The Current State Of Trials Needs To Be Addressed

[Venn2]

This thread is an informal petition to ask Digital Extremes to give some much needed attention to the Law of Retribution and Jordas Verdict Trials in regards to bug fixes. This post will outline precisely what the current state of trial content is like, in the form of a list of major bugs and look at how they've been treated over the last year. We’re hoping DE sees this as a call to action to address these long-standing issues.

Things like this need to be fixed:

Spoiler

https://gfycat.com/BetterRegalDegu

 

With each major update, raids are afflicted with exciting new bugs ranging from minor inconveniences to total progression stoppers. That much is normal - sometimes an update can break things. We understand how this happens and I think most of Warframe’s playerbase can accept that the cost of getting constant updates means that sometimes bugs will pop up.

What isn't normal, however, is how long it takes to resolve these issues, if they ever get fixed at all. Let's take a look at a textbook example - Disruptor Drones in Nightmare LoR. For those that don't know - they're a special enemy type that exists only in that one mission and they are attributed to over half of the difference in difficulty between regular and NM versions of the trial. On August 19th, when The Silver Grove update arrived, the Disruptor Drones lost their nullifying effect entirely and instead only slightly buffed enemies (basically they turned back into glorified Propaganda Drones). Disruptor drones remained broken until the War Within: almost 3 months later! And this wasn’t the first time this particular enemy unit was bugged for an extended period of time. Prior to this, there were issues with the nullifying shields blocking all hitscan damage which lasted several weeks as well.

And that’s nothing in comparison to one of the oldest LoR bugs of all - the Proximity Mines during the Hijack portion of Stage 2 in NM LoR have not worked for over a year! When the raid first came out, they used to deal significant damage to the hijack objective but for longer than I can even remember they’ve just been idle props decorating the rails.

But this thread isn’t just about disruptor drones and LoR. Let’s take a look at several major progression-stopping bugs that are currently present The Jordas Verdict.

1. In Stage 1, players can often fail to transition from Archwing to warframe mode, and be locked out of decryption phase
2. In Stage 1, enemies will often fail to spawn in decryption stage and decryption will not begin even if using the Rumbler workaround, forcing players to restart
3. In Stage 3, non-host players almost always spawn without their Archwings, and are forced to walk around on foot, while still wielding their AW weapons. (this was listed as a “Fix” in the Hotfix 19.0.6 patch notes, but still happens)
4. In all phases, Nekros can desecrate Atlas’ Rumblers to generate antiserum injectors (this was listed as a “Fix” in the Recurring Dreams update, but still happens)
5. In Stage 2 and Stage 3 there is still a chance for enemies not to spawn at all.

With our community-made tools, we can even report on what the most common issues are which lead to fail states of The Jordas Verdict. Below, you can see what the last stage a group managed to reach before the failure state on each day in the past month:

The first one displays the number of raids that fail each day in those 3 stages. The Grey one means they failed during the transition between AW and WF stages in phase 1, most likely due to getting stuck in AW, a bug that has been present since the raid was launched over a year ago. “Reached Ship Interior” indicates the raid failed at the start of decryption stage, due to the no enemy spawn bug. “Golem Encountered” is most likely due to all or most clients spawning in without their archwings. Over 100 failures occurred on Nov. 13th, the day TWW dropped! That’s over 500 people who wasted their time and/or resources.

This one shows the total number of failed versus successful runs over the past month and a half. You can see that on Nov. 13th, there were almost twice as many failures as there were successes in JV - primarily due to new bugs.

It is important to note that the reason for the number of failures dropping afterwards is not bug fixes, but rather players finding workarounds and fixes of their own, and sharing them with others.

Basically, we’ve set up tools to monitor the content.warframe.com pages (such as this one: http://content.warframe.com/dynamic/trialStats.php) over the course of what has now been several months. This allows us to see how groups are progressing and how quickly they can get between certain phases.

We’re also putting in an effort to improve bug reporting for the players. Here are some links to feedback topics the Raid School Bus is maintaining on the forums:

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/722572-law-of-retribution-bug-compilation-including-general-trial-bugs/

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/722566-jordas-verdict-bug-compilation/

There are several raid bugs which have been present from the very beginning. The picture that all of this paints is pretty clear:

Trial content has seemingly been abandoned.

Please, DE, give the Trials just enough attention to fix the bugs. We here at the Raid School Bus, as well as other communities in Warframe which complete the Trials on a regular basis, have done what we can to promote this content and draw in new players. We’re doing what we can to reach out to the community and get them engaged in these missions, but with bugs growing in magnitude and completely stopping progression lasting for weeks or months at a time it only makes it harder keep players interested. Tenno Clock News published an article in October about other reasons players might not be interested in the Trials — major progression-stopping bugs make it exponentially more difficult to keep players interested.

We’ve built tools and guides for players to learn more about the Trials and manage their communities. We’ve improved the existing statistics tracking options. We’ve made it easier for players of any skill level to quickly find a group at any time of the day (through Discord servers).  All we ask is for you to give the raids a little more attention. To test for or at least fix major bugs quickly after each update.

We know that only a small fraction of the entire playerbase play the Trials on a regular basis, but we’re just asking to be given at least the same level of attention other similarly low attention game modes. Like Conclave. On Devstream 80 (September 16), DE published the following chart:

Though probably only by a few hundred or maybe a thousand players, the Trials saw more daily active players than Conclave did.

Even though the Trials are played regularly by a thousands of players, we rarely see updates or at least any documentation of changes made which affect the Trials directly. Here’s a comparison of all the updates Conclave has seen compared to Trials since Update 16:

 

Balance changes are one thing, but Conclave constantly sees new rewards being added in (mods/skins/mechanics) and even new missions. Only DE knows how many players actively play Conclave versus how many actively play the Trials, but the difference in dev time is noticeable. Even if the Conclave content is done as a labor of love, the Trials should at the very least be expected to get attention on major bugs.

On behalf of everyone who still enjoys the raids, we are begging you to give them just a little bit more attention.We’re not looking for massive overhauls or making demands for new content - we just want the content we already have to be fixed.

Also, we would love to know what it is we can do to help improve the current state of Trials as players. We want to help DE in any way we can to improve upon this content, even beyond just bug fixing. We just need to know what it is DE need to move forward. More daily active players participating in this content? More bug reports and EE.logs? More forum posts for feedback and suggestions? What can we do to help? What will it take to make Trials worth the dev time to fix?

There’s definitely room for more improvement within the Trials, but we’re willing to take this one step at a time. We just hope that DE can see our plight and get the raids back in gear soon. Maybe after we take this step, we can work through suggestions and polishing existing mechanics within the Trials.

big props to TGDM, Pegasy, and the rest of the RSB team for their work in helping research and organize this initiative

Edited November 21, 2016 by Venn2

[MorrowDeath]

Hey Venn, long time no see! I agree completely with all of your points; hopefully, DE will take notice sometime soon and put some lovin' into trials that it desperately needs

[War-.]

im doing atleast 1-2 jv bus everyday with all of these bugs.

PLEASE DE !!

Edited November 20, 2016 by -Shiva-

[Killomatic]

Raids need more love, DE! Please help us out! 

[Max_AKC]

Thank you, Venn for writing this up. You've done a great job too!

I haven't used the Discord group yet, and often go through recruiting. Even when you find a good team, the other half of the battle with raids are bugs and connection issues. Connection issues are probably out of DE's hands but the bugs are well within their power to fix. I think trials should be given as much love and attention as the other parts of Warframe.

Thanks again, Venn for posting this thread.

[invalid5]

let's get some raid love

Edited November 21, 2016 by invalid5

[Zerdfer]

Great post Venn.

It's time raids get some attention. There are numerous bugs that have been known for ages but where never fixed, and players have had to findworkarounds and band-aid fixes by themselves if they wanted to complete the mission. After every update raids get more and more bugs and fixes have been long overdue...

[Cray]

I wholeheartedly agree that raids Trials need a hell of a lot more attention from DE. I would like to think that DE does in fact care about them, but at times, it seriously feels like they don't. There is nothing more frustrating than taking the time to report a whole list of bugs and getting an actual response from a member of staff, only for none of the issues reported to be addressed, even in a belated manner.

 

For what it's worth, "Walkwing" should be getting some attention soon, as it's happening in normal Archwing as well.

Edited November 21, 2016 by DeltaPhantom

[Zerdfer]

By the way, I created a thread a few weeks ago about almost the same topic, you can find it here: 

Some Other bugs are very well known and are happening all the time. For example the "camera-up-the-arse" bug in arcwhing stage (having the AW occupy more than 50% of the screen space does not offer a very good visibility) :

And it's newer variant the "first-person-archwing-mode", where you dont see your archwing at all and fly around with a first person view. I have yet to take a screenshot. There is also the bug in which in the Host of the mission is not inside the golem in stage 3, some players might be bugged in the oesophages resulting in animpossibility to complete the mission.

 

I would also like to emphasize on this: " It is important to note that the reason for the number of failures dropping afterwards is not bug fixes, but rather players finding workarounds and fixes of their own, and sharing them with others." 

Which I think should be the most appalling thing for DE. It is not normal the players have to find fixes themselves if they want to complete the mission. And I find it quite shameful that when DE actually fixes something, it's the baid-aid that the players have found to work around the bugs and/or bad design of the mission (i.e. the atlas+nekros interaction).

Edited November 21, 2016 by Zerdfer

[Venn2]

Good point, @Zerdfer, will add that as soon as I have some free time.

[ShiraHagane]

tbh being out of archwing is better than 6 dof

[--Q--Animan8000]

Also when the Trials are finally fixed, there are definitely much players like me who will look then forward for a new Trial like a Corpus or Sentient Trial because in my opinion more players are playing Trials than Conclave also because Conclave is PVP which isn't the "main part" of this game while Trials are Co-op with more players than in usual missions which fits more into this game. But whatever, Trials are getting more popular since the last months also because of the Raid School Bus and much people like to do Raids often just for good arcanes for trading or buffing their Warframes and stuff. So please DE give the Trials more attention!

Edited November 21, 2016 by --Q--Animan8000

[Venn2]

@--Q--Animan8000 yup, agree on all points. In fact, as you can see from that pie chart, raids literally are more popular than PvP. As for additional raids - this is just the start. If we can show DE how many of us want them, then maybe the Initiative can accomplish that as well. But for now, let's focus on debugging them. 

[Me.Greedy]

i'll never get into trials, but this assessment is very accurate. well done informative look at... *applause

[redux1031]

Yes please give more attention on trial.. me and clan member use to run raid everyday, but now maybe 3 times a week or during weekend only because of the bug getting more and more annoying.. and yes we do find a way around to fix it... Well player should not fix the bugs by themselves... we just wanna do trial normaly without half of our play time to find a way around the bugs... so sad...

Edited November 21, 2016 by redux1031

[MariAnnette]

I love to raid.  Adding my voice to Venn's post in the hopes that some of the nasty bugs are looked at and the state of raids is improved.

 

Nice job on a clear and informative post, Venn.

[(PSN)True_Reclaimer]

DE will fix trials at the same time when they rework dojos, add a sortie token system, add warframe.market in game, add an augment slot, make archwing fun, and put dark sectors back in the game.

So about next tuesday in the month of never.

[(PSN)Blazingfire906]

Amazing work  venn I couldn't word it any better myself, this is a problem on console as much as a pc problem, though there are some bugs that I've ran through such as:

Being stuck in the pause menu and having to restart the game, I know it's not a raid glitch but it's very common there.

Players getting kicked mid jv loading transition from 2 stage to 3 and same for lor, when it transitions to the boss battles. I usually lose half my team if I run above 4 players.

Not to mention on JV enemies barely start spawning for some reason and it always does this on the second stage of the raid.

Lor, enemies are way too cramped in the beginning area and are rare to find near the toxin injectors which is a problem in my opinion.

Suggestion: It can be a great addition if you can run the raids in a more creative way or provide different way to treat the objective to provide a fresh way of completing the lor so people would come back to it and enjoy it more. 

If you do end up patching those glitches we thank you DE for listening to your fans and taking our complaints and fixing them

[Amphyy]

Thank you for taking the time to compile all this data! It definitely sheds a lot of light on the effects of DE's neglect of trials. I wholeheartedly support your informal petition; I used to love raiding with my friends but with all the bugs we've pretty much abandoned them, and I'd love to see the trials fixed so that we can do our daily runs again :( 

Edited November 21, 2016 by Amphyy

[Takkov]

@Zerdfer I think the first person view you are referring to is in fact also a different camera postition, namely "we set the camera so high that you cant see anything of your AW".

when I encountered this I used my melee, which would as part of its combo show up in the lower part of the screen (centaur)

[-dicht.ThanksFrost-]

I think what upsets me the most is how much more attention conclave gets compared to Trials. Nobody plays conclave. Just look at their respective discord servers. In rsb there are over 800 players online alone peaking at 2k members in total (and thats not counting the normal WF server) and in conclave? less than 100 online maybe 200 total members. Quadruple the amount compared to conclave. You would think that Trials would get more attention, because it caters to the audience that dominate the game but no. Instead "irrelevant pvp" gets a team, they get patches every time and just to finish it all off they get dedicated servers. And look at those player counts they totally peaked when those came out.

 

If you even look at the pie chart from devstream theres more to it then that. Most likely de counted by matches completed or hours done in total, regardless a player only needs to play 3 trials which is only maybe 45mins to an hour of content total, and most players will play maybe on of each trial per day some even just one trial because you can only get rewards once a day. But in conclave theres incentive to play as much as you want  since that is the nature of competitive multilayer and Trials STILL beat conclave statistically.

 

What does this mean?  It means that conclave should be scrapped, removed like the forgotten feature that it is and, they should make a team for parts of the game that are more popular and help keep the game and the game economy booming. Concalve is just in the way, it does not help the trade economy, almost no body likes it, its littered with design flaws and people only play there to farm challenges /s

Edited November 21, 2016 by Eureka.seveN

[Redthirst]

Yes, Trials are probably the most meaningful content in the entire game(mainly because they require actual coordination), so it's sad to see them in such a sorry state. Had they received proper support, we would potentially be closer to our never-ending chase of end-game, but instead Trials are abandoned. The least that DE can do is to fix the bugs(although I would really like them to revisit the idea of Trials, but even fixing bugs could be enough).

And I think it's quite telling that even in a broken state and being abandoned by DE, Trials still have more people playing them than Conclave, that sees constant support, with changes in every update.

Edited November 21, 2016 by Redthirst

[Rhealin]

      I love Warframe I have for the past four to five years it is a game where I can have some fun with some friends and work towards new goals everyday, one of which is to become a decent Trial speed runner. I avoided Trials for a long time because I had heard a lot of my friends talk about their bad experiences with team mates and the constant fear of having a bugged Trial session, and once I opened myself up to these Trials it was worst than I could've imagined. You rely so much on your team that you cannot afford to have half of them not able to connect. I think its time you show some love to the Trials DE. Some experiences can ruin a persons attitude or even day. The fact that you have what seems like a fifty fifty shot at whether enemies are going to spawn in rooms in Jordas Verdict is unbelievable. Please help your community out DE. 

 

Yours Sincerely, A Fellow Tenno

 

[TGDM]

I've had the pleasure of working with the team at the WFRSB for a long time now. They've put a great deal of work into improving the Trials for all players by creating the space for players to find groups, learn how to complete this content, and self-moderate their own sub-community to reflect well on the greater WF community. They're even making a great effort of encouraging their community to make copies of their EE.log files so that we can get as much information as possible to DE for bug fixing.

It's hard to accept that the state of Trial content has become so decrepit that many have come to accept the massive number of unfixed bugs as the norm. This is content that was designed as a proof of concept for a different path of end game in WF, but has been left to rot. Other players have in this thread have already mentioned that it's become a norm for WF's design process to introduce new mechanics and then abandon them for long periods of time, but I'm struggling to think of examples where the content was completely broken for such a long period of time before being addressed or fixed. The only thing that comes to mind is last year's changes to Exterminate missions and de/respawning enemies which lasted a little over a month.

I hope that Digital Extremes sees this call to action and gives us an update on what's going on with Trial development. Arcane Enhancements are still desirable rewards and the Trial content is generally enjoyable, but we cannot accept these obviously broken gameplay modes as the norm.

[Sempiterra]

After not touching JV for an entire year from its release with the thought process of "let's wait untill it's playable" I decided to give it a try in which WRSB helped me greatly, and to my surprise it's better to know all the bugs and how to potentially avoid them than knowing the trial itself after all this time. And after the last batch of trial hotfixes the "no enemies = no progression" bug has creeped into LoR aswell (unless it was happening even earlier, I've only recently started doing raids again).

Bugs were what kept me and many many other players away from doing trials, it has to be fixed.