The Waframe Fatigue Syndrome

[OrangeBisket]

This "Fatigue," is something most if not all of us had felt before. Largely felt after long missions, repeated bad luck, or being hit by the raw scale of Warframe. I want to point out my observations related to burnout that I have had during my time playing, learning and teaching Warframe.

As a founding member of a clan and early player, I have seen and taught many new tenno the basics and how to establish oneself in Waframe. In teaching, I have seen many players get hit by this burnout by the time they get to mastery rank 3 or 4. Part of this is due, I believe, to how much time one has to invest in Warframe to get at a piece of content. In the early version of the game, I could understand this as a way to control the speed of consumption of content so that DE has breathing room to not feel pressured to release incomplete or bulk content. Although this is still true, I believe that DE should re-evaluate the "time" aspect of Warframe. By time, I mean the minimum and maximum time that a player would be expected to take to complete a piece of content; like a weapon, frame or quest.

Prior requirements (MR, BPs, Relics), actual requirements (parts, resources, missions) and general accessability impact the total in-game time and effort needed in accessing content. I believe that all three of these can be streamlined to reduce fatigue without breaking any sense of value or rarity.

Prior requirements that a player will commonly need and sometimes may not be immediately obvious are things like; Mastery rank, Blueprints, Relics and Mods. However, the issue with this family of requirements is they all require a fair amount of time of general play. For recently joined tenno, this can become a little overwhelming and becomes a unintended speed bump.

• For Mastery Rank, I believe having a slightly faster progression from MR 1 to 5 would help new players have less to be gated by, and there for less requirements that they feel like the need to focus on. (potentially mini quests to help new and mid level players get a one time high xp missions as to not need to taxi)
• For Blueprints, most of the current system is simple and effective, you either find it or buy it. Some of the early weapon blueprints are credit hogs to buy and build for new tenno, money that would otherwise help upgrade mods or build other things.
• Relics and mods are requirements for other requirements (parts, missions). I believe both of these suffer from a common problem of not having a system to get an exact relic or mod. Yes, particular relics are farmable on certain missions. Also transmutation is an option to gain new mods. But neither are as clear cut as say the blueprints. I think that should both receive a system that allows for an exchange system. Something like a AI trader that takes a few of your uncommon mods to trade for that one uncommon you haven't gotten yet.

Actual requirements that players have before they can acquire that specific content they had been working for are things like resources, parts and mission nodes. These requirements also take up a large amount of time, but understandably as they directly interact with the content (ex: limbo theorem). Aside from the mission nodes, resources and parts do not always have a guaranteed path to fulfilling the requirement.

• Mission nodes are nice and obvious, you see where you need to go, which mission to do next and complete the whole planet before moving on. for once I will say that this should take up time, as expanding to new missions allows players to experience all of the core mechanics and ideas by experiencing them. I found that quests that require a mission node can make people feel like they need to rush, unfortunately, I can't see an improvement for this situation.
• Parts, like with the relic and mods, can benefit from an exchange system, although this would be more in line with the trading system. However, I believe that most relic based parts, should have a more lenient rarity curve. I enjoy the design of void traces, but I would like to see a 5 to 15% increase in roll chance. My reasoning behind this, is largely that I don't enjoy putting time into relics, upgrading a relic, then getting nothing for my added effort. My bad luck shouldn't need to be something I worry about when I had actively tried to reduce my odds against me. Alternatively, I believe that should the rare end of the relic parts become easier to obtain, the common parts gain some trading value in return.
• Resources are commonly a struggle to obtain enough of, also hard on newbies that haven't the large piles that veterans do. But the imbalance of resources by drop chances start to show once you have spent some time playing the game without focusing on gathering. By this, I mean that I remember when alloy plates where rare, but now I have a million sitting without anything that would use that amount. Once again, I would like to recommend an exchange system in which I can take some of my million alloy and convert it into something comparable. (alloy to salvage or ferrite, gallium to morphics, neurals to cells)

I also mentioned "general accessability" to which I mean a mixture of things that will affect how much effort or difficulty content could be to obtain. All of my previous points brush up on the raw needs that a player must more or less have. But the general access is more of how easy is it, how long will it take, what sort of things do I need. More broad and arbitrary, but this is something that I commonly think about when discussing something Warframe related. An example is the War, firstly one must complete enough quests to even have a Shadow Stalker. Then one will need to mark you, repeatedly, by running assassinate missions. After that, one will need to play a some what restricted list of mission types for him to spawn(non assassinates). After all that, you now can actually start farming for parts and bps of stalker's, but will still need to re-up the earlier requirements. And as I had mentioned in prior parts, having a low drop chance (15% or less) can become an issue. Largely in situations like the Stalker or rare units that have rare drops. If access to the stalker easier and faster, I would not have as much issue.

 

Sorry for the long post, but I was hit by the feeling to write this down, as Empyrean furthered this idea of "fatigue" in my head. I still enjoy Waframe, but my friends have been able to take less of it for a shorter duration before their burnt out. There is vast amount of content that I would like to get to one day, but I would like that to be within a reasonable time without taking as long as it currently does.

[Miyabi-sama]

My friend took a break after a brief dive in for Old Blood. Left me just when DE rolled out coop content. Now i'm reading this and I wanna cry.

[Lightel03]

God I hope these suggestions are taken into account once DE goes on to focus on the new player experience.

Everytime I recommend this game to a friend, they play it for a couple hours and just give up, they say that they just don`t know what to do, and whatever  they want to do takes so long that it becomes painful, so they just quit.

until then, we can only type f to all the potential lost players that Warframe could`ve had, if the new player experience revision had already happened.

[Steel_Rook]

In my own personal experience, new players almost always drop out by Jupiter or Saturn. That's where difficulty ramps up significantly and far outstrips their available gear. After a certain point, these players become entirely unable to play by themselves or make any kind of progress simply because about there is where level scaling really kicks up a notch. Elite enemies start spawning and the game slowly shifts towards requiring high-level mods, catalysts and polarised gear - all things new players can't really afford in large numbers. I lost at least one player who simply COULD NOT get past Jupiter despite my help, despite my advise, despite my assurance. Burned out, gave up and rage-quit. Another of my friends I did manage to save and push through Jupiter, largely by getting him a stock Valkyr which he really seemed to enjoy.

The problem is that Warframe is one of the stingiest games I've ever seen. It gives you NOTHING for free, it makes you work for everything and it constantly ups the ante requiring more and more grind just to stay relevant. Sure, that does tend to level off once you've cleared out the Star Chart, but a lot of new players won't even get a sniff of that. The OTHER problem - and hold onto your butts because I'm about to say something controversial - is that Warframe is all but entirely P2W. It's stingy in large part to make you PAY for stuff - pay for Catalysts/Reactors, pay for Forma, pay for Warframes and Weapons, pay for more slots, etc. I've often admitted to being a whale for the game, I buy nearly all my Forma and I use a LOT of it. I bought all my Arcanes and most of my high-level mods. I might be sitting pretty with overpowered gear comfortably dealing with the level 100+ Grineer of my Lich, but that cost me quite a bit.

The reason so many new players burn out on Warframe is because most of them try to play it as advertised - for free. And sure, you CAN do that, many people have. The problem is that this is an AGGRESSIVELY depressing experience replete with massive unconscionable grind, much wasted time and the constant reminder of all the cool stuff you CAN'T have. Not unless you turn Warframe into a job, work the Void Relics, sell your produce at the market and scrape together what you can. I don't see how this design is acceptable to people who already have pretty much exactly that kind of job in real life. For me, I have a hard time recommending Warframe to friends because I know just how expensive that game can be to really enjoy properly - enjoy as it's meant to be played - unless you put down a fairly large sum of money. Hell, the only reason I stuck around is I got a 75% off on my very first day playing it seriously, with which I bought 1000 Plat.

I've played other F2P MMOs in the past, and I don't recall many which lock THIS much of the game away from you THIS consistently while constantly offering you to buy it. Even World of Tanks, as P2W as that is with gold ammo, premium consumables and a constant backsliding progression system, at least mostly sells you a subscription service, not "quite literally everything." And I can't even use WoT as a negative example any more, because that's essentially where Kuva Liches and Railjack - what we've seen of DE's view of the future of Warframe - are a similar backsliding progression system where you grind for consumables to be able to tackle content, eating into your own progression.

I agree with the OP for the most part, but I strongly suspect most of those issues are by design, and intended to push people to the Cash Shop.

[kapn655321]

If it were not for players helping players, this game would not have been this successful.
The community is tight because it's having a very hard time alone.

Was that the point?
Or was this never noticed because we solve it for each other?

[kapn655321]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

an AGGRESSIVELY depressing experience replete with massive unconscionable grind

A great cause of burn out is that Video game rewards are playing with
(perhaps the most) fragile and volatile aspects of people: Ambitions.

Spare sets aren't a source of platinum income.
They're the get-out-of-jail-free-card for someone losing their mind behind RNG,
and an investment in having players who aren't so utterly absorbed in desires
and ambitions, that they (or anybody else around,) can't enjoy themselves.

The grind isn't a grind when you're just there to graze.
...If you're able to not feel behind ball, late to the party, or ill equipped.

When there's a clear objective in mind, it gets personal.
Players are insulted by the very fabric of the universe itself
when it takes, "just literally too many runs," to get something.

Rarity of items is balanced in a place, not meant for those people.
It's meant for people like myself, who will just wind up with a few sets over time.
Someone who is grazing will stumble into sets.. but not that one specific set.

While that's a fair place to have things, that is Not how many people play.
If you have the expectation that the game is with-holding the thing you, "need," to enjoy it,
then the whole dynamic is flipped on it's head.. and you get people running 50 relics in a row
to get one thing, before they can let themselves sleep.
...obsessive and self destructive behaviors.. being snippy to team mates..
Things that spoil the experience for them, and folks there to just graze and have fun.

Everyone having different play styles, different skill levels, different loot from RNG..
that list of, "needs," is all over the place. Every place.
An insurmountable wall of insult in some cases.
Not even knowing if that gear will perform..
That person's whole week in game is gonna be bad if they're thinking that.
Same with everyone around them.

Is that Warframe's fault?
They are the stewards and hosts of our experience; it's parameters are of their design.
They've created the platform that draws from that hunger.. so in that respect, their role is certain.
Players do not sustain the game's reputation when they are given one too many chances to feel
slighted deliberately, in an avoidable way.

Likewise, People get so driven that they aren't interested in the, "recommended usage."
We also don't want them to go easy on us, and that there Is a grave uphill slope to conquer as a team.. And we ask for that.

It's a matter of degree, to what extent this is leveraged..
and with what manner of courtesy, that a player feels personally respected regardless of if they make it up that cliff.
This goal being different for every player, would we even know when they hit the most comfortable possible medium?

They've created a platform also where players help players; where different people have special unique gear for all sorts of styles..
but who have they missed, who can they help, and who's hurting more than they intended? Surely, you've met them out there..
and we're the folks that to help dig them out for both their sake, and DE's.
While I'm happy to do that job, I'm not happy to always have to.

Edited December 18, 2019 by kapn655321

[Steel_Rook]

26 minutes ago, kapn655321 said:

A great cause of burn out is that Video game rewards are playing with (perhaps the most) fragile and volatile aspects of people: Ambitions.

That's actually a pretty good way of putting it. Modern Live Service progression systems are designed to set player ambitions high, stick us with a pretty low status quo and then task us - however implicitly - into un-sucking ourselves. This goes double when the game sends you along a progression path where difficulty spikes a LOT faster than your ability to match it. Sure, you could just stop there and quit, or stop there and grind for materials to upgrade, but that's still a psychological trick. The game is telling you "Come on! You need to progress. Everyone's progressing. Look, you have a quest which requires you to reach this Solar Rail. You're falling behind, you're not keeping up!" It's easy to TELL people to just ignore it and not be affected by it - a lot easier than that is to actually do.

This is why both of my friends that I mentioned burned out. The game presented them with a supposedly intentional path of just clearing node after node until you reach the end. Neither knew anything about the story, but were told that it "gets good" in Uranus. Trouble is, they capped out at Jupiter, desperately clawed their way to Saturn, got carried into Uranus... Only to discover that they're massively under-geared to an almost hilarious extent. All of that effort, all of that hardship, and for what? To realise you just aren't cut out for it, so go back to the low levels where you belong. It might be realistic, yes, but it's the game giving you ambition, then taking it away from you as a means of motivating you to try harder. That right there is the very definition of an abusive relationship.

This is why I tend to speak up whenever people bring up the "gun to head" excuse. Oh, nobody's putting a gun to your head making you grind/pay/do research. Just don't do it and play the game. It fundamentally disregards the power of the very psychological conditioning the game has been drilling into players' heads right from the start. Think back to something like Activision's "microtransactions-based matchmaking" patent, where the game will deliberately match you against stronger opponents to convince you their gear is what's making them awesome, then matching you against weaker opponents once you buy to convince you your new paid gear is making you awesome. Playing modern video games is an exercise of constant, subversive psychological warfare.

No, the game is never going to put a gun to your head. But it's going to do its best to put thoughts in your head, instead.

[kapn655321]

55 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

sends you along a progression path where difficulty spikes a LOT faster than your ability to match it.

There is also how this relates to cognitive dissonance.
People not receiving a fair reward, have a counter intuitively higher chance of recommending that task to others.
The value is gratified in venting it through social influence, making it about having enjoyed the task rather than profited from it.
That feeling of an incomplete transaction makes us seek whatever positive aspects of it more favorably.

It's in how transparent that is, that you're being extorted to act like you love getting f'd.
Even the slightest tip too far on that scale, and the whole balance turns into resentment.

To run a free service as this is, that's going to Need to be, part of the plan.
..and for what we get, it's hardly that we're not rewarded in game.
It's that sometimes we feel like we're transparently being asked to love it.
There's only so much of a whooping that can ever possibly feel like a lesson,
and the rest is more thinking that the person supplying it isn't doing it to be instructive.
How many of those lashes are for our own good?

The cognitive dissonance effect also falls apart when there is dissent.
It takes one person saying, "That's B.S." to flip the entire script..
People's minds become more primed not to seek validation after the fact,
but change tracks to proudly defy any attempt to not lose control.
Then everything is about what's ideally entitled, and being hyper vigilant to not be made a fool.

Even if the pay out is the same and people would enjoy it more had they not been made to question it;
they're not allowed to enjoy that because their pride is in question, and bucking the system resentfully is the new game.
Then those players pay, because it's better than not being prepared, and looking like a fool.
So, it's kind of a Win Win for DE in that respect, however..
It isn't for broke people.

There are a whoooole lot more broke people. They're eager to get involved in a free game.
They're the ones most likely to speak highly of it, should they be allowed, as they're more 
comfortable taking it in stride when there's not enough reward..

If they are made to feel insulted by the grind along the way, there's likely no coming back for
them without direct intervention from other players.

Listen to what the broke players (metrics) say is enough to quit over.. and never let it go past that.
Not so many people install this massive game because they're not that interested.

It's also important to note that, "being scared of looking foolish," is by no means the only source of
income. Some folks have enjoyed themselves, and they want to contribute to the project.
Many of us want to be able to consider our purchases to be just that.. and things like RNG and pricing
make that harder to do.
 

Edited December 18, 2019 by kapn655321

[kapn655321]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

so go back to the low levels where you belong

This I wanted to make of incredibly special note.

When this feeling creeps through the halls of the game,
that gets projected around a lot.

I am a player that has been here since 2014,
and I ABSOLUTELY get that impression from players, Still.
"You don't belong in this mission."

Fostering that is profitable, as people will pay very well
to have the right to say that to others.
Encouraging that, is despicable.. and anything that
looks like it, smells like it, feels like it, or leads to it
being a part of the experience disgusts and loses players.
(Ultimately, I believe this is why we don't have Raids anymore.)

Edited December 18, 2019 by kapn655321

[OrangeBisket]

I do also want to point out that DE overtime as added, changed and tweaked many systems to this game. This is something that I believe is the source of the problem with the frustration of slow progress, and high difficulty curve. Originally, Waframe was meant to be a quick money maker to pay the bills, but now has expanded for six years. The scale is now much larger, beyond some of the core ideas and systems that had been used as reference. By this, I mean thinks like build times, weapon and frame slots, as well as overall difficulty. In the past, the game had to rework the level system due to the shift to what players can do with newer content (power creep will happen). Systems as such will need to be updated with all things in mind. I do hope to see this sort of mentality from DE in 2020, as they have mentioned they understand reworks and tweaks are needed.

Now I feel that DE has continued to get distracted by an idea of the game having to fit in a predetermined scale. As Warframe slowly gains more content on the high end of the scale, like Empyrean and Arbitrations, I see the lower end of the scale become shorter but taller. DE does understand that some players will make this game their job. But that shouldn't be the player base that gets the most focus. Progression in Warframe use to feel like a sharp linear path, but now I see it more as a exponential curve. This is dangerous for new and moderate players that don't really want to invest that much time or money for a random free to play. Having one of the major drives in this game be investment of time like other MMO's creates a rift between players that do spend time and money, vs the people that just want a game to play for a quick bit of fun. I also believe that with the scale of the game now, people that recently join are hit by a wave of things to do, which ends in a long laundry list and only so much an individual can do in a day.

Overall, I feel like DE should revisit the older ideas and systems as to avoid punishing people. I don't enjoy being punished for having bad luck, or not having the time to farm for resources. I wonder if a QA tester could test the total time that cannot be avoided or "hard time" (total time for crafting, time running the missions) and avoidable time or "soft time" (things related to RNG, resource amounts, mission nodes). I believe that if DE where to evaluate this information with the intent to normalize the minimum and maximum time someone would take to complete something. DE has done something like this before when they where working on Fortuna. Steve even mentioned how generally un-fun Cetus felt from a fresh account in a devstream.

I also believe what is skip able by paying isn't consistent, and is one of the main reasons why I feel that re organizing content to fit more universal rules rather than per individual piece would do good. For example, the original Stalker pack was fairly expensive, and still is, yet the shadow stalker set is somewhat less, but with more items that have more rarity.

And to limit burnout for players, I feel like a negative feedback loop is required. As going after one weapon, frame or quest item then realizing how much more one could do saps some of the feeling of completion. This would be difficult to implement, as it would have to involve both mentally rewarding you for completing something, but also be able to bring you out of the "I still need to do XYZ" feeling. As currently, Warframe only has a positive feedback system that lets one continue constantly until you hit your limit and burn out.

[Salenzar]

Reading this thread was a very strange experience. I see a whole lot of intellectual discourse going on here, so first of, props for that, this actually seems like a rather intelligent discussion right off that bat. On the other hand, I do find myself not so much disagreeing with it, but I absolutely cannot even begin to relate to the experiences the posters above me seem to have had.

I see talk of a variety of subjects, that are all completely alien to me, including things such as;

Aggressive difficulty spikes, occurring around Jupiter/Uranus?
I must have missed these, as at pretty much any MR there's very easy ways to 1-shot everything, both through warframes and weapons. This may have been because I enjoyed the content that came before it, and as I found early missions that rewarded relics, I'd play those in hopes of getting the relics and I enjoyed cracking them. Perhaps that's a possible explanation as to why I never found the game to put up much resistance to anything, but it does beg the question; why are all these people who get stuck on Jupiter in such a hurry? Am I seeing this correctly that having cleared 1 node on the star chart means, for them at least, that they invariably must continue on to the next node immediately, and that it is inherently something negative when they have difficulty clearing, or cannot clear something at all? Isn't overcoming hardship part of what makes a game fun? (Mind you, this is the kind of fun I crave most from Warframe, yet am unable to find it, as the game offers little to no hardship anywhere) 
All in all, gearing up to tackle harder content is part of the game, no? If that does not constitute a good experience, then I cannot help but wonder where these people thought the journey would end up. Taking on the star chart in a linear fashion, 1 node after the after, doesn't lead anywhere. There is no end. There is no end-game. If you don't like the journey, you most definitely will not like that there is no actual ending at the end of this line.  

Players getting the feeling they "don't belong" in a certain level.
Yeah, the game tends to do that, true. In a worst case scenario newer players are going to encounter people infinitely more skilled and geared than them, and feel they don't even need to be there at all. On the other hand, this can motivate them to become just as geared and skilled as the others. 
In other scenarios, when players are simply undergeared, well, that's pretty much what I talked about in the paragraph above this one; if you're not geared enough maybe just gear up more? The game already requires little to no effort to breeze through all of the content.

The game being P2W:
I could contest this, but truthfully, the game becomes infinitely more playable after buying plat once. I got a discount, bought plat, and never lacked plat again after. Maybe some more rigorous spenders would run into this problem, as I also see talk of "needing" high-level mods, catalysts and other stuff, but I fail to see how any of this requires thousands upon thousands of plat, especially considering everything can still, realistically, be obtained for free, especially if it's only to get 1 setup to carry you through the star chart. If you, however, want to get 20 weapons all potatod with 5 forma in them and every warframe available then one might have to make a choice of how to obtain that, and how much plat might be wise to spend on that. 
I do, however, greatly wonder how one might still come to the conclusion that WF is pay to win. We are playing a game that is already borderline-impossible to lose, where the overwhelming majority of players are so overpowered that 1 player is usually sufficient to clear 99% of all content while the other 3 sit back and watch. We are already winning. Always. And nobody needed to actually pay for that. So what is your point? 
Warframe makes it easier for you to compulsively hoard everything available in the game by shelling out real money, that much is absolutely true. But I wholeheartedly disagree that we need to spend a single cent to win, as winning is all we ever bloody do in this game, and this only gets worse and worse the further in you get. By the time you reach the practically non-existent endgame, the worst thing you'll encounter is that your 4x3 accidentally becomes a 3x3 because one of your teammates happens to be less skilled than you hope they were. I guess I'll cry myself to sleep with the 1x arcane energize and 1x arcane grace that I still got from the 3x3. 

More and more "endgame" content being released.
I wish this were true. Any player who reaches the supposed "endgame" has absurd amounts of power but not a single obstacle that actually requires that power. Also, please don't trick yourself into thinking arbitrations and empyrean are actually "endgame" activities. Arbitrations are just your regular missions with slightly higher enemies, and a death mechanic that is more of an annoyance than anything else, and empyrean doesn't make use of the power you acquire on your warframe at all, it's on a completely different curve altogether. There's an initial investment that requires some credits and a small portion of the billions of resources you acquire through regular play, but that's about it. It doesn't require a tremendous amount of skill, nor does it require crazy gear setups. (Although I must concede I could be wrong on that last part - I did notice some of the enemies getting rather...beefy in the higher nodes.) 

Lastly, I see some stuff about the game being too grindy.
Well, you're right. Sort of. The game is immensely grind-heavy, and oftentimes doesn't much respect the time that you, a human being, puts into it. The most difficult thing about that is that you, yourself, have to limit how much you're willing to put into this game, and whether it's worth it or not. 

While I applaud the level of discussion going on around here, I cannot escape the feeling that many of these sentiments come from wishing to rush through the game as fast as possible in order to advance the star chart / catch up to other people / etc. However, like I said before, there's not actually anywhere to go. The content some of these new players are trying to blaze through is the game. There's no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. You're just infinitely chasing the rainbow, and if that isn't your thing, maybe burning out on the game isn't even necessarily a bad thing.

[Starbridge]

Some nice points however getting up to rank 5 is quick enough if you ask me.  BP prices could be a little lower as well as resource costs for lower grade items.  You do get 50plt for free and I always recommend new players to save it and when you are comfortable then buy a booster when you know you have time to play.  

[prodi1600]

My advice:

- take breaks from the game

- play other games

- Have other activities

- I usually play other solo games and WF, and compliment with other activities.

[kapn655321]

5 hours ago, Starbridge said:

Some nice points however getting up to rank 5 is quick enough if you ask me.  BP prices could be a little lower as well as resource costs for lower grade items.  You do get 50plt for free and I always recommend new players to save it and when you are comfortable then buy a booster when you know you have time to play.  

It's certainly possible to make some good progress, especially your first week or two.
Though, once things ramp up, folks may find it getting steep real quick.

Example, I play support. If I see someone with their starter frame on say, Jupiter,
I know for darn sure I'm working double time on them to make up for the mods and gear they absolutely don't have yet.

In those cases, it's nice to be able to say, "hey, have these 20 mods that are about critical to your survival here and up,"
but without that... Like, you don't get life gain mods like Life Strike 'till you're at least on Orb Vallis..
Healing Return, Quick Thinking, the endo for the normal life sustaining things.. all take a lot of time to come together.
In that time, there's every chance the difficulty slips from being a brisk challenge, to being an exercise in futility, or a pay wall.

I felt worried when they raised the Mastery Rank limit on Orthos Prime.
There are so many players I gave that set to that finally felt themselves in control of the power fantasy aspect of the game again,
and that kept em' going. ..Thankfully, melee just does that better in general now, so that's good.

I think DE knows all this well enough, and they're doing what they can to balance an enjoyable time with a reliable source of income.
Though the smallest imbalance in that unfortunately does translate into players getting left out.. and there's not always a way around it.
Where I'm a bit concerned is, I'm not sure their metrics are able to account for how much others help newbies pick up the slack.
Can that be accounted for, and might that play a role in just how steep things are in some special cases?
Is the experience of new players based on what they're "statistically," going to find as much as what they actually have?
Is it based on the team performance, when old timers come in and help.. and if so, what about solo folks who won't be buying boosters?

There's also every chance I'm far more a casual in this game than they designed it for,
but what I do know is I've had plenty more players hang around through casual gaming..
and very few really exited and ambitious folks make it far in game without money.. or quitting.
That's just my experience from having a clan up for 4+years.. which is still a small sample size. Mileage may vary.

[kapn655321]

7 hours ago, Salenzar said:

Isn't overcoming hardship part of what makes a game fun?

That's when you can overcome them.
It's super important that a game feels tantilizingly close to being too difficult..
but then Magically you pull it together at the last minute.
You can feel under the gun, without feeling under the boot.

Something that is real important to note.
...there are absolutely ways to cheese the game. Certain frames or mod combos.
And once you learn them from Youtube, Wikia, or other players... things are a breeze.
Though, if you're a Volt that doesn't get that an armor mod will never stop you from being squished,
you're about to find the game a miserable and deceptive let down.

If you're not looking up any guides, don't have many friends in game yet..
This is a whole different story by comparison.
A mag who hasn't figured out Parkour yet,
compared to someone who bought a Mirage and mods based off of a youtube video..
It's playing an entirely different game in those cases.
And when does a different experience go from being unique and personal style, to being just humiliatingly ill advised?
New folks won't know the difference, just the humiliation part.
 

7 hours ago, Salenzar said:

how one might still come to the conclusion that WF is pay to win

"That frame is good, you just need the mods that make them not suck."
"And which ones are those?"
"Oh, these 3 from Vault Runs, this from Arbitrations, that from a syndicate you're not in.."
"Are there any I can get free that will work for now?"
"Technically yes, but the drop chance is actually 0.03%, so you're just wasting your time."

This is not technically p2w, but if it were any closer in some cases, it would be undeniable.
I do my best to make p2w sentiment not true by giving folks free stuff, usually around the
time they appear to be feeling like, either they pay or uninstall.
That's not a new or rare sentiment from my experience.. and it's deliberately manufactured to happen.

[schilds]

8 hours ago, Salenzar said:

Aggressive difficulty spikes, occurring around Jupiter/Uranus?
I must have missed these, as at pretty much any MR there's very easy ways to 1-shot everything, both through warframes and weapons. This may have been because I enjoyed the content that came before it, and as I found early missions that rewarded relics, I'd play those in hopes of getting the relics and I enjoyed cracking them. Perhaps that's a possible explanation as to why I never found the game to put up much resistance to anything, but it does beg the question; why are all these people who get stuck on Jupiter in such a hurry? Am I seeing this correctly that having cleared 1 node on the star chart means, for them at least, that they invariably must continue on to the next node immediately, and that it is inherently something negative when they have difficulty clearing, or cannot clear something at all? Isn't overcoming hardship part of what makes a game fun? (Mind you, this is the kind of fun I crave most from Warframe, yet am unable to find it, as the game offers little to no hardship anywhere) 
 

The problem is the game doesn't teach you how to progress. It doesn't say "hey, you're having trouble here, maybe you need to discover some new mods", or "maybe you need to practice evading enemies", or "hey, you need to hang in some of these missions a bit longer because the rewards are different in each round, or whatever. I remember that when I hit a wall I thought it was because I didn't have the right weapons, or the right frame or something. There were mission types I thought couldn't be completed without a group. I was going by typical progression mechanics in other games. I see newer players making the same mistake. So players expect and try to progress by what's visible to them, making their way through the (very visible) starchart, trying to build new weapons (unlocked each MR) and frames (one every planet).

There are so many things the game doesn't explain. Where do you farm endo? Why do you need to farm it? Why would you repeat missions? Why would you stay longer than one round in a mission?I could go on, but I'm going to stop there :-P. New players don't know where to acess information, and when they find out it's often presented in a way that overloads them..

 

Quote

Taking on the star chart in a linear fashion, 1 node after the after, doesn't lead anywhere. There is no end. There is no end-game. If you don't like the journey, you most definitely will not like that there is no actual ending at the end of this line.

How are they supposed to know this? They're not even on the journey you're describing. They think they're on another journey. They've been misled by what is made most visible to them.

 

I think the game needs to help players to help each other, and clans would be the perfect vehicle for this. Why isn't there a codex available in a dojo? Why can't players try out equipment (frames, weapons, mods, whatever, at levels they don't have access to yet) using equipment donated to the dojo?

Edited December 19, 2019 by schilds

[Steel_Rook]

12 hours ago, Salenzar said:

Aggressive difficulty spikes, occurring around Jupiter/Uranus?
I must have missed these, as at pretty much any MR there's very easy ways to 1-shot everything, both through warframes and weapons. This may have been because I enjoyed the content that came before it, and as I found early missions that rewarded relics, I'd play those in hopes of getting the relics and I enjoyed cracking them. Perhaps that's a possible explanation as to why I never found the game to put up much resistance to anything, but it does beg the question; why are all these people who get stuck on Jupiter in such a hurry? Am I seeing this correctly that having cleared 1 node on the star chart means, for them at least, that they invariably must continue on to the next node immediately, and that it is inherently something negative when they have difficulty clearing, or cannot clear something at all? Isn't overcoming hardship part of what makes a game fun?

So there's a lot to unpack here. The first thing which bears mention is that - no, "overcoming hardship" is not what makes the game fun, not for everybody. I've often said that "some people treat games like a sport, other people treat games like a toy." Warframe's end-game experience (once you've figured out how it works and have most of the mods) is definitely on the "toy" side of the spectrum, with nothing much offering a meaningful speedbump that spending more money or piling on more damage won't solve. Once I had my Inaros kitted out with Adaptation, an Arcane Guardian and an Arcane Grace, I could idle in level 100+ missions and not notice. In fact, I recently did just that, Alt-Tabbing to check out a comic book a friend had linked me to, and coming back to find level 90 Grineer had been beating on me the entire time and not making a dent. DE are well aware of this, and they've been balancing the game accordingly. Actual difficulty is fairly rare, both because they know most people don't react well to it and because they genuinely don't have the tools to do that in a meaningful way thanks to power creep.

However (and this is the next thing), all of the above only applies to long-term veterans with lots of stuff. The New Player experience is DRASTICALLY different. New players don't have easy means to heal infinitely. In fact, new players don't have any means to heal AT ALL, which is why Warframes with sustain are so useful. New players don't have any means to recover energy, and consequently never get to use their abilities more than maybe a couple of times per mission. New players have crap gear and crap mods, their weapons can barely scratch level 15 enemies, their EHP can barely stand moving from cover to cover. Low-level Warframe feels like an entirely different game, like something closer to Payday 2, if anything. Hide in a corner, wait for shield recharge, get a few kills, sprint for more cover. But it gets worse. New players DON'T KNOW that they're undergeared. I remember my first time playing a level 20 mission, facing off against Elite Lancers as common enemies and having to dump entire magazines from my Gorgon just to down a single one. I know NOW that the Gorgon is just a terrible weapon and that the Magnetic damage I was using is terrible against their Ferrite armour, but I didn't know that at the time. And even if I had known, I wouldn't have been able to DO anything about it because Electric and Cold were the only Elemental damage mods I had.

It's easy to speak from the perspective of a veteran, saying stuff like "Well, it's easy, just get better gear." Having tried to introduce multiple people to this game, I can tell you from experience - it ain't that easy. They can't survive, they can't deal damage and they don't know why. Even once we establish that they need better mods, what mods? They don't know what mods exist, what mods work or WHY those mod combinations work. I've done my level best to convince people to just use critical mods on their weapons, but a lot of people don't like random criticals so they don't. Warframe offers you a lot of choices on paper, but most of them are sucker traps. It offers you a lot of weapons, but most of them are crap unless you know how to build them. It offers you a lot of Warframes, but a lot of those only really come into their own with high-level mods and a lot of experience. The reason people run into a difficulty spike around Jupiter because that's around where the game takes off the training wheels. You can fail your way to progress up until that point, blindly stumbling over backwards into mission completions. After that point, you start having to use proper builds and smart plays. Because Warframe does AN ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS JOB teaching players how to play, it feels like the game just got impossible and there's nothing you can do about it.

I've personally introduced and guided two players through the game. One NEARLY quit at Jupiter and it took a LOT of convincing for me to keep him playing, some amount of carrying, a lot of doing research for him, a lot of planning builds for him, some twining with mods and such. The other player I couldn't hold onto. He simply grew more and more resentful of the game until he had nothing positive to say about it and it was draining ME to listen to constant never-ending complaints while playing it. He's uninstalled and I doubt he's coming back. And sure, you can argue that they should have just gone back to older nodes and done grinding there, but I argue that that wouldn't have helped. What do they grind FOR? Primed gear? Well, we got them a Lex Prime, the low-hanging fruit of Primed items, but a lot of the other non-vaulted items at the time required a high MR-lock. Plus JUST Primed items wouldn't help - they're not significantly more powerful than regular items. Proper builds are what's required, but this doesn't help a player who doesn't know what a "proper build" is.

As to why keep pushing forward? Because low-level Warframe simply isn't fun. As I said - it's an entirely separate game, almost, from what Warframe becomes at high level. There's no sense of power, no sense of agency and the majority of the systems don't even work properly for lack of resources, lack of tools and lack of sustain. Moreover, low-level Warframe has nothing to offer from a narrative perspective. The reason one of the two I keep mentioning pushed forward was because he knew there was SOME kind of coherent storyline in Uranus. His constant overriding complaint was to the tune of "I don't know who anyone is, I don't know what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, I don't care about any of this. What's the story?" And there IS a story to Warframe - a damn good one, too, at least in concept if not in execution. But to GET to it, players need to push well past the point of no return, and many simply won't. Because Warframe's new player experience is bad in just about every conceivable way.

Like you, I didn't have trouble around Jupiter. I'd bought 1000 Plat, that was enough to buy me Atlas (who had quite a bit of Sustain) and Catalysts for all my important gear. I didn't even slow down until I think Neptune where Moa Puncture damage finally started outstripping Atlas' DPS. At THAT point, however, I was already far enough into the game that I knew about the Wiki, I knew how to do research and I knew how to solve potential issues. I got myself a Vanilla Rhino, then bought Rhino Prime (this was around the time of the Brains and Brawn Prime Access), then eventually got an Inaros and THAT right there turned the game around for me. FINALLY I had a Warframe who behaved how I wanted him to behave. Consequently, Inaors represents over 60% of my playtime to this day. But this was hundreds of hours in, hours upon hours of research later and a massive amount of grind later too, because #*!% hunting Juggernauts. Most people don't ever get to that point.

And hell, I had multiple near-ragequits in that amount of time anyway. Ferrite Armour on Grineer Commons was one. Kubrows were another, once I realised they had upkeep. Getting Syndicates and PvP and Cetus and MR and Primed gear all dumped on me is another still. Warframe is a massively overwhelming experience these days. New players sort of stumble through it in a haze, having no knowledge or understanding of what they're doing, why they're failing or what it is they're doing right when they succeed. So when the game suddenly ramps up the difficulty and it feels like no further progress can be made, that's overwhelming to the point where people take stock of their experience and think "#*!% it, I have other games to play which aren't frustrating." And that's without bringing up stuff like Cetus/Fortuna which are CLEARLY designed for extremely high-level players yet sold to new players as appropriate content. Yeah, because what you want a player who just finished Vor's Prize going to Cetus, fighting Tusk Grineer and having to figure out eleventy billion resources, modular weapons, Sentients, mining, fishing... I was lucky enough to mistakenly believe Cetus was ONLY high-level stuff, and so entirely ignoring it until I was done with the Star Chart, but not everyone does.

Point being, Warframe is an acquired taste. It's GODAWFUL TERRIBLE when you start it, gets mildly bearable once you get some ways in and only really gets good once you've settled into gear strong enough to comfortable handle level 30-40 enemies, because that's where the game truly opens up. But the actual new player experience is probably the worst I've had in a decade or two. Even playing classic MMOs with their crafting and gear and enhancements and whatnot was never this overwhelming.

 

12 hours ago, Salenzar said:

I do, however, greatly wonder how one might still come to the conclusion that WF is pay to win. We are playing a game that is already borderline-impossible to lose, where the overwhelming majority of players are so overpowered that 1 player is usually sufficient to clear 99% of all content while the other 3 sit back and watch. We are already winning. Always. And nobody needed to actually pay for that. So what is your point? 

That's because you're insisting on a literal transliteration of the words "pay," "to" and "win." I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that this is a genuine question and not the deliberate straw man this line of argument almost always is, so I'm going to address it in good faith.

The issue with the P2W moniker is the way it impacts balance and monetisation. It's an issue fundamentally rooted in the concept of buying power. Everything non-cosmetic in Warframe can be earned for free, this is true. Even Platinum can be earned for free (to you), so the majority of cosmetics can also be purchased that way. However, just shelling out money can entirely circumvent all of this. That, in a nutshell, is what I did. I paid ~100 Plat for Adaptation, ~500 Plat for Arcane Guardian, 1700 Plat for Arcane Grace (obviously I overpaid - I know that now), I've bought thousands of Plat's worth of Catalysts, Reactors, Forma, Exilus and so on, all of it because I can't be arsed jumping through the pointless grind and hoops that DE deliberately put in my way seemingly specifically to push me into the Market. And that right there is the kicker - being able to pay to skip gameplay raises the question of whether developers are deliberately hobbling the gameplay experience to make the Market more appealing in contrast. DE have every incentive to do so, and with The Old Blood / Empyrean / "Extrinsic Rewards," I have every reason to believe they have.

Humour me for a moment. Why do we have 12-hour build timers we can skip for Plat. Why do we have Catalyst/Reactor upgrades at all? Why are they 75 Nightwave credits vs. the 20-credit cosmetic helmets when they sell for 20 Plat on the Market vs. the 75 Plat cosmetic helmets? Why, other than because DE really want you buy them? Why does Forma have a 24-hour build timer when it can be earned fairly quickly from Void Relics? Why is every Primed Warframe launched with an accompanying $80 minimum price tag alongside the ability to earn it in-game? Surely you'd want players actually PLAYING the game and earning their new Warframe, and only sell it when it comes back around? Hell, let's go recent - why can I buy Repair Drones for 50 Platinum when repairing Wreckage otherwise has PROHIBITIVELY high costs (to the extent that I've so far managed to repair all of ONE)? I mean, why bother, when a drone can not just repair it for no resources, but also skip the 12 hour waiting time?

And sure, you can make the currently very popular "gun to head" excuse. After all, nobody put a gun to my head and MADE me spend Platinum. I could have just wasted my spare time doing long, tedious, boring, repetitive activities that I hate and unlocked it that way. I could have, but NOT doing those things is expressly what I paid for. But that right there is the catch. The "free" path is made counter-intuitively not fun not because this improves the game in any way, but rather because it makes the paid path less undesirable in comparison. The "gun to head" excuse fundamentally misunderstands the nature of video game design, as well as the nature of Skinner boxes. The game's presentation revolves around convincing you that YOU WANT THIS! Look, it's golden and magnificent, it's a superior version of the crappy thing you have. You want this. Aren't you tired of sucking? Do you want to actually dominate your enemies? Here, have this gun that's objectively better than the crappy version you have. You want this!" And the moment you go to actually get it, you're slapped across the wrists and told to go work for your reward, you entitled spoiled brat. What, do you expect everything handed to you?

I'm exaggerating for effect, obviously, but my point stands. Progression systems in modern Live Services don't exist to enhance the experience. They exist to drill a sense of ambition, a sense of "pride and accomplishment" into people's heads before they're sent off to grind content they hate. That's the conditioning. The game tells you that you want a thing, then proceeds to not give you a thing unless you do increasingly unpleasant tasks, almost as if to pinpoint your exact breaking point where you give up and just pay for it. Sure, some people never break and just keep grinding. More power to you if that's how you earned your own loot. But I have neither the time nor the patience to be taken advantage of. I recognise that modern games have been designed to test my patience until I pay because apparently paywalling content is passée. The only way I can really enjoy these kinds of games is to accept this status quo, skip the double-talk and just figure out how little I can pay to make the majority of the deliberate road blocks go away. How much do I have to pay in order to get the game to ease off on deliberately sabotaging my experience for the most part?

I call Warframe "P2W" because it's a common moniker, even if the literal meaning of the term leaves room for debate. I do this, however, because Warframe is AGGRESSIVELY monetised to a degree which is as of late starting to actively degrade the overall experience, both in terms of increasing the "cost of doing business" and in terms of systematically degenerating what progression systems we had left. It feels like there's less and less "game" to enjoy, with releases being comprised predominantly of Skinner boxes. All the grind for make-pretend rewards, none of the compelling experience. I don't complain about P2W because I don't want to pay. As you'll note above, I've paid quite a bit over the just under two years I've played this game. Paying for Warframe doesn't bother me. It's the grasping, aggressive push for monetisation I feel from every facet of new content that's starting to wear me down. You want this, pay for it! You hate that, pay to make it go away! You don't like waiting, pay to speed it up! You don't have enough resources, pay to get more! Pay more, more, it's not enough, pay more! I get it, it's a F2P title, but there's a point past which it starts to feel gratuitous.

No, Warframe doesn't have lootboxes. Kind of, if you don't count Wreckage. But "not having loot boxes" is quite literally the ONLY words of praise I can come up with for its monetisation any more, and that's a low bar.

 

13 hours ago, Salenzar said:

Well, you're right. Sort of. The game is immensely grind-heavy, and oftentimes doesn't much respect the time that you, a human being, puts into it. The most difficult thing about that is that you, yourself, have to limit how much you're willing to put into this game, and whether it's worth it or not. 

I agree, but this line of thinking is a double-edged sword. I've been playing games for 30 years, MMOs for 15. I've been taken advantage of, I've battle compulsion, I've experienced first-hand not just all the modern predatory monetisation tactics but also all the old-school time sinks. I battled burnout for the full 8 years of playing City of Heroes and came up with every single way to convince my way that no, really, I can still enjoy this of only I achieved X. I firmly believe that people need to take back agency over their own hobbies and their own spending. I've often advocated for just not playing games you don't enjoy any more, take breaks, set realistic goals and make do with enough. Play what's fun, ignore what isn't and don't let the game tell you what you want.

The reason this is a double-edged sword, however, is that it leads to a very cynical view of games and their development. Once you start paying attention to all the little psychological tricks MMOs stack against you, once you start acting to push back... You stop being the target audience for these games, and they in turn lose their appeal. That's not what developers want you to do, because a thinking customer is less likely to blow, say, 1700 Plat on an Arcane Grace in a moment of weakness and frustration, just as a random non-specific example. F2P games aren't "free." They're just as paid as the $15 a month MMOs of yesteryear, except we the whales foot the bill for everybody else. F2P titles can't function without whales, they can't function without idiots like myself massively overpaying for things we don't need, or paying over and over again to skip gameplay we know was added specifically to make us pay to skip it.

If you could wish upon a star and give instant self-awareness to all players, you would tank the F2P industry and all of mobile gaming overnight. That's why I have such a cynical view on the matter. I recognise that I'm a whale, I recognise I'm massively overpaying for things which aren't worth that much and I like to think I've minimised it to some tolerable degree, but my mentality is what modern Live Service progression systems are specifically targeted at. They are designed to spawn complaints just like mine. They NEED players complaining about them, because those complainers are the ones frustrated enough to pay money to make it go away. Those like yourself who are happy to truck along grinding as long as it's fun and walking off when it isn't - that's not where the money is. That's not what's monetisable. Developers don't WANT self-aware players with agency and responsible spending. They WANT irresponsible impulse shoppers because that's what pays the bills, so that's what they design their games around.

Trying to enjoy modern Live Service video games is a constant psychological battle between one's own desire to have fun and years upon years of psychological research. It's a war we the consumers lose by degrees all of the time.

[DoomFruit]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

If you could wish upon a star and give instant self-awareness to all players, you would tank the F2P industry and all of mobile gaming overnight.

And honestly, is that really such a bad thing? If something really is that terrible if you stand back and look at it, we're much better off without it.

[Salenzar]

Alright, this is going to be a long one. First of, thanks for the huge reply, and sharing so much of your experience. I value the input, and took some time to have a long conversation with someone who I actually introduced to WF, and who happened to quit around Uranus, just to get yet another perspective on all of these matters. Since quoting is going to be something akin to an eldritch hellscape I'll just be adding my responses in the body of your post, but in italics. I'll also take the liberty to only preserve the parts of your post I'll actually get into, as to ensure this doesn't turn into a wall of text that might make some unfortunate soul's computer catch on fire while looking at it.

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

no, "overcoming hardship" is not what makes the game fun, not for everybody. I've often said that "some people treat games like a sport, other people treat games like a toy." Warframe's end-game experience (once you've figured out how it works and have most of the mods) is definitely on the "toy" side of the spectrum, with nothing much offering a meaningful speedbump that spending more money or piling on more damage won't solve. DE are well aware of this, and they've been balancing the game accordingly. Actual difficulty is fairly rare, both because they know most people don't react well to it and because they genuinely don't have the tools to do that in a meaningful way thanks to power creep.
Not to be nitpicky, but are you completely sure most people will react badly to this? I could understand that WF, as a whole, being rather on the easy side of the spectrum of difficulty in video games might appeal more to people who enjoy easy video games, but that's not to say there would actually be a majority that is opposed to difficulty. I do, however, fully agree that it would be extremely difficult to properly implement difficulty in this game, as the power creep is rather intense, which would require any possible difficulty to have to take place outside of the aspect of raw damage output, which I admit migh just be nigh-impossible. 

However (and this is the next thing), all of the above only applies to long-term veterans with lots of stuff. The New Player experience is DRASTICALLY different. New players don't have easy means to heal infinitely. In fact, new players don't have any means to heal AT ALL ... New players have crap gear and crap mods, their weapons can barely scratch level 15 enemies, their EHP can barely stand moving from cover to cover. Low-level Warframe feels like an entirely different game, ... New players DON'T KNOW that they're undergeared. I remember my first time playing a level 20 mission, facing off against Elite Lancers as common enemies and having to dump entire magazines from my Gorgon just to down a single one. I know NOW that the Gorgon is just a terrible weapon and that the Magnetic damage I was using is terrible against their Ferrite armour, but I didn't know that at the time. And even if I had known, I wouldn't have been able to DO anything about it because Electric and Cold were the only Elemental damage mods I had.

At this point I do have to admit that many of my remarks were aimed at WF in general, and not so much the new player experience, as the general feeling I got from this thread was that it not aimed at only the new player experience(NPE). Many of your own remarks were also aimed at WF as a whole, and as such many of my remarks were also aimed at WF as a whole. Bear this in mind, as it might apply to more of what I say/have said. All I can say is that the NPE suffers immensely from a lack of information being relayed to the player, and not just the NPE, but WF as a whole suffers from this tremendously. Playing with the wiki open was almost mandatory for the majority of even my own playtime.

It's easy to speak from the perspective of a veteran, saying stuff like "Well, it's easy, just get better gear." Having tried to introduce multiple people to this game, I can tell you from experience - it ain't that easy. They can't survive, they can't deal damage and they don't know why. Even once we establish that they need better mods, what mods? They don't know what mods exist, what mods work or WHY those mod combinations work. ... The reason people run into a difficulty spike around Jupiter because that's around where the game takes off the training wheels. You can fail your way to progress up until that point, blindly stumbling over backwards into mission completions. After that point, you start having to use proper builds and smart plays. Because Warframe does AN ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS JOB teaching players how to play, it feels like the game just got impossible and there's nothing you can do about it.

Again, I aready conceded the NPE is terrible, etc, but I would still argue that the game actually increasing in difficulty should be fine. I could go into this in more detail, but I think you already understand my stance on this enough for it to not be necessary, and if so, I'll do it on a separate occassion. 

I've personally introduced and guided two players through the game. One NEARLY quit at Jupiter and it took a LOT of convincing for me to keep him playing,... And sure, you can argue that they should have just gone back to older nodes and done grinding there, but I argue that that wouldn't have helped. What do they grind FOR? Primed gear? ...Plus JUST Primed items wouldn't help - they're not significantly more powerful than regular items. Proper builds are what's required, but this doesn't help a player who doesn't know what a "proper build" is.

Again, NPE-focused mostly, but the part I put in bold is a question both new players and veterans alike struggle with, and I would argue it's a question even you should be asking yourself. Why? The grind is the game, and if you can't find an answer to this question, your experience of playing will most certainly be rather empty. 

 ... "I don't know who anyone is, I don't know what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, I don't care about any of this. What's the story?" And there IS a story to Warframe - a damn good one, too, at least in concept if not in execution. But to GET to it, players need to push well past the point of no return, and many simply won't. Because Warframe's new player experience is bad in just about every conceivable way.

Again, NPE is bad, yes, but the story is, without a doubt, one of WF's most rewarding aspects. I've also tried explaining this to the one person I tried to guide through this game, but it just didn't work. Everything leading up to it was so overwhelming and confusing that the person never made it to the start of the story. Again, a shame, but I think we're in agreement here.

I've snipped out a huge portion of your post here, which was mostly aimed at the NPE, and most of it boils down to the game communicating next to nothing to the player about how the game works. I can only agree. The next part, however, I have a lot more to say about.

 

That's because you're insisting on a literal transliteration of the words "pay," "to" and "win." I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that this is a genuine question and not the deliberate straw man this line of argument almost always is, so I'm going to address it in good faith.

No straw man here, I do, however, insist on taking a really close look at what it is that people mean when they talk about P2W mechanics, as I genuinely have never believed WF to have them, and this, if you ask me, is, in fact, closely related to what "winning" means in terms of gameplay. Like I said before, and what I'll stand by, is that we are continuously winning in WF. Aside from the roadblocks you mentioned that are related to the NPE (which are, as you also said, not experienced by everyone), we hardly lose if ever at all. Sure, there is more power to be had, but we are never paying money to win. We can pay to circumvent playing the game, but I won't even have to go into that, as you already did that for me;  

The issue with the P2W moniker is the way it impacts balance and monetisation. It's an issue fundamentally rooted in the concept of buying power. Everything non-cosmetic in Warframe can be earned for free, this is true. Even Platinum can be earned for free (to you), so the majority of cosmetics can also be purchased that way. However, just shelling out money can entirely circumvent all of this. That, in a nutshell, is what I did. I paid ~100 Plat for Adaptation, ~500 Plat for Arcane Guardian, 1700 Plat for Arcane Grace (obviously I overpaid - I know that now), I've bought thousands of Plat's worth of Catalysts, Reactors, Forma, Exilus and so on, all of it because I can't be arsed jumping through the pointless grind and hoops that DE deliberately put in my way seemingly specifically to push me into the Market. And that right there is the kicker - being able to pay to skip gameplay raises the question of whether developers are deliberately hobbling the gameplay experience to make the Market more appealing in contrast. DE have every incentive to do so, and with The Old Blood / Empyrean / "Extrinsic Rewards," I have every reason to believe they have.

Aside from the obvious point of a company having to make a profit, bla bla, the biggest take-away here for me is the part I put in bold. These "pointless grind and hoops" aren't pointless grinds and hoops. They're the game. This is Warframe. It's not pushing you into the market for you to be able to play the game. The market is there so you can choose to not play the game. But that raises a rather big question, doesn't it? And it's a question you yourself asked earlier as well: Why do you play this game? (Or as you put it: what do they grind for?) Because all content in the form of power you can obtain, be it Warframes, weapons, arcanes, or ANYTHING really that adds to your power as a player is used to clear the exact same content that you played to obtain that power. In this sense the game does seem rather pointless, and I suppose that, in the end, it boils down to nothing more than the enjoyment of being a demi-god among the relatively easy content that exists currently, but the question still stands. Why do we play this game? And perhaps more so for you; why do you truly wish to pay money to circumvent playing the game? What do you do with the power you have bought? 
(to go back to the point before this one, you paid to circumvent pointless grinds and hoops that DE put in your way. Does that feel like you paid to "win"? Did you win? Or did you just pay? I'm genuinely curious how you feel about this.)

Humour me for a moment. Why do we have 12-hour build timers we can skip for Plat. Why do we have Catalyst/Reactor upgrades at all?  Why is every Primed Warframe launched with an accompanying $80 minimum price tag alongside the ability to earn it in-game? Surely you'd want players actually PLAYING the game and earning their new Warframe, and only sell it when it comes back around?

Simple. People want things now and are willing to pay for it. And honestly, though, do they want people playing their game? Probably, yes, but they are also completely fine with players paying to not play the game, because that's essentially what most of the market is for. 

Hell, let's go recent - why can I buy Repair Drones for 50 Platinum when repairing Wreckage otherwise has PROHIBITIVELY high costs (to the extent that I've so far managed to repair all of ONE)? I mean, why bother, when a drone can not just repair it for no resources, but also skip the 12 hour waiting time?

Drones are another thing entirely. I despise them, even if it's only because the resource cost on repairing parts the normal way is absurd. It's probably much, much faster to obtain 50p in any conceivable way than it is to actually farm the resources needed. The numbers make no sense here. No discussion here. Repair drones are horrible. 

And sure, you can make the currently very popular "gun to head" excuse. After all, nobody put a gun to my head and MADE me spend Platinum. I could have just wasted my spare time doing long, tedious, boring, repetitive activities that I hate and unlocked it that way. I could have, but NOT doing those things is expressly what I paid for. But that right there is the catch. The "free" path is made counter-intuitively not fun not because this improves the game in any way, but rather because it makes the paid path less undesirable in comparison.

I'm definitely not interested in the slightest to take the gun-to-head approach here at all. I do, however, again, wonder why you play at all. These activities you describe, which you seem to loathe, they are the game itself. I also can't agree with the free path being less desirable, or unfun. I have plenty of platinum to spare, and could buy a lot of things with it, but I choose to grind for stuff, because it is the only way of achieving things in WF that gives me a sense of accomplishment. Different people, different experiences, and for me, personally, the paid path is, in fact, largely undesirable, barring a few absolutely crazy exceptions, but those are incredibly rare. 

The "gun to head" excuse fundamentally misunderstands the nature of video game design, as well as the nature of Skinner boxes. The game's presentation revolves around convincing you that YOU WANT THIS! Look, it's golden and magnificent, it's a superior version of the crappy thing you have. You want this. Aren't you tired of sucking? Do you want to actually dominate your enemies? Here, have this gun that's objectively better than the crappy version you have. You want this!" And the moment you go to actually get it, you're slapped across the wrists and told to go work for your reward, you entitled spoiled brat. What, do you expect everything handed to you?

I'm exaggerating for effect, obviously, but my point stands. Progression systems in modern Live Services don't exist to enhance the experience. They exist to drill a sense of ambition, a sense of "pride and accomplishment" into people's heads before they're sent off to grind content they hate. That's the conditioning. The game tells you that you want a thing, then proceeds to not give you a thing unless you do increasingly unpleasant tasks, almost as if to pinpoint your exact breaking point where you give up and just pay for it.

Again, if you hate the content, and find it to consist of unpleasant tasks, I have a hard time imagining how the game would be a better experience if you performed these tasks you hate with better or shinier gear? 

Sure, some people never break and just keep grinding. More power to you if that's how you earned your own loot. But I have neither the time nor the patience to be taken advantage of. I recognise that modern games have been designed to test my patience until I pay because apparently paywalling content is passée. The only way I can really enjoy these kinds of games is to accept this status quo, skip the double-talk and just figure out how little I can pay to make the majority of the deliberate road blocks go away. How much do I have to pay in order to get the game to ease off on deliberately sabotaging my experience for the most part?

I feel this sentiment only applies to people like me, who value the feeling of achievement derived from getting our stuff through grinding or challenges. It doesn't seem to apply to you, though. If you feel that the game's content only, or largely, exists to force you into the market to skip it, then I can only say, as I've said before now, that maybe you don't even like the game at all. 

I call Warframe "P2W" because it's a common moniker, even if the literal meaning of the term leaves room for debate. I do this, however, because Warframe is AGGRESSIVELY monetised to a degree which is as of late starting to actively degrade the overall experience, both in terms of increasing the "cost of doing business" and in terms of systematically degenerating what progression systems we had left. It feels like there's less and less "game" to enjoy, with releases being comprised predominantly of Skinner boxes. All the grind for make-pretend rewards, none of the compelling experience.

This part, I agree with wholeheartedly. Not much to say, we both know what skinner boxes are, we know we're the chickens, but pecking at the button has gotten very, very stale as of late. Well said.

I don't complain about P2W because I don't want to pay. As you'll note above, I've paid quite a bit over the just under two years I've played this game. Paying for Warframe doesn't bother me. It's the grasping, aggressive push for monetisation I feel from every facet of new content that's starting to wear me down. You want this, pay for it! You hate that, pay to make it go away! You don't like waiting, pay to speed it up! You don't have enough resources, pay to get more! Pay more, more, it's not enough, pay more! I get it, it's a F2P title, but there's a point past which it starts to feel gratuitous.

Why do you want "it"? (It being any objects you might want at any given time) these are usually frames or weapons or cosmetics that only allow you to play the content the game has, but that all comes back to whether or not you actually like playing that content to begin with. If the answer is, at any given point, "no", then maybe it's more so a compulsion to be in possession of something, rather than to actually use and/or enjoy it. 

No, Warframe doesn't have lootboxes. Kind of, if you don't count Wreckage. But "not having loot boxes" is quite literally the ONLY words of praise I can come up with for its monetisation any more, and that's a low bar.

 

I agree, but this line of thinking is a double-edged sword. I've been playing games for 30 years, MMOs for 15. I've been taken advantage of, I've battle compulsion, I've experienced first-hand not just all the modern predatory monetisation tactics but also all the old-school time sinks. I battled burnout for the full 8 years of playing City of Heroes and came up with every single way to convince my way that no, really, I can still enjoy this of only I achieved X. I firmly believe that people need to take back agency over their own hobbies and their own spending. I've often advocated for just not playing games you don't enjoy any more, take breaks, set realistic goals and make do with enough. Play what's fun, ignore what isn't and don't let the game tell you what you want.

You seem aware enough of all the psychology behind game design, and your own nature that I most likely cannot add anything useful at this point, other than to simply reiterate a question I've now asked a couple of times already: Do you still enjoy playing this game? 

The reason this is a double-edged sword, however, is that it leads to a very cynical view of games and their development. Once you start paying attention to all the little psychological tricks MMOs stack against you, once you start acting to push back... You stop being the target audience for these games, and they in turn lose their appeal. That's not what developers want you to do, because a thinking customer is less likely to blow, say, 1700 Plat on an Arcane Grace in a moment of weakness and frustration, just as a random non-specific example. F2P games aren't "free." They're just as paid as the $15 a month MMOs of yesteryear, except we the whales foot the bill for everybody else. F2P titles can't function without whales, they can't function without idiots like myself massively overpaying for things we don't need, or paying over and over again to skip gameplay we know was added specifically to make us pay to skip it.

If you could wish upon a star and give instant self-awareness to all players, you would tank the F2P industry and all of mobile gaming overnight. That's why I have such a cynical view on the matter. I recognise that I'm a whale, I recognise I'm massively overpaying for things which aren't worth that much and I like to think I've minimised it to some tolerable degree, but my mentality is what modern Live Service progression systems are specifically targeted at. They are designed to spawn complaints just like mine. They NEED players complaining about them, because those complainers are the ones frustrated enough to pay money to make it go away. Those like yourself who are happy to truck along grinding as long as it's fun and walking off when it isn't - that's not where the money is. That's not what's monetisable. Developers don't WANT self-aware players with agency and responsible spending. They WANT irresponsible impulse shoppers because that's what pays the bills, so that's what they design their games around.

Trying to enjoy modern Live Service video games is a constant psychological battle between one's own desire to have fun and years upon years of psychological research. It's a war we the consumers lose by degrees all of the time.

 

The last part of this does get to me, as playing WF has in fact been a bit of a war of attrition for me. Your story here was of great interest to me, as over the last couple of days I have -sigh- again started wondering if I'm playing this game in a healthy way, what I should value here, and what I shouldn't value. It's a rather tiresome battle, and to be completely honest, I'm starting to feel more and more as if playing these games that have no end is a waste of life. I could be doing other thing, better things. On the other hand, however, Ivara Prime looks pretty damn sweet. It's rather mindless, I know. What sets us two apart, however, is that I get a sense of accomplishment (no matter how minor) from obtaining these things the "regular" way, which is of course derived from how I function as a person, and my personality, which was shaped over the course of almost as many years as you have been playing games. It's almost kind of a letdown that, in the end, it boils down to "I'm me, and you're you. We differ, and therein lies the difference of our experiences".

I must however, thank you for the immense story you wrote down. It was a very interesting look into the experience of someone who is so different compared to me in terms of how we engage with this game. I really did feel like I learned a lot here, and coupled with the discussion I had with my friend over here regarding both your story and my views, I can safely say that at least 2 people valued what you wrote down. 

[DrakeWurrum]

This is why Warframe is best taken in small doses. I'll play a couple hours a day casually, and will save BIG things for weekends. I'm planning to spend hours in Railjack at once this weekend, instead of only doing one mission at a time. I might just build a crew through Recruiting for it.

I spent a good decade rapidly consuming all content from MMOs as fast as I could, then I jumped to Warframe and... found I couldn't play the game the same way.

Edited December 19, 2019 by DrakeWurrum

[Gamer798]

Perhaps our generations should lose the ability to have entertainment for a while so we understand what a luxury and a gift it is to be playing games like these. That Warfarme isn't perfect, DE makes mistakes, has horrible bugs is only natural thing to be. I haven't played a game nor an MMO in last twelve years that hasn't been otherwise. We are spoiled, arrogant and addicted to entertainment and our hunger is getting out of hand. DE works hard and their business model is quite generous.  It is still more fair in my eyes than hundreds if not thousands of game companies out there. We play and play and play and burn out thats the unfortunate truth for all games eventually and we tear it down for others. It is true that DE doesn't always listen 100% to feedback. How can you listen and please to thousands (if not millions) of people at time. It isn't reasonable. That the game is here and there generic and boring itssimply cause we have been doing it for years. 

I quit and play warframe over periods of times and i have loved it as much as my first day. I done everything there is to do and gather what is to gather more or less.
I love railjack and i love all the parts of the game.

There are horrible frustrations, there are things i want, or would love to see.
And in our current age we should tear it down cause it doesn't fix it or give it instantly on our desire.

This isn't happening in gaming alone or hereits about everything. We are creating fictional problems just to have problems.
Cause we are just so fking bored and hooked on entertainment.

For me DE does good, i hope they do better of course. But I know they need time.
Making a game like this isn't easy it takes time, effort, blood and tears and huge amount of money and in the end

 

YOU PAY FOR WARFRAME AS MUCH AS YOU WANT.

 

The reason I type this isn't fully in line with the topic here at hand, but it still answers part of what is being discussed what i also see on forum, discord, video's etc "i am tired of it so DE is useless, is bad blablabla" is just a personal issue, not a DE issue. If you don't want to play then don't play, if you want to play then play. Whatever the reason or level of frustration I don't think its fair to ruin the experience for others and the people who work daily very hard to get it done. It is good and more than fair to give feedback even if thats a bit frustrated, but never forget after every company name there are mostly a lot of casual hard working people that go home to their family just as us.

 

We forget that too often. You have the choice to play or not at all. 
More choice than many in the world have even to date.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Gamer798

[Steel_Rook]

So I worried that putting your responses inside my own quotes would make it hard to quote you back, but nope! Turns out the Warframe forums will just stick whatever I quote in the proper quote box, so that worked out 🙂

 

16 hours ago, Salenzar said:

At this point I do have to admit that many of my remarks were aimed at WF in general, and not so much the new player experience, as the general feeling I got from this thread was that it not aimed at only the new player experience(NPE). Many of your own remarks were also aimed at WF as a whole, and as such many of my remarks were also aimed at WF as a whole.

Roger. The reason I brought up the new player experience is that's where the "difficulty spike at Jupiter" line of the conversation originated. I've had tremendous issues getting new players engaged with Warframe because the game does a terrible job educating them and I'm apparently not able to help enough. However, fair point.

 

16 hours ago, Salenzar said:

Again, NPE-focused mostly, but the part I put in bold is a question both new players and veterans alike struggle with, and I would argue it's a question even you should be asking yourself. Why? The grind is the game, and if you can't find an answer to this question, your experience of playing will most certainly be rather empty. 

I have to disagree here. "Warframe is a grindy game" and variations of this are not an excuse, but the statement of an issue. "Grind" can at best be a tolerable thing, but is never actually a good thing. As with "pay 2 win," a literal transliteration of the word isn't helpful, so allow me to explain. Video game progression systems are built on a balance between activities the player is required to do and the fruits of those activities, all of it in an attempt to stimulate our natural reward response. In the past I've spoken about the "physicality" of virtual activities, such as having loot bags depicted as physics objects in Payday 2, that the player is required to manually pick up, manually carry and manually secure. Or if you want a more Warframe example, think of the added physicality of Railjack requiring you to fly to a Grineer Gallen, disembark from your ship, fly to the entry point dodging flak along the way and get inside vs. just clicking a button, sitting through a loading screen and simply appearing inside. There's nothing fundamentally FUN about moving 20 bags of Cash and Gold in Payday 2, nor anything that fundamentally fun in the added commute to a Galleon in Warframe, but the act of doing so creates a sense of verisimilitude. We as players require this, because video game rewards are virtual and so inherently value-less without the gameplay they're wrapped into.

The issue of "grind" comes in when said wrapper gameplay is not just fundamentally unpleasant to play through, but is also deliberately designed that way. This is where predatory monetisation comes in, because the progression systems in most modern Live Services are not designed to be fun. They're designed to waste your time and test your patience with the intent of either slowing your progression or straight-up making you pay new money to skip it. Worst case scenario, said progression systems aren't designed to be a "game" at all, but an exercise of psychological conditioning beating into your head the idea that you want a thing, and you'll have the thing if you keep repeating an action enough times. How many times? Doesn't matter, keep hitting that lever! The term "grind" itself originates as a shorthand for "a long, boring, painful, unrewarding activity one does for a salary," such as grinding flour for bread. While the term has since become a catch-all for all kinds of progression to the point when it's now just about synonymous with the term "progression," that broad definition is not what people are complaining about when they do. Sure, occasionally you'll have outliers like myself who believe that games can work just fine with no progression whatsoever, but that's not what the majority of people mean when they complain.

All of the above is to say that when people complain about "the grind," what they're complaining about is DE deliberately making content unfun as a means to waste our time and push us into the Market. It's DE deliberately introducing rentals, consumables and upkeep not because they in any way enhance the experience, but simply to increase the cost of doing the content we actually enjoy. Now, part of this is also on the player mentality of "What's in it for me?" I've often pushed back against notions that <insert new game mode> is not worth playing if it doesn't offer unique rewards, but that only goes so far. Sooner or later we have to recognise that DE themselves foster this attitude. Their development strategy is to create a small bit of content, then milk it for all its worth by threading ALL future rewards through it until we're sick to the teeth of it while outright ignoring legacy content. Fortuna is a great example of this. We got that, then for the next several months, EVERYTHING which came out required Fortuna progress. Baruuk and Garuda? Fortuna. Exergis and the other Corpus weapons? Fortuna. Opticor Vandal? Fortuna. Hyldrin? Fortuna. Atmospheric Archguns, AN ENTIRE WEAPON CLASS? Fortuna.

Some complaints can be dismissed about people doing this to themselves and grinding for the sake of grind, sure. That's where burnout comes in, you no longer enjoy the game but still go through the motions out of habit. You should absolutely play something else for a while and try to break the habit. But in an increasing number of cases, the issue is elsewhere entirely. Players LIKE playing Warframe. They WANT to engage in specific content that's fun for them, but they CAN'T. They can't because said content is locked behind a grindwall, which is in reality a paywall. I want to enjoy Railjack, but I can't do any content past Earth with my current ship. To reliably run Saturn nodes, I need at least Mk1 gear, but so far I've been able to collect enough resources for ONE Mk1 item - a Reactor. The costs are so high I'm having to repeat the same missions over and over and over again, and I'm having trouble doing that due to stability and matchmaking issues. The same was true of Atmospheric Archguns. I don't give a rat's ass about "raids," but I still had to grind up to Old Mate with Solaris United AND do 3/4 of the Profit Taker raid just to get access to them, and THEN I had to do Profit Taker fights to get the new Archgun mods. Because it's a new thing, OF COURSE it's gated behind the new Fortuna release.

I don't necessarily disagree with your statement there. Fair enough. I do, however, need to caution you that normalising "the grind" as being a natural part of the game is dangerous. Grind is not and should not be part of any video game, because it's inherently not fun. Grind is a tool of disincentive that developers use in their conditioning toolkit. Accepting it takes us one step farther down the rabbit hole of anti-consume mobile game design.

 

16 hours ago, Salenzar said:

I'm definitely not interested in the slightest to take the gun-to-head approach here at all. I do, however, again, wonder why you play at all. These activities you describe, which you seem to loathe, they are the game itself. I also can't agree with the free path being less desirable, or unfun. I have plenty of platinum to spare, and could buy a lot of things with it, but I choose to grind for stuff, because it is the only way of achieving things in WF that gives me a sense of accomplishment. Different people, different experiences, and for me, personally, the paid path is, in fact, largely undesirable, barring a few absolutely crazy exceptions, but those are incredibly rare. 

Right, but you're not the target audience of the game's monetisation. You prefer the free path which brings in no revenue, thus the game's monetisation system largely ignores you and lets you go about your business. That's the insidious nature of modern "F2P" monetisation. It's just as paid as any MMO of the past, and indeed far more so than the standard $15 a month subscription, but this cost is footed by a disproportionately small part of the player base towards whom all of the predator monetisation is targeted. You prefer to grind for your items and I can respect that. However, DE fully recognise that a large portion of us don't, that a large portion of us would pay some amount of money if we could skip the parts we dislike and focus only on the parts we like.

I talked about this before so I won't dwell on it, but it's not that I HATE WARFRAME. I rather like the game, just not ALL of it. Not only are there game modes I generally dislike (such as Defence and Interception), but I tend to like moving around and doing different things - kind of whatever strikes my fancy. This, however, gives me a choice - do what I like and make no progress thus not getting any new toys, or make progress but play modes I dislike. And I will, to an extent. I spent a day farming for Frost way back when despite resenting that activity, but I love Frost so it was worth it. The issue is that increasingly DE release less and less in the way of things to do but gate those new things behind more and more grind, more and more repetition. With Railjack, we're about 3/4 of the way to World of Tanks, and to a point where I can honestly describe Warframe as "a genuinely good game ruined by progression and monetisation."

Again, you might not find the repetition of the progression system problematic, but that doesn't mean it wasn't designed to BE problematic by clear intent. It doesn't affect you, no, but it affects enough people to foot the bill for your enjoyment. And I don't say this to be classist, from the perspective of "I pay for you, respect me!" Quite the opposite - you're the lucky one who happens to enjoy the content designed to irritate those of us more willing to pay to make it go away. You got the good deal. That Platinum you're earning from selling Primed parts or whatever? That came out of the pocket of a whale like me who really wanted a Soma Prime but hated the process of actually attaining it. And I DO hate the process of attaining Primed items, because it's effectively a casino. You hit the lever hoping for the right relic, you hit the lever hoping for the right item rarity, you hit the lever hoping for the exact item you want out of that rarity... Usually don't get it, so you keep doing and doing with no deterministic way out, no clear end in sight. Keep grinding... Until further notice. To me that's just DEPRESSING... But I want Ivara Prime and I'm not paying $80 for that because even I have my limits. And even then, I don't think I'll bother with her gold drop. Probably snag the bronze and silver drops and just pay for the gold. Save me a bit of plat, because I don't fancy plonking down another $50 quite yet.

Long story short - plenty of us enjoy parts of the game that we aren't allowed to engage in due to the game's progression and monetisation systems.

 

16 hours ago, Salenzar said:

Why do you want "it"? (It being any objects you might want at any given time) these are usually frames or weapons or cosmetics that only allow you to play the content the game has, but that all comes back to whether or not you actually like playing that content to begin with. If the answer is, at any given point, "no", then maybe it's more so a compulsion to be in possession of something, rather than to actually use and/or enjoy it. 

Because there's more to Warframe than grinding missions in the most optimal way possible. Please understand I say this in good faith, but this line of argument reminds me of the "it's just cosmetic" excuse. Oh, it's just cosmetic, it doesn't affect gameplay, who cares what it costs I'm just here to play. Not all of us are, though. I'm an old City of Heroes player. I stuck with that game for eight years for a variety of reasons, but "the gameplay" wasn't even in the top 10. Granted, I have my own compulsion issues with that game, but even that wouldn't affect my top 5. I stuck with City of Heroes because it allowed me to essentially experience the super hero TV shows I enjoyed as a child, but using my own original characters. I've written short stories about them, commissioned artwork of them and even long after the game shut down, I still kept those characters. Sure, I liked having them be high level and have lots of powers, but their value was almost entirely cosmetic for me. I didn't care about having a level 50 Katana/SR Scrapper. I cared about the story of Samuel Tow, my very first character and the one whose namesake I used for nearly a decade. I cared about having a sword made out of energy because it looked cool. I cared about having a cape with a high collar because it was closer to what I imagine in my head. I cared about those moments where I'd stop, take stock of what I was seeing and thing "I can't believe this is actually happening."

This obviously doesn't translate full to Warframe where a lot of my backstory is written for me and the "costume editor" is far more restrictive, but it does apply to a large extent nevertheless. I came into this game with one primary objective: Find the biggest, heaviest, loudest machinegun in the game. That's all I cared about. I tried the Gorgon, that sucked ass. I tried the Soma and that was decent but far too small. I tried the Supra and the Tenora, but they still felt like large rifles. It wasn't until I was able to bring my Imperator Vandal into a mission that I finally made that dream come true, and I spent something like a week just shooting people with that gun and giggling like a little kid. I didn't care that it kind of sucked (I had a S#&amp;&#036; build for it) or that it was heavily limited, or that it was and still is heavily bugged and likely to soft-lock my weapon selection. I got the Minigun I always wanted, and that right there instantly made EVERY bit of content in the game far more enjoyable. I don't use the Imperator a lot these days because of all of the above-mentioned issues, but I still carry it with me as a fallback. I still get a kick out of every time I call down a gun so big it knocks everyone down just equipping it.

There's more to Warframe than grind and rewards. There's more to Warframe than stats and optimisation. There's a whole host of "intrinsic" motivations to keep trucking, and more than just "Fashionframe." Hell, I find most of the cosmetics in Warframe to be absolutely butt ugly, but I you'll take my Inaros Ramses skin over my dead body. I want certain things simply because I like those things. I wanted an Aklex because I like giant heavy-hitting handcannons. I wanted the Supra because I wanted an LMG. I wanted Inaros because I look for tanks in almost every game I play. I want to play Raijack because I genuinely find the space ship gameplay to be fun. ALL of these things I mentioned have cost me, and cost me dearly. My baby, the Imperator Vandal I had to pay for because I couldn't get one of the pieces to drop, then I had to grind Fortuna to unlock the Archgun Launcher, then I had to pay to install a Gravimag and a Catalyst because I didn't have any of those on-hand, then I had to pay for a bunch of the Archgun mods to actually make it work, not to mention wait a year. My Supra Vandal took me a pretty expensive purchase AND grinding weapons I hated for 14 levels of MR. My Railjack... Well, that one I still can't really use due to the Railjack progression system, but one day I'll get it to a point where I can use it by myself or with friends on an Invite Only lobby.

And I realise that that's likely not what you're claiming, that only the soulless numbers matter in Warframe. I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I'm just pointing out that resenting the content we have to play in order to get certain items you may consider worthless is not incongruous with enjoying the game once we HAVE those items. Even if I could  technically get better DPS out of a Phaedra against Grineer, I still want the Imperator. Even if I could get better sustained fire out of a Braton Prime, I still want my Tenora. I want these things because I like these things. DE are fully aware of that, which is why they keep gating them so I either have to grind or pay - or both. And this is where I disagree with THEM. There's this prevailing fallacy that if people get everything they wanted, they'll just up and leave the game, that the grind is the only thing keeping us here. Not for a lot of us. For me, the grind is the cost of doing business, and I start enjoying the game once I HAVE the things I want. For me, the game starts being fun once I have fun toys to play around with, and the road leading up to that is the price I have to pay in order to enjoy it. If I had the choice, I'll usually pay in money over paying with time.

 

18 hours ago, Salenzar said:

The last part of this does get to me, as playing WF has in fact been a bit of a war of attrition for me. Your story here was of great interest to me, as over the last couple of days I have -sigh- again started wondering if I'm playing this game in a healthy way, what I should value here, and what I shouldn't value. It's a rather tiresome battle, and to be completely honest, I'm starting to feel more and more as if playing these games that have no end is a waste of life. I could be doing other thing, better things. On the other hand, however, Ivara Prime looks pretty damn sweet. It's rather mindless, I know. What sets us two apart, however, is that I get a sense of accomplishment (no matter how minor) from obtaining these things the "regular" way, which is of course derived from how I function as a person, and my personality, which was shaped over the course of almost as many years as you have been playing games. It's almost kind of a letdown that, in the end, it boils down to "I'm me, and you're you. We differ, and therein lies the difference of our experiences".

I completely understand your frustration. Waging a constant psychological battle with my entertainment gets really tiresome after a while. At the end of the day, my solution is similar to yours. I know I'm being taken advantage of, I know I'm overpaying for stuff (in your case, perhaps over-grinding for it) that I don't strictly need and that I'm buying into anti-consumer designs, but... This is the world we live in. We have to engage in this sort of thing if we want to enjoy modern video games. It then becomes a question of how far you want to go. I try to look at things in a dry, detached "cost vs. value" consideration. How valuable is this item to me, how much will it cost me to have it (in time and money), is that worth it to me? WORTH = VALUE - COST. Sometimes I'll drop 225 Plat on a ship skin I don't really need because I REALLY want to have it, sometimes I won't pay 50 Plat for a Repair drone because I feel taken advantage of. The sad reality is we have to let ourselves be swindled a little bit, let ourselves be conditioned a little bit and go against our own interest a little bit in order to enjoy our hobby. There's no going around it. The best we can do is keep stock of just how deep we've gone and know to bail when it starts to get bad.

There's no actually "healthy" way to play modern Live Service video games, but a seasoned player should be tough enough to take a bit of unhealthy play as long as you're smart about it. I absolutely agree with what you said - play what you like, ignore what you don't, bail when it's too much. But a little bit? Eh, we can take a little bit.

 

18 hours ago, Salenzar said:

I must however, thank you for the immense story you wrote down. It was a very interesting look into the experience of someone who is so different compared to me in terms of how we engage with this game. I really did feel like I learned a lot here, and coupled with the discussion I had with my friend over here regarding both your story and my views, I can safely say that at least 2 people valued what you wrote down. 

I'm happy you found it useful. My overall goal on these forums is honestly try and offer perspective on issues as I see them, for whatever that's worth. I realise walls of text don't go down well on forums, but it's a risk worth taking.