DrakeWurrum

No, I'm in my late 30s and have very limited free time in general between work hours and post-work exhaustion. A single game session lasting 20-30 minutes is absolutely something I still expect, because if I only have 5-10 minutes of free time, I don't feel free to get any decent amount of gaming - I would feel like I got blue-balled instead of actually enjoying the experience, so I instead watch something when I have little-to-no time. I certainly wouldn't go jump into an endless Fissure knowing I need to leave after a single round, because I consider that disrespectful to the other players. The only time I commit multiple hours to gaming is when I plan to do so in advance, knowing I have the free time to do so. You probably shouldn't try to judge people with the biases you hold, it seems like you tend to be way off the mark. Additionally, it feels genuinely ridiculous to me to have to actively organize for a 20-30 minute run. To my mind that's a quick PUG - the equivalent of using Duty Finder to quickly knock-out a Roulette in FFXIV.

Is anybody else getting fed up by just how rare it is to get a Public group in an endless Void Fissure (i.e. Defense, Excavation, Interception, Survival, Disruption) that will actually stick around for 4/5 rounds? (I personally prefer 5 rounds because you get a free Exceptional relic from it) In fact, it seems like the standard is that everybody leaves after a single round. I've had mixed success from simply asking people in chat how many rounds they'll go - some people don't even answer. I will often join endless Fissures and throw in older Vaulted relics with parts I don't need - both to farm Void Traces and in the hopes of getting lucky from somebody else opening a relic with a part that I DO need. But often this only lasts 1-2 rounds; this doesn't really lose me anything, but can get aggravating when I would rather just mindlessly destroy enemies for a while instead of constantly going through menus to restart the same mission again and again. On the one hand, I could find a pre-made group specifically intending to do that, but I'd rather not have to do that. I'd prefer it if groups would organically continue the mission for 4-5 rounds. I'd only realistically expect to need to form a pre-made group if I wanted to run for hours in a single mission, because that's not the norm for everybody and is a significant time commitment, which shouldn't be expected of a quick pick-up group. But going 4-5 rounds used to be normal... and it feels like that's changed in the last year or two. I could continue to run these missions solo and thus just open Relics all on my own, but then I lose the added benefits of getting lucky from other people's Relics and I'll never get the small gain of +5 Traces from somebody selecting my reward. At least then I could just mindlessly farm my way to the cap for Void Traces and get a bunch of Prime parts I could trade away for Plat/Ducats. I personally think there is simply not enough incentive to stick around for more rounds. Currently, the only incentive is improved credit and resource drops. But if I'm running Void Fissures, that's not really my goal - even when I could use more Credits or Nano Spores or whatever else, I go to Fissures for Traces or Prime parts (usually both), not Credits and resource drops. I'd do insane things with endless Fissures if there was a way to increase how many Void Traces I get or to improve my odds of a rare Relic drop beyond just upgrading to Radiant. I could sit here and type out a bunch of ideas for how this could be improved based on my biases, such as increasing Void Traces by some percentage per round, or letting us continue to use the same relic over and over until we extract (didn't it used to work that way, or am I misremembering?), or changing how we use Void Traces on Relics, or allowing people to join in-progress endless missions every round instead of only at the start, and I'm sure plenty of people have discussed all of this before, but what I think is actually worth discussing on this forum board... is to just ask specifically why this happens. From what I understand, the dev's intent is for these "endless" missions to last 4-5 rounds. I'm pretty sure they've mentioned this in devstreams before. So why do so many players leave after the first round if that's the design intent? Specifically: those of you who have done so, for what reasons do you immediately bail after the first round of a Survival/Interception/Excavation/Defense/Disruption mission? Alternatively: those of you who leave after 1 round, why *don't* you stay for more rounds? What would convince you to stick around for longer? (obviously, when there isn't a Capture/Exterminate/Mobile Defense, you take what you can get, but maybe THAT is a sign that we always need one Endless and one "quick" Fissure type to be active?)

I'm not a big fan of MOBAs myself these days, not like I used to be back in college 15 years ago. So believe me, I know where you're coming from. The only reason I even include it is because I was working on updating my old Frost builds today and was just stunned at how much more tanky he's become. And I remembered, with disappointment, that most frames are just judged by their room-clearing potential. There are a few exceptions to this (like bringing Frost or Gara for Defense, or bringing Volt or Titania to blitz a Capture mission, or the specific roles for eidolons/Orbs), but for the most part it's not really something to take into account for Warframe's looter shooter gameplay. There's no true party roles most of the time, so despite being a "co-op" game, we mostly feel like we're fighting our own team for something to kill instead. A MOBA would open up gameplay design choices that the devs could implement to make party role matter, thus allowing that game's frame's to shine in different ways than just how fast they clear enemies away. And Warframe has all the pieces it would need to put together to make a game like that - from the playable characters, to the mods for item builds, to damage types and enemy designs, etc. Would it necessarily be able to compete in the MOBA market? Maybe not, but again... I think it's fun to daydream. I'd like to think that it would appeal to the type of gamer that already enjoys MOBAs.

I'm not sure if this does fall under a specific category, but I've been working on grinding out Void Traces lately specifically to finally grab up that last rare drop that I need to finish Cobra & Crane Prime before it's vaulted, and uh... I'm genuinely starting to think that the number of Void Traces that are dropped per opened relic really needs to be looked at and adjusted, or else we need to get new content that provides us with less aggravating ways to farm this resource, or else the RNG spread of Prime part drops from relics needs to be looked at somehow. ^Because getting only 7 traces from opening a relic is ridiculous. Yeah, I know, that was me only opening a single relic, which is anywhere from 2-5 minutes of time spend in a mission, so what would I expect. I just got a bad dice roll. It happens, I know. I have tools to increase resource rewards, which I take full advantage of. But it genuinely doesn't feel good to have to open so many relics, grabbing up Prime parts that I don't need (and thus either use for Ducats or Plat through player trading), and never really feel like I make progress on collecting Void Traces. And yeah, there's plenty of things that could be said about the grind to either paint it as perfectly reasonable or completely ridiculous, but in the end grinding this resource just doesn't feel fun right now. I'm not necessarily asking for a more efficient farming method that makes this grind practically non-existent, but when the grind is as tedious as constantly opening relics and getting shafted on RNG for part drops again and again (especially since Radiant relics is *NOT* guaranteed to drop the part you want), the grind shouldn't also just be so devoid of fun that I'm spending more time watching anime on a second monitor than I am actually playing the game. And I'm not a new player. Not even close. Been playing since the Founders Pack was being sold, I just never had the money back then. I have hundreds of relics, so of course I need something to do with them anyways. Could we at least get a change that makes it so we can use Void Traces to apply to a Void Relic and basically "select" the drop from it? Maybe it takes 100 Traces to add 30% chance to one specific item inside the Void Relic, but we can do it multiple times? Or maybe I can consume other relics to choose my drop from one? Maybe if I fuse 10 relics into another one, I can select the drop I want from it? I'm just... so tired of this Void Relic design now. It's been a couple years since it was changed, can we get another update to it please?

This idea pops into my head sometimes, so I thought I would see if the community in general has ever had similar ideas. Maybe I'm just bored today; I haven't really bothered with the community forums in a couple years. Warframe as an IP has a large amount of potential that never seems to slow down. The game itself can be considered "all over the place" sometimes with what sort of content gets released. (e.g. we've got Archwing for space/underwater missions, we randomly have K-Drives and large mechs, we're about to get a friggin' motorcycle) They regularly joke "What even is this game we're making?" in dev streams, because they just kinda do whatever seems fun to do. It's part of why the game is so fun to begin with - because the devs have fun making it! Through it all, Warframe has remained anchored firmly to it's looter shooter gameplay with a focus on PvE. I want to be clear: I have no complaints about that. I am NOT a big fan of pvp, especially as I get older, largely because of the kind of people that are drawn to pvp content. I'm not here to whine and complain about the game that Warframe already is. I'm sure most of the community is of the same mind about this. However, DE has never really made a move to fully utilize the potential of the Warframe IP. DE is comfortable with the space that Warframe has carved out for them and they damn well should be, especially with regards to what we often see happen with the big "AAA" game studios these days; it seems more and more that smaller game studios fare better and produce better games. While Warframe has been shining brilliantly as a looter shooter, we also know DE is working on Soulframe for its second game. It's a huge gamble to come up with something entirely new. They need new lore, new characters, new gameplay systems, all unique enough from Warframe to have its own identity, right? Warframe is approaching 60 unique "characters" or "classes" to play in the warframes. There are enough different weapons (Primary, Secondary, and Melee) in the game that it's not really worth counting for a precise number. It's a lot and there's always more to come. There's a sizeable variety of choice for companions to equip along with our frames. There's even differences in ability kits and weapons for Operators, Drifters, and our Orbiter can even provide a unique power. Lots of variety, customization, and choice. And it's always adding more while also changing up the meta through updates to the game systems to keep everything fresh (the updates to melee combat, damage types, companion systems, shield gating, how armor scales, updates to older frames to keep them relevant, etc etc). And that's all before we get into what NPCs and enemies exist in the game and what they're capable of, not to mention that we have plenty of cosmetic skins/attachments for all of this content. The point I'm getting to it this... what if DE were to explore other game genres with Warframe? Not in the same game; I'm not talking about new game modes nor mini-games. But what if, for example, DE were to establish a new dev team, separate from the "mainline" Warframe game's amazing people, to bring us... A Warframe MOBA? Or a Battle Royale? Or an RTS? Or a "Rogueframe" a la Hollow Knight. I know Soulframe is meant to be DE's attempt at a Soulslike but... what about an actual Soulslike with the Warframe IP? Or perhaps they take Prex cards a step higher and to their own TCG (similar to how Genshin has Genius Invocation and Witcher gave us Gwent as its own standalone game or how Blizzard put out Hearthstone). We already have a mini-game where Warframes can do Tekken-style 2D fighting - why not take that a step further and develop their own Warframe Smash Bros/Warframe Sparking Zero? Why not try their hand at a creature collector game, but more dark and gritty, using the variety of companions and huntable/fishable wildlife that can be encountered in the Sol system? (Palframe? Might need more companions, but with all the Dojo decorations we have... base-building could be insane) And yeah, I'll admit, a Warframe MOBA made by a team dedicated to making that work separate from the mainline game (while still using the same/similar designs for characters and ability kits) is probably the only way DE could convince me to play Warframe pvp - whether or not I keep with it would depend on the other people who play. Maybe I'd try a "Palframe" type of game for a month and then get bored (because that genre doesn't often appeal to me for long), but plenty of others would stick with it. Thanks to the nature of the Void, other Warframe games wouldn't even need to share stories or exactly match the lore. We know there's alternate realities that canonically exist. Expanding into a different genre like that would even give players a chance to play other characters and experience something that Warframe really can't provide - like playing as Corrupted Vor or Parvos Granum. Sure, we've got the Kahl missions as a game mode, but again - that idea can be taken further! Realistically, I can see why they wouldn't do it. That means hiring more people or else ultimately slowing down Warframe development. This is something they're already having to figure out for Soulframe, after all. There's always cost associated with all of that, not to mention the risk of whatever they put out not really catching on with gamers. But all of that is a moot point, because if doing new/different things was easy, we wouldn't even have Warframe to begin with. We can at least have fun daydreaming of the possibilities.