I've seriously had enough with focus 2.0 farming.

[devildevil21]

I'm gona go right into the point:

 

When you make a system based on obtaining SOMETHING, you either go 1 of 2 ways:

 

1. Make it a SHORT term goal with SLOW obtain rates BUT no limits whatsoever (no daily/weekly caps).

2. Make it a LONG term goal with FAST obtain rates BUT with limits (daily/weekly caps).

 

What DE did: Making a LONG term goal with SLOW obtain rates and WITH LIMITS.

 

Look, I get it, you guys wanna make it so that earning focus is a passive thing, not active thing, but you guys contradict yourselves so badly!

 

If you wanna make it passive gaining, you DON'T add a mechanic where you have to ABANDON your objective JUST to pick up that said mechanic (in this case, convergence orb).

 

Here's a tweet from the Lead Designer for warframe:

HOW can this still be a thing to discuss? It's OBVIOUS what should be done.

 

First, PICK a route. You want a long term goal or short term goal?

With that done, simply follow the basic steps of HOW to make a long term goal, which I have mentioned in the start of this thread.

 

I really like focus 2.0 and how it revolves around the operator, but the grindy side of it, the limiting side of it is just... awful! I sometimes go up to playing 8 to 10h per day, doing normal missions, picking the convergence orb every now and then, and I still DON'T hit the daily cap (sometimes).

 

Please DE, take a moment to zoom out of the game (or actually zoom IN) and see through the players perspective how annoying and troublesome it is to farm focus 2.0

 

Best Regards,

Devildevil21.

[Mattoropael]

A cap is fine, the old syndicates all have caps, and the current relationship between passive point gain, point cap and point required to make progress (whether through advancing or buying somthing) is at a very nice place.

Focus feels like DE forgot they ever learned anything from the syndicate fiasco.

Edited October 27, 2017 by Mattoropael

[devildevil21]

Just now, Mattoropael said:

A cap is fine, the old syndicates all have caps, and the current relationship between passive point gain, point cap and point required to make progress (whether through advancing or buying somthing) is at a very nice place.

Focus feels like DE forgot they ever learned anything from the syndicate fiasco.

Yes, the sindicates are actually well done. You can easily and quickly hit the daily cap by doing some quick missions, and you can even store some medallions for the following days which don't affect the daily cap at all.

 

The speed at which one progresses through in the sindicates and the item's price is balanced and actually in a great spot.

And yes, I totally agree with you. Focus seems like a messed up system where there was no proper route or objective planned for it...

[Somb3rBivalve]

Well, as I recall, the convergence orb was supposed to be an anti-camping sort of mechanism since there's obviously the presence of people on hydron button spamming. If the convergence orb was effectively on at all times, then they would be rewarded for said button spamming (you know stuff like saryn and banshee)

Anyway, I agree that it should be a long-term system (even the 500-something days that it would take to unlock everything seems reasonable to me), but if players have to resort to using the ridiculous strategies that they use to actually hit the focus cap each day (abusing the 8x stealth multiplier) then something has to be done. In all, agree that you should get focus more quickly. Hitting your focus cap should be as simple as hitting your syndicate cap; the question is what to do with the convergence orbs since they do seem to do their job as an anti-camping mechanic if players are complaining about having to move around.

Edited October 27, 2017 by Somb3rBivalve

[Mattoropael]

Just now, Somb3rBivalve said:

Well, as I recall, the convergence orb was supposed to be an anti-camping sort of mechanism since there's obviously the presence of people on hydron button spamming. If the convergence orb was effectively on at all times, then they would be rewarded for said button spamming (you know stuff like saryn and banshee)

Anyway, I agree that it should be a long-term system (even the 500-something days seems reasonable to me), but if players have to resort to using the ridiculous strategies that they use to actually hit the focus cap each day then something has to be done. In all, agree that you should get focus more quickly. Hitting your focus cap should be as simple as hitting your syndicate cap; the question is what to do with the convergence orbs since they do seem to do their job as an anti-camping mechanic if players are complaining about having to move around.

The convergence orb does not counter camping. It adds minor inconvenience at worst - I farm my daily Focus at Berehynia, and more often than not the downtime created by convergence orb is so short, I can grab it and wait for the EV to replenish me before continuing to kill mobs.

A reasonably easy-to-reach daily cap on the other hand will stop focus farming dead in the tracks, simply because there's no need to. (You don't see people going to Bere/Hydron just to farm syndicate points these days)

[DiabolusUrsus]

The huge gap between gains from passive play and power-farming systematically normalizes power-farming.

If you don't farm, you don't finish in a reasonable amount of time.

Want to prevent power-farming and make focus a long-term goal? Then do two things:

1. Drastically reduce the differences between passive gains and farming gains.

2. Sharply decrease the cost to upgrade each passive, and greatly increase the number of upgrades available per passive.

Why? If power-farming confers minimal benefits, people will be less likely to bother with power-farming. More importantly, a long-term system needs to be consistently rewarding long-term. If players can acquire a small upgrade or two every 1-2 play sessions instead of needing to save for a long time to get a small payout, actually progressing through each tree will be more enjoyable. Consistent progress feels good. Saving for days without getting anywhere feels bad.

IMO, it should not take more than 3 months to max a single tree with consistent daily play. Across 5 schools, that's still a year and a half to finish, which seems a lot more reasonable to me.

EDIT: to be clear, I mean consistent daily non-farming play. As in, just playing Warframe, not farming Focus.

Edited October 28, 2017 by DiabolusUrsus

[racooperii]

This isnt a long term goal even, its a sheer vertical climb. Syndicate is a long term goal, getting mods to R10 is a long term goal, getting to top MR is a long term goal.

Focus 2.0 is a god damn job! If you cap every day, you could get one School done in 80 days...and to get that through normal play requires 10-12 hr days or Sleepquinox-Exterminate-Stealth farm fo 2 hours a day. So between 160 hours - 960 hours for One School. When I hit the 500 hour mark I got significantly more done with the entire rest of the game than this!

The cost, acquisition rate, cap and a Resource Burn to just have SPACE to work on a Node is insulting to the players time.

If your cap, that thing that gates people from blasting through it in a week(FFS no ones even talking about getting it a week, just this Decade), is so high then the passive rate should be achivable in a normal play session(2-4 hours).

Those responses irk me, like actually hitting the cap in 2 hours is too fast for them. Really!?! Thats the issue youre seeing with Focus 2.0, that and the complaints are we dont get it all in a week? How disconnected from the playerbase so you have to be to not realize people are discussing how it would take the better part of a decade the the average player to complete and not this *in a nasal voice* “Youre not supposed to get it all in a week” response. Even a hardcore cap everyday would take 400...400 days! Thats 800- 9600 hours to unlock the whole thing, with dedicated capping....just wow.

[Wolfchild07]

Yeah, and if you're out on the plains with a non-damage frame just passively getting focus, you come out of one bounty with about 400 focus gain.

Make sure you bring your high damage cheese frame to gain focus. Focus gain is completely broken on some frames and trash on others.

Edited October 27, 2017 by Wolfchild07
Spelling correction

[Borg1611]

Not sure I understand what he's getting at in the tweets. It almost sounds like he's suggesting we found some way to circumvent the horrid grind, but the daily cap alone makes it take hundreds of days, IF YOU CAP. People do XP farm maps because there's literally no other way to even attempt to hit the cap in a day. All they need to do is give us other ways to hit it so we don't have to go out of our way just to cap it daily. They should not be afraid of us hitting the pathetic cap daily fairly easily as the total grind even hitting the cap is INSANELY LONG. 

I find the daily focus cap ridiculous to hit even with the affinity boosters I got from twitch drops. Even with an affinity boosters just doing stuff on the plains would net you a laughable amount of affinity for the time spent compared to going to hydron. Adaro stealth farming is probably the best, but I don't want to do that. 

Add affinity to bounties and incursions with an 8x or higher automatic focus multiplier (or just a direct focus gain). Add affinity with focus multipliers to spy missions and sorties. Just give people a variety of ways to get focus so you just get it while doing something else. Then, re-consider the grind OR add more interesting nodes to focus because taking hundreds of days to finish such a pathetic and lackluster system that offers such a small reward is just sad. 

Even the quasi infinite grinds Blizzard added to D3 and WoW aren't as poorly conceived as the focus system. I hate paragon and artifact power, but those systems were still better than this. Paragon has no caps, but the increasing costs eventually creates an artificial soft-cap so your gains are so slow that you're not really getting that much further ahead of the pack anymore. Artifact traits were more substantial and interesting and overall a better system than paragon. The grind for artifact power also hits a soft cap where you unlock all the traits and then you just have this infinite grind at the end that gives fairly trivial returns (increasing the level on concordance of the Legionfall, which is a buff to your main stat). Most players just give up on going out of their way to farm artifact power after they unlock concordance. You gradually increase it without really thinking about it anymore. I would have preferred the grind simply ended completely, but it looks like game devs feel we need to have an endless carrot on a stick to chase forever. By letting players slowly get more ranks of Concordance, they think they create this endless sense of progression to make what you're doing feel more rewarding (even though AP gains don't really feel rewarding to most players). 

If you're going to add a super long or quasi infinite grind, it needs to be designed in a way where it just happens as you're doing everything else you have to be doing. In WoW you just get AP from doing numerous other tasks. You can be doing dungeons, raids, world quests, invasion points, sometimes just killing a mob has an AP drop. That's the ultimate flaw of the focus system (though it has many flaws). You can not multi-task to get focus, you have to specifically choose to go out of your way and spend a decent chunk of time EVERY DAY just getting focus. When you add lackluster nodes on top of that and the horrid lens system and the horrid convergence system, it just is a gigantic steaming pile of fail. 

[Kurtys]

The system to gain focus was bound to fail to begin with, because it is tied to affinity gain which is, since the release of the game, really inconsistent. That's why we got problem like draco, viver and i also remember, really early in the game's life, a node on saturn(i think?) that people grinded because it had insane spawn rate for the time(compared to now it was normal but back then the general enemy count per mission was way lower).

[Naaya]

The focus farming problem existed pre PoE and now they realize, that they need to take a further look? AFTER they added even more grind? Do they even test their changes or just type in random numbers and look at the feedback threads in forums? Honestly, this update isn't only full of bugs, but also not comprehensible numbers/decisions in the economy, like the 25standing per intact core, major focus point costs, not reusable bait blueprints, ridiculous bounty rewards and so on... 1 or 2 closed beta tests or public beta weekends would've given so much valuable feedback before PoE rolled out 

[FollowTheFaceless]

Stop whining and just GRIND A LOT for your eidolon lenses 

[sarcasm off]

[Seraphyx]

It's pretty rough, I honestly don't know if they should scrap the entire focus system and come up with something new or try to rework it again. They really need to sit and think about a very clear direction and focus on how to achieve that AND make it satisfying. I think they did a good job with syndicates despite all the complaining in the beginning, it wasn't that bad. This is pure grind right now for VERY little gain, if any at all. Capping your focus might not even unlock the next level of one skill in the tree, it sucks. The only reasonable way to make progress is to cheese the system to cap your focus every single day, and even when you do that it will still take at least several months just to unbind all the skills and upgrade the capacity to use them. Personally I'm not bothered by that because more than likely I'm just going to choose a very small handful I like and focus (ok I'll stop I promise) on unlocking those rather than something absurd like maxing out every single path or even just ONE path. No thanks. I guess (many?) people want to be able to unlock absolutely everything and use every single waybound skill. I'm fine with picking and choosing the ones I want.

If I didn't use stealth for focus gain, I would literally never touch focus, even less than I did with the previous system. I could play for years and likely still not unlock 1 waybound skill by simply playing the game. I think they missed the mark completely on this rework.

--

I don't have any suggestions really, but I think there is this obsession in warframe to have everything you can possibly have. So people want to unlock EVERYTHING in the focus system and that's where I think the main problem is. And partially because the game ALLOWS you to unlock everything so obviously people will WANT to unlock everything (most of the math and calculations I see use numbers to unlock every single thing as the main reason for focus 2.0 being horrible). If it was more like traditional games with skills, you can't really max everything. Typically you would have a set amount of points to allocate. This is probably going to be a very unpopular opinion but maybe if the option to unlock everything in the focus system was taken away people wouldn't be so obsessed with it. You have 50 points you choose the path you want to take and how to spend them and that's what your focus (I couldn't) is for the operator. At the same time maybe this goes against all of the freedom that warframe gives you, which is awesome. 

Edited October 27, 2017 by Seraphyx

[Sigma-118]

Ok heres what I think needs to be done:

1. Drastically buff all lenses. And i am talking big &#! number buffs here. Like really big. Seriously..... big buffs.

2. Plz just let convergence orbs be a drop from enemies instead of spawing FAR AWAY FROM THE ACTION..... IN AN ACTION GAME!!!

 

And heres what I think could be done, and would be very nice if it did get done:

1. Since convergence orbs will be dropped from enemies you could make it so that the effects of them stack when you pick up an additional convergance orb before the effect expires. Or alternatively have additional convergance orb pickups replenish the effects duration.

2. As DiabolusUrsus mentioned increase the number of levels for each focus node to be fully unlocked while drastically decreasing the cost of each upgrade ( just for clarification, there doesnt need to be a buff or nerf to any abilities. just add in more levels inbetween the first and last)

[AcceptYourDeath]

3 hours ago, Borg1611 said:

Even with an affinity boosters just doing stuff on the plains would net you a laughable amount of affinity for the time spent compared to going to hydron.

Yeah it is funny how they frequently speak about how we are not supposed to grind the same mission all day long and spam abilites....why Draco has to go etc.....!

At the same time they push us into this numbing grind-fest. If you DON`t want to farm focus for hours a day it is completely unreasonable at the moment. 

This will burn out alot of players most definitely. Stick to your weapons you have lenses for, stick to your few Warframes doing actual damage, stick to your favorite grind mission. Who needs variety in Warframe? It`s fine!

[TheMostFrench]

I always felt focus gain should replace affinity for max level weapons and frames. Lenses is an ok system, but the syndicate sigils are much better and also tie into the 'identity' of your warframe - you literally advertise what syndicate you belong to with your sigil. The convergance orbs are very annoying because they don't drop nearly frequently enough, and even though they might briefly interrupt a banshee or ember spamming their max range AOE power on the defense point, that doesn't mean it should drop out of the way in other missions. I find myself having to go completely out of the way to grab it in exterminate missions, for example.

Edited October 28, 2017 by TheMostFrench

[Aleksi134]

Everytime you complete a mission you gain syndicate standing if you havent capped out...why isnt focus like this at all? Why isnt there specific missions to gain focus like syndicates? You only have 1 choice in focus farming, power farming with equinox.

[Gokuofuin]

I have actually just stopped farming focus.... Ill wait until they redo it.

[Aleksi134]

20 minutes ago, Gokuofuin said:

I have actually just stopped farming focus.... Ill wait until they redo it.

I tried farming for a week and stopped after about 4 days. 

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

I really don't get DE's reluctance to fix this issues, especially since trophy/achievements already prove that the acquisition rate for focus is absymal and that nobody invests into the system as a result (only 0.2% percent of the PS4 userbase have fully unlocked all nodes in a single tree after more than a year of playing the game, that tells you something about focus acquisition).

I absolutely get that then want the system to be a long term objective... That's already enforced pretty well with the daily cap, requiring a player to max it for almost a full year to unlock everything. What I really don't get is the 2% conversion rate from lenses... Why have a 250k cap when most missions give 800 focus?

DE doesn't gain anything by forcing people to grind focus for extended periods of time ? They won't sell more lenses, and forcing your fanbase to do 1 to two hours of tedious grind does not make players stick around for longer... It just makes people give up and ignore said system after hitting the cap for a week or so.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Solution is simple :

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- Massively improve the % conversion rate of focus lenses. I'm talking about at least 20% conversion... Maybe even more with greater and eidolon lenses. I would go 20-25-30% myself.

- Remove convergence orbs. They are too arcadey (why do I have to run after an orb to gain focus for my operator ?) , constantly force you to abandon objectives and backtrack and they keep appearing at wrong timings when there's no enemies anyway, they suck.

-  I think lenses put on Operator amps should give even more Focus.... Maybe 50% conversion.. That way people would actually be rewarded trying to use their operator to gain focus... Which should be the main thing about combat operators, you use them , they get better ?

- As for the "what happens a year later when many people have all lens in the current focus tree".. Well, guess what, you add new nodes then !!! It's not like the operators are perfect, and you can always add new, more expensive nodes, more levels for popular nodes, more waybound nodes to increase operator damage... If you want the system to be long term, update it regularly instead of hoping people will stick around farming it slowly for the next five years.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Conclusion : The slow acquisition rate of focus was fine on Focus 1.0, precisely because 95% of the focus trees were useless and as such , people didn't need to max them out. I think you guys did a pretty good job making most nodes in Focus 2.0 relevant, but you haven't touched the focus acquistion rate in the process , which is a huge mistake since it was fine when you only needed energy regen and being invisible on two trees , but now that you need to unlock at the very least all waybound nodes and almost max a couple focus tree to be a peak efficiency operator.. It doesn't work. The solution is simple to implement, you just need to do it.

Edited October 28, 2017 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[FlinttheImmortal]

3 hours ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

- As for the "what happens a year later when many people have all lens in the current focus tree".. Well, guess what, you add new nodes then !!! It's not like the operators are perfect, and you can always add new, more expensive nodes, more levels for popular nodes, more waybound nodes to increase operator damage... If you want the system to be long term, update it regularly instead of hoping people will stick around farming it slowly for the next five years.

I was with you until this point.

You don't add new nodes.  That's akin to moving the finish line back another mile when a marathon runner is within 100 feet of it.  And it's basically what DE has done already with Focus 2.0 - many players already crossed the finish line of the Focus 1.0 race.

Arbitrarily increasing or prolonging the grind is lazy and unimaginative and it's insulting to players.  It's something DE has been doing for years.

How about this instead: Develop content for which a completed Focus 2.0 is actually useful.  This should be the goal behind any tool or utility the devs create for the players - content in which to use it, content which tests its and the player's limits.  But we don't have that.  We have: farm focus so we can unlock focus that gives us the ability to farm focus faster so we can be done with farming focus faster.

The fact that the devs have already commented on "doing something about the strats" tells me that the whole thing - Focus 2.0 - was poorly conceived from the start, and that little to no thought was put into anything beyond the grind for Focus 2.0.

 

[steelblueskies]

no snark, legitimate question here.

 

now that brilliant(two lure eidolon capture shard) shards can convert to 25k focus, that means that theoretically ten full eidolon captures later, a no lens fellow can cap for a day correct?

do you think this equally ill conceived (imo of course) concept could have been them attempting to make this viable  after a certain amount of grindwall on plains is achieved while also hitting the function of syndicate medallions? 

 

if so then its yet another proverbial nutpunch to soloists(plains no pause solo, lure+lure+eidolon solo functional impossibility adding group tax vs stealth solo farm).

 

it almost feels like a small cluster of passable ideas that just don't make a good final product together, as they could each be a core approach needing smoothing out by other parts, which are expecting the same  smoothing form the others and not getting it, leaving this jagged edged mess.

[Aleksi134]

If brilliant shards were 50k each it would be more acceptable as a farm alternative imo.

[devildevil21]

26 minutes ago, steelblueskies said:

no snark, legitimate question here.

 

now that brilliant(two lure eidolon capture shard) shards can convert to 25k focus, that means that theoretically ten full eidolon captures later, a no lens fellow can cap for a day correct?

do you think this equally ill conceived (imo of course) concept could have been them attempting to make this viable  after a certain amount of grindwall on plains is achieved while also hitting the function of syndicate medallions? 

 

if so then its yet another proverbial nutpunch to soloists(plains no pause solo, lure+lure+eidolon solo functional impossibility adding group tax vs stealth solo farm).

 

it almost feels like a small cluster of passable ideas that just don't make a good final product together, as they could each be a core approach needing smoothing out by other parts, which are expecting the same  smoothing form the others and not getting it, leaving this jagged edged mess.

 

The 25k focus points from 1 brilliant shard don't count toward the daily cap.

Example: you got 0k daily cap left, but you can still trade as many brilliant shards as you wish for focus points.

[MirageKnight]

8 hours ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

I really don't get DE's reluctance to fix this issues, especially since trophy/achievements already prove that the acquisition rate for focus is absymal and that nobody invests into the system as a result (only 0.2% percent of the PS4 userbase have fully unlocked all nodes in a single tree after more than a year of playing the game, that tells you something about focus acquisition).

Oh I get it completely.

Steve and Scott are stubborn as anything about the systems they've built and tweaked and the decisions they make.

Their general attitude seems to be "I made this so I know better than anyone else how this should work and I know I'm right. If people don't appreciate that, they're just wrong." The very real problem is they can't look at a given situation objectively or from someone else's perspective and say "Hrmmm, there's some merit to what these people are saying about X. Let's see what we can do."

No, people like Steve just dig their heels in, make excuses, or just say "You're wrong, so there."

Remember Hema-gate? Steve's flippant response to the still-absurd mutagen cost for merely RESEARCHING the BP was "It's raining Mutagen on Derelict" and "we want to honor the work that other players have made".

Yeah, I've had enough of Focus 2.0....At least with 1.0 the goal posts were in reasonable reach. To call the current focus requirements an up-hill grind is a grotesque understatement..and attaining the goals gives really meager bonus / rewards. Plus, there's Convergence which arguably breaks the whole idea of co-op gameplay on which Warframe was partly founded. And I want no part of that.

 

Edited October 28, 2017 by MirageKnight