My new player experience

[innociv]

I played during closed beta, but basically just the tutorial. So I had Loki and Lato Vandal to start. The game just didn't compel me then and I think I was playing Path of Exile and Dota and stuff at the time, even though I thought the base movement and gameplay was pretty fun.

I've read some guides and went really hard since then. I was MR0 to start with since I only did the tutorial before, and I got the MR9 after 8 days of playing since I've come back. So even as a player who's played really hard and looked things up and had friends helping, I've had a lot of poor experiences.

- I don't get why Junctions and Mastery Rank tests aren't combined. Shouldn't the game be testing skills before moving on to the next area? Like shouldn't the movement Mastery Test be what someone does at the junction to unlock Jupiter? The first half or so of MR tests should just be removed but their content replace junctions imo. And the cooldown on Mastery Ranking up is just nonsensical.
- I very likely would have quit a few hours in if not for Octavia being OP, and having gotten her from Twitch Prime. Trying to do some missions with Loki was pretty impossible. There was one really frustrating part at just like MR3 or MR4 but I forgot what it was now... it was before The War Within I'm pretty sure.
- We should really get a "baby Void Rig" that's easier to start with. Though people told me that Void Rig farm was awful, I had a pretty easy time of it and started it in.. I dunno 2 days after the quest that got me the damaged part? I got REALLY lucky not getting part duplicates, though. It'd be nice if we just had a quick quest to recover a core section, and then we get a Void Rig with a single gun and reduced health or something.
- ... this would also help give us an upgraded Archwing gun if DE gave new players a quicker weaker Void Rig access.  Early Archwing experience is awful, and we really need a quick easy thing on the main story to get a better gun.
- On that note... why are there even duplicate part drops for story items? If you already have one Void Rig part, why doesn't it reroll the drop into one you don't have? Everyone should be as lucky as I was on farming Void Rig, yet this experience could have still been better for me as noted above.
- The War Within was great, but this should be something that most players experience in their first couple of days, or first few hours, not
- Chimera Protocol was really fun. Though... maybe 1 too many Rell missions. And it should happen in the first week, and first 10 hours, for most players. For me I'm like 40-50 hours in before I'm playing it. I think player retention would be better
- A bad bit of that too is I got stuck on what I had to do to actually progress the quests. I had made my Personal Quarters too late.
- On that note why are so many later main story item crafts so long?! Personal quarters should have been 30 minutes at most. No main story item required should take more than 10-30 minutes to craft to help make it clear how important they are.
- Main story items should also be pinned to the top. I missed that one for days. I thought it was some optional cosmetic reward...
- Railjack missions were the absolute worst I've experienced so far.  They're monotonous, repetitive, and unfun. There should be double the time between enemy spawns, and imo half the missions like the 2nd nassel and tail should just be removed and already there to start with or combined in another mission. There's too many of these. I thought this quest would just take 30 minutes and it's been well over an hour even with Octavia. I probably would have quit the game here, again, if not for having Octavia and now some other strong Warframes. It'd be extremely frustrating on a couple of them even when I had a ranked up Fulmin and some other good weapons.
- Not allowing me to obtain items I don't have the MR ahead of time for has really driven me mad at times. Why isn't the MR requirement simply for equiping, with a warning that you can't equip yet like every other games has?! This also screwed me over since I got a good rare piece of a MR14 weapon, but couldn't buy the other 2 cheap pieces from player market to sell it as a set for more...
- Medical debt bond farm is really aggregating. Ticker should at the very least be changed to be procedural RNG where it always rolls a medical, advanced, and familial bonds option if there is none available! I checked for med debt bonds on Fortuna ranking up for THREE DAYS, over and over, waiting 4 hours multiple times. I checked it during like 8 different 4 hour periods and NO DEBT BONDS. I was capped and unable to rank up despite planning 2 days ahead for it! That was another of my most awful experiences. They also were not dropping from missions. I did like.. 15 of the bounties with a 20% chance and only got the reward once. That should not have been so stressful!
- Fishing seems really buggy with not spawning at times. Yes, I know what hotspots are. Yes, I know some spawn in non hotspots instead. Yes, I know your spear needs to be out. I fulfil all the correct conditions and they simply don't spawn sometimes. Same with conservation. This seems like an engine limitation on the amount of things it can spawn, but it happens solo, too. Really seems like fishing and mining should have been separate areas and not open world as the engine/server just can't handle it...
- The Market is quite an annoying experience as well.  I don't really get why blueprints you can buy for credits aren't just in your Arsenal screen on another tab, and also in the foundry on another tab for each category.  If I need Orokin reactors in foundry, I don't just get why I can't just buy it for plat from the foundry. There's so much having to spam esc to get out of one menu, get to the esc menu, go into market, then back again.
- Similarly with Foundry, I don't get why there's not a "craft chain" or "craft prerequisites" button for when I need modular items or mining combined items and stuff like that. There's SOOOOOOOOOOOO MANY THINGS to search for one at a time since there's too many things to really find them other than typing them in.
- Similarly again... when it comes to crafting a Warframe, I don't understand why I don't like... have a tab that is only the blueprints. It's a really bad experience that the Warframe Foundry tab has 4x the "warframes" that you really have to craft to scroll through and see what you need.  It should be that you click the blueprint, then it expands with each component where you can see what those then need and craft the components.
- The need to use the wiki for this game is the worst I've played in at least 5 years. Why can't I just hover a resource to see the best places to get it, with buttons I can click to go right there?
- ... why can't I search/filter for mods I don't own, and click a button to go to the mission where it drops with the drop rate shown in game?
- ... why can't I search for blueprints and components I don't own, and same thing? etc.
- Why doesn't it tell me earlier that I should do steel path for a 2x resource drop?
- Why doesn't the Syndicate tab for Simaris daily have buttons that recommends 4 or so missions for finding the target at?
- The game doesn't tell you how important it is to apply modules as the weapon level increase. It doesn't remind you every 10 levels that you should upgrade the modules on a weapon.
- Equipped weapons and Warframes should default to auto-mod applied.
- ... an option in settings to automatically open a weapon's Upgrade screen when you  finish a mission and it has upgraded to rank 10, 20, and 30 would be great as well.
- Is there really not a selection filter I'm missing for.. "select all mods [rarity] mods with [number] duplicates" when it comes to selling those for endo? o_O
- A lot of the earlier area and content on planets should be removed or replaced, in my opinion. It really serves no purpose. The game got a lot more fun as it FINALLY started introducing me to new enemies like the giga grineer things and Sentients and so on. There's 40+ hours of game that's the same basic Grineer, Corpo, and Infested. The only thing I can really think that mixes this up is some new enemies on the open world, and the Giga MOA thing on Pluto. The new player experience would be better with the number of level 1-40 missions up until that point cut in half and some more 50+ level branches added to the planets instead. So many missions were "mindlessly go through these 3 areas on a planet so you can reach the one that was needed" when ti should have only been 1 at most.
- [b]Not being able to use an animal companion while incubating is basically telling me not to play the game[/b]. This would be so easy to just... change and serves no purpose except to be annoying.

[AreeSoothsayer]

I don't agree with everything you've shown but there is enough there that I feel is valid to give you a like.

 

You should have seen Rail Jack before they... dumbed it down to merge into the Warframe mod system.

[PhiZero]

I've been around for just as long, and yeah most of these have been issues from the get go and seem to possibly be addressed for Duviri and future content moving forwards.

Though I can chime in on Mastery Rank Tests and Junctions being seperate.

Mastery Rank did exist starting with the Open Beta, and were used as a means to lock certain equipment behind time investment gates.

Though Junctions if my memory is correct, we're introduced like a year later? It's been so long, and it was more of a way to reward players for completing accomplishments in that specific planet, and had a loose tie in to a now removed MOBA styled game mode that was clan exclusive at the time.

Seeing them combined to an extent could be nice, especially considering that Junctions are the remains of a much larger system in the Solar Rails. (It's been too long, I'm not even sure if they were called solar rails at the time.)

[innociv]

I did read that they intend to improve the new player experience and that'll be like their largest update yet.

Some other things:
- It's too difficult to see Star Chart progress.
- Citrine's game mode thing to farm her is really fun. I really like platforming and it's nice that I can just platform and jump around while you only need 1-2 people killing.
- ... but it's disappointing that she doesn't get a story quest.
- Being AFK in Defense shouldn't default to continue, or it should be a setting.
- Similarly, though some of my friends don't seem to like the Zariman stuff... I like that for a similar reason.  It's nice to just hunt for the Voidplumes.
- ... but the maps are too large for the affinity range do this. I wind up losing out a lot of the time if I do that, which just seems like pretty poor design. I think those maps should be smaller, or have sections that open and close off to keep people in affinity range.
- I also got RNG screwed on ranking up the Zariman faction thing.
- I don't like how many junk weapons there are that are just MR fodder. Why isn't "Prime" for weapons just an upgrade similar to Forma that replaces the previous version? I get that it would be annoying to have to also craft non-prime versions of weapons to begin with, but I don't know. This is going to become more and more a mess as more and more new weapons get added and more is just MR fodder.
- Similar to what I was saying before with there not being an "auto-mod by default" on a fresh equip, why don't we just start with 30 mod capacity at Unranked instead of a need to refresh mods as something is leveled, and have weapon stats scale with weapon ranks similar to Warframes stats? Like I'm saying these seem reversed, so you could put your build on at Unranked and not need to worry about it until you reactor/forma.
- I'd say the same for Warfames. Since their stats scale with Warframe rank, and you could make ability strength also not start at 100% until rank 30, why not just start with 30 mod capacity at Unranked to make updating build as you go less of a pain?
- ... I know this isn't a "huge issue" when you can max out in like 7-11 minutes of Sancutary Onslaught, but it still seems like kind of eh design that's so easily improvable. I just don't see the reason not to improve design and minimize friction where possible when it wouldn't have any negative side effects like that.
- I really really really want a way to see when things are going to be vaulted again. Like a relic or a selection option from cracking one with something that'll be vaulted should say something like "Will be Vaulted in [less than 30 days, more than 30 days, more than 60 days, more than 90 days, more than 120 days" etc. It's really overwhelming trying to figure out what to prioritize. This is another issue of needing to use the wiki too much. And even then you need to... look at when the last time it was unvaulted and do math on top of it yourself.

- There's too many dailies instead of weeklie or bi-weeklies. Sortie Daily is one that I don't get why it's not a weekly with better rewards. I'd rather it be a weekly where I get one of each reward than daily that gives a "chance" of getting 7x of the rare reward if done every day for a week.
- Open World Standing Dailies... it'd be a huge improvement if, whenever a new Open World comes out, an older one becomes a Bi-weekly cap with a cap equal to 14x your daily cap. That way newer players can catch up by grinding more out in one day if they want to, or choosing to do it one day at a time.
- Mastery Rank standing cap increases should really be effective immediately, or retroactive, however to put it.

- New War really really wasn't fun. It feels like some completely new team made it or something.  I just wanted to play Warframe but I was stuck for 4.5 forced to play some other game so I can play Warframe again.
- ... I don't really see this being changed even though it was an awful experience since it's a lot of work, but yeah...
- ... We really should have had our Warframe or some Warframe (similar to using Excalibur before), perhaps damaged without mods, in order to do Archon fights. It felt so silly just being a guy without the Lotus' training. Maybe for the first one, have it be Drifter but you can transference into Hunhow's shadow stalker guy? I dunno but eesh.
- ... it should have been broken up more.  Like the Zariman parts simply could have been moved into the Zariman quest as a flashback without taking us out of the game.
- ... Kahl was the only pre-warframe part that I actually enjoyed. Every other Flashback wasn't, really. Tenshin's was okay, but went on to long. Veso's was funny I guess but waaaaaaaay too long. Drifter part was, again, too long.
- The story was okay, but it was marred by the way the gameplay presents and puts you through that story.
- I hated the stealth missions.  MR9 stealth test was fine, but these were aggrevating. I think its' largely that they were made in a pretty pre-defined puzzle way with one true solution intended by the map maker.
- Zariman, on the other hand, is so totally different and fine. It's Warframe. It adds some new stuff, but the new stuff is pretty fun.
- ... that said, I feel that some of Zariman doesn't really respect my time with the level of rewards and/or heavy RNG of rewards, sometimes.

- Some people's Warframe's look really cool, like the "fashion frame" but there seems to be know way to tell what Warframe it is without recognizing the look and/or animations. The Warframe name should really be on Inspect.

[(NSW)BenHiraga]

As @AreeSoothsayer said, while I don't agree with everything in your initial post, there are enough cogent points there for a case to be made.

Your second post, though, lost me. Almost everything there just seems petty and nitpicky. Complaining about RNG in a FTP game is playing a tune on the world's tiniest violin. And the "every weapon should be good or it shouldn't be in the game" argument is pretty tired, as well.

It's interesting that Octavia is what saved the game for you. Having observed her in the wild, she seemed like the most boring frame. Then I got her from the Amazon Prime drop and I discovered ... yup, she indeed bores the heck out of me.

The lovely part about this game is, since I don't like her, I don't need to play her. Much like the option you have with many of the complaints you've outlined.

[innociv]

I'm not saying that every weapon should be good, but there are 400+ weapons and I think 90% of people use like 20 of them (5%).

For a new player, it makes it a lot more difficult to figure out which is just fodder junk and which is worth keeping. I know they want people to spend plat on slots, but I think that'll happen even if there were closer to 200 or 300 weapons.
It's one thing for many Prime/Kuva/Tenet weapons to not be very good, but then they often have 1 or 2 or even 3 even worse versions of them and I seriously don't get the point. Like the Lato Vandal I understand why it's in the game... it was like an early player version that was then made a rare drop. But it's worse than the Prime. I'd rather it just be an alternate way to get the Prime and have the same stats, and just be a skin you can use for either, or something, idk. It's weird to have 3 version of a meh gun. And I actually LIKE the Lato. It reminds me of the Halo pistol. But it's not strong in the metagame.
If it were me, I'd give everyone with the Lato Vandal a Lato Prime, have it be a skin, and make the current way to farm the Lato Vandal be a way to farm the skin.

Then you also have Hek. The Vaykor is just worse than the Kuva one, as far as I know? And neither can use the Hek mod so... er sometimes Hek is actually better? And if a Hek Prime is added, that'd probably be the best since it can use the mod? Why's there 3 similar versions of a shotgun that are all largely worse than the Corinth Prime?
Maybe it makes sense to you having played for a long time. This is surely less overbearing and difficult to learn what's trash and what's not, what has a better version and which of those better versions is actually the best and if even that is worth using over some other weapon, but for someone new there's a lot of too many similar weapons that are all just MR fodder.
And MR fodder has a place, for sure, but there's plenty of it. I've gotten to MR 14 in 16 days now while just using stuff from the Market, Quests, and Clan Lab. I've only seen a small handful of the junk weapons and will see many more.

Really the complaint is that it's too much to figure out when many are going to want to "catch up" to start with on a game that's been around for 10 years. So even just showing on weapons that there is a prime version so you can safely discard it would be useful.

 

Octavia is definitely boring at times, but she saved having to deal with some content that's pretty frustrating. I get why other people don't like her. I personally don't like Wukong, myself.
Because the game has so much wiki reading to do, it's nice to be able to throw down ball and read wiki while doing a defense or survival or something lol

[innociv]

I'm not new at all anymore since I've been playing a lot but..

- It just hit me the other day, though I had been thinking of this before and forgot to add it as a friend kept warning me about things people could do and saying I should just play solo. "What people seriously do that?" I kept asking, and didn't see any of it initialy, but now?... yeah this is by far the most griefable game I've ever played but the community seems to mostly ignore it from what I've seen.
  - You can grief Thermia Fractures by intentionally taking the radiation debuff and ruining 7-8 minutes of other peoples time.
  - You can down other players in Void Defense with the lasers.
  - There are many abilities to cause points to be deleted in Index making it take 3 times longer or more per round. You can also just gather points from other players in Index and never turn them in to hold other players hostage.
  - Limbo is one that does this... and he can grief a lot of things in general.
  - Bizarrely, Aya isn't tradable but the relics are so you can scam people by getting them to spend their Aya on the worst relics with the false promise that you'll pay a lot of plat for them, leaving them stuck with those.
  - You can join another Nightmare mode party on Defense, drop a specter right at the end to mission fail for everyone.
  - You might have Simaris that you wanted to do in SP for double standing, but started doing other missions first in normal. Your target spawns, and you don't want to do it because you want the extra 3k-4k standing you'd get in SP but someone else scans it and completes it for you and they are rewarded for that. This is really minor but just because it's minor doesn't mean it should be a problem as it's so easily solvable. This feels worse than someone killing your target to me... and yeah also why can other players besides the one whose target it is even kill it at all?
When I ask Discord what to do about someone griefing and holding a game hostage, people say "just leave". You forfeit rewards by leaving so it feels better, but still bad, to just afk and wait out the griefers to finally let it end than leave and forfeit rewards. Why should the person being griefed be the one punished?
Many missions don't allow you to extract solo with rewards and you get held hostage by players doing Rivens that they should have been the ones to do solo or they should at least ask for help and not demand hostages. Like one time I was held hostage by players claiming they had to find all syndicate medallions and they took forever to get the last 3. AFAIK there is no such Riven that requires all in a mission to be found and those can be completed over multiple missions. The riven also says "alone" yet the two were in a party and had me randomly matched with.
I have noticed a lot of people say to play solo just in general, but IMO the game is better with other players, and more enemies spawn thus you get more farm and progress faster with more players as long as they're working together ... until someone starts griefing.

I see these things as game design problems and not "well players just shouldn't abuse these broken systems to grief" problems.
It is the design of the game that has so many systems to allow griefing, and many of these things are easily fixed by ... making Thermia Fractures event less awful and make objectives immune to friendly fire. Halving the number of scans required to complete Simaris daily in Steel Path rather than just doubling the standing per scan. Letting people extract solo and keep rewards. etc.
I get that Warframe has its niche and maybe they don't want to change some things that might play into that niche ... but I doubt this is one of those things. Same thing with the bad new player experience.

- I've tried to get some friends to play, and a lot of them are like "I tried playing before and the gameplay was serviceable but it repeatedly had be do the same 'sit in this spot for 2-5 minutes' mission over and over and I got bored".
That feels a lot of what I was saying before with how it feels to me that a lot of the Star Chart should be cut out so people get to actual content faster, and Junctions should be more interesting. A lot of older games have removed older content and streamlined it for the benefit of new player experience and it seems like such low hanging fruit to me.

- I really like the random Warframe bonus like on Archon Hunt and Arbitrations, though Arbitrations are too easy for them to really matter.
- I also really like Invigorations and it's gone a long way to point me toward which Warframe to do next. It's like getting 2 free primed mods to borrow for the week that don't use mod capacity which is crazy good especially for someone who doesn't have many Primed mod yet.
... but needing 10 of them before you can choose one it's needlessly time gated. Why is it not just do 2 of them and then the 3rd each week can be any warframe of your choice?

- I feel even more strongly with more experience that Sortie daily should be replaced with a weekly with guaranteed rewards. Like bringing back updated Raids or literally anything else. Sometimes Sortie gives me something good when Nightwave is telling me to do it, but most of the time it's a waste of time that I could get more reward in the time it takes doing something else

- I feel even more strongly now about older Open Worlds needing touched up and made easier to progress through to catch up on for new players.

- Orphix is really fun! But the rewards aren't enough for the time it takes, especially for something that's unpopular content since it's Railjack...

- Harrow was my worst farm. Took me over 6 hours to get the Systems even when I had optimized Defection C rotation down to 12 minutes. 6+ hours of the worst game mode. I found Xaku, Gauss, Baruuk, Hildryn, Sevagoth, Ash, and others that people say are a pain I thought were really easy as all but Gauss there are 'multifarms' and at least Gauss is disruption which was more rewarding than the Defection mission (yes I know you can do Kuva Fortress Survival too, but that's 20 mins for 12% vs 12 minutes for 15% and the other drops there suck too). Haven't done Nidus and Equanox yet but I'm dreading those.

- I forgot this one before, or maybe I was more reserved on my opinion of it at the time, but the foundry timers are just weird. Why are they so long, especially for Equinox?
Was the 'experiment' with 1 hour timers for Amps, Open World Companions, and Kitguns considered a failure? Why haven't those been increased then?
If they're not a failure... why haven't other timers been brought down?
I get that they don't want the game speed ran, but there's lots else in place like having to take the time to farm resources that prevents that.
And I don't think these timers even prevent that since at times I've had 20+ things building at once anyway and I've still pretty much speed ran through progression and shorter foundry times wouldn't have really sped things up much. The only thing they've done is stress me out that I have 7 days to use an Invigoration, but a frame takes 3.5 days to make so I better farm it immediately.
Timers like 4-16 hours instead of 12-36 I think would still serve to make players remind themselves to log back in later which is why I think these timers are really there. I guess it's also there to get people to rush completion, but do many people really do that?

- Why don't Fieldrons, Mutagen things, and so on, just drop instead of needing crafting? I guess someone would say so their material can be Helminth food, but Fieldrons and such could just be made Helminth food too. It's weird that there's this special little junk resource just for these forgotten things. It feels very overlooked.
- This also goes into the point I would make that Invasions with those as a reward feels like incredibly outdated content that should be replaced. When I was new, it was one of the first buttons I got in the top right and it felt important. And yet not. And I had to have other players tell me it's not unless it's forma or orkin, and maybe weapons.
... so now I have to click this button and see if there's anything good, when there normally isn't.  If that button has a number by it, it should have something good and not Fieldrons.

- I get that Orokin Reactors and Catalyst exist as a platinum sink, and a platinum sink is important to have to prevent inflation and to keep the value of platinum reasonable. But boy do these feel awful. You can't experience how a weapon is without one of these and it can really be a waste.
I would really rather Forma be like.. 25 plat or 45 plat for 3, if that meant removing Orokin Reactors/Catalysts and just making mod capacity +30 by default. This is the most common complaint shared besides new player experience that I've heard from the new friends I've made in this and they ask me how I'm enjoying it. Though they all tend to have different ideas on how it should change.
Really I feel like Exilus are already the new plat sink that got added and that Orokin cost should have been removed when they were, but whatever. I'd almost surely spend more plat on Exilus if I didn't have to on Orokins.
And I know this has changed in the past. I saw a video on how Warframe was before, and Orokin Reactors were even worse but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be improved more.
This is an especially bad experience because I really enjoyed Ash when I didn't expect to, but I don't want to invest an Orokin Reactor on a non Prime warframe. So I don't even have something to tide me over until I can get his Prime I just have to just not play him anymore until then since things without Reactors are half as powerful.

- The timer to choose a relic during endless missions is soooo bad. Why can't I default to the last relic chosen instead of "No Relic"?

- Mods should be its own topic, and has been, and I've seen it talked about on youtube. I could go onto how boring it is that everything gets multishot and is turned into a shotgun because that's a multiplicative damage increase... but new player experience wise: I had an easier time with this because a friend gave me basic starter mods but looking back those basic ones really should all be guaranteed drops from the first few junctions and had their drop rates lowered (and others increased likewise). It should be like 5-10 mods each from the first 5 junctions so you don't have to hope someone wants to bother to do a 3 plat trade with you.

[(NSW)Probably_Asleep]

On 2023-03-11 at 5:47 PM, innociv said:

I got the MR9 after 8 days of playing

I feel like I've been left out of something big here. Is there a way to get MR tests quicker than once every 24 hours? I'd love to know for whenever I make a new account or help a friend get into Warframe.