[Mastery Ranks 28 - 30...?]

They are not currently implemented in the game, as far as I know.

Though, DE did change the title of rank 30 in Update 24.6.0 (and did not mention it). It used to be Grand Master and is now True Master. I think this is because DE referred to Founder's Program participants as Grand Masters in the past and wanted to remove any possible confusion.

[Reward Quality vs Quantity: Why Nightwave is so Detrimental to New Players]

2 hours ago, taiiat said:

the Weapon Blueprints should also drop from Enemies anyways, just like Gorgon and Boar, Et Cetera. they shouldn't be an important part of a multiple month long term task system, they simply aren't relevant enough to the game for that to make sense. but that's a different matter.

Yeah, another concern of putting these old Alert weapon BP on Nightwave store is that it creates a 'noob trap'.

Back when I was a few planets in and had a very limited selection of weapons, I would have been tempted to spend 50 Wolf Cred on one of these BP because I didn't know any better. Doing that would have been a huge mistake, given that I also was extremely limited on mod slots and the Reactor/Catalyst for 75 would have served me 100 times better.

[Reward Quality vs Quantity: Why Nightwave is so Detrimental to New Players]

50 minutes ago, Genitive said:

But you will unlock rewards anyway while progressing through the star chart. That's the point of this system.

People ignore the fact that tasks are easy and can be completed organically while doing other things. On top of that you get free equipment slots, forma bundles, and catalysts, which should be much more important for new players than alt helmets anyway.

There is also no risk that you will miss an alert and have to wait who knows for how long for the next one. I took me over a year to get Vauban.

There is literally no other way to obtain the alert-only items besides the Wolf Cred store, though, so a new player is looking at a multi-year grind to get a decent collection of items compared to what used to take a couple months of casually doing a handful of alerts a day. Also, you don't socket ayatans, kill eidolons, do invasions, bounties in the plains, do sanctuary onslaught, or do sorties while progressing through the star chart. There's only like 5 acts that can be organically completed right now. Adding them all up, it's just barely over a rank worth of points.

When new players are going on Week 3 without even having gotten their first Aura mod, are people still going to be defending this as fair and a vast improvement?

You guys just don't seem to realize how heavily gated Wolf Creds are and how ungated Alerts were. You only needed planet access for Alerts, and even that was only if you didn't have a friend I think. For a decent rate of accumulating Wolf Creds, you need almost the entire game open to you and you need to be doing activities across the entire game.

[Reward Quality vs Quantity: Why Nightwave is so Detrimental to New Players]

I started playing 2 weeks ago; this is my first Warframe account on any system. Friends finally wore me down to try it, and so far, I've been loving it.

However, the recent replacement of Alerts with Nightwave has me extremely wary. I've skimmed through the dozen different threads on the front page of the forums here, but none of them seem to accurately express both the problem I am experiencing as a new player looking at the Nightwave system's rewards and the feelings I have around that issue. I want to specify that when I talk about the rewards of the Nightwave system that I'm largely talking only about the accumulation of Wolf Creds through ranks and the spending of Wolf Creds in the Nightwave store.

I like collecting things. When I play Warframe, I want to have all the helmets, all the skins (free ones anyway), all the warframes, all the weapons, all the mods, etc. Obviously, that's not realistic or even possible due to time-limited stuff, but it makes collecting things a goal for me as a player regardless. I'm sure this is not a unique thing for me in particular. Everyone likes collecting things, and in Warframe, more things means more options for how you can play this fun game. It's great to have options. As a new player coming into a game like Warframe, I want to be able to collect things quickly. They don't always have to be important things (I don't require the game to dump vaulted or limited items in my lap on every mission completion or even at all), but I have to be able to feel like if I put enough dedication into Warframe over a medium period of time that I can 'catch up' (at least in some areas). This is where Nightwave fails; it restricts the growth of new players' collections far too heavily.

Let me back up. I play a lot of Hearthstone, and I think that a trading card analogy can help here to explain why this new system is so detrimental to new players. The Alert system is like getting a pack of 5 cards. Most of the time, the majority of those cards will be mediocre or bad. For new players, though, even mediocre cards can have great uses (because they don't have access to the best cards). Additionally, all cards are useful to have at least 2 copies of for the collection aspect and the sake of having future options. For veterans, those cards will very often all be things they already had and will be instantly dismissed. The Nightwave system is like forcing players to trade in a pack of 5 cards for 1 card from a specific list of cards that rotates weekly. The options are mostly quite good, but the problem is that you've just cut the quantity of rewards down to 20% of what they used to be.

Alright, let's go back to Warframe terms again. For a veteran, this type of tradeoff is fantastic. Instead of getting almost nothing from Alerts on average, now you're getting useful things like Catalysts and Reactors on a weekly basis. The limited resource Nitrain can now be bought en masse without you having to stay up at weird hours waiting for an alert. You've been missing one lousy helmet for 6 years and with these pools of items, you have a much better chance of actually seeing it, especially if they rotate on a cycle that ensures everything gets a turn in the store! Nightwave is great for letting you fill in small remaining gaps in your already large collection like this.

For a new player, this is devastating. Instead of getting half a dozen different items or more per day from rewards that improve your game in many different ways (you can simultaneously get a helmet, a mod, credits, and resources all from just a few alerts), you have to devote a substantially greater amount of time away from your core task of unlocking the star chart in order to receive -wildly- less quantity of rewards. When I was playing the last 2 weeks, I was really excited by how quickly I was acquiring things in so many different areas at once. I was picking up new helmet blueprints (got over 10 of these in 2 weeks), new weapon blueprints (got at least 6 of these from alerts), new frame component blueprints (got 2 out of 3 for Vauban), resources that I needed for building those components (argon crystals and nitrain extracts), and loads of credits which I -desperately- needed (you don't get anywhere near enough of these while clearing the chart to even keep up with how much Endo you get - Alerts helped bridge that gap). Nightwave has severely dampened that excitement.

I'm lucky that the Alert system gave me a head start I suppose. Looking at the Wolf Cred prices right now while I sit here with my 0 Wolf Creds, the Alert system was so good to me that it feels like cheating in comparison to this. The items I got in 2 weeks would have taken several months to get via Nightwave, so I seriously don't know how you could start building a collection now as a new player. That's not even considering that they can't even complete several of the objectives on the Nightwave board, including all of the most valuable ones! They get maybe 50 Wolf Creds a week, assuming they're lucky and the objectives are completable for them. That allows them to buy ONE helmet blueprint, TWO aura mods, or ONE weapon blueprint (and none of these weapons are even that good from my limited understanding - they're meant as introduction weapons... yet are priced at ridiculous values). That's insane!

All of the comparisons I've seen trying to justify the benefits of Nightwing are focused on advancement in one part of the game at once, like "Nightwing is so much better because you can get X faster". They're mostly right. You can get specific items faster (sometimes wildly faster) and you don't have to be lucky or have no life to do it. However, the cost is just way too high. For veterans who already had most of the items in the game (whether that be frames, mods, helmets, resources, skins, or other things), the Wolf Cred part of the Nightwave system is a nice gain on average. For new players, replacing the Alert system with Wolf Cred is one of the single most harmful changes that could possibly be made.

I know this can't be intentional as there is no reason for DE to harm the new player experience so significantly. My best suggestion would be to radically reduce the prices of all aura mods, helmets, skins, blueprints, and basically every other item that is in the Wolf Cred store primarily for new players. I mean these items need like a 50% reduction minimum and that's likely still too high. Leave the Catalysts, Reactors, and other items that are essentially there to absorb the credits of veteran players at the original costs - fine. However, if you're going to limit the weekly selection of items to a crazy small subsection of the overall pool, then you need to allow new players to get most of the items in that small subsection every week. Maybe also offer a grab bag that gives you 10 items from the current pool at random for 50 Wolf Cred (probably also still too high) - anything to try to bridge the gap and help out the new player collection building experience. As it is now, new players would need years worth of Wolf Cred to get 90% of the items they wanted from it, something which would have only taken a couple months for Alerts.

Thanks for reading!

[Some feedback on the nighwave system from a casual player]

I feel like the anonymous discord poster failed to hit all of the key points as to why this system is so bad for new players.