Warframe needs an event log!

[auxy]

Old lady auxy story time! (￣▽￣;) I clipped this from a reply I was making to another thread as it got way long.

In old MMORPGs back in the day (EverQuest, Final Fantasy XI, City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa, and basically every other MMORPG from before 2010), you had a log that included system and event messages. It was basically a friendly version of the kind of debug messages that every game already has in development. Among those messages were (optionally!) messages that talked about damage. Something like this:

This screenshot is from City of Heroes. It had a highly-configurable windowing system. You could have five different windows, each with any number of tabs. You could also split windows in half horizontally. The log messages could be enabled or disabled by category, as well as split among any of the windows and tabs that you had, again by category. You can see in this screenshot I have a tab for combat messages, a tab for system messages, and a tab specifically for group chat.

I'm not looking for that kind of configurability in Warframe. However, I do think that the ability to pull up log messages like these would be useful, though. You can see in the screenshot above that there are messages for defeats, for rewards earned, for damage dealt and taken, for when powers recharge, and obviously for chat messages. How great would it be if you could have a log window in Warframe?

It's something I've always wanted since I started playing back in 2013. Sure, sometimes things are happening too fast for you to read them. That was also true back in City of Heroes. However, it was really nice to be able to go back and read the log sometimes to find out what happened. It was also really nice to look at your log and see what you picked up, or who killed whom.

There are SO MANY instances in Warframe where I've desperately longed for a message log. If I could look at the log to see my damage types illustrated with a message like:

Quote

auxy's Prisma Gorgon hit Heavy Gunner [50] for 3976 (2894<viralicon> 811<impacticon> 159<punctureicon> 107<slashicon>) CRITICAL! HEADSHOT!
auxy's Prisma Gorgon inflicted <viralicon> on Heavy Gunner [50]!

^{By the way, it took me almost an hour to do that damage math. Warframe's Damage system is incredibly obtuse and needlessly complicated.}

It would be pretty awesome. It would also remove a lot of the guesswork and experimentation people currently have to do to optimize builds in the simulacrum. It would also be nice for things like:

Quote

Picked up an energy orb. (25)
Equilibrium restores 25 health!
auxy's Arcane Energize restored 50 energy to you!

And so on.

There are other benefits to such a system besides convenience and transparency. A running event log could be saved to disk and examined or programmatically parsed later. It also could be useful for anti-cheat purposes. The list goes on.

I realize something like this would be a pain to implement, and most likely go completely un-used by the majority of players. I'd sure get MY use out of it, though. Let me know what you think of my idea!

[(PSN)XxDarkyanxX]

You do realize that a single mission has in average 500-1000 pickups? Needless to say, you'd have to go through more than one hour of log just to find the very first item you've picked in a mission.

The same kinda applies for damage dealt, we're way past millions if we're looking through damage dealt to 200-5000 enemies on one mission.
It would be even worst if every single status proc was tabbed on the Log.

Healing might be more chill and relax though I'm sure Oberon's healing log would be filled with ones and tens every 2 milliseconds as compared to one hit heals like trinity, harrow and Equinox.

Point being, if there was a Log, I'm willing to bet 5$ that you wouldn't ever be able to even find what you want to see.

Edit : The only time I could find an use to it would be Simulacrum. The sheer number of pick-up and enemy spawn is entirely controlled and editted by you and only you.

Edited March 28, 2018 by (PS4)XxDarkyanxX

[auxy]

1 minute ago, (PS4)XxDarkyanxX said:

You do realize that a single mission has in average 500-1000 pickups? Needless to say, you'd have to go through more than one hour of log just to find the very first item you've picked in a mission.

The same kinda applies for damage dealt, we're way past millions if we're looking through damage dealt to 200-5000 enemies on one mission.
It would be even worst if every single status proc was tabbed on the Log.

Healing might be more chill and relax though I'm sure Oberon's healing log would be filled with ones and tens every 2 milliseconds as compared to one hit heals like trinity, harrow and Equinox.

Point being, if there was a Log, I'm willing to bet 5$ that you wouldn't ever be able to even find what you want to see.

I am an MR25 founder. I am quite aware of how busy Warframe missions are.

You may not realize how busy some of those older games could be, with 100+ players in a single encounter. ('ω')
Even with as much depth as they give a single player, these modern games with only 4 players are much simpler in comparison.

[Zext]

This actually seems pretty neat. And easily toggleable, too. I think for the sake of redundancy it shouldn't include certain things, or maybe have options as to what to include. The progress screen already exists, listing total resources and exp, and there's the bottom log that is very temporary but sufficient (would be nice to scroll through that I guess) so the main thing it would bring to the table is damage logging.

Would you log each of a proc's ticks though?

[auxy]

6 minutes ago, Zext said:

This actually seems pretty neat. And easily toggleable, too. I think for the sake of redundancy it shouldn't include certain things, or maybe have options as to what to include. The progress screen already exists, listing total resources and exp, and there's the bottom log that is very temporary but sufficient (would be nice to scroll through that I guess) so the main thing it would bring to the table is damage logging.

Would you log each of a proc's ticks though?

It definitely should have options as to what to include. Honestly the option to simply scroll through the bottom log would be quite amazing in itself! (・ω・´)

As far as logging each tick, I definitely wouldn't. I would probably consolidate the totals of effects that happen very quickly (like the aforementioned Oberon healing) across one second, or maybe 500ms.

I've shown this to others and discussed it elsewhere. One thing that people seem to bring up a lot is the pace of Warframe. However, those older games that I mentioned were all real-time; it's not as if they were turn-based games. There is downtime, and you certainly can pause a moment to check the log for something you're curious about. You also might be surprised at how fast you can (or, perhaps, some people can) read something at a glance, even if it's only on screen for a single frame.

As I said in the OP, I don't think many people would even use this feature. Those of us who WOULD use it would find it enormously useful, though. ('ω')

[rainmaker170]

Well, I'm sure you could have it like every other chat in an MMO and just toggle the options you want from it, wouldn't really need to see pickups there as they already come up on your screen, but it just sounds like everything else about it would be helpful.

[Shalath]

That sound you can hear is DE's databases weeping at the idea

[auxy]

11 hours ago, Shalath said:

That sound you can hear is DE's databases weeping at the idea

Haha, no way! You'd log it on the user's PC, if logging is enabled.

If I were DE, I'd even restrict the option to toggle logging to the launcher, or even put it as a command line option.

[Vaz2017]

What about just a death recap feature like ESO and a few other games have?

https://us.v-cdn.net/5020507/uploads/editor/1b/1zrxpi6de6p7.png

[rainmaker170]

On 3/29/2018 at 11:40 PM, Vaz2017 said:

What about just a death recap feature like ESO and a few other games have?

https://us.v-cdn.net/5020507/uploads/editor/1b/1zrxpi6de6p7.png

That would probably be really useful too, I remember when we were still trying to figure out that AoE glitch with the bombards, probably would have been helpful then.

[auxy]

On 3/29/2018 at 9:40 PM, Vaz2017 said:

What about just a death recap feature like ESO and a few other games have?

https://us.v-cdn.net/5020507/uploads/editor/1b/1zrxpi6de6p7.png

I'd like to see death recap for sure, although having the logging feature would make it somewhat unnecessary. Certainly the logging feature is more useful than the death recap alone. Either one would be a very welcome addition to Warframe! ('ω')