[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

35 minutes ago, (NSW)ShinobiEX3 said:

Actually the more hostile you get the less people take you seriously, especially if you are an Adult.

/snip

First of all, I don't really care if some folks that have maybe put 6~ months into a game I've spent 6 years playing(off and on) have a gripe about my perspective.  Not to take a jab at you, I've just seen how the game has progressed as the years have gone on.  I'm not sure how to not come off as a d!ck bag when I say "I have more information", but that's where I sit.  We'll go through your retort point by point as this is the system I myself instigated:

1. 72 hours is 3 days, minus the typical 6-9 hours(lets say 7 average) for sleep, minus work which is usually another 3-8 hours depending on schedule(lets say 5 average) is about 36 hours, assuming you can play all 36 hours in a 3 day time-span.  Usually this'll amount to about 20ish hours from what I've seen/heard from newer players.

2. There aren't really any "hard" frames, honestly.  I own nearly all of them.  A solid tutorial provided to properly extrapolate all the various tips n tricks would go a long way to making more frames available.  I can thing of several outside of the usual starter kit: Loki, Ash, Rhino, Ember, Trinity, and Vauban.  There might be a few more, but it's late and I can't be f*cked to remember 'em.

3. There's actually been game-related research on this.  You're more likely to retain players if they have an easier time early-on and progressively make the game more difficult.  It gives a difficulty curve, rather than a learning curve.  As it is now eventually(around mastery 3-4) you hit a massive wall where you've got to go back and grind.  If it were more of a slope, players would be less inclined to screw off to some other game.

4.  Not initially, the quest thing was expanded upon later by another user than I chose to include in this hypothetical.

5.  I logged on mid-day to my buddy ranting about a quest he couldn't do because it was Orb Vallis' unlock quest.  This kind of thing shouldn't be available until mastery 5-6, minimum.

@-NightmareMoon-Piss off back to whatever hole you crawled out of, furry.  No one gives a crap about some #$&(% that idolizes a 90s disney character.  You rank lower on the totem pole than weebs.  Pimple-ridden, goku-impersonating, weebs.  Edit: Just like to add that I could blow through all the planets on a fresh account as excalibur, so the only aspect of what I'd do "as a dev"(the frames) would have absolutely no bearing since all excalibro really needs is streamline, pressure point, and fury to absolutely eviscerate everything on the screen up to early level 40 mobs.  Only issue is that not everyone is interested in that, so I've tailored this entire topic with their considerations in mind.

EDIT: @ZilchySorry bud, I missed you: He's 30 hours in and still feels like he's being carried whenever he wants to play with me.  I feel inclined to ask: How much game time is acceptable before you can feel like you're progressing?  I've since started using off-meta frames with the 75% damage reduction, no primes, and he still feels he's not contributing.  Obviously I don't get it, so you tell me: Why is there a wait period on mastery?  There's already a time-gate on crafting frames/weapons/sentinels, there's already a grind requirement on ranking the previous up.  We've been trying to grind out his ideal frame for roughly a week now(None of us, including him, want to kill manics non-stop).  Even if the stars aligned and our next few missions got him the frame, he's still waiting 84 hours for it to finish.  Again: on a frame that f*cking sucks but I don't have the heart to tell him that.

He and I have the same background: An absurd waste of time in World of Warcraft.  We're progression minded gamers.  I lucked out by getting into warframe at the beginning where there weren't 101 objectives.  I just ran around and killed things and everything I earned from that was relevant because power creep and the myriad of gating didn't exist, yet.

Now forma, 1mil trade taxes, prime frames/weapons/mods, quest gating, and a whole slew of other crap exists that raise the mountain peak to such a degree that I've had a dozen+ folks not play at my invitation over the years.  How's a newbie supposed to use the wiki and not get immediately overwhelmed from the sheer amount of information required to play the game that isn't addressed in...y'know, the game?  Again, I still don't think vets really understand exactly how much of a lack've information there is for new players to navigate the game.  Take all your information about frames, weapons, kuva, orbis, mods, plains, endo, etc, and throw everything out the window, then examine Warframe as it is.  Hell, I have a hard time interpreting that kind of cluster-****.

DE was aware of the issue years ago.  As far as I can tell they've done nothing to improve the game for newbies and the worst part: ...It's been years.  I can handle not having a shiny new toy frame/weapon that I'll immediately throw away if it isn't sufficiently power-creepy enough if it means I can incorporate and game with folks I actually know, and not some gaggle of shmucks I picked up in LFG to do a radshare/affinity/eidolon farm.

[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

22 minutes ago, sleepychewbacca said:

But above all, it is amusing since OP posted in a place that's more for the community to chat about random in-game stuff , vs where the devs are most likely to see it and pay attention. And with a title like that? 

I expect OP to be incredibly disappointed. That or a forum rep farm, or just some hot moments of drama.

Not gonna lie.  The feedback forum didn't load in when I booted the page and I don't frequent the forums that much(It's not exactly the target audience for my topic since most new players either have trouble navigating the forum or don't realize it's a valuable source for information).

@(NSW)ShinobiEX3If you're expecting me to roll over and play the gentleman every time some moron pipes up with what most folks would consider an ignorant opinion, you're sadly mistaken.  I'll get progressively more hostile as I have to deal with dumb@SS nonsense.  I was quite hostile initially, cooled down as we got into more discussion/actual conversation, then with the flood of opinionated teenagers - I've since lost my patience even bothering to provide a civil discourse.

FYI.  Just because you've turned to the nintendo switch for your wife doesn't really qualify you for my targeted insult.  I've watched twilight for my girlfriend.  Twilight.  All damn five of them.

You're a new player and it seems like older players have long since forgotten: The new player experience is absolutely awful.  I remember when I did Lech Kril.  I was rocking non-MK1 weapons(Braton specifically, love that gun) and there was never a moment in time when I had to backtrack for several hours to farm/grind weapons/ranks(respectively).  He really wants to play Ash and I can't even provide that for him.

We've killed 30~ manics.  1 chassis, that's all we've gotten in 30~(5-6 minutes per Yursa run), or roughly 2 hours of playing defection, of all things, total.  For a frame that's absolute trash in my eyes, but his #1 priority.  An argument could be made about his play style, but honestly I can't think of a reason why one of the oldest(and most useless) frames in the game is such a *@##$ to get.

I'm genuinely glad you managed to grind through the initial hump, Shinobi.  Warframe really is a great game.  It bugs the piss out of me that I can't introduce more people to it because it's such a ridiculous undertaking to enjoy.  Over the years I've tried to convince dozens of folks to try it out, only for them to read the reviews about the near-insurmountable wall of grind to get anywhere.  It's like playing WoW and "Before you may hit level 10, 20, 30, 40, etc: you must meet all these other quotas to progress".  Thank god though, that there's premium boosters that as a new player you'll have to pay real money for, because you sure as hell don't have any in-game options to generate platinum.

If I were the devs:

1. Free 72 hour boosters across the board for new players(Because why not?  Ain't going to make a dent in the economy and smooths out the transition)
2. Several more frames added to the starting pool(Variety is the spice of life)
3. Provide the REAL weapons rather than their crap MK1 counterparts(There's nothing wrong with making players feel strong in the first 1-10 levels)
4. More strictly lock quests based on mastery(With directions on "what to do next")
5. Give a gradual introduction of all the various gameplay options, open world being the biggest one(Too much information causes overload and without a vet guiding you by the nose, leads to burn out).

That's 1(maybe 2) work cycle(s) worth of coding until they finally get into the nitty gritty of that early game revamp DE's been harping on about for 3+ years now.

[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

8 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

I honestly found the new player experience better when it’s a bunch of new players.

From what you described, it sounds like you’re being far too hand-holdy.  

Eh, so far I've only answered a lot of questions and come in for about 8~ missions.  A couple defenses, 1 spy, 1 boss, and maybe a defense+some other stuff I can't recall.  The guy's played a minimum of a dozen hours without my hand-holding.  Not sure how much more hands-off I can be without abandoning him outright and him getting bored of playing by himself/with 3 others (aka poor buggers that don't have someone answering their questions).

[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

54 minutes ago, Drasiel said:

Okay that I can more easily understand and may even have a way to explain the whole "why I can't as a new player play this specific frame now?" Warframe gives you the illusion that every frame is equal by showing you every frame and having no mastery locks on frames (except maybe rhino but I'm 99% sure that was removed). That however is a lie of omission on the UI's part. The "level restrictions" on warframes are their location and resource cost. Right now Ash is "too high a level" for your friend to equip because doesn't meet the prerequisite which instead of character level are "specific loot and manics". Warframe further shuffles this to back stage by offering the frames for money instead of meeting the requirements. The game doesn't clearly convey that "this frame requires you to do this" and that can leave a lot players out in the cold. The new player experience should put greater emphasis and possibly additional rewards for building the early boss drop frames to guide players to frames they actually stand a chance of building.

Now you actually bring up what think the crux of issue is here: The gap between new and older players. As the game runs longer the gap will only get wider. I even have issues with newbies I've brought in getting frustrated because we are so far apart. DE said once before they didn't want to do basically level rescaling on early maps because they didn't want to (I'm paraphrasing) punish players for playing lower level content. Now what I think would have possibility is squad scaling an option either in the squad itself or the options menu where if enabled will scale your final Health, shield, armour, damage, range, strength, and duration down to the weakest player so at least new players can potentially play on the same level as you do when with them.

I'd just like to say that I was happy to spend the money.  If I could just buy and gift him the Ash frame I would have.  I spent 5 minutes going through available warframes/bundles/etc on the market and could not find Ash nor Ash Prime.  Ash is VERY far from being what anyone would consider "meta", yet he's one of the hardest frames to get outside of quest lines.  We have prime weapons/mods/frames.  We've got weapon/frame variants like umbra and vandal.  There's no shortage of potential late game options.  I don't see the logic behind constricting new players especially when at least in this case: they've looked at all the frames on the wiki, they've decided on a frame/playstyle they're really interested in, then they get into the game and "Sorry, you can't play this because it's hell to get or you don't meet the right quest requirements".  The former I care more about rather than the latter.

The issue with vet vs newbie could be solved with(not entirely different than your suggestion) simply providing a method of "downgrading" your build and providing some sort of incentive for doing so.  I believe it was City of Heroes that did this, where you could mirror lower-level players and get some relatively attractive reward(At least, where it doesn't feel like you're not progressing as someone's sugar daddy).  Warframe could probably incorporate a similar system, most likely targeting the various time-sensitive resources like Standing.  I like to believe I'm a pretty nice mentor, but I'm not so altruistic that I'll spend hours explaining XYZ or carrying someone(Friend or no) through a planet.  Edit: Just to provide a bit more detail, I'm specifying the overall state of "vet"s and "noob"s.  Completely separate issue from the rest of my gripes about my buddy's enjoyment.

It's 2019.  We've gone through thousands of different iterations in game design, I refuse to believe there isn't a pretty decent(not the end-all-be-all, but a good one) solution to the myriad of problems facing new players and the vets themselves trying to help them that hasn't already been utilized in other games.  I have enough friends/gaming buddies that haven't played Warframe that I could found a Storm clan if I could just convince them that the game is worth playing.  3/4ths of them have tried it and hit the wall only to uninstall(Poet, didn't know it, etc).  The other 1/4th were busy with WoW/Division/some other time sink.

I'd love to play with my gaming group, but the mountain is way too steep of an incline.  The "magic" that hooked guys like us in when we first played isn't there anymore.  That's why I made the call on the devs to answer.  It's been a problem for WAY too long.  Warframe as a source of entertainment deserves more than this.

[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

1 hour ago, JujuHex said:

snip

 

I perfectly understand where you're coming from and I agree.  I haven't helped him too much.  He's got 20+ hours under his belt, I've done at most a dozen missions with him.  The problem isn't my help(Going to assume we're differentiating between "Help" and "Answering Questions").  If something's too tough I'll come in, clear the screen, and advise him to stay where he's at or go back if things are too difficult.  The issue is simply this:

1.  There's nothing I can do as a vet to smooth what is an otherwise pretty bad experience.  You played back in 2013, so did I.  This is a very different game than it was 6 years ago.  Aklatos/MK1 weapons don't go very far with the enemy/weapon reworks.

2.  There's no information for the actual important bits of the game.  I'm pretty sure 99% of PC gamers know what crouch, WASD, and aim-down-sights are.  When I got to him an hour after he started, he only knew how to slide, jump, and by some miracle use the ziplines.

3. The progression is extremely mismanaged.  He's not going to bother me for a play-by-play on exactly what to do at point ABCDEF-etc, and I don't expect him to nor should he need to if as a new player he was being provided all the intel he needed to succeed.  In the military we call this "Setting someone up for failure".

4. There's no progress.  Back in the day once you went from aklato to akbolto, that was a game-changer and happened early on.  Now after update 7 it's barely noticeable(The crit chance of akbolto is wasted because again, ya don't got the mods to capitalize on it as a new player).  You can't even get the akbolto until mastery 7 now which is actually a substantial amount of play time.  You also get an equivalent upgrade by mastery 3 over the mk1 weapons because they're absolute garbage.  No idea why they chose to provide mk1 weapons when they're barely functional even at lower levels.

I was a bit miffed initially when I created this topic, however I'm not frothing or foaming as you say(I get it, internet, gotta err towards the extremes when you're using analogies).  For the last time, because I'm tired of speaking to rocks: I have barely provided him any assistance.  I would if I could, but I can't because of gating.  If you're implying my willingness to help but can't is somehow impacting his enjoyment of the game, I believe you're not giving neither me nor my friend enough credit.  I also took a break, I came back a week ago and with me playing he joined in.  Burn out is not a factor, here.  You're making a LOT of assumptions, based solely off your own state of mind and assumptions you're making off the back of other folks assumptions.  You're assumceptioning me right now. 😛

I know how good Warframe is.  He doesn't.  The new player experience doesn't show it, that is the problem.  New players are grinding and they don't know why, they're getting roadblocked for seemingly no reason(to both them/him and myself), there's over 20 basic resources they need to accumulate for basically D-list weapons, and they don't even know what's the "next step" after Vor.

I've observed region/LFG chat, I see far less "LFM to farm X regular frame" than at any point inbetween Hiatuses.  That means far less new players are around than there used to be.  After seeing and hearing the problems and hiccups involved, it's a bit disheartening that there has been very little done in improving the early-game since Warframe's inception(outside of the mk1 weapons).

I'm not sure how much clearer I can be on my stance that folks are still misunderstanding my intent.  I re-read my original post, realized it didn't represent my point very well, have gone through the effort of multiple paragraphs to further elaborate, and people are still on this kick that I'm my buddy's trusty steed, trampling everything in his way.  I have no reason to lie, I genuinely don't understand where this notion is coming from, nor the almost cultist defense of Warframe when it seems to me there are very clear and abundant flaws in the entry-level game play.

The majority I'm seeing is "It's your fault" and "It's his fault".  I've seen a few new players actually post in here which is mind boggling.  Most games you won't find much of a representation of newbies on the forums.  They echo many of the same points I've made(albeit after I elaborated a little bit more).  How many people are found wanting, here?  Is it me and my buddy?  All the new players?  Any vets that introduce the game to someone?  Is it wrong that neither new players nor select few vets that babysit 'em find the experience "fun"?

I've bought hundreds of games, I've probably pirated 2-3 times that.  I've never spent 20+ hours with training wheels on in any game besides maybe Eve Online(aka accountant simulator) and World of Warcraft(One of the first non-DOS games I ever played).  RTS, RPG, FPS, TPS, ARPGs, TSG, OCG, you name it, I've played it.  There's nothing wrong with complexity, but it needs to be spaced out and managed in chunks.  Something Warframe currently does not do.  Too much information makes peoples brains flatline.  Too many mechanics introduced, overwhelms.  Too large of a gap between early and late game drives a wedge in the community/player base.  No options in the early game makes Warframe seem stale and since there's no financial incentive to play, it's very easy to just drop the game before it even gets going.

I went into a lot of details over the last few posts, but the above is the crux of the matter.  How can I introduce more friends to play the game when they're going to have a miserable time on their own and a miserable time again when I come in to nuke the tileset when they struggle?  Newbies need MK1 mods for under rank 15 frames/weapons, rather than just mk1 weapons and less than 10% of the available frames as a starter.

I would love to just give them a few weapons/mods where they can steamroll lvl 10-15 content and actually progress if it means they get hooked and will actually jump down the rabbit hole.  In the earliest levels you spend far too long circling the drain before there's any noticeable pay-off beyond familiarization of the basics.  A 20+ hour learning curve, with vet assistance, is(excuse my french) f***ing horrible.  I don't want new players to suffer the grind I had to do.  I've had to unlock the star chart 3 god damn times.  I want new players and my friend, especially - to enjoy a game I enjoy.

[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

Jesus this blew up quickly after I went to bed.  I'll try to hit the biggest points then elaborate a bit more, just so it doesn't seem like I made a whine post and skipped out:

1. I never said I actually blew through planets for him, I said the only way I could help him is by doing that.  Important distinction.
2. I will never, ever agree that someone should have to have a wiki page(or other resource) open to understand a game.  "Brain-heavy" or no.
3. The issue isn't my help.  It's that the NPE is not fun.  It's not fun to run into the resource/level/time gate over and over again on every little thing a newbie wants to do.  I'd make a list of the culprits, but it's just about everything.  Variety is the spice of life, I don't see why early weapons/frames need 12/84(respectively) hour wait time before you can actually use 'em.  This isn't counting the resource/credit farming or boss grinding required to actually get them.  I can't even begin to imagine how irritating it would be if a new player didn't have someone around with a opticor, deleting the boss from existence from the umpteenth time just because the grind starts strong from hour 1.

The only tangible progress you'll make in your first 20~ hours is maybe 2-3 new weapons, a couple planet unlocks, and a few rank 30 weapons/single frame.  That's an absurdly steep hill to climb.  It wasn't as bad back when I played because to be frank, the ceiling wasn't a 4+ forma'd Knell because it didn't exist yet.  If you were rocking a Braton or Latron, you're more-or-less set for non-endless anything.

I think something a lot of you fellas are struggling with is the understanding that as a newbie, he knows absolute jack about anything.  I had to take 2 minutes and personally give him the play-by-play on how to navigate the market so he could buy new weapon blueprints.  He spent the little endo he had on mods on the level as Expel Grineer because "they seemed good".  The NPE is full of newbie traps(blitz'd by quests they can't reasonably do and bad mods/weapons), valuable information they aren't getting, a basic understanding on movement(Again, sat down with him to show him how to bulletjump/crouch/bullet time/etc), and they basically start with nothing.  50 plat isn't something a new player needs.  They need mods, a decent credit+endo infusion, and actual options.

Options, guys.  The thing us vets actually have.  He's still playing Volt(He doesn't like Volt).  He can't get the frames he'd like to play because the requirement to get a new frame is absurd for a new player.  The easiest 3 frames to get(iirc) are Mag, Rhino, and Valkyr.  They all involve grinding a single boss 6-36ish times of varying difficulty.  For a new player that's hours of play(Don't know tilesets, can't dps/one shot the boss quickly, etc), another 12 hours crafting the blueprints, then another 3 days before you get your shiny new rank 1 frame with no auras, no catalysts, 1 if any polarities, and can get blown over by a cool summer breeze.

As someone with far too many hours in a single game, this isn't a problem to me.  For a new player it's pretty bloody frustrating.  This isn't a typical MMO, there's no leveling gear I can offer.  This isn't a typical shooter, he can't just use some cheesy tactics like door/corner camping to advance a bit.  This isn't a typical looter because the highlight of looters is that you're constantly making noticeable progress(Getting bigger numbers).

The biggest factor in my own frustration is because I love Warframe and he at least likes the game.  It's just ridiculous the number of roadblocks, painfully little information, and inability any one of us vets has to help ease the transition.  Do I think he should be slaving away at kuva farming like the rest of us poor bastards by hour 20?  No.  Of course not.  I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.  What I wish is I could leave him to his own devices and still have fun doing it.  The early-game landscape of Warframe is drastically different from the days of 'yore.

An important note:  He got frustrated before I started trying to help him beyond just answering questions.  If your answer to that this post is still "Well maybe he isn't patient enough" or "Maybe this game isn't for him", you're part of the problem.  Someone that likes the game, but is struggling to actually enjoy it means there's an inherent issue that needs to be addressed by the developers.  If you're potentially losing folks interested in your product before they've even spent money on it, that's a net loss for any company.

[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

51 minutes ago, kikasnoob said:

Htf is your mate going to learn how to play if you are blowing through the content for him? No wonder he is pissed off!

Aaaahhhhhh,,,,,,, fcuk you got me!! I should have realised sooner, 

good one mate well done 👍

I guess I'll only address whatever you said that actually makes sense which is: "How is he supposed to learn how to play?"

A). I couldn't blow through content for him even if I wanted to.
B). The same way a chef learns how to cook, or a football player learns how to aggressively hug: By having someone more knowledgeable than them pointing out the negatives/positives.  We finally managed to get him his clan key today so I could show him how to move faster.  He went from being 4 minutes behind us to extraction to 15 seconds in 10 minutes of example+execution.
C). He's pissed because there's nothing we can do to help ease climbing mount everest.  He downloaded the game to play with us.  Not get carried by us, not to die horribly when we bring him into a lvl 40+ mission.  He wants what we want:  to play with friends.  He's got 21 hours on record(Just checked) and still can't play the game at the level we're playing at as 15+ mastery accounts.

I understand the impulse to immediately go on the defensive with very poorly thought-out responses, but reel it in, my dude.  Personally I'd be happier being able to scale my frame down without having to buy more slots and play at his level than expect him to go up like the world's biggest firework to grind out at my level.

@sleepychewbaccaI think you may have misunderstood my meaning.  My concern isn't that I'll quit the game, but that someone who would otherwise enjoy the game will.  All for the silly expectation that they grind mindlessly or get carried for nearly the amount of time it takes to complete a full-blown RPG in actual time spent in-game and he's still not even remotely close to playing with his friends.  He's sitting there swinging his dual-dark sword on 2 mobs in the time it takes me to delete everything off the screen with 1 key press.  You tell me, why are there only 3 frames to pick from?  Why aren't every non-prime, non-quest frame available from the get-go?  Not like 2/3rd of the basic frames are going to make or break anything in terms of balance, anyway.  I'm not trying to paint a picture of "Doom and Gloom", but address what I'd consider a flaw.  I'm not stamping my feet, not making demands, I just want to know the logic behind some of the design choices so at least I have a better answer to a question than another question like "...Wait, why the **** is it like that?"

@KazuXSoraThis would make sense if I actually needed help.  Dude, if I could just play the game with him, I would.  I can't even fire my gun without trivializing the content for him.  I can't take him into anything I'd run because he'll just spend the entire time on the floor.  I can't solve the former because that'd just be handicapping myself and he knows it.  I can't solve the latter by giving him a maxed out vitality mod because of stupid-as-hell time-gating.  You're speaking from a place of experience.  It's probably been over a year since you were like "Oh ****!  What the hell is going on!?".

It takes an absurd amount of time just to get your sea-legs, let alone actually progress then contribute.  I don't expect the guy to be treating the ground like it's hot lava and neither should you.  If the learning curve takes over 15 hours of play, it needs to be smoothed or at least more accommodating.  Why does someone need to wait 12 hours or spend money to access a dojo?  Why does there need to be a 30ish hour grace period before I can hook a brutha up with basic necessities?

Y'all aren't even addressing the exigence of my point, you're just asserting your own opinions without any basis for them.  What's an acceptable amount of time to learn a game(not warframe, just the generic game) to you?  How long should a person have to wait to properly enjoy a game with his buddies as a new player?  How fast is "too fast" in terms of the content in this game?  I've got over 1300 hours, I still don't have everything unlocked/upgraded/etc.

@DrasielEh, I'm not angry, just irritated.  Introducing a friend to a new game where he can't play the frame he wants to play(Ash, teleporting around, being a melee "badass" because I don't have the heart to tell him there are better melee frames than Ash), can't use the types of weapons he wants to use or in other words: can't play the way he wants to play, and constantly getting hamstrung by the 20+ types of resources he has to figure out as he's cradting.  After the exhausting array of what I'd almost call "stupid logic" from the other posters, you're a breath of fresh air.

Never took him to open world, it's just something he was offered and interested in way before he could actually tackle it himself.  It sets a bad precedent when he needs help, I want to help, but I can't because of XYZ in a co-op game.  I've been pretty hands-off with the guy besides teaching him some basic movement techniques, helping him understand the different mission types, and once he gets too frustrated: come into the mission to see what's killing him and how to avoid it without sending him off to the warframe wiki.

Perhaps I did a poor job of explaining my position:  I don't care how slow or fast he is.  I care that we can't really play together because what he's doing is too easy for me and what I'm doing is too hard for him.  Put that way, in retrospect, I'm starting to consider the possibility that there's too much of a gap between the end-game and entry levels.

@(PS4)thowedThis comment was stupid.  Sorry man but I'm already responding to 5 other people, I can't be ****ed to make this post any longer than it already is.  Reflect on and think very hard about this statement: "In no other game can a new player contribute to a group of vets without grinding"

@(PS4)NewcastleDiseaseYou only addressed half my point in a vacuum.  I wouldn't have even brought up me trying to help him if it weren't for massive flaws in the new player experience.  I'm lazy as hell, dude.  I don't want to babysit someone through the game just so they'll stick with it.  I also don't subscribe to the idea that because I slogged through it way back when, someone else should too.

@trstDude...everything is time-gated.  Mastery levels are time-gated.  Every crafting recipe is time-gated even the random bull**** ones that for some reason take 1 minute to make.  Reputation is time-gated.  Alerts, available prime frames/weapons, Baro mods, you name it and there's a big ol' gate with "TIME" chiseled into it.  Are you really going to try to convince me that this is "the most basic of time-gating"?  That's really the hill you're going to die on? 😛

I don't disagree that it's largely information rather than time-gating that's the issue, but I think you're missing a small factor which is: options.  There's 40ish frames, less than half are quest-related and new players can only pick from 3.  There's hundreds of weapons with no clear distinction between what's good(Going back to your original point of poor newbie information) but they only get access 7 terrible(MK1) weapons at the start.

I could go on, but it's getting very late.  tl;dr:  While I've reconsidered some things, I still don't feel like I'm necessarily off-base with my criticism.  I look forward to more thought-provoking responses from you kind folks.

[Okay, seriously DE, I need an explanation to the new player experience]

I've had some misgivings with you guys in the past(I'm a supporter after all), but let's put that aside for a moment.

For the first time, I've managed to introduce Warframe to a person who had never actually played it.  The result of which has been an absolutely horrible experience for him and me.  He's pulled in every direction, he can't afford anything decent, and he can't rank up because for whatever asinine reason there's a time-gate between each successful mastery test.

I can't even help him out besides blowing through planet systems for him and collecting blueprints of frames/weapons he's interested in using(Which I can't give him for another 12 bloody hours due to him not being mastery 2 yet and the aforementioned time-gate).  I'm sitting on a mountain of duplicate mods I don't need that he really could use and I can't so much as help him with his damn quests because so far 2/3rds of them are solo-only.  Even the open world quests are solo(solaris).

Are you guys just allergic to too many players?  Is stemming the tide of chinese gold farmers so important to you that you'll lose people that are actually passionate about your game?  I don't get it.  What the hell is the point of a coop multiplayer game if I can't even help a friend out until a week+ goes by and they're in the mid-game?

He's annoyed, I'm annoyed that he's annoyed, and there's absolutely no excuse for this.  There's no reason to hamper players by locking trading behind time-gated mastery levels.  There's no reason to punish new players with massive grind walls before they feel like they can contribute anything to a group of vets.  There's no reason that he has to spend 12+ hours in a glorified tutorial before he can play with his buddies where even then, there's sprinklings of "solo only" quests.  He wants to play Ash, it "resonates" with him.  I'd give him my ash prime if I could even though it's vaulted(Can't trade completed Warframes because...reasons), but I can't even give him the blueprints of the original Ash frame until 4 days after I introduced him to the game.  He's still stuck playing Volt.

I saw that interview, btw - about the kubrow incubation lottery way back when and how you're such honest folks that care so much about your players that ya pressed the abort button.  I see none of that sentiment, here.  Just developers utilizing a more under-handed method of squeezing money and time out of their consumers.  Is this really the game and developer I spent triple-digits supporting?  Instead of 1$ dot sights, you're just going to take a virtual baseball bat to someone's time constraints then offer up a super great deal?  He got a 75% discount on plat.  I told him to ignore it because if he's not having fun even after 10+ hours of play, the developers don't deserve his support.

I want an answer.  There's been roadblock after roadblock preventing us from actually being able to enjoy the game as little toddler-Tenno and super 1337 no-scope Tenno, and each time we hit one of said roadblocks, I can't give him a good response besides "Why?".  Is this a game for gamers, by gamers, or is it a love letter to Warframe fanboys with 1k+ hours on steam?  I ask this because like any game, your die-hard fanbase will eventually die and the only longevity you can hope for is from new blood, who's experience is absolutely horrible from what I've seen and heard.

If this comes off as aggressive: I apologize but I've reached my limit of what I consider acceptable levels.  I've never, in 15+ years of gaming, ever introduced someone to a multiplayer game with such an awful initial experience.  I've known the guy most of my life and he's docile like a damn koala.  If even someone like him can get frustrated at Warframe's entry-level gameplay, there's something VERY wrong.

[The long, long road to a better warframe.]

11 hours ago, (Xbox One)Evilpricetag said:

I enjoy seeing that your a long time player, with a low post number. This is telling me you've really analized the game. 

First for your resources. I'm not sure of an actual fix, you've been through crazy loot system's. I've seen the whole loot multiplier in endless missions, people walking out with 500 orokin cells/gallium/ect. Wasnt there myself but glad its gone. Selling? Sure. I like the idea of in game resource donation to build things, with a highscore dedication board. Its time we tenno started pitching in to the star chart.

The major topic I noticed, polarities on Warframes. Why have 3 loadouts if they all rely on the same set-up. I need an entirely new Warframe for a different build most of the time. Each load out needs to be its own forma plot.

  While I respect your desire to keep this thread a proper debate/discussion, A simple, "I disagree", is appropriate. Evan if I dont agree with them, I've always found the forums to be great for feedback to change the game, I dont approve if a thread may be 500-2000 pages long in discussions, but only 10% of the entire game population, that entirely changes aspects of the game. But in all fairness there are those that want this change, but dont speak up.

I understand your point that voices should be heard, if I could I'd gather the entire active playerbase here so everyone could voice their opinions.  However, "I disagree" is just white noise, it contributes nothing and is the equivalent of "Weather sure is nice today".  I don't expect people to extrapolate in an excessive way like I have, but a simple 2 or 3 sentence explanation on why they disagree is incredibly helpful.

I also hear you on the configs.  It never even occurred for me to check but almost every frame I have forma'd 2+ times simply doesn't use the extra configs.  They have one and only one build because any other build I try to make would be incredibly subpar.  Whereas my un-forma'd frames usually have 2 configs that are at least passable for higher end content.  Again, polarizing weapons usually don't matter, you can build just about anything with a few V and - polarities.  However formaing warframes sucks.  You get strong armed into specific builds and it completely defeats the purpose of customization through mods.

@Littleman88 It'd be nice if each faction were vulnerable and strong vs particular effects outside of just damage mitigation.  Grineer could have stronger stagger resistance at the price of weaker knockdown recovery(gg hydron if this ever happened).  Eximus enemies could also differentiate depending on faction.  Not every Energy Leech Eximus needs to do the same damn thing.  One could reduce efficiency instead of being a straight drain while another hard caps your energy pool to 50% of its base value(Restoring it upon death).

I'd also love for DE to finally dial back on the enemy CC that they've decided to double down on.  There's gotta be better ways to manage difficulty than 8/10 enemy types having some sort of knockdown/stagger/pull.  Most of my deaths/bleedouts are solely off the back of getting stagger locked into oblivion with zero opportunities for me to recover.  I posted this years ago when it was starting to become a real pain in the &#!: Wrenching control away from a player this frequently in what is supposed to be a high speed game is one of the worst balance moves I've ever seen.

One last thing: I'd really like a button that calls my pet to me.  I don't care if I have to under-arm carry my damn cat around while only using a secondary, I just don't want to have to go back 3 rooms to pick the "special" thing off the ground because it decided to run in place in front of an open doorway.

[The long, long road to a better warframe.]

@Fishyflakes Warframe is largely a cooperative game, I don't want to shove all the workload onto my buddies running around with tigris primes to clean up a sortie or high end endless mission just so I can have a bit of fun and diversity by bringing fun but weak weapons.  Back in the day I had a blast using throwing secondaries like Despair but these weapons are so horrendously bad now that I can dump an entire "magazine" into the face of a 80+ heavy gunner and not even chew through half its hp.  That's just not fun to me and I'm sure that's not fun to other people either.  In the same way it kinda sucks when you have a favorite frame, but nearly all its abilities are useless in 90% of your game play.  This is by and large a spectacle shooter, one of the fun things about these types of games is feeling "powerful".  When it feels like my weapon is a spring loaded pez dispenser firing candy, it hurts the experience for me.

@topsickrat I agree, it is kinda nice to not have to swap weapon load outs all the time but when your only choices are corrosive, slash, and gas it gets a bit boring.  Though I hear damage is being looked at again, I also hear slash is getting buffed at the same time so it's just going to end up as all slash, all the time.

@Kurtys I disagree on a few points.  There are plenty of trash warframe mods and a lot of mandatory ones.  Vitality is pretty much required in almost all situations in the end game.  All the damage mitigation in the world isn't going to save your paltry 300~ base hp from 80+ hyekka fire or mutalist osprey gas.  Like I said previously though, warframe formaing isn't as much of a problem right now but it will be as more primed mods come out.  Primed intensify, primed streamline, along with the inevitable power creep of enemies by virtue of these mods existing will make it harder and harder for decent frames to compete with strong frames.  Strong frames already perform well in 80+ missions, whether they get better or not is irrelevant because they already do well(Gara, Trinity, Mesa, Octavia, etc).  Where as weaker frames need all the mod help they can get to function in the end game.  Then once they get that help, they're locked in.  Even right now my Ember is geared towards world on fire speed running low end missions as she's really the best at it and saves me a lot time plus I can watch a show or movie while I'm going through the rounds.  If I wanted to turn her into buff ember it's extremely difficult with the polarities I have on her and there's no way I can accommodate both builds and I don't even have any primed warframe mods.

Something I'd really like to see is a single augment slot next to the exilus slot so it doesn't feel as bad to bring something like pilfering swarm or fireball frenzy and hurt every other aspect of your already somewhat underwhelming warframe.  Hysterical Assault looks like a lot of fun but between steel fibre/vitality/rage/flow/streamline/continuity/fleeting expertise/endless war I literally have no where to put the mod in a decent hysteria build.  That seems so bad that you can't bring the augment for the ability you've built all your mods around with no real wiggle room as all of them are mandatory for the build to play relatively smoothly.

[The long, long road to a better warframe.]

I'm not going to lie, this feedback is going to be all over the place.  This is more or less a compendium of what I'd like to see changed with the game, addressing what I consider problems and providing potential solutions.  The end goal is to have a debate and through said debate, come up with a better answer to the problem presented.  If you're just popping in here to say "lol no" or "Yeh!" with no meaningful dialogue on why you disagree/agree, I respectfully ask you to just move along.  You'd be simply cluttering up a hopefully constructive thread with essentially white noise, which benefits no one - especially a DE employee that may be spending their valuable time reading and cataloguing this topic.

1. Weapons/Frames need some kind of structure.  It's simply unrealistic for DE to make every single weapon viable for every stage of content.  A lato/braton/neiza/volt etc will not be able to perform in sorties and nightmare raids.  Don't get me wrong - I loved using the braton and latron, I used them almost religiously through the formative months of warframe way back when, but they rapidly got phased out as time went on.  Rather than a band aid fix that largely does nothing like the riven system, we really should shift our focus towards making MR more relevant in terms of frames and weapons.  Players should feel rewarded for progressing through crap weapons and frames to a higher tier, rather than it being an after-thought once we've gotten our core weapons and frames forma'd out.  This could come from a special resource that improves an existing weapon up-to-par with the current "meta" weapons, or a completely separate weapon that functions similarly.  At the same time, warframes will inevitably reach a critical mass where X is fundamentally better than Y.  We're already seeing this from Gara largely replacing Frost.  Frost is almost entirely dependent on its bubble and Gara's wall is just better in most situations.  Once this happens en-mass we should just classify X as low tier and Y as high tier.  Another solution could be to specialize certain frames for certain situations.  I almost religiously use Ember when I'm speed running through level 30 and under missions with world on fire, which is pretty much useless even with the augment for 80+ level missions.  Possibly give each frame something that they completely excel at in a given situation, so we never have another nezha or zephyr(Yes, I know, this is actually a warframe that exists).
    
2. Resources need to be looked at.  Those of us with excess resources really need some means to convert them into something useful.  I have 2.3 million alloy plate that I'd love to at least sell for credits 1-2 credits each.  The current DE philosophy of "We'll just release a weapon that requires an exorbitant amount of a particular resource" is...well...kinda lame, and horrendously unfair to new players that don't have a metric crap ton of said resource.  Another alternative is add an NPC in the bazaar that can convert one resource to another at fairly hefty price.  Something like  250 nano spores to 1 cryotic and such.  The exact transfer rate is entirely up to DE as they have far more data than I do.
    
3. Please normalize warframe abilities.  Ember's 2 is far, far more useful than her 3.  Outside Lephantis/Hemocyte the only time I ever used her 3 was on accident when I was trying to press her 2.  Gara is even worse in that her 3 is completely useless and not even worth the time nor energy casting it.  You can't even mod to make these abilities good which just makes it worse.  I could dedicate an entire build to min maxing these useless abilities and they'd still be terrible.
    
4. Forma-ing frames feels horrible.  Allow us to change forma'd polarities without jumping through hoops.  For weapons it's not as big of a deal - 3 or 4 Madurai(V) polarities and 1 and 2 Naramon(-) polarities can accommodate just about every single meta build in the game, but warframes suffer from the current forma system.  There are quite a few frames that simply don't jive well between builds and this will become more and more of a problem as more primed mods come out.  An alternative is to allow us the ability to use 1 forma to polarize each individual config separately.  Say Config A I want a V polarity, but Config B I want a D polarity.  Config C could be a `` polarity.  The whole point to the mod system(in my opinion?) is to customize and optimize, but for some reason the polarity system directly contradicts that, sometimes restricting particular builds due to limited mod points.
    
5. Please, please dear god give us an option to completely skip the fish catching window.  I don't give a damn about what size fish I catch.  All I need to know is that I threw a spear and when I retrieved it a fish was impaled on the end of it.  Along the same train of thought - Stop the grineer train.  There have been many times where I've had to entirely reset the plains by going back to cetus because the konga line of grineer decided their number one priority was to pester the living **** out of the lone tenno and his fishing spear.  I literally have the entirety of my warframe gaming time to systematically wipe out every grineer and their extended family, just not when I'm ****ing fishing.
    
6. To be Continued.
   
   I've exhausted about an hour of my time and this was largely on a whim, I may or may not add more depending on if I get a decent turn out and the thread isn't simply drowned by trolls with too much free time.  If you did manage to suffer your way through this: Thanks for your time, I welcome all critique and additions to what I've proposed.  I am in no way a game developer, there could very well be solutions or disagreements that make some or all of the above completely null and void, if so I'd love to hear from you.

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

Just now, Fishyflakes said:

I'm making enough plat to buy boosters every month from trade chat.

It's working fine for me, so I just had to comment about how silly your idea was, since there's no downvote.

Sorry you got rustled dude

Don't worry, I'm a grown adult, I'm not going to get rustled over a forum topic. :P  I was mostly just trying to hammer the point home so I might get a few less notifications of "You're wrong!  You want to know why???  YOU'RE JUST WRONG KAY!?".  You seem to find plat gambling silly, however it's already in the game.  My suggestion wasn't to add gambling, merely to improve what already existed so it at least serves a purpose, because I sincerely doubt DE would ever actually remove the mod and relic packs.  The goal isn't to add a slot machine into our lisets.  The goal is for the mod packs to serve the purpose they were meant to(A plat sink).  The only people that buy mod packs and relic packs are people that are completely oblivious to fact they're useless.

Relic pack = 5 relics for 50p.  I can hand pick and buy 5 relics for roughly 25p that are in circulation.  That's 5 relics of exactly the one I want/need, at half the price.
Dragon Mod Pack = 5 mods for 90p.  I can once again, hand pick and buy 5 mods of any rarity that are in circulation for 15p.

Now, let's say a random newbie- we'll call him Andrew, decides to buy a few dragon mod packs.  They seem like a good idea when you have a pool of like...70 mods across everything, right?  It'd be pretty nice for Andrew if maybe he got something decent and hard to get out of that pack.  Because let's be realistic, DE will never remove these market options.  They've long since been considered complete noob traps and DE seems all too happy to prey on ignorant players.  Don't gotta look much further than the whole encryption of drop tables thing that happened years ago.

Let's be clear: None of these suggestions wholly matter to me, personally.  I have plenty of plat, plenty of mods, every frame(Excluding a couple primes that got locked up when I was on hiatus).  Though I do have buddies that are just starting out and it feels like there's far too many pitfalls in this game for them.  I don't expect people to spend hundreds of dollars on warframe like me(I have far too much disposable income).  Once the plat well runs dry and you have very little at your disposal to sell, this game starts to really suck to play if you don't already have a ridiculous pool of resources/mods/frames/slots.

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

Just now, Fishyflakes said:

I dismissed your credibility when you suggesting Gambling with Platinum.

Terrible.

And, pray tell, what would you consider relic packs, mod packs, trading unknown rivens - hell, if I wanted to be a real snide bastard I'd even throw the boosters into that pool.  Theoretically it's entirely a coin flip on exactly how much you'll even benefit from them.  New frames as well if you opt to purchase them, since out of the gate you have no idea if they'll be the next Mag vs the next Trinity.

What is with the reading comprehension on this forum?
There's already an unofficial auction house(Warframe.market) but they say an AH or anything similar would ruin the game.
There's already gambling your plat away on the official market but it's barely gambling, you're essentially throwing plat into a fire.

God damn.  The hope of this thread was to state a solution to a pretty potent weakness of the game, then we'd debate, then we may come to an even better solution.  Instead quite a few of the responses don't have me thinking "Oh, that's a good point, we should extrapolate on that", it's more along the line of "I need to figure out which state these people are from and make sure I never drink the tap water..."

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

On 11/6/2017 at 11:09 AM, kuchn said:

there are people that have very very very large amounts of plat in cash or assets
give them an opportunity to have trades even without them being online (like an auction house) and you will quickly find out what the word "monopoly" means

I see a lot of this argument which is odd...because we already /have/ a pseudo-auction house.  It's infinitely faster and easier to just hop on warframe.market and get what you want/need.  An auction house(Or similar, but for the sake of the example) can be implemented a variety of ways.  Yesa, if you just copy/paste something like WoW's auction house, you will run into that problem.  There are many solutions to this: No buyout being one, or merely it act as an item listing.

The argument isn't "THIS SHOULD BE MORE LIKE WoW!".  The argument is "It's f*cking ridiculous to expect players to spam trade chat or sit in maroo's bazaar day-in and day-out to make a trade."  Imagine a world where warframe.market doesn't exist.  This is the world DE wants, because the best they've come up with is Maroo's Bazaar and Trade Chat.  Respectively the worst trade system I've ever seen and a trade channel that exists in almost every multiplayer game that has trading.  A system that just makes it /easier/ for a buyer to find a seller and vice versa would drastically improve the quality of trading in this game.

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

32 minutes ago, (PS4)fullblast35 said:

EVERYTIME a player gets tired of either grinding resources or acquiring plat you see these type of threads.  This is exactly why the veterans are quitting this game.  your suggestions can't be based on your own convenience.  DE has to understand that their game is not made for everyone, and everyone can't expect the game to be like any other game.  I play this game because there is nothing like it since 2013, maybe similar.  If you got these ideas from friends or new players, as an advanced one just take the time to explain what they don't understand, guide them.  Dont try to make this game become like every other common thing.

I have more resources than I'll ever feasibly need(Except polymer bundle, due to the 600+ energy pizzas I made).  I have over 2k plat, and about 95% of the total mods currently available in the game.  If you must ask why this thread came about, it'd be a few reasons:

• (Veteran)friends tired of certain aspects of the economy.  Such as the gross resource distribution in crafting(I have 2.3 MILLION alloy plate I'll never find a use for).
• The previously mentioned scumbags on design council chat that advocate not only ruining the trade economy, but new player experience as well.
• Mild frustration that certain frames/weapons/skins/etc are impossible to fashion frame to satisfaction(Like Ivara).
• Because I f***ing felt like making a thread on this and didn't see a header on the forum saying I had to check with the local inconsequential pantie-stain on whether or not I can.

Let me point this out: You're responding to a thread you find unnecessary due to it being "opinion"...with your own opinion, where nothing in your opinion actually addresses the topic or its contents.  You are literally saying that my ideals of the game aren't desirable and the source of veterans quitting, with your own ideals of what the game should be.  But for the sake of the fact I have nothing better to do at 1 in the morning, I will address each of your points.

• "EVERYTIME a player gets tired of either grinding resources or acquiring plat you see these type of threads." - False.  I had no trouble with either of these things.
• "This is exactly why the veterans are quitting this game." - No, they're quitting for the same reason I have twice; burn out.
• "DE has to understand that their game is not made for everyone, and everyone can't expect the game to be like any other game." - True, however it certainly doesn't hurt to make it new player accessible.  Y'know, constant influx and retainment of new players is kinda good for the game and DE's bottom line.
• "I play this game because there is nothing like it since 2013, maybe similar." - Warframe is not the first of its kind.  Won't be the last of its kind.
• "If you got these ideas from friends or new players, as an advanced one just take the time to explain what they don't understand, guide them." - Well, I didn't, but let's say I did:  I as a player should have to hand-hold someone who has NO idea about ANYTHING in the game besides the most brief concept of things like WASD and mouse to aim and shoot?  Really?  That's something you're going to advocate?
• " Dont try to make this game become like every other common thing." - Okay.  I'mma say this just once... Warframe is not a mystical unicorn.  Bad innovation is still bad.  I've seen games "innovate" themselves into a nearly non-existent player-base(See: Mechwarrior Online).  Warframe's foundation started out very shaky, and instead of fixing it first then flipping the "on" switch for the content machine, they decided to do the opposite.  That's why we've had so many changes to the star chart.  That's why we are still in "Beta" after nearly FIVE YEARS.  That's why even to this day they're going back and unscrewing things like the void.

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

On 10/29/2017 at 8:46 PM, (Xbox One)Big Ditches said:

This all the way!  There’s games out there that can give a good idea on what to list on an Auction House.  Like I can’t believe after all these updates we’re stuck at a chat trying to sell crap instead of having an Auction House to list your items for competitive prices.

It's simple why that is, bud.  The vocal minority/founders don't want to lose the opportunity to rip off noobs for easy plat.  Warframe.Market already exists yet you still have Relltards claiming an in-game auction house will "Ruin the game".  Ruin the game my &#!.  The only thing that will change is that new players that aren't in the "know" about warframe.market to better understand the value of XYZ well won't get absolutely nuked with overpriced S#&$.  Now, I'm a veteran, I always price check when buying from someone, with my own list of data of price fluctuation on certain high priced items(Primed mods and exclusive S#&$), so I never really suffer this fate.  But it bothers the S#&$ out of me when someone asks a price check over Design Council and the consensus is "As much as they're willing to pay" or "A ridiculous price, let them haggle down to a slightly less ridiculous price".  People like to tout this game has an awesome community but really, the majority are a bunch of scumbags.

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

29 minutes ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

Pretty good Ideas, my only problem is with this one:

You might think it will prevent Vets from ripping off Newbs, but it will actually make it easier. Want a copy of Maiming Strike? Too bad someone with 50k+ plat has written a script that buys any and all that appear on the market and then sells them for 5k each. Want to start building up an Arcane Energize set? Different player, same set-up. Ultra-rare Stance mods? New set-piece mods? Glappid fish? All the same, across the board: someone wrote a script and now owns the market.

I've seen this happen way to often with Auction Houses to think that it wouldn't happen here. Even if direct API calls weren't possible, someone would figure out how to script keyboard and mouse inputs to do it 'manually'.

Now, one possible solution would be a 'Bounty Board' style market, where the only ones setting prices are the buyers. Since the only way to corner the market would be to put up the highest offer, and the only available customers would be lower offers, it would greatly reduce the ability to game the system.

As for selling cosmetics to alter the 'shape' of our Operators; NO. DE would never go for that, parent company withstanding, no matter how popular it might be, due to it not fitting the theme (and lore) of Warframe.

 

 

Thing is, vets could potentially do that already through Warframe Market, if they really wanted to.  There are things DE could do such as moderate said behavior(Even WoW has banned people for tanking a server economy too hard), limit players in the same way trades are limited(X number of purchases and auctions per day), or simply not introduce an auction house and go with a more tame system.  The goal is to replace Warframe Market on DE's terms.  I understand the wary stance, but the fact of the matter is: It's already here, in a crappy state, might as well bring it in game and refine it to DE's vision of trading than to just leave it as is.

As I told Rell, mostly tongue in cheek.  I would like more options for my operator to make him less cringy to look at though.

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

12 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

1. You have no info to base your first point on.

2. See 1. Adding gambling to a real money purchase? Insanity.

3. This would crater the Plat market, that's certainly a way to get people to buy less Plat.

4. Why not add an item that just skips the mission and gives you the drops you would have gotten.

5. It's IRC. One of the most basic chat systems still in existence on the Internet. What are you even saying here?

6. Sure, just go full on KMMO, I'm sure that won't lose people.

1. I have years upon years of watching this game evolve and the economy be the same pile of garbage it always has been(Both market, Trade Chat, and trading).  As well as participating heavily in every economy of every game I've played that had a functioning one(Final Fantasy MMOs, Guild Wars 2, WoW, Path of Exile to name a few)

2. Heya Rell, didn't realize you hung out on the forums after we sorta mercy-killed you, sorry about that by the way.  Mod packs already exist, ergo gambling already exists, you can't add something that was there in the first place.  This suggestion was merely to make it "Worth it", and allow returning and new players alike to get mods they have no idea when they'll have access to without breaking their bank on a video game.

3. The suggestion was merely a better, more streamlined method of trading. The current system is ***, and again, WE ALREADY HAVE AN AUCTION HOUSE.  The problem is it's a website, 3rd party, and therefore there will be people that don't know about it.  We need a better form of trading that is not baroo's shanty of crap.

4. Oh, heya Rell, I feel like we just saw each other but fancy seeing you here again!  Nice strawman fallacy by the way, I honestly didn't think you even knew what that was!  Selling players luxuries is a hallmark of just about every single successful F2P game I've ever seen.  We already see a little bit of that in the form of boosters, however only two(Affinity & Resource) out of the 4 are even remotely worthwhile after you've built up some sort of foundation in the game.

5. I've never seen Trade Chat be anything but an eyesore in every game I've ever played.  At best, it serves its purpose and you're sitting there for hours straining your eyes for good deals.  At worst, it becomes a cesspool for trolls due to lack of moderation.

6. Rell, we've gotta stop meeting like this, people are going to talk.  The %$# & &#! bit was tongue in cheek, but the message is clear.  People play the game because it's cool and fun to be a space ninja, play that angle and money will flow.  If you really want to play it like a typical game: Get Tigris Prime, get Akstilleto Prime, get Galatine Prime, get the 5 or 6 decent frames in the game and few formas+potatos later...  You now have everything you could possibly need to do every aspect of content in this game.  Come back for each update for a week or 2 then drop the game again.

[The Long, long road to a better economy]

Warframe has suffered from a horrendous economy since pretty much day 1.  Terrible prices on equally terrible weapons, resources for plat(A complete noob trap), and platinum prices being far higher than they should be, to name a few issues.  In light of all this, I, my most esteemed self, have decided to help pave the way for a better economy.

Step One: Reduce the price of platinum by 25%, remove the 75% discount, keep the 25% and 50% discount, make the 50% discount rarer than it currently is.  Currently most in game trading is essentially based around 50-75% discount platinum prices.  It's why we have still available but hard to get mods and parts going for 200+ plat and Riven mods that can go for thousands.  Just about everyone I've talked to over the years on here says "Just wait for a 50/75% discount. The prices are stupid as-is", and that statement has been very consistent.  This change would make people feel more compelled to buy plat even without a discount, without largely effecting the market.  Currently no one "In the Know" is going to spend, say, 20$ when it barely covers buying a primed mod.

Step Two: For the upper-end of the platinum buying spectrum, provide the ability to pick from a pool of mods.  Most people will have Armored Agility, Animal Instinct, and Seeking Fury looong before they spend 100+ dollars on a bundle of plat.  This isn't a must-have change, but it's consumer friendly and consumer friendly=more sales.  In addition to this, do something about mod packs.  They're incredibly over-priced in comparison to just going on Warframe Market and buying individual mods for 2-10 plat a pop.  I can buy 45 serration mods for the same price of the more expensive mod pack.  Two solutions: Reduce the price drastically, or include(and advertise) event mods and others that players can gamble for.  Maiming Strike is 400+ plat, I'd love to be able to gamble 90 plat at the shot of getting lucky and turning a profit or otherwise not having to spend that extra 310 plat on a single mod(Nearly 20$ at default plat market value).

Step Three: Introduce some form of auction house.  I realize the response to this is mixed, but for all intents and purposes we already have a really S#&$ty one in the way of Warframe Market.  The only thing lacking an in-game Warframe Market does is ensures the veterans of the game can easily rip off newer players.  Which once discovered, discourages said new players from participating in trading, or continuing a cycle of trying to rip off newbies, or even worse straight up quitting.  This game is already jarring enough for new players without a S#&$ty trading experience hammering the point home.  Any immediate sales DE might make from the unwary buyer will absolutely be impacted in future sales.  Now, how this Auction House is introduced is entirely up to DE.  It could be in the form of a real trading post, a buyer/seller review board(To keep us honest), or a full-blown WoW auction house where everyone's undercutting each other into oblivion.  Maroo's Bazaar is a pile of **** and watching trade chat is like someone hopped into a Rhino to spin the wheel of fortune, it's exhausting to look at.

Step Four: Add more luxuries to the market that are not essential to the game and are strictly quality of life improvements but can only be bought from the Market.  Things that spring to mind: Gear that can be used to teleport to a pre-selected buddy regardless of distance, can have 25 charges and cost 50 plat.  Your buddy find a pack of Kavats and you're half way across the map looking for them? Fear not! There's the buddy teleport system!  Another item could be a teleport crystal that you use once to place a beacon, and again to warp back to it.  That person lagging behind manage to find a vault room/anasa sculpture/cephalon fragment while you're sitting at extraction?  Drop the beacon, do your thing, warp back and smoke a cig, you're done here Tenno.

Step Five: You've almost completed the program, it's now time to find the data containing the trade chat code and set it on fire.  No one will blame you if you start laughing maniacally.

Step Six: Go full tilt into fashion frame.  Most of the attachments look like ****(Sorry art team).  They look like my Tenno is a Mag that used Pull in a kitchen and the coolest ones(Ember Prime Acc. Access, Frost Prime Acc. Access) aren't available.  If they were on the Market right now I'd be chomping at the bit to buy them even if the whole set ran me 500+ plat.  Hell, I'd drop 500 plat for a button to make my operator not look like an emo ballsack and I know - without a shadow of a doubt, that at least half the community would drop thousands to make X Tenno's %$# or &#! bigger.  Content is always important but I strongly recommend expanding your cosmetic art team.  This is a spectacle shooter/slash-em-up.  Let us pimp our warframe.

That's all I've got for today: Discuss.

[Coming Soon: Devstream #61!]

1. When can we expect weapon rebalance?  As it stands weapons are all over the place in power, and the requirements/means to get weapons almost never correlate to their actual value.  Almost all the alert weapons are extremely underwhelming compared to market counterparts, and the hek is by and far one of the best weapons in the game.

 

2. Will there be any additional moves to make arcanes more desirable?  As it stands, I can't be bothered to drop 200-500+ plat or god knows how many raid runs just to get 10 arcanes I'm going to put on one sydana I don't necessarily want to use for all my frames.

 

3. Will there be QoL improvements to syndicate sigils?  Swapping sigils around constantly, making sure the one I want is on the frame I'm using, and the fact that I can't equip some of the cooler designed syndicate sigils because of inter-syndicate sigil clashing or I just don't want to gain that particular reputation is a little troublesome.

 

4. When will the market prices be looked at?  Most of the market exists solely as noob bait, for example the stay frosty bundle is significantly less rewarding than equivalently-priced update bundles.

 

5. RNG is still a big problem right now, where some people get what they need within a few hours, and others spend literally a week plus of constant playing just to get that one warframe systems or weapon receiver they need to finally finish a build.  Are there any little hints you can drop as to how [DE] plans for making the grind a little more reasonable?

 

6. You talked about weapon scaling with rank and the removal of serration which got me very excited.  Not only because of the possibility that this could result in fixing a lot of the weapon balance I described above, but because it means we could expect more flexibility with mods in the future.  Has there been any more talks about this change?

 

7. Can we hope for improvements to the existing trade system?  Warframe market does a good job of filling in some of the odd nick-nacks, but some sort of ingame system would be greatly appreciated.  Even an auction house system would be better and more welcoming to new players than the current system where half the people are just trying to rip you off.

 

8. Speaking of new players, will there be steps taken to improve the newbie experience?  It's extremely difficult and takes a lot of hand-holding from veteran players to make new players stick.  People see this gigantic grind wall and without any real guidance they tend to get discouraged from playing.

 

9. Will there be any sort of dedicated servers for conclave or at the very least better implementation of host migration and detection?  All the balance changes in the world won't solve the lag problems and host migration running rampant in conclave.  Just the other day I played 10 conclave matches, 6 of them ended right away, all 6 resulted in host migration, and 5 resulted in me getting booted back to the liset.  2 of those matches I had over 20 oro and then the host left, which went to migration, which both times booted me back to my liset, with 0 standing earned... And I can't tell you how many times I've been killed by someone with their backs facing me.  Unless there was a &#!-mounted cannon in the patch notes that I didn't hear about.

[Rift Sigil - Regarding Project Undermine]

This oozes "I'm a pretty princess and things should be my way".

 

"Now don't think I'm being elitist, because I'm not"  Then the very next sentence, you basically state it's a status symbol, here's a definition "a possession that is taken to indicate a person's wealth or high social or professional status."  You are by definition being elitist.  People go on to establish that Phoenix Escalation was actually easy, you were just doing it the hard way.  You responded by saying you don't try-hard.

 

If people want to "earn" the sigil, they can just go in with a mag, decked out in all rank 0 weapons and earn it that way.  Where as the actually intelligent players will forgo that inane thought process and just follow the path of least resistance.  Is it easy? Yeah, it is, so was Phoenix Escalation solo or with a group.  But it's unreliable.  I'm 70 missions in, spent the better part of the day trying to get it, and still have bumkis.

 

They could scale every enemy up to lvl 150 for this mission and guess what I'd do? Yep, Loki Prime, solo, with irradiating disarm, and faceroll through it just as effortlessly as I do now, it'd just take more time.  Warframe isn't a hard game and it's just a sigil.  It literally has 0 influence on the game, and 99% of players aren't going to even pay attention to what's plastered on your warframe's chest.  I get more comments about my solid pink excalibur than I do any sort of clever color scheme/design I come up with.

 

Because no one cares.  Warframe apparel is like a model train set, you'll spend all this time perfecting it, in the hopes that if just one person praises you, it won't feel like such a waste of time.

[Misc. Fixes That I Feel Would Benefit Warframe As A Whole.]

Edited with more suggestions.  Focusing mostly on quality of life.  If only one thing comes from this topic, I'd be happy to never see another 600 xp secondary weapon login "reward" again.

[Misc. Fixes That I Feel Would Benefit Warframe As A Whole.]

I've been bumming around on council chat for a while, having some interesting exchanges which brought me to this forum to lay some of the ones I have in mind out.  Warframe is a great game, it has lots of potential, but it is plagued by some of the word game design imaginable.  This isn't a shot at you DE, it's just how the game evolved and I understand why it would be extremely difficult and time consuming to up end a lot of the issues, hence why I'm making this post now.  Consider it my giving back to a game I genuinely enjoy, even if that makes it sound like I'm full of myself...Lets start things off, shall we?

 

 

Enemy Scaling:  There are better ways to increase difficulty without multiplying hp by 9001%.  Implement harder enemies mechanically rather than through sheer stat boosts.  Exilus were a step in the right direction but they don't actually influence how you play the game or react to a situation.  This can be accomplished by giving enemies more threatening abilities.  A few basic ideas/examples:

 

The Dominator:  This enemy only spawns in level 40+ missions,  It will spawn and remain stealthed until it has found a target, it will then begin channeling an ability that takes control of a target player and renders it immune to all warframe abilities.  No more than one of these can be active at any given time(Optional, nightmare mode increases this cap to 2).  This would immediately change the situation from "Kill everything that moves" to CC/down the controlled player, or find the dominator before the player kills the party.

 

Ancient tangler:  This enemy only spawns in level 40+ missions. This enemy will grasp a player but rather than pull them towards it, simply render them immobilized for X amount of seconds or until the tangler/tangles are killed.  These tangles would have infested "bulbs" along its length that all must be destroyed before the tangle releases the player.  While tangled the player can attack, but cannot use warframe abilities, this will also disable warframe effects such as hysteria, absorb, and other buffs/channels.

 

Grineer Abductor:  This enemy only spawns in level 40+ missions. A flying grineer unit that has an ability that dives at players, grabbing them and hauling them off to an unknown location on the map, it would release an audio queue to inform the players of its presence and it priming its abduction ability.  The idea is to make camping a particular spot less desirable.  This enemy would only appear in multiplayer games, and cannot appear in rescue, defense, mobile defense or excavation missions.

 

Corpus Goliath:  This enemy only spawns in level 40+ missions.  Possessing a massive frame as well as an impenetrable frontal shield, this death machine is only vulnerable from behind.  The frontal shield blocks 95% of damage, and 70% damage from the flank, whereas its backside is completely defenseless.  This machine is orbited by 2 "Squire Osprey"s that drastically improves its mobility at the expense of damage, if an osprey is destroyed the goliaths' speed drops but its damage output skyrockets, making it a very bad idea to destroy them before dealing with the goliath itself.

 

 

Mods:  Last weeks' devstream was an interesting watch, and its good that [DE] is looking into how to make modding more interesting and fun, I wanted to weigh in on the subject.  Mods should fundamentally change how a weapon's mechanic functions, rather than just adding mo' dakka.  Even if multishot gets nerfed, serration gets removed/changed, the mods you put into a weapon will never change its functionality.  I personally don't mind their existence, it puts a gap between brand new players and people that have put in the time, but mods were originally supposed to be about customizing, not figuring out how to get the highest damage per second/shot.

 

Redeemer:  This gunblade has several mods that change how its gunshot performs.  By default it would be a slow, semi auto shot, this could then be modded to either be a shotgun-esque attack, a channeled beam that drastically extends the reach of the weapon, or a brief "pulse" that interrupts enemies immediately adjacent to the player.

 

Soma:  This weapon can be built as a crit or "crit-light". Mod A).  On a critical headshot it has a small chance of demoralizing nearby enemies, applying a debuff that will randomly stun them throughout its duration for X number of seconds.  Mod B).  Any non crits will apply a DoT on the enemy, inflicting 50% of what would have been critical damage over the course of so and so time.  Mod C).  Gives the soma guarenteed criticals, but each shot costs an additional bullet, it also provides a 50% chance to crit on enemies/shields/etc that are normally immune to critical hits.

 

 

RNG:  Rather than having random prime parts dropping, can we have a vendor that trades "prime tokens" for prime parts instead?  Said prime tokens would drop in the void.  This would alleviate one of the biggest sources of RNG frustration.  We would still have to farm for mods/resources/etc, but at least we wouldn't be pulling hair out trying to get that last piece to the prime puzzle.

 

 

Press "Use" to "Reload": Please give us an option to turn this off. Already in, apparently, under "controls" in options.

 

Party kick: If 3 out of 4 people don't want a particular person in the group, give us the option to get rid of them.  The possibility for abuse is there but this would still be a step in the right direction.

 

 

Edit! Part one!

 

 

RNG P.2: Alternatively there could be an end of mission reward that allows you up to 3 choices from the reward pool.  For things like sabotage, spy, and endless missions this would also extend to their identified pool and have their own loot choice as well.  Even if the void is changed to only contain prime parts as rewards, it will still be a farming nightmare to find the one part you need just to finish a build.

 

Crafting: Nothing much needs done here besides letting us crafting multiple instances of the same item at once.  Waiting 12 hours just to cut into your forma stock again is obnoxious, unnecessary, and overall hurts the experience of the game.

 

Mastery Challenges:  Lets be honest, these are painfully easy.  Some ideas to improve them would be: Default loadouts, no bringing your shiny, 6 forma catalyst'd hek to finish a challenge in 10 seconds.  There should also be more ways to gain mastery rank than leveling hundreds of "level to 30 and toss" weapons.  Such as unlocking all planets, completing all planets, maxing a rank 10 mod yourself(No buying a rank 8 serration or something like that), etc.

 

Mission Roulette:  Randomly selects a mission that is scaled to your current loadout level.  These would have there own pool of new mods/parts/etc and bonus credits/resources.  These could be completed 1-5 times a day.

 

Login rewards:  Please dear god remove the useless rewards from 7 day streak rewards.  Instead of weapon xp add in common/uncommon mods for days 1-6, and fusion cores to 7+.  The logic is that people first logging in for 1-6 days are more than likely new or can't play often, and will benefit the most from a larger mod pool, and people logging in at 7+ will always need more fusions.  Adding 30-60 minute credit/affinity/resource boosters would also be a nice way to kick off a gaming session.

 

Markers on weapons already maxed:  In every screen, not just our codex, and also on weapons that have been forma'd.  It's a small quality of life improvement that would get nothing but a positive response unless they're *@##$ing about "Oh my gawwwddd you fixed this but didn't fix that!?"  which is unavoidable.

[A Simple Rework Of Chat Could Make Trade More Bearable:]

Introduce a filtering system to chat, where either the inputted word/s are highlighted, or omit all posts except the one being filtered for.  This would strike a nice medium between a free market and marketboards(Even though I'd generally prefer a marketboard, I understand why it may not be economically feasible for this particular game).  The only real catch would be that you're still waiting for quite some time for your purchase/sale.

 

Alternatively, open up a website similar to Path of Exile's: http://poe.trade/ then move all trading to the forums.  The drawback to this system, however, is that the seller/buyer may not always be on when you're looking to make the purchase/sale, but it's still far better than busting a blood vessel in your eye scrolling through trade chat.

 

These are my proposed solutions, since the most obvious one for games(Marketboard) is not a desirable fix, even if it would cleanly resolve the main gripes many people have with trading, which are the wait, the unstable prices, and the eye strain.

[I Dont Know Which Decision Makers Have Farming As A Life Style In The Dev Group, But It Would Be Slowly Time To Get Rid Of Them]

I never played WoT, that's why I didn't mention it. MOBAs and Battlefield don't work like WF. The grind isn't the main focus nor the goal, each match is. Nobody (or at least not many people) plays Warframe to "just play a match on Cyath". Unlocking new things, getting more loot or ranking up equipment is currently the primary objective in Warframe. MMOs are often all about progression as well, and I've rarely seen someone enjoy "picking up 10 chicken feathers and taking them to that guy over there".

 

It is somewhat similar to Killing Floor, except that each KF match has more "substance" than half of Warframe (I like WF, but I get a lot more involved in each KF match than in any WF event), which means you can actually play it after you have all perks maxed and you'd still feel like you are achieving something after every match. It also somewhat helps that it takes centuries to max everything... but while you are leveling a perk you don't feel like you are gaining nothing at all with every match (even though you are), because the game itself is solid enough.

 

Warframe either needs to be as engaging as Battlefield, Killing Floor or any good MOBA or it needs a endgame people can't possibly "complete".

With Warframe's current iteration I see almost no options for providing "end game" content. The timed courses in the Void were a step in the right direction, but it's not like DE can just "add more bosses", or continue adding more obstacle courses. There are a lot of demands with no offers on solutions. I liken Warframe to the previously mentioned because the only real way they can "spice up the game" is to implement new game modes.

 

The unfortunate reality is that Warframe backed itself into a corner from the get-go. The game has no longevity and instead of balancing what's already there they're just layering more and more garbage onto it. You want challenging content but don't realize that from weapons to warframes to abilities to mechanics it needs to be polished before anything else. The game is a mess, a fun mess, but still a mess.