Complete, Point-By-Point Feedback On The Informer Event

[XCodes]

Lots of text to follow, which is made up entirely of my opinions on where this event went wrong and how to make better events in the future.

 

1) The Informers - I actually kinda liked the informer.  It's like an easter egg hunt trying to find them.  They even kinda look like easter eggs, especially from afar.  That said, there are some problems with their mechanics.  The fact that they spawned in roughly the same numbers regardless of the number of players AND that kills were not shared among teammates was a big issue.  They also followed all the same spawning rules as other enemies, except they didn't spawn on defense missions.

 

All this wound up really limiting what missions you could do to find them in any particular quantity: Grineer, non-Defense, non-Extermination, that include level 15 or higher Grineer.  Optimal farming of them also added the requirements that you play solo, which may also block off Assassination, Mobile Defense, Spy, and Deception missions if you don't have the gear to do those solo.  Rescue missions were also to be avoided because of the extra failure state of the Hostage dying, and I believe Raid missions were also sub-optimal because I found that I got fewer drone kills on the Grineer Galleon tileset compared to the Asteroid Base or Corpus Ship tilesets.

So, how did most of the active players participate in the event?  They ran Cambria - Earth as many times as they could.  Well, their clan dojos will not be hurting for Ferrite or Rubedo any time soon.

 

As such, my suggestion here is that if it's not shooting at the players, you shouldn't have it follow the standard spawning and kill rules.  If it is shooting at the players, then you should pretty much ONLY have it follow the standard spawning and kill rules.  It's really that simple, and is the easy way to have a more well-balanced event.  Fact of the matter is, Warframe is a really boring game if you're just doing the same thing over and over again.

 

2) The Reward System - This was pretty much designed to fail and/or &!$$ many, many people off.  It's clear that even if every player went out and killed 20 drones, the progress bar wouldn't have been anywhere near 100%.  DE counted too much on the extra carrot of "top 100 players" getting an extra bonus, and top clans getting extra bonuses.  As a direct result, you had people who went out, killed 20, and sulked that the event might not complete, as well as people that went out, killed a few hundred, and then complained that there's no way they're getting top 100, so there's no point to continue.  I fall into yet another group, having ground my way through Grineer all weekend long, I wound up with a whopping 1,111 Informer kills, and my clan put together an amazing performance of 7,786 kills spread over our 9 active members this past weekend.

Yeah, 9 ACTIVE members.  We have 15.  I'm not judging the 6 who didn't participate; as others have said this was a holiday weekend in the US (and the UK :p), but we were still competing against clans with up to 100 members -- clans that are over six times our size.  All said, our clan members came away with praise from our fellow members for a job well done, and not a whole lot else.

For future extermination events, the reward system needs to be dramatically different for both individuals AND clans.  For individuals, include a wider variety of rewards.  Having the baseline reward be a sniper rifle is kind of meh, since not everyone likes playing at being snipers (even though this gun just might become my new favorite primary).  Maybe have a prize pool instead of just one participation reward.  It'd work like this:

There's a prize pool of stuff: 3 primaries, 2 secondaries, 2 melee (all weapons would be 'vandal,' 'prime,' or whatever variations on in-game weapons, so people know what they're dealing with), and a prime warframe.  The weapons all take 1 redemption ticket to claim, the frame takes 5.  You get 1 redemption ticket for your first 20 kills, and 1 more redemption ticket for every 50 kills after.  Claiming everything here takes 620 kills.  Beyond that, there's a "top 100" scoreboard for something cosmetic; an avatar, alternate weapon skins, a color pack... something like that.  Even though the mod will almost certainly be made available at a later date to everyone, it sucks for people who miss out on it now, and it sucks for people who get it down the line.  Ginding Informers all weekend and racking up 3k kills for a mod that everyone just picks up at Xini?  I'm not sure that's a reward fitting the communities most dedicated members.

As for clans, have it be the same kind of deal.  X number of kills per member gives the Warlord something to redeem for the dojo, stuff like statues, trophies, and so on.  Top clans would be judged both based on performance per member as well as clan size (since larger clans tend to have higher inactivity issues), and would get something neat and cosmetic.

 

3) Timing - I mentioned before that this event overlapped with a major holiday in the United States. This is something to be avoided for pretty much any country with a substantial playerbase, so long as there's still time left to actually have the event.  Furthermore, these events shouldn't be just weekend events, they should last a full week.  The idea that everyone's either a student or working a 9 to 5 on Monday through Friday is unrealistic, and unfair to people with schedules that don't line up with this outdated line of thought.  If the event just goes on the whole week, then everyone has a chance to participate regardless of their schedule (barring extraordinary circumstances).

 

I think that's it.  I feel like the event should have been more inclusive of newer players, too, but I don't have much specific to offer there.  With the 2 days fore-warning, anyone who really wanted to participate could have probably built a Paris and ranked it up sufficiently to one-shot these things if they really wanted to.  At least if it wasn't for the holiday, that would be the case.

Edited July 9, 2013 by XCodes

[_Kireek_]

Good post.

Your prize pool is too big, though. I think it'd have to be a more in-depth event for that many rewards.

 

Oh, and my two cents: If an event is based around "Extermination", I assume that if we succeed, there's not going to be any more after the event. Y'know, since we killed them all. (I'm looking at you, Fusion MOAs. D=< )

[theammostore]

This is good feedback.

 

Also, I don't like your exact suggestions, but I like the general thoughts of the changes.

[Pendragon1951]

I completely agree with the OP in fact unfortunately this event has made me realize just how boring Warframe has become after hours and hours on Cambria, so I have come to the conclusion that I may take a break till U9 hits. So see you all when U9 hits.