Huge Number Values May Be Unhealthy for Warframe in the Long Run

[Fallen_Echo]

[Volinus7]

Big numbers are essential to Skinner's box, Powercreep and microtransaction. It's not about just balance but also money. It even involved in how players become more addicted to WF.

If they move all monetization to cosmetics only, they can tinker with numbers easier without any worries about nerfing monetized stuffs.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Volinus7

[blazinvire]

They need a big ole stat squish, drop enemy health and damage, drop player damage, fine-tune everything, make defenses modular rather than scaling.
Or just make defenses more interesting in general...

Let's look at armour for a second: It's literally just a bigger effective health pool, that's it.  Nothing else.  It doesn't offer unique defense opportunities, it's a static variable that literally just slaps a bigger health pool on the target.
Why can't we have armour act like armour?  Damage soak/deflection, armour breakage and dynamic mitigation, setting it up so people have to decide whether to brute force it with piercing and slashing and whittle their armour and health down the old fashion way, or Impact past the armour's soak if you think they have too much armour.

Shields could be made into a hundred different interesting defense options, giving some value to all those millions of weapons we discard because it's not AoE rapid-fire;
Brittle: Shields outright deflect a portion of the damage, but break super fast if hit hard once or thrice -favours snipers over automatic
Hex-Grid: Area damage is dispersed across a dozen localized shields, shield only decays in places its been hit -rewards accuracy and makes AoE less favourable
Limited: Deliberately allowing damage to bleed through the shield, something Armour tanks might favour for a bit of early added mitigation?
Shield Gates: Install one or a dozen of these things to catch damage overflow, but shield regeneration speed resets at each gate as trade-off -favours automatic over sniper

Probably wouldn't even have to change the numbers at all for these changes to have an effect.
Which says volumes >.>

[(XBOX)CannyJack]

I got pointed to this thread from another one, and I'm all for what's being discussed here. I characterized the approach - which would require significant adjustments (often reducing sheer power, but also increasing the tradeoff requirement to mod for specific capabilities, adjusting enemy scaling across their abilities, etc) - as the path to finding a smooth difficulty curve so the game isn't a binary selection between "one-shot everything simply by showing up" and "hard CC lockdown all the time or I'm instantly dead."

I am not personally interested in "insanely difficult all the time," but as it is, I'm able to go on autopilot for most of the missions. I'd like it if I had to keep my brain on the whole time, no matter where I am. 

[Somb3rBivalve]

I don't think it's an issue of the physical values being too high, I think it's the issue of the scaling of, well, everything else in the game. As @Hemmo67 pointed out, massively inflating number values were actually handled in Borderlands 2 quite well. I think the main reason was that the player's health, shields, and damage all scaled (damage scaled because you got more skill points, so your kit got better, and guns' damage got better with your level) along with the enemies' scaling, and the enemies scaled with the player's level. In effect, the game was no more difficult at one level than the other since EVERYTHING scaled. Borderlands also scaled with having more people in the game as there were the same number of enemies, but those enemies were much tankier in co-op.

The only reason that Borderlands 2 DID feel harder as you progressed was because you moved from Normal Mode from levels 0-30 to true vault hunter mode from levels 30 to 50 to ultimate vault hunter mode from levels 50 to 72. These different modes gave bonuses to the enemies in the form of extra damage and HP (I think), which made it more difficult. These modes were challenging, but you had progressed so much in your kit that you felt like you had the tools to take them on that made you still feel like a powerful character despite the difficulty, and it was a blast.

I hate to be that guy that says "why don't you do it like that game," but I think it's true in this instance. One of the best answers to scaling in this game would be to make EVERYTHING scale like in borderlands, but as you advance throughout the star chart, enemies get more bonuses that make them more challenging. Your health, shields, and damage would scale with enemy level, but depending on the tier of the planet, the enemies would get bonuses that make the game more challenging than the previous planet. Endless missions would still be able to get increasingly more challenging throughout the mission if the enemy got extra bonuses like +5% enemy health, damage, shields, and armor every rotation or something like that.

There are other problems with the game that this wouldn't solve, like power creep, the overprevalence of hard cc, and room-covering AOE abilities that take no setup or skill to use, but this would be a good start.

[Omnimorph]

14 hours ago, PsychedelicSnake said:

With that obligatory image out of the way, let's begin.

I can't help but feel that with the release of Octavia with Update 20, one of Warframe's larger problems is back in the spotlight: obscene number values. This includes things such as buff percentages, damage numbers, enemy health and armor, and so on.

Why do I bring Octavia into this? Well, it has to do with her classic archetype: the bard. Traditionally, bards in games provide buffs for allies and debuffs for enemies. Octavia highlights exactly why a Warframe built entirely around providing buffs and debuffs would not work, as well as why number values in Warframe may be far too high.

Let's face it, we as players are incredibly powerful. Some would argue too powerful, and that's a can of worms I won't be opening right now. There's nothing wrong with allowing the player to feel powerful. I welcome it, in fact. However, problems arise when the player is so powerful on their own that they can stomp through the majority of content without breaking a sweat. To make up for this, enemies are given high health and resistances. But the enemies can't do enough damage to the player to give any sort of challenge as their health and armor values are so high, compounded with any buffs they may be receiving. So, the enemies are given obscenely high damage. It's a vicious cycle of cause and effect.

Ultimately, I feel this can hurt Warframe in the long run. Why? Well, aside from the whole cause and effect thing, I feel having such high number values could hurt the creativity of the developers. They may run into a situation where they want to create a Warframe that provides a certain benefit, but are unable to because the values would be far too high. They wouldn't be able to lessen the values, because then it wouldn't be on-par with other Warframes or their abilities. Again, this would potentially draw in the dreaded cause and effect.

I know many people won't agree with this, and that's fine. I just can't help but feel this is a problem that should be solved sooner rather than later. Not an easy task, I freely admit. However, I do feel it is necessary. 

You say that, but the fact is Warframe isn't finished yet, in that it doesn't have an endgame proper.  

It had a placeholder "endgame" for a long time (endless missions) but since reason to do endless was nerfed, there's no longer even a placeholder endgame (barring Sorties, which could perhaps be seen as a component of an endgame, along with the raids, but don't amount to an endgame proper, even with raids).

I've always felt there are two options here:

1) DE are winging it (Agilely); or

2) DE have had an endgame plan all along, and what looks to us currently like "OP" or "powercreep" is actually headroom built into the system for an endgame proper that they've always had in mind.

[low1991]

14 hours ago, Hemmo67 said:

well if u look at borderlands. the king of number simulator, high numbers if done right can actually be good

ofcourse it depends how DE decides to go forth c.c

Borderland 1/2/Pre-clude do have high numbers... But they are mostly confined to single-hit-scan weapons. What's more, they can equip 4 range weapons (Pri/Sec) at once. 

WF? Max of 2 range weapon, (1 Pri, 1 Sec) and 1 melee. By instinct, players will use the up-most damaging range weapon for the limited slots. 

 

On-topic: High number damage dealt is co-related to the problem (bullet sponge enemies with infinite scaling), which is further compounded by other problems. When scaling increase, damage has to follow leading to more high numbers & causing players to cry Nerf/buff-spree. Otherwise, players will just drop-out due to the insane spawn of enemies, and lack of tactical planning/layout/position.