"War"frame or "Farm"frame

[Foras.]

Here's what I can't understand at what stage the "War"frame turned into a "Farm"frame or at what stage I began to realize it 😆

[Leqesai]

Just now, Foras. said:

Here's what I can't understand at what stage the "War"frame turned into a "Farm"frame or at what stage I began to realize it 😆

It has been like that for many years before you started playing.

[Steeldragonz]

WarFarm? how about that, atleast for people that arent L3 i guess. Saying that though i have been playing the 10+ years and just get things as they are added/updated. so i have never really felt like im just constantly farming things. Im just enjoying the latest update/features, and getting the items that come with it. But i definitely see how newer players can be overwhelmed considering im sitting at 710/710, then you have intrinsics, nodes, and a few other things on top

Edited May 23, 2023 by Steeldragonz

[chaotea]

Wow, get this hot take.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

it's Farmfarm. 

[Graavarg]

It's not so much the farming itself, which has been there "always".

It's that DE has given in (or you could say "sold out") to a certain subset of players and playstyles, that focus only on the reward and how to to get that reward as efficiently as possible. And "as efficiently as possible" translates as "as easily as possible", in this case. Which in turn, in actual "playing the game"-terms means as overpowered as possible.

It has turned Warframe into a "roll the dice"-, "yank that handle"- and "spin the wheel"-kind of game. Space Ninja fighting is now incidental, "horde shooter" is meaningless as a concept due to the sheer op-ness and all new content and mechanics are geared for the insatiable "next reward"-crowd. It's not even only these direct effects on the game, indirectly DE tries to put the brakes on the ever-hungry "want more content" using all kinds of shenanigans but those shenanigans impact ALL players.

The best part of game, the Warframe that still shines brightly, is starting out and advancing through the star map and ranking up MR and slowly getting a grip on the Warframe universe. But once you are through that (to a degree that varies for all players) all that is left is meaningless slog towards "more rewards". At the point where you can kill everything easily enough and know how the basic mechanics work, what else is there?

Even so, the game and it's universe has a humongous latent potential to become something bigger, instead of just mora and more and more of the same, dressed up in different colours, sounds and cosmetics. This is a game that still has a soul, even if it is receding, year by year and by almost every decision DE makes. I would claim that anyone going to all the trouble of reaching LR3 (or even just any LR) have felt that soul, hard as it is to determine precisely what it is. Or they are anal-retentives/compulsive completionists 🤪. Or all of the above. But as that soul slowly and surely flickers out, most of them leave the game. A short break, turning into long breaks, turning into "waiting for a miraculous change, then I'll start playing again". It's a psychological paradox in a way, trying to save your love for a computer game by not playing it, because to continue playing it would kill that love.

So the farming is mostly ok, if it was meaningfully connected to playing the game in it's interconnected, ever-expanding sandbox universe. But when it is just stacking more "yank that meaningless slot machine handle one more time" on top of more of the same, the farming is inherently both silly and horrible. As in "if I have any sanity left, why on Earth would I spend time doing that?".

There is an easy check for this, a trick of the mind: imagine that you at this moment in time have absolutely everything in Warframe, everything done, everything collected, 10k plat, all cosmetics. Would you continue to play the game to the same degree as now? Or at all? The answer will tell you why you play Warframe, if you just give it a thought...

[Grommile]

21 minutes ago, Graavarg said:

Would you continue to play the game to the same degree as now?

No, but that's mostly because by that time I would have seen every piece of content the game has to offer (many times over, in many cases), including the ones I don't enjoy, and so would likely be tired of playing the game.

[Stormandreas]

3 hours ago, Foras. said:

Here's what I can't understand at what stage the "War"frame turned into a "Farm"frame or at what stage I began to realize it 😆

About..... a year to year and a half after initial release.

I distinctly remember them upping spawn rates, and increasing costs of things fairly quickly back then. Console was somewhat new to warframe at the time

[Felsagger]

3 hours ago, Foras. said:

Here's what I can't understand at what stage the "War"frame turned into a "Farm"frame or at what stage I began to realize it 😆

The vocabulary terms where non existent by the time DE proposed the game. The concept was fresh when such model got inserted in 2013. 

 

GAAS Game as a service 

F2P Free to play

Peer to peer, distributed file system architecture between devices 

Player assisted model. The bug report and testing for free done by the players 

DE way of making money is focused on time gates shortcuts, resource collection short cuts, RNG or pachinko evasion shortcuts, and gear checks power creeping devices. Among other strategies that involve ROI or return of investments. 

Vanity project approach. (Apparel choice of colors, items, material apparel, "fashion frame")

[SneakyErvin]

17 minutes ago, Felsagger said:

The concept was fresh when such model got inserted in 2013. 

You are about uhm 17 years off atleast. GAAS games really started with MUDs and followed with MMOs back in the 90's, F2P also started with MUDs and became a thing for MMOs a short while after sub based MMOs were introduced. The first F2P games were supported by an add monetization often. Peer to peer is also age old in gaming, heck we arent even using peer to peer in WF, we use listen servers, which is a slightly different approach.

"Player assisted model" has also exsisted since online gaming became a thing, also dating back to atleast the MUD era.

And the monetization has been a part of gaming ever since MUDs or other text based multiplayer games where you could buy cooldown removal or extra daily actions etc. Even B2P games like GW(2) made use of that monetization. As in you got alot of the stuff you are used to in the purchase of the game, but alot of what you'd also expect would be locked behind paygates or long grinds. I've actually spent less on WF than I have on GW2 and I've gotten more from it aswell. And that is after having played GW2 for about 1-2 years tops and WF several thousands of hours over roughly 6 years on a daily basis.

"Vanity project approach" dont get me started on dyes in GW2 or pets in WoW. Warframe has a really generous approach for it, since 1 pallet is enough to cover you on all colors unless you want that very very slightly different saturation on a specific one. Also, vanity in games has been promoted since the first rendered MMOs, where that rare horse would be worth sitting on for hours in the town square while stroking your e-peen in a glorious armor of awesome epic looteyness.

[Felsagger]

5 minutes ago, SneakyErvin said:

You are about uhm 17 years off atleast. GAAS games really started with MUDs and followed with MMOs back in the 90's, F2P also started with MUDs and became a thing for MMOs a short while after sub based MMOs were introduced. The first F2P games were supported by an add monetization often. Peer to peer is also age old in gaming, heck we arent even using peer to peer in WF, we use listen servers, which is a slightly different approach.

"Player assisted model" has also exsisted since online gaming became a thing, also dating back to atleast the MUD era.

And the monetization has been a part of gaming ever since MUDs or other text based multiplayer games where you could buy cooldown removal or extra daily actions etc. Even B2P games like GW(2) made use of that monetization. As in you got alot of the stuff you are used to in the purchase of the game, but alot of what you'd also expect would be locked behind paygates or long grinds. I've actually spent less on WF than I have on GW2 and I've gotten more from it aswell. And that is after having played GW2 for about 1-2 years tops and WF several thousands of hours over roughly 6 years on a daily basis.

"Vanity project approach" dont get me started on dyes in GW2 or pets in WoW. Warframe has a really generous approach for it, since 1 pallet is enough to cover you on all colors unless you want that very very slightly different saturation on a specific one. Also, vanity in games has been promoted since the first rendered MMOs, where that rare horse would be worth sitting on for hours in the town square while stroking your e-peen in a glorious armor of awesome epic looteyness.

Google translator should become a Google interpreter too. He, Google, is failing you. Punch him. 

 

The problem you have misinterpreting my post happens when you discard the rest of the items. 

The combination of concepts applied to one single product built a "vocabulary" of terms. They were NON EXISTENT in this combination. They existed previously since DE knew about them on different products. 

 

Edited May 23, 2023 by Felsagger

[SneakyErvin]

8 minutes ago, Felsagger said:

The combination of concepts applied to one single product built a "vocabulary" of terms. They were NON EXISTENT in this combination. They existed previously since DE knew about them on different products. 

Nope, all those things you mention have coexsisted in sungular products since the 90s, either all of them or in different combinations.

[nslay]

Maybe a bit of "Wait"frame too.

[Hayrack]

This jam perfectly illustrates my relationship with Warframe:

 

Edited May 23, 2023 by Hayrack

[cute_moth.npc]

2 hours ago, Graavarg said:

It's that DE has given in (or you could say "sold out") to a certain subset of players and playstyles, that focus only on the reward and how to to get that reward as efficiently as possible.

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a video game"

- Soren Johnson

Most developers try and fight this. Digital Extremes kind of took it as an instruction manual.

[Corvid]

1 hour ago, cute_moth.npc said:

Digital Extremes kind of took it as an instruction manual.

It's more that they felt they couldn't fight it without risking the death of the game (and likely the studio) in the early days, and those habits haven't been dropped.

[TARINunit9]

It is said the Roman soldier used his sword once a year to kill the enemy, and his shovel once a day to build the empire

[Hypernaut1]

2 hours ago, cute_moth.npc said:

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a video game"

- Soren Johnson

Most developers try and fight this. Digital Extremes kind of took it as an instruction manual.

But they always make changes to the game to combat afk play, burnout and meta.

 

[Felsagger]

4 hours ago, SneakyErvin said:

Nope, all those things you mention have coexsisted in sungular products since the 90s, either all of them or in different combinations.

Yup. 

What game has all the traits that Warframe currently have? 

[Yamazuki]

51 minutes ago, Felsagger said:

Yup. 

What game has all the traits that Warframe currently have? 

Even if you only want to look at online PC games that have a client, you can look at the MMORPG genre and find that they have everything you listed in one game. Chinese/Korean Shooters also have the same thing, and they are even worse considering these are generally pvp games. The same was actually true for the racing [cars] genre. These are games that existed during the 2000s, before Warframe.

I'm actually unsure, did you actually think free to play games as a service started in the 2010s? They popped up in the late 90s/early 2000s with most of them from Korea. I, unfortunately, had the pleasure of mostly only being able to play f2p games as a kid/teen which means I've played hundreds of Korean and Chinese online games from different genres and combat types; playing some that actually never made it to the West in an era where you couldn't just whip out your phone and have it easily translate everything to English.

Time gates, rng, cosmetics and it all being monetized was the standard. Some of them even used p2p connections for both pve and pvp.

From the 2000s to Warframe's release there was nothing that changed, just the terminology did. There are recent things games have that may seem new, but it really isn't. Take the 'battle pass' craze that's been going on in recent years and how just about all online games across every genre has them... well they aren't actually any different to 'optional subscriptions' that some free to play games had before.  In either case for most games it's just extra rewards for money on a monthly or near monthly basis. They just happen to be worse and less rewarding, see LoL and their 'events' for a massively downgraded equivalent of an optional-sub or 'battle pass'. Leave it to a purely pvp game to come up with the grindiest events possible that put even deliberately grindy Korean games to shame.

Edited May 23, 2023 by Yamazuki

[cute_moth.npc]

2 hours ago, Hypernaut1 said:

But they always make changes to the game to combat afk play, burnout and meta.

 

They constantly bake encouragement of cheese into their design as well.

Arbitration literally rewards using AoE weapons as fast and as much as possible in order to gain Vitus. The design encourages it.

Rather than encouraging multiple ways to defend a defense objective, it's health does not scale with enemy damage output and healing was gutted as opposed to balanced, resulting in the answer for high level play becoming "stand in a bubble" - the design encourages it.

Archons have a massive weakpoint that was never addressed despite developer indications that damage attenuation would get a review, the fights feature damage spikes far beyond what glass cannons can withstand. There's a strong incentive to play using nothing but a tank frame and a Kuva Hek. 

Duviri was shown off as having a tactical melee engagement for the player to enjoy, but when you go and try this, it becomes clear that the system isn't well balanced without decrees, you're expected to run it many times and stacking decrees substantially reduces the risk involved in losing rewards. Players are virtually encouraged to do this and bypass the showcased design. 

Capture and exterminate missions have no equalizing factor between them and other types, rewards for an individual run are skimpy and therefore players are literally encouraged to cheese them as fast as possible.

There are countless examples in this game of how your best rewards are gained by invalidation, cheese and bypasses, and the developers not only minimally fight against this but liberally offer up the tools to lean into it.

I'm just kind of curious about the burnout part.. We got I guess the Kuva / relic limit, but also now we have like.. An hour of Archon hunts, 3-4 hours of circuit, Nightwave.. It feels like we are just moving from keeping hardcore addicts from overdoing it straight into putting pressure on to play constantly every week? I don't know if it's hugely improved..

The meta also hasn't really moved in years aside from the slight switch from Bramma and Zarr to other explosives and AoEs that just have more ammo like Tonkor and Incarnon? Meta isn't really super important as long as it doesn't have a massive distinction between it and what follows after it..

Most games have some kind of meta, like for example FFXIV has best class comps for raiding.. But every single savage raid is 100% clearable and fun with basically any mix of classes. I have favorite weapons in Returnal but can beat the game using any of them, the only time I'm going to "meta" my picks is when I try and chase a better leaderboard spot in the competition mode.. You just won't eliminate meta unless you destroy all distinction between things, which nobody really wants.

In Warframe though, bringing the non meta for an activity in a lot of cases results in utter failure or extreme duress (defense objective one shot late game ~ goodbye rewards.. 15 minutes of shooting an Archon in the head, etc) which highly encourages optimizing the fun out of something, again. 

Edited May 23, 2023 by cute_moth.npc

[Graavarg]

5 hours ago, cute_moth.npc said:

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a video game"

- Soren Johnson

Most developers try and fight this. Digital Extremes kind of took it as an instruction manual.

Yes.

And I've been guilty of that too, "gaming the game" instead of "playing it". Many times. But even so I do like to find my own "optimal solutions", not copy them from the internet.

Regarding Warframe my initial feeling for quite some years was that DE did not give in, to all kinds of demands. And then something changed, and now that change is running amok. Though I have quite a lot of experience with "development processes" (using software and computers), I have no real experience with computer game design. But to me it feels like DE is now chasing numbers, which is a creative trap and a looping process you can get stuck in when you lack a vision and the goals to fulfil it. I've seen it a lot, and there are a lot of different names for it, but what ultimately happens could be described as a measurement for a target turning into the actual target itself.

A gaming example could be using the total gaming time or concurrent gamers playing the game as measurement of how good the game is (along the theory that if players spend a lot of time playing they are liking it). The goal is quite clear: making a game that is so good players will spend a lot of time playing it. But if the vision of how to achieve such a game gets lost, the actual measurement can become the goal, which then is no longer about making a good game, but developing mechanisms to keep players playing so that the "measurement" level stays intact. And there is huge, really enormous difference between making a vision work in practice and between angst-filled weekly meetings where everything centers on coming up with some new gimmick that will affect "the measurement" itself.

My fear is that DE has got stuck in such a loop, either due to a lack of vision of what Warframe could still become or due to pressure to keep the weekly dough rolling in. Or both. But hype and rewards and regurgitated and re-skinned content can take you only so far, even if the core concept is still good. And the continuous trickery will only work on "the sheep", smarter and more experienced users either see through it or simply feel that something has "gone off". And those are the ones you actually need to keep playing the game ("the sheep" are never dedicated, they just "follow" and will be just as happy playing the newest game on their smartphone). Just look at Blizzard and what happened with WoW, the reasons are what they are but that game actually broke when they lost the trust of enough of those insanely dedicated players and they upped and left. Or stopped paying, if you will. After a few years totally lost in space WoW has bounced back, of a sort. By going back to it's roots, finding a vision and going for it instead of powerpoint boardroom presentations of Excel charts. And incidentally by slashing the power curve basically in half (level cap down from 120 to 60 with Shadowlands). WoW might never become what it could have been, but it has now kind of found it's soul again. Getting that all-important trust back is a lot harder though, and that is what makes players willing to shell out actual hard-earned, real-world coin...

[Hypernaut1]

1 hour ago, cute_moth.npc said:

They constantly bake encouragement of cheese into their design as well.

Arbitration literally rewards using AoE weapons as fast and as much as possible in order to gain Vitus. The design encourages it.

Rather than encouraging multiple ways to defend a defense objective, it's health does not scale with enemy damage output and healing was gutted as opposed to balanced, resulting in the answer for high level play becoming "stand in a bubble" - the design encourages it.

Archons have a massive weakpoint that was never addressed despite developer indications that damage attenuation would get a review, the fights feature damage spikes far beyond what glass cannons can withstand. There's a strong incentive to play using nothing but a tank frame and a Kuva Hek. 

Duviri was shown off as having a tactical melee engagement for the player to enjoy, but when you go and try this, it becomes clear that the system isn't well balanced without decrees, you're expected to run it many times and stacking decrees substantially reduces the risk involved in losing rewards. Players are virtually encouraged to do this and bypass the showcased design. 

Capture and exterminate missions have no equalizing factor between them and other types, rewards for an individual run are skimpy and therefore players are literally encouraged to cheese them as fast as possible.

There are countless examples in this game of how your best rewards are gained by invalidation, cheese and bypasses, and the developers not only minimally fight against this but liberally offer up the tools to lean into it.

I'm just kind of curious about the burnout part.. We got I guess the Kuva / relic limit, but also now we have like.. An hour of Archon hunts, 3-4 hours of circuit, Nightwave.. It feels like we are just moving from keeping hardcore addicts from overdoing it straight into putting pressure on to play constantly every week? I don't know if it's hugely improved..

The meta also hasn't really moved in years aside from the slight switch from Bramma and Zarr to other explosives and AoEs that just have more ammo like Tonkor and Incarnon? Meta isn't really super important as long as it doesn't have a massive distinction between it and what follows after it..

Most games have some kind of meta, like for example FFXIV has best class comps for raiding.. But every single savage raid is 100% clearable and fun with basically any mix of classes. I have favorite weapons in Returnal but can beat the game using any of them, the only time I'm going to "meta" my picks is when I try and chase a better leaderboard spot in the competition mode.. You just won't eliminate meta unless you destroy all distinction between things, which nobody really wants.

In Warframe though, bringing the non meta for an activity in a lot of cases results in utter failure or extreme duress (defense objective one shot late game ~ goodbye rewards.. 15 minutes of shooting an Archon in the head, etc) which highly encourages optimizing the fun out of something, again. 

I don't use meta and I do fine. "Utter falure"  What are you talking about? It's hard to fail at anything in WF. Every frame can do all content in this game. 

[(PSN)Joylesstuna]

Deimos bounties and Heart of Deimos, at least to me, is when DE intentionally started slowing the grind to extend shelf life. Everything else after introducing new mechanics that hinders grinding.

Edited May 23, 2023 by (PSN)Joylesstuna

[cute_moth.npc]

26 minutes ago, Hypernaut1 said:

I don't use meta and I do fine. "Utter falure"  What are you talking about? It's hard to fail at anything in WF. Every frame can do all content in this game. 

Oh, so.. Which Warframe are you using for eidolons?

You're doing Archons with Hydroid?

And when your team is 45 minutes in to your circuit defense and you don't have a bubbler or wide area CC, everyone totally swipes right to keep going?

Do you want 1-2 sets of arcanes a night or 6?

Do you want the easy win or the 15-20 minutes of headshotting, shield gating and frustration?

When you're doing steel path Duviri, do you try the tactical melee combat they showed off where the hammer unit takes around 2 dozen strikes before it goes down, or do you pick up enough decrees to one shot it?

Do you want to lose all of your circuit rewards? It's consistently super polarizing design.

It's design after design that heavily encourages and rewards doing it one specific way and punishes the crap out of you for not doing it.

Regular gameplay, generic stuff? Yes, we Powercrept it into irrelevance years ago and you can make meme guns that fire glue nuggets into your feet and still win.