DE, please reconsider the repair drones thing

[Vit0Corleone]

I'm having tons of fun with Railjack, and was pretty happy with the progression systems it comes with.

This includes getting wreckage, understanding that you need to keep pushing through harder nodes to get the rare resources to repair the wreckage etc.

This is a nice goal to aim for, if it weren't for the fact that you ruined it by allowing players to basically skip all progression by paying 50p.

Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about spending plat, I can afford it just fine. I just think it's a shame that you make this irrelevant.

Simple solution, IMHO, allow repair drones to be used to speed the repair but not to skip the grind.

Edited December 14, 2019 by Vit0Corleone

[OniDax]

16 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

I'm having tons of fun with Railjack, and was pretty happy with the progression systems it comes with.

This includes getting wreckage, understanding that you need to keep pushing through harder nodes to get the rare resources to repair the wreckage etc.

This is a nice goal to aim for, if it weren't for the fact that you ruined it by allowing players to basically skip all progression by paying 50p.

Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about spending plat, I can afford it just fine. I just think it's a shame that you make this irrelevant.

Simple solution, IMHO, allow repair drones to be used to speed the repair but not to skip the grind.

You can't skip the grind. Believe me, I'd skip it if I could because I don't want to farm for these excessive resources. But I've seen no way to use the rush repair drone to skip the grind.

Edited December 14, 2019 by TheGildedOni

[Grahark]

All repairs. All ammo. Everything on the Railjack should be on a cool down or on one resource. The more resource you get in missions equals a smaller cooldown in the next. 

[Steel_Rook]

It's not just that you can skip some of the "grind," but rather that it's also stupidly expensive. I can buy permanent upgrades to my gear for 20 Plat in the form of Forma, Catalysts, Reactors, Gravimags and such, but the ability to USE an item I've picked up costs me 50? And really, why are we having to pay resources to use items we've fought to get? This is getting dangerously close to looping all the way around to TF2 "crates" where the items drop on you in spades but you have to pay money to unlock them. Between this and "sustainable rewards," I'm genuinely worried about the future of Warframe. Monetisation gets more and more aggressive, items get more and more expensive while the actual substantive content - the stuff we're supposed to want to play - gets thinner and thinner.

[Vit0Corleone]

16 hours ago, TheGildedOni said:

You can't skip the grind. Believe me, I'd skip it if I could because I don't want to farm for these excessive resources. But I've seen no way to use the rush repair drone to skip the grind.

You can. Unless it's a bug or something.

I just clicked the repair drone icon and instantly got all my MK-II gear without farming for the Saturn resources.

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

Warframe's evolving into a P2W game now. I guess Leyou demanded this. 

[Vit0Corleone]

42 minutes ago, (XB1)Erudite Prime said:

Warframe's evolving into a P2W game now. I guess Leyou demanded this. 

Not pay 2 win, but rather pay to skip the grind.

Which in itself is dumb, because you're paying to not have to play, in a way. 

[DtHouse]

I pay for the drone because i don't have a lot of time to play, so i can advance the same of the people that didn't pay. For me it's a fair way, if i wanna pay and skip the grind it's my problem, since i use my money. If you have the time to grind the mat and you like it, have fun and skip the repair drone, you aren't forced to use them.

[Vit0Corleone]

4 minutes ago, DtHouse said:

I pay for the drone because i don't have a lot of time to play, so i can advance the same of the people that didn't pay. For me it's a fair way, if i wanna pay and skip the grind it's my problem, since i use my money. If you have the time to grind the mat and you like it, have fun and skip the repair drone, you aren't forced to use them.

Except you're paying to basically skip playing. What's wrong with taking it slow? By that measure, maybe we should pay 50p to get our warframe weapons fully forma'ed and leveled up to 30 with the click of a mouse?

With things like this, give it a couple weeks and we start hearing "content drought", since there won't be much to do once you get all MK-3 gear.

[EinheriarJudith]

14 minutes ago, DtHouse said:

I pay for the drone because i don't have a lot of time to play, so i can advance the same of the people that didn't pay. For me it's a fair way, if i wanna pay and skip the grind it's my problem, since i use my money. If you have the time to grind the mat and you like it, have fun and skip the repair drone, you aren't forced to use them.

this is a tired argument. if DE didnt make the grind ridiculous in the first place, they wouldnt be selling you a solution to it. if you dont have time to play, you have more important things going on in your life right?

[Mephane]

I will be more radical than OP. Remove the entire feature of repairing dropped items. We are not showered in them, their stats are random, and they also have to compete with the stuff we can build from clan research. I have today started doing missions on Saturn. I have most of the Avionic slots upgraded to level 2, got a bunch of nice Avionics, Intrinsics etc. But the ship components are still all stock because repairing even one decent gun would require me to blow everything I have in materials, and clan research takes time. There is such a vast disparity between the different upgrade systems, caused entirely by the inability to simply use the components that we loot without jumping through extra hoops.

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, (XB1)Erudite Prime said:

Warframe's evolving into a P2W game now.

It's been P2W since I started playing it. There's very little in this game that you can earn but can't straight-up buy, and most of THAT you can trade for using real money anyway. Then you have new content releasing with massive grinds but advertising quick and easy way to skip the tedium the developers themselves put in by paying money.

You know what's worse? Repair Drones are lootboxes. I bought one because I had a superior version of my existing gun as Wreckage but didn't have the Pustrels to repair it. The game very deliberately did not tell me what the weapon's stats were, and what I got had good damage but AWFUL heat build-up which causes it to seize up after about 5 shots. So not only am I paying Plat for these things, but what I'm paying said Plat for is "surprise mechanics." This is TF2 crates all over again. I just wish I knew I was buying a loot box before I bought it, because DE's metrics have likely tagged me as "Sucker, will pay for loot boxes" now. Weak-minded whales like myself are why stuff like this keeps happening.

You have to admire DE, though. They were crunching hard trying to get Railjack, releasing it with bugs and missing features and unfinished mechanics, just about at the 11th hour, but they made it! Railjack monetisation, though? Well, that's ready to go, functioning reliably and there from Day 1. Priorities, I guess. And before anyone gives me S#&$ for being "unfair" - I haven't been able to take anything DE say or do at face value since the Old Blood and their response to criticism surrounding it. This is entirely consistent with my worst fears.

[MJ12]

2 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

It's been P2W since I started playing it. There's very little in this game that you can earn but can't straight-up buy, and most of THAT you can trade for using real money anyway. Then you have new content releasing with massive grinds but advertising quick and easy way to skip the tedium the developers themselves put in by paying money.

You know what's worse? Repair Drones are lootboxes. I bought one because I had a superior version of my existing gun as Wreckage but didn't have the Pustrels to repair it. The game very deliberately did not tell me what the weapon's stats were, and what I got had good damage but AWFUL heat build-up which causes it to seize up after about 5 shots. So not only am I paying Plat for these things, but what I'm paying said Plat for is "surprise mechanics." This is TF2 crates all over again. I just wish I knew I was buying a loot box before I bought it, because DE's metrics have likely tagged me as "Sucker, will pay for loot boxes" now. Weak-minded whales like myself are why stuff like this keeps happening.

You have to admire DE, though. They were crunching hard trying to get Railjack, releasing it with bugs and missing features and unfinished mechanics, just about at the 11th hour, but they made it! Railjack monetisation, though? Well, that's ready to go, functioning reliably and there from Day 1. Priorities, I guess. And before anyone gives me S#&$ for being "unfair" - I haven't been able to take anything DE say or do at face value since the Old Blood and their response to criticism surrounding it. This is entirely consistent with my worst fears.

FYI if you hit tab when mousing over weapons you get their stats in the Railjack UI.

Also weapons have no stat variations-only non-weapon components.

It's funny that you say this is consistent with your worst fears because you've been playing since what, 2018?

Frankly it's a return to form for DE. It has everything I remember from early Warframe. The jank. The weird and counterintuitive progression mechanics. The slow progression. The broken economy. And inexplicably despite all that it's still fun and compelling.

I'm amused at new players running into things like this and not realizing that the parts of Warframe they like looked like what Empyrean does, and they kept looking like that for the longest time.

But the flipside of this is that DE does right in the end. It takes a hell of a long time, but they do eventually make things work. Mostly.

[Steel_Rook]

44 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

It's funny that you say this is consistent with your worst fears because you've been playing since what, 2018? Frankly it's a return to form for DE. It has everything I remember from early Warframe. The jank. The weird and counterintuitive progression mechanics. The slow progression. The broken economy. And inexplicably despite all that it's still fun and compelling.

Account is I think from 2015/2016 or some such, but yes - I only really started playing for real since about 2018, though I did rack up 2200 hours... And yeah, I've heard the horror stories, the Kubrow skin slot machine, the Orokin Catalysts only available for money, the gob-smacking bad design across the board. I even sat through the whole NoClip documentary on DE and Warframe 🙂 I remember Jim Sterling fawning over himself about how good and fair DE were for offering Prime Comsetics bundles so people didn't have to re-buy the Prime Warframes they already had (making no mention of why Vaulting is even a good thing in the first place). Thing is, though, the spirit in the community was high when I first started perusing the forums. People kept insisting that Warframe is F2P done right, that DE are fair and their monetisation awesome, that they've learned from their past mistakes and were genuinely making an effort. I came into Warframe with promises of "a good F2P game."

What I've seen first-hand has... Not given me that impression? Sure, DE have plausible deniability for most of their monetisation in the form of the "gun to head" excuse. Well, nobody's putting a gun to my head and forcing me to spend money. I could just grind for everything and get it that way. After all, some random player never spent a penny and got all their Plat from trades. OK, but that's not the game's design, though. Warframe might not have loot boxes (arguably) but it has damn near everything else I'd expect from a Chinese knockoff mobile game. You have the 24-hour times you can pay to skip, the appointment mechanics asking you to log in every six hours to manually restart resource harvesters, the for-no-reason day/night cycle which exists solely to gate certain activity, the FOMO Battle Pass, not to mention all the promotional crap, all the overpriced Prime Vault crap, the list goes on.

In my short time here, I've amassed a litany of gripes with Warframe's monetisation model, but still people kept insisting it was good and fair and so on so I tried to believe it. Nightwave made me seriously wonder about that, the Old Blood basically constituted the straw that broke the camel's back. So now when I look at Railjack and I see a World of Tanks level grind where you waste your upgrade resources for ammo and repairs but you can also pay gold to have upgrades NOW, I'm starting to wonder what people were even talking about back then...

[EldritchRose]

57 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

FYI if you hit tab when mousing over weapons you get their stats in the Railjack UI.

Also weapons have no stat variations-only non-weapon components.

It's funny that you say this is consistent with your worst fears because you've been playing since what, 2018?

Frankly it's a return to form for DE. It has everything I remember from early Warframe. The jank. The weird and counterintuitive progression mechanics. The slow progression. The broken economy. And inexplicably despite all that it's still fun and compelling.

I'm amused at new players running into things like this and not realizing that the parts of Warframe they like looked like what Empyrean does, and they kept looking like that for the longest time.

But the flipside of this is that DE does right in the end. It takes a hell of a long time, but they do eventually make things work. Mostly.

This is going to save me most of my resources.

[Grey_Star_Rival_Defender]

Weird thing is how Dojo components seem to be instant in construction, but repairing stuff takes 12 hours. Somehow, fabrication takes less time than repairs.

[DrakeWurrum]

8 hours ago, MJ12 said:

FYI if you hit tab when mousing over weapons you get their stats in the Railjack UI.

Also weapons have no stat variations-only non-weapon components.

It's funny that you say this is consistent with your worst fears because you've been playing since what, 2018?

Frankly it's a return to form for DE. It has everything I remember from early Warframe. The jank. The weird and counterintuitive progression mechanics. The slow progression. The broken economy. And inexplicably despite all that it's still fun and compelling.

I'm amused at new players running into things like this and not realizing that the parts of Warframe they like looked like what Empyrean does, and they kept looking like that for the longest time.

But the flipside of this is that DE does right in the end. It takes a hell of a long time, but they do eventually make things work. Mostly.

I'm SO friggin' glad some of the other older players see this!

 

1 hour ago, Grey_Star_Rival_Defender said:

Weird thing is how Dojo components seem to be instant in construction, but repairing stuff takes 12 hours. Somehow, fabrication takes less time than repairs.

It also takes less resources than repairing. None of it is logical.

[DtHouse]

On 2019-12-14 at 9:24 PM, EinheriarJudith said:

this is a tired argument. if DE didnt make the grind ridiculous in the first place, they wouldnt be selling you a solution to it. if you dont have time to play, you have more important things going on in your life right?

So, if i'm willing to pay where is the problem? I don't have a lot of time because i work a lot and i do personal stuff, so yes, for me drone are a life safer. Thx to them i have the railjack with full MK3 and i don't have anyproblem to give money to DE since they made a lot of new things every time. Drone are good for me, if you don't like them you can allways farm the material, it's up to you. DE didn't force you to use the drone ot other market items, you can still play the game with no restrictions if the farm and the grind it's your way

[tychondus]

Its called the carrot and the stick method. The carrot is the Resource drone. The stick is the excessive requirement to repair. This was intentional. Make no mistake about it, The endgame here is your money from your wallet given to DE. That's it. To ensure people buy into this crap Archguns were nerfed. Soon Amesha will be too.

Edited December 17, 2019 by tychondus

[Aldain]

I've played f2p games before where building or grinding for an item was so heavy a time investment that many would buy them just because getting them for free was an obnoxious and pointless grind.

I get that DE needs money, but this just reeks of desperation, be it desperation for new plat purchases or to get old plat out of the market from long time market players.

[tekmansam]

First Rivens, then Kuva Weapons, now Railjack Parts.  DE is trying to hamfist randomized looter-shooter mechanics into Warframe and if that wasn't bad enough, now they are jacking up the economy just so they can extort platinum for these pseudo-lootbox type items.  What happened to the DE that removed fur patterns from the store because they were too predatory?  I fear for the direction of the company.  If they aren't careful they are going to doom themselves.

[zuraja]

One of the dumbest parts of this whole thing is that you can probably upgrade your railjack faster by farming prime parts and selling them to people than by actually doing railjack content.

Edited December 17, 2019 by zuraja

[ciTiger]

If people can/want to spend plat I see no problem with it, I think the repair costs are too hight though.

[0_The_F00l]

I only think 50p is too high, 35p would be closer to something I would purchase. 

The amount of resources needed are also rather high, the economy sure is terrible at the moment. 

[Wesir54]

13 minutes ago, 0_The_F00l said:

I only think 50p is too high, 35p would be closer to something I would purchase. 

The amount of resources needed are also rather high, the economy sure is terrible at the moment. 

I'd argue that it isn't high enough, you can spend hours grinding out all the resources for a single mk2/mk3 part or you can spend 1 hour running void fissures for prime trash to sell for plat.  They should at least require multiple repair drones depending on the tier of what you're repairing.