The Garuda Grind Is Predatory at Best

[NeonXTheWolf]

I recently came across a general discussion board regarding this, but just in case, I'm gonna bring this up here so it (hopefully) gets seen. Note: This is ignoring any RNG or non-gem resources that play into Garuda's construction, and this is MY OPINION (Even if many share the sentiment). The problem with Garuda's grind has less to do with RNG resources (yes, toroid drop rates aren't fun, but if you run around the map for an hourish through the right caves, you'll come out with SOMETHING), and more to do with the fact that she requires the rank 3 and rank 4 gems to be built.

Being at MR 22 myself, that means I can get 23,000 rep in per day. Getting to rank 1 was easy, just burn 5,000 rep. Next rank required another 22,000 though, which meant that It'd cost me another day to get to r2, being two days so far. Getting to rank 3 from there costs 44,000 rep, so another two days, now at four total. At this point I'm assuming the person bought absolutely nothing with their rep and took the gem recipes for free. Lastly, you need another 70,000 standing to get to rank 4 and get the t4 gem recipe, which would take an additional 4 days for just A GEM. This means it takes a total of 8 DAYS just to get the recipes needed. On top of that, each part of Garuda takes 12 hours, but assuming you build them all at once, that's just another half of a day. Finally, it takes 3 days in the foundry for Garuda to be built. 

That totals to a MINIMUM 11 AND A HALF DAYS to build Garuda. And that's assuming that everyone playing is at least mr22, where the majority of people would be lucky to be around half that, doubling the amount of time necessary. That's also taking into account perfect RNG and complete dedication to just building the warframe, instead of enjoying the content at all. The problem is that, when compared to everything they've done in the past, this is extremely predatory for DE. If someone has the money they need to circumvent a nearly two-week grind, they will. So the options are either play exclusively fortuna for at least 8 days, then wait at least 3 and a half more, or dish out 20 dollars. Which, yes, many people have and many people will, especially after looking at the numbers. Many people have rebutted this by saying, "Oh, you shouldn't expect content in the FREE game to be FREE for you to enjoy it, that's why the market's there!" but that's both a sad excuse for a defense and a sad opinion on DE. 

Warframe has handled microtransactions and F2P well for years now. They even went as far as removing a micro-transaction pet gene change simply because too many people used it. But this? Plus the 3 new corpus weapons needing clan research, one after the other, for a total of 9 days (ignoring resources)? We all know that a company has to make money. This is not the way to do it.

[DiabolusUrsus]

I can't help but think that the fact they keep amping up the timegating for new content - the fact that you must sequentially research the new dojo weapons is another example - suggests people aren't buying Warframes or weapons from the market.

Personally, I have never really considered buying a Warframe because they are absurdly expensive for the amount of content they are likely to offer. 20+ USD in plat?

Try 10-12, or I'll just get an entirely new game or three on a Steam sale or something. IMO DE should reexamine the market pricing for their non-consumable non-cosmetic items.

Again, this is assuming that they aren't selling well enough and based on my own feelings on the matter. If there is some other reason for this worsening wait-walling, I'd be glad to hear more about it.

[NeonXTheWolf]

40 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

I can't help but think that the fact they keep amping up the timegating for new content - the fact that you must sequentially research the new dojo weapons is another example - suggests people aren't buying Warframes or weapons from the market.

First of all, while I cannot prove this with numbers or market($$) info, I think that's a pretty solid idea. Especially when you think about how the whole "timegating" thing has gotten worse and worse over time, especially since around the Plains release. Thing is, that's also when Warframe marketing (ads) were heaviest and new players were coming in more. Kinda like right now with Fortuna. Difference is, the grind for Gara wasn't nearly as bad, with the gems and alloys being from low ranks, and her plat price is 100 below Garuda.

Second of all, when you put it that way, it makes the whole thing clearer. Yes, 20 bucks is a lot of money for one in-game item-but it's either that, or play exclusively one thing in that game for 8 or more days. Some people who just don't care, but love warframe, will easily drop the money. Now I still love warframe (been playing cross-platform since the PC betas) and always will, but personally, if I manage to get $20 to drop on anything, it'll be a meal that isn't ramen. It puts players who won't pay money in a precarious situation: Play a game purely because grind, never play Garuda (which in this sense is content-locking, or paywalling), or waste your life on the declining trade market.

[Lior55]

31 minutes ago, NeonXTheWolf said:

First of all, while I cannot prove this with numbers or market($$) info, I think that's a pretty solid idea. Especially when you think about how the whole "timegating" thing has gotten worse and worse over time, especially since around the Plains release. Thing is, that's also when Warframe marketing (ads) were heaviest and new players were coming in more. Kinda like right now with Fortuna. Difference is, the grind for Gara wasn't nearly as bad, with the gems and alloys being from low ranks, and her plat price is 100 below Garuda.

Second of all, when you put it that way, it makes the whole thing clearer. Yes, 20 bucks is a lot of money for one in-game item-but it's either that, or play exclusively one thing in that game for 8 or more days. Some people who just don't care, but love warframe, will easily drop the money. Now I still love warframe (been playing cross-platform since the PC betas) and always will, but personally, if I manage to get $20 to drop on anything, it'll be a meal that isn't ramen. It puts players who won't pay money in a precarious situation: Play a game purely because grind, never play Garuda (which in this sense is content-locking, or paywalling), or waste your life on the declining trade market.

I have literally been livid all day about all of this and was thinking about making a post. I'm glad you did. I was fine going in to grind for her, but to find out that they did all of this ON TOP of her costing so much if you want to circumvent it? I don't even know seriously. It's upsetting and I'm disappointed. This grind is too much. Especially if you've hated mining since it came out. I haven't tried the new mining but it sucks the life out of me so hard. To read that I need to grind to RANK 4 to fully work on getting her??... I-I can't. Plains of Eidolon did enough damage. It was too repetitive and grindy for the cetus syndicate. I'm still not even maxed out with it because I could only manage like 2 bounties before I was like "ok I'm done", when I was playing a lot. 325 is a clear cash grab on her hype and that's disappointing because they did the same with Khora but the grind was nowhere near as serious. I need a break clearly which I thought I was already doing.

[NeonXTheWolf]

To cover more possible arguments/counterpoints, the numbers now point to Garuda being the worst time-gated frame in the game. This is taking into account the in-theory/minimum/"perfect play" solid requirements, meaning non-rng, and why it matters.

Previously, Vauban Prime was the worst offender needing 20 Nitain in order to be constructed. While Nitain is a limited resource, it has 4 guaranteed alerts every 24 hours, meaning a player can theoretically get all 20 in 5 days, 3 less than Garuda, a non-prime frame marketed alongside Fortuna as an early area for newer players. Sure, not as heavily as The Plains, but the introductory message shown alongside your first Fortuna login still pushes this idea.

Ash is another grindy frame, but one that is based entirely in RNG, and thus not correlated to the problem. Even so, Manic units (the Grineer that drop Ash's blueprints) are guaranteed to spawn, in the worst case scenario, 1 every 12 minutes, in Defection missions. Manics have an about 33% chance to drop any Ash part blueprint, with the individual odds stacked against the Systems. With the odds in mind, it'll take a likely maximum of 117 Manic kills to get the blueprints. One kill every 12 minutes, making 1404 minutes total, or 23.4 hours. A heavily RNG-based frame takes about a day to get the pieces for. That's a whole 7 days less than Garuda.

The last comparison is Oberon (not including the prime, which may be easier than normal Oberon to get). Oberon's tricky as the numbers don't exist in as nearly a cut-and-dry form as the others. See, Oberon is a frame that anyone can get and use, guaranteed, as long as they just play the game. Oberon's blueprints drop from Eximus units, which can spawn in any mission, at any level. A lucky player might get every blueprint in an hour. Ultimately, it differs from Garuda as the player isn't forced to do any one thing at a scheduled rate and time. You're probably likely to get all of Oberon's blueprints during the 8-day grind for Garuda if you're playing that much. However, if you are more of the numbers type, please understand that there is no guaranteed time as no certian amount of eximus unts are guaranteed to spawn in a certain place, however some players have said they have about a 2% chance to spawn, going up to a 20% chance over time in endless missions. There's also Eximus Stronghold modifiers/sorties, which could easily be the easy run any player needs. However, it takes roughly 4,070 Eximus kills maximum to get all of Oberon's parts. 

TL:DR-Disregarding RNG, yes, Garuda is the worst time-gated warframe and possibly item in the game. The only thing that comes close is Oberon, but only because he is based almost entirely in RNG. However, any player can, in theory, get all the blueprints for Oberon at any given time or rate doing anything in the game, whereas Garuda locks the player to Fortuna day in & day out for reputation, while being marketed as a "Beginner's frame" like Gara due to new player accessibility to Fortuna: and if you don't believe that, any player who has gone past the Earth-Venus junction and do a low-level quest is given Garuda's blueprint-then thrown to the dust.

[HUNDarkTemplar]

4 hours ago, NeonXTheWolf said:

I recently came across a general discussion board regarding this, but just in case, I'm gonna bring this up here so it (hopefully) gets seen. Note: This is ignoring any RNG or non-gem resources that play into Garuda's construction, and this is MY OPINION (Even if many share the sentiment). The problem with Garuda's grind has less to do with RNG resources (yes, toroid drop rates aren't fun, but if you run around the map for an hourish through the right caves, you'll come out with SOMETHING), and more to do with the fact that she requires the rank 3 and rank 4 gems to be built.

Being at MR 22 myself, that means I can get 23,000 rep in per day. Getting to rank 1 was easy, just burn 5,000 rep. Next rank required another 22,000 though, which meant that It'd cost me another day to get to r2, being two days so far. Getting to rank 3 from there costs 44,000 rep, so another two days, now at four total. At this point I'm assuming the person bought absolutely nothing with their rep and took the gem recipes for free. Lastly, you need another 70,000 standing to get to rank 4 and get the t4 gem recipe, which would take an additional 4 days for just A GEM. This means it takes a total of 8 DAYS just to get the recipes needed. On top of that, each part of Garuda takes 12 hours, but assuming you build them all at once, that's just another half of a day. Finally, it takes 3 days in the foundry for Garuda to be built. 

That totals to a MINIMUM 11 AND A HALF DAYS to build Garuda. And that's assuming that everyone playing is at least mr22, where the majority of people would be lucky to be around half that, doubling the amount of time necessary. That's also taking into account perfect RNG and complete dedication to just building the warframe, instead of enjoying the content at all. The problem is that, when compared to everything they've done in the past, this is extremely predatory for DE. If someone has the money they need to circumvent a nearly two-week grind, they will. So the options are either play exclusively fortuna for at least 8 days, then wait at least 3 and a half more, or dish out 20 dollars. Which, yes, many people have and many people will, especially after looking at the numbers. Many people have rebutted this by saying, "Oh, you shouldn't expect content in the FREE game to be FREE for you to enjoy it, that's why the market's there!" but that's both a sad excuse for a defense and a sad opinion on DE. 

Warframe has handled microtransactions and F2P well for years now. They even went as far as removing a micro-transaction pet gene change simply because too many people used it. But this? Plus the 3 new corpus weapons needing clan research, one after the other, for a total of 9 days (ignoring resources)? We all know that a company has to make money. This is not the way to do it.

Toroid drop chance isnt that low tho.

[NeonXTheWolf]

40 minutes ago, HUNDarkTemplar said:

Toroid drop chance isnt that low tho.

You seem to have missed the point, and the line where I say that the toroids have little to nothing to do with the grind time.....

[Ocerkin]

its a really rediculous time gate and clearly intending to push people to buy her, and it seems to be working, ive been seeing garuda around fairly regularly and theres no way anyone has built her legitimately yet and cant for quite a while yet

 

its actually pretty depressing that DE has sunk to this level of paywall, and at 20$ for a frame (325 plat) its really obvious in its attempt to force people to pay up, which worries me at what it might mean for the future, if this is only the farthest theyve gone so far and its going to get worse from here...

[HUNDarkTemplar]

38 minutes ago, NeonXTheWolf said:

You seem to have missed the point, and the line where I say that the toroids have little to nothing to do with the grind time.....

I know and agree with the other stuff, I just pointed out that toroid drop rates arent so S#&$ as all the people are making It out to be. Toroid is not the problem, daily standing limit is. 

[LupisV0lk]

Hmmm now hear me out, maybe they're doing this so people don't breeze through everything then go and REEEEEEEEE "muh content drought" REEEEEEE.

[HUNDarkTemplar]

19 minutes ago, Ocerkin said:

its a really rediculous time gate and clearly intending to push people to buy her, and it seems to be working, ive been seeing garuda around fairly regularly and theres no way anyone has built her legitimately yet and cant for quite a while yet

 

its actually pretty depressing that DE has sunk to this level of paywall, and at 20$ for a frame (325 plat) its really obvious in its attempt to force people to pay up, which worries me at what it might mean for the future, if this is only the farthest theyve gone so far and its going to get worse from here...

Idk how many people buy plat just raw, but I only buy with 75% off and I think so do many people. The regular plat price in the market are quite expensive ( still not too bad, lets say a league of legends skin is 20 euro, we have warframe skins cheaper, even the tennogen and some skins are really good ) and, while the market is a noob trap, because theres so many stuff to buy for plat which are just not worth It, but considering You can get plat quite easly as a more experience player and You dont buy useless stuff Its not that bad. Garuda on the other hand is not a useless buy atm, because theres such a bullS#&$ time gate on her, but I wouldnt say She is very expensive, because 300 plat is not much ( 20 euro is much for the character, but 300 plat is not that difficult to get and with 75% plat reduce, which should obviously be considered, Its not that rare to get It and while It is not the raw prices but most people can do just buy plat when there is 75% reduce and while It may be just marketing, so people go for this good deal and they just make the raw prices high, well, doesnt rly matter, because as long as you buy with 75% reduce the prices are still good wheter the raw prices are expensive intentionally or not, as long as you go for the "good" deal ) 

Timegating is bullS#&$ tho, but I wouldnt say Garuda is 20 bucks, Garuda is 20 bucks only for new ignorant players or very lazy people who didnt buy plat with 75% reduction and now instantly buy plat for Garuda.

[Fallen_Echo]

3 hours ago, Ocerkin said:

its a really rediculous time gate and clearly intending to push people to buy her, and it seems to be working, ive been seeing garuda around fairly regularly and theres no way anyone has built her legitimately yet and cant for quite a while yet

 

its actually pretty depressing that DE has sunk to this level of paywall, and at 20$ for a frame (325 plat) its really obvious in its attempt to force people to pay up, which worries me at what it might mean for the future, if this is only the farthest theyve gone so far and its going to get worse from here...

Its nothing new honestly.

Take a look at nidus, harrow, gara, octavia, khora and revenant. They are all have heavy RNG based drops and placed in a way that you most of the time cant just go and farm something else simultenously. All of them made precisely in a way that you are expected to buy them instead of grind them, that age is over.

 

I honestly wouldnt be suprised if the next frame coming out would have a least minimu of 5 day timegate, one hard rng material with 5% drop chance on rot c and a bunch of resources you cant effectively farm or have large amounts of.

[Fallen_Echo]

3 hours ago, LupisV0lk said:

Hmmm now hear me out, maybe they're doing this so people don't breeze through everything then go and REEEEEEEEE "muh content drought" REEEEEEE.

Its not really an efficient strategy to fill up content holes by stretching content around them with timegates. That creates a shallow experience.

[Caramello]

DE keeps one-uping the dificulty to farm/build frames, is almost like they sell them in a market or something O.o

[skyline15]

vor 8 Stunden schrieb HUNDarkTemplar:

Toroid drop chance isnt that low tho.

I have become 1 Toroid for about 6 hours of farming that ressources. One **** Toroid at all 3 Places, This drop chance is so low it seems like 0,00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent. That sucks DE

[catalyst22]

I make about 20 in that time... what are you doing?

[skyline15]

vor 1 Minute schrieb catalyst22:

I make about 20 in that time... what are you doing?

Stay in the 3 places where they drops and kill mobs, and this for hours. And yes i am in the facilities.

[Vanilla_nuka]

9 minutes ago, skyline15 said:

8 hours ago, HUNDarkTemplar said:

Toroid drop chance isnt that low tho.

I have become 1 Toroid for about 6 hours of farming that ressources. One **** Toroid at all 3 Places, This drop chance is so low it seems like 0,00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent. That sucks DE

This, toroid drop rate is insanely low right now, Ive spent hours farming and have only come across a handful of them, and when garuda needs them, as well as vox solaris for standing, its excessively grindy. you need like 30k standing with vox solaris to buy one set of operator cosmetics, even if you farmed an entire day for them, I highly doubt anyone can hit the vox solaris daily cap without some sort of resource booster

Edited November 10, 2018 by Vanilla_nuka

[catalyst22]

Don't go inside, let the alarm/police or whatever it's called rise to max., farm the incoming waves until lvl ~125(depends on your frame and gear) and then reset. 1-6 drops per run and the duration depends on how fast you can kill stuff.

[Lior55]

4 hours ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Take a look at nidus, harrow, gara, octavia, khora and revenant. They are all have heavy RNG based drops and placed in a way that you most of the time cant just go and farm something else simultenously. All of them made precisely in a way that you are expected to buy them instead of grind them, that age is over.

I don't have a problem with farming the pieces and the resources, but when you can only get the resources from one area AND you need blueprints to refine those resources AND those blueprints are behind a time gate such as this, that is a real problem. Gara was terrible for me because found POE to be ok but not super fun, but Garuda is worse and that's depressing. DE had a fine system. It wasn't so easy that you'd never think to buy a warframe and it wasn't so grindy that you were always forced to. If they continue with this particular trend it could upset the balance of what they've had with the fans thus far. I hope they make some changes soon.

[NeonXTheWolf]

7 minutes ago, moostar95 said:

I just got all of her parts in one day. some people are just looking into something to cry about. take your time and enjoy the update people. if anything, we need DE to crack down on this weird fps issue that's been happening since the release of fortuna. I want the game at max settings and fortuna tends to real slow down the fps rate. 

I'm going to assume you mean you got all the BLUEPRINTS in one day, not built them, as that's literally impossible at this point. Building them is the problem, not getting the blueprints.

[Fallen_Echo]

4 minutes ago, moostar95 said:

I just got all of her parts in one day

You missed the entire point of this discussion, we dont have any problems with her rng droprates (althought you being lucky doesnt mean the system is perfect) but we have problem with the timegate requied to get her.

11 days to build her at rank 22 if you get lucky on all rng drops.

As for the update it already started to fall apart in the eyes of most people, we have the same poe bounties we all hate twisted around to fit venus, the same standing systems, timegates to make this relatively low content appear much larger than it is actually.

[Lior55]

1 hour ago, Fallen_Echo said:

You missed the entire point of this discussion, we dont have any problems with her rng droprates (althought you being lucky doesnt mean the system is perfect) but we have problem with the timegate requied to get her.

11 days to build her at rank 22 if you get lucky on all rng drops.

As for the update it already started to fall apart in the eyes of most people, we have the same poe bounties we all hate twisted around to fit venus, the same standing systems, timegates to make this relatively low content appear much larger than it is actually.

Ignore him. He wasn't paying attention to this discussion. The thing is, is that there is plenty of content in Fortuna that has nothing to do with Garuda, so getting her in a way that doesn't feel scummy and puts her more in line with the rest of the warframes won't change anything for the rest of the content. They need to get rid of the blueprint idea for minerals and just let us mine and craft just like how we get polymer bundle and oxium. We don't need blueprints for those things. This system adds wayy too much to trying to get her. We got her blueprints. Let us go mine and craft her. No Solaris United BP gates required. Bada bing bada boom.

[SqualZell]

let's all just sit back, relax and consider that warframe has one of the best monetization models in the gaming industry. Lets see their philosophy and try to understand why Garuda, Equinox and other frames named in posts above require so much time to build, as well as to why 12-24-72 hour build time on everything.

"either time or cash" 

that's their philosophy.

- you don't want to spend money? fine, spend time. 

- you don't have time to spend? fine, spend some money.

(except for Tennogen) everything, and i mean EVERYTHING can be acquired with time/grind. not only that, they allow you to trade plat! so with a bit of grind, and I mean... a weekend's worth of relic grinding can get you enough plat to buy the frame (300ish plat) a second weekend can get you the bundle (500ish) and a 3rd weekend can get you the premium bundle (900ish plat).

Now the game being FREE, I guess it's fair to have 1 weekend worth of relic grinding to get a frame that comes with a slot and a reactor in it already?

 

[NeonXTheWolf]

1 hour ago, SqualZell said:

let's all just sit back, relax and consider that warframe has one of the best monetization models in the gaming industry. Lets see their philosophy and try to understand why Garuda, Equinox and other frames named in posts above require so much time to build, as well as to why 12-24-72 hour build time on everything.

"either time or cash" 

that's their philosophy.

- you don't want to spend money? fine, spend time. 

- you don't have time to spend? fine, spend some money.

I like that you brought that up. Again, the grind for Garuda has nothing to do with RNG when compared to Equinox. In theory, any given person could get all of Equinox's blueprints in 6 Tyl Regor kills, or 1000 kills. Garuda has a minimum time gate, depending on your MR. The lower your MR, the more likely you are to spend money on Garuda. DE knows this, which is why she costs 325 platinum-20 dollars-even when marketed to new players.

I wholeheartedly agree that DE does very well when it comes to monetizing Warframe-that's why Garuda is a problem. It's blatant and ridiculous compared to everything else they've done in the past. 

So I'll ask you this: As soon as the update dropped, you bought Garuda. Probably from hype, and DE knows this. You haven't even gotten to rank 1 with Solaris. At your MR16 cap, you get 17,000 rep per day. Yadayadayada, it would have taken you at least 11 days to just get the required gems for Garuda. What would you have done if you couldn't have bought her?

Based on your profile, you probably would have never played her. That's the idea. Nobody is going to want to do one thing for that many days in a row, let alone be able to. So to get Garuda, they HAVE to spend money. It's F2P marketing at its worst.

Also, I already mention trade, albeit briefly. The market trade in Warframe is, again, completely RNG based, and falling apart. Sellers want more plat, buyers want to spend less. Trade is a whole other problem, but likely an easier grind than just getting Garuda through gameplay. Again, that's part of the problem.