Constructive feedback about The Index

[vith0s]

Personally, I haven't enjoyed playing The Index so far. I believe that with some iteration on the mechanics it can be more fun. I have mostly been farming the Endurance mission solo, but I've tried to give public mode and mission 2 a fair chance so my feedback would be better informed. Here are my concrete complaints in no particular order:

1. Greedy teammates are still a problem even after the goal reduction

2. Melee gives far too much advantage in ability to acquire points

Some players continue to aggressively pick up Index Points after reaching their goal, without regard to their teammates. This is exacerbated by the disadvantage of gunplay from range when it comes to grabbing points. Melee players will almost always be able to take them first. Many times I have had the most kills and damage, but still failed my personal goal while others succeeded many times over. Rather than play public and risk essentially subsidizing melee players with my credits, I have ended up mostly playing solo.

Potential fixes:

- Grace period of a few seconds on dropped points that allows only the killer to pick them up.

- Restructure the credit rewards so that half (3/6ths) comes from achieving your own goal and half comes from your teammates reaching their goals: 1/6th each * 3 (AI will probably need dynamic tuning of their desire to score points to avoid worsening the situation with spectres involved)

3. Avoiding enemy abilities with positioning should be more integral to the fighting

Reward players for understanding enemy abilities and having positional awareness. Right now there's kind of too much chaos and not enough telegraphing. It's OK for abilities to be strong as long as there's reasonable downtime between them (taking into account that there are often 3-4 enemies nearby) and some windup time with sound/visual tells.

A few specific examples from memory I would tweak:

- I believe Azoth sometimes levitates and spins, doing massive damage in a large AoE. This needs more telegraphing, I think the damage comes very quickly. Might be Lockjaw rather than Azoth, not sure. Neither is in my codex yet.

- Azoth drops something like 8-10 bombs rapidly that linger for a long time. This can be too punishing without warning if you're in melee range, and they should expire somewhat quickly. They should be an effective danger when they're being dropped, not a permanent moat of lava that enemies stand in.

- Whichever enemy has the ability to instantly teleport across the map: I realize you can destroy the teleporter if you see it, but it's often nowhere near you when you're fighting this enemy. It's pretty much the strongest possible escape, and usually means you've just weakened the enemy so someone else is going to get free points. How about a timed teleport channel with an object-damage shell that you have to break to interrupt the cast?

- Raptor RX: How about instead of the barrage of fast explosive shells, a slow moving single rocket with a ground target graphic and sound warning. The target can follow you but has a maximum movement speed.

- Whichever enemy does the purge/energy drain whenever you're near it... just remove the instant energy drain.

In general there's just often a feeling of "oh, I died because the enemy decided to use their *explode, killing nearby players* type ability". When we get gibbed by some ability, we should feel "oops, should have avoided that". Rather than "well I guess that's what I get for playing this game mode, random sudden deaths".

4. The weakness caused by holding many points needs to be tuned down I think.

Right now the health reduction is too severe (you might as well just have 1 hp after some point, anything that damages your health is going to do more than your max hp anyway). And the passive energy drain means you can basically only use abilities if you have enough efficiency that a single energy orb pickup will allow you to immediately cast something.

Potential fixes:

- Make the HP reduction scaling a bit more gradual and split it up into smaller reductions to shields, HP, and armor so it affects all frames more evenly.

- Reduce the scaling of the passive energy drain and supplement it with small cooldown increases and a reduction to max energy (don't scale it too quickly)?

5. The energy economy just isn't fun, even before you're holding a bunch of points.

This may be difficult to fix as I have the feeling it may have been done because of warframe abilities trivializing the arena game mode too much.

However I think it might be worth playtesting letting players spawn with some amount of energy and/or doubling the energy orb pickup amounts.

6. When you turn in points, your max HP returns to normal but your current HP will remain at near zero.

Either do a full heal with the teleport after turning in points or at least scale up the old current HP by % when the max HP is being restored. I'd also like to see this give you some energy back, after the drain is removed.

7. Enemy movement can be very erratic, especially when they decide to path up and down ledges repeatedly.

This isn't the biggest deal but on the other hand it probably affects all game types? Just seems to happen a lot more often in The Index. Particularly the level with 3 height levels.

8. Enemy level scaling in Endurance is problematic in combination with personal goals

The early points are much much easier to score than the later ones. This makes Endurance not worth playing in public mode.

Possible fixes:

- Make endurance only have a team goal instead of personal goals

- Make points dropped by higher level enemies be worth more

9. Endurance is somewhat dysfunctional as a credit farming activity

My experience has been something like: spend 3 minutes reaching personal goal, alt tab out of the game for 3 more minutes waiting for the time to run out.

Possible fixes:

- Add some way to intentionally reduce the game clock, maybe hacking consoles?

- Make the reward scale with the total game time (greater than 1:1 scaling so there is reward for extending the game and fighting tougher enemies vs just restarting the game)

Edited October 24, 2016 by vith0s
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