1000 Pearls for a Captura Scene – The Most Boring Grind Ever

I’m going to be honest, the gimmick has worn thin, the fun has faded from the Dog Days event. It’s a really fun little game mode when you’re playing for the main advertized rewards, but when you realise just how much you need to play for the rewards that Nakak is hiding, well, it’s just… not fun. At all.

You see, there’s only one map. There’s the same old set of enemies. Nothing changes from round to round apart from other players, if you have them. Sure, you can be somewhat creative with Aero Vantage and set mods (I did manage to get an orange crit on one poor Grineer guy) but it’s pretty much the same. 5 minutes of shooting with weapons that need constant pumping and do little damage. There is no way to reduce the 5 minutes per round and you need to do a huge number of rounds to be able to get the special rewards from Nakak.

So when everyone saw the costs of the rewards, there was a collective sigh. Of course people started to find ways of speeding things up  or making things easier. I originally only wanted the Captura Scene and I’d just throw myself into public matches before realising that solo meant I spent less time loading. Everyone soon realised that you only needed to get more kills than the Grineer to win, so a 1-0 or 2-0 victory would be fine. Or even a 0-0 draw would be enough. I soon learned to just get one kill and then run around and noticed that sometimes the Grineer would get stuck. Then a clan mate informed me that I was right, there were LOADS of places that the Grineer can’t reach you.

Then everyone discovered that you could literally just pause the game. Because for some reason the developers forgot to pause the timer when everything else is paused. Not that you actually NEEDED to do that because most of the time you can just run to one of the many safe spots where the Grineer can’t hit you and idle there.

Basically, the community realised that this event was no fun at all if you wanted the cool rewards. And the developers were pissed off about that. They very begrudgingly and hastily sent out some patch notes, making it so you needed 1 point to win and that personal kills grant one pearl per kill – great if you play solo, not so great if you play in public, because it’s very easy to accidentally steal kills and you end up fighting each other to get more points. They also fixed the timer issue, which shouldn’t have been a thing in the first place since that doesn’t happen in normal arena mode. But this is all ignoring the two main issues that people have with this:

The matches are too long and repetitive and the rewards are too expensive.

“But you have a week to do this mission and you don’t need one of everything!”

I don’t even WANT one of everything! I can get the mods from Kela De Thayme herself on Sedna! But even the sigil, something that is normally given away as a reward for completing the first of three event missions, takes forever to obtain! It costs 600 points, which means 12 repetitive runs. Considering each run is 5 minutes long plus loading times, that’s 1 hour minimum just for a sigil. I don’t even want one of each ball, I got the brightly coloured one that matches my ship, but if you want one of each, that’s 300, 400 and three sets of 500 pearls needed.

What makes it worse is that the emblem and the Beach colour palette are actually reasonably priced. You need 5 games total for those and you get 100 points by doing the four alert missions. But everything else is a tad silly. You can argue that this event will come back and I could get the other rewards then, but Plague Star only seems to come back once every 6 months… would we have to wait a YEAR to see Dog Days again?

I understand wanting to stretch content over a week, not everyone can play on a weekend. But not everyone has an hour to spend to get one sigil either. Not when there are always other things you need to do in Warframe, like Nightwave, Syndicates, fissures, Sorties, things like that! Dog Days isn’t a grind at all for the casual player – you need to spend half an hour on Dog Days alone if you want the cheapest fluff, and not everyone knows that the mods on display aren’t exclusive mods.

So of course people are going to find the easiest way to do the Dog Days mission. Because they don’t want to spend an hour doing the same repetitive event for one sigil. Or half an hour if you are genuinely good at killing things. The best scores I’ve seen in the level 40 mission are 80-90, which is about 20 kills per team member, but a good player might be able to get 50.

But you know what? Getting one kill and then running or hiding is a good thing for another reason: It means those poor, tortured Grineer get to have a break as well. I’m sure they appreciate the 5 minutes of not being mass-murdered and having Kela shouting at them…