Yet More Problems with Nightwave

I know I’ve gone on about Nightwave a lot, but it’s the current new thing in Warframe, replacing an ancient relic that has been in the game for years. Sure, Alerts weren’t ever that important aside from rare Gift of the Lotus missions and things like that, but Nightwave has a lot more… urgency to it.

Nightwave comes in ‘Seasons’ or ‘Episodes’, and we are currently on the first season, the Wolf of Saturn Six. There’s a vague story behind it, that this Wolf guy has broken out of a high security prison and him and his buddies are now rampaging everywhere. To deal with it we have to… do random tasks each week? I don’t know, how is that going to deal with these escaped criminals. In fact, these tasks are probably distracting is from the escaped criminals.

But these tasks are limited. You only have a week to do most of them and 3 days per daily task. The daily tasks are always simple but the weekly tasks vary wildly in difficulty and time needed to accomplish them. It’s these weekly tasks that are really getting on people’s nerves.

Let’s look at week 5 for example. This week (starting from the 24th-25th of March), the elite tasks require you to do a 40 wave defense mission with a friend and do 3 consecutive waves of the Index without the enemy team scoring a point. One is long and boring, the other is  very easy to accidentally fuck up, forcing you to start from scratch. Neither of these are DIFFICULT tasks, they’re just tedious.

The other weekly tasks include killing 3 Silver Grove Specters, which require you to make Apothics which require you to 1. be MR8 to access the Silver Grove quest and 2. spend a long time scanning plants, if you haven’t done so in a while. Neither of those tasks are difficult (although it’s impossible to accomplish if you started playing today, but that’s unlikely) but they are very tedious. Another task is to find all 3 caches in a sabotage mission three times. Again, not hard (unless you’re hard of hearing) and if you have any of the loot radar mods, can be done at a reasonable pace. Heck, if you have Apothics ready, you can do the caches challenge and the Silver Grove challenge together like I did.

Then there’s the return of the 10 Syndicate Missions challenge, which is again an easy task but most people will HAVE to do it over the course of two days. Luckily, the 6 Rare Plains of Eidolon Fish challenge is nice and easy, and so is completing Nightmare missions, something most people have probably forgotten about.

These weekly tasks are not hard. They’re boring and tedious and that is why no one likes them. And because you NEED to do them to unlock higher ranks, people get burnt out from them.

Okay sure, you don’t need to do all of them. But you DO need to do most of these tasks if you want to unlock all the items. Apparently about 60-70% of all tasks need to be completed to unlock everything. But because we’re only about half way through the current season, it feels upsetting to not do a task, especially an elite one which gives you half a rank. You can’t really risk NOT doing a task because next week, there might be tasks you definitely can’t do at all. There is a lot of cool gear that is locked away behind these tasks – huge amounts of Kuva, Forma, unique weapon augments and even a syandana and weapon set, not to mention the mythical Umbral Forma. So risking losing out on these rewards burns people out even more.

What’s making this even worse is that there are supposed to be other things to do. Like capturing escaped convicts and fighting the Wolf. You know what though? Escaped convicts only seem to appear once every few missions, completely at random. They do have a higher chance of spawning (sometimes multiple times) in the Orb Vallis and the Plains of Eidolon, but even if they do spawn, all 3 convicts only give you 150 standing. A daily challenge (which is normally kill X enemies) gives you 1000 standing. The convicts are just not worth it.

But what about the Wolf? I’ll be damned if I know. I’ve seen the fucker ONCE in 5 weeks and he dropped a common mod for me. I’ve seen the Stalker about 6 times in the last 5 weeks in comparison and their spawns are supposed to be the same.

That’s the thing though. Nightwave could be so fucking cool, but it’s just a bunch of boring tasks. I wouldn’t have a problem with the tasks if they weren’t boring, and I don’t have a problem with replaying old content. But not many people are really enjoying these tasks. They’re chores, not missions or challenges.