I'll take some time to talk about current stealth

[Serdinor_Darkrose]

   First things first, I personally enjoy playing stealth variants of missions in Warframe. When I go solo or with friends who share this interest and we have the time to spare we will run almost every mission in a stealthy manner (no perma-stealth though since it gets boring quickly). We have run Spy missions using our rules to beat our clear times & compete with each other. Stealth in Warframe is a choice and not forced upon you by any means, if you like it you go along with it and DE has created really nice details in many tilesets to support this playstyle. Consider this a discussion hub for people who like or dislike this playstyle-both opinions are valid and need to be heard. Nothing is improved through indifference and nothing changes through lack of feedback.


Time-consuming requirements:

A lot of people do not like playing in stealth, but perhaps the most vocal argument is what one may expect: it is time consuming to do so. People do not have infinite time on their hands. Even if you have plenty of time to spare, it always makes much more sense to use it in a smart way. Grindframe is not a joke and you're always in need of many items (relics, materials, standing etc). The faster you complete a mission the faster you'll acquire rewards. You can run an Extermination in 10+ minutes killing everything under cover or run through it slaying everything on sight and finish in 4, it's simply not convenient. This is not something that can change, by nature stealth is the slow-paced gameplay, it requires your attention and time.


Besides that, there are two things worth mentioning: necessity and payoff.


-Breaking stealth & triggering alarms has no real consequences:

While this doesn't hold true in the lower newbie levels where getting swarmed or hunted can be lethal, once you get the hang of the game alarms become a trivial thing. This is due to two factors: 1) The alarms are easily deactivated since almost every tileset has a console and when you're in a group the person deactivating the alarms will never be prioritized. This becomes even more trivialized through Void Mode as the enemies have no real means of stopping you. Invisihack can be countered by both Grineer and Corpus however. Granted I do mention "easily" but players with inexperience in hacking consoles can find this challenging to perform while swarmed, but nothing a cheaply built Cipher won't solve. 2) Alarms don't have a big impact on your gameplay and even serve as an immersion-breaking point sometimes. Indeed you are a being capable of one-frame genocide, whole towns can fall under the assault of one Warframe. Yet alarms exist and fail to capture that "things got serious moment". Your Operator and Lotus will always remind you not alerting enemies will be beneficial to you. Enemies will rush to those consoles in a desperate attempt to call backup and survive. Special enemies will be dispatched during alerts, yet it's not something to fear but you rather prefer for them to spawn since they do drop valuable loot.

You never get the feeling of being hunted down, not during triggered alarms state or lockdown state, you are not trapped in that room but in fact they are trapped in there with you. And while this entire thing serves as a point of recognition to your power, it was also meant to unsettle you which doesn't really achieve and falls under the category I call The Stalker Effect. The Stalker Effect was created through the experience you have when facing a Stalker invasion, you are not unsettled but rather happy because you can finally get that loot you wanted. When your chances of survival are always in your favor, any attempt towards tension breaks automatically.

A good example of doing things right in this category would be a semi-recent example, XCOM 2. Breaking stealth and being invaded by a powerful foe in that game is not something you seek or ignore, it creates both tension and the feeling of potential failure.


-Mastering stealth is not rewarding:

That's not to say you won't benefit from it, but that the payoff is very little for a player to actually care. If we consider what stealth is good for right now it would come down to 1) focus & xp farming due to stealth affinity multipliers, 2) sortie Spy vaults where you'd rather play it safe and 3) kuva missions. Focus & xp isn't something that requires mastering stealth, all you need is a massive cc like sleep to count your aoe attacks as stealth attacks. Sortie Spy vaults like all Spy vaults require stealth, however it is possible to rush-hack every vault in the game with slim chances of failure if you have a decent experience with vaults. Kuva missions can be done stealthily through your Void Mode or any form of invisibility (which doesn't require any particular skill at all) or you can just draw attention in a crossfire map while jumping out of your frame as an operator to make the siphon experience easier.

What else can we use stealth for:
-Riven missions which is currently the only real stealth-required segment in the game besides specific Spy vaults.
-Assault missions are a great example of utilizing both stealth and all-out warfare to complete your goal. They have the problem of being Assault though which almost noone plays due to the rewards not being anything special.
-Rescue missions can be rushed. Sortie Rescues trigger the execution timer no matter what so no real reason to use them in an end-game mission either, sortie Spy is more about area awareness rather than stealth the more experienced you become.
-Sabotage / Exterminate / Hijack require no stealth whatsoever to reach the mission's goal.
-Capture could be an excellent stealth mission but as soon as you encounter your target they immediately become omnipresent alongside every other enemy.
-Assassination / Archwing / Arena have nothing to do with stealth.
-Defense / Survival / Excavation / Defection / Infested Salvage / Mobile Defense / Interception have all enemies alerted to you basically from the start.
-Cetus bounties that have not a single stealth mission involved. Free roam stealth can be proven beneficial for one and only purpose: so you can mine and fish uninterrupted after you've killed everything nearby (random ships continue to appear either way so nothing to gain from this as well).
-Any fissure mission breaks stealth immediately since corrupted enemies become aware of you at all times.

Out of 20+ missions currently in the game, stealth is only really required in 2-3. If we assume a new player gets into the game, the introductory chapters make attempts to teach them stealth mechanics, but the more they play the more they realize stealth is not a requirement. Becoming good at stealth will require time out of you, properly modded weapons and patience for little to no payoff. To this we can add the final nail: Spy missions. While Spy missions could reward players with extra rewards for hacking every vault undetected or even for going through the entire mission with no alarms activated, your rewards remain the same even if you trigger every alarm possible. The same missions that should require stealth give no current incentive for a player to actually use stealth.


Some things you may not consider:

While stealth currently is by no means a requirement and has faded into dark times, the lack of a slow pace has three more outcomes that I tend to notice regularly:

1) New players grow up with lack of map structure / spy puzzle awareness. The second one is very self-explanatory, but to give a personal note. During my time playing in low level Spy missions to observe how new players handle that content, I have seen 8/10 players rushing inside the vault and failing to extract the data. These are players along the ranks of Mr 1/2-6 and higher. The other 2/10 is mostly completely newbies at the ranks of Mr 0-1 whose actions split into two parts: they are either lost trying to figure out what to do or take their time to figure out the puzzle in a vault. This carries on all the way to end-game however since nowhere the game will tell you to slow down and take things slow to succeed.
Lack of map structure awareness is simply your familiarity with a map or a particular tileset. It's not strange to see players (new and semi-familiar) get stuck in maps or getting downed due to bad positioning and using their surroundings to a minimum level.
Both those reasons come from a very single source: gameplay is fast from the start. And while this is not a bad thing for Warframe, we also need to consider Warframe is not a simple game. It requires from you to master and learn about many different things and a very fast gameplay from the get-go tends to leave new players with gaps in their knowledge. They see others rushing through the map and feel the need to do so.

2) Tileset details and map structure in general become underappreciated. When everyone runs for the entire mission, they don't have time to look around. This doesn't affect the gameplay directly, but having a broader knowledge on tilesets can affect your feedback in general and also your assistance in bug-fixing and suggestions for future content. Also sometimes being aware of how the environment around you works can help you in some missions and the ever-present Bugframe scenarios. Plus it is a shame so many alternate pathways and rooms remain unnoticed to the larger part of the playerbase unless another playes mentions them.

3) Stealth requires patience and breeds patience, however lack of patience is not a good thing for a co-op game. While this may be situational, I am pretty confident that the people who take Spy vaults or use stealth in Warframe have fewer chances of raging at another squad-member or lose their cool when a frustrating scenario takes place. Inherently having patience allows you to take a breath and think things over, it allows you to not lose your cool and adapt. It's is a small detail, but I always consider it and how it can affect a person.


As a means of epilogue:

This is what I consider the current stealth status in Warframe. I enjoy it but it could definitely use some love. At the end of the day it affects more things than just being an alternative playstyle. Noone forces it upon you and noone teaches you the ropes, but even if it's barely rewarding you with items it may allow you to appreciate some other things.

May Shadow hide you.
Tenno out o/

[Errodin]

Ohhhh the Shadow does hide me my friend, but i disagree that stealth is all but useless. Loki is my go to for most of everything, as an experienced player my preferred play-style to slice and slide through enemies without consequence. It both cuts down the risk of failure and time of completion in missions.

I do get where your coming from though, because being a master of stealth only reaps personal benefits. I know maps inside out, it's a reflection of my experience, i can hack computers faster and more proficiently that others, most of the time beating them to 2 of the 3 consoles. You can stealth and still be fast paced you just need to know the ins and outs, but you're right, nothing compels players to learn these ways. Stealth has seeped its way into Solo play and away from Co-op, but maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.

I've run Eliminations, Spy, Defection, Mobile Defense, even Sorties ... Solo in stealth.. even in a team, but as i said i'm a veteran player. I don't run a high duration build either, i focus movement speed and efficiency. I've dabbed with Warframes that have no stealth too, a lot less fun but not impossible. 

Edited March 27, 2018 by Errodin

[Zhoyzu]

4 minutes ago, Errodin said:

Ohhhh the Shadow does hide me my friend, but i disagree that stealth is all but useless. Loki is my go to for most of everything, as an experienced player my preferred play-style to slice and slide through enemies without consequence. It both cuts down the risk of failure and time of completion in missions.

 

conversely i main frost nidus and banshee and know every tile inside and out and have no issues hacking. But none of that is related to stealth. DEs original vision was the quickness and speed of ninjas rather than their ability to hide.

Other than using a loki to cheese spy puzzles there really isnt any stealth in the game at all. Unless of course you take the effort to bow hunt the entire map.

as far as stealth works in the game its just having not yet been detected. you can run up to an enemy and blast em in the face with a shot gun and still not be detected. Being invisible just doesnt equate to stealth in this game. Sure you can avoid detection easier, but you could just run past enemies all the same free of consequence (excluding the actual spy puzzle room)

[Errodin]

Not saying that Loki is my only warframe, I have them all, i rotate playing them all. 

25 minutes ago, Zhoyzu said:

as far as stealth works in the game its just having not yet been detected. 

That itself is the essence of stealth, the very definition, not to be detected, how does the game fall short in this aspect? Your talking about one enemy and a shotgun, what about a group of enemies? Once they see a slain ally, detection, or if they catch a glimpse of you, detected.

True you can just run past the enemies and they can raise the alarm to have more enemies spawn. For new players invisibility can make maps easier, so they're not overwhelmed by enemies, the same applies to sorties. It increases survivability.

Edited March 27, 2018 by Errodin

[Zhoyzu]

9 minutes ago, Errodin said:

Not saying that Loki is my only warframe, I have them all, i rotate playing them all. 

That itself is the essence of stealth, the very definition, not to be detected, how does the game fall short in this aspect? Your talking about one enemy and a shotgun, what about a group of enemies? Once they see a slain ally, detection, or if they catch a glimpse of you, detected.

look, i just dont see this as a stealth game because the risk/reward is completely absent. I loved playing all the elder scrolls as a stealth class, its incredibly fun. Thief was a fun game too. WF just isnt set up for it

[Errodin]

The risk/reward is absent? How so? You start a match and end a match, no matter what play-style you use to get through it you are rewarded at the end. It's a way to play the game and you want to be convinced to play it that way other than wanting to play it because you like playing that way?

If i suit up as a never-die-tank and just skip over all the obstacles as opposed to confronting them. At the end, i get a reward.

If i suit up as a glass cannon and blast my way to the end. At the end, i get a reward.

If i suit up as a gun-slinger and shoot my way through. At the end, i get a reward.

Why do you need additional rewards/ to be convinced to play stealth? What other play-style offers you any reward to play it that way? Why does it need to be more than an alternative play-style?

Edited March 27, 2018 by Errodin

[Serdinor_Darkrose]

1 hour ago, Errodin said:

The risk/reward is absent? How so? You start a match and end a match, no matter what play-style you use to get through it you are rewarded at the end. It's a way to play the game and you want to be convinced to play it that way other than wanting to play it because you like playing that way?

If i suit up as a never-die-tank and just skip over all the obstacles as opposed to confronting them. At the end, i get a reward.

If i suit up as a glass cannon and blast my way to the end. At the end, i get a reward.

If i suit up as a gun-slinger and shoot my way through. At the end, i get a reward.

Why do you need additional rewards/ to be convinced to play stealth? What other play-style offers you any reward to play it that way? Why does it need to be more than an alternative play-style?

This is not quite the case though. All 3 cases that you mention have 2 things in common: they preserve your free time and don't require much of an afterthought in the mission. You run as fast as possible, kill everything or ignore most enemies to save even more time, use your loadout and abilities to kill or defend the objective, run to extraction. Playing using stealth in Warframe will make you use more time than every other playstyle (which is to be expected) but also provides no added bonus. If you enter a room, kill every enemy methodically while waiting for patrols to move away or split etc and trigger no alarms you gain no benefit over someone charging in the room with a Scoliac and button mashing spin attack while triggering the alarms. The risk/reward concept of stealth is that you risk exposure that can be fatal to you in order to gain an edge over the enemies by reducing their numbers, gain more information, avoid the confrontation entirely etc. Exposure in Warframe simply does not exist however, you are never punished for not even considering going in silently, the risk factor is eliminated. Even at high level missions where this could have a payoff it doesn't since all scaling end-game missions feature enemies in a constant alert state. If we had endless Spy missions with lvl 2000 Bombards guarding them things would be different but currently stealth has no value outside of QoL for Spy vaults and being a fun alternative. Plus Spy missions not really work, the time you have to get the data if you mess up are way too forgiving already (and ciphers exist).

[Errodin]

Hmmm seems we've gone in a circle haha, lets lead this in a more positive direction.

So if we narrow it down Stealth at this point in time as all we've stated above ... (just trying to sum things up)

• Zero value outside QoL & Spy
• Heavily based around Detection
• Little to no consequence/reward
• Overall dreadfully slow compared to competitive game mods 

Nothing attracts us to play the game in this way.

So how would we change it in a simple way to make it more appealing? What ways could the current game modes be tweaked to ensure the desired affect?

Feel free to reiterize anything you've said before that I've missed (I've made this short on purpose)

 

[Serdinor_Darkrose]

The time cannot be improved, that's for sure. Well technically you can storm a room with an aoe power or melee (or let's say a Sonicor with Suppress) but that hardly feels like stealth. Besides that, it's very hard to improve on timers since like I mentioned stealth is inherently tied to a slow-paced gamestyle. So I'll leave that aside, can do nothing about it.
So, how do we make stealth a gameplay that is not required (for the people who hate it) but feels good to use for every other player?

-Let's start with alarms. Currently alarms do not impact your strategy or mission outcome very much (lack of risk). I would personally suggest two things for this:

1) Alarms will lock the room(s) the player(s) are currently in within 5 seconds from the moment they are triggered unless you disable them, during this time AI sets as top priority target the person trying to hack the console and will aggressively storm the console areas as well the player(s) inside the room. As soon as the room locks due to the alarm (not broken windows forcing a tileset into vacuum lockdowns) a special squad will spawn inside the room and close to one of the locked doors, similar to how the syndicates attack you but the spawn points will be specific and not on top of you. These squads will differ for grineer and corpus, will have at least 1-2 Eximus heavy units (f.e. Bombard/Tech) as well as a Hyeka Master or Scrampus in order to hunt down the Tenno. As of current game version, this is something that can be cheesed with Operator's Void Mode, I do expect something to change in the future given how overpowered the ability is but until then this won't solve much. The general idea is to make alarms unsettle you, so that you have an incentive not to trigger them or try to shut them down as soon as possible.

2) All Spy vaults no longer have consoles just before you enter the vault, these are removed. While the vaults are not affected by the outside alarms normally, opening the door to the vault tileset while an alarm is in place will immediately trigger the alarm in the vault and start the data destruction process. It makes more sense imo for this to be implemented this way, you would assume vaults that contain high-value data would have such a mechanism and be connected with all alarms in one mainframe. We already know both factions have mainframes as Lotus points out during mobile defense and certain sabotage missions. So while vaults have their unique setup to prevent external hacking, door breach with the external alarms currently going on will trigger the vault alarms since those rooms would be alerted by someone's presence in the area.

-Now why would such risk exist? Here's where we need a proper reward system to be implemented. What I'll suggest is simple: the creation of two extra drop tables. Completing a mission with no alarms triggered (those missions must have alarms and able to be executed in a stealthy manner-those being Rescue, Spy, Exterminate if all enemies aren't already in alert state, Sabotage & Hijack up to the point where everyone becomes alerted) will roll from that extra reward table for an extra reward. Additionally Spy missions will have extra rewards added to their pool for their higher level variants, completing all vaults without a single alarm triggered will eliminate low-tier rewards and roll for the higher ones plus the new extras. These rewards must be good enough to justify the trouble. Ideas that come to mind for no alarms in general are a chance for 500 Kuva, rare mods like Condition overload, exclusive parts for new weapons etc. I doubt people will complain about the slow-pace if they have a chance to get rewards that are time-consuming to acquire either way. It will be a new alternative as well.

While for the suggestions on 1) I'm not sure because they would depend on how much they would slow down the game, I feel that 2) would be a good touch. It eliminates a lot of the problems and would push stealth into a type of gameplay that would both be encouraged (but not forced) and feel rewarding.

[(XBOX)Artakka]

I disagree with your stalker effect comment. If I'm ranking up a bunch of mastery fodder, and the stalker randomly comes in angry at ME, I'm like oh s*** I'm so f*****