Talk:Tonkor/@comment-27.246.208.168-20160128070428/@comment-25938077-20160208120315

Originally posted by A Lone Tenno:

''There is no overpowered stuff! This is a PvE game, when are you PvP tards gonna get that? ' ''

- Nothing is OP in a PvE game!

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Your statement is hard to take seriously. First, you assume you're right in the first place. You've done nothing to argue the point, making it essentially a hollow argument. You merely state "this is the state of affairs, listen to me for I know better" with all the grace of a froth-spewing charlatan. I could write this off as trolling, but since you seem to have a message you genuinely believe in, I'll try to extrapolate your point to something that can be discussed. By the looks of it, you're arguing that because players don't face other players, it doesn't matter how powerful items are. Whatever item power, if it's only used against NPCs, it's okay. Ultimately, it seems like your argument boils down to: "It's not possible to design an item that's unhealthy for the game experience unless it's used directly against other players." Put in these words, it should be easy to see why the argument is preposterous, but allow me to open it up just in case.

First, the only function of balance is not to ensure that players are evenly matched. Indeed, PvP does not really amount to this. This is easily proven by a Reductio Ad Absurdum argument: imagine a warframe whose 1 costs nothing and says "you successfully finish the current mission and get all the possible rewards". The problems should be obvious: nobody would ever feel like they've accomplished anything again after finishing a mission or getting a rare drop. Everyone would have everything. One key part of game design is thinking about why people play this game. In Warframe's case, it's almost certainly in big part because they want to get things and/or accomplish things. People sign up for the grind and play the missions because they want to. The exact motivations can of course vary a great deal: judging by what the game offers, it should be natural to assume that some players want to own everything in the game, some want to feel competent and skilled, some want to show off to friends, some just like hanging around and feeling powerful or playing with friends but all of that is ultimately based around gameplay. Of course, most people are motivated by a set of complex motivations than a single, simple one, but the motivations are probably composed of aspects of the presented. Now, the issue with imbalanced items in the worst case scenario is then that they can remove any reasons people have to play the game.

Now then, we established couple of key motivations for playing the game. It's important to realize that all players should be allowed to enjoy themselves and some are more influenced by imbalance than others. I particularly mentioned the people who like to feel competent and skilled and the people who like to show off. Both of those players require challenge to enjoy the game. They need enemies that are hard, but not impossible to beat. Further, many players have further limitations on what they enjoy. The game has a lot of different weapon classes and warframes; different equipment speaks to different players. Thus, to serve these players, the game's top end difficulty content needs to be possible but difficult with various different equipment loadouts. That's two places where balance matters a lot: equipment needs to be balanced against each other so players enjoying different types of equipment still have the capability to feel competence in succeeding in the difficulty content and top equipment across the board needs to be balanced against the harder enemies so that players can feel first failure and then the rush of success, playing the content that's on the edge of what's possible in the game and eventually succeeding in it.

Note that game-contained challenges feel more fulfilling to the accomplishers than self-made challenges. Once an accomplisher has worked hard to acquire all the end-game gear, they want a place where that gear can be put to use. Having to restrict themselves to worse gear to find challenge is far from as rewarding as playing content that challenges even the endgame gear in the first place. This is another reason internal balance and varying levels of difficulty in design are paramount to catering to certain crowds and maximizing the amount of enjoyment people draw from the game.

Summary: Your argument, at least best I could postulate it, fails to consider the different motivations of different players playing the game and assumes everyone enjoys the same things. It completely misses two major types of balance, equipment being balanced against each other (important for providing enjoyment to people who like to accomplish things with the equipment they enjoy) and equipment being balanced against enemies (important for providing enjoyment to players who like to use their hard-earned gear to try and accomplish difficult feats in game to feel competent) that increase enjoyment in a PvE environment.

Thus, I find your argument utterly convincing and recommend you should put more thought into the big picture of why people play the game and what kinds of different sources people draw enjoyment from before getting into discussions like these.