Contents
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Background
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Complaints
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Cooperative Play Problems
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Lack of Diversity
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Lack of Interaction
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Core Problems
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Large Enemy Numbers
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Drop Rate Reductions
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Duplicated Effort
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Problem Pattern
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Solutions
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Reduce Enemy Count
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Increase Reward Consistency
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Closing
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Background
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Currently, AoE (Area of Effect) weapons are a hot topic. These are weapons that attack enemies in some sort of area or group to do damage to many enemies at once (opposed to shooting single enemies at a time). Rocket launchers, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, beam chains, stuff like that.
These weapons have been a top player choice for a while now. Both the 2020 and 2021 usage stats that DE has published show that almost all the top primary weapons players use are AoE ones. The top 4 AoE primary weapons alone accounted for a quarter of all weapon usage in 2020 and 2021, and it's clear that 2022 will be the same if nothing changes. Secondary weapon usage statistics are similar, with sidearms that can deal with groups of enemies taking up 20%+, with a single AoE sidearm alone being 15-22% of usage.
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Complaints
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Why is this a talking point in the first place, why are players complaining about it if it's such an effective choice? Discussing every complaint is beyond the scope of this thread, so I'd like to focus on three main points.
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Complaint 1: Cooperative Play Problems
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Warframe is an MMO and there's often many benefits to running missions with others. More enemy spawns, relic choices in a fissure mission, splitting up to complete objectives at the same time, etc.
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However when one of the players in a squad is using an AoE-heavy strategy it can often remove the opportunity for other players to be involved in many aspects of combat. The choices and tactics of other players often stop mattering.
Players could aim at enemies, but chances are the enemy is already dead before the players ever round the corner. Players could put up a defensive wall, but if somebody else already killed all the enemies there's no point. Warframe has some pretty areas, but it can be hard to even see sometimes because of all the AoE going on.
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Complaint 2: Lack of Diversity
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Variety is the spice of life, and Warframe has a variety of weapons and methods that players can use to kill enemies and complete objectives. It's fun to use different things, change it up, and learn new gear.
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Rifles, snipers, shotguns, bows, crossbows, dual pistols, throwing knives, swords, scythes, hammers... tons of weapons exist. Guns, melee, stealth, abilities, the environment itself, there's numerous ways to approach combat with enemies and numerous things that can help with completing objectives.
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However in almost every single mission type it's strictly better to bring an AoE weapon than a single-target weapon. This cuts down on the choices players have and leads to repetitive choices and repetitive gameplay which bores the players.
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Complaint 3: Lack of Interaction
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With most AoE weapons, the player rarely interacts with the enemy themselves. It's often best to shoot at a wall or floor between enemies than it is to even aim at the enemy's model, let alone aim at specific spots on the enemy.
The enemies become area markers, it's entirely possible to clear them all out just by aiming according to groups on the minimap. Even objectives fall into this.Doing a spy mission? Just disable the scanners.
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Forget where the cameras are in a vault? Just fire off a rocket launcher. In a spy mission.
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This reduces the amount of attention and learning and reaction needed to fight enemies, which feels powerful at first but eventually gets boring. Players could choose not to use AoE, but then they're missing out. They'll be less likely to actually kill things in public runs, and their kill speeds and thus farming speeds will be slower than other players.
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Core Problems
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Those are the big complaints players have and they clearly focus on the use of AoE, but I don't think that the AoE gear itself is the core problem. I think players focusing so much on AoE is a symptom of the actual problems with the game, the way Warframe has changed over the years.Let's try to identify those core problems.
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Problem 1: Large Enemy Numbers
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When Warframe was first made playable in closed beta, there were no endless missions. Defense wasn't added until U7, survival wasn't added until U9, interception in U12, excavation in U14, etc. This is important to note because it means that Warframe's core "gameplay loop" was made with the idea of single, isolated mission runs.
Warframe has lots of enemies to kill, and the game expects you to kill them. However the sheer number of enemies players encounter and are expected to kill has been rising over time. Missions have gone from 50 required kills to 80 through 150, to way more for other mission types.Even when it comes to the mission types that you can technically clear with no attacking required (such as spy), you'll still deal with enemies being an obstacle. Enemies can block your path if they're still alive.
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Not if they're dead.
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Doing a sabotage (which technically requires no kills) may end up with 80 incidental kills just because the enemies were in the way or may have hurt you if you didn't kill them. Players attacking in order to remove enemies as obstacles or even potential slowdowns like this leads to a lot more kills than a mission's requirements alone may state.
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I don't mind lining up for headshots on a handful of enemies for a riven.
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I don't mind lining up headshots on 30 enemies for other challenges.
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I'll aim at 60 enemies in general to clear a mission with a bow no problem.
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However, when the requirement is 500+ enemies, hell no, that's AoE territory there. It's like giving somebody a bowl of rice and expecting them to eat it one grain at a time. They're going to grab a utensil that's best fit for what's given to them.
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Running a 10 wave defense fissure with 4 random players resulted in 908 enemies that spawned.
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Being a defense mission, enemies need to stop existing for the waves to move on. Outside of enemies falling out of the map, they all need to be killed before all 10 waves would finish. This is the type of goal that DE has set for us, the huge numbers of enemies are an obstacle and we pick tools to work through them.
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How many times do those 908 enemies need to be killed by some player action in order to accomplish something? Well, with the way Warframe's drop rates have been getting worse over time, you'll have to take part in those 908 kills over and over and over.
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Problem 2: Drop Rate Reductions
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Warframe is an F2P game, and as any surviving F2P game it needs to have content available in-game and not just paid. However the time and effort to acquire things has been going up over time due to the drop rates getting lower and lower.
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Traditionally to farm a frame's parts we had to fight a boss. Classic frames like Rhino are split into two 38.72% parts and one 22.56% part.
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This seems pretty close to 1/3 since you'll still get one out of three the parts each run, but the imbalance in those rates is a method to make it take longer. You need all three parts to make the frame, so in practice you're limited by the rarest-dropping part. This means you have up to a 77.44% chance to fail to finish the set each time you run.
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Those are still acceptable numbers. Over time though, those numbers have gotten worse and worse. Let's look at some examples in chronological order.
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Equinox: 11.28% rare part
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Ivara: 12% rare part (in the good tables)
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Nidus: 14.29% equal chances
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Harrow: 15% rare part (in the good tables)
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Khora: 9.09% rare part
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Gauss: 7.84% equal chances
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Protea: 11.11% equal chances
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Sevagoth: 10% equal chances
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Gyre: 10% rare part
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There's exceptions to this pattern and there are frames that have had drop rates improved/changed, but it's clear that as time goes on the devs have decided that the new norm is about a 10% chance of success. That's a 90% chance of failure though.
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A 90% chance of failure is much, much worse than a 77.44% chance of failure. The lower the odds of success, the higher the chances of repeated failures where a failure leads into a failure. This results in a higher percentage of players falling into chains of repeated failures (failures that are not their fault).The closer the failure rate gets to 100%, the worse the effect gets with longer and longer chains becoming more and more likely.
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Let's compare two mission types.
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A: The first one using the classic drop rates you find on Rhino and Nyx and such.
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B: The second one using the newer rates on frames like Gyre and Sevagoth.
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Let's assume that players run these things the same number of times, and then compare the average perc