Just My Feedback

[zumbledum]

just thought i would offer up my thoughts and opinions on areas the game could go with some more work.

 

1-The noob experience; So you appear in your first game, and the other 3 guys around you sprint off while the cinematic plays, their probably farming ferrite and in high gear / high speed frames , But you don't know that, 

So the first few games consist of trying to sprint after your fast disappearing team and then trying to stay in XP range as long as you can, then a boring stroll through empty corridors waiting for the clock to appear and tick down, or if your unlucky running into the huge stream of mobs the guys infront just spawned and ran past.

 

first impressions matter and i bet its hurting your new player retention.

 

 

2. Its a 4 player co-op game, but there are too many mechanics that split people up and not enough that stick them together, i point to left for dead the spiritual father of the genre (well i guess you could trace the lineage back to the gauntlet arcade game) as an example of a game that does this right.

 

a. Movement speed - and i know the player base will hate this suggestion but make it the same across frames,  do away with sprint or make it a much shorter burst ability to dive for cover/door with a longer stamina regen. loose mods like rush and marathon or perhaps find a new use for them. a team moving at different speeds isn't going to stay together.

 

foster interdependence, right now reviving a fallen tenno is about the only team function we have.

 

a. in Left for dead no one wants to be alone because of the "special infected" there are enemies that can instantly one shot incapacitate, Payday the heist also utilizes this mechanic well and i think it would be a good addition here , they would have to scale with the amount of people in the game of course and disappear entirely in solo.

 

b. mini and sub bosses, right now you run into top level mobs like the ancients, bombardiers etc but they are still just high priority targets for solo execution. a big scary thing serves as a very natural group up and bring it down together mechanic, have a hidden mechanic that gives them a huge reduction to damage that gets stripped away the more people who have hit it recently ,  so as an example you run into a big infested charger sub boss, its got a natural 100% damage reduction , each time it takes damage from a different player 25% off that buff gets stripped away so if one person tries to chunk it down it will have 400% effective health but if all 4 are attacking it then it takes full damage , Obviously scale for player numbers.

 

c. ramp up the counter attack function , the game already features this you hear the warning "a lot of infested ahead " or "walkers incoming!" but these events are hardly more than a blip they should engender some fear and give the tenno pause , right now they are little more than an opportunity to hit 4 and see some number spam. give the group a 10 second warning to gather and dig in then hit them with an onslaught from every direction possible.

 

d. gauntlets, areas which are in effect like the above idea but require the group to fight through an area under permanent heavy counter attack. imagine having to run through a moa factory or a infested spawning room. its another way to push the players together and make them work together.

 

e. Add incentives to being together, you could have a stacking team aura, or give each warframe unique auras, increased regens, ammo regen, enable a enemy /loot radar if 2+ are together 

 

 

 

Endless Defence Missions, these guys need a bit of work , Lets look at Xini , we all know a handful of mobs will spawn on the far side of the pod then the majority will pour in from near our spawn point.  so someone with ae will sit near the spawn and kill most of the mobs before they get into xp range. so your left with the choice of either sitting by the pod to kill the odd straggler that comes from other directions while most get mown down out of xp range then try and do the 300 m dash between waves to hoover up the drops , or go and join in and fail the mission because no one could be bothered to sit bored at the pod.

 

 

Kunai and Despair. its made all the more surprising and noticeable because of how good a job you guys did on the general weapon balance but these things are so mind blowingly out of whack i find it hard to believe the same people are responsible. does someone on the dev team have a throwing knife fetish or did these things somehow skip the balance phase because in the dictionary under the entry for overpowered they just need a picture of these!.

 

 

Difficulty , so long as i take one decently leveled weapon with me running tier 3 with a fresh unranked frame and unranked other weapons isnt a problem. and if i take my good gear that is ranked up and "potatoed (how they hell did that name come about ? was there some early graphic for these items)" i feel im massively out gearing the content.

at the start the game is pretty challenging and fun , right now i feel the end tier stuff just isn't challenging.

 

 

The lobby system, when i started i looked at all the planets and systems to work through and it looked cool , like a dungeon progression system out of an MMO, but you soon come to realise your going to play most of these missions once and only to unlock the next in line , your going to skip alot entirely because you only need them to be yellow to allow alerts there and they dont lead to anything else, and a few ie boss levels your going to be farming ad nauseam.

 

 

would it be heresy to suggest throwing the entire system out? ;)

 it just feels very awkward , i find myself just playing xini and some varro with the occasional boss run for resources because these are the only maps i find people on to play with, i seem to spend a lot of time clicking on a mission waiting , hitting back zoom out go to another place click wait back out etc just trying to find players.

 

a. how about some kind of lobby screen where i can see what people are searching for a join from there to stop this blind searching?

 

b.how about we que for a system and groups are formed that way , make each map a boss level or make the boss's appear less frequently but always drop something.

 

c an option to que for anything then have matchmaking put a group together out of similar gear levels in a random scenario with mob levels tuned to that group.  

 

d. endless defence are both disproportionately rewarding and counter intuitive , the best reward in this game is always to run an endless def to round 5 and quit then repeat.  actually it might be to run it till 10 and quit its hard to say but as people dont know you save the rewards at 5 they are unlikely to push past a tier 2 void key , each new game rewards you with all those barrel drops .

 

so how about allowing each mission type to "double down" like endless def does, you sabotage a reactor then are offered the choice to either take a reward or a new objective at an increased mob level and difficulty +1. also change the way the rewards are worked out so rares become more common and common rewards drop out of the table if you do push on , going to level 20 only gives you 4 rolls it doesn't increase the chance of the rolls being good, so why not just run to 5 each time and get 4 times as many barrels to break? 

 

 

UI - any chance of adding buff debuff icons with timers? would be nice to see when my links about to run out.

 

energy regen . this needs to be its own mechanic not reliant on rng drops and the one artifact option.

 

 

Thanks for a great game and keep up the good work. i hope some of my feedback gives you something to think about ,

[Lactamid]

Many good point.

Look at this thread about incentives for co-op play (and not rushing)
https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/60900-incentives/?hl=incentives

[zumbledum]

had some more thoughts to share ;)

 

is there any chance we could have the dojo as our normal pre lobby screen so we hang out in the clan hall rather than just looking at the solar system 

 

chat window , would be nice to  be able to keep this permanently open and on a set channel , its annoying having to open it up after every mission to see whats been said it clan chat.

 

could we have the resources gathered in a mission listed by type and amount in the post mission results screen?

 

since u9 we can no longer see alerts without dropping all the way back to first screen, it would be nice to be able to see these in the zoomed in view to , if your chain farming one mission over an over for that 1% drop chance , damn you blaze! its perfectly possible to entirely miss an alert without knowing it happened.

 

lock mods out of fusion. i would love a way to tag mods so i cant use them in fusion by mistake. or a simple toggle that would prevent using mods that have been leveled as fodder, you can still pick them to fuse things to , you just cant fuse them to anything.

 

moar skills! dont know how others feel but its a rare day i run with more than 2 of the 4 available powers, it would be really nice if there was a bigger library of skills to pick from.