the patches and reworks and enemies given and calmly address what the pros and cons to them and hope that DE can actually see it through. Hopefully this helps, I don't want to start any further complaints, sorry if I did in advance if so.

[Darkwave1098]

4 hours ago, 5HV3N said:

And you not being supposed to beat that content is perfectly viable argument.
There is no need to stay beyond first C rotation in endless T4, it's just your choice.

 

Then why can we keep going then? Why is the game centered around endless modes?

It's like being gifted a new car, but you can only go up to 80mph on it or else the tires will start to wear out.

That argument is a farse, take a look at Dark Souls (the first installment) for example, it was advertised as an extremely challenging game which rewards you once you get to know its mechanics. Did it succeed in doing so? Yes. Did the players find new ways to beat the game's hardest content? Yes, as a matter of fact there are a lot of ways to do so. Believing players should not be able to beat some parts of the game is just an excuse for not fixing the currently adressed issues.

Edited May 29, 2016 by Darkwave1098

[40880472.]

It's frustrating to see that DE is dishing out these changes, patches as if they don't understand how the players are playing their game.

[5HV3N]

25 minutes ago, Darkwave1098 said:

Then why can we keep going then? Why is the game centered around endless modes?

You make common misconception here, but that is to be expected. Game is centered around PEOPLE SPENDING MONEY.
like every single game in f2p universe.

I presume by endless modes you mean voids? So obtaining shiniezz is tedious.
So people cave in and buy PA. Or just plat, to buy this part off some grinder.
And this prospect is driving force for grinder.
But I'm ok with this. At least they care about game itself.

I'm glad they're trying to add some substance to this game, as I believe all those tweaks are just preparation for dmg 3.0 and introduction of real endgame.
 Change is welcome, in u19 we trust.

Edited May 28, 2016 by 5HV3N

[DeadlyPeanutt]

another +1 for OP's post

this is the only wall o' text that has been worth reading in a long while on these forums !

difficulty in WF is more annoying than challenging:

 bot mobs that behave and look exactly the same as lower level counterparts, but have HUGE health pools and huge DPS.  And you, the bemused player, has his health, shields and/or energy nerfed drastically AND you can only use a sniper rifle with three bullets OR a dull melee weapon whose blade is shorter than 2 1/2 inches. 

WF's 'high difficulty' is simply lazy game design

(the good news: plenty of other great games out there)

Edited May 29, 2016 by DeadlyPeanutt

[DYSEQTA]

I agree with all that was said in the OP regarding content. However, if this post is made in response to changes to the skills of several frames that were obviously over powered then that I don't agree with.

To add to the discussion: Difficulty should be a scaling in enemy competence, not just stats, but I guess its hard to scale something that doesn't exist right?

In my opinion the one area Warframe seriously lacks is in content depth. We have content variety but that is it. Ever heard the saying "A mile wide but only an inch deep" that's Warframe right now.  The lack of depth comes from a lack of any kind of enemy AI. They are just zombies marching forward to their slaughter or your slaughter, one or the other (the Infested are the justified zombies of the Waframe universe. There is no excuse for the other two factions being zombies as well). Due to this the only way to scale enemy difficulty is to scale their stats and that is where the OP's assessment rings true. With only stat scaling it is obvious that you will reach this invincible or dead situation before long.

To return to my first point, it is competence scaling that allows for depth and satisfaction in gameplay.  However, to scale competence there has to be agents of competence in place. Warframe has none right now. Ok, not true, it has one, and it's poor to say the least. The only behavior I see that could be classed as anything but zombie behaviour is the hiding in cover behaviour. The fact that it is poorly implemented and often involves an enemy "hiding" in plain sight...lets just not go there. The point is that Waframe needs AI so that AI can be scaled.

For that to happen the enemies in the game need behaviours, ones that actually mimic the kind of behaviours seen in players. Behaviours covering offensive and defensive tactics, weapon loadouts, weapon usage, healing, etc.

For example: We reload; a good player will duck into cover to reload, if their reload time is anything longer than near instant, whereas a bad player will sponge damage will reloading under heavy fire. Introduce enemy reloading and then you have a point of intelligence to scale. Level 1 enemies would often stand in the open while reloading whereas a level 100 elite unit would never stand in the open to reload. You could extend the idea to Nullifier shields by inserting a shield reboot behaviour, and you could have "dumb" Nullifiers standing round in the open rebooting their shields and "smart" Nullifiers ducking for cover before starting their shield back up. Another example: Give enemies multiple weapons in the same way we have multiple weapons. Then you can have behaviours choosing weapons based on range or situation and apply competence scaling to that, we have seen a bit of that coming into the game with the Hellion and Hyekka Masters, it just needs to be expanded and built upon so as to be more reactive and less "scripted". I would love to charge at a sniper and see them discard their rifle and pullout an SMG in response to my gap closing tactics. In fact not knowing exactly what weapon an enemy is going to have, short of sighting the weapon or it's effects would add immense depth on its own. What if Corpus Crewman could have 1 of say 5 different load outs of primary and secondary weapons? There's some free depth right there...

It's not rocket science, it just needs someone in the team to be assigned to think about it...and then someone hired that actually knows how to code AI to implement the ideas.

[P0TAT0CANN0N]

1 hour ago, 5HV3N said:

You make common misconception here, but that is to be expected. Game is centered around PEOPLE SPENDING MONEY.
like every single game in f2p universe.

I presume by endless modes you mean voids? So obtaining shiniezz is tedious.
So people cave in and buy PA. Or just plat, to buy this part off some grinder.
And this prospect is driving force for grinder.
But I'm ok with this. At least they care about game itself.

I'm glad they're trying to add some substance to this game, as I believe all those tweaks are just preparation for dmg 3.0 and introduction of real endgame.
 Change is welcome, in u19 we trust.

Guess what, I am one person who will stop spending money on this game.

 

Keep up changes like this and eventually enough people will be fed up with it and the game will die. 

 

Glad to know people aren't interested in the longevity of the game lately. 

[(PSN)aiptekfanboy]

2 hours ago, 5HV3N said:

You make common misconception here, but that is to be expected. Game is centered around PEOPLE SPENDING MONEY.
like every single game in f2p universe.

I presume by endless modes you mean voids? So obtaining shiniezz is tedious.
So people cave in and buy PA. Or just plat, to buy this part off some grinder.
And this prospect is driving force for grinder.
But I'm ok with this. At least they care about game itself.

I'm glad they're trying to add some substance to this game, as I believe all those tweaks are just preparation for dmg 3.0 and introduction of real endgame.
 Change is welcome, in u19 we trust.

Nope .

Not spending any more money on this game since devs are not playing endgame raids and these nerfs just broke raids.

[BuddaOfLife]

1 hour ago, DYSEQTA said:

I agree with all that was said in the OP regarding content. However, if this post is made in response to changes to the skills of several frames that were obviously over powered then that I don't agree with.

To add to the discussion: Difficulty should be a scaling in enemy competence, not just stats, but I guess its hard to scale something that doesn't exist right?

In my opinion the one area Warframe seriously lacks is in content depth. We have content variety but that is it. Ever heard the saying "A mile wide but only an inch deep" that's Warframe right now.  The lack of depth comes from a lack of any kind of enemy AI. They are just zombies marching forward to their slaughter or your slaughter, one or the other (the Infested are the justified zombies of the Waframe universe. There is no excuse for the other two factions being zombies as well). Due to this the only way to scale enemy difficulty is to scale their stats and that is where the OP's assessment rings true. With only stat scaling it is obvious that you will reach this invincible or dead situation before long.

To return to my first point, it is competence scaling that allows for depth and satisfaction in gameplay.  However, to scale competence there has to be agents of competence in place. Warframe has none right now. Ok, not true, it has one, and it's poor to say the least. The only behavior I see that could be classed as anything but zombie behaviour is the hiding in cover behaviour. The fact that it is poorly implemented and often involves an enemy "hiding" in plain sight...lets just not go there. The point is that Waframe needs AI so that AI can be scaled.

For that to happen the enemies in the game need behaviours, ones that actually mimic the kind of behaviours seen in players. Behaviours covering offensive and defensive tactics, weapon loadouts, weapon usage, healing, etc.

For example: We reload; a good player will duck into cover to reload, if their reload time is anything longer than near instant, whereas a bad player will sponge damage will reloading under heavy fire. Introduce enemy reloading and then you have a point of intelligence to scale. Level 1 enemies would often stand in the open while reloading whereas a level 100 elite unit would never stand in the open to reload. You could extend the idea to Nullifier shields by inserting a shield reboot behaviour, and you could have "dumb" Nullifiers standing round in the open rebooting their shields and "smart" Nullifiers ducking for cover before starting their shield back up. Another example: Give enemies multiple weapons in the same way we have multiple weapons. Then you can have behaviours choosing weapons based on range or situation and apply competence scaling to that, we have seen a bit of that coming into the game with the Hellion and Hyekka Masters, it just needs to be expanded and built upon so as to be more reactive and less "scripted". I would love to charge at a sniper and see them discard their rifle and pullout an SMG in response to my gap closing tactics. In fact not knowing exactly what weapon an enemy is going to have, short of sighting the weapon or it's effects would add immense depth on its own. What if Corpus Crewman could have 1 of say 5 different load outs of primary and secondary weapons? There's some free depth right there...

It's not rocket science, it just needs someone in the team to be assigned to think about it...and then someone hired that actually knows how to code AI to implement the ideas.

Strangly enough i was having this thought tonight lol

 

 

[victor_victory]

As a 3 year veteran who've played the game since it first released. I stopped playing when I realize the current direction of the game is flawed. That was almost 6 months ago.

I came back for the Uranus update and Second Dream. And I left both times because I almost fell asleep in afternoon when I was doing void defense and interception.

I rarely talk in this forum anymore but what OP said is exactly what I felt about the endgame back when I left. I thought DE might see the problem and fix it. It is disappointing to see them still ignoring one of the fundamental flaws that is holding the game back.   

Edited May 29, 2016 by victor_victory

[Biscotchi]

I tend not to post in forums in general to avoid  the drama that they usually bring with them, but after the last update and coming across the OP's letter, I felt obligated to give it my +1. 

 

It has been clear for a while now that players completely lack the tools to deal with endgame content in a realistic manner. This latest patch has exemplified DE's skewed priorities in dealing with the endless cycle of cheese strategies rather than set about the long and difficult task of reworking endgame content to focus more on skill than cheese. After all, DE can patch out as many builds and strategies as they want, but as long as end game content remains as it is, players will just keep working out new ones (case and point, magnetize + lanka). When dealing with large, chaotic, horde-mode style encounters, with enemies possessing 90k shields, 99% damage reduction from armor, and the ability to one-shot a players through a wall (I still don't understand why DE made the choice to negate cover in this game, perhaps someone can enlighten me on that. [not in this post, keep things on topic please]), you either need to give players the tools to pop shields, strip armor, and  mitigate team damage respectively (most of which are present in at least some ways in the game, but typically only exist as flat amounts that scale VERY poorly past roughly level 50-60), or you need to re-balance end-game content around the abilities players already have. I'm not saying some abilities and builds can't trivialize content and shouldn't be patched out, as they should be, but until enemy scaling or frame abilities are completely overhauled from the ground up, DE patching out cheese strats will accomplish nothing more than wasting their time and pissing off players.

 

According to Steam, I've spent around 400+ hours in the game since I started playing it last year, and lately I've been trying to recruit my FF14 raid group and Overwatch friends into giving Warframe a try, as I've been able to look past the many design faults and bugs the game has and still find a TON of fun with it. However, after seeing how skewed  DE's priorities are after this last patch, I'm truly on the fence on how much time I'm going to be dedicating to Warframe in the future, and how much effort I should really be putting in to getting my friends to play it as well. I love Warframe and love seeing it evolve with each patch and content update, but there's a point that we need to start seeing long-term existing issues addressed, rather than scapegoats.

 

(PS: I noticed in the patch notes discussion, there was some drama between the OP and DE. I'm hoping DE will show themselves to be the mature party here and seriously respond to what is being discussed here, preferably in a direct way without an easy out of "we're constantly taking player feedback considering out options", as that is not a real response and tells players looking for answers, absolutely nothing.) 

[-CdG-Zilchy]

This video just shows DE's poor approach to balance. Since the inception of Trinity and her Blessing ability, instead of actually FIXING content so that we don't have to rely upon her ability, they have instead repeatedly nerfed her into the ground, over and over. The real problem DE, is that we need to use such tactics in the first place and that is ALL ON YOU and your laziness regarding altering enemy scaling. Enemies should increase in intelligence and tactics as the game goes longer, not simply rock up with more health and shields and the same pea-sized brain as the level 1 enemies. Minibosses, sniper threats, assault teams, invisibility threats, are all legitimate means of doing this. You struck gold on the Comba and Scrambus units, they're a far better solution than Nullifiers and broken health, armour scaling, run with it.

 

Edited May 29, 2016 by Zilchy

[CandyDragon]

This just reminded me of my original "darkness 2" critique.

The darkness 2 starts you off as a rage fueled tentacle murder machine. By the middle of the game however, they introduce every possible mechanic to keep you from utilizing it, to the point that you really can't. Hiding behind walls to avoid floodlights, hiding behind corners to avoid the enemies also equipped with floodlights. There wasn't a single moment past the funeral sequence that felt fun. The final boss, the culmination of all the skills you've learned in the game, is more cowering and using only guns. It was an aggressive slog that reeked of poor play testing and an extreme disconnect from what the player is experiencing. 

TL;DR the "DEvelopers" (laughtrack.mp3) empowered the players at the start of the game, but by the end of it trivialized the skillsets to the point of you playing "cower in the corner using only guns" the game. They are Extremely prone to making the end game harder, and the player abilities pointless, And generally not playing the game enough to understand its own rules. 

 

Thoughts on balance:

The nerf to Excals spin slash. If you wanted us to pay energy, why not remove the blind component and just force us to cast radial blind. Spin attacks are part of melee damage, you made excal more focused on getting close but then crippled his ability to do so without eating precious energy to even do it. The blind has always been subpar by comparison to Radial blind.
The Changes to Mag, So, now she's bad at corpus killing, and semi okay at killing grineer, you just traded sides. She doesn't scale, so back to the trash.
The nerf to Valkyr. literally anything else could have been done to address the 24/7 hysteria builds. Including but not limited to "giving it a time limit, giving it a cooldown, adjusting the invincibility"
 

Edited May 29, 2016 by Nariala

[-CdG-Zilchy]

2 minutes ago, Nariala said:

This just reminded me of my original "darkness 2" critique.

The darkness 2 starts you off as a rage fueled tentacle murder machine. By the middle of the game however, they introduce every possible mechanic to keep you from utilizng it, to the point that you really can't. Hiding behind walls to avoid floodlights, hiding behind corners to avoid the enemies also equipped with floodlights. There wasn't a single moment past the funeral sequence that felt fun. It was an aggressive slog that reeked of poor playtesting and an extreme disconnect from what the player is experiencing. 

TL;DR the "DEvelopers" (laughtrack.mp3) empowered the players at the start of the game, but by the end of it trivialized the skillsets to the point of you playing "cower in the corner using only guns" the game. They are Extremely prone to making the end game harder, and the player abilities pointless, And generally not playing the game enough to understand its own rules. 

The nerf to excals spin slash. If you wanted us to pay energy, why not remove the blind component and just force us to cast radial blind.
the fix to mag, So, now she's bad at corpus killing, and semi okay at killing grineer, you just traded sides.
The nerf to valkyr. literally anything else could have been done to address the 24/7 hysteria builds. Including but not limited to "giving it a time limit, giving it a cooldown, adjusting the invincibility"
 

Their approach reeks of laziness and wounded pride, plain and simple.

Edited May 29, 2016 by Zilchy

[SSG-Rage-Quit]

I took a 3 year break from Warframe due to the poor condition it was in when it first released. Im considering another 3 year break lol. When Beta ends I will return lol. 

[AgonoizeOP]

On 28.5.2016 at 8:27 AM, ZaeXithos said:

Okay DE.  I'm going to step back from the actual decisions being made here.  I want to talk about the philosophy behind them, and what you, as developers, need to be thinking about when you make these changes.  They smack of kneejerk reactions, without understanding the deeper meanings of why things happen the way they do.  So as someone who's worked in game development myself, I'm going to help you bridge the gap between player's-eye viewpoint and dev's-eye viewpoint.

Now, with any content you make, people are going to look for strategies that beat it.  That's the nature of the game.  It's the nature of every video game - to overcome the challenges the devs have put before you and reap the rewards, then use those rewards to meet and overcome the next set of challenges.  Your goal, as a developer, is to provide a challenge to your playerbase that is difficult enough to require strategy and tactics and preparation, but is also winnable within a margin of error that is humanly achievable.

Warframe's highest-end content has a serious problem with that.  Once enemy levels get into the 60s, 70s, 80s+, survival becomes increasingly binary.  You are either alive and strictly invulnerable, invisible, or sheltered behind tens of thousands of intervening effective health points, or you are dead the moment you are exposed to enemy fire.  First it's the bombards, who deal ridiculous damage over huge AoE.  Then you notice that seekers and eviscerators are one-shotting you too, and soon enough you fear stepping outside that Frost's bubble for even a half second lest you catch a stray Grakata round and spontaneously evaporate into a cloud of gore.

Some people look at that and go 'nope, not playing that, that's not fun.'  In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of 'em, typically.  I've never been fond of games where one slight mistake will end you.  This is why I don't play sorties, despite the rewards.  I don't know a lot of people, I don't like trying to put together a team for it, and it has such strict requirements on what you can and cannot bring to the table that most of my arsenal is useless in it.

Others, however, look at that and go 'challenge accepted.'  They will look for ways to overcome even this extreme difficulty.  Like Ivara surviving while invisible and using sleep arrow and covert lethality to score kills regardless of armor and HP.  Or Blind Mirage rendering entire spawns comatose across an entire map and then merrily obliterating them one after another.  Or Ash using a combination of invulnerability and finisher damage to kill enemies he could never take in a straight fight.  Or Excalibur utilizing EB's range and blind-spin to get free finishers and stay out of reach of enemies while still benefitting from his sword boost passive.

The fact is, players look for ways to trivialize content because there's content that's very good at trivializing players.  It is, in fact, using content-trivializing strategies is the only way to survive player-trivializing content.

When health and armor don't matter, and shields are merely a formality between enemies and your health, your best guns take off mere slivers of enemy health, and all the buffs in the world won't fix either of those situations, that's when players reach for the nuke options - invulnerability, invisibility, scaling damage absorption, finisher damage, finisher openers, and instant-kills.

What's important to remember is that players are right to do this.  You made the content capable of obliterating anyone without these tools; therefore, players are going to use the tools you gave them that work.  And they're going to keep using them, until you either take the tools away (nerfing), or the tools are no longer necessary and there are more efficient and less-drastic means of accomplishing the mission.  If my guns started to deal damage again, and my shields and health could actually survive a bullet or two, I might decide to use them over wtfhax bladestorm/stacked snowglobes/BLIND BLIND BLIND SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP FINISHER FINISHER FINISHER.

So here's what you, as game devs, need to do.  Ask yourselves the question, "What are players SUPPOSED to do to defeat this content?"  And gear your changes towards THAT.  You need to make a hard decision as to what gear and what methods players are allowed to use, and which are exploitative and need to be either nerfed-out or compensated for.  The answer "Players aren't supposed to defeat this content" isn't an acceptable answer; it's a terrible GM that measures success in trashed character sheets, and likewise it's a terrible developer that measures success in Game Overs.

Finally, you need to look at rewards in the light of the effort required to get them.  If defeating a piece of content is supposed to be a difficult task and a momentous event when you and your cell succeeds, then the rewards should be commensurate.  The rewards need to be something immediately good and useful.  If you throw out player-trivializing content, and then say to those who beat it "Congratulations, now run it five hundred times more if you want a reasonable chance to get the actual good rewards from it" then they're going to look at you, scoff, and walk out.

This is how you make good gameplay.

Correct! Ty!

I hope DE will read this and take actions because now the game is pretty much dead to me.

[Noteybook]

6 hours ago, Nariala said:

This just reminded me of my original "darkness 2" critique.

The darkness 2 starts you off as a rage fueled tentacle murder machine. By the middle of the game however, they introduce every possible mechanic to keep you from utilizing it, to the point that you really can't. Hiding behind walls to avoid floodlights, hiding behind corners to avoid the enemies also equipped with floodlights. There wasn't a single moment past the funeral sequence that felt fun. The final boss, the culmination of all the skills you've learned in the game, is more cowering and using only guns. It was an aggressive slog that reeked of poor play testing and an extreme disconnect from what the player is experiencing. 

TL;DR the "DEvelopers" (laughtrack.mp3) empowered the players at the start of the game, but by the end of it trivialized the skillsets to the point of you playing "cower in the corner using only guns" the game. They are Extremely prone to making the end game harder, and the player abilities pointless, And generally not playing the game enough to understand its own rules. 

 

Thoughts on balance:

The nerf to Excals spin slash. If you wanted us to pay energy, why not remove the blind component and just force us to cast radial blind. Spin attacks are part of melee damage, you made excal more focused on getting close but then crippled his ability to do so without eating precious energy to even do it. The blind has always been subpar by comparison to Radial blind.
The Changes to Mag, So, now she's bad at corpus killing, and semi okay at killing grineer, you just traded sides. She doesn't scale, so back to the trash.
The nerf to Valkyr. literally anything else could have been done to address the 24/7 hysteria builds. Including but not limited to "giving it a time limit, giving it a cooldown, adjusting the invincibility"
 

Disconnect from what the player is going through is definitely what it feels like to be Mr15+. You're always playing void, you're always playing missions that are lvl 50+, and at that point in the game the normal structures of gameplay just completely break down, as you are either dead or not dead. There is no avoiding the BS tactics & damage you get form enemies. You have to resort to "cheese" because the normal mechanics that would keep you alive in lower levels aka most of the starmap just don't work whatsoever. Players have to go to extreme niche builds and learn how the game works inside & out to make these things happen.

DE nerfing this things without also nerfing enemies just means more power is being taken away from players who had found a way to deal with these things, as DERebecca said, "fighting fire with fire".