So.. what happened to Warframe?

[rapt0rman]

3 minutes ago, I_Eat_Toast said:

Make due with what you have. If this was science, I'd collect more data, but DE holds the key. DE can release metrics, or Steam is the metric. It's their choice.

To be clear, what some people on the internet incorrectly think is the metric literally has no bearing on anything other then the amount of threads like this that pop up and then fizzle out.

[Yakhul]

First thread of the year that speaks about this very divisive topic.

[--Aegis--Toast]

1 minute ago, Tesseract7777 said:

No one is forcing you to presuppose an outcome without enough data. 

DE/Sony/Microsoft/Discord/Epic Games/Panic Button/Nintendo Switch are not releasing all of their numbers, so I choose to not try to determine a result without enough data. I'm not saying WF is growing, dying, or staying steadily about the same. I am saying I do not know, because I do not have the data to know. If you want to try to guess based on one metric out of like 6-7 be my guest, but as far as mathematical or scientific process is concerned you are practically extrapolating out of thin air. 

Statistically speaking, it's a subsample of the population of WF. The subsample shows that player base has declined to a 3rd of what is was 6 months ago. Subsamples are a good methodology of polling a population to get a good approximation. You can choose to be undecisive, but it's better to work with the data you have than to wait for perfect data that will never come.

[(PSN)Darkrya]

I think there are various other threads that cover this topic better than anyone else here (including me), but for the most part player dips are a natural part of Warframes Cycle, after almost every big update you see a big decline, only for it to jump up again at the next big update, Deimos in fact seemed to bring in the largest amount of traffic warframe has ever seen, the numbers at themselves don't equate to the quality of the update, but big updates tend to attract alot of people.

If you look at the whole timeline instead of the current numbers you'd see this pattern of player peaks and troughs.

[--Aegis--Toast]

9 minutes ago, rapt0rman said:

To be clear, what some people on the internet incorrectly think is the metric literally has no bearing on anything other then the amount of threads like this that pop up and then fizzle out.

What are you implying?

[PublikDomain]

Just now, Genitive said:

Warframe being on Epic store seems like the most probable cause for the drop. And most people are probably already done with the event.

  Warframe's peak CCU has been higher on Steam since it was made available on EGS, so I don't really think that's the case.

If I didn't mark the day Warframe launched on EGS you'd never be able to find it.

6 minutes ago, Tesseract7777 said:

And those of us who rule our thoughts based on pure logic will continue to disregard out of hand people who think they can divine activity based on one single metric out of several that determine activity. 

If you're going to rule your thoughts based on pure logic, then it's purely logical that general trends for a given platform will be the same regardless of how the game is launched. To say otherwise would be to say that PC players who use EGS or the standalone launcher are significantly different in their behaviours than players on the Steam launcher. Do you have some purely logical reason you could share as to why that could be?

[KitMeHarder]

• Crappy balancing direction
  • (Melee nerf, status nerf, bad Khora nerf, etc...)
• No cinematic quest
  • The thing that brings in most new players, and what a lot of casual players enjoy
• No content worth grinding/devaluing the current grinds
  • Scarlet Spear/Orphix venom killed Eidolons, rivens are a horrible fuster cluck with every update, etc...
• Botched updates (Railjack) that were meant to push Warframe into it's next evolution, like the Second Dream and PoE did.

[Yakhul]

1 minute ago, KitMeHarder said:

Crappy balancing direction

• (Melee nerf....

 

Melee is stronger than before btw. The fact that every single melee weapon is now viable, instead of a few selected ones, makes melee that much better than before. Combo system is more fluid and feels better. Quick swap from melee to gun and from gun to melee, is a huge improvement over the old melee, and makes the pace feels faster. Melee does not need a riven to shine at high end (if by that, you mean facing lvl 100000000000+ enemies, which btw, is only very few people who do that, and thus, cant really be used as a way to say if a weapon is good or not.)

Status nerf, if by that you mean that the meta changed from corrosive+heat to Viral+slash, then is more of a personal opinion. A change in meta doesnt mean a nerf, nor adjustments to specific status mean nerf. Status do need to be looked at again, as there are some statuses that need a rework from the ground up, such as impact and cold, but i havent seen any nerf to status, or if there was any, i have not noticed it.

And about the Khora nerf? So you call a line of sight requirement a nerf? Feels like you are one of those who cried to no ends about the slide attacks not doing damage through walls anymore. One frame got a re adjustment to its ability, but many others can now do steel essence farm. Same stuff that happened with self damage and chroma. Self damage was only beneficial to Chroma, but the other frames suffered. With it gone, yes, 1 frame was "sacrificed" but 41 others are safe now. Same deal with Khora.

[PublikDomain]

5 minutes ago, Yakhul said:

So you call a line of sight requirement a nerf?

It's not quite on topic, but yes. Absolutely. It makes building up stacks for Accumulating Whipclaw slower and impacts her ability to kill enemies. It's a nerf no matter how you look at it. But more importantly, it's a giant buggy pain in the ass for anyone that plays her actively, while sewer campers are almost entirely unaffected because Strangledome still hits through walls like it always has. The only time you notice it is when it blocks your S#&$ and makes your abilities not work.

Spoiler

 

Does this look like it's working right?

What about this?

 

I think trying to balance a frame by intentionally introducing buggy mechanics to their kit falls pretty well under "crappy balancing direction".

[Myscho]

Nothing, everything run just fine, keep walking

[Yakhul]

7 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

It's not quite on topic, but yes. Absolutely. It makes building up stacks for Accumulating Whipclaw slower and impacts her ability to kill enemies. It's a nerf no matter how you look at it. But more importantly, it's a giant buggy pain in the ass for anyone that plays her actively, while sewer campers are almost entirely unaffected because Strangledome still hits through walls like it always has. The only time you notice it is when it blocks your S#&$ and makes your abilities not work.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Does this look like it's working right?

What about this?

 

I think trying to balance a frame by intentionally introducing buggy mechanics to their kit falls pretty well under "crappy balancing direction".

Ironic. Mesa has always required a line of sight to use one of the most overpowered and efficient abilities in game: Peacemaker, and yet, people NEVER or very little times, complained about her. Now that a similar requirement is put in one of the MOST OP single target abilities, people rally under the same banner to call out for a reverse to the "nerf"? Golly Gee some people really need a new hobby if they gonna call nerfs to anything that hinders THEIR playstyle.

[Viges]

Bugs on bugs on bugs. Big slow clunky ships instead of warframes. Big slow clunky mechs instead of warframes. Clipping everywhere.

32th right now bts. This is fine.

Warframe out of top sellers on steam this year btw for those who tells that numbers don't matter.

[KitMeHarder]

46 minutes ago, Yakhul said:

Melee is stronger than before btw. The fact that every single melee weapon is now viable

(I'm talking about what the Old Blood brought. Directional melee slams and insta switch are great, but they were pre-melee 3.0)

No, what you're feeling is the massive buff to viral, and the massive nerf to any enemy above level 75. Even then, melee was still stronger. Every melee feels that way because they all play the same, and they are all built the same. The new combo system is ass, that mandates Naramon, instead of appreciates it. Heavy builds accomplished nothing on weapons that weren't given forced procs, almost all the exalteds were dumpstered. Etc...

Melee channeling sucked, and some nice things were introduced, but it was executed unbelievably poorly.

46 minutes ago, Yakhul said:

Status nerf

Shotguns were nerfed (don't say just some of them, almost all the good ones reached 100%). The meta didn't just change to viral, plenty of stuff was nerfed. 

• Gas and Blast got absolutely maimed.
• Corrosive got a large b*tch slap, and really relies on its damage multipliers.
• Toxin and slash got small, but significant nerfs.

46 minutes ago, Yakhul said:

And about the Khora nerf? So you call a line of sight requirement a nerf? Feels like you are one of those who cried to no ends about the slide attacks not doing damage through walls anymore. One frame got a re adjustment to its ability, but many others can now do steel essence farm. Same stuff that happened with self damage and chroma. Self damage was only beneficial to Chroma, but the other frames suffered. With it gone, yes, 1 frame was "sacrificed" but 41 others are safe now. Same deal with Khora.

• Was barely here for melee punch through.
• You are off your rocker if you think it wasn't a nerf.
• You don't even know what you're talking about. That analogy is one of the worst I've ever seen, and I don't know how to even start responding to it. And there is no steel essence farm, it was removed in the same exact update were Khora was nerfed. 

[Genitive]

50 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Warframe's peak CCU has been higher on Steam since it was made available on EGS, so I don't really think that's the case.

Orphix venom launched on 18th, which was most likely the cause of the surge of players. By comparison, around Scarlet Spear there were around 30,000 players more. This leads me to believe that Epic is in fact the main cause of lower numbers.

55 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

If I didn't mark the day Warframe launched on EGS you'd never be able to find it.

I would just look it up myself. It is not that difficult, you know?

[rikimaru6811]

26 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

It's not quite on topic, but yes. Absolutely. It makes building up stacks for Accumulating Whipclaw slower and impacts her ability to kill enemies. It's a nerf no matter how you look at it. But more importantly, it's a giant buggy pain in the ass for anyone that plays her actively, while sewer campers are almost entirely unaffected because Strangledome still hits through walls like it always has. The only time you notice it is when it blocks your S#&$ and makes your abilities not work.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Does this look like it's working right?

What about this?

 

I think trying to balance a frame by intentionally introducing buggy mechanics to their kit falls pretty well under "crappy balancing direction".

Looks like a bug to me

Best to report every instance of them, like stairs, corners, etc. while providing as many videos/images as possible. For images, I suggest using the in-game screenshot function as it also provides meta data within the image (or so I heard).

Seriously stop treating every bug you see as nerf

[bad4youLT]

Well :

 1) bad and disapointing updates

 2) lack of end game to keep veteran players playing 

 3) DE failing to keep new players 

[Dunkelheit]

vor 16 Minuten schrieb bad4youLT:

Well :

 1) bad and disapointing updates

 2) lack of end game to keep veteran players playing 

 3) DE failing to keep new players 

Mysteriously though, noone in our big, big alliance that I know of left the game because of those reasons. Especially the new players keep playing and playing and are having fun.

I was not disappointed by the updates, but I came back 125 days ago after a long break, so more than enough to do for me. My guess is that most people complaining here have everything in the game and whine, because DE cannot keep up with their thirst for content. Or maybe I am wrong about that, I dont know.

Other than that, Warframe is the same as ever. A long big grinding machine that is fun and has great gameplay. Oh, and I love the Mechs btw. I dont know how it will play out when they are side by side every warframe in normal missions, but I am excited about it.

Can't wait for new lichs and new railjack play either. I can command my own crew of liches now? Sign me up!

[Yakhul]

19 minutes ago, KitMeHarder said:

You don't even know what you're talking about. That analogy is one of the worst I've ever seen, and I don't know how to even start responding to it. And there is no steel essence farm, it was removed in the same exact update were Khora was nerfed.

Perhaps i wasn't too clear for your refined language.

You see, before this nerf you speak about, any frame could go into Steel Path and start farming essence, but one frame stood up above the others for its efficiency: Khora. Before the update, You would go with Khora for HOURS to get Steel Essence. Ohh want to bring another frame? sure, you can, but if you want to FARM EFFICIENTLY, you HAD TO use Khora and a specific build for her. So yeah, screw your favorite frame and your favorite guns, because in order to be efficient, you needed a single frame to do the job.

After the update, Steel Essence farming changed. I honestly have no idea what you people find joy in spamming THE SAME BUTTON FOR HOURS while farming for essence before the update, and it wasn't even a guaranteed essence you would get, you had to play RNG with the eximus units to get it, and include other factors such as Resource boosters, Kavats and mods.

Khora got "nerfed" wooooo, doom and gloom, the end of the world is coming, this is even worse than the self damage removal for Chroma or the spin2win nerf!! The end is coming!! But nothing said about how accessible Steel Essence is right now, nothing said about a fixed amount of steel essence after a mission is completed, nothing said about how just staying for 5 mins in a mission can yield steel essence guaranteed, nothing said about how you can now bring your favorite warframe and setup to any steel path mission and get out with a number of steel essence, without spending boredom hitting 1 single button for endless hours to be "efficient"

[PublikDomain]

1 minute ago, Yakhul said:

Ironic. Mesa has always required a line of sight to use one of the most overpowered and efficient abilities in game: Peacemaker, and yet, people NEVER or very little times, complained about her. Now that a similar requirement is put in one of the MOST OP single target abilities, people rally under the same banner to call out for a reverse to the "nerf"? Golly Gee some people really need a new hobby if they gonna call nerfs to anything that hinders THEIR playstyle.

Well there's a difference, isn't there? Mesa shoots guns, Khora shoots an explosive AoE. Khora isn't a single target frame and never has been. But instead of balancing her by adding the same damage falloff they use to balance explosives anywhere else, they added a LoS that frequently breaks while leaving Khora's immense upfront damage fully intact. I deal the same damage as before, it's just now my ability breaks every 30-90 seconds. Imagine DE balancing Mesa by making every 10th shot not fire, would that make any sense? Meanwhile Excalibur has LoS on one of his abilities, but he's got LoS protection so it won't bug out so often. And they've left Arquebex alone, which puts out a full order of magnitude more DPS than Khora with zero ramp up time. DE balances poorly and inconsistently and they do this all the time.

And people finding a new hobby is kind of the problem.

1 minute ago, rikimaru6811 said:

Looks like a bug to me

Best to report every instance of them, like stairs, corners, etc. while providing as many videos/images as possible. For images, I suggest using the in-game screenshot function as it also provides meta data within the image (or so I heard).

Seriously stop treating every bug you see as nerf

My bug report has 65 animated examples of the LoS failing on every standard tileset in the game, as well as breakdowns of the common modes of failure. I've spent hours recording footage and processing gifs. And it's not just that it's buggy now, it will always be buggy due to how the check functions. Even if all of the level geometry in the game was combed over and fixed to not produce the super obvious errors, there'd still be common orientations of geometry where the LoS check fails. I've been posting on every update and hotfix thread since the change was added, and has this obviously buggy system been reverted? Nope.

27 minutes ago, Genitive said:

Orphix venom launched on 18th, which was most likely the cause of the surge of players. By comparison, around Scarlet Spear there were around 30,000 players more. This leads me to believe that Epic is in fact the main cause of lower numbers.

If you look at any update it follows the same pattern: it's most popular the day it releases, then gradually declines. Steamchart's data gets aggregated as time goes on so there's no daily peak CCU data left, but from the aggregate you can see that Scarlet Spear experienced the same gradual decline as Orphix Venom as it ran its course. I don't see any reason to believe that EGS has had a noticeable impact on the Steam playerbase in the less than a month it's been around.

[(PSN)Yggranya]

3 hours ago, Tesseract7777 said:

Yeah I haven't switched back to Steam since switching to Epic... I'm sure I'm not alone.

 

3 hours ago, Tesseract7777 said:

And those of us who rule our thoughts based on pure logic

Heh, that's a good one!

[MagPrime]

3 hours ago, I_Eat_Toast said:

It're the only metric. DE can release metrics or Steam will be the only metric and will be what people use to measure WF's activity. 

Except, it's not?

It's certainly the easiest one to obtain but the other platforms offer similar metrics as well, it just takes some digging.  Again, Steam is simply the easiest and most familiar as it's been around the longest.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Hmmm, maybe a pandemic? Maybe the short attention span of casual players? Maybe the obvious fact that people don't play the game through steam? Maybe game populations come and go over 7 years because it's kind of a long time and stuff happens in waves?

[rikimaru6811]

10 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Hmmm, maybe a pandemic? Maybe the short attention span of casual players? Maybe the obvious fact that people don't play the game through steam? Maybe game populations come and go over 7 years because it's kind of a long time and stuff happens in waves?

sounds too logical to be true

3 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

it will always be buggy due to how the check functions.

And.. this function is?

3 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

My bug report has 65 animated examples of the LoS failing on every standard tileset in the game, as well as breakdowns of the common modes of failure. I've spent hours recording footage and processing gifs.

Thank you for your hard work. I'm sure it will be fixed later if given enough data, just be patient.

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

5 hours ago, I_Eat_Toast said:

Statistically speaking, it's a subsample of the population of WF. The subsample shows that player base has declined to a 3rd of what is was 6 months ago. Subsamples are a good methodology of polling a population to get a good approximation. You can choose to be undecisive, but it's better to work with the data you have than to wait for perfect data that will never come.

You obviously know nothing about polling. For the comparison to be valid, you need to be sampling under the same conditions. Since among other factors, everyone playing the game would have gotten the news that the Epic Game Store had those unreal skins just for signing up with them and launching the game through them, and people did so, the conditions that exist now are not the same at all. 

You are looking at flawed data and claiming "it's all we have so it must be counted as valid", but it's not valid, and does not need to be counted to be valid. 

[trst]

Just to add to the thought of more people switching to Epic's Launcher over Steam is that Epic was giving out a free game every day for a week or two (plus are still doing their free game a week) meanwhile all Steam did for the holidays was their usual sales and a free chat sticker every two days. So there are multiple reasons for people to have stuck to Epic's launcher meanwhile Steam sales always draw people into different things.

Beyond that the only content we were left with was an event that anyone could have completed in a sitting or two. That was also entirely centered around a mechanic that not all players have full access to or don't even want to associate with. And the update prior (Arcana) was just more bounties for lackluster rewards. So for those who already dislike Deimos and/or Mechs are pretty much in a long running content drought. If the next update is Railjack/QueenPin then we'll likely continue to see people dwindle off until more "general" content gets added.