Difficulty! What I feel is an important issue

[Khyyy]

TLDR: The core global gameplay of parkour and shooting is too easy currently (no cheese, no abilities). "Hard" mission enemy levels are too low because you don't need anything, but decent parkour to make them really easy. If you know how to jump around, you don't die in current content. Soft fix is very easy: give a couple normal survival/defense/excavation? missions with starting level at least 100 and scale enemy damage up.

I made this post because I see a lot of people saying things like "Don't use this, don't use that and put on all dragon keys to gimp yourself". Just being skilled enough makes 99% of the content in this game too easy (unless you really do put that S#&$ty weapon with no mods against higher levels and run out of ammo pads yay fun).

 

 

I see a lot of posts about difficulty. There is conversation about time to kill, armor scaling, levels and cheesing, but the biggest problem in my opinion right now is how fast can we die and be out of revives.

When you consider how many ways there are to cheese with frame abilities you have. The way to consider an important part of difficulty is how hard it is to survive with only parkour (jumping, sliding, dodging, cover). The reason this is important is because if you know that jumping constantly reduces enemy accuracy, it is easy to survive confidently in every mission the game currently has.

There has been serious power creep even in our survivability. It is not just our weapons and mods that have become more powerful. Operator gives you access to instant immortality for a long while and some really good cc. And even 2 more revives from arcanes. In multiplayer one huge deal is the ability to 100% no risk revive anyone with operator void mode.

You can take the starter frame excalibur with no mods, jump and dodge around level 100 enemies and survive infinitely against anything except grineer. Add to that the ability to go into operator mode that takes you out of the most terrible of positions (even falling down if you pop into operator before you teleport, when you pop back up your operator dies first and your frame can dodge out).

Mastering the mechanics of dodging, sliding, jumping and operator dashes is really fun and satisfying. People praise this game for its space ninja feel, but I have a feeling this part of the game is somehow really unknown and underused. How often do you see people using dodge to move way faster through tiles? Does anything in the game teach people how enemy accuracy and parkour + aiming down sights affects the damage you take? You have to stand still casting or aiming down sights so long while standing still to die in all missions except last sortie that I feel really disconnected with all the players that die in random missions.

edit. as someone pointed out to me. You don't really need much else than just strafe jumping at a steady fast pace to get really far.

 

Am I wrong in assuming a lot of people with bad gear start having problems dealing enough damage before dying becomes a problem? Many game modes require you to keep killing to not lose. Maybe this game just has enemies do too little damage compared to how much they can take themselves.

• Which is more fun? Losing a mission because you ran out of life support, lost in % at interception, your defense objective exploded or your capture target running away OR losing because you died 6 times? I would actually like to know how people feel about this.

 

Corpus are fun to play against when they are high level. You can dodge their projectiles if you stay aware, they have aoe damage that can be avoided and they have nullifiers that force you to act. They have units that fly, are close to the ground and interesting head positions to shoot. The problem is the content this game has gives you way too much leeway for mistakes even if you have no defensive mods on your frame.

Corrupted are similar with how much slow projectiles they shoot. They have heavy gunners that deal low chip damage with hitscan, but you can play around them with line of sight. Corrupted have nullifiers and also ancient healers that are kind of interesting in how they shake things up when their damage reduction gets really high. The good thing is void Mot has extra damage scaling so they can be more punishing, but it will still take an hour before you have to play well to survive.

Infested are a joke. They wont kill you if you jump right in front of them until they spawn an ancient with passive toxic proc that slowly kills you.

Grineer are in a way a lot harder to survive against with parkour, but their bullets deal so little damage you can recover shields even against high level ones pretty comfortably. If you can shoot them down in a reasonable speed they usually don't even start shooting before they die. Grineer don't have anything interesting in my opinion about them. It doesn't feel very space ninja to dodge around like a boss and still be chipped slowly to death, they don't have interesting units to fight like nullifiers and they all share almost the same silhouette and hitboxes.

 

 

I made a video in 2014 where I complained how you have to stay 40minutes in void survival to have serious trouble. I took a 4 year break and now it is 1h+ with a proper weapon.

I know I am in the minority as a competitive, challenge seeking really mechanically able player with a lot of fps background, but if this game had something for those kind of players you could get people who pop in a good amount of plat to skip grind they don't enjoy and go straight to challenging content (I have done that a couple times, but I always feel depressed afterwards because I know DE hasn't addressed this problem I noticed back in 2014). The knowledge that there is fun and challenge waiting is a powerful tool to make people grind and spend time with the game. I don't know why I should bother with rivens and mods when I don't really need them.

 

I can't be bothered to sit in a mission for an hour to get challenging enemies and I am not the only one with this complaint. DE doesn't want people to play missions longer than 20minutes and I agree with that. The sweetspot for challenge and risk is a hard to achieve line with all the power creep and variables there are in this game, but there should be experiments to get around this.

I know a lot of people really like the power fantasy aspect of this game and are not really competitive and mechanically great players, but it doesn't mean there can't be a node in every planet that starts as level 100. No need for different loot, just keep the planets own ones.

A mission I would absolutely love to death would be a survival mission in the beautiful tileset of lua with something like this off the top of my head: starting level 100, double damage and keep the same enemies as the corpus survival with sentinels, but add more bursas and scramblers. Now that would be an interesting parkour rewarding setup that could actually end up in failure. If it didn't give any more rewards than the default lua survival it would also only attract people seeking a challenge.

I don't want to discuss rewards really since I don't think they are important here, but kuva as a recource that is currently only useful to roll mods that power weapons way over current missions is a good one. Also as a sidenote isn't kuva survivals enemies only level 50 at 30minutes in? It's completely baffling to me how easy that place is considering how late people get there (or am I really that out of touch with the common player? Has anyone actually failed in that mission?).

 

I think this post has become too long now...

Edited August 11, 2018 by Khyyy

[venon23]

this post has become too long now.

yea u right didnt read half of the stuff u type in
but the game is not easy for all warframes
and some builds u dont even need too parkour or jumparound u just dont die
the problem is some frames are just not made for that and can easyly be one shoted pass lvl 100
not only that but DE made the game for solo players coop players pro players and casual players if they realese something lvl 100+ they need too put rewards or players dont play that (u say u do but 90% dont see what happen too raids)  so they have too put rewards and u are limiting casual players some of that rewards 

[Joe_Barbarian]

40 minutes ago, Khyyy said:

I feel really disconnected with all the players that die in random missions.

You sound like the kind of person that will ask "Why you dead bro" in a mission when sometimes it happens, took a Naplam to the face or just playing a seriously squishy frame like a Trinity.

42 minutes ago, Khyyy said:

I made a video in 2014 where I complained how you have to stay 40minutes in void survival to have serious trouble. I took a 4 year break and now it is 1h+ with a proper weapon.

This and the whole issue with your post where there have been a few of the "I wants" post where a player such as yourself is asking for instant high level content. *COUGH* Elite Onslaught *COUGH* But that comes with the issues of:

• Players coming in for a zone/wave or 2 just to power level weapons.
• Players with less than ideal frames and weapons. Either trying something new out or literally not having a clue.
• Niche content for the few players that don't want to wait in a mission to have scaled enemies.

You know what you have to do to get challenging content but you don't want to wait for it, you've already said this:

48 minutes ago, Khyyy said:

you could get people who pop in a good amount of plat to skip grind they don't enjoy and go straight to challenging content (I have done that a couple times, but I always feel depressed afterwards because I know DE hasn't addressed this problem I noticed back in 2014).

What you lack is patience, if you were to get these instant level 100 nodes you'd attract leeches to the most affinity giving nodes which then it'll turn into what the current ESO is all about, power levelling weapons and maxing out your focus in the least time possible.

Lastly, you want challenging content then go into ESO and score as highly as you can and be ontop of the Cephalon Simaris score board. 

[(PSN)guarddog98]

[Khyyy]

24 minutes ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

You sound like the kind of person that will ask "Why you dead bro" in a mission when sometimes it happens, took a Naplam to the face or just playing a seriously squishy frame like a Trinity.

I meant my feeling of disconnect coming from how little effort avoiding that damage becomes after learning to parkour well. I fully understand that there are way more players who die a lot. But I also feel like they could die less if they were taught to use parkour well, one of the problems this game has for having so much stuff hidden in the wiki. Also is there a typo? Trinity? squishy? what?

 

30 minutes ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

This and the whole issue with your post where there have been a few of the "I wants" post where a player such as yourself is asking for instant high level content. *COUGH* Elite Onslaught *COUGH* But that comes with the issues of:

I didn't think I would need to address ESO in this post. There are a lot of threads how badly designed ESO is in terms of high level content. It is more about playing against a timer than enemies and you just can't fight against the timer with a weapon, you need specific builds and warframe abilities.

 

33 minutes ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

issues of:

• Players coming in for a zone/wave or 2 just to power level weapons. 

Affinity scaling is a thing: Affinity = Enemy Base Affinity × (1 + 0.1425 × Enemy Level0.5)
http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Affinity

,but for all I care they could remove affinity from a high level mission I so "misguidedly" seem to want.

 

35 minutes ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

Players with less than ideal frames and weapons. Either trying something new out or literally not having a clue. 

I am exactly one of those players that come with less than ideal frames and weapons. Less than ideal doesn't mean it would not be fun in a high level mission. I would so much rather test a build in a mission that is hard from the get go than wait for and hour in survival to see how it goes. Like I said, you don't need anything but a weapon that has good enough time to kill to last very long.

If a high level mission had very bad rewards compared to the difficulty as I mentioned in the post. It would not attract players with no clue. And even if it did attract players with no clue, who cares? It's not like they lose anything by trying it out and figuring its not for them (yet).

 

41 minutes ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

• Niche content for the few players that don't want to wait in a mission to have scaled enemies. 

You know what you have to do to get challenging content but you don't want to wait for it, you've already said this: 

But would it even be that niche? So many people are trading rivens, so many people are slowly learning how to play and so damn many people don't want to waste time like idiots before the challenge kicks in. Now people just get the feeling that there is no content. They don't bother getting rivens because they are not needed. What if there was missions that challenged the players enough that they feel they need everything they can get to push their frame and weapon to manage it, not because there is loot behind there, but because it just exists? I don't see any negatives.

It's not like I am asking something that is hard to implement. It all exist, all the great gameplay is there, it just needs a mission or two with a couple variables tuned up.

 

49 minutes ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

What you lack is patience, if you were to get these instant level 100 nodes you'd attract leeches to the most affinity giving nodes which then it'll turn into what the current ESO is all about, power levelling weapons and maxing out your focus in the least time possible.

Lastly, you want challenging content then go into ESO and score as highly as you can and be ontop of the Cephalon Simaris score board. 

Yes I do lack patience if you mean I should take for granted that every run of warframe where I get to have good fun takes an hour to START.

Scoreboards promote cheese in this game where it can be found in so many different flavors.

[Joe_Barbarian]

What players like yourself are always forgetting is that Digital Extremes does not have the staffing or the resources of a AAA title such as EA or Blizzard etcetc; To say "All this already exists in the game" it's not a matter of copy paste. If making a game/content was that easy then why does it take years for games to develop. 

You can claim
"Loads of players this, loads of player that" - Where are they?
"There are no down sides" - You've ignored what I've already said
"They can take Affinity out for all I care" - The very definition of niche

Hell you just said yourself, the content is already in the game but you suggest they "just" edit it, that's called developing content. Which right now I would assume they are currently developing Fortuna, Reworking frames, preparing for the next prime frame etc etc; Right now what you've basically asked for is niche content based on making content harder so higher level players can play niche setups to play around in.

[Khyyy]

4 hours ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

What players like yourself are always forgetting is that Digital Extremes does not have the staffing or the resources of a AAA title such as EA or Blizzard etcetc; To say "All this already exists in the game" it's not a matter of copy paste. If making a game/content was that easy then why does it take years for games to develop. 

I'm not 100% sure of the exact numbers, but DE supposedly has 200+ employees. Now I don't know how many of those people would be able to code enough to implement a harder mission. But I know for a fact that everything that I have requested already exists in the game. And if it exists somewhere in the game it shouldn't be that hard to implement. Hell they even said their game was designed to be easy to add parts and pieces.

Void Mot has damage scaling increase. Kuva floods and sorties can start at level 100 enemies. The last event had different enemy spawns.

 

4 hours ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

You can claim
"Loads of players this, loads of player that" - Where are they?

Probably quit the game because there is nothing for them to do. Like I will do when I get sick of waiting in long survival missions. I'm in 2 different discord servers that have a lot of people who share the same feeling. You can even look into recruit chat in game and see that there is a steady source of people who look for long endless mission parties.

 

4 hours ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

"There are no down sides" - You've ignored what I've already said

What have I ignored?

4 hours ago, Joe_Barbarian said:

Hell you just said yourself, the content is already in the game but you suggest they "just" edit it, that's called developing content. Which right now I would assume they are currently developing Fortuna, Reworking frames, preparing for the next prime frame etc etc; Right now what you've basically asked for is niche content based on making content harder so higher level players can play niche setups to play around in. 

How would you know for sure what their coding resources go to? The more popular this game is, the more "niche" higher level players there will be. It is a whole new demographic DE could EASILY cater to. And like I said time and time again, you do not need niche setups for harder content.