Discussion On Improving Events And Possible Gameplay Repercussions

[Fiziks]

With the current time remaining in the spy drone event around 15 hours and the progress bar only at 73%, I felt it a proper time to discuss the possible effects that DE could implement should we fail this event. Even if we succeed this time, this discussion will prove valuable for critiques on the current event system and on the fail-state case of an event, should one occur.

 

Firstly, I want to make it clear that I feel DE should not provide us with any community rewards, like Snipetron BPs, we if fail. Such an action might silence the groanings of the community for now, but it will instill a lazy mentality that will mar all future events as users won't care to meet the goals if they expect DE to provide the rewards anyways. This opinion is likely to upset some users, particularly those that have worked dilligently hunting down drones, but I feel it is one that DE must remain firm on to preserve the excitement and fun of future events.

 

Assuming you agree with my previous point, you might also agree that it is still slightly unfair to provide no reward to those tenno tirelessly hunting down drones as we speak. They have worked hard and deserve something for their trouble, right? In this case, I'm reminded of the PvE multiplayer experience of Mass Effect 3. Much like Warframe, ME3's multiplayer had several weekend events ranging in a variety of objectives. In these events there was a community objective to achieve, such as kill a number of a certain enemy type, as well as a squad objective, like clear a mission on the hardest difficulty. Each objective had a unique reward, with the community objective being more valuable than the squad objective. These squad objectives worked towards the same goal the community objective and provided incentive to participate in large community event going on with small, easily earnable awards. This method of two-tier event rewards would be perfect for Warframe events, such the spy drone event going on right now, as the squad objective would provide a reward to all those who have participated, even if the community goal fails, and possibly encourage more to participate. 

 

In addition to providing two-tiers of rewards, I feel that the current events lack transparency with the objective's goals. For the spy drone event, users were informed that if they kill 20+ spy drones, they will receive a snipetron BP if the community kills enough drones to reach 100%. However, how many drones is 100%? Right now, we are 70% completion, but how many more do we need? 10,000 more drone kills? 1,000,000 more? Without a clear sight of the finish line, one can easily become discouraged and give up. Most tenno I've spoken to got their 20 kills to be eligible for the BP and then immediately stopped farming because they didn't feel like they were contributing to the goal. More transperency in objectives would go a long way to aleviate this issue.

 

Lastly, what would happen if the community objective is not reached? Let us return to the ME3 multiplayer again to discuss Operation SILENCER, the first ME3 community event that ended in a fail-state. In this event, players were tasked with killing 3,000,000 of a specific enemy type, known as Banshees. The community did not reach this objective, but the developers had prepared for such an occurrence. The ME developers decided to increase the spawn rate for the Banshees on all maps for several weeks, giving the world a dynamic feel where the actions of the community had direct repercussions. In my opinion, this simple act was an even better result than actual reward because altering the spawn rates gave new life to some-what stale maps. Imagine if we failed an event in Warframe, and the result was a higher spawn rate for Toxic Ancients on levels with enemies level 20+. Or, what if the Stalker refuses to appear on levels with enemies less than level 35+. These are simple effects that can add some challenge to the game, which several players are asking for, as well as provide the feel of a dynamic world for us.

 

With all this knowledge, how could we revise the current event and what would be the result? Let us make it so those who kill 20+ spy drones receive a forma blueprint and, upon completion the squad objective, you will also receive a Snipetron BP if the community kills 1,000,000 spy drones. Notice how we have added the two-tier reward system and have clear, understandable objectives. Our squad reward is minor, but it's enough to motivate people to join in and participate in the event. Let us also revise the counter shown in-client so that clicking on it will display the total number killed and the number remaining. Easy access to data will provide users with a clear distance to the goal, ideally avoiding discouragement. Finally, if the tenno are unsuccessful in their mission, make it so the spy drones appear in greater numbers and have a chance to appear on non-Grineer missions. This change will provide a dynamic feel and add further challenge to missions, which would be a nice touch.

 

Anyway, those are my thoughts on how to improve the current event system. What are your thoughts on the system, and how could we improve it?

 

EDIT: Some individuals have said that the most recent event caught them by surprise as there was little warning, barring some forum posts and hinting towards it during the livestream. In future cases, it would be advisable to broadcast information on upcoming events through official channels 2-3 days prior to their start rather than posting shortly before the event began to provide users with a heads-up. This assumes, of course, that DE wasn't intending it to be a surprise.

Edited July 8, 2013 by Fiziks

[Lady_Khaos]

Yay for constructive feedback. Good feedback at that.

[adamkie]

I think that these are all valid observations.

What I would suggest is to "tier" the event(s) in the following way (using this event as an example)

 

Tenno Personal Objective:

 

Get XX kills to get a unique sniper rifle.

 

Tenno Cell Objective:

 

Achieve XXX kills in a 4-man team to receive X reward (mod pack, resources, artifacts, sth team related, w/e)

 

Tenno Clan Objective:

 

Achieve X kills with your clan to receive Y Dojo reward (statue, bragging rights, etc)

 

Tenno Global Objective:

 

Achieve Event Goal X to unlock a new technology for all players (new mod, new weapon BP)

 

Tenno Competitive Clan Global Objective:

 

Best Clan with Event Goal statistics receives Y Dojo reward (new room, research, materials)

 

----

All these objectives are -independent- of each other. I.e. Not achieving the Global Objective does not impact personal, clan or cell rewards.

This gives different types of players different goals to work towards and provides incentives for different gameplay styles. Everybody wins.

 

Of course this would need some/more effort put into the event, so these events could happen once a month/rarely but provide really interesting and desirable rewards for every player.

Edited July 8, 2013 by adamkie

[RyuhoTheDragon]

Very good points.

[Ronin666]

Good read man.

I'd also like to know if there's a dedicated Event Team at DE? If there isn't, well..I dunno then.

Edited July 8, 2013 by Ronin666

[Blazer-X]

All these objectives are -independent- of each other. I.e. Not achieving the Global Objective does not impact personal, clan or cell rewards.

This gives different types of players different goals to work towards and provides incentives for different gameplay styles. Everybody wins.

 

Of course this would need some/more effort put into the event, so these events could happen once a month/rarely but provide really interesting and desirable rewards for every player.

Very good points indeed. That said, I don't think we even need to have 5 or 6 completely new rewards for something like this. We can easily have existing resources, potato, forma or even void keys as some of the tier rewards. Those rewards, especially the potato and forma, have more than enough demand that most reasonable players would try to shoot for them.

[MBaldelli]

In addition to providing two-tiers of rewards, I feel that the current events lack transparency with the objective's goals. For the spy drone event, users were informed that if they kill 20+ spy drones, they will receive a snipetron BP if the community kills enough drones to reach 100%. However, how many drones is 100%? Right now, we are 70% completion, but how many more do we need? 10,000 more drone kills? 1,000,000 more? Without a clear sight of the finish line, one can easily become discouraged and give up. Most tenno I've spoken to got their 20 kills to be eligible for the BP and then immediately stopped farming because they didn't feel like they were contributing to the goal. More transperency in objectives would go a long way to aleviate this issue.

 

Interesting criticism...  But you seem to be forgetting the second part of this event that's stated https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/74111-spy-drone-community-event-july-5-%E2%80%93-8th/'>here.

 

- Don’t stop at 20—the top 100 players will receive a PRIMED CHAMBER MOD- first shot in new clip gives +25% bonus damage per fusion level.

- Part of a clan?  The top clans from 4 pre-determined tiers will receive a GRINEER DRONE STATUE for their dojo -- awarded after Update 9 (see below for tier/reward details) 

 

Heck, I didn't even realize I had killed almost 100 because I forgot that it was being tallied in the stats screen.    While I don't want to be a contrarian voice, I sometimes think it's prudent not to tell people how many they need to kill.  Sometimes a huge number will leave people feeling intimidating and won't want to continue if the number seems too big.  Works for me, I like helping, but I don't like being daunted by a hard number.  After all this is a game, not work.  

[Xylia]

I just feel they set the bar way too high with this event.

 

They should have known that people WERE going to stop at 20, because face it.

 

There's 100 Primed Chamber Mods going out.

 

If you're not a person who can play Warframe 48+ hours straight, you have no chance whatsoever at all at being in the Top 100 when Warframe has TENS OF THOUSANDS of players.

 

This is made even worse by the lack of a Leaderboard that one can view that tracks personal and clan kills.

 

Joe Schmoe might get 500 kills and think that's impressive, but then he'll see on the forums that people are boasting 3,000+ and go "nope. No reason for me to continue." and then just stop right there.

 

That's why the "Top 100" fails miserably when you're not offering anything other than the gun at 20 kills.

 

The "Top 100" players are not enough to fill the bar in.

 

And the No-Teamwork thing sucks. I'm going to throw that out there, yet again. Not awarding us credit for team kills is the worst mistake made in this event. Removing Co-Op from a Co-Op game is beyond fail.

Edited July 8, 2013 by Xylia

[Fiziks]

All these objectives are -independent- of each other. I.e. Not achieving the Global Objective does not impact personal, clan or cell rewards.

This gives different types of players different goals to work towards and provides incentives for different gameplay styles. Everybody wins.

 

Of course this would need some/more effort put into the event, so these events could happen once a month/rarely but provide really interesting and desirable rewards for every player.

 

Although I agree that more tiers rewards are always welcome, I'm wary about the difficulty on DE's part of making such an event feel cohesive while making each objective somewhat unique. Think about the current objective of killing x amount of spy drones. If you were to do 5-6 separate objectives for the same event, how many variations of spy drone related objectives could you make without them being the same? I'm not saying such a goal is impossible, but this would require significant man hours to generate something so large in scope. Even the spy drone event required development of art assets, writing the event's background story, implementation of spawn locations and spawn rates, sound design (even though they just used the same sound effects of the ospreys), bug testing, and closed alpha testing prior to the event. These are not small feats and likely required several team members working tirelessly to meet a short deadline. Adding something like multiple tiers of rewards would be amazing, but that would require even more man hours out of DE at a time when they are working to get Warframe to a release-ready status. What I listed in my original post were steps DE could take right now to improve events without having to drastically increase anyone's workload and/or adding new personnel tasked with handling such operations.

 

 

 

Interesting criticism...  But you seem to be forgetting the second part of this event that's stated here.

 

- Don’t stop at 20—the top 100 players will receive a PRIMED CHAMBER MOD- first shot in new clip gives +25% bonus damage per fusion level.

- Part of a clan?  The top clans from 4 pre-determined tiers will receive a GRINEER DRONE STATUE for their dojo -- awarded after Update 9 (see below for tier/reward details) 

 

Heck, I didn't even realize I had killed almost 100 because I forgot that it was being tallied in the stats screen.    While I don't want to be a contrarian voice, I sometimes think it's prudent not to tell people how many they need to kill.  Sometimes a huge number will leave people feeling intimidating and won't want to continue if the number seems too big.  Works for me, I like helping, but I don't like being daunted by a hard number.  After all this is a game, not work.  

 

 

To your first point, I did realize there are rewards for being in top 100 players and the top 4 clans, but these are rewards are difficult to achieve and are only for the most hardcore of tenno. Most of us can't contribute the time necessary to reach such goals and also don't have a large enough clan to even be considered for such an award. I'm pleased to see DE offer such rewards for their most devoted of fans, but these objectives are so far beyond the scope of most of us that they should not be considered in such a discussion on events as perceived by the average player. As someone who can only play a few hours a day, I only see one reward.

 

And regarding your point on the number of kills needed to succeed, I completely agree that there are times when it's not advisable to make the numbers available to the users. This is a delicate step that requires some serious thought before putting into place because a large number can be just as daunting as no number at all. Were I to develop an event like kill x number of y, I would need to know the average spawn rate of enemy y per level, which I'll denote as s, and the number of active players p on an average weekend. I would then determine the approximate number of kills for the community objective to be:

 

x = 2 * (p * 3 * s)

 

In this system, if every player online over the weekend ran a level with enemy y on it 3 times, we would achieve 50% the total number of required kills. Let us also set a squad objective to kill 3 * s, guaranteeing that the majority of players will at least farm that much as they will want the squad reward. With this system, most players would see that the community has 'passed the hump' in the kill counter as it will quickly exceed 50%, and they can now count down the number of kills left rather than counting up. This change in mentality is extremely powerful in motivating individuals and would be a perfect opportunity to know the number of kills remaining rather than keeping everyone in the dark. Keep in mind that this is just a crude equation. I'm just saying that a careful choice of the objective goals through use of readily available data to DE has the potential to turn the daunting feeling of a large number into a goal that the community can eagerly work towards as they race to the finish line.

[LasersGoPewPew]

events should be:
Kill X amount of enemies: receive base reward if the community bar is filled

 

Kill Y amount of enemies: receive bonus reward relating to basic reward if the community bar is filled

 

Kill Z amount of enemies:guarantee that you receive the event reward and bonus reward even if the community fails.

 

X amount of enemies would be something reasonable as people do have lives and work and everything else that keeps them from the game

 

Y amount of enemies should be somewhat reasonable as the same reasons mentioned for X enemies.

 

Z should be for the hardcore monster/redbull chugging no life farmers some extremely high amount of enemies killed(the number could be very high but still do-able so people have an actual GOAL to ensure that they get the event reward which also increases participation)

[adamkie]

Although I agree that more tiers rewards are always welcome, I'm wary about the difficulty on DE's part of making such an event feel cohesive while making each objective somewhat unique. Think about the current objective of killing x amount of spy drones. If you were to do 5-6 separate objectives for the same event, how many variations of spy drone related objectives could you make without them being the same? I'm not saying such a goal is impossible, but this would require significant man hours to generate something so large in scope. Even the spy drone event required development of art assets, writing the event's background story, implementation of spawn locations and spawn rates, sound design (even though they just used the same sound effects of the ospreys), bug testing, and closed alpha testing prior to the event. These are not small feats and likely required several team members working tirelessly to meet a short deadline. Adding something like multiple tiers of rewards would be amazing, but that would require even more man hours out of DE at a time when they are working to get Warframe to a release-ready status. What I listed in my original post were steps DE could take right now to improve events without having to drastically increase anyone's workload and/or adding new personnel tasked with handling such operations.

 

If quality is not feasible then I would suggest dropping it altogether. I'd rather not have any event at all than this mess right now.

 

Personally I think this is absolutely feasible over a longer timeframe, the tier rewards were -examples-, nobody needs unique warframes as rewards for every tier.

[__Kanade__]

The event wasn't thought out right, I was going to do this event whenever I had the time so that i could qualify for the new weapon mod, but only the top 100 players will get it. After reading that part, I just wasn't interested anymore, I don't have that kind of time to get 600-700- or even 1000 drone kills. I just got the 20 for a weapon I will most likely never use, let alone craft it. Bottom line is that I don't care for this event to put any effort into it, I mean I got the 20 kills from just doing one run, so if we make it, cool, if not oh well. And as much i woulda loved to get that new weapon mod, I just don't have that kinda time to put into this game to even make it in 99th place.

[Mishotaki]

I think that failing this event would be the best thing for the community: we won't have the feeling of "we can't fail"

 

if DE doesn't give us any reward for failing, it would be even better, when the next event comes in, everyone who will remember that we failed this one will be in there like hardcore to make sure we don't fail this time...

 

but that's my opinion...

[Fiziks]

If quality is not feasible then I would suggest dropping it altogether. I'd rather not have any event at all than this mess right now.

 

Personally I think this is absolutely feasible over a longer timeframe, the tier rewards were -examples-, nobody needs unique warframes as rewards for every tier.

 

I agree that there is no need to include unique rewards for every tier as that would certainly increase development costs and time for events, but it is certainly something DE could include in the future. Once the game reaches a stable release and the majority of art assets are completed, the designers and writers can shift focus to creating unique items and story that could be exclusive for events, and I'm curious to see what their creative minds can accomplish when they aren't struggling to meet to several different deadlines all at once. For now, I feel that smaller events are better, but I'm optimistic for the future.

[Kuhl-Ka]

See my other topic about email notification. It's likely most of the community was off on vacation and had no idea the event was happening until they were far away from their computers. Had I known about this event before I drove across three states to visit family, I would have packed my laptop and taken a few hours to participate. Instead, I assumed nothing was going on, so why bother packing my gigantic Alienware laptop if nothing special was happening... My mistake I guess. Should have been combing the forum and dev chat videos as my second job to stay in the loop. Community event emails are a major technical undertaking it seems.

[Fiziks]

See my other topic about email notification. It's likely most of the community was off on vacation and had no idea the event was happening until they were far away from their computers. Had I known about this event before I drove across three states to visit family, I would have packed my laptop and taken a few hours to participate. Instead, I assumed nothing was going on, so why bother packing my gigantic Alienware laptop if nothing special was happening... My mistake I guess. Should have been combing the forum and dev chat videos as my second job to stay in the loop. Community event emails are a major technical undertaking it seems.

 

Excellent point. I have edited my original post to also include this idea as a possible revision. 

Edited July 8, 2013 by Fiziks

[silentdrumr]

Although I feel DE wanted to keep most information hidden/mysterious, I think you have a good point about having them at least hint out a number or some kind of hard clear information to go off on.

 

Also with the competitiveness of this event (top 100 players, top clans), they could've implemented a specific leaderboard which would've let people at least know how far or how close they are. I know this could also be discouraging, but I know a lot of people I play with or even met online were more discouraged at the fact that they didn't know how high people were in the drone count.

 

Had I known that my clan maybe was 50 drones away, I would've probably worked harder at it than just farming blindly for hours. It would've given a bit more incentive is all.

 

Overall this post has valid points. so +1

[JrBuck]

I think that there was a lot of problems with this event but I'm not too upset by it considering that this is like a testing phase not only for the game but for the community. As I recall the Fusion MOA Operation was completed well before the due timer and the Top 10 on that Operation had something like 1000-1500 kills (not including the #1 that I think had 2500+). Where as this event the top 100 all had 2000+. So it seems to me that there was a major change in either the DE expectations and/or the involvement of the community (i.e. fewer heavy grinders and the rest getting the min 20 kills).

 

The thing that I liked least about this event, and I didn't see it mentioned here (didn't read absolutely everything posted) is the effect of individual goals on a co-op game. All weekend it was like everyone was pitted against each other. Since only 1 player in a squad of 4 can kill a target...everyone was fighting to get in front of the others and get the kill first. And since the frames themselves may or may not have an AOE ability this didn't always mean you were the most skilled player in the squad. 

 

I had an idea for an operation (not saying that it is the BEST idea, but just saying there are alternatives) where players would run and collect tags or something hidden on maps. This type of goal would improve co-op and team work over solo play considering that all 4 squad members could collect the pickups and in doing so quadruples the rate of completion. If they were actually hidden rather than drops I also think that players would get more use and interest out of the less visited areas of the maps (considering how often everyone is speed running objectives). As well more knowledgeable players would actually have a reason to educate their peers on locations they have found in the maps that are generally overlooked. Having these tag have a low drop rate. (like maybe 1-3 per game) would further influence co-operation since a selfish player who is not marking drops will only get 2 tags towards the global goal where as if he notifies his team mates then that makes 8 pickups towards the goal. And in that situation his individual aspirations as far as the leader boards go aren't going to be impeded because reaching the top 100 is going to be more about persistence than selfishness. 

 

I think someone else pointed this out as well, but I agree that having high level rewards (like players that reach 1000 tags) and lower level rewards like the 20 kills minimum in the Drone event would increase general participation as well as the moderate grinders (those who never think they will make the top 100 but would like to put forth more than a minimum effort). In this instance you could still have the top 100 and top clan leader boards.

 

These are my thoughts anyways.