WidescreenJohn

It says no such thing. All Rebb did was say that currently "Whispers in the Walls has a prerequisite of The New War to access it for narrative & story reasons" and that the goal is to "allow players to use Platinum to buy a pack that unlocks & completes the replayable Quests required to access Whispers in the Walls". (Emphasis mine.) She makes NO statement whatsoever in any of her post that every, single thing - nodes, junctions, etc. - will be unlocked as part of the purchase, just that previous quests will be unlocked so that newer players can go into the Codex and start quests. She also makes no mention of the entire Origin system or other requirements that force core gameplay, nor is she saying that all quests will be unlocked, just the ones for Whispers in the Walls. This implies that Origin System grind will still be necessary for other quests, and DE has also acknowledged that they're looking for ways to streamline that, too. But I still see absolutely no problem with playing plat to skip a quest that gets unlocked during Origin System progression, just like we can with weapons, warframes, or mechs that we don't want to have to grind.

You argument is a total straw man. Skipping quests does NOT remove the obligation to unlock the planetary nodes or junctions, which is where the game modes truly exist. New players are *still* going to have to go through all of that if they want to play with veteran players. You can't simply skip through to Chains of Harrow, which requires The War Within quest. They still must play (or replay) the Mot Survival node in the Void, the end node of the Void branch accessible via Sedna. Once both conditions are met, the quest will become available from the Codex. The War Within requires The Second Dream to be completed and the Sedna junction at Pluto to be unlocked. The Second Dream requires the Neptune junction to unlocked. You can't just skip through the quests withouth performing actions in the Origin System to get to those checkpoints. So your argument about "the rest of Warframe" is pointless. New players will still have to play through the Origin system to access quests and could be skippable. So stop with the false equivalence.

You are going under an assumption that people will be skipping entire series of quests or even all of the quests to make things easier for them. I don't see that happening. And I would expect (or at least hope they would have) big warnings before allowing skipping to say, "Hey, you're going to be missing this, this, and this if you skip this. Are you sure you want to do this?" If the player still wants it, that's on them at that point. Rebb has even stated that they are looking at small packs of a few quests to let people progress more if they want. I see no problem with this. But the issue for me is that the whole notion of being against unlocking quests reeks of hypocrisy. - Buy a warframe off the market to skip the grind: OK - Buy a weapon off the market to skip the grind: OK - Buy a Prime Access pack to reduce the relic-cracking grind: OK - Buy a booster off the market to reduce the grind: OK - Buy a booster off the market when there's a DE-given doubler weekend to further reduce the grind: OMG YES! - Buy a quest off the market to skip the (often solo) grind: OMG HOW DARE YOU THIS WILL RUIN THE GAME EXPERIENCE FOR EVERYBODY! AND WHAT ABOUT THE STORY?! Are you kidding me?

There are 35 quests in the game. Some don't take long at all, sure, but some take quite a while. If we consider an average of 1.5 hours among all of those quests, you're looking at 50+ hours just to complete all of the quests. So to say that the quests have nothing to do with 100 hours is not correct. I understand that the various missions, junctions, and open world grinds are more impactful, but quests absolutely are part of the pain. We can already play plat to buy warframes and weapons off the market and skip the grind for those. (I'm looking at you, necramechs!) I see this idea as simply an extension of that. How DE decides to implement it is the key factor; but no one should have any objections to something like "Ugh, I'm not in the mood to do that quest, but I can't move on without it. Fine, here's 10 plat to skip. I can go back later if I want."

Cannot agree more. Too many people are falling back on the lore, story, etc. as an excuse to force the grind. Those have little meaning to those, including veteran players, who just want to jump into a mission and kill things. I love the lore and story behind Warframe as much as anyone else. I've spent hours completing the Cephalon Symaris stories, hunting the Solaris data fragments in Orb Vallis, looking for kuria, and such. But forcing new players to go through the story just because we love it is projection. It's no different than "I absolutely love this book, so I expect you to love this book as well!" It's very disappointing to see how many people are using the story/lore as an excuse to force people into a 100+ hour grind. Newer players do not need to know the lore behind Vox Solaris (for example) to understand the mechanics of an efficient Eidolon hunt or how to optimize an Arca Plasmor and Smeeta kavat to hold off level 60+ infested during a defense mission. It bothers be how much people are attempting to mix the two.

When DE hired YouTube creators who never played WF to do the lead up to New War, I was blown away by how much needs to be done to get to that point - WAY more than I expected because I had been doing it over the past 10 years. There is a RIDICULOUS amount of content that might not be obvious when you've had the privilege of playing it months apart as it came out. It's totally understandable if new players feel overwhelmed by that. I have friends who got turned off by the grind and never came back. I don't begrudge them that. I agree that going through the game is better (and I fully agree that Vor's Prize should be a requirement, perhaps the entire Mercury map as well so that players can experience most gameplay styles), but not everyone has the free time to go through what we have gone through. That's who this idea is geared towards. I won't blame anyone who chooses this accelerated path, especially if it helps to retain them in the long run rather than scare them off from the mountain of grind they face by taking this option away. We can already use plat to buy non-Prime warframes and weapons so that we don't have to grind for them. I simply see the Story Pack as an extension to that.