Lack of Endgame, Loss of Veteran (Kuva/Riven thoughts included)

[Doomsknightmare]

A lot of veteran players have talked about the endgame issue in current Warframe and I believe I wouldn't be the last one who mentions this, until DE address the issue.

Personally speaking, I start playing Warframe in 2015(before the Void system change), back then I didn't know anything about this game until three of my friends recommended it, and they're both high MR veteran players who played the game for over hundreads of hours(two of them, actually over 1000 hours) They're not those who just P2W(they did bought some Steam DLC though :) and know little about the game, they're players with skill and knowledge who are able to solo Sortie 3 and complete The Law of Retribution in a 4-player squad, and now they both left the game, totally AFK. 

I'm not blaming the Void system change, actually I appreciate it, simply because it makes farming Prime parts less tedious and I'm fine with the fissure system. But why my friends all went AFK ? Look, if you're a veteran who can effortlessly solo Sortie 3 and capable of doing Raid, and here's your daily routine : You login, finish Sortie within 20 minutes, already tired of Raid, so what else to do ? Overkill some low level enemies in fissure/syndicate missions with your god build frames / weapons which can easily slash lv.145 enemies into pieces? Sure you can find some lv.100 mobs in Kuva Flood, but that's another topic I'll talk about later.

Before the Void changes, you are willing to do high level endless missions in the Void as it's challenging as well as rewarding and you can do it whenever you want. What now ? Now every time you join a fissure survival / defence, everybody wants to extract after 20 mins / waves, and actually I never stayed in a survival more than 30 mins since the Void change, which makes me miss the good old days when my friends brought me(who was an Excalinoob back then :) to a T4 survival and we stayed over 1 hour, no "camping" in the corner, just run and kill (and many revives :) 

In Kuva Flood you need to face higher level enemies to get more Kuva, which sounds reasonable but I will never farm kuva unless I got a double resource booster or there's a double resource weekend, since the amount of Kuva rewarded from a Flood is not enough to motivate me, and you really need a lot of Kuva to reroll riven mods but there's no other way to farm it.  #KuvaFortressNoKuva#

As a hardcore / veteran, I appreciate that DE want to buff some outdated weapons via Riven (it works in some way) and they're willing to make more frames / weapons endgame viable (recent Limbo&Oberon rework / upcoming old Prime weapons buffs / new syndicate augment mods, etc)

But please, with so many powerful frames / weapons / mods, where to find lv.100+ enemies in a real worthy fight ? An Excalibur without any augment mods can already deal with lv.100+ enemies with ease, and now he has an Exalted Blade augment "Chromatic Blade" which somehow makes him an even stronger DPS but you don't even need this simply because it's an absolute overkill.  #FashionIsNotEndgame#

To be honest I don't know how to "perfectly" address the endgame issue, but here's my little suggestion:

Add Kuva and veiled Riven mods to the drop table in endless Kuva Fortress/Void mission, and add some bounus reward to encourage players to stay longer.

I understand that Warframe as a Free-to-play game that needs to be more friendy to casual/new players, but that shouldn't be contradicted against providing endgame content for hardcore/veteran players.

 

Edited June 10, 2017 by Doomerang

[K244]

Personally I think adding an Ending to a Free-to-play game would probably hurt it more then help it. More actual challenges I can understand, but throwing up an actual "This is the end of the story" bit in my opinion would hurt it.

 

Then again what do I know, I haven't been able to play in ages.

[Airwolfen]

My hope will always be that they create a place where, if a sortie happens there, the mobs will have to be downscaled. The fortress would be a great place for that imo.

[Darkvramp]

they need to do something, the game needs something that you can use all these suupped up weapons in, because all the content on the game is trivial.

[ashrah]

f2p model is bad for ppl who making game and for players...i log in once maybe in week it not that game anymore.. u doing all same.. u max gear and where to go? same things

[(XBOX)freakytiki3]

I don't really understand the need for "Endgame" if there was an "Endgame" it would just as others have said cap the games scaling and difficulty which is currently not capped,

we currently have Sortie, Raid, Nightmare Raid, and Endless Scaling. and the majority of regular player never do

[DJ_Vauban]

I personally think that "endgame" is just a myth. In many games, not just MMOs or such, you reach a point where you completed the story and are now left with tons of sidemissions or such. You finish them up to get even stronger but for what? You have already achieved everything that is there to achieve, what good does a weapon do you that can one shot literally every single thing in a game, when you have nothing to do anymore? I also have "Warframe burnout syndrome" so I'm at that point myself by now, I gave up on rivens now too because I can already obliterate everything so all I really do now is log in for the daily reward and occasionaly play when there's been a new batch of stuff, Woooo, endgame.

Edited June 8, 2017 by DJ_Vauban

[Lord_of_Lords]

1 hour ago, Doomerang said:

• two of them, actually over 1000 hours
• solo Sortie 3 and complete The Law of Retribution in a 4-player squad

As someone who has done both of these things, I don't blame AFKing on the lack of endgame content.

I blame the lack of a challenge.  I originally liked LoR because it was a new kind of challenge but it eventually became grindy.  I liked solar rails but they became grindy.  I liked running that lvl 5 survival on Mercury until 1 hour (before the level scaling of enemies was changed) until it was grindy.

I honestly don't think your suggested changes will be a sustainable fix as the Kuva Fortress will eventually just be another grind with some cheese strat and Kuva will just be the patch 20's version of the patch 7 Orokin Cell (they're basically worthless now).

I'm not going to say that I don't like your suggestion without giving an alternative (although it's very different).
We just need a gauntlet of endless missions with modifiers that we choose when making the lobby.  All of the modifiers (enemy starting level, weapon restrictions, nightmare effects, etc.) will affect the time-to-item-drop.  Each "round" of the gauntlet will be a combination of several of the current endless mission types, generated within some pre-programmed bounds.  For example, do a X min survival starting at Y% life support, do Z waves of defence (or mobile defence), kill the insert-mini-boss here, etc. where you get several rewards after completing each "round."  Each round may take 30+ minutes but it will be a semi-unique, semi-customizable experience every time where the game starts off as a challenge instead of having to wait an hour for the game to get fun.  The gauntlet will take place on a single map so that there are no map reloads (and no refreshing revives).  This isn't impossible to implement with the current systems as it's just some existing mission conditions all generated together.  There could even be a "gauntlet key" which can be crafted from several of the relics although I feel like the key should be very expensive (20+ relics of varying types) and that you only lose it on mission loss.
Oh and the most important thing is that the reward table doesn't have ANY drops exclusive to the gauntlet.  The point of this gamemode is to do something hard and get rewarded for your accomplishment.  I personally feel like every non-vaulted relic drop should be included in the gauntlet drop table with equal drop chances but if the drop RNG uses some whole number shenanigans then this might actually take a bit of real code to accomplish.

[Marine027]

RNG is the endgame, you make your goals yourself, farm all, build all, try all is my goal, collect all Mods one day without grinding the hell out of the misisons.

Builded mostly all weapons so far and evne owning all, same for frames.

Consider this, evevn MMO'S you pay monthly, you still have RNG in raids for Gear or rare objects from there.

And what do the people do and paly for? Certainly not the Story or atmosphere sadly, just Loot, Loot, Loot.

Do oyurselfa favor and takea break simply, come back later and see fi there are new goals you could go for by now.

I don't even see why people complain about forma a weapon over and over as example, its there own decision after all, no one forces them to do it, but it is a goal they set for themself at least, while others whine about no endgame but the endgame we have not gets used or even tehy overpalyed the edngame we have like raids, sorties, etc.

For a F2P game, it does it very well, you cna gian everything, even accesoires wtihout spending one bit of money technicly, i never seen a F2P game doing this so well were you actually cna work for soemthing. Here i also not understand people askign for the strognest weapon or frame right from the start, i mean how long do those people want to play this game? A week? Then be done with it? I mean i as example again as said, colelct all, try all out. What is the problems for people to just try all weapons out then sell them, that is also a goal for people isn't it.

A game like this, no real endgame exists, you simply make it yourself, its like a sandbox game like minecraft, you find things out and work with what you know and can do.

[Ceadeus]

I've talked about this issue with people quite a lot, and I've always come to two conclusions.  1.  DE's too afraid to give us anything of sizeable reward for what we would consider "end-game" because we've been known to exploit these things.  That's why things like Draco get removed because it makes it too easy for us, even though we enjoy the ability to know going into one mission, we'll come out with a maxed loadout, or maxed standing/focus cap for the day.  They want us to have the slow grind for everything, but they haven't figured out how to present it in a way that isn't just tedious and boring.  They gave us the new relic system which allows us to somewhat pick our loot, but because of the way relics work, it doesn't really fit in the same end-game category that running keys used, because the thing about keys is that this system is great for single run missions, but you could run one endless key and get endless rewards for the whole squad, and now you can't do that.  There's absolutely no reason to sit in a mission longer than a couple minutes because you're not gaining much of anything at all for it.  What's supposed to motivate me to sit in a mission longer than 20 minutes and risk losing the stuff I already have on those higher levels?  A 50% resource and credit buff?  Great.  Not like I have an endless stockpile of those.  They need something unique and worthwhile to those later levels, or just outright higher level relics for better rewards, like relics that start at level 100 or something but only have gold tier items in them.  2. The other conclusion is that Warframe's lost the factors that it advertises all the time.  We're not a Robot-Space-Ninja game anymore, we're a Robot-Space-TPS.  The element of stealth is almost entirely gone unless you're just doing a stealth run for S#&$s and giggles, even spy missions are just 2 minutes parkour challenge, then back to blasting everything with your shotgun because the detection doesn't even carry over.  Their biggest focus right now should be Stealth 2.0, and giving weight to actually getting detected.  As dead as the game is now (due to a lack of content, not necessarily mechanics) something like The Division had would probably be good for Warframe.  Actually sneaking up on enemies and feeling like if you get caught you could get shredded pretty quickly if you don't get the drop on them first.  Right now detection is nothing more than whether or not enemies are gonna shoot right away, or wait 5 seconds for you to run in front of them blasting their friends then shoot.  There's no sense of danger or failure in being detected.  And that's not to say that missions should just outright fail if you touch a spotlight or something, but that there should be consequence to doing that, that makes you actually not want to.

Edited June 8, 2017 by InsanityKey

[Regenerating_Degenerate]

If we just keep doing what we are doing and enjoy what DE gives up using the feedback we give, maybe the game will evolve into what you want, or maybe not? WoW evolved into something i despise, i may despise warframe someday or i may play it forever, who knows? 

[ShadowStalker]

how about custom mission creator and quest creator with custom reward? this can some cool endgame or maybe 

inb4 simulacrum is endgame in disguise :p

Edited June 8, 2017 by ShadowStalker

[Volinus7]

It's a game about collecting trivializers, what do you expect?

 

Scaling levels without standard breakpoints shouldn't be called "contents", endless number chasing is laughable. 

Edited June 8, 2017 by Volinus7

[_Vortus_]

There is no proverbial end game to this kind of game.    Sadly however, there is also a severe lack of high level content.   Sorties, Raids, Floods and the super rare Council Challenge is about it.    And they are not even a challenge for a geared up Tenno.     There is technically high level content, if you are willing to play for hours to get to it.    Nah.   For me, ill hit my Sortie, maybe a Flood, then move on to another game.  

[Xzorn]

It's weird the end-game subject  has come up a lot more recently. Long endurance runs are still there and yes I very much still do 2-4h runs because as a Veteran I could care less about the rewards. I just want a place to use all my toys and stress test my builds and that's always been the only option.

What players are missing are the rewards for doing that content.

Still, everything said here is accurate. lvl 100 was a moderate challenge 3 years ago. It's a joke now and a bigger joke as time goes on.

I wouldn't worry too much though. Something is bound to happen. Power Creep makes it inevitable.

[Liminal]

There can never be a proper endgame, nor a proper challenge, without good balancing. And DE already gave up on that when they ditched Damage 3.0.

You either wipe a room with the press of a button or get instakilled by cheap mechanics, there's not middle ground in WF, and I doubt there ever will.

[(PSN)lhbuch]

I think that there should be a place where enemies would start at level 100+. This place could have different rewards, something to incentive older players to keep playing it.

A veteran wont feel attracted to get more resources, credits or regular mods. I have more than 115 million credits, did the Hema research alone for my clan etc... 

Maybe the rewards could be increased chance for rare mods, Kuva, arcanes etc...

Im a riven addict but I always keep asking myself, why do I need the perfect riven for? The game content doesnt require such powerful weapons. 

[peterc3]

It has been [0] Days since someone stated that Warframe was totally legit dying if pet problem wasn't addressed.

Endless void never went away, people need to actually say what they mean. You are no longer rewarded for minimal input in endless game modes. This will likely never return to anywhere near the level of use 1 key/relic and endlessly get prime parts.

Every frame can do lvl 100 content, augments aren't even aimed at helping you go further, just change how a power acts.

If you reward people for going far in endless nodes, they become the node to farm on, why bother doing anything else.

Rivens explicitly are outside any present or future retuning of the current weapons, and they have always tweaked older frames. The idea that they are only now doing it is odd and shows a rather odd view coming from an apparent "veteran" and their looking at older frames has nothing to do with endgame as there is no established endgame.

[Redthirst]

15 hours ago, The_Doc said:

There can never be a proper endgame, nor a proper challenge, without good balancing. And DE already gave up on that when they ditched Damage 3.0.

You either wipe a room with the press of a button or get instakilled by cheap mechanics, there's not middle ground in WF, and I doubt there ever will.

This exactly. The issue of Warframe is not the lack of endgame content. It's the lack of a possibility of endgame content. Any potential endgame content they add will either be cheesed by players using all of the extremely overpowered options we have, or have enemies that oneshot everyone and take almost no damage.

[(PSN)fullblast35]

haha :)  Veterans are not seeing the bigger , or should i say other side of the picture : we are Assets.  The vaulted sets worth 600 1200p? we are the ones with them in stock, balancing the plat economy.  If there were not any veteran players out there Plat would not have so much value, remember that.  Now, for the end game part. no matter how much endurance runs you ran, or how much damage you can take or deal, you're forgetting you're an experienced player with ALOT of knowledge you can or eventually will share, that's our endgame. you might disagree but think about it, you're mr 24 now, you've baought everything in the market, you have tons of plat, you can spend hours on MOT, damage display numbers start to make the game lag to a point you have to go disable display options.  Unless they create a "endgame category"  how would it be beneficial for DE to set endgame all over the game jeopardizing its stability?  ok, maybe you don't spend 7 hours but maybe 2 or 2h30, there's not 50% of this community with veteran players, what would be the point of providing a game type that's not going to generate profit with already existing players who have everything?  I'm not objecting to your thread, I'm being realistic.  I too at some point was complaining about endgame.  Giving players the option to go low mid high or insanely hard Tiers is not hard to pull of in my opinion. question is why haven't they done this.  The more they wait, the more veterans will get better so I don't see why the wait.

[(XBOX)DShinShoryuken]

The Endgame demand.....

The game is made for all to play and if DE added some massive Endgame (besides the ones that are already in the game), Veterans would blast through it with powers and 6-8 FORMAd gear saying it is not Endgame. 

What do most Veterans in wars do? Retire and help the new guard more informed. Veterans in a video game either go Pro or PvP it up. Pro in WARFRAME should be partnering up make videos about new content & using current content to enjoy, heighten, and expand the WARFRAME experience beyond the Meta shooting/CC. PvP is fun when everyone is balanced but when all weapons are used....Veterans even have a hard time finding the enjoyment in playing because winning with cheese is different than winning with skill. 

Players will ask for Endgame forever abd a decade ib WARFRAME and DE will give something the players will burn througj in days (more like hours). Endgame is not about the challenge in this game i adore- its about what do players see as the reward worth going for. Does the reward offer flip value to get plat? This is what most people look at as what they really want for Endgame. 

Veterans will leave and some will stay and move the game forward for the new joiners. This is life. It gives newer players a icon to strive towards being (or being better than) while giving long term players someone to play and interact with on a friendly (trollish....sigh) level as well. The game is a grand journey into the lore and ideas of a game developer that want to do things their way with input from the community that invests time and money to make it keep moving. That is MY Endgame....to see how much of this adventure i can before the end (mine or the games)...and i am enjoying it every step.

Cheers

[Xzorn]

1 hour ago, (Xbox One)DShinShoryuken said:

Players will ask for Endgame forever abd a decade ib WARFRAME and DE will give something the players will burn througj in days (more like hours). Endgame is not about the challenge in this game i adore- its about what do players see as the reward worth going for. Does the reward offer flip value to get plat? This is what most people look at as what they really want for Endgame.

 

Not really. You don't see players in Diablo3 asking where the end-game is. It's defined and it scales with a player's skill and gear.

We have that in Warframe with endless missions however the scaling in this game breaks by lvl 80 forcing player into specific play styles which can get tedious and for the most part is less fun than it could be. It also takes longer and longer to reach that competitive level. DE continuously chooses to ignore scaling when they add content to this game. They work against a system that's designed to make content lasting. As a result they're constantly chasing updates when they could be doing far less work.

Can any developer keep up with hardcore gamers? Of course not but they could certainty get x10 the value from their content and not spend 6 months on a quest players finish in an hour, never to return.

[Pizzarugi]

Why not open access to a new star system, specifically whichever one the sentients went to and became death machines? The Origin system would be the early-lategame content and the other is the endgame.

Either that or we go back to the Void. Clearly there's some malicious entity lurking there.

Edited June 10, 2017 by Pizzarugi

[UltimateGrr]

End Game is inherently meaningless, and if you actually think end game content stays end game for longer than a week, then you must be new to video games as a medium.

The problem with end game content is 2 fold.  First it has to be hard, and second it needs to give you a reward.  And here's the crux of the matter people, the crux that seems to hover just out of reach for most of you to actually grasp: if the reward is too small then nobody will do the content because the ratio of effort to reward will not be worth it.  Conversely, if the reward is something players want, then the content becomes a tedious chore to be done.  And so we, as a community, will spend a week or two throwing ourselves against the content, and work out the meta required to cheese the ever loving greedy milk out of it until we have beating the content worked out to a science and go back to complaining about the lack of End Game.  Trials, Sorties, the Raids in MMORPGs, it doesn't matter, because the same pattern holds true.

 

[ikkabotz]

On 6/8/2017 at 0:37 AM, Doomerang said:

A lot of veteran players have talked about the endgame issue in current Warframe and I believe I wouldn't be the last one who mentions this, until DE address the issue.

Personally speaking, I start playing Warframe in 2015(before the Void system change), back then I didn't know anything about this game until three of my friends recommended it, and they're both high MR veteran players who played the game for over hundreads of hours(two of them, actually over 1000 hours) They're not those who just P2W(they did bought some Steam DLC though :) and know little about the game, they're players with skill and knowledge who are able to solo Sortie 3 and complete The Law of Retribution in a 4-player squad, and now they both left the game, totally AFK. 

I'm not blaming the Void system change, actually I appreciate it, simply because it makes farming Prime parts less tedious and I'm fine with the fissure system. But why my friends all went AFK ? Look, if you're a veteran who can effortlessly solo Sortie 3 and capable of doing Raid, and here's your daily routine : You login, finish Sortie within 20 minutes, already tired of Raid, so what else to do ? Overkill some low level enemies in fissure/syndicate missions with your god build frames / weapons which can easily slash lv.145 enemies into pieces? Sure you can find some lv.100 mobs in Kuva Flood, but that's another topic I'll talk about later.

Before the Void changes, you are willing to do high level endless missions in the Void as it's challenging as well as rewarding and you can do it whenever you want. What now ? Now every time you join a fissure survival / defence, everybody wants to extract after 20 mins / waves, and actually I never stayed in a survival more than 30 mins since the Void change, which makes me miss the good old days when my friends brought me(who was an Excalinoob back then :) to a T4 survival and we stayed over 1 hour, no "camping" in the corner, just run and kill (and many revives :) 

In Kuva Flood you need to face higher level enemies to get more Kuva, which sounds reasonable but I will never farm kuva unless I got a double resource booster or there's a double resource weekend, since the amount of Kuva rewarded from a Flood is not enough to motivate me, and you really need a lot of Kuva to reroll riven mods but there's no other way to farm it.  #KuvaFortressNoKuva#

As a hardcore / veteran, I appreciate that DE want to buff some outdated weapons via Riven (it works in some way) and they're willing to make more frames / weapons endgame viable (recent Limbo&Oberon rework / upcoming old Prime weapons buffs / new syndicate augment mods, etc)

But please, with so many powerful frames / weapons / mods, where to find lv.100+ enemies in a real worthy fight ? An Excalibur without any augment mods can already deal with lv.100+ enemies with ease, and now he has an Exalted Blade augment "Chromatic Blade" which somehow makes him an even stronger DPS but you don't even need this simply because it's an absolute overkill.  #FashionIsNotEndgame#

To be honest I don't know how to "perfectly" address the endgame issue, but here's my little suggestion:

Add Kuva and veiled Riven mods to the drop table in endless Kuva Fortress/Void mission, and add some bounus reward to encourage players to stay longer.

I understand that Warframe as a Free-to-play game that needs to be more friendy to casual/new players, but that shouldn't be contradicted against providing endgame content for hardcore/veteran players.

 

I've lost most interest playing Warframe. I love the game and like many others have over 2k hours invested. There's something different about it lately. Quite simply I feel like everything is earned easily, new frames melt everything. Game feels more cluttered. The feel of the game isn't what it used to be. Game just isn't as fun as it was and honestly at this point I doubt it ever will pull itself back together. My own impression is they are conceding every point of the game to the casual in mind. As tried and tired as that argument is, I truly believe the game has lost itself to a new audience. The game just feels casual now. UI has a ton of icons on it. The game itself feels cluttered and not very synergistic with teammates. Doubtful I'll ever have the same enthusiasm as I once did.  +1 to OP. Game was in it's most perfected state right around Second Dream. Shouldn't have added so much clutter and noise to it. It's hard for me to not compare its prior game state to what it is now. 

I can look at Harrow as an example. In the prior game state, I'd been really excited for the potential of what Harrow can do. I'm still excited for his implementation, but honestly what effect will Harrow really have on most games? Next to none as everyone can melt enemies and are pretty self reliant. I don't want to over explain the issue, but a frame like Harrow would be a ton of fun but would have been a lot more fun prior to the way Warframe is played now. The larger issue currently with the game is everything feels the same. There's less synergy amongst players and frames sacrificed to basically just killing stuff till you hit the wall with it. We can argue there's a later game to be found and played in still for Harrow's use, and it's true but not like he'd been available to groups around the Second Dream Era. I hope I'm making some sense. Player synergy and incentive to play together longer came more naturally before relics and everything else. Despite the casual audience saying they don't have time for longer games, I can testify it was a whole lot more fun. 

Edited June 12, 2017 by komoriblues