Please End Nightwaves

[motorfirebox]

I don't agree at all. Having completed 99% of the content, I appreciate having some stuff to do in Warframe. And like nearly all the content in Warframe, Nightwave is opt-in. You don't want the rewards, ignore them.

Moreover, it's important to point out that Nightwave is not a monetization scheme, except to the degree that  all game content is a monetization scheme. Nightwave is a battlepass system without the pass. You can't buy Nightwave rewards, you have to earn them.

[hyzmarca]

On 2020-06-12 at 12:23 PM, Teljaxx said:

And, really, I would much rather play a finite game that lasts like 10~30 hours, than one that never ends. They tend to be much better made, and be much more satisfying experiences overall. Mostly because they actually end. They can have a properly paced story with a dramatic ending that sticks with you long after you put down the controller. But these "live service" style games don't end. They don't go out with a bang, they just keep going until you stop playing, or they die. So, more than likely, your final experience and memories of the game will not be pleasant ones. So even if you spent thousands of hours enjoying the game, the main thing you will remember it for is its gruesome end.

 

The real Warframe is the friends we made on the way.   

That is to say,  Warframe has good gameplay,  but the long term draw is community,  something that you do't get from a 30 hour single player game. 

[AltheusVI]

On 2020-06-12 at 5:28 PM, DebrisFlow said:

What a counterproductive argument. So you want to tell to the average player that it is ok being limited to one umbraed warframe in a game (i have to repeat here for you since you didn't care to aknowledge) founded on built diversity and exploration? 

slighly? one year and a half of slavishly following the game to obtain 3 UF? In a game made on collecting things and ticking boxes, this is pretty much disheartening. And without the possibility to catch up, as i already explained. Aknowledge that this matters.

Matters to you, doesn't bother me in the slightest.

[Tesseract7777]

On 2020-06-13 at 4:07 PM, Ceadeus said:

Again, WoW's dailies and weeklies were for non-unique, constantly reintroduced or alternatively acquirable content.  Not even remotely a similar comparison.  "WoW gave you a chance to earn some extra money and XP!" is not remotely the same as "Battlepasses twist your arm into playing the content on their terms or lose it forever with no method to get it again."

As has been said plenty of times now, this has nothing to do with how Warframe has personally handled their form of the battlepass, this has to do with the greater concepts of what a battlepass aims to do and the consequences it has on not only the gameplay loop of the game it belongs to but also any other games that could potentially vie for the same timeslot.

Not going to argue with you on the comparison... It's not worth it see what you want to see. 

I actually did read the thread, I just disagree with you on some things still. That's normal and  you are going to have to get used to it when you post on public forums, sorry. 

Enjoy tilting at windmills. 

[fr4gb4ll]

15 hours ago, AltairFerenc said:

forces me

nothing and no one is forcing you to do anything - like i said, if you 'feel' any kind of compulsion, better stop playing at all... else, learn to live with the fact that you'll never get everything out of a game like warframe. better stick to solitair if that's your motivation.

 

15 hours ago, AltairFerenc said:

have I said that? 
NO
the dude asked for tl;dr and I gaved him one

seriously, for someone who just said he only have 4 hours a day to play, you sure did a long compain about something and with all the wrong arguments at it too. we all get that you don't like NW - others likely feels the same way - but as far as one can gather from the forum and other sources, most people are at least 'ok' with the concept of it. you, just disregarded it in length, which is fine, but don't expect the majority of people to agree with it (which you might noticed too by now, based on the response you got... btw, you're not the first to called for and timely end of NW - might have saved you the time if you had done some research first).

 

16 hours ago, AltairFerenc said:

umbra forma was in ralijack but incredobly low drop rate then removed it, it was just like legendary core but you could actually farm it. 
cosmetics? you know there's a thing called marked where you can use palt, or a million sindycates where you can farm for standing to get things. 
Or the different cashes in different mission could have them since all I got from any cash is either credit or useless mods.

i agree on the umbra forma (i never got it in railjack even though i already maxed out all intrinsics by now - i do have 2 legendary core though, so one could argue about the comparison of those two). hopefully DE find some better solution to acquire them - but they aren't really a necessity either (also just like the legendary cores).

not sure what you want to tell me here about the cosmetics, 'palt'? or a million syndicates though... i think there might be some misunderstandings or whatever. what i said about cosmetics was about the 'old' way we could get alternative helmets and also that some of the other 'cosmetics' are bond to the NW story (e.g. saturn six armor set). nothing from those things are mandatory or will give you any edge in the game... so if you don't have the time to get them, why care? if you want to play warframe casual, do this and give a ѕhit about how your frame is looking. fashion frame is only the last resort of those player who have nothing else left to do in the game.

[MagPrime]

On 2020-06-12 at 2:30 AM, Ceadeus said:

--- Edit ---

To clarify, since I'm seeing a lot of similar replies:  This is not an attack on Warframe or DE or the way that DE has done Nightwave.  Nightwave is without a doubt probably one of the most respectable implementation's of a battlepass system to date.  This post is about players being forced to juggle several different games all at once that each have their own battlepass that demands your attention or risk losing content, you may have more than enough time to complete Nightwave or maybe even Nightwave + another game's battlepass, but with new and old games alike continuing to develop their own battlepasses, it means the number of games you have to allot time for is only going to grow.  Will you still be able to juggle them when it's 7 different games you need to play not even because you necessarily want to, but just because you need to keep up with the challenges to get the rewards you want and likely have already paid money for?

Why should Warframe remove content that provides more incentives for free to play players?

DE's job is to make players want to play their game above others, it's absurd to ask them to remove content to support other games that they don't get any benefit from.

[DebrisFlow]

4 hours ago, AltheusVI said:

Matters to you, doesn't bother me in the slightest.

So pretty pointless for you to come on this thread and discuss something that doesn't bother you in the slightest. And pretty egoistic from you to hamper a solution to a problem that doesn't bother you in the slightest.

[fr4gb4ll]

17 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

but we're talking about being made to juggle several different games at once

hmm, no?

i sure play more than just warframe and i don't feel any force making me do this. sure i have the little advantage that i play the game for a long time now and could 'grow' with it, therefore never really had the 'problem' of standing before a mountain of things to do in warframe - something i see many new players seemingly succumb to, especially when they don't tackle this in a more systematically fashion (or step by step if you prefer). true, that is a little bit of DEs fault to make this a concept in warframe, but it's also a big part of its charme (at least imo).

17 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

Let me propose you this: Two games you really like both launch 1-day events on the same day, both of these events have rewards you'd really like to get, but you simply don't have enough time to play them both, so you simply won't be able to get both rewards, one of those games is going to lose out on having you play it and invest in it.  Now imagine if it's that same situation every single day.  Eventually you're going to get tired of missing out on content, but there's nothing you can do to fix that because you'll never get another chance to get that content again.  That's what battlepass culture is.  It's forcing players to pick and choose which games they can actually be bothered to invest in even if they want to play both games.

well, that's easy: i might stop playing both if start feeling compulsion to get the stuff - or worse, if it seems that you'd be in a disadvantage when not getting them. in fact that was what i did to many games before, so much that i was really sceptical about warframe when i was first invited to it - i had already enough of games that forces you to play (or pay) to be competitive in it. to my suprise, warframe was different - back then and still is. again, i do have the advantage of growing with the game and being able to lazily playing any new contend with minimum amount of time without lagging behind anymore - mostly because i still am faster finishing new contend than the devs are releasing additional one.

i can't really tell what i would feel about warframe if i would just start it now, but see the many problems of those who do.

17 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

This is what needs to be happening, is companies need to be moving away from this time exclusive content and return to simply asking a price and giving the content for that price, no potential for loss of investment.

it sure is, but think about this: most games that you pay once for are either never extended anymore (sometimes not even maintenant after release / or only with some few fixes) or the start throwing out DLCs like a machine gun or worse start with bloody micro-transaction (which imo is a prime reason to quit a game). for warframe, we either pay with our time or we spend platinum to circumvent those time costing farming and building. i'm not sure about how DE can make a living with this method, but since they done it for years, i guess it works and well too at this. if we had payed a fixed sum for the game in the first place, i bet we would never had seen most of the contend we got over the years. if, on the other hand, DE would have made warframe a game with a monthly/years subscription fee, it would have died long ago like so many other promising games did - there are not many games that were sucessfully with this line of financing. so, in my book, DE done the right way, for the players as (seemingly) well as for themself.

ofc, there is always room for improvement (or for failures too), so they should stay alerted to what their users 'feelings' - and more or less they done so too over the years - but that's everyones own perspective.

[Ceadeus]

 

16 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

so if you don't have the time to get them, why care? if you want to play warframe casual, do this and give a ѕhit about how your frame is looking. fashion frame is only the last resort of those player who have nothing else left to do in the game.

"I don't value this part of the game, so clearly if you do you're just stupid and desperate!" Is what your argument boils down to.  The fact of the matter is for a lot of people the cosmetic potential of the game comes before many of its systems or other gameplay elements.  I can't decide if your telling people to simply give up what they care about in the game just to feed a completely anti-player content model is absurdly self-centered or just plain ignorant of the fact that not everyone values the same things you do or has the same time and resources as you.

So far all you've done is prove you can't even acknowledge any of the greater problems we're addressing here, you just want to ignore them, tell the people who care about them they're crazy, and act as if you've somehow made any tangible argument here.  The game is built on feedback, people being negatively affected by Nightwave is feedback, you sitting there telling them to shut up and get over it is just you being a more colorful word I can't say without getting banned.

16 hours ago, MagPrime said:

Why should Warframe remove content that provides more incentives for free to play players?

DE's job is to make players want to play their game above others, it's absurd to ask them to remove content to support other games that they don't get any benefit from.

Because for one, in an attempt to make players "want to play more" they're enforcing a system that for a lot of players only furthers burnout that actively makes them want to play less once those required challenges are done because the rest of the content in the game can be taken at its own pace.  Forcing players to not only do things they don't want to do but also at a time they don't want to do it makes them more likely to get sick of it and quit the game all together if they decide they don't want to be under threat of missing content forever all the time.  That or they simply will run out of raw time.  Exactly why this thread isn't about just Warframe or an attack on how its done its battlepass, because you have plenty of time to put an hour aside and knock out Nightwave, but most people don't really have time to do Nightwave, and another pass, and another one, and another one, and another one, and so on, all on top of real life responsibilities or just plain anything they actually want to do with their freetime.

Two, is because every other game is going to be doing the exact same thing, and every other game so far has been going with the greedier option of making paid tracks.  Let's say you have 2 appointments, both are about the same importance, but if you miss one of them, you'll be charged $20.  Pretty safe to say you'll probably try harder to go to the one that you'll be charged for if you don't.  That's what other games are.  The more games that keep harboring battlepasses, the more of those "$20 appointments" people have to juggle, leaving Warframe more and more likely to get left in the dust due to a simple lack of time.  Alternatively, if Warframe stops trying to be another "appointment", then it means you can simply return to it whenever you're done with all the others, there's no urgency, there's no risk, there's no burnout.  Battlepasses hurt the games using them that want to try to compete with every other game just as much as the people getting them who then have to try and find time to play every other game that's demanding their attention.

Specifically because Nightwave is not monetized in any way is why it's the most reasonable game to ask to give up on the battlepass trend and let it die.  Obviously stopping Warframe won't fix the whole problem or even most of it, but continuing to feed the problem anyway won't fix even the slightest idea of it.

16 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

hmm, no?

i sure play more than just warframe and i don't feel any force making me do this. sure i have the little advantage that i play the game for a long time now and could 'grow' with it, therefore never really had the 'problem' of standing before a mountain of things to do in warframe - something i see many new players seemingly succumb to, especially when they don't tackle this in a more systematically fashion (or step by step if you prefer). true, that is a little bit of DEs fault to make this a concept in warframe, but it's also a big part of its charme (at least imo).

Let's start with, you don't get to come into my thread and tell me what we're discussing or what problems are affecting me.  Get over yourself.

Next, that's not even addressing the problem we're talking about.  Static content is not what is "forcing" people to play these games, it's the fleeting content (aka the entire core concept of a battlepass) that threatens them with the loss of something they might want if they don't, that's the problem.  You've already made your opinions on cosmetics and the importance of in-game items clear, so its great for you that you can feel no concern or pressure about it, but for a LARGE demographic, missing a good cosmetic due to something stupid like a time constraint is one of the worst feelings in games, that's what compels people to attempt to juggle all of these games even when they don't necessarily want to be playing them.  That's what's "forcing" players, and no amount of high horse preaching about how cosmetics or in-game items don't matter fixes that.  Again, none of it matters, so your solution essentially boils down to "Stop valuing the things that make you play the game to begin with," aka "Just quit then," which if you can't see how that's the most toxic response possible to people trying to fix this easily fixable problem, then please just leave and never bother commenting again.

16 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

well, that's easy: i might stop playing both if start feeling compulsion to get the stuff - or worse, if it seems that you'd be in a disadvantage when not getting them. in fact that was what i did to many games before, so much that i was really sceptical about warframe when i was first invited to it - i had already enough of games that forces you to play (or pay) to be competitive in it. to my suprise, warframe was different - back then and still is. again, i do have the advantage of growing with the game and being able to lazily playing any new contend with minimum amount of time without lagging behind anymore - mostly because i still am faster finishing new contend than the devs are releasing additional one.

i can't really tell what i would feel about warframe if i would just start it now, but see the many problems of those who do.

That's what battlepasses are.  Cosmetics are peoples "advantage".  Many people could not care less about min-maxing their build to wipe content as efficiently as possible if they can't also make a frame that they like the look of to do it.  Battlepasses do exactly that, forcing your hand into either playing things you don't want to play and risking burnout, or forcing you to give up what you value in the game and lose interest.

16 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

it sure is, but think about this: most games that you pay once for are either never extended anymore (sometimes not even maintenant after release / or only with some few fixes) or the start throwing out DLCs like a machine gun or worse start with bloody micro-transaction (which imo is a prime reason to quit a game). for warframe, we either pay with our time or we spend platinum to circumvent those time costing farming and building. i'm not sure about how DE can make a living with this method, but since they done it for years, i guess it works and well too at this. if we had payed a fixed sum for the game in the first place, i bet we would never had seen most of the contend we got over the years. if, on the other hand, DE would have made warframe a game with a monthly/years subscription fee, it would have died long ago like so many other promising games did - there are not many games that were sucessfully with this line of financing. so, in my book, DE done the right way, for the players as (seemingly) well as for themself.

ofc, there is always room for improvement (or for failures too), so they should stay alerted to what their users 'feelings' - and more or less they done so too over the years - but that's everyones own perspective.

So why then when we try to acknowledge that these battlepass systems are making people feel stressed and burnt out is your response to belittle them and say that's their own fault?  You seem to be playing both sides here quite a bit.

[MagPrime]

1 hour ago, Ceadeus said:

Because for one, in an attempt to make players "want to play more" they're enforcing a system that for a lot of players only furthers burnout that actively makes them want to play less once those required challenges are done because the rest of the content in the game can be taken at its own pace. 

Challenges can already b completed at the players pace.  Even if the weeks challenges are incomplete when new ones roll out, the players progress is kept so they can pick up once the challenge is recovered.  The only players this system hurts are players who aren't able to log in for long or often, and I'm assuming that's a fairly low percentage of players due to no changes being made to accommodate them over the past few years.  And I can make that assumption with confidence due to the massive changes they have made to account for players limitation.  

1 hour ago, Ceadeus said:

Two, is because every other game is going to be doing the exact same thing, and every other game so far has been going with the greedier option of making paid tracks.

"going to be doing"  So, no game has done this?  As in, no game has reduced their playerbase retaining mechanics in favor of other games that gains them no income, and there for, no profits?  

No game is going to drop tactics that increase player retention and therefore, revenue.

1 hour ago, Ceadeus said:

Let's say you have 2 appointments, both are about the same importance, but if you miss one of them, you'll be charged $20.  Pretty safe to say you'll probably try harder to go to the one that you'll be charged for if you don't.  That's what other games are.  The more games that keep harboring battlepasses, the more of those "$20 appointments" people have to juggle, leaving Warframe more and more likely to get left in the dust due to a simple lack of time.

If other games want money to bypass their battlepasses and make it harder to keep up while playing other games, players will simply stop playing those games and move to free to play ones, like Warframe.

What you're describing will only benefit this game because it'll scoop up all the players that can't afford to pay or aren't willing to pay.

[motorfirebox]

1 hour ago, Ceadeus said:

Forcing players to not only do things they don't want to do but also at a time they don't want to do it makes them more likely to get sick of it and quit the game all together if they decide they don't want to be under threat of missing content forever all the time.

Honestly, this whole line of reasoning is kinda selfish. "Stop offering players new content, because I might not have time to keep up." That's... no. It's not right at all to ask DE to take things away from everyone else to benefit the peace of mind of people who don't want to play as much.

And it's not like anything but the Founder's packs are gone forever if you miss them the first time they drop. Miss the Wolf stuff from Nightwave 1? Guess what, they came back in an Intermission. There's no reason to expect the 'exclusive' drops from Nightwave 3 (or NW2 for that matter) to work any differently. Missing it the first time just means you have to wait for the next time.

[Joezone619]

yes do it. remove it i don't want nightwave. at this point im not even paying attention to the story. only AND ONLY the rewards.

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

16 hours ago, Mephane said:

That would make it worse - given their rarity, you want to save them up for when a build absolutely warrants it and you love playing that Warframe all the time. And whatever mechanism you are hinting at to swap the Umbra polarity between Warframes would surely end be costly - also even if cheap, it would be a massive hassle to swap them around each time you switch to a loadout with a different Warframe.

An easy solution that doesn't require outright removal would be to add a blueprint like the weapon exilus adapter blueprint for syndicate standing that requires similar components - 2 formas, argon crystal etc. This way they would become farmable, you could plan your builds around them, but there'd still be a significant investment to acquire them.

Interesting idea about the Umbra Formas. I like it but I can also understand the need for keeping them a rare and progressive reward to acquire. I like the freedom as well as the commitment needed when using these. I hope this never changes because we're already overloaded with great rewards and options over time as is. 

In regards to losing NW rewards at season's end, I'd still like for newer players to have the opportunity to work for them. Currently, four UFs exists and, if you started this year, you are only able to obtain two (intermission and glass maker). Having the option to earn the other two allows the catch-up mechanic to be true to form. Don't make them easy to get but don't allow newer players to miss out either.

[AltairFerenc]

8 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

seriously, for someone who just said he only have 4 hours a day to play, you sure did a long compain about something and with all the wrong arguments at it too. we all get that you don't like NW - others likely feels the same way - but as far as one can gather from the forum and other sources, most people are at least 'ok' with the concept of it. you, just disregarded it in length, which is fine, but don't expect the majority of people to agree with it (which you might noticed too by now, based on the response you got... btw, you're not the first to called for and timely end of NW - might have saved you the time if you had done some research first).

 

in my original comment I just did thta what I said, gived a tl;dr and agreed with the OP in 1 senctence nothing more nothing less

8 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

i agree on the umbra forma (i never got it in railjack even though i already maxed out all intrinsics by now - i do have 2 legendary core though, so one could argue about the comparison of those two). hopefully DE find some better solution to acquire them - but they aren't really a necessity either (also just like the legendary cores).

I mean you can only do 1 sortie a day but you can do infinite amount of sentient anomaly in railjcak, technicly it's easier to farm, even tho the drop chance was lower than my selfesteem

9 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

not sure what you want to tell me here about the cosmetics, 'palt'? or a million syndicates though... i think there might be some misunderstandings or whatever. what i said about cosmetics was about the 'old' way we could get alternative helmets and also that some of the other 'cosmetics' are bond to the NW story (e.g. saturn six armor set). nothing from those things are mandatory or will give you any edge in the game... so if you don't have the time to get them, why care? if you want to play warframe casual, do this and give a ѕhit about how your frame is looking. fashion frame is only the last resort of those player who have nothing else left to do in the game.

well yes noghtwave is better than the old alert system, but I said that for the nightwave exclusive and themed cosmetics you said to where to put those, that's why I said market for plat or the large number of sindycates.

9 hours ago, fr4gb4ll said:

nothing and no one is forcing you to do anything - like i said, if you 'feel' any kind of compulsion, better stop playing at all... else, learn to live with the fact that you'll never get everything out of a game like warframe. better stick to solitair if that's your motivation.

 

well duh, if I want something that's in the end of the nightwave reward I'm "forced" to do things I don't want to do.
And just for the fact I'm playing this game since 2013, I always took brakes, long and short alike.
3 months, I just came back from more than a year brake and 3 months and I'm already burned out since all that left is mindless grind for resources and leveling up things at least 5 times because that many forma needed to make them good, and leveling up gets old really fast, especially if it goes like yesterday went, host migration then getting pushed back to the orbiter and losing all the xp that I got then trying again only that just before the exctraction timer was at 5 "warframe.exe is not responding"  and losing everything again.  I just put steam into offline mode and went playing f*ing borderlands 2 with my overpowered character.

Pretty sure I have the right to tell my opinion, and be angry when the game is aginst me, and locking every new thing behind mindless grind, and after some time everything feels like a chore.

[taiiat]

'Battlepass' systems are pretty much garbage in every game that have them, so i wouldn't complain any if they all went away.

maybe if games actually tried making the idea of having the fundamental concept that a 'Battlepass' brings to the table have... stuff to do, or any relation to the game, or... just.... being relevant for anything other than trying to occupy time with chores.

 

4 hours ago, motorfirebox said:

"Stop offering players new content, because I might not have time to keep up."

what content.

"Kill some Enemies"
"play a Mission"
"click on this button"

yeah, that's definitely the 'content' that makes me touch myself at night over. 100%.

Edited June 14, 2020 by taiiat

[Teljaxx]

23 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

This is where the Princess Leiah line comes in. The harder games push us to keep coming back every day on a schedule, the more they force us to keep making that choice - "Should I just quit entirely?" After all, you can easily put yourself in a position where you've missed out on so much that it's really not worth coming back until the next Season Pass. And by that time, you might not feel like coming back at all. This is what Destiny did to me. I had fun with the first Season after it went Live, but burned myself out on it a little. I went to play other games when the next Season started and fell behind. By the time I was done and thinking about going back to Destiny, it was mid-season and way too late to get the big rewards out of it. I figure I'd just come back for the next seasons... And I just never did. I didn't really have a reason to quit that game - not a strong one, anyway. I just felt like doing other stuff, I fell behind and the FOMO of it demoralised me.

This is why I say that modern Live Service developers are "doing it wrong," and DE are not exception. They seem to be trying to keep players playing constantly with subversive, habit-forming mechanics and don't seem to want us to stop playing ever. All this does is burn veterans out and swap them out with new players. And while that might have worked 10 years ago when the MMO market was small and still growing, it's really not working out well these days. There aren't all that many "new players" for whom your game is their first MMO. Generally you're poaching burnt-out players from other MMOs, and there are only so many of those. And because more and more players have "grown up playing Live Services" as time goes on, more of them will be aware of just what I'm talking about. This is why I cite commercials. Back in the 60s and 80s those might have been effective, but I don't think anyone even watches them these days. You have DVR, you have AdBlock, and plenty of us no longer even watch TV for this precise reason. I have fond memories of TRYING to watch the History Channel... It would go into a 15-minute commercial break. I kill the audio, turn to the PC. Check the TV, still commercials. Check the TV, still commercials. Check the TV 45 minutes later, realise I was watching a show that I completely forgot about.

Point being, I agree with you. Design your game to let players leave when they're bored or burnt out. Ensure they leave on good terms, ensure they leave with fond memories and you ensure that those people will keep coming back. More than that, you ensure that these people will keep spending money on your DLC and your Microtransactions and so on. There's this mentality in Live Services that you have to "turn players into payers" by pressuring and extorting money. I feel quite the opposite. Make your players happy, and they will spend. I didn't spend money on Warframe because I hated the game, after all. By contrast, I haven't spent money on GTA Online, because I resent Rockstar and the game itself is pretty shoddy.

 

And this right here is the core issue with a lot of F2P games - there is no actual game, only monetisation. There's no fun, engaging gameplay to be had. There's only a grind for stuff, made deliberately tedious to make you buy it, instead. However, when you do buy it... Then what? There's still no fun gameplay, and now there's no progression, either. Earning stuff is dull, but buying stuff feels hollow. This is why I brought up GTA Online. That's a fun toy to the extent of driving around aimlessly an griefing other players, but there's no actual "game" to be found. You grind boring, tedious tasks for money that Rockstar would really rather you bought via Whale Cards. But suppose you buy said Whale Cards - then what? There's still no game, but now you have an Apache. Now you have a Jet Bike. Now you have a Yacht with no purpose. The monetisation here is just a symptom of a broader issue - a bad game.

You're right that Warframe does tend to strike a decent balance, because the core gameplay loop is intrinsically fun - at least, for me at this point. My concern, however, is that DE seem to be more focused on adding more grind than they are on expanding and improving the said core gameplay loop. Look at Liches - no novel gameplay (not even in the guessing game), just lots of grind. Look at Railjack - a TOKEN of novel gameplay, with lots of grind. But OK - these were both brand new systems so the bulk of the work went under the hood. OK, then what's the excuse for the Granum Void? There's no novel gameplay there AT ALL. It's Sanctuary Onslaught except on ONE map against ONE enemy type. And you have to grind this for literal hours just to get meaningful rewards out of it. DE claimed that they were finally going to have us earn a Warframe through a Quest... But they didn't. They gave us a blueprint, and we still had to grind for the parts, with low god damn drop rates.

You know what pisses me off the most about the Granum Void? I can't actually enjoy the new tileset. The benefit of having a new tileset is that it improves not just the core nodes, but all the other game modes which take place on them. Except I can't play any of these modes if I want the Granum Crowns. They don't drop on Lich missions, they don't drop on Crossfire missions and I need to play level 1-15 missions if I want the T1 Granum Void rewards. So not only is that boring and uninspired, it's actively undermining the new and genuinely good tileset redesign. Worse, it's encouraging me to optimise my grinding of it, which means running the same capture mission over and over again, disregarding the map and just going for the objectives. As a result, it's burning me out on the tileset before I can even enjoy it.

DE are so fixated on providing "extrinsic rewards" and keeping people playing through compulsion that they end up in exactly the problem you describe. The monetisation and progression systems undermine the core gameplay experience. I honestly wish they'd spend less time worrying about players having too much fun, earning too much fun and leaving as a result... For some reason.

All this stuff we've been talking about is why I almost always avoid F2P games, no matter how awesome they may look at first. There are far too many bad, anti-fun things they always have to do to make the game profitable for it to ever be a fully enjoyable experience. I call them "necessary evils", because they are necessary to make the game profitable at all. But the worst part is that most games do so much more than just the necessary evils. I don't begrudge a developer making enough money on their game to live by. But most F2P games go way beyond that, far into the realms of obscene profit margins.

Really, the entire reason the genre is still so common, even after the initial bubble burst, is because of how absurdly profitable it can be. Which is why most "AAA" game publishers have also started forcing F2P monetization mechanics into their games, while conveniently forgetting the free part. And at that point, these necessary evils just become evil, because they are no longer necessary to make money. They are only there because, to the "AAA" industry, there is no such thing as making enough money.

And if you noticed in that video I linked in my last post, he never once mentions anything about making the game fun. Because fun simply isn't part of the equation. Its not necessary to make a game profitable. F2P games don't have to be fun to be successful. If anything, they're actually more profitable when they aren't fun, because then you can sell ways to make them less not fun. Like how people were praising Bethesda for adding "convenience boosters" to Fallout 76. But they never considered that Bethesda made the game inconvenient in the first place for exactly that reason.

Just like with Anthem, I think that if Warframe wasn't F2P, it would have been a much better game overall. Because then they wouldn't have had to do any of this crap to it. The grind wouldn't have to be completely unreasonable. The drop rates wouldn't have to be stupidly low. Cosmetics could be earned via gameplay, instead of simply being bought. They could have had a properly told story and world building. And, they could have properly ended it and moved on to something even better, instead of trying to drag it out forever long past its prime like they have been.

[Steel_Rook]

8 minutes ago, Teljaxx said:

All this stuff we've been talking about is why I almost always avoid F2P games, no matter how awesome they may look at first. There are far too many bad, anti-fun things they always have to do to make the game profitable for it to ever be a fully enjoyable experience. I call them "necessary evils", because they are necessary to make the game profitable at all. But the worst part is that most games do so much more than just the necessary evils. I don't begrudge a developer making enough money on their game to live by. But most F2P games go way beyond that, far into the realms of obscene profit margins.

While I don't want to speculate on profit margins without actual metrics, I do agree with you in spirit. Plenty of F2P games push monetisations well beyond reasonable requirements and into straight-up exploitation. Destiny 2 was actually famous for this when it came out, selling lootboxes with colours which were themselves single-use? That's egregious any way you slice it. Hell, I'd argue the same for Warframe. Do we REALLY need 5 different kinds of boosters, including TWO separate resource boosters? Because to me, this just feels like segmenting what other games would sell as "Premium Mode" into multiple purchases to jack up the price. I've you've seen me post on the subject, I've recommended selling an "Everything Booster" for 400-500 Plat that contains all of them. I'd buy that. The counter-argument there usually goes along the lines of "Why would they sell it to you for 500 when they can get 1000 out of you?" Well, they WON'T get 1000 out of me, but that's really the logic I'm arguing against. When monetisation is obviously more concerned with the maximum amount of money it can extract from an individual player rather than providing said player with good value, that's monetisation gone too far. Well, farther than "necessary," anyway.

It's a business, sure. I'm actually perfectly fine with paying for it. I already have, quite a bit. All too often, however, F2P games seem unfamiliar with the concept of "enough." No matter how much a player pays, it's never enough. There's always more crap to buy, there are always other consumables and other monetisation mechanics that need to be paid for. For as much as late 2000s subscription MMO get made fun of, at least that $15 gave me access to everything. That $15 was "enough." Modern F2P monetisation has no upper limit, no point at which a player has spent enough money to actually enjoy the game, and that's what gives this impression of "going too far."

 

16 minutes ago, Teljaxx said:

Just like with Anthem, I think that if Warframe wasn't F2P, it would have been a much better game overall. Because then they wouldn't have had to do any of this crap to it. The grind wouldn't have to be completely unreasonable. The drop rates wouldn't have to be stupidly low. Cosmetics could be earned via gameplay, instead of simply being bought. They could have had a properly told story and world building. And, they could have properly ended it and moved on to something even better, instead of trying to drag it out forever long past its prime like they have been.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is viable any more. Warframe's recurrent monetisation model exists to support its nature as a Live Service. Constant development has constant running costs, so you can't just "sell" the game and support yourself off of that. As a developer, you NEED your players to be paying continuously. Back in the day, this came in the form of a $15/month subscription fee. These days, it's whales like myself overpaying for basic stuff and footing the bill for the Free players. In either case, though, these mechanics are necessary. The reason so many games went F2P in the late 2000s is because developers realised a simple truth: $60 upfront is not a lot of money. Not if you're planning to support the same game long-term. The bulk of a Live Service's revenue is in recurrent monetisation. The upfront cost is near-meaningless, yet it serves as a gate to a massive potential audience. Developers got rid of that cost because it was doing more harm than good.

Long story short, I don't think a Live Service can really survive as a buy-to-play game. Not long-term, anyway. It's why Console Live Services used to run for a year before shutting down as the publisher released the next game in the series. That's about what you can support just on game purchases and DLC. After a year, you have to re-release the same game so people can buy it again and fund further development. Even console games, however, seem to have caught on that this is a BAD practice. Even console games now have longer-term plans, Premium account subscription fees (aka "Season Passes"), microtransactions and long-term plans for support. This is the business model that a Live Service requires. It's just a matter of how developers balance grasping for more money vs. delivering value to players.

If I treat it as a "pay-to-play" game, Warframe GENERALLY delivers decent value for money. The items the game really wants me to keep buying are fairly cheap and a Secondary Market exists where other things can be bought for cheap, as well. I AM somewhat biased in that I've gotten a large number of 75% Plat discounts, but that's my perspective. However, DE have been releasing more and more expensive items of late. 20 Plat for Forma? Sure, that's fair. 80 Plat for Aura Forma? Why so expensive? $80 for a newly-released Prime Access bundle? Are you #*!%ing kidding me? Even $40 for an Unvaulted Prime Access bundle is too much, let alone $80. That is such a ripoff! And this is coming from the guy who'll happily plonk down $50 for Plat on discount. Come on, now...

Point being, modern Live Service monetisation is what it needs to be to support these games. It's not as egregious as YouTube pundits make it sound by default, but plenty of developers and publishers seem to be pushing the envelope, providing increasingly less value for increasingly more money. There's nothing wrong with paying for our video games, as long as it's a fair trade.

[Teljaxx]

11 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Unfortunately, I don't think this is viable any more. Warframe's recurrent monetisation model exists to support its nature as a Live Service. Constant development has constant running costs, so you can't just "sell" the game and support yourself off of that. As a developer, you NEED your players to be paying continuously. Back in the day, this came in the form of a $15/month subscription fee. These days, it's whales like myself overpaying for basic stuff and footing the bill for the Free players. In either case, though, these mechanics are necessary. The reason so many games went F2P in the late 2000s is because developers realised a simple truth: $60 upfront is not a lot of money. Not if you're planning to support the same game long-term. The bulk of a Live Service's revenue is in recurrent monetisation. The upfront cost is near-meaningless, yet it serves as a gate to a massive potential audience. Developers got rid of that cost because it was doing more harm than good.

Long story short, I don't think a Live Service can really survive as a buy-to-play game. Not long-term, anyway. It's why Console Live Services used to run for a year before shutting down as the publisher released the next game in the series. That's about what you can support just on game purchases and DLC. After a year, you have to re-release the same game so people can buy it again and fund further development. Even console games, however, seem to have caught on that this is a BAD practice. Even console games now have longer-term plans, Premium account subscription fees (aka "Season Passes"), microtransactions and long-term plans for support. This is the business model that a Live Service requires. It's just a matter of how developers balance grasping for more money vs. delivering value to players.

If I treat it as a "pay-to-play" game, Warframe GENERALLY delivers decent value for money. The items the game really wants me to keep buying are fairly cheap and a Secondary Market exists where other things can be bought for cheap, as well. I AM somewhat biased in that I've gotten a large number of 75% Plat discounts, but that's my perspective. However, DE have been releasing more and more expensive items of late. 20 Plat for Forma? Sure, that's fair. 80 Plat for Aura Forma? Why so expensive? $80 for a newly-released Prime Access bundle? Are you #*!%ing kidding me? Even $40 for an Unvaulted Prime Access bundle is too much, let alone $80. That is such a ripoff! And this is coming from the guy who'll happily plonk down $50 for Plat on discount. Come on, now...

Point being, modern Live Service monetisation is what it needs to be to support these games. It's not as egregious as YouTube pundits make it sound by default, but plenty of developers and publishers seem to be pushing the envelope, providing increasingly less value for increasingly more money. There's nothing wrong with paying for our video games, as long as it's a fair trade.

Part of what I meant when I said Warframe would be better if it wasn't F2P, is that it shouldn't be a "live service" either. As you said, that's one of the most expensive parts of game development these days. Continuing to host servers, and pay developers costs quite a bit more than $60 per player. Which is why its such a problem. Its what makes these monetization evils necessary.

Its also what causes the OP's problem. They constantly add new things, so you constantly have to spend more and more time on the game. Warframe was already daunting enough when I started playing seven years ago that I nearly quit right away. I can't imagine seeing just how much stuff there is as a new player now. Even with all the time savers you can get, you still have to have quite a bit of faith in the game, that it will be around for long enough for you to get through it all.

Personally, I like the method Elite Dangerous uses. Just a few cosmetic microtransactions for a small constant income stream, then big pay-to-play expansions every once in a while. This can end up segregating the playerbase, since you can't play certain parts together if you don't all have them. And, it can very easily feel like a waste of money if the expansion isn't big enough to justify the price. But I much prefer it to simply monetizing every single part of the game, like most do, because any part that is monetized inevitably ends up being much less fun than it should be.

Though, I would much prefer if they all stopped trying to make every game infinite. If they would simply accept that games have a lifespan, and that its better to let their players move on, all of this would be much more enjoyable. I would much rather Warframe be a series of sequels, than one endless ever-changing game. Hek, then they could even do the current popular thing, and remaster their early games, or make an "Ultimate Collection" like Halo did, whenever they want to re-sell them for more money.

Personally, the preservation of history is really important to me, because I like to be able to go back and re-play the best parts of games. And you can't do that if the game is constantly changing those parts. One of the saddest parts of this newest update is that the very first tileset ever created for the game, before it was even Warframe, is now gone, replaced by something completely unrecognizable. That's a big, important part of the game's history, and no one can ever directly experience it again. If DE had been willing to make sequels instead, they could have had this new tileset without having to remove the old one, because they could exist simultaneously in different games.

Not to mention how, when "live service" games die, they disappear completely. Their servers shut down, and no one can access them at all, even if you still have all the game data on your computer. But it doesn't have to be that way. Like how, even though the old Unreal Tournament games may be "dead", you can still play them. You can play botmatch, or setup a private server with your friends. But you cant do that with, say, Hawken. And you won't be able to with Warframe once it inevitably dies, either. This is what makes me so unwilling to ever spend any money at all on F2P games. Its guaranteed to be a temporary investment, sometimes extremely temporary. I would much rather spend $60 on a game that I will most likely be able to play whenever I want for the rest of my life, than even a couple bucks on a game that may be gone in a year.

[supernils]

Omg the fear of missing out is real.

1. If you don't like battle passes then don't purchase them and you're good. I think they're terrible too so I don't buy them.

2. What does Nightwave have to do with battle passes? From what I read of your post it is basically "there is too much content and I don't have the time to achieve everything".

Like really? Get a grip of yourself. I'm honestly sick of people projecting problems of their own personality onto the game.

[supernils]

On 2020-06-12 at 11:55 AM, CxLL said:

A person comes into the bakery and says "please stop selling sesame bagels".
 

A person comes into the bakery and says "please stop selling 10 different cakes"

The clerk asks "why should we do that?"

"Because I cannot eat them all."

[Lers]

While I dislike all of the battlespass-esque systems, NW is the most inoffensive version I've seen, and requires mostly minimal energy and time investment to max out.

I have to agree with some of the other commenters that there seem to be a lot of personal issues projected into this complaint. Don't give into FOMO, weigh the rewards vs the time investment, and just skip the tasks if the trade isn't worth it to you. If you don't find it fun, don't juggle multiple games with FOMO based systems. It's a great way to burn out on multiple games at once. The most effective feedback to developers is by voting with your time / wallet.

The Umbral Forma is its own issue, but its severely overvalued by many. Its a luxury item with minimal gains if you otherwise don't mind burning dozens of Forma to make sub-optimal Umbra builds.

For reference I mostly skipped the previous NW seasons due to the undewhelming rewads, only getting rank ~15 each passively. I am however invested in the current one, since the visual rewards appeal to me, while also juggling two other games with weekly tasks.

[Steel_Rook]

11 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Part of what I meant when I said Warframe would be better if it wasn't F2P, is that it shouldn't be a "live service" either. As you said, that's one of the most expensive parts of game development these days. Continuing to host servers, and pay developers costs quite a bit more than $60 per player. Which is why its such a problem. Its what makes these monetization evils necessary.

Strongly disagree. If that's what Warframe was when it launched, it wouldn't be alive today. Probably wouldn't have survived its first year. Considering it was Digital Extremes' "Hail Mary" with the alternative being bankruptcy, that's almost a guarantee. For all the complaints I have towards the Live Service game model, I'm always going to take it over traditional "buy to play + DLC" games. While there's nothing wrong with those games in principle, I rarely get more entertainment out of them than 30-60 hours. I'm looking at almost 3000 hours in Warframe by this point, and I can honestly do more fairly easily. This is also why I don't subscribe to the Jim Sterling style of radical fundamentalism which paints all post-launch monetisation as "evil" regardless of context. I'm fine with paying for my Live Services. I'm fine paying a subscription, I'm fine additionally paying for new content, I'm SOMEWHAT fine paying for consumables depending on the specific implementation.

The issue with Live Services isn't that we have to keep paying for them and that's always bad. Again - I paid an MMO subscription all throughout the 2000s and never had a problem with it. It was worth the money. The issue is with specific implementation and mentality. Warframe has all the problems of a modern MMO with a bad business model. The game over-emphasises habit-forming mechanics with the aim of keeping players compulsively logging in when it doesn't need to. It over-emphasises wasting people's time with excessive grind with seemingly the sole goal of appearing to not paywall anything - even though they effectively do anyway. I was never going to earn a Korrudo, so I bought one from the Market. It wasn't paywalled, but it might as well been paywalled TO ME.

Warframe's recurring monetisation has issues, but "it has recurring monetisation" isn't one of them. Not as far as I'm concerned. I played video games when I had to go to a store and buy a boxed copy of a game which was never going to change. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. I don't miss that time. The moment I found out how MMOs actually worked, I had no intention of going back. A game constantly maintained, updated and adapted is always going to appeal to me more than a game sipped, given a DLC or two and then abandoned for the sequel.

What happens when you try to do a Live Service like model but pretend you're a buy-to-play game is Payday 2. That game was a Live Service. Yes, it didn't monetise in-game systems, but it introduced brand new systems in DLC and lauched I think $200-$300's worth of DLC in the span of a few years. The result was a game where owners of the base version had basically nothing, could earn basically nothing and were faced with a mountain of DLC if they wanted anything specific, which was off-putting. So off-putting, in fact, that developer Overkill eventually launched an "Ultimate Edition" bundle for $50 with all of the prior DLCs in it. Because that's what happens when you try to handle content distribution through DLC.

 

11 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Personally, the preservation of history is really important to me, because I like to be able to go back and re-play the best parts of games. And you can't do that if the game is constantly changing those parts. One of the saddest parts of this newest update is that the very first tileset ever created for the game, before it was even Warframe, is now gone, replaced by something completely unrecognizable. That's a big, important part of the game's history, and no one can ever directly experience it again. If DE had been willing to make sequels instead, they could have had this new tileset without having to remove the old one, because they could exist simultaneously in different games.

I think we'll have to disagree here, because the preservation of history isn't really all that important to me. Sure, I liked the old Jupiter Tileset and the old Corpus Ship tileset. I have issues with the new ones (a lot fewer lockers, for some reason), but I overall vastly prefer the new tilesets to the old ones. In fact, I look forward to a similar update for the Europa tileset, because that's the game's ugliest, most broken, most unpleasant tileset. Getting rid of it entirely would be a positive action, far as I'm concerned. I generally put very little value on nostalgia and tradition. A thing isn't made any better just because it's old or just because it's been with us since the start. Far as I'm concerned, the various "Warframe Revised" updates have been the highlight of Warframe for the last few years. Yes, they drastically changed the status quo, but they did so by addressing longstanding, fundamental issues with the game - like shotgun status. For as much as people complain about the new Status system, shotgun status was just badly designed and needed to go.

This is the primary selling point of Live Services, in fact. For the most part, they get better over time. At least if the development studio behind them have their heads screwed on straight. No game is perfect on release. Even the ones which seem really good are later revealed to have been deficient in light of further patches. Hell, I talk about City of Heroes all of the time, but that itself was pretty terrible on release, with a sparse costume creator, HORRIBLE power balance and lack of balanced progression. I managed to run out of missions at level 37, with no more showing up until level 40, which left me with a massive boring grind of running around the overworld killing stuff.

If you want to preserve history, do it by saving snapshots from a game as it develops. Don't, however, do that by trying to prevent a game from developing.

 

11 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Not to mention how, when "live service" games die, they disappear completely. Their servers shut down, and no one can access them at all, even if you still have all the game data on your computer. But it doesn't have to be that way. Like how, even though the old Unreal Tournament games may be "dead", you can still play them. You can play botmatch, or setup a private server with your friends. But you cant do that with, say, Hawken. And you won't be able to with Warframe once it inevitably dies, either. This is what makes me so unwilling to ever spend any money at all on F2P games. Its guaranteed to be a temporary investment, sometimes extremely temporary. I would much rather spend $60 on a game that I will most likely be able to play whenever I want for the rest of my life, than even a couple bucks on a game that may be gone in a year.

Everything is a temporary investment. People always bring up Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 in these kinds of conversations, but these games are an aberration. A generation of players grew up with these games and revere them like children from the 80s revere Super Mario. What if I wanted to play Aliens vs. Predator 2, though? You figure there are a lot of multiplayer lobbies for that? What if I wanted to play Wages of Sin? I played the S#&$ out of that in the 90s, still have fond memories of it. Yeah, you can play the single-player components of those games, but especially for Wages of Sin... That's not actually good, or a meaningful selling point. City of Heroes was an exception, in that private servers exist for that game, and I could still play it to this day if I chose to. That didn't stop me from having to consider what to do with my time in 2012 when NCsoft shut that game down, however.

Everything in video games is transient. Trying to pick a game and make it your "home" is always going to be a mistake. Every game dies, every game loses its relevance. The best you can do is play them while they're active, then be ready to find a new source of entertainment when they go away. A lot of people tie their own sense of self-worth to the entertainment they consume. It's why we have so many 7-year veterans talking about "slap in the face" all the time. Far as I'm concerned, that's not a healthy way to approach video games. And yeah, sure - ideally I'd like for developers to release their server-side software when they discontinue a game. Let players host their own private servers like what happened with City of Heroes. Hell, maybe license out the server software so that fan servers can make their own development changes.

Any video game is going to die sooner or later. Trying to hold back the tide with our hands is only ever going to lead to disappointment.

 

1 hour ago, Lers said:

While I dislike all of the battlespass-esque systems, NW is the most inoffensive version I've seen, and requires mostly minimal energy and time investment to max out. I have to agree with some of the other commenters that there seem to be a lot of personal issues projected into this complaint. Don't give into FOMO, weigh the rewards vs the time investment, and just skip the tasks if the trade isn't worth it to you. If you don't find it fun, don't juggle multiple games with FOMO based systems. It's a great way to burn out on multiple games at once. The most effective feedback to developers is by voting with your time / wallet.

While the current version of Nightwave is the least offensive iteration, it's still a season pass built on FOMO. You can't really blame people for "projecting personal issues" when the entire system is designed specifically to capitalise on and invoke personal issues. Remember when lootboxes were criticised for praying on people with gambling addictions? We didn't criticise vulnerable players for being vulnerable back then. We criticised developers for deliberately targeting vulnerabilities, and we might end up with gambling regulations for lootboxes in the long run. Because it's gambling. The same applies to your average Season Pass. It's intended to pray on people's compulsions. Criticising people for their compulsive behaviour that the game deliberately stokes is disingenuous.

Yes, logically, you have a point. Approaching rewards as a cost/value proposition and only engaging in activities with enough worth is the rational choice. The problem is that a lot of players still fall victim to the presentation and are compelled into the irrational, exploitative choice instead. Even for those of us who can make the rational choice, it still sucks. OK, sure, I didn't waste my time on activities I hate, but now I have a lingering sense of having missed out on things. They may not have been things I wanted, strictly speaking, but it's still going to colour my perception of the rest of the game anyway. And even looking at it completely rationally, my perception is already coloured because I recognise a "predatory" system when I see one. That a developer would put that in their game in the first place speaks ill of them, and so colours my perception of the rest of the game.

DE have a lot of sins to atone for, in terms of "engagement." For a while, it honestly seemed like they were deliberately half-assing the game, introducing very little content and focusing predominantly on grind and appointment mechanics. As it turns out, this was caused predominantly by a failure of management causing the studio to repeatedly and badly blow through deadlines, release whatever half-finished work they could slap together and back-fill it with grind to tide people over. It doesn't change the fact, however, that for pretty much all of 2019, content released bare-bones with lots of grind and the option to buy your way past most of it. It seemed deliberate, even if I'm now willing to accept that it was not.

In short, there are persona issues involved here. No doubt. When it's the game itself which capitalised on them, though, I feel those personal issues are relevant.

[Lers]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Snip

 

Games capitalize on such psychological hooks all the time, and its not a bad thing inherently. It only turns sour when they intentionally exploit and monetize these hooks... and extremely bitter, when built to monetize a minor portion of their consumers (aka whales).

You don't advocate to remove alcohol from their product to a wine maker, because alcoholics drink too much pure ethanol. You advocate for reasonable regulations on the industry.

NW (and Warframe overall) is harmless, and arguably a good exemplar in the grand scheme of egregious game monetizations.

[Steel_Rook]

40 minutes ago, Lers said:

Games capitalize on such psychological hooks all the time, and its not a bad thing inherently. It only turns sour when they intentionally exploit and monetize these hooks... and extremely bitter, when built to monetize a minor portion of their consumers (aka whales). NW (and Warframe overall) is harmless, and arguably a good exemplar in the grand scheme of egregious game monetizations.

I'd expand this a little. It's a problem when used to exploit vulnerable players, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I'm willing to believe DE on the story about the Kubrow slot machine incident - that they didn't mean to design one and pulled it the moment they realised what had happened. Fair enough. It doesn't make the decision any better, though. I'm not arguing for the removal of Nightwave like the OP is - we're too late in the game for that and its current iteration is the least bad of the lot. The "recovered" mechanic helps considerably, make no mistake. My argument, however, is that Nightwave as a core concept has unpleasant roots. It IS a modified Season Pass. It's free, it's less egregious (though I need to remind people that other Season Passes don't require weekly participation), it has been improved... But it's still a Season Pass.

Look at the history of F2P monetisation. For a hot minute, everything was Lootboxes. Gained popularity with Fifa, it gained acceptance with Overwatch, then spread everywhere. Every game had you earning a "thing" which you could then cause to explode in a shower of colourful "things" given to you at random, and you usually had to pay for it. Then EA S#&$ the bed, raised awareness of lootboxes and forced the hand of national governments to re-examine online gambling. Note what happened afterwards. Almost overnight, newer video games started bragging about not having lootboxes, and simultaneously assuming Fortnite's Battle Pass. The market moved from one exploitative mechanic into another as lootboxes themselves became too toxic to really handle.

Nightwave aside, Battle Passes are a modern reinterpretation of the late 90s / early 2000s MMO subscription. They're cheaper, of course, but they have most of the same mechanics. You get access to a thing as long as you pay, and you need to pay more if you want to keep having access to it. Warframe's Season Pass is free, but I honestly wish that it weren't. DE have done more damage to Warframe trying to pretend it's "free" than they've actually accomplished. I've said on a number of occasions - give players a reasonable monthly subscription and a lot of us would buy it. This attempt to retain "engagement" just to pad out the stats is actively burning vulnerable people out while doing fairly little for anyone else. I already have my Umbral Forma from this Season of Nightwave and will probably have the titular Nightwave ship by next week. All Nightwave does is add another grind.

[supernils]

1 hour ago, Lers said:

 

 

NW (and Warframe overall) is harmless, and arguably a good exemplar in the grand scheme of egregious game monetizations.

NW is not only harmless, it's positive natured. It's nothing more than an extra REWARD layer on top of existing content. This whole thread is absurd.