Problems That Must Be Fixed Before We Can Have Scaling Rewards

[HisokaXEveryone]

This is kind of an odd thread idea, but considering how many times people ask for scaling rewards on missions such as Kuva Survival, it seems worth posting(and maybe pinning?) the problems with that sort of idea. This isn't an argument against such a thing, but rather a list of hurdles that should be overcome before such a thing could be put in the game, and a place to talk about fixes for those problems.

 

1. Scaling rewards encourage pressuring teammates to stay.

      Basically, the better the rewards for scaling items are, the more trouble a player might get into with other people if they wish to/need to leave a match before the rest of the team is satisfied. This is especially an issue with survival/excavation, which players cannot leave in unless at least one other player joins them and it then drags all players out, but the other endless modes could also trigger whining, troubles with guildmates, or even outright harrassment at times. I'd love to say the Warframe community is a perfect group of just friendly people.... but I've personally been told by 3 other in a pug to abort (and therefore lose a rare item from my radient) a survival because I got a call and had to go pick a friend up at 7 minutes in, and that was just a low-level Meso survival which barely has any real scaling rewards to make restarting it an issue. While those sorts of people and situations are rare, they do need to be considered.

2. Survival and Excavation currently do not have a way for people to leave them alone.

     Sort of mentioned above, Survival and Excavation currently have NO way for people to leave them on their own short of aborting the mission. When tied to the above problem, you basically cause a place where toxic behavior can occur, and scaling rewards would make that worse. And since less players actually makes those missions harder thanks to less enemies causing less life support/energy cells to drop, simply allowing a player to leave without punishment would hurt everyone who got left behind.

3. Enemy scaling is not a linear thing, so how do you set up scaling rewards?

       Fairly self-explainatory: there's a bigger difference in how dangerous the enemies are between certain times during a level, with some periods causing more heavy enemies to show up, others creating lots of eximus's, and other levels simply giving a flat increase to enemy level,(For instance, in kuva survival running till 10's pretty effortless for most groups, running to 20's barely a problem, but a lot of the groups that try to hit 30 suddenly tend to run into a point where everyone starts dying constantly) so how exactly do you set up scaling rewards? Do you do it flat by level, or by the average enemy quality, or what? Might be less of an issue than the above points, but still probably needs some serious thought, especially if the goal is to NOT remove siphons from viability. 

4.The more value a mission's later periods have, the more "meta" teams are needed, harming character choice.

       This is already pretty obvious for most people who play Kuva survival. Try to get into a PuG without running into a Nekros. Seriously, your chances of getting three might be higher than your chance of hitting none, and that's just caused by one sort of "scaling reward" which causes Nekros to be required(As in, other frames cannot compete with Nekros for viability there due to his ability to harvest kuva, giving him the best reward-scaling. The inability to get enough life support for most frames decreases the number of capsules they can convert, and they'll generally hit a point where they cannot kill fast enough to make up for lost life support capsules sooner than Nekros.) If real scaling rewards were in, you'd just reinforce the need for a specific team composition over the ability to pick whatever you'd like, and while I'm sure you can make your ____ work anywhere, it won't be "ideal", something that will hurt you both in rewards and in the form of complaints from the crap of our community.

5. Should scaling rewards be consistently useful things, or one-time rewards?

        Both ideas have their issues: The one-time rewards such as mods, cosmetics, etc. are great, and drive traffic at first, but may eventually leave a mission fairly empty. Meanwhile things such as resources, relics, and other constantly used things have a chance of triggering bad behavior.

6. Scaling rewards push players into playing only missions that can scale.

        Increasing the rewards on some missions naturally makes them more valuable, and reduces the interest in the less useful mission types. This is something that you can already experience just from looking at most non-endless missions. Since they don't give resources(and are arguably less fun) people stop picking them as soon as they have whatever mod or warframe parts they need from them.

 

Anyways, that's just four problems that need to be considered and worked around when considering placing in scaling rewards. I'd love to see comments covering how to get past them, as well as any additional problems I haven't thought up. As I said before, the purpose of this post wasn't to tell people "scaling rewards aren't a thing", but rather that there's some pretty big issues that need to be considered before they can implemented, and to get people thinking of how to get past them.

Edited April 18, 2018 by HisokaXEveryone
Adding points 5 and 6

[Urlan]

1. Playing games with others, particularly randoms means at least trying to show appreciation for the roles of others in a mission or taking the antisocial path and using the others as a handicap of sorts. Some try to force their brand of companionship on others. Ultimately, if you are playing a random match, and have to go afk, there is no expectation without prior asking, that the rest of the team continue or go further. Having the ability to separately leave would be awesome for such players and would help eliminate the often toxic nature of rushers versus those that want to explore a mission but perhaps DE can explore such an option in time, if enough players request it.

2. Survival and other endless missions are largely the long haul as its the point of them. Trying to at least get a C reward option, to get something out of the mission. It is often wise to ask team mates beforehand how long they can go to establish team times but in a random match, one gets what comes as they offer whatever they have when they come. You get both good and bad basically. This has little to do with the rewards themselves scaling or not, though indeed, it would inspire players to both enjoy and try to go farther - as there would be less grind going on in theory; but rather communication. One must agree that allowing dynamic extraction or insertion would allow such situations to be more fluid and allow for random player quality and attacks of real life.

3. Enemy scaling does however go based on tiers of difficulty and such rewards could be either set up tiers based on their difficulty presented; or alternately, lesser chaff rewards removed and replaced with better chances for the actual rewards sought as difficulty raises. A mix could be used if someone so desired; but while some DE staff have been clear on their opposition to endless representing anything more than it does now; I feel that something is needed to incentivize players to both try content and to keep playing - there is decreasing reason lately to do so in the mind's of many.

4. Meta can be defined as different things. One, players often try to label popular ideas or accepted best ideas as 'meta' while this is more just a popularity contest - what one Youtuber or usage charts show, by their interpretation is the most used or best. Second, you have a metagame. This situation is not created by players but is acted upon by them. Essentially, metagames are inserted into a bigger game by the designers who wish to push particular play-styles or reward certain behavior on for activities in their game. Usually, this is done by making certain tools available have strong interactions with particular niches or desired roles; it can also mean making some tools cheaper to use or otherwise incentivizing their usage. In Warframe, elements like acolyte mods for instance are such metagame tools as are warframes like Nova, Trinity, and Loki for the most part. Much content made for the game, is designed against how these throe warframes or their derivatives would handle it; and thus pushes the player towards using them or the popular consensus - thus a metagame influencing the meta popular opinion.

Roughly though, if some wants to fight scaling challenges with the most chance of success, they will take the tools highlighted by both popular opinion, and what the devs are trying to push one to use as it might make such things easier. This happens on any content in a game, as not everyone is the same base skill level and in fact, in a game like Warframe such a thing is embraced. As players have power plateaus and enemies do not, one could draw the conclusion that if you want the rewards, you need to either be stubborn and try to succeed with what you like; use metagame elements the devs are pushing; or use what popular opinion feels works for them. The pain of biases against playing with players that do meta or metagame, again could be lessened by individual extraction; enemy level scaling being reworked; or one can avoid randoms as they logically have little control over what their allies intend to use without communication and agreements.

[MiMiren]

You missed the "player blows through the new game content too quickly." hurdle. Actually that's the most important "hurdle". One that every developer on this world always needs to take into account.

[Urlan]

1 hour ago, MadGrekon said:

You missed the "player blows through the new game content too quickly." hurdle. Actually that's the most important "hurdle". One that every developer on this world always needs to take into account.

That is the reason for increased grind and stuff like focus having caps. If content is supposed to be taking months to a year to get anything of value out of it, perhaps its not worth the time however. Certainly many players seem to be confused about what they feel the devs should do to make the game engaging and fun for the whole community.

[Dobroazur]

Scaling rewards would also pressure people to play endless modes even if they don't like them. Leaving all the non-endless modes deserted.

Let's say i like spy missions a lot, i can do a run in about 5 minutes and always get one relic out of it, pretty much in line with the current endless rewards. If scaling rewards is a thing, doing 10 spy runs instead of 50 minutes of boring survival/defence will penalise me a lot in terms of rewards, pushing me towards playing endless modes i don't like. Spy is just an example but the same goes for every other non-endless mission mode, as a result players will flock to the endless nodes leaving all the rest deserted.

[fluffysnowcap]

1 hour ago, Dobroazur said:

Scaling rewards would also pressure people to play endless modes even if they don't like them. Leaving all the non-endless modes deserted.

Let's say i like spy missions a lot, i can do a run in about 5 minutes and always get one relic out of it, pretty much in line with the current endless rewards. If scaling rewards is a thing, doing 10 spy runs instead of 50 minutes of boring survival/defence will penalise me a lot in terms of rewards, pushing me towards playing endless modes i don't like. Spy is just an example but the same goes for every other non-endless mission mode, as a result players will flock to the endless nodes leaving all the rest deserted.

Right now the game encourages speed running the short missions, and actively discourages running endless missions.

[Dobroazur]

That's not totally true.

If you want to farm any crafting material, be it nano spores, polymer bundles or argon, you usually go endless.
If you are looking for a rare mod dropped by an enemy, you go endless on a tile that spawns that enemy.

The most popular nodes used to rank up new/formaed gear are endless.
Excavation is literally the fastest rewarding mode in the game with less than 2 minutes between rewards if done properly.

And if you are planning to open a bunch of random relics endless fissures are more efficient than jumping in and out of captures or whatever

 

[Urlan]

3 hours ago, Dobroazur said:

That's not totally true.

If you want to farm any crafting material, be it nano spores, polymer bundles or argon, you usually go endless.
If you are looking for a rare mod dropped by an enemy, you go endless on a tile that spawns that enemy.

The most popular nodes used to rank up new/formaed gear are endless.
Excavation is literally the fastest rewarding mode in the game with less than 2 minutes between rewards if done properly.

And if you are planning to open a bunch of random relics endless fissures are more efficient than jumping in and out of captures or whatever

 

I would agree with this point. It is one of the reasons that I find exterminate and its kin highly unrewarding or exciting to play - they offer little reward and no variety. I would figure increasing the quality of reasons to play a mode would be essential to incentivize running a mission honestly. The rewards for running endless though, I don't feel deserve to have 1000-5000 credit rewards; common common rarity mods; and even less functional offerings at high level starchart enemies or more.

[HisokaXEveryone]

Thanks for the feedback, I updated the first post with an additional couple of points based on the comments. I'll write them out in a bit more detail once I get some sleep.