Thursday, April 10, 2014

Moving Along

I've been working on the Sentinel Armor here and there when I get free time. The big details are all done. I'm making metal look like metal and leather look like leather now (or at least what I think metal/leather look like). After this, it's normal and specular maps followed by skinning to Skyrim's skeleton.

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I'm almost ready to call it quits in Warframe. It's a fun game to play sometimes, but I'm finding that anytime I want to talk about it, I have nothing good to say. If I can't state a positive other than "the art is cool", why am I playing it? Oh right, time invested. Should I stop playing, I've effectively admitted I wasted my time. Therefore, I should keep playing to justify my investment.

Like I said on my first post about it, the grind gets worse with every update (except hotfixes!). It took until trading was introduced before I could acquire the last part I needed for Ember Prime. And now, it's just this huge RNG grindwall for pretty much everything.

I went through 35 Void keys and only got 1 Rhino Prime part. 10 more keys yielded 2 other parts, but getting the last key type is a 15 minute commitment for a 2% chance of it being rewarded with diluted void drop tables further reducing the chance of obtaining that last part. They had to stash all the parts for the 2-4 piece prime gear recipes in something's drop table, so they pretty much doubled the number of items for a majority of Void Missions.

The solution for this further dilution? DE finally removed resources and credits from the Void drop tables. There have been dozens upon dozens of screenshots showing credits/resources making up 70-90% of the rewards for all Void Missions. The claim was they still had to do internal "testing" to make sure the drop tables worked properly without them. And now, when they worsen the issue, they pull this out and go "See! We addressed this problem!"

With Update 13, the grind is truly ridiculous. Instead of making Vay Hek a standard "Go here to kill him" boss, you have to farm his randomly spawned lieutenants for rare drops, make a one-use key that takes an hour to build, use the key to confront him in a 4 stage fight where you mainly have to wait for a flashing dot to appear (if it ever does) in order to damage him, and hope he drops what you are looking for. Rinse and repeat. And, should you get all the parts you need, you have to farm the Void for a resource that expires at 0:00 GMT, not 24 hours after you get it.

I really want to try the Stances mechanic DE added to the game, but weapons don't have a default stance mod and the Stances themselves are rated Uncommon or Rare. They are also mod drops that were not "included in the proper drop tables" and subsequently "fixed" in a patch. I haven't seen a single person use the Stance mechanic aside from the developers on a livestream.I have now.


I tolerated waiting a week to get my hands on all the new gear/systems/etc when I started playing the game, but now I'm waiting months to even touch aspects of it. I...think I'm done.