Improving new conclaver's experience

[Stormdragon]

Hi there!
After some time playing conclave and seen my little sister do the same, I've come with a small list of things intended to help new players feel more welcome in the conclave.

1) 

To many players this might be a very simple question, even a fool one for some others, but the intention of this post isn't questioning players' intelligence, but helping to prevent questions like that in the future. Seeing this player lost in the conclave reminded me of the amount of times I've seen somebody asking exactly the same, which led to someone (me or someone else in the lobby) to stop playing in order to explain how to equip their guns for PvP.

Fix: Seeing that question pop up in chat made me ask to myself "Why isn't the basic gear pre-equipped in conclave loadouts just like in the PvE ones?" and BOOM the solution was found, all we need is expect for it to be implemented in the future.

2) After seeing the previous player's stats, I was left only with more questions:

Spoiler

What is a player like that doing out of recruit condiotioning?

Imo, allowing whirlwind and mistral players to leave RC to test themselves before leaving it forever by ranking up tempest is a good thing, the problem comes qhen totally unexperienced players can do the same without knowledge of what they will find over there. This could be fixed simply by hiding the choice to disable RC from players until they get a fixed amount of kills.

Probably someone could try to say:

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"But -Storm, let things be done the easy way and let everything be fixed and measured by syndicate ranks instead"

And my response will be a huge NOPE. and after watching my little sister struggling against certain kind of players it became even bigger.

The reason? Recruit Conditioning is not serving it's purpose. 

Yes, RC is currently not doing it's job to keep experienced players apart from newbies, and it's mostly because having a totally optional and voluntary graduation creates two different problems:

A) Players rushing out of RC. Not a big problemsince It's just their business, but any player taking the step to Tempest should get a popup with Teshin explaining what's coming and that there's no way back. It's usually not our business if they simply leave RC forever, but at least this way they can imagine Teshin saying "I told you, Tenno" while laughing at them.

B) Players improving but staying in RC anyways. This is the diametral opposite to the previous problem since these playersusuallydon't care about the skins higher tier rewards, but unlike the players described previously, these actually hurt to conclave newcomers since these learn and become stronger until they are the bullies in the kiddie's pool.

I realized this mostly by watching my little sister playing and realizing that in the lobby there were some guys who popped up over and over again and eventually getting a high amount of kills with very few deaths and making the experience gap clearly noticeable. If you still can't believe it just take a look at these profiles (names removed due to obvious reasons)

Spoiler

and a more blatant example:

Spoiler

Ignore their KD ratio and amount of deaths, focus only on the amount of kills obtained by each one and tell me: can players like these be called "unexperienced newbies"?

No matter if these players are good or bad in terms of skill, but imo this kind of player is the one ruining the new conclaver experience, the ones making many long term players who give conclave a first try hate the game mode forever claiming that it's nothing but a mess with no balance where mods are what makes a difference or making some others ask for some kind of safety net for pvp newbies.

FIX 1: One way to get rid of this kind of players is disabling the access to RC by force after getting certain amount of kills. If you believe that after, dunno, 2,5-4K kills (probably a few more) you're still a bad player, well... I've got bad news for you:

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RC should be for inexperienced players, not "low skill" players
                                                                                                                                                 ^{-SevenLetterKWord}

 

FIX 2: Another alternative proposed in the conclave community is:

1. Get rid of RC
2. Clear all K/D history for players who still there and implement dynamic match balance or booster mechanics to assist players who are not performing on par with their enemies.

I'd personally prefer the Fix 2 since it reduces player dilution, tightening the community and allowing a better matchmaking.

Edited March 29, 2017 by -Stormdragon
updates

[Kierlak]

These smurfs in the RC pool are definitely a problem, but they are not what is ruining conclave.

 

You can legitimately be out of RC in a matter of days, depending on your MR. I think I was out in 2 days, and beyond needing to rank up to avoid wasting standing, I needed to be out of there because I was too strong for the average RC player. Not that I was going 25-0 or anything, but the average RC guy just couldn't effectively fight me. Regardless, even if you go slow, you're almost guaranteed to be out of RC in a week.

 

Once you are forced out of RC, what is actually keeping conclave in a ruined, worthless state kicks in: Total lack of matchmaking, combined with vets that absolutely refuse to hold back on obviously less skilled players.

 

This is more than common, this is actually closer to being the norm. This is what keeps conclave in a permanent cycle of self destruction. Without matchmaking to separate players into groups that make sense, conclave will never go anywhere, and there aren't enough players for matchmaking to work because anyone that gives it a try gets run over by vets that refuse to hold back, so they leave and don't bother to return. Until this changes, it really won't matter what you do to combat the RC smurfs, because all that does is give an EVEN MORE false impression of what they will be getting into after RC.

[AdunSaveMe]

1 hour ago, Kierlak said:

These smurfs in the RC pool are definitely a problem, but they are not what is ruining conclave.

 

You can legitimately be out of RC in a matter of days, depending on your MR. I think I was out in 2 days, and beyond needing to rank up to avoid wasting standing, I needed to be out of there because I was too strong for the average RC player. Not that I was going 25-0 or anything, but the average RC guy just couldn't effectively fight me. Regardless, even if you go slow, you're almost guaranteed to be out of RC in a week.

 

Once you are forced out of RC, what is actually keeping conclave in a ruined, worthless state kicks in: Total lack of matchmaking, combined with vets that absolutely refuse to hold back on obviously less skilled players.

Just because you can get out of RC doesn't mean 'smurfs' in RC are not a problem.

Players trying to get into conclave will have to experience horribly unbalanced matches, which is a problem that continues to crop up even outside of RC. As an introduction and as a newbie training zone, this should not happen. The fact that you can eventually get out of it is irrelevant. How many people are going to be driven away by more experienced players farming newbies in RC? I guarantee the majority would not bother to stick around to get out of that bracket, especially if they knew that the issue of matchmaking doesn't go away.

Part of the issue is being able to choose to not rank up. You're choosing to stay in a beginner bracket simply by not increasing your rank, so you can farm those people. Seriously, this is ridiculous. We don't just need matchmaking; we need an entirely new system for ranking, not one that works like a mastery XP bar.

It's basically a universal problem. It's not 'fix RC, or fix regular matchmaking'. It's fix both.

Edited February 25, 2017 by AdunSaveMe

[Stormdragon]

1 hour ago, Kierlak said:

These smurfs in the RC pool are definitely a problem, but they are not what is ruining conclave.

You can legitimately be out of RC in a matter of days, depending on your MR. I think I was out in 2 days, and beyond needing to rank up to avoid wasting standing, I needed to be out of there because I was too strong for the average RC player. Not that I was going 25-0 or anything, but the average RC guy just couldn't effectively fight me. Regardless, even if you go slow, you're almost guaranteed to be out of RC in a week.

Once you are forced out of RC, what is actually keeping conclave in a ruined, worthless state kicks in: Total lack of matchmaking, combined with vets that absolutely refuse to hold back on obviously less skilled players.

This is more than common, this is actually closer to being the norm. This is what keeps conclave in a permanent cycle of self destruction. Without matchmaking to separate players into groups that make sense, conclave will never go anywhere, and there aren't enough players for matchmaking to work because anyone that gives it a try gets run over by vets that refuse to hold back, so they leave and don't bother to return. Until this changes, it really won't matter what you do to combat the RC smurfs, because all that does is give an EVEN MORE false impression of what they will be getting into after RC.

I see where you're coming form, and I totally agree on conclave needing an actual skill based matchmaking in order to get a bigger playerbase. The main problem lies in that even when the conclave community is bigger than many players would think, it's still too small to justify such system, so adding stuff such as more game modes or more player tiers would simply dilute the playerbase, making it harder to find lobbies and then making it feel like there's even less people playing than with the current system, reason why the last fix option (included in the last edition) offers removing RC and changing it for dynamic match balance to let newer players have better chances against older players.

[TheJadrimian]

Good observations; it seems to me there's actually a fair amount of important info that isn't made clear to newbies, and which should probably be front-loaded (perhaps in a codex entry, training mode or hints-and-tips box on the Conclave console). This includes:

• That Conclave == PvP (seriously, it doesn't actually say this explicitly anywhere on the Liset console)
• That your Conclave loadout has to be set up separately from your PvE loadout (I hear a lot of people end up in games just with MK1 melee weapons; only seen it once outside of RC, but it made me sad.)
• How Recruit Conditioning works.
• Staggers are replaced with the 'impair' effect, which stops you jumping for a couple seconds.
• Quick-melee slams do no AoE knockdown, except for fist weapons.
• You should probably channel if you want to kill someone with a melee weapon.
• Channelled ults require 100 energy to cast, even if the cost to activate the ability is below 100.
• Shotguns have a lot more drop-off than they do in PvE ("Why is my Tigris not gibbing people from 20 meters away?")
• If you use a heavy frame you gon' be sloooooow.
• Sniper rifles are pretty much useless without the Lie in Wait mod.
• Warframe powers sometimes work somewhat differently in Conclave; you can check your 'abilities' tab in your Conclave arsenal to get an idea of what's changed.

I posted a similar list on another new-player-experience thread just over a week ago, but it's even more pertinent here.

[Exploding_Acorn]

On 2/24/2017 at 11:59 PM, Kierlak said:

These smurfs in the RC pool are definitely a problem, but they are not what is ruining conclave.

 

You can legitimately be out of RC in a matter of days, depending on your MR. I think I was out in 2 days, and beyond needing to rank up to avoid wasting standing, I needed to be out of there because I was too strong for the average RC player. Not that I was going 25-0 or anything, but the average RC guy just couldn't effectively fight me. Regardless, even if you go slow, you're almost guaranteed to be out of RC in a week.

 

Once you are forced out of RC, what is actually keeping conclave in a ruined, worthless state kicks in: Total lack of matchmaking, combined with vets that absolutely refuse to hold back on obviously less skilled players.

 

This is more than common, this is actually closer to being the norm. This is what keeps conclave in a permanent cycle of self destruction. Without matchmaking to separate players into groups that make sense, conclave will never go anywhere, and there aren't enough players for matchmaking to work because anyone that gives it a try gets run over by vets that refuse to hold back, so they leave and don't bother to return. Until this changes, it really won't matter what you do to combat the RC smurfs, because all that does is give an EVEN MORE false impression of what they will be getting into after RC.

I can 100% attest to what you've written here. Never touched the PvP outside of the snowball event in which I did maybe a handful of matches before not bothering with it or any PvP event again. Finally jumped into the actual Conclave since I found out the Opticor has a Conclave skin now (Fashion Frame above all) and wow I'm looking forward to never having to do this again. Just like the screenshots show I've had only one semi-fun match and that was a 2 v 2 CTF match in which everyone was around the same skill level (outside of whoever that was that started spamming the Zarr, still have PTSD from that shelling >_<). Granted to be fair twitch shooters aren't my preference to begin with so Conclave already had a handicap to start with. 

Otherwise every single FFA or team deathmatch has been a one sided slaughter usually by a single individual that far surpasses the rest of the people in the match. And this is with recruit conditioning on, I turned it off a couple of times when I couldn't even find a match for long stretches of my limited playtime and it was 1000x worse, and has me not looking forward to tomorrow when I should get out of the RC range (got put against someone with nearly 96K kills.... didn't go so well for me). At this point no rep is going to waste on mods, I'm taking the plunge getting this rep grind out of the way getting the skin and GTFO until something else forces me back in (Kulstar skin when?) Even then I'll be only in long enough to get the weekly out of the way, too headache inducing for a game I play to relax.

[VanLyrr]

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Edited May 4, 2017 by VanLyrr