Packetdancer

Sure. My point was more, there's a variety of squad buffs, and if they were to just give us a blanket "disable all squad buffs," you just know some players are going to complain that they can't shut off the elemental buffs while keeping red crit buffs. Or can't shut off red crit buffs while keeping Wisp health motes. Or whatever. I think at best you kind of have to tackle each thing one at a time, like having an exilus mod for weapons which makes them exempt from squad buffs -- elemental, red crit, whatever -- to allow folks to avoid people unintentionally breaking their builds. Even there it's not going to be perfect, because you're inevitably going to encounter someone out there who wants just exemption from elemental buffs but wants to still have red crit buffs. Or someone who wants to skip the red crit buffs but still have elemental damage. Or whatever. The complexity of Warframe's systems is great for those who want to experiment with build variety and being creative, and supports a ton of different playstyles. Which is great! The downside is that it's almost impossible to have that level of complexity and not have it be possible for someone to mess up someone else's build; I don't think there's a simple, easy "make everyone happy" solution to this problem.

More to the point, I think the bigger problem would be how to have any granularity to it. Just let you render yourself unaffected by all squad buffs? Someone's gonna complain that now in order to avoid elemental damage bonuses they're going to have to give up Overguard, Wisp health motes, and Harrow's red crit buffs. Moreover, someone's going to want it to be specific per loadout, etc. I can see it being done with exilus mods or something, though. Have an exilus mod for weapons which makes the weapon exempt from squad elemental bonuses, or whatever.

Isn't that kind of the preferable option, though? That the frame gets balanced before release rather than being adjusted after players have their hands on it? That said, to some extent, I sympathize with them; putting on my game-developer hat instead of my player one... there's a reason devs like to take the old "no plan survives contact with the enemy" and twist it to suit game-dev with "no balance survives contact with the players," after all. If they find 10 ways to mess with a frame or weapon's balance and play with them pre-release, we'll find 12 more, of which 2 will render the thing brokenly OP. That's hardly a thing unique to Warframe or DE. (I do think doing a rebalance one week after release is a little bit more of a snap judgment than I'd personally have gone for, admittedly, but I grant they may also have had numbers we're not privy to which rendered the situation more dire than I realize.) Don't you mean "just kaithe around," what with this being Dagath? :P

Fair; I suppose I should say, it's why Drifter is technically able to use all emotes (whether or not they make all emotes available during transference) while Operator is not, though there's enough similarity you could try to play them all to Operator (likely with a great deal of attendant jank and deforming in certain cases). Maybe a better example would be that, so far as I can tell, Operator lacks the attachment sockets for things like syandana, while Drifter has them. (Doesn't surprise me that Kahl's also just a Warframe under the hood, though, in terms of being able to do all the emotes.)

While I agree this is a "we all lift together" scenario in terms of gameplay mechanics, in terms of player mentality it isn't always. I've run into people who'll look at the end-of-mission summary and consider it a competition as to who did the most damage, etc. But moreover, as noted earlier, "win" in "pay to win" does not itself even need to be a competitive thing with regards to other players. Rathuum (or Dog Days), or the Index, still has a "win" condition even if we're all on the same team. And you can absolutely buy better gear and hit that win condition faster. Even if everyone on your team benefits.

*traumatized Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 player noises* As explanation... in FFXIV you can "overmeld' gear, attaching more materia to the gear than it has slots for. However, there's a very high chance of breaking the materia when you try. Fundamentally, imagine if you could try to fuse extra forma into mod slots, with a low chance of success, and if you lost the forma would be gone but if you succeeded you'd have two polarities in the slot. Or something like that. Back in FFXIV 1.0, however, you did not destroy the materia if you failed... you destroyed the gear itself. So those of us who lived through that... uhm, experience of a first incarnation of the game have already dealt with a gameplay mechanic that is fundamentally the "attempting to install a forma or potato has a 50% chance of entirely destroying the frame/weapon instead" which you describe. I realize you're being sarcastic and all, but... please, no. Never again.

Hrm. Which element is that faction weak to, again? Might want to make sure you have an appropriate loadout... Joking aside, I tend to agree that "P2W" isn't necessarily a PvP-specific concept (or term). After all, you can "win" a single-player game, so you can certainly "win" a PvE game. (Your personal definition of "win" might differ from others, but regardless.)

Yes, so far as I can tell, Frames (and Drifter) share a rig. It's worth noting that Operator does not; presumably this is why Drifter can use all emotes but Operator can only use a subset.

Yes. However, quxier was saying that the bugs were seemingly only in non-Steel-Path; I have recently experienced bugs in the Steel Path version as well, so I don't think any bugginess in Duviri is tied explicitly to Steel Path versus non-Steel-Path. (Which it sounds like you agree with.)

Isn't the ship behind Jade in the promo art just Stalker's landing craft?

Just to provide some anecdotal counterpoint, I had the steel path version bug the heck out on me this past weekend once I summoned the Orowyrm. The actual 'take control of the Orowyrm' part got what I would politely call "kind of buggy" to start with -- twice I was moving from grapple point to grapple point and then abruptly died to no visible effect while the tether was still attached, leaving me falling into the void below with the tether stretching endlessly... only to have the tether pull Drifter's incapacitated form back up to the orowyrm, preventing falling far enough to actually be able to ever revive. (Though both times Drifter finally got caught on a tree as the orowyrm flew around, slammed to the ground, and I was able to revive.) Then during the actual fight, right after the kaithe stage, my frame decided to be locked in an ability casting animation. Meaning that no ability could be used (because "Ability In Use") and no weapon could be fired (because supposedly I was in animation lock). I'm not sure this is really any more buggy than some weirdness I've seen in Duviri in the past, mind you, but it does definitely attest that the Steel Path version is not entirely free of bugs.

While I agree it's not a mindset I personally adhere to, I do kind of understand it. I've had friends pick up Warframe and then get frustrated because they're at the beginning of the star chart and actually getting to the stuff they see streamers doing looks like it will take forever. And if all your friends who play are off at the endgame... sure, they can come back and play early star chart with you, but sometimes it's hard for folks to scale down so they're not just overpowering all the content you're in as a newer Tenno and leaving you no space to actually play. In some cases, the person runs out of steam (occasionally before even reaching the Second Dream) and drifts off again. So, sure, I can see people who want to skip right to the meat of things wanting a story-skip to get to later content and play more actively with friends. As I said, it's not a mindset I ascribe to, but I can at least understand where it might come from.

I just tell myself it still works immersion-wise. I mean (spoilering for the sake of anyone who hasn't been through the Second Dream or the New War yet)... It's like how the original Secret World wrote players wearing Speedos and rubber horse masks into literal Hell into the lore, having Sonnac (the Templar handler) remark at one point that he was becoming concerned about the mental/emotional stability of some of the New Bees after all the horrors they'd seen.

I still think that the easy solution is that Umbra forma should, instead of making something Umbral polarity, make it a universal polarity. We already have universal polarity for aura and stance slots, and it's not like Umbra forma are so thick on the ground that it would be game-breakingly OP; even with steel essence you can only buy one every eight weeks, after all, and otherwise they only come from Nightwave and the occasional alert. And the MR30 rank-up rewards as a one-off, I guess. At any rate, they're already pretty rare, so it would make having universal polarity on a slot still a thing you couldn't just constantly do on a whim. But it WOULD mean for those scenarios where you can't easily farm a second of something, you would have an (expensive/difficult) option to make the build more flexible. (It would also still fill the current purpose inasmuch as Umbral mods would only have a polarity-match cost reduction in universal polarity slots.) Plus, it just requires having one more polarity type in the enumeration; no worries about more storage or confusion about "what happens if you buy another config" and so on. I mean, heck, it doesn't even require "one more enumeration" since you're replacing Umbral polarity, which is already in there.

After the Dante Unbound update, human Loid actually has dialogue about Otak: So... That said, I assume that what you mean by "Otak is missing" is that current interations with Loid -- e.g. the non-human instance of Loid who now handles Deep Archimedea missions -- don't involve Otak. But interactions with that Loid in the Necraloid syndicate also didn't ever involve Otak that I can recall either, so I think it's safe to assume that since Otak appears to have zero sense of subtlety -- and everyone's trying to keep the Entrati from finding out about the labs -- that necrabot Loid probably puts Otak into some equivalent of 'sleep mode' when down in the metaphorical basement to avoid him learning about them and blurting out something revealing the existence of the Sanctum Anatomica and labs at an inopportune time.