[The Index] General Feedback

[Loswaith]

Honestly its a nice idea but lowering the points to qualify wasn't the way to do it as it still causes competition between players on the same team (thus making solo the better option).

What it should be is a team based qualifier score at the original values.  This would make players work together instead of against each other.

The advantage of that too is that an organised group will have roles to the group like killers (players designed to take out the opponents), carriers (players made for collecting and carrying the gems) and defenders (players made to protect and assist carriers, or become carriers themselves should the designated one fall).
With this kind of set up its much more beneficial to work as a group and add for a lot more interesting game-play on the whole.

Likewise if the above style was implemented bonus rewards could be added to spice up the game. Things like completing the score in one bank, banking an exact score value, carrying a certain amount of points for a set time, winning the game from vastly behind, and so forth (ie conditional factors Corpus would bet on).

Likewise the energy drain just isn't needed. Warframe is different to other games because of powers not in spite of them (essentially forcing players to just run zenurik), having a cap of say 100 energy would be much better to limit the way powers are used or gaining energy only by using tier 1 power, or any other number of things you want to test out as alternatives.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Loswaith

[XoRted]

I've done quite a few runs on the index now and realised a few things,

#1 It punishes team play. You may be in a team but in the more expensive missions you get punished for going dps frames because your "allies" will take all point drops and you end up wasting credits (not that credits are a big issue for me but other players do have limited credit stacks)

#2 The mod drop chance is ridiculously low. I started running "mod farming runs" with nekros and had games with 150+ kills where at best we got 1 rare and 1 common mod drop. The rarity of drops is even discouraging the completionist in me from trying to farm the rare drops (100+ runs 1 rare drop)

#3 Energy and enemies. Even playing the easy missions (which are better for farming mod drops) enemies have attacks that can 1shot you and you are constantly searching for energy/out of energy cos carrying points. Also the fact that a lot of the standard game mechanics don't work the way they should is extremely frustrating (Azoth instantly disjoints from Ash's blade storm)

 

All in all the index feels tedious and repetitive for little to no reward.

[Thrymm]

Played through the event, then played some of the endless.  Here's my take in general:

Pros:

1.  The map layouts are great.  Very smooth, large enough to have room to move and small enough to have chokepoints, while being fast enough to respawn and/or turn in points and continue.  If conclave and rathuum maps where this good, I'd consider playing those things.

2.  The mode is well thought out, in terms of how it scores in relation to holding points for bonuses.  The risk vs. reward of holding onto points for a bigger bonus seems pretty good.

3.  Some of the opponents are well thought out, dealing good damage but not being too much of a sponge.

4.  The sixty point ending seems solid, games run an appropriate amount of time with it.

5.  Credit rewards in the mid/high levels are fairly reasonable for the amount of time played per match.

And now the Cons:

1.  I'm not doing this with other players as a co-op thing.  I haven't yet, and won't(to be fair, I rarely group up anyway, but when I do it won't be for this).  The specters scoop up the points badly enough, no way I'm doing that with thinking oppone...I mean, teammates.  The grief potential is real.

2.  Specters, and the Corpus, don't try to score nearly enough.  It's not at all uncommon to be either the only scorer or nearly the only scorer in a solo match, regardless of how well you're doing.

3.  Mods and abilities seem wonky.  Most seem to use PvE rules, but some, especially CC abilities, seem to use conclave rules.  Consistency matters, or at the very least some measure of accessible documentation---no trip to two forums plus a wiki to figure it out, please.

4.  Some enemies are poorly thought out and too tanky.  The Bursa, in particular, seems far too able to turtle up and even when you do crack his shell he can take far too much punishment.  I'd suggest significantly more ability for them to heal and less total health---if you don't kill them in one go they get it back, so to speak, rather than multiple hit and runs to eventually drag down their massive health bars.  Surviving multiple twin Grakata clips with most bullets connecting seems a bit much.

5.  The team with the Bursa on it is putrid.  All but one on that team are far too tanky.  Other teams are more universally soft, mixing these enemies in for more appropriate teams makes sense.

6.  The timered endless mode doesn't work well solo because the specters simply never score and keep time on the clock.  It's extremely difficult to get any payoff at all in this mode because of this.  The structured 60 point end works many times better and feels better.

7.  The mods are....kinda bad. Not niche, not situational, just mostly poor.  It'd be pretty difficult to justify making room for most of these in any loadout.

8.  Energy drain sucks.  Negative modifiers suck.  Doesn't matter what mode, doesn't matter what game, these things are always a terrible idea unless targeted as duration based debuff type attacks.  Please stop using them in anything, and certainly stop using them in EVERYTHING new or "high level".

9.  Spike damage and high survivability are key here.  Frames that rely more heavily on constant, consistent damage tend to fare poorly because the consistent damage sources aren't strong enough to do their job.  Many frames and weapons really showcase their need for attention if a person attempts to use them here.

Please don't mistake the fact that I listed more cons than pros as a bad thing--I actually rather enjoy playing this one.  I would like to see it smoothed out and I think these are the areas that would really make it shine.

[RistN]

Stealing those green points between players is downside of it all.Promotes solo and leeching gameplay rather than team play.

For guys saying enemies are not to hard...Did you play endless?

Edited October 24, 2016 by RistN

[Thundervision]

11 hours ago, p3z1 said:

(-) "Cashing in the bank" keeps your health low. Recommending that after cashing in, players recover how much health they lost from holding points, and not damage received from enemies.

Huh, your idea gave me another idea. A couple of.

Currently it's:

• The Corpus reduces your time if they cash in.
• You're increasing their level if you cash in.

In the first minutes and points the mode is OP on our side: enemies die in 1-3 hits and we can take some hits w/o dying. Though, sooner or later, but eventually, we will face both issues: their level is absurdly high making it a tedious and time-consuming process to kill them and get a point, so we will have to keep increasing their level to compensate our time spent for killing while they become tanky OHKO-ers that have no issues to kill us and get our points to drastically decrease available time. And the icing on the cake is that we have HP & energy drain along with 0-2 negative effects limiting our abilities, also, some powers don't even work there.

However, what IF:

• 11 hours ago, p3z1 said:

  (-) "Cashing in the bank" keeps your health low. Recommending that after cashing in, players recover how much health they lost from holding points, and not damage received from enemies.

• Once The Corpus cashed in, they decrease our available time, BUT at the same time they increase our EHP/Damage values, so we would be able to fight back. This way we could still compete, and the balance would be close to 1:1, not even saying that it would be fun to play then, not just cheesing cheese with cheese.
• Enabling positive effects like: +Power Strength, +Power Efficiency, +Ammo regen, +Melee/Primary/Secondary, +Parkour boost, +Shield regen in range (the more allies close to each other the higher regen. rate). Basically, something similar to Conclave conditions.

[RistN]

12 hours ago, p3z1 said:

"Cashing in the bank" keeps your health low. Recommending that after cashing in, players recover how much health they lost from holding points, and not damage received from enemies.

Did you try carrying Furis with augment mod as your secoundary?It works...

 

[DarkOvion]

27 minutes ago, RistN said:

Stealing those green points between players is downside of it all.Promotes solo and leeching gameplay rather than team play.

For guys saying enemies are not to hard...Did you play endless?

Yes.

If you look back, I was doing it almost asleep at 5am and still pulling 50-60 point games on endless.

And I'm not even that good at the game, I've just had time and good mods (from spending time).

 

 

I think a large part of it, is people seem to not realise (or forget) this is really an equipment based game - you're meant to take the right tools for the task presented.

The Index is a Conclave style arena combat system with a small number of enemies (4), with varying degrees of output.

Energy economy is fine, so long as you don't have any Index Points (which drain energy and reduce max health).

This means that taking power reliant frames that don't tend to sustain their own energy level is impractical.

It also means that Crowd Control overall and low-damage, high-DPS weapons will be less efficient.

You want high armour or fast frames, preferably that have high duration or preferably 'active' effects (percentage remaining like Iron Skin / Frost Bubble / Scarab armour), or self-sustaining powers / effects (Limbo, Trinity), and high damage single-target weapons (Tigris, Hek, Opticor, Marelock, Bows, War, Destraza, etc).

[p3z1]

59 minutes ago, RistN said:

Did you try carrying Furis with augment mod as your secoundary?It works...

Sadly, not everyone owns a furis, much more fully forma'd.

Yes, I am such a person.

[lolmetimbers]

1. Energy deprivation - what's the point of even picking up orbs when enemies/points drain your energy so fast that you cannot cast any skills? Get rid of any detrimental energy drain unless it is a skill where an enemy casts a skill on you. It forces people to play certain frames/weapons/playstyle since you cannot even use your abilities.

2. Many enemies are overtuned with their ridiculous one shot mechanics/damage e.g: Raptor RX. Enemy scaling in endurance is also ridiculous.

3. Picking up points and making it into a competitive trash collector/bin game is bad. Not only is it annoying to pick up points after killing an enemy from range, teammates can steal your points as well - I'd rather play it solo. If you are going to implement a point system make it points on kill and no drops. Stop forcing us to pick up 'reactant' drops - it's tedious and annoying. 

Overall, not very enjoyable, needs some serious design tweaks. The whole pickup points systems is honestly a turn off.

Edited October 24, 2016 by lolmetimbers

[Carifyn]

I like it. It's a fun alternative for making credits.

But only when you're playing solo. Your team shouldn't be able to steal points away from you, when you need to complete a personal goal to win anything... Now when your team wins, you don't necessarily win anything at all. That's frustrating. Especially in endless, where you need to collect a lot of points to get the credits.

But all of your team invests in the game, right? There should not be a personal goal, but a team goal, and everyone gets his share when the team wins.

[Thundervision]

Indeed.

I did my 20th run (in total), sitting at 2255 points.

And i think i've encountered just 3 or 5 teams that didn't steal (or they accidentally did that) the points and helped each other to not only get the points, but also hold them as long as possible. In most of my runs i ended up with 0 scores but with the most kills and used powers (as Volt/Frost/Banshee/Trin -- basically as support frames), while someone with 5 kills had about 60 points.

Now i just want to say that i'm a patient guy, most of the time, and the only things that can piss me off are: annoying repeating bugs, unbalanced enemies or mechanics, toxic and selfish players. That's all. However, while playing this preview i noticed that i'm getting pissed off when i see someone keep stealing my points: i'm standing there, killing a mob, then another players appears from nowhere, runs under my nose stealing a point and then runs away. And he gets rewarded, not me. Now imagine just the point where i play not for scores (i've come to conclusion, that it just does not worth it at all), but just to help the others. I'm not losing anything, but also not earning.

 

Possible ways to remove counter-COOP play:

• Personal Goal should be replaced with a Team Goal (WE ARE in the same team after all, why don't ), all Risk payouts should stack giving the total amount of Crs if the team won the match. As a trade-off those 25/50/100 Risk requirements can be increased along with negative effects affecting everyone in your team (Team Goal => someone selects a 25 points and someone selects a 100 points Risk => you can expect a great reward (90.000+150.000 Crs), but you also get certain negative conditions to do so. 
• Killing, but not taking dropped point should reward a person who killed a mob with scores when the other player (who picked that up) cashes in.
• If you contributed in killing the enemy: damage dealt, powers used on him/teammates, but didn't pick up the point, you get a pickup multiplier, so on the next point pickup you get x2/x3/x4/x5 points multiplier, depending on how many enemies you hit/players you buffed.

 

And again, something really needs to be done to Lockjaw's Sol. As i said before, this is the only one Index enemy i hate don't like and have problems.

This thing's projectile is almost unavoidable: once you stepped within its fire range, it will most likely kill you. I had a match where its projectile killed 2 players in a row that were in different places. I've seen it doing at least 5 bounces. It's fast, it's deadly and i don't think it has any sound indication at all. In the middle of the fight you simply have no time to notice it or counter.

Another example how i get killed by Sol: while Lockjaw is fighting someone or running away, i'm bullet jumping from the one to another side of the map suddenly getting killed from nowhere with no enemies nearby in 15m (Enemy Radar). After about 5 kills in a row by this darn thing i have no desire to continue to play. While the other mobs are challenging, agile and lethal i don't get killed that often by them or by Lockjaw itself. It's just a flying cheese.

[(NSW)BlaineKodos]

This may have come up before, but my time is limited to post today.

Since each of the three teams seem to share drop tables, consider having a guaranteed mod on mission completion in addition to those dropped by the champions brokers investors enemies. It's very disheartening to do a round and get nothing new for your time aside from some credits. I'm aware that making these mods rare is intended design because it encourage replayability, but getting the rare mods from a drop is already hard. The low drop chance in general just makes it icing on the cake when you hit a dry spell where no enemies drop a mod, then you finally get one and it's just Pain Threshold again.

Simply having a guaranteed mod on completion (like with all of the Rathuum mods on Kela) helps you at least feel like you're making some headway, even if the odds of getting a rare mod haven't actually increased. How a drop rate feels can be just as important as how they actually function.

 

On an unrelated note, I feel like you missed a golden opportunity to place John Prodman onto a team. These are meant to be some of the most martially imposing Corpus, which John has famously been displayed as. There's even a Prova-specific mod to be obtained. He could have had an aoe shock attack to represent him using the mod, or somesuch. Just felt like a waste.

[Tobiah]

1 hour ago, BlaineKodos said:

I feel like you missed a golden opportunity to place John Prodman onto a team

Maybe John Prodman will be Neffie's champion when the full index comes?

[[DE]Danielle]

Last Friday's Hotfix changes based on your feedback! 

• In an effort to reduce unfair competition within squads which could lead to griefing tactics, we have changed The Index Points required for each tier of Risk Investment wager to be 2/5/10.
• Increased The Index score limit to be 60 Index Points.
• Smoothed out frame-time spikes from Rhino Stomp; when surrounded by a lot of enemies it could end up adding 3-4ms on a very fast PC (this occurred once when cast and once to apply time-dilation). 
• You can now purchase the Embolist Armor separately. 
• Adjusted rotation and positioning of the Officium Syandana based on creator feedback.
• Removed the smudge motion blur from Volt's Speed ability.
• In an effort to fix inconsistent trade tax values, Amber and Cyan Stars now both have the same trade tax value of 2000 Credits, Ayatan Sculptures now have a base trade tax of 4000 Credits, plus 2000 Credits for each Star that is attached.
• Heavily reduced the frequency on "broker has a lot of points"and "point dropped!" sound clips because they were playing far more than everything else combined in The Index.
• The "Rally" voice clip now plays after 3 consecutive scorings to reduce excessive frequency in The Index.
• All friendly Index Specters are now equipped with the Tetra (farewell Twin Heks!). 
• Self-kills will no longer grant an Index Point for teammates to take. This was allowing players to trade self-kills and never attack enemies for points. 

[Chipputer]

Alright, I've acquired all of the mods and I've taken a few days to cool down from the frustration that was mod hunting to collect my thoughts. Here's how I feel about the current iteration of The Index:

The current objective based gameplay is counter-intuitive to team play. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate being able to sit in the first mission and farm mods to my heart's content, barring when the AI starts turning in points, but I feel the game would be much better off with a time limit per match where you can turn in as many points as you want until the time limit runs out. As it stands, right now, the original iteration had a team full of High Risk Investors competing to get their points in, always leaving at least one person in the dust, while a team of Low Risk Investors never had to worry about it. Now it's... not quite the same problem but moreso that you didn't solve the issue so much as just make it easier to meet your own goal. One teammate stacking points is still going to ruin it for others.

There seems to be no reason to go beyond meeting your personal point goal. I stopped playing after the double credit event started, only doing two missions after that, but only during the endless run did I notice any extra credits gained from turning in extra points, and I'm not even sure if that's what caused it. Your investment should increase based on how many points you turn in. Doubling your goal should give you twice the return, and so on, and so forth. This could be further emphasized by making each match have a time limit that you can just free-for-all turn in as many points as possible.

Enemy armor is way out of hand and optimal modding to counter enemy types is difficult to achieve. Due to the random chance of having one of the three factions, you can easily end up with one of your weapons just being entirely useless through the entire fight. Not only do the purely robotic enemies take far less damage from the usual Corpus-killing elementals, but they also seem to gain armor at an exponential rate, making it far more difficult to kill them than anything else. Bringing another weapon specifically modded to kill them will still leave you with a 1/3 chance of barely being able to use one of your weapons. Lowering the amount of armor the enemies have and lowering damage resistances just a smidge will make it feel a whole lot better to encounter the mostly robotic faction.

Enemy damage scaling is off the charts. I have no qualms with level 200 enemies one shotting me, but the speed at which the enemies scale, along with their damage, is one of the most ridiculous increases I've seen in this game, during the endless mode. It's already bad enough that encountering the robotic faction in Mission 2 would make a regular Magnetic/Toxin build start to fall off, almost requiring you to counter shields, armor, and robotic at the same time, but to then see the same enemies in the endless mode go from being a fair challenge, but tough to kill, to being both tough to kill and also able to kill you by simply turning toward you and processing data in your general direction.....

 

At least one of these issues is my own problem to deal with, that being optimal modding, but I feel like toning the situation down a bit might help everyone, as a whole. I can't really think of any other things that stuck out, in my head, so I'll leave the post at that. Enjoying this event much more than Rathuum.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Chipputer

[Doc-Orange]

1 hour ago, [DE]Danielle said:

Last Friday's Hotfix changes based on your feedback! 

• In an effort to reduce unfair competition within squads which could lead to griefing tactics, we have changed The Index Points required for each tier of Risk Investment wager to be 2/5/10.
• Increased The Index score limit to be 60 Index Points.
• Smoothed out frame-time spikes from Rhino Stomp; when surrounded by a lot of enemies it could end up adding 3-4ms on a very fast PC (this occurred once when cast and once to apply time-dilation). 
• You can now purchase the Embolist Armor separately. 
• Adjusted rotation and positioning of the Officium Syandana based on creator feedback.
• Removed the smudge motion blur from Volt's Speed ability.
• In an effort to fix inconsistent trade tax values, Amber and Cyan Stars now both have the same trade tax value of 2000 Credits, Ayatan Sculptures now have a base trade tax of 4000 Credits, plus 2000 Credits for each Star that is attached.
• Heavily reduced the frequency on "broker has a lot of points"and "point dropped!" sound clips because they were playing far more than everything else combined in The Index.
• The "Rally" voice clip now plays after 3 consecutive scorings to reduce excessive frequency in The Index.
• All friendly Index Specters are now equipped with the Tetra (farewell Twin Heks!). 
• Self-kills will no longer grant an Index Point for teammates to take. This was allowing players to trade self-kills and never attack enemies for points. 

Yeah, I kinow the Hotfix but this dosen't change the general game design problems. I don't want to repeat all of them. The post above me from Cipputer says it all.

You're changing game core philosophies with this like co-operation vs. competition, use of powers. I feel like everything but NOT like a bad-a$$ space ninja who fights corpus. The only one I fight are other kill- and point stealing tennos.

You're writing about "reduce unfair competition". So you don't want to stop - only to reduce? This is not meant ironic. In the meanwhile I'm not shure about the general co-op strategy. I think better would be "stop competition - even fair competition" in PvE. WF is about co-op. When I want to play competitive, I'll play Conclave.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Doc-Orange

[LSG501]

Ok after a little more time playing it, wanted the sigil...

I saw no reason to do the higher levels... the bronze ones were just as suitable for getting the mods and points needed.  Personally I don't mind this but it is something to consider perhaps.  I also saw no reason to continue with it once I had the sigil and all the mods... there's far easier ways to get the credits that this offers imo. 

Those sticky threads they throw out, can they have like a limit to how many they throw out at a time or a cool down or something. 

The tiny little drones... can they have some sort of audible noise so we can actually know they're about.  They're pretty hard to see and they've killed me on a few occasions because I just didn't know they were there.

Can there be some sort of easy identification of the enemies on the mini map, maybe make them different colour to my side. 

I also have to agree with some other comments about health restoration after we put in our collection of green orbs.

The green orbs can block our view when/if we get a lot of them, might need to put a limit on how many go around the warframe.

Elemental damage also felt 'off' compared with the usual corpus enemies, it didn't seem to have the same impact on damage that it does normally against corpus. 

Edited October 24, 2016 by LSG501

[TheLexiConArtist]

There are four axes of difficulty in the Index as we see it now. Two of them are flawed but acceptable, one is prohibitive, and one is, sadly, not even within the player's control.

1) Mission level. Obviously. First mission, second mission, endurance. This is mostly fine, except the endurance mission is as ridiculously exponential as ever. Which plays into everything onwards.

2) Investment. The most pressing flaw, high risk investment contributions, was hotfixed to be not literally impossible in a full group, but non-cooperative play is still a risk factor. Acting to the detriment of other players signifies bad design, but that's nothing new; Ash is still unchanged and the idiot-mode weapons are still as rampant as ever in the game despite months upon months of negative feedback. However, once you progress into the endurance.. well, I managed to pull off a medium investment once, high risk is outright impossible unless people find an exploit. That Warframe-brand hyperscaling of enemies combined with the third (and definitely fourth) difficulty axes means that you're outright delusional if you think you're going to score up 100 points (per actual player) before enemies are unassailably beefy and powerful, especially since you're double-hamstrung by negative modifiers. It's not even worth it even if you could, if you wanted to farm credits, you can do two low-risk runs (or high-risk Mission 2s) and gain around the same or more for much less stress and strife, and probably do it faster too.

3) Passive Weakening and the burden of Points. Prohibitive. Yes, because when there are projectiles and explosions everywhere at all times, plus the occasional Bonus Turrets, what you really need is to be ground down to 10% of your EHP passively, with no freedom to use any abilities to soften blows or secure any kills. Players want to play their desired warframes, with their desired abilities, and yet you still haven't learned the lesson that maybe you shouldn't find new and exciting ways to remove abilities and powers from every equation and call it 'difficulty'. I resorted to Inaros once again, when nothing but the natural defense of the Warframe you're using is really all that relevant. Especially since all that hard work we put in to our weapons also gets slashed to pieces. All in all, it feels disengaging and oppressive. No defenses, no abilities, pathetically weakened weapons. Against uniquely-capable, powerful and quickly Sortie-level enemies.

4) The RNG of your opposition. Now this is the ridiculous part. The three groups of enemies are a whole other level of difficulty and you have no way of planning and preparing for which specific set you'll face.

Zenith Galactical - the easy mode. Mildly irritating at best, these soft targets and mostly standard weaponry stay easy pickings for the longest. Sure, they have a teleport pad and that sneaky devil who wishes he was the TF2 Spy, but all in all, not a problem. Until you have 10hp and they're all level 100, spraying Cestra projectiles all over to graze that pitiful health off, but we mentioned that already. At least they're still moderately murderable.

Loan Reclamation Division - Wait, what killed me? Mid-tier difficulty by the sheer capacity to flood the area with Nemes, mines, and then pick you off with homing projectiles or flawlessly-aimed Opticor shots, plus having Lockjaw there being pretty ambivalent to most controlling effects and finishers, and boasting much better tankiness with its set of health types. On the other hand, the Loan Reclamation guys are all deathly afraid of fire, and become finisher-capable while panicked, which seemed to be much less reliable to execute on the Zenith Galactical team. These guys gave me my successful solo mid-investment endurance run because Sheev ground slam into Covert Lethality finisher actually let me kill them even when they get right up there in levels... until the interference from Lockjaw and the 'allied' AI screwed me over one time too many.

Robotic Technology Division - I long for the cold embrace of death. No wait, there it is. Again. With the half-exception of Jad Teran (since he supplies status issues constantly to make life even worse), these godforsaken robots are the Hard Mode, "RNG Hates You" team to go up against. Despite showing similar stats of health and health types in the Codex, the Robotics do not have the same health as the other squads, even compared to the robotic units M-WAM and Lockjaw. They have so much more, and since they're based on bosses and a Bursa, pretty much don't care what you throw at them. Status effects? Meh. Abilities? Nah, don't care for them. Not to mention that, while the Loan Reclamation team have a nice habit of peppering hazards around and picking you off while you deal with them, these damn robots just hit you with endless streams of status effects (hope you like being slowed for hours, while burning and also being flat on your back), while also under barrages of ridiculous damage and explosions everywhere forever. Why the hell are these so much worse than the other two? It's like a difficulty progression of 1x-2x-10x over these three enemy groups.

 

 

Now, back to the endurance. I've mentioned about how terribly players are hamstrung from every conceivable angle, and how the high-risk is pretty much impossible, and I think this will be reflected once people are pushing for the best endurance runs.

As far as I can see it, the emergent gameplay of an organised squad will probably be centered mostly around suiciding into the Corpus team so that the enemies are carrying so many points that they're weak enough to continue to kill (by players defending the Corpus' drop point), and so that enough Index Points can be generated in a short enough time to keep pushing the remaining time limit back up despite the incresing resilience of the opposition.

The defending players can avoid carrying points themselves, so they can use abilities to defend the drop point without worrying about the drain (with Zenurik focus, once things have kicked up into gear). Suiciders will be sure to be at full health once points have been generated, and one will probably be a designate carrier, picking up some energy and using an ability to protect themselves while they carry the full stack of points from the freshly killed Corpus across to the other point, 5 - 10 at a time.

 

That doesn't sound like an engaging experience to me, and you know it'll be something completely antithetical to the designed nature of the event like that.

Oh, and players will be restarting the mission depending on what enemy group they get, of course. They can plan a skilful approach for the point-carrying weakness, they're all on Low-Risk Endurance for best survivability, but the group that find themselves going up against the Robotics Division have already lost ground.

[Hearsay]

Players should be healed upon turning in points.  This may not apply for Endurance but, currently, the optimal play is to turn in points and then jump to your death to get fully healed with no penalty.  Otherwise you're left with ~100-200 HP, or lower without HP mods, and its too dangerous to go and collect points again.

[Drufo]

I played it enough to have something to say:

- Point stealing is a problem. A cooperative mode turns into a competitive one, where everybody tries to get the points. Most of the time they stack them and never bank them, causing the end of the mission in the endurance mode. This is a problem even when playing with specters: they pick up points, but never bank them, so every point taken by them are lost points

- Enemy team balance: the Robotic Technology Division wreaks havoc even at level 20 (they are the tankiest tanks I ever saw), while Zenith Galactical needs 60-80 levels to be a threat.

-Credit rewards are unsatisfying. Not considering the high-risk endurance (in which is humanly impossible to get 100 points), in general the credits earned don't justify the work you have to do. It's better to do a Dark Sector or other generic missions.

-Health Orbs are pretty much useless. Ok, this is a general problem, but it still is.

-Last note: why we bank points in the enemy bank (I guess it's the enemy's since they respawn there)? Wouldn't it make more sense if we need to get the points in our bank?

 

If those problems get to be fixed, the Index could be much more funny and rewarding.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Drufo

[DraccoDoom]

If your not a close range tank(Rihno or Inaros) you can forget of hiting 25 point and up.

Go melee Inaros and you swim in them. 

I tryed to go Mag once to take down robotic team faster( especialy the flying osprey that's a thorn to kill) from safe range with snipers and my points got stolen left and right, its not fun.

Its like go Inaros or Rihnoi, Chroma(tanks) or not at all becuse they are the only ones that can go very close whitout beeing one shotet and get your points before someone steals. 

[Xekrin]

I just did quick topic search and there are at least 30+ posts about index points stealing, being stolen or taken as one of the biggest problems with this game mode.

That alone really is making just not want to play it at all.  I did enough to get the event rewards and stopped.  It is an enraging feeling to kill something and have the reward for said kill taken before I can blink.  

Great example

 

Bottom (5th) player was actually a mag specter for some reason, it happened a few times we had 5 players.  

Anyway I know there are a lot of other aspects of the game mode that can be focussed on but I feel like this is the main one.  I mentioned earlier in this thread that the pitting us against each other is very in the spirit of corpus and it rather distinguishes it nicely from rathuum mode, its grineer counterpart, but I think it is a bit overboard.

a few suggestions spring to mind to fix this.

1. Only the person who kills the enemy can pick up its point, either permanantly for at least 3 to 5 seconds.
2. Only when a player dies can their accumulated points be picked up by another player, going hand in hand with the first half of the 1st suggestion.
3. Players become vulnerable to other player attacks if no enemies are detected within 20 meters.
4. Point sharing within affinity (or 1/2 ) range until goals are met, then its a free for all. 
5. Some variation of the above, perhaps some points are green, some are blue, some are yellow.  Green are shared with everyone, blue can't be picked up by anyone but the deathblow dealer, yellow ones allow anyone to pick them up but if not turned in within a certain time frame cause all points held to explode, I dunno.  

The 3rd suggestion was pretty spur of the moment out the idea, basically we are a team when the enemy is near, but when we're alone all is fair game.  Something like that.

I don't want the whole corpus greed bloodsport aspect to be removed completely but it needs toned down a lot and there needs to be some loopholes that prevent just general anger and angst between squads.  The corpus may be hosting this event but as Tenno, don't you think it'd be completely feasible we'd find a way to band together anyway, despite the rules the corpus lay down for us?

There are a lot of ways to differentiate this mode from rathuum.  Isolating players from each other and causing anger and upset isn't one of them.

 

[Pendragon1951]

IMHO What I've seen and read and of course played what seems to be DE's desperate attempt to revitalize Conclave by introducing this "new" game mode which really at it's core is a re-skin of conclave and calling it a different name. I personally don't want a game mode where I have to compete with my fellow team mates to achieve a goal. Warframe PVE is about co-op play and this mode most definitely does not encourage that. The worse thing is that no matter how bad this is they will not remove it because of all the time used on it, which again IMHO should have used those resources and man power to help finish TWW.

[Awazx]

An event badly designed. Very easy or very difficult. Competition between teammates and toxicity is rewarded. Poorly balanced in the mathematics of game dynamics. Rewards low or insufficient. Very poorly designed.

[Jorak_Falconstar]

well after playing about with this abit I have to say that the Mag and Volt specters need to go.  they are more a hindrance than a help.

Mag's Polarize crucifies you and leaves you a sitting duck

Volt's speed only ever kicks in when your on the edge of the map trying to pick up point usually resulting in you running of the map at full speed to your death.

and the Specters have no concept of how to bank points but I've seen brokers do it with ease..