PoE Did Not Fix the "In and Out" Fatigue of Running Missions

[Somb3rBivalve]

Considering Venus is already underway, I'm probably a little late on the draw with this, but as I understand it, one of the main objectives with PoE was to relieve some of the fatigue with running missions back and forth from the orbiter to the planet and back, over and over. I don't think PoE did all that much to solve this issue because although incursions, (missions that pop up during free roam) exist and DO solve this problem, most people run bounties because the incursion drops are crap, and with the bounties, instead of going back and forth out of the liset, you are going in and out of the cetus gate. It's the same sort of action, just in a different setting.

Steps to fix this:

• There needs to be multiple bounty boards out in the world to start new bounties without going back through the gate. Upon completing a bounty, there should be waypoints for the nearest bounty board as well as the gate back to the town so your team can make the decision to stay or leave.
• Incursions should not have worse drops than bounties
  • The way I see it incursions should be a viable alternative (in terms of loot) to doing bounties depending on what playstyle you are looking for. With bounties, you load into the game with the understanding that you will traverse directly from waypoint to waypoint with no diversions. Incursions are more friendly for solo players or teams who want to take the time for diversions like resource gathering, and I think it's important to support these two different playstyles with this open world thing simultaneously
• By default, something like plains (and I assume venus too) will have very low level enemies when you load into it in free-roam.The issue with dropping good loot in incursions is that the level of the enemy needs to match the loot quality, but we don't want players to arbitrarily pick the level of enemies because that severely divides the playerbase with matchmaking if everyone picks different levels.
  • The way I knew I wanted to go about this through a level scaling system. Completing incursions would level up enemies across the plains, and if the incursion drops are identical to the bounty drops (with some tweaks here and there), then the level that the enemies are currently at would match the level range on the bounty to determine the tier of loot. As you continue to play, the enemies would scale and the loot would scale through the different loot tables from the bounty tiers. So for example, your first incursion on the plains would drop something from the T1 loot table; doing that incursion levels all the enemies up, and your next incursion will drop from the T2 loot table, and so on...
    • The cool thing about that is that it opens up this to that sandboxy "see how long you can last" style of gameplay if the enemies continue to level up infinitely (loot would cap out at T5 tho), which could be cool to the right type of player
  • The issue with that level scaling system is that if my team only wanted the tier 3 loot instead of tier 5 (or if we couldn't handle level 50s) we would have no way to make enemies stop leveling up. As a result, I think there also needs to be a threat level system. Basically, each time you skip an incursion, the loot tier decreases by 1 tier from its current value. As an example, say you complete a T3 incursion. The enemies then all level up, and the next available incursion will be T4. However, skipping that incursion will mean that the enemies and loot will return to T3 levels, and you can run that again. This makes sense to me because people that would want to target loot tiers other than T5 would probably still need time to farm for resources anyway, so I think this act of manipulating the threat level makes sense to me.

TL;DR: Needs to be bounty boards; Combined with a level scaling system, incursion drops could have identical rewards to bounties, and as enemies level up through completing incursions, the tier of rewards (from each bounty tier) would change, a threat level system manipulated by skipping incursions (presumably to resource farm) would give players control over which tier they are farming for.

[Restless14]

I second these ideas.

Edited March 22, 2018 by Restless14

[peterc3]

8 hours ago, Somb3rBivalve said:

It's the same sort of action, just in a different setting.

This is what DE said they were going to give us. You are expecting things that were never going to happen, that were going to take a hell of a lot longer to do. There will be improvements on Venus, but expecting the entirety of Warframe to be distilled into a single large tile was wrong.

8 hours ago, Somb3rBivalve said:

There needs to be multiple bounty boards out in the world to start new bounties without going back through the gate. Upon completing a bounty, there should be waypoints for the nearest bounty board as well as the gate back to the town so your team can make the decision to stay or leave.

This would not really save much time, currently. The entire instance needs to be refreshed. Which means at least 1 if not 2 loading screens.

[(PSN)Ferretime]

Being able to leave on one's own accord rather than still having to leave with the rest of your squad is something POE really needs. That way people who don't want to stay in the same instance can leave with no penalty to their loot and xp.

[Siilk]

The way I see it, current bounties should be replaced completely by incursions which should become progressively more and more difficult with each incursion completed exiting the open world area. "Bounty board" should only be there for special quests, events and coop bounties. Scaling of regular enemies in the freeroam mode should be done in a natural way: the closer you get to the enemy strongholds & outposts, the stronger the enemies are. So if you're looking for a tough fight(and better loot) but not interested in bounties at all, you should simply be able to head for the enemy high-security zones. On top of that, completing an incursion should, gradually increase the level of the roaming enemies until you exit the area(at which point enemy levels should be reset), progressively bumping up the difficulty for the area as a whole.

 

 

[Somb3rBivalve]

On 3/22/2018 at 11:10 AM, peterc3 said:

This is what DE said they were going to give us. You are expecting things that were never going to happen.

I apologize for the late reply, but is it really wrong to expect someone to deliver on their goals? If DE says that relieving mission fatigue is a main goal of an update, then one should expect that that update should actually do that!

On 3/22/2018 at 11:10 AM, peterc3 said:

There will be improvements on Venus, but expecting the entirety of Warframe to be distilled into a single large tile was wrong.

This would not really save much time, currently. The entire instance needs to be refreshed. Which means at least 1 if not 2 loading screens.

I'm not expecting the entire warframe experience of running missions on all these different planets and tilesets to be boiled down into one location. All I want is more continuity between the existing missions we are already completing on plains of eidolon. As I said, incursions already accomplish this, but the rewards for those incursions suck, which force me to do bounties which are discontinuous.

As far as I know, you don't work at DE and don't know exactly how multiplayer sessions are initialized within the game. Is there any particular reason why a loading screen would be required to start up a new bounty on the plains with my squad, assuming that is what you are referring to? Even if loading screens are required, I would still prefer 1 loading screen in the middle of the plains as opposed to: fly back to the gate, wait for everyone to come back, load up laggy cetus, go to konzu, load up plains, and fly all the way to the objective. It gets really old really fast.

[peterc3]

31 minutes ago, Somb3rBivalve said:

As far as I know, you don't work at DE and don't know exactly how multiplayer sessions are initialized within the game. Is there any particular reason why a loading screen would be required to start up a new bounty on the plains with my squad, assuming that is what you are referring to? Even if loading screens are required, I would still prefer 1 loading screen in the middle of the plains as opposed to: fly back to the gate, wait for everyone to come back, load up laggy cetus, go to konzu, load up plains, and fly all the way to the objective. It gets really old really fast.

I don't work for DE. What I do have is the ability to look at the rest of the game and make some assumptions based on it. PoE isn't so much open world, but a very, very big tile like the rest of the game works with. We start in the Landing Craft/Orbiter with the ability to build things, look at mods, change our load out, etc. We go to Navigation and pick a node to run. Cut to a series of loading screens to make sure everyone is on the same page. We run the mission and we cut to another loading screen and we are back in the Landing Craft.

What happens in the mission is another telling bit of info. Take an Exterminate. Things we break while in the mission aren't replenished at any point. The enemies do not change, the levels of the enemies don't change. The route from start to finish is random, but made up of the tiles for a given set.

The enemies do change level in various endless missions, but after set points. The mission goes on, so there are new enemies generated and based on when they spawn, they are at a certain level based on the number of waves/time survived/Cryotic mined/rounds intercepted. What do we not see? Enemies just blinking into existence where we are looking. The level itself changing. Breakables being unbroken/moved.

Based on that, it is probably rather ugly to see things just appear. These things are hidden not because they can't make it happen, but because it would be even more work to add things to make it less jarring. So the process to do all of that is not given any thought as to making it look good, just do it behind the scenes and show it when it is done. See also bugs where set pieces spawn in bad places and block doors/consoles.

DE could have spent a lot of time making something that works also look good, but that would risk breaking something that already works for the rest of the game. We start in Cetus, like any other Relay and then go into the Plains, or just go from the LC to the Plains, probably using the Bounties as incentive to make people go into Cetus first. The tile is generated and we are let into it. The Plains are not the same in Free Roam or in any of the 5 levels of Bounties that we can pick. Enemies in location A may be one level in FR but much higher level if it is used in a given Bounty. The super secure vaults we have to protect and open with keys are allowed to just be opened if it isn't involved in a stage of the Bounty or in an Incursion. There could be tests to see if an Incursion will occur with a vault if they have been opened already. An Iradite block will drop different amounts based on what level of Bounty you start the instance as.

It might be rather "dangerous" to refresh an instance with a player in it, which necessitates moving them to another place while creating another instance. It might end up as a single loading screen, but really we are being moved twice, probably ending up as a single, long, load. Not impossible to change, just work that is not applicable to the rest of the existing content.

All I'm really saying is, people seemed to expect an entirely different game. The game, the engine, everything up to PoE was designed to best suit the previous iterations of missions. They don't reuse things because they are lazy, but because there are not enough people to do all the work, all the time. You don't see them doing things, like the recent weapon rebalance, a lot because, as you might have noticed, things like new weapons/content have to wait for people to finish looking over old content.

What we are seeing with Venus is an evolution of PoE, with things like progressively loading the area, scattered bases to turn things in/choose new things to do, taking good things about PoE and refining them. The game's design is all about evolution, not revolution. Take an idea and iterate and refine. See what works, what doesn't. Take feedback but confirm it with hard data.