[Improving the New Player Experience]

I just found a weapon you can buy in the market. Not even the blueprint, just a weapon, you can straight up buy.

What's the point of this? By the time any player learns of it, they'll be past the point where a cheap, direct-purchase weapon is relevant to them. I'm MR5 and I only just discovered it.

Rejiggle, reformat, redo the market! Make it very obvious what's relevant to players at the level they're at; put the items in tiers; make it easy to navigate, easy to see lots of items, easy to see how expensive / lategame all of these items are. Perhaps highlight items you can craft right now (i.e. you have all the resources for them), maybe with a little green tick. A pink tinge could be added to all weapons that are weapons, not blueprints, while a steely grey tinge could highlight weapons you would need to spend plat to buy (like Dojo research weapons that can't be bought on the market).

You've got a bunch of nifty new-player tools and they're being ignored because new players can't know about them!

Speaking of new-player tools, Ostron standing would be a great way to introduce new players to syndicates without having to piss off a rival syndicate, but you never use it to explain anything to players. Consider it! It's a great opportunity you've set up right there. Disclaimer: I've yet to do anything regarding syndicates, so I don't know what you'd actually be teaching them, but I'm sure there's something.

 

EDIT: Could you add a microforma that's fairly easy to get, used as a tutorial item, and can only forma a weapon / warframe that has no polarities (to prevent it from being OP)? You can also use this item to teach players about potatoes; sure, it's not the same item, but the way it functions is similar enough that you can explain it to players as they do it.

[Improving the New Player Experience]

When I found my first undamaged version of a damaged mod, I thought "oh, I see, so there will be better and better versions of mods, so I should avoid investing too much into this undamaged heat mod because a better heat mod will come along in a bit".

If you aren't going to remove damaged mods, you should at least explain how unique they are and that there isn't any kind of mod progression until much later (primed mods - I don't know anything about them but a friend has told me they exist).

[Improving the New Player Experience]

How much resource are you looking to put into the NPE?

Could you create a half dozen new quests, covering a new player's first 2-20 hours of gameplay?

Because there is a ton of stuff to learn, and you absolutely cannot just throw it all at a player and expect it to stick. But you could spread it across a long time period, perhaps even locking it off until the player has done the relevant quest (just like you currently do! see also: Archwings, Kubrows). Seriously, disable advanced parkour until the player has unlocked it. stuff like that. Quests give players a purpose; unlocking more kit to play with is a great goal for a player to have. Look at all the people who love unlocking new stuff while they play, for example, Metroid.

You could make an entire game out of learning the "basics" of Warframe. New players can enjoy it. Me, personally; a lot of my enjoyment of a game comes from learning it. That enjoyment vanishes if I have to look it up; being taught by the game is fun. That's fun I barely had in Warframe, and I can never have, now that I know the game. I'd love for other players to have the chance.

And for those players who hate this kind of wait, give them an option to take a test which runs like an MR test and expects them to perform everything on a checklist, to be sure they know how. If they wanna just look it all up and skim through it, make that easy on them, let them do so in-game! A "skip" button is crappy, but a skip *system* could be good.

As I'm sure you're aware, balancing the NPE of slow players vs. those who want to blaze through the early game and hit the lategame ASAP can be a challenge. An option to skip the NPE easily but not utterly trivially might be...an option.

If you have the resources.

[Improving the New Player Experience]

Oh I've just remembered something.

Please don't suddenly enable public matchmaking to a new player when they finish the tutorial! I had no interest in randomly being matched with other people at that point, especially without being asked or informed first! Give us a little dialogue box that asks, and then once we've chosen, tell us where to go to change that setting.

Hurts even more when the first mission you're likely to be matched up with people for is your first trip into the Plains of Eidolon. Good grief, that's just a triple whammy of nothing making any sense, and other players just doing stuff for you while you stand around doing nothing.

[Improving the New Player Experience]

27 minutes ago, Daealis said:

The first real obstacle that I think is really hindering the experience overall, is that you need to go all the way to Jupiter to be able to craft your second warframe...But since all these frames require Control Modules, you are stuck with your starter frame until you reach Jupiter, or you can get someone to taxi you there, and until you farm Plastids from Phobos.

Control Modules drop in the section of the Void accessible from Phobos. No need to go to Jupiter.

[Improving the New Player Experience]

2 minutes ago, PeachPlumPair said:

I didn't even know what mastery rank did until I was like.....MR6......

Wait, mastery rank does something? Other than just letting you use mastery-locked weapons?

[Improving the New Player Experience]

16 minutes ago, Jeahanne said:

• unless I misunderstand something somewhere, new players have to do at least one mission on the Plains to get to the nearby Junction.

Just to confirm you're right here, you have to do the Plains to access most of Earth (which a new player will want to do) and access the Mars junction (which you'll want to do after you've plowed through Earth, Venus and Mercury, all of which are trivial).

[Improving the New Player Experience]

I wish I had a job where I just go from company to company implementing excellent NPE's.

[Improving the New Player Experience]

I just started playing in the last two months, and though I'm not by any means qualified, I've been playing video games for decades and the new player experience is a subject I've always been passionate about. I really, really hope you can take strides to improve the NPE, because you have an excellent game hidden behind a very ugly veil.

• What were some things you wish Warframe taught you in the first 2 hours?

Gear was never explained. I had to have a friend explain what a codex scanner was and how to use it.

Alerts, invasions, and nightmare mode aren't explained very well. Alerts are self-explanatory, but there's two kinds of nightmare mode (nightmare alerts, and the three-times-a-day-per-planet nightmare missions) that I had to look up on the wiki. Invasions on early planets are all vs Infestation, so the player doesn't understand some of the UI (it asks you to pick a side...but you can only pick one side. "Progress" on those invasions doesn't make as much sense.)

The Market is unexplained, and finding anything in there is just...well, I search in there for random words like "shotgun" and just click on every weapon to see how it goes. That's not great, is it? I want to find the newbie-friendly weapons. The stuff I can craft with resources from just Earth and Venus. Can we explain the Market? Can we allow players to find easy-to-craft equipment for themselves?

Finally, this is rather vague, but...you don't really know why you're doing anything after the tutorial. There's no goal, once you've finished the tutorial. No objective to pursue.

• Were there some things that were too overwhelming or confusing during these first 2 hours?

The controls. Open up your keybinds menu right now and read over it. Ask yourself - what's a new player going to understand? Will they know what "item popup" is? Will they understand an archwing icon?

You're barraged by item drops constantly. None of them are explained. Resources, and especially mods, drop constantly, and you just...don't know if they matter, at all. I wonder - could you just not have resources drop in tutorial missions, until you've had chance to explain them to the player?

 

• Can you recall any points in which you or a friend weren't sure what they were supposed to be doing during the first 2 hours?

After you complete the tutorial missions, there's one node of vanilla mission (that leads onto the Venus Relay), and one node for Cetus and the Plains of Eidolon. How to actually clear the Plains is not explained at all, and the Venus junction says you have to kill Eximus - but by this point in the game, no Eximus have ever spawned, so players will have no idea what to do. Can't make informed progress to Venus because they have no idea what an Eximus is; can't make informed progress past the Plains because the Plains are.....weird.

You might consider making Cetus and the Plains a side-node instead of a required node. You might also consider having Lotus explain an Eximus (by forcing players to fight one) before you finish the tutorial.

• Any other obstacles that stood out to you at the beginning of your Warframe experience, or any particular items you feel a new player would benefit from.

More access to mark-1's and a better system to get items for new players. The foundry feels like it should only start being relevant once players have gotten past the "newbie" stage; sort of early midgame. Before that, I would love a system that lets players buy - and experiment with - other mark-1 items. A bigger variety (mark-1 shotgun? mark-1 crossbow? mark-1 hammer?). This way players can get S#&$ty items, play around with them, get a feel for what they like, and learn the game's item system, without having to ever understand the foundry, and where to get crafting materials and such. That's something that can wait a little.

Apparently you can do all of this! But it's not obvious. I'm hearing right now in the Discord server I'm in, there's a bunch of cheap, easy, bad gear to find in the market. But new players have no idea! I didn't! I'm MR4 now, grinding through a Grakata and Bronco and my fifth melee weapon, and all this time I never knew I could get cheap, easy gear in the market. Make a smaller market or different kind of option for bad, newbie weapons!

Could we lock fissures behind a quest on Mars so that new players simply don't see them? New players do not need to see fissures at all. New players don't understand farming for Prime parts or whatever, nor do they expect to. Locking content behind progress gates lets players play earlier content without behind quite so overwhelmed with information. If a player gets a relic drop, have Ordis or Lotus say "Interesting. Keep this; we'll be able to use it later, once you're stronger."

Ayatan stars and sculptures aren't explained. I just made 7.5k endo making and selling some, because a friend explained them to me. Once again, could we lock the ability to get stars and sculptures until after a quest, which can also explain them? This one might be a bit more controversial because it straight reduces the amount of endo a new player gets, but once again, it reduces the amount of information a new player is barraged with. Also, the interface for putting stars in the sculptures is....um...Pretty. But awful. It explains nothing. I had to be handheld through it!

In general, consider questlocking content. It's a way to ease players into the game.

Tooltips can be very useful to new players. Tips that pop up when you mouseover something.

I've just been informed that you can find a lot of the answers in the Codex. I had no idea until I was told just now. That fact is never made obvious to the player....and Codex options are never good solutions to players not knowing things anyway. Great that it's there, but never think that the Codex is enough on its own.

Explain Clans? They're required to get some weapons, but I've had no explanations! Make a clan quest! (This one could gate the ability to join your friends, so think long and hard about how much you gate behind a clan quest).

There are a lot of UI elements that are honestly not great - this is less about the new players and more about all players, but difficult to use interfaces hit new players disproportionately hard. Notable bad interfaces:

• The weapon comparison is...awkward. Make a good, easy way to compare any two weapons.
• Market and foundry menus have massive big buttons for each item, taking up a huge part of the screen, reducing how much you can see at once. Makes searching harder/more tedious.

Good luck with improving the NPE further. As I said; I'm truly passionate about the NPE in all games. I've come from games like Dota. The NPE there is awful too. I want it better, in all games.

Truly, good luck.