A Critical Summary of Warframe's Monetization Methods

[kuciol]

Out of curiosity can you point me to any info about your company. I find it hilarious when no-names from internet try to teach multimilion companies how to do bussiness.

[(PSN)grayscale358]

OKAY. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH DE'S MONETIZATION???

SERIOUSLY

[(PSN)grayscale358]

Personally, I find this discussion to be... irrelevent. Is the market great? No. Is DE's monetization better than most other f2p games? Yes. Could they do better? Yes. Will they change anything? Doubtful.
Do the devs need money to survive and keep the game going? Yes. Do they provide the game at no upfront cost or major DLC releases? Yes.

Now ask where the devs would get their money from if every monetization method was removed? And ask how many new players, who understand the type of game Warframe is will buy things, like Nano Spores, for 30 platinum, or will rush any build?

[killerJoke66]

Warframe's mometiziation methods do kinda screw up newer player experience and drive to play further , just the fact that this game can hold on its own while maintaining some of its active playerbase is quite the thing to me .

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

On 2020-09-22 at 11:12 AM, (PS4)Hooligantuan said:

Son requires 10 Son Coins to Gild each Predasite or Vulpaphyla companion.  I had to get 60 Coins together.  He trades Coins for Tags.

Initially Son Coins were a pretty severe requirement to rank up Entrati standing, too.  DE later reduced it, but regardless - Son and his Conservation were initially super garbage.

You can chalk up some of that other business with getting fish parts and minerals to that whole "obtuse" thing I mentioned earlier.  There's some unintuitive business to pick through amid the drudgery, which seems relevant to incentivizing microtransactions through player ignorance or disaffecting game design.

Dude. He literally gives you 10 for turning in a rank 30 ungilded new-pet, and 15 for a gilded one. You can get the tags for those almost by accident, stumbling over them when bashing enemies in bounties. 

Depending on how many of them you wanted to gild and keep, you could have done all of that with a minimum of just 7 tags, without touching the tranq gun even once, and had something like 25 surplus tags at the end of it if you only kept one new-pet. 

So.... Wanna explain why you "had to get 60" tokens, and why you seem to think that's not the same as "just 6 weakened tags"? 

 

I'm also struggling to see how "run bounty, check vendors, realise that you have a surplus of the things they want without having done anything other than collect loot" is anything approaching "obtuse", or "unintuitive". I mean it kinda sounds like someone assumed that they knew how entirely new systems would work, and just ran with that, then complained about it, doesn't it? 

[White_Matter]

I've tried to get some friends to play the game but as soon as they realized they needed to sink some real life money to buy plat to be able to progress at a reasonable pace, they called  the quits.

Unless you plan on playing the game alot, meaning 5+ hours per day, some plat bump is essential and that is pretty discouraging for new players. 

 

[Imniscor]

The only problem I see :
It should let us craft more than one forma at once.

You can still play all content and have nearly everything (except Tennogen but still have a lot of cosmetics) without spending a dime.

[(PSN)Hooligonzo]

3 hours ago, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

Dude. He literally gives you 10 for turning in a rank 30 ungilded new-pet, and 15 for a gilded one.

That's the kind of information that'd be nice to know well in advance.  :D

Warframe is notorious for these kinds of quirks.  Everywhere else in the game, turning in ranked up weapons and such gives you a pretty skimpy return, probably in faction reputation.  It's great you knew that this time was an exception, but why would you expect it of other folks?  I constantly have four to six tabs open for the Warframe wiki and stuff slips my notice all the damned time.

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

3 minutes ago, (PS4)Hooligantuan said:

That's the kind of information that'd be nice to know well in advance.  :D

Warframe is notorious for these kinds of quirks.  Everywhere else in the game, turning in ranked up weapons and such gives you a pretty skimpy return, probably in faction reputation.  It's great you knew that this time was an exception, but why would you expect it of other folks?  I constantly have four to six tabs open for the Warframe wiki and stuff slips my notice all the damned time.

That's why some of us spent a bit of time checking out the different menu options in their dialogues (in my case it's also because quite a bit of the quest was totally borked and I was sure that I had missed some useful information because of it and wanted to be doubly certain that I had an idea of what each of them was about. 

 

I didn't know that "this time was an exception" I knew that I didn't know anything about the new world and vendors. Like everyone else I was being flooded with a whole bunch of new stuff that I didn't recognize (and to be honest still don't... Most of my captures are totally unintended because the new-pets still just register as "it moved, hit it" until they start to glow and the "press square now" icon pops up. Then I usually try to mark it and give others a chance to come near to share the capture with them.) Honestly we were all in the same boat, none of us started off knowing anything, so my question is why did you assume that you did? 

 

Seriously I feel for you, I dislike hunting, even though I'm okay with fishing. But by just trying the Mom bounties it became immediately apparent that I didn't absolutely need to do anything to get Daughter, Father and Otak tokens. Grangran was happy to trade me tokens for those, and once I had enough detritus collected to also make a low level new-pet Son was willing to give me a ridiculous amount of tokens for it. 

I get the whole "I don't like being forced to do this thing" but with the exception of a few specific tags to rank up, and build that Helminth Segment.... We absolutely have been given alternatives. That's why I'm pretty okay with the whole thing. 🤷‍♂️

[CatboyPrincess]

5 hours ago, White_Matter said:

I've tried to get some friends to play the game but as soon as they realized they needed to sink some real life money to buy plat to be able to progress at a reasonable pace, they called  the quits.

Unless you plan on playing the game alot, meaning 5+ hours per day, some plat bump is essential and that is pretty discouraging for new players. 

 

What would help with this is a non-plat purchasable package ~20$ that provides the player with a significant value proposition, ex. access to all non-prime frames forever, or a cast of 10 frames -- that refunds any duplicate frames in part as plat. maybe rip out the noob trap endo-mod packs (they're better but still pretty bad). Definitely rip out Nano Spores 3000/30p. And reduce the overall selection size of products for sale. (Akin to a condensing a bloated dinner menu at a restaurant.)

* reduces player decision paralysis and sensory overload (a problem I'm sure a lot of warframe players have had, me included)

* streamlines what products are visible

* reduces the number of low-value purchases, proportionally increasing high-value purchases -> results in higher player confidence in what they're considering to buy is worth their cash.

If such a value-pack was released guaranteeing all frames forever, I'd drop my money on it in a heartbeat.