Burning out quite a bit, so here's an essay on some reasons why

[Tyreaus]

Prelude

I am writing this almost immediately after the release of Deimos because, simply, there is content. I have been running on a wick for a while and wanted to make sure it wasn't just a lack of novelty or "things to do". I have things to do. This is still a thing.

With that out of the way, this is an essay of the problems I've had with Warframe. Some things will be familiar. Some might be a new angle on existing issues. All of it is stuff I doubt will make a lick of difference. Most people won't care, some might agree, many might hate me for it, and DE - I expect - won't change a damn thing no matter what words I put on their database. Not when these are things that have gone on before my time.

But I've been wrong before, so #yolo

Contents / TL;DR:

1. Big changes or bust? - the vast majority of changes are large in scale, leaving smaller tweaks to the wayside until they can fit into a large update or Warframe rework - see Well of Life and Ember's old World on Fire.

2. Mechanical conflict and exclusions - the most optimal choice in any given mission with the vast majority of setups is minimal diversity.

3. AI and spawning - simple AI isn't bad, but without overarching patterns (like well-defined platoon structures), becomes the most defining feature.

4. Over-reliance on RNG - RNG limits everything to a per-tile basis, limiting art, level design, and enemy placement, and tugs players's focus toward traversal over exploration or observation.

5. The engagement problem - players ask for difficulty because the minimum level of engagement asked by the game is marginally above a clicker game.

6. Power-pacing and difficulty - power sufficient to complete virtually the entire game can be acquired very quickly, leading to a lack of difficulty too soon - overpowered is fine, but needs a healthy amount of contrast to appreciate. You don't appreciate broken Binding of Isaac runs without the starting-with-nothing phase.

7. Content-pacing and endgame - the current MR system does not utilize even 1/2 of its total play-time potential, squishing content toward the earlier game and leading to a quick flattening of progression (i.e. a swift lack of progressing further into the game). Not surprising "endgame" gets thrown about a lot, is it?

8. The brighter side - not everything is lost, but things have been this way for a very long time...

9. Story and narrative - the kick in the teeth that is Heart of Deimos

10. Conclusion - plus a few other things not mentioned

Big Changes or Bust?

This is partly speculation based on observation, but it certainly seems - especially with the Helminth system - that DE feels like it has to go big or go home. The problem is, in a number of cases, changes that might be necessary are small. Equinox, who I've harped about over many (many many) threads, doesn't need a massive overhaul for her kit to fall more in line with her theme. She can see a massive improvement with quite small changes. And yet, those probably will never see the light of day. Same goes for the few ability updates to Zephyr and Trinity with the Helminth system. Those probably could have been done ages ago. Likewise, there were weapon stances that could use some tweaks and updates. Yet the changes we received to stances changed things across the board - no stance was left untouched, even the ones considered effective.

If there's no apparent way for smaller or more specific tweaks - no matter how impactful - to find their way into Warframe, then I regret to say, I'm not holding my breath on any of them. And that is a problem given the sheer number of smaller areas that could be polished or improved.

Mechanical Conflict and Exclusions

Warframe is about killing enemies. Question: is Warframe's killing enemies about the weapons or the powers?

There are some abilities that feed weapons (Chroma for a prime example). There are some abilities that are fed from weapons (Equinox's 4, for example).

Then there is a massive swath of abilities where weapons play no role whatsoever and so either become stat-sticks or otherwise compete with the ability. Khora and Nidus showcase abilities overshadowing weapons. Conversely, every exalted weapon fails to compete with a regular weapon. Ash's vanilla Shuriken finds a tough spot of its own.

So the question is: is it about the weapons or the abilities? In a few cases it's answered, but in many, many others, the response is one gigantic shrug. There's no fall-back to have weapons feed into abilities by default, like granting energy for weapon kills, or some kind of scaling damage on base damage-dealing abilities (like a pocket form of Equinox's 4). Energy is so plentiful that there isn't even a solid "weapons as a fallback" concept. Much of the time, you pick one at the exclusion of the other - and many times, there's a clear winner, to one side or another.

This kind of conflict isn't limited to abilities and weapons, but also to abilities and weapons by themselves. Weapons are relatively straightforward to see: ammunition is plentiful and weapon swap times so long (compared to reloads) that nothing is lost by taking a pistol and going to town. Abilities are not immune, either. In many cases, the optimal modding setup for a Warframe excludes some stat and, by consequence, abilities reliant on that stat. Equinox, for example, is married to the range stat, and maximizing that neuters her power strength. Yet her 3 and day 2 rely on that power strength. You can build for power strength for Peaceful Provocation or duration for Duality, except A: they're exclusive with the build that makes Mend and Maim effective and B: there's a clear winner between "mild CC and ally buffing" and "blow up an entire room at the press of a button". In other cases, abilities simply conflict as-is. Without their augments, why would Volt's 1 or Ash's 1 find use instead of their 4s?

And that goes throughout much of the cast. If you're lucky, you get something like Wukong that can get away with low range and have his other powers work at least acceptably. Defy still gives a ton of armour no matter the range, after all. Or something like Saryn, where her abilities at least remotely feed into her main shtick (even if half the time you don't need them). If you're unlucky, you get Nyx, who - by my recollection at least - is pretty much "build for her 4 or use someone else".

To put it more simply: in the vast majority of cases with weapons and abilities, the optimal choice is minimal diversity. Don't bother switching weapons, your secondary kitgun will do fine. Don't even worry about weapons if you're running Nidus. Don't build for a Warframe, build for an ability and ignore the rest. It's through that kind of exclusion and conflict that the game steers players away from diversity, even in the face of apparent synergy.

And yes, that means I'm trashing on Warframe corrupted mods. Trading fire rate for damage is one thing. Trading abilities outright is another.

AI and Spawning

I am going to be controversial and say: there is nothing inherently wrong with Warframe's AI.

I have seen many posts that clamour for more complex and engaging enemy AI. Putting it simply, this is not necessary. Zombie shooter games and modes like Call of Duty's Zombies mode are quite straightforward in their AI: it runs at you and baps your head in.

It is important to understand what complex AI would present: a systemic challenge. That is, it provides an enemy-based structure for the player to analyse, adapt to, and overcome. This is what Soulsborne games do to the tenth degree. But you don't need complicated, whirly-gig artificial intelligence to pull that off. A platoon of Grineer arranged in a phalanx that plods forward the same way as it always does needs no complicated AI but still provides a degree of challenge to the player. Note, however, this does not work with random spawning.

By its nature, random spawning disavows structure for unpredictability. Those Soulsborne games I mentioned? Part of the way they work at all is in the telegraphing. There are elements to analyse, which then proceeds to adaptation and success. If those enemies flailed about at random, they could still be hard - or they could be easy - but the technique for handling them would quickly become the same: stay away, poke from a distance, don't get into the mess. Without that structure, what the enemy does ceases to matter.

This applies to groups of enemies as well. Tossing enemies at players at random, with no structure, causes the enemies themselves to stop mattering, and the strategy to become the equivalent of "stay away and poke at a distance". See, then, the prevalence of nuking abilities, and massive CC abilities, and stealth abilities. All those do the same thing of minimizing engagement with the enemy.

This isn't to say randomness can't be present - Soulsborne enemies may telegraph attacks, but the patterns of attacks can be more random - but such works at a higher level. If you want randomness, then randomize enemy waves that, themselves, have structure. Changing systemic challenges doesn't dissolve the system.

There is also a psychological angle to this. People gravitate toward patterns; that's part of what allows the analysis of bosses in those Soulsborne games. If the enemy flails around like a spaz, their attacks lose pattern and structure, but there is still the pattern of "stay away from the thing". Likewise, when enemies spawn at random, what's the most common pattern presented? The thing they share?

Simple AI. That becomes the defining feature of the enemies at large. And so we have players asking for more complex AI, because that's the only sensible piece of the puzzle. Because there isn't even a hint of a possible, larger structure that, itself, could present a challenge.

Over-Reliance on RNG

To be blunt: Warframe is not a rogue-like, or even a rogue-lite, and I fail to find a polite reason that explains the current level layouts.

Throughout the forum is littered discussions on the RNG of rewards and the odds of rewards. I do not believe these are, themselves, problems, but are more symptoms of underlying problems. So that is not what my talk on RNG is about.

What it is about is level design and flow. I give credit to the level designers: within the constraints of randomized tile patterns, they've done a respectable job. However, this constraint has two major problems (plus two minor ones).

First is the simple, obvious fact that effective tile design does not beget effective level design. I commend what the developers have been able to do with randomized map layouts, but I can only imagine what they may be able to pull off with full, non-randomized control. (The map of Awakening is pretty darn effective, just as an example)

Second is that random tile layouts call for the player's attention. Players who have been playing for a long time will likely know what I'm talking about when I say I can path through half the Gas City tiles by looking at my minimap. Over time, players develop a sort of muscle memory when it comes to traversing maps. I am led to believe that DE prefers players not to get into routines, and this is part of the reason that randomized map layouts exist. The issue is that this detracts from things like appreciating the level's design or interacting in other ways, like looking around for collectibles or aiming for that bow headshot or trying a different route. In essence, players who could run a map blindfolded are too distracted with determining the next tile (and remembering its route) to be distracted by anything else.

Third and fourth are minor but, I feel, worth mentioning. For one, random levels flat out kill potential uniqueness. The difference between Helene on Saturn and Hydron on Sedna, or Pantheon on Mercury and Telesto on Saturn, is enemy strength and that's it. They could have more unique layouts to make the missions more unique, or differences in layout that make one mission type more challenging in some way than the other. For two, random levels kill speedrunning. You can't actually have an effective speedrun or a race if the tiles are constantly different, and that's a pretty healthy area of entertainment just tossed out the window (especially for the game's fast-paced stylings).

RNG isn't problematic just for map designs but, also, in enemy spawns. This is, in reality, the root cause of the lack of enemy structure: enemies spawn in semi-random points and with semi-random types. A Bombard at position A may not be a Bombard the next run, or may not have an enemy there at all. As stated in the previous section, this eliminates patterns that could make up for simplistic artificial intelligence. But this also ties into map designs for the above four issues. Enemies are, in a sense, part of the map, and so every gripe about map design caused by an over-reliance of RNG - from less effective map designs to attention-grabs to uniqueness to speedrunning - applies just as well.

Not to mention that stealth becomes borderline impossible to do effectively. I won't belabour that point, what with Warframe having abandoned that conceptual slogan ages ago, but the almost total inability to do stealth without cheese due to the random nature of freaking everything is a personal sticking point.

The Engagement Problem

People have clamoured for difficulty. I don't buy into the game needing difficult content, but what it does lack is something that's engaging.

The level of engagement DE seems to permit is quite low. They don't want players to sit on a defense objective with Ember and kill everything. That is fair. But if the player can sit on the objective and macro a button, perhaps with a few extra keystrokes and mouse movements for energizing dash, that's generally acceptable.

...pardon?

To be clear, I do not see an issue with nuke abilities as a concept - when done right. As far as I'm concerned, Equinox's Maim heads in an acceptable direction: while some gain-on-kill values could be tweaked, it requires a decent amount of attention from the Equinox player, at the least to watch the damage tick up and keep track of the enemy radar to know when to burst a tile down (And, at the most, to tick up that damage counter herself).

However, the more accessible room-clearing abilities are, the less engagement the player has. This culminates in players pressing a button to wipe entire tilesets, with the occasional energizing dash (assuming some other player doesn't do that for them). This is, in blunt terms, a clicker game. As in, something in the style of Cookie Clicker. I know of nobody on this decaying planet that would consider Cookie Clicker hard, and given it spawned an entire genre of games called "idle games", I feel quite confident people would agree it isn't spectacularly engaging from a gameplay standpoint.

I understand that this is controversial and that there are groups of people who don't want the game to become terribly difficult. The response to Orb Vallis enemies, generally, shows this. To a point, I agree: it shouldn't be a terribly difficult game. But the issue isn't that it's easy, it's that it's homogenized. Part of this comes down to the "mechanical conflict and exclusions" section: most of the times, one thing does just fine and the rest can be safely ignored. But part of this also stems from the fact that access to that room-wiping power is immediate. There is no build-up, no contrast. The room-wiping ability isn't some "ultimate" ability, it's just the ability.

Content does not need to be difficult, in almost any sense, to be engaging. It just has to ask the player to do something a little more than press a button (or four) once in a while.

Power Pacing and Difficulty

"Contrast" is an important phrase in game design. Slaughtering demons in Doom is the name of the game. But those moments of ripping and tearing are made sweeter by the moments of not ripping and tearing - managing upgrades, navigating rooms post-carnage, replenishing health, so on and so forth.

There is also a contrast in power. In Warframe, the player starts out weak and gains power - this is such standard fare to the point that Metroid Prime subverted it a little by taking away the player's power following the intro sequence.

The caveat to contrast is that, in order to appreciate it, the player has to spend some time in both states. The player in any Metroid game, or even any rogue-like game, spends quite a bit of time in a less-powerful state. They climb in power, but this climb is gradual and takes place throughout the game.

The time for Warframe players from weakest to strongest is MR16 (and from weakest to strong enough to handle the game overall, via effective mods, is even shorter than that). I will come back to the MR level system in the next section, but to put it lightly, this is not very far into the game at all. This means that players spend a lot of time in the "overpowered" state, which means less time spent in the "underpowered" state. As it is, this does not help matters much: it's hard to develop appreciation for power if it's shoved into your lap as soon as you raise your hand to ask when you get more. But this is exacerbated by the means with which difficulty is accomplished in Warframe.

In a typical Metroid game, the progression goes as such: much of the game is quite straightforward with some backtracking, where the end of the game - after the player has acquired their top-of-the-line power - either requires or encourages the player to traverse through many of the old levels. These are, at times, old levels the player spent some time in, struggling with enemies that were once difficult but now keel over dead at the player's sheer destructive power. There is a distinct contrast between the memory and the moment.

Backtracking in Warframe is...strange. Say, for example, you just barely clear Pluto and immediately back-track to Venus. The same enemies, the same tile-sets. Mathematically, you are more powerful. Does it feel that way? In the player's view, that's unlikely, because the enemy they're wrecking with their absurd power is the same enemy they were just struggling against one mission ago. The difference is less in the player's power and more in the enemy's durability. In other words: I don't feel stronger, I just feel everything's weaker. I don't feel accomplished, having gained all this power. I feel like I selected easy mode.

That kind of difficulty implementation, removed from enemy designs or differences, kills the ability to appreciate just what the player has gained through their time. Which, itself, isn't a lot of time.

Content Pacing and Endgame

Games are, generally, about progress. Progress takes many forms, from more offensive power to more ability to manoeuvre to more ability to take damage. Or more allies. Or levels.

Player progression in Warframe is, generally, measured by mastery rank, or MR. Increasing MR grants access to things such as quests and systems like the Helminth. MR is determined by mastery of different weapons. This has many issues.

First, it's almost completely divorced from the primary progression of power that lies within the modding system. Players become more powerful not through mastery rank, but through the mods they acquire and level up. That means a player can have a very high level of power with zero progression into the game as a whole (having explored a minimal amount of content).

Second, everything unlocks by MR16, and MR has scaling requirements. Given the current presumed cap is MR30, this means that the player is not even half-way through their total mastery path before everything is unlocked. This has the major problem of compressing content toward the front, which is exemplified most by all quests being unlocked by MR7. In effect, the player has most of the game's content shoved into their lap very early on, then has nowhere left to go. This density is more of an issue when one considers that this skips content: if you have a dozen weapons, need only five to rank up, and only one to progress through the game's difficulty curve, that leaves eleven weapons barely noticed and seven weapons completely untouched.

Third, the ranking of weapons in the current day and age means absolutely nothing. It has zero measure of how far into the game a player is, or how capable they are of handling new content. But even those aside, there are so many weapons that it is effortless to get to MR16. In some distant past, it may have been effective as a pacing mechanism, slowing players down by making them rank up just-released weapons to access newer content. That is not holding up to the test of time.

In a Youtube comment, I brought up the idea of vertical progression and horizontal progression. Vertical progression would include everything up to achieving MR16 - there is something to unlock and the player reaches for that unlock. After MR16, any remaining, incomplete content is horizontal progression - things that the player can do, but aren't especially reaching for, in terms of progress. Generally, horizontal progression isn't "progress" in the typical sense. This, essentially, places MR16 at the end-game state. To reiterate: this is the point at which the player's MR progression is not even half-way complete. There is still a swath of space that could be used to extend the game further, to pace the game so that grind walls are less necessary to keep players from burning through new content the night of.

I feel it important to stress that the MR system could be used to effectively pace content and, because of its design, isn't. That's a big reason we don't have end-game content, and I would say, the very reason we expect end-game content anyway. We've got nowhere else to go but sideways.

The Brighter Side. Sort of...

Not everything is lost. All of these issues above have conceptual solutions. The MR system, and progress in general, could be reworked. Enemy spawning could be reworked. Maps could be retooled to, if not abandon randomization outright, rely on it much less. Ability systems could be retooled to give more contrast in the ultimate power players have, give them more ability to appreciate it. Gameplay in general can be made so interesting that half of these problems just evaporate into a cloud of "who cares I'm having fun". And there's nothing saying DE can't emphasize smaller changes even tomorrow, just go ham on a bunch of tiny tweaks for no reason than just to spite me.

But these aren't new issues. These are problems that existed when I started. These are, I wager, problems that existed before I started. So I don't have hopes that'll change. It has potential, but it had potential years ago, and...here we still are.

I do want to take a moment to say that Warframe is, in my opinion, a good game. It has bugs and issues in design and philosophy and so on and so forth. Most games do, especially ones that continuously update. I will certainly not say it's perfect, good lord is it imperfect. It's tarnished almost to rust. But it's good, and I can feel DE is trying their best, and they're finding commercial success, and even in the constraints of their existing (IMO flawed) design, they're pulling off some spectacular things. Heck, they're working on maps on a tile-by-tile basis and they make those tiles look good.

Yet, one big of polish doesn't rid the rust.

Story, Narrative, and the Reason for this Thread

(Below are spoilers for the Heart of Deimos questline. Please don't open it if you want that ruined.)

Spoiler

According to dialogue by (I think) Father, Warframes and Tenno were a sort of "second option", what with Necramechs being outfitted to combat Sentients during the Old War. Apparently, that was the purpose behind the Necramechs.

When I heard this, my immediate question was: Why were Warframes needed at all?

I presume something happened to the Necramechs. The narrative doesn't give an answer, or some critical flaw in the Nechramechs the Sentients exploited. The narrative provides no reason why the Tenno, or Warframes, would be necessary. It thrusts upon the player the revelation we aren't that important and leaves us to stew on it.

Also, apparently, killing the Heart nullifies the Tenno's power. That's a whole thing.

Speaking as a writer, this is quite a big shift in narrative tone. For a while, it was that we're basically unstoppable killing machines - barring that one fatal weakness circa the Second Dream - and we were necessary to end the Old War. We were, in many senses, the main players. Almost invulnerable, imperfect, but god-like. Yet now we're not only apparently unnecessary, we aren't even self-reliant in our powers. We have to hope Son doesn't have another existential crisis in the next few cycles and blow up the Heart again. This kind of shift is not only unnecessary to the weight of the quest or the mystery of the Void and the Orokin's Void technology (doesn't "intra-dimensional collapse" carry enough weight on both fronts? Why even delegate Tenno to second-class behind the Necramechs?), it's a heck of a good way to kick the power fantasy narrative in the face.

Which creates the question again:

Why are we even needed? What were we doing here? What are we doing here?

Conclusion

The question of what we are doing here mutates into a different one very readily: What am I doing here? Frankly, I'm not sure. I could rank up with the Entrati, but so what? I have fully ranked kitguns. The new Paris mod won't detract me from my Daikyu + Nikana lifesteal combo. There's a swath of content and, in my view, no real point to it.

The simply-stated error in Warframe is a lack of focus and coherence. There aren't well-solidified connections between a lot of things. Abilities and weapons conflict. Players progress in some senses very quickly, slower in other senses, and there's not really a rhyme or reason for the divorce between power progression and game progression. Connections between the player and their enemies are so loose that the game can devolve into an idle clicker at the opening of a scripting application. New content is seldom useful beyond completionism.

That isn't even every little thing I've wanted to detail. The pace of progression skips over a massive swath of items, and even then, it's desynchronized with things like Tempo Royale dropping most readily from Rathuum - the end of the Starchart, well after the Dark Split Sword is useful. The damage system is a ridiculous mess where things like Blast apparently had to be altered and the Viral + Heat meta is king because everything has health and armour scaling sucks. The dual-wielding aspect on Glaives is a relic from the first melee system (before instant swapping was a thing) and it's still around. The vast majority of the game boils down to the modding screen, with missions themselves being trivial gear-checking exercises. And what monstrosity has the Riven system mutated into (or never evolved from) from its original goal of making underpowered, underused weapons a touch more desirable? How was the entire Fang Prime issue not the raising of a thousand red flags in how stats there work, let alone Sicarus Prime and Tiberon Prime back then? How did none of that lead to revisions in the Riven system itself?

I suppose "how is x still a thing" can be said of many things.

Anyway, that's it for this. Time for me to mess around in Conclave a bit, probably build a house in Minecraft, and watch a man (who puts animals in virtual holes) mod a Nerf gun with double voltage motors. Take care, be safe, hug your loved ones. Cheers.

[Xylena_Lazarow]

13 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

Story, Narrative

Since I don't RP myself as a hero in violent games, saving my personal power was actually a pretty clever way to convince me to help the Entrati. Unlike Fortuna, the least sympathetic crew of oppressed workers I've ever met, all they ever seem to do is talk down to me. Except Ticker. Ticker is cool.

Burnout is pretty understandable. I once burned out so hard I gave away the 15k plat I had from being a Riven Lord and didn't play for a year. Best of luck, feel better.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

"power sufficient to complete virtually the entire game"

Acquiring a frame and knowing how to use it is not the same thing. 

I had no idea how to use a nuke frame or mod properly once I acquired it, and I also didn't have the capacity, mods or forma to make such a build either. 

Acquiring a frame or weapon and building it will always take time and a forma/potato investment. Most people aren't dropping money on plat to make some powerful build right away.

Take for example when people talk about energy economy to utilize those powerful builds: that's Zenurik dash, having the resources to constantly make energy pizzas, and arcane energize which is probably 500+ plat or doing Hydrocaps which also takes a huge investment.

 

I found this game actually incredibly hard in the beginning. It took me a solid 4 months to get close to a solid foundation and begin my journey to hardcore gameplay.

[johnno23]

I would agree that the player gets too much too soon. 

Solo play was how I started and it had one advantage and that was I could actually appreciate the story and the feeling of actual progression and improvement was rewarding up to a point. That point for myself was the part of the campaign where I had to kill the Kuva Queen. By then I had worked out how to build a weapon and mod a frame to such a point the game was essentially easy and just a lot of fun killing anything that appeared on screen. 

In todays scenario i can farm a lich get a Kuva Bramma - Kohm - Nukor - Ogris etc etc and annihilate everything at mastery level 5 ???

DE have basically Nerfed the challenge of progressing thru the star chart and learning how to mod effectively to make your frame and weapons sufficient to deal with what you encounter as the story unfolds.

DE now have a situation where players at low level mastery [ possibly only a week of play ] have no need to learn how to mod correctly or use the frames abilities to the best advantage to actually survive.

I would say that mastery level 16 to unlock everything was bad but now it is even worse. Level 5 you already have access to Kuva Weapons that will simply decimate everything for you without too much thought planning or effort. Kuva Weapon Blue Print as the reward for killing the lich but then work for the resources to build them would have been a far better implementation..........not just "Here you go, go blast everything"

 

[(PSN)thegarada]

regarding the story, you can ignore mostly everything in Demios and stick to the last relevant story content, Sacrifice. Sacrifice explains Everything there is to know about Warframes. Demios is what happens when you unnecessarily f*** with Complete story arcs. It does not add or explain anything of value. Actually, the story content unblockable vetervian like cut scenes, in the room accessible by Tenno, were the important story stuff. Everything else is sparkle with no substance.

As for MR, progression is not MR. MR is gating to ensure players cannot by there way into the most powerful stuff by cash, without playing the game. No more no less. It has little value beyond MR 14 and extremely little after MR 16. Player progression is measure primarily with what rivens you have for what weapons, and access to all important mods. 

[redkunaz]

On 2020-08-26 at 8:54 PM, Xylena_Lazarow said:

Since I don't RP myself as a hero in violent games, saving my personal power was actually a pretty clever way to convince me to help the Entrati. Unlike Fortuna, the least sympathetic crew of oppressed workers I've ever met, all they ever seem to do is talk down to me. Except Ticker. Ticker is cool.

Burnout is pretty understandable. I once burned out so hard I gave away the 15k plat I had from being a Riven Lord and didn't play for a year. Best of luck, feel better.

my god the things id do for 15k plat...

I did a overpriced riven trade (1200p) the other day, and the guy asked for 6 items and plat, I couldnt put the plat because of the 6 items and he accepted the trade. I thought he just trusted me, but he didn't notice the plat was missing... God i kept thinking about doing it... but i couldn't, i sent him another trade he typed "?" i put the plat and he is like "i never thought id meet someone like you , thnks" and i  felt good because i did the right thing but also horrible with myself because i really needed the plat.

Something worse happened in real life... i found 20 euros on the floor of a caffe while i was playing 8-ball and i pick it up and ask who the money belongs too...how stupid can i be... anyone could lie... it was INSTINCT i kept shouting at myself in my end, even more when the random guy picked up the money, and left the 8-ball feeling depressed... It still hurts today.

My family always kept making me feel like i need to do the right thing... but it just isn't rewarding... i lost 20 euros when i was unemployed , and i could had kept 1200 plat even if it was wrong.

I'm happy many people in the community like you have a good heart and do donations, like on disccord, thnks man.