SilentMobius

Meh, I'm a Vet (by most definitions) and I'm happy it's come back. Player trade prices are not a thing that DE should ever consider when they talk about "player investment" that is entirely a player-created problem. Good on ya DE

This looks to be a more general problem but it happened on an Empyrean Grineer Galleon so I'll put it here: Enacting a Stealth finisher on an enemy while falling into a respawn volume results in a Warframe unable to use powers, move, enter operator more or do anything except quit the mission losing rewards. A good example is this tile on the Galleon where Grineer spawn off the main path looping around forever, the gap between the two circular things I am standing on here is big enough to fall into a respawn volume, especially when performing a finisher on grineer stuck here. You can see the tile layout in the mini-map

I'm not sure we can even claim that, the timelines are missing too many chunks to be sure. The discovery of Transference as relates to infested hosts is supposed to have happened after the Bio-Drone warframes had their day and were destroyed (according to the Vitruvian) so the experiments being done by Davis and the Narrator in the Rhino Prime Codex could have been post-bio-drone efforts to create non-rebellious Bio-drones, perhaps by taking samples from the original infected bio-drone hosts and mixing in other infested matter. After all, we know that the Orokin could control pure infestation as the towers have no trouble adding Ancients to its corrupted forces. For all we know the Orokin could have been theorizing that less human and more feral mixtures may provide less resistance to their usual means of control. Really we have no information about the "Bio Drone" era. The only Warframe shown in the Vitruvian is a non-prime Excalibur. The specific sequence that talks about the Bio-drone era shows a subject in some kind of suit and then a partially-infested version of the same, something that looks like no Warframe we know of. We don't even know if the quest Warframe stories are from the Bio-Drone-era or the Operator-era

I'd just like to second this. I remember the addition of dueling in U8 and conclave maps in U10 All with full warframe abilities and weapon profiles, it was a mess. All that effort: special stats for Warframes, Weapons, custom game modes and maps and it gets less use than the trials did (remember the 1.29% trials vs 1.07% PvP stats Reb gave out in 2016?)

So DE Shipped Empyrean without any solo option. It was their choice to drop that to get it out by their internal deadline. They announced it as such at the time. You can solo it by hiding your Railjack in a hollow asteroid or in between the machinery of a Grineer Dry dock and doing the whole thing in and Amesha Archwing, relying on the pathing for the Grineer fighters being terrible but this is not intended nor a supported platystyle, solo players are supposed to wait. Do this enough times and you will have intrinsic points and equipment upgrades to solo the early levels in your railjack. Right here and now there is no supported solo path, that is why the experience sucks. If you want to blame DE for a bad solo experience, blame them for the right thing, willfully leaving out the solo path.

It's pretty simple, people have gathered playing warframe at least in part because of a lack of PvP here. There are a significant amount of people who like unique Sci-Fi co-op looter shooters who not not want PvP, at all. Enough that any attempt to shoehorn PvP into any progression related game loop will cause screaming blue murder because they don't want PvP nor PvP people accumulating in warframe the way they do in D2. That and the obvious technical problem that DE development style is inherently evolutionary where there is one fitness function that they fight against "Speed of completion of PvE content" which cannot result in a level playing field for competitive gaming, short of dedicated "PvP staff" playing constant soul-draining catch up (as they were, for a long time)

Landing Craft, not the Orbiter. Everything below the ramp is the Orbiter, above the ramp is the Landing Craft that you take to missions, the Orbiter... Orbits.

Steam is non-walled garden storefront. You can get and run PC games without Steam, so Steam has to has laxer rukes regarding remuneration. The consoles are a walled garden, you can't bring things in, you can't take things out, the Consoles are the Apple App Store and Steam is the Google Play Store. The consoles sell their hardware with much lower hardware margins considering the development investment, that is recouped from walled garden transaction cuts. That's their business model, getting a cut, that is what funds their continued development and running costs. It's not "pure profit" it relies on the existance of the ecosystem and the investments and ongoing costs there. You build an asset (the ecosystem) and extract a percentage of those who use the ecosystem. Obviously promotional platinum still pays the cut, when DE give it away they pay MS/Sony/Nintendo to get it on their platform, or they have a promotional allowance built into the contract. *Sigh" I literally gave a caveat in the prior post because I knew you'd get the wrong end of the stick. "hosting" doesn't have only one meaning. Each vendor holds a certed copy of the game, they hold local identification for approved communication targets association of the game and associated purchaces, metadata with the account. Basically the same as any vendor with optional addons. They "host" the game the same way Amazon "Hosts" products other vendors, I think you'll find that the console manufacturers have done this as a result of pressure from the publishers and MS who has the advantage of having two platforms, the open PC/Windows and the closed Xbox. Just look about at the purchace information for games I quoted above (Including D2), obviously it is not that easy contractually or the above games would have it solved.

Question: DE sells platinum themselves, they also use steam but you can buy it direct if you want to. If the console overlords allowed foreign microtransaction tokens to buy things on their platform, why would any publisher ever use those platform's payment system? Hence why would any transaction ever happen in a place where the console overlords would get their cut? It's the same thing with mobile (Google Play/App store). If you control the platform you get a cut of the sales and you put rules in place to ensure that cut doesn't get sidestepped. You may not like it but that is how walled gardens work. I mean you know they take a cut of game sales right? What is a microtransaction other than a fraction of a game sale? Cert fees are just about the cost of performing the cert, nothing to do with the ongoing cost of hosting the game on their platform (Note this is not the same "hosting" as P2P vs Hosted servers, just FYI) You know that Fair's often take a cut of food vendor sales on the Fairground right? this is not a new phenomenon.

I mean if you have magic dust that affects the console ecosystem rulers desire for profit, go right ahead, but as far as I'm aware If a game publisher wants to sell and/or do microtransactions on a console platform they have to use that platform in a manner those rulers agree with, if they don't then that's a "lose" rather then a "win", and that's where we all are. Simply put, DE need them more then they need DE

Sure, auth is one issue that is only as hard as the support you get from the people providing the auth API, but that's only one part of the problems with walled garden game platforms. I've been working with auth systems from banks to telcos to delivery services for... over 20 years now (sheesh, I'm old), that part I'm pretty confident about. You're talking about the technical hurdles of crossplay I'm talking about the financial hurdles of a FTP game who monetization is entirely based on microtransactions, which is relevent to cross-progression (which is what the OP is talking about, not cross-play, Warframe cross-play has the versioning problem which is built into DE's dev cycle currently and would have a hefty cost to build out, but is not so much of the issue here) Hi Rez has the following to say about purchases: Which is a mess Now let's look at Bungie and Destiny 2 Lets look at Fortnite, one of the big guns: So yeah, everything I said holds. Only the larger players can leverage a semi-smooth experience, there are still notable holdouts and some delevopers design their monetization to avoid the problem and this is without even considering trading, which is not a thing in most of the other games

You are mistaken, the console manufacturers have allowed it purely due to pressure from the heavy hitters. They default contracts for these platforms still have very strict revenue sharing arrangements for microtransactions. Simply put, DE may or may no have enough clout to force the kinds of deals that the larger studios have, in addition some of the newer games have designed their monetization to specifically avoid a lot of the contractual pitfalls. Regardless of the platform DE gets their cut of any purchase, So fiscally they are happy. The problem is the Walled Garden "partners" who are still very resistant to let microtransaction content be switched on in they ecosystem without them getting a cut.

This is not a win-win. Percentages are extracted from real money purchases. A Steam-based Plat purchase gives a cut of that money to Valve, If that Plat could then be used to buy someting on the XBox the result is a microtransaction that happens on an MS platform that MS doesn't get a cut of, and that is not something that walled garden owners like, at all. Same for "subverted" microtransactions where the whole transaction happens elsewhere but another walled garden owner is expected to enable the content without seeing any money.

Ignoring all enginnering issues I'm pretty certain that DE's contracts with Sony/MS/Nintendo/Steam will be the defining factor. My guess is that: All Platinum will be local to the platform it's gained on. Including trading. All purchase-only cosmetics wil remain platform local (Yep I know this will kill cross-save for some but I'll bet it'll end up being a requirement) It's even possible that all materials and blueprints remain platform local with only completed gear being synchronised. As annoying as those limitations might be I think it would provide a lot of people with the utility they need while allowing DE to honour the revenue sharing agreements that they have made with Steam/MS/Nintendo/Sony I do not see any situation were DE can negotiate an agreement where purchases made in one walled garden give players content in another walled garden without the owners getting a cut. I know that some larger studios have negotiated something like that deal for a new game but given the pre-existing contracts and DE's lack of clout with those companies (Now being a one-game studio) I don't see it happening here.

I really go to bat for DE on may of the UI changes (just check my post history) I believe truly understand what DE is trying to do here and the difficulty of it. But. Pabo, Warframe does not have "recognisable icons" for the majority of cases the players actually need them. I'm not disrespecting the work of the art team but DE is making a far future Sci-Fi game, the vast majority of the "loot" you invent is has no meaningful real-world analogue to provide recognition. In addition many of the equipment designs (while visually beautiful) are horrendously noisy, resulting in icons what are very, very visually noisy, with no meaningful colour identifiers and no meaningful silouettes. Also, how many of the games you compared to are fantasy games? Where all the items have obvious and immediate real-world analogues? I've been playing this game for almost seven years now. I still have to go back and forward and back and forward in the UI because resource management is so frustrating, mostly due to lack of visible information. "Complexity" has never ever been a problem Please also remember that people who espouse "progressive disclosure" also measure and balance against "time-to-task-fulfillment", "number of actions needed" and "Task cognative load" And while I really praise the style and effort you're putting into the UI especially given the difficulty of modularisation when working in scaleform. I certainly feel that Warframe is going backwards in usability. And when you trade usability for minimum initial complexity, the resultant messaging is that you value attracting new players over the needs of current players. And that creates bad feeling, as I'm sure you've seen from the UI threads.