Whoever programmed the login "coupon analysis module" should get a "Genius" T-shirt..,

[Graavarg]

Today the login system threw me an interesting offer (and not for the first time). Interesting from a timing and meta-perspective, and so "in tune" with my personal Warframe "situation" that my first thought was that it is actually someone at DE who does this manually. Which it of course isn't, but that just accentuates how well the programming is.

I am, once again, basically "done". Almost all interesting content is acquired, all the new stuff collected and maxed, standings maxed, Nightwave done and any interesting stuff left in the game is unfarmeable, unachievable or locked behind other arbitrary walls. I'm just finishing up (a couple of Duviri arcanes left, a few missions to fully unlock Nami Solo Incarnon, get the other Incarnon adapter, force myself to do the %¤%¤#! "worm mission" for Pathos clamps a few more times and then that's it. I even have plat left enough to fund another potential future re-visit to Warframe, if that were to happen.

And at that moment the login system drops a 75% plat offer in my lap... 😀. I'm on my way out, I don't really need it, I basically don't even want if (the trade system sucks and is full of schysters, I have cosmetics up the wazoo and all I use plat for is boosters and slots). But I am still going to buy that damn plat, and pay real money for an in-game made-up currency which I might never need or use.

My reasoning (which is a bit surprising even to myself) is that it is a good offer (which it is, if you need the plat), that it is a way of "tipping" DE on the way out the door, for years of fun and mostly very good service, that it is a way of supporting DE (which is one of the better developers out there, even though I disagree a lot with some "Warframe decisions") and that it will be a nice surprise (to have a small pile of plat) if I get back into the game in the future. And because whoever wrote those damn algorithms really deserve some credit 🙂.

Somewhere in that analysis also lives a faint hope that DE really will come to it's senses and unlock the current content potential in full. Explicitly from a diversity perspective, I couldn't care less about the self-defeating, ever-increasing and inherently stupid "power fantasy". No matter how "very human" it is to always need "more, more and more", giving in to it is just as destructive for Warframe "the computer game" as for the IRL planet we are pillaging to death. In Warframe it is functionally "totally dumb", as climbing that fantasy ladder leaves more destroyed content behind you and less left to play at the same time, from a "fun and challenge"-perspective. And from an "human ethics" viewpoint it enforces not "power" but rather our virus-like behavior, destroying the host that feeds us (in this case the fun and enjoyment to be had in Warframe). It just doesn't taste as well as it once did, for me. And that part also reeks of "sheer stupidity and greed".

But back to happier things. If DE unlocks the arbitrary riven limit I just would have to come back, I have so many interesting weapons that need that little extra. The same with the incarnon system, which I "hated on sight" when it was introduced but which in actuality have provided a lot of fun (so my initial take was wrong). I still hate having to acquire Pathos clamps through one of the most meaningless and boring missions in the game, but otherwise the Incarnon Adapters have been a great addition. I don't need the "extra power", but the selection of older weapons was a brilliant choice (from my perspective), allowing me both to use my old favourites and use my just as old rivens in new ways. Not all Incarnon "effects" are created equal, and the system of switching really is a bit "clunky" (to say the least), but making the Adapters buff the basic weapon specs has been downright fantastic. Hmm, what else... well, the two new "18 months of farming"-arcanes will either be irrelevant or possible to acquire in some other way/event (they are the only ones that won't be fully upgraded, so my completionist soul is complaining...), and the shards are still both unnecessarily OP (they REALLY shouldn't affect weapon damage, whoever came up with that idea... well, Marie Antoinette and so on...) and sort of fit into the game only for players using one or a few warframes. If you try to use even half of the warframes (in order to maximize the fun, instead of POWER!!!!) you are screwed. This boils down to being able to put together a "complete build" for any warframe (and that is 5 shards + full modding + the Helminth) WITHOUT making a few warframes insanely more powerful than the rest. Having shards enough for just some of them forces you to select between a few power-up favourites and other non-sharded favourites, which is a negative experience. In short: if you start using shards the limiting acquirement (of shards) will turn a large part of the warframes into "MR fodder" (using an older term). Which is downright dumb if you play Warframe for the great sandbox diversity it offers.

Anyway, thanks for the coupon offer, and all the fish...!

[Zakkhar]

Cool story, bro.

Anyway...

There is no system, you are not a snowflake, world does not orbit around you. This is a grind shooter game. You did all the grinding, good for you.

Edited January 26 by Zakkhar

[0bsi]

1 hour ago, Graavarg said:

And at that moment the login system drops a 75% plat offer in my lap... 😀.

Which is still far more useful than the affinity boosters I keep getting frequently  -  I'm L4 ... of all the possible boosters, affinity is not useful in the slightest.

[TeaHands]

46 minutes ago, Zakkhar said:

There is no system, you are not a snowflake, world does not orbit around you.

One Piece isn't real, the Tooth Fairy is in bed with Big Soda, Santa Claus got bought out by BlackRock, and the Volcano Taco ISNT. COMING. BACK.

 

Anyways OP I feel ya, I swear once something else is starting to grab my attention this game just happens to drop a 75% coupon, but the investment is worth it everytime.

[Quimoth]

1 hour ago, Zakkhar said:

Cool story, bro.

Anyway...

There is no system, you are not a snowflake, world does not orbit around you. This is a grind shooter game. You did all the grinding, good for you.

Not completely true. Try taking a break for several months (not logging in at all) and you will find that 10/10 times you get a coupon on your first login. I myself have had this happen at least 5 times. I always use these, you never know just how tedious or horrible the latest grind is. Somehow DE either conceives an okay grind, or the most horrendous stuff you have ever played.

Besides that there really isn't much of a system though. OP has had some random coupon drop though.

[Zakkhar]

1 hour ago, Quimoth said:

you will find that 10/10 times you get a coupon on your first login

Nope. Already disproved several times, myself included.

1 hour ago, Quimoth said:

I myself have had this happen at least 5 times.

That doesnt mean anything, you realise that? 

1 hour ago, Quimoth said:

I always use these, you never know just how tedious or horrible the latest grind is.

You know you do not have to get everything, right? I am completely free to play LR3 atm, I do not have plenty of stuff because I was not even curious. I may be in the future, though. It also leaves me stuff to obtain in game, unlike some people. Buying stuff with plat is not skip the grind, it is skip the gameplay.

 

[Graavarg]

1 hour ago, Zakkhar said:

Nope. Already disproved several times, myself included.

While true that no one has ever been able to prove that there is a system, that does not translate into proof that there isn't one. That would be one logical step too many. The opposite argument, that there isn't a system, has also never been proven. 

But system or not doesn't really matter (for me), I was sort of referencing the situation (getting a nice coupon while on the way out, and using it without any idea for a purpose... 😉).

[kamisama85]

Never realized someone could be this tin foil hat over something like login rewards but here we are. Burnout makes people wacky.

[UnstarPrime]

My spouse and I both play Warframe on consoles, but she plays it much less frequently than I do and can go months without playing it.  If memory serves, literally every time she has logged in for the first time after one of these breaks she's had a coupon, usually 75%, sometimes 50%.  And with others reporting similar things, it seems like there's something going on there.

However, there are also people who have taken long breaks and reported that they came back to no coupons.  So assuming that everyone is telling the truth, what could be going on here?

My pet theory is that functionally, even when you're not logging in, Warframe still does a dice roll to see what your daily login bonus is.  And if that roll is a coupon, instead of discarding it when you don't login, that coupon gets kicked down the road until at least one of two things happens:

• A better coupon is rolled, which replaces the lesser coupon.
• You login and your coupon reward is claimed.

That would explain why folks seem so much more likely to receive a coupon after a lengthy break: because in essence, the day that you login from that break gives you N+1 different rolls to try to get a coupon, where N is the number of days you've been absent.

[Tiltskillet]

21 minutes ago, UnstarPrime said:

My pet theory is that functionally, even when you're not logging in, Warframe still does a dice roll to see what your daily login bonus is.  And if that roll is a coupon, instead of discarding it when you don't login, that coupon gets kicked down the road until at least one of two things happens:

You stole my pet theory! :P

 

[Aldain]

I doubt there's such a system, though I am moderately suspicious as to why every time I've taken a long break from Warframe I come back to a 50/75% off coupon (this was true even when I was back on Switch only).

[Zakkhar]

4 hours ago, Graavarg said:

While true that no one has ever been able to prove that there is a system, that does not translate into proof that there isn't one. That would be one logical step too many. The opposite argument, that there isn't a system, has also never been proven. 

Wrong and more wrong.

There have been multitude of theorised systems/corelations and literally all of them were disprooved. In order to disproove a system you just need 1 case where system does not work. 

And yours (big pause) was made up and disprooven the most.

[ShockTNC]

On 2024-01-26 at 7:44 AM, Zakkhar said:

Cool story, bro.

Anyway...

There is no system, you are not a snowflake, world does not orbit around you. This is a grind shooter game. You did all the grinding, good for you.

Yup was on my way to convey the same thing.

[ShockTNC]

On 2024-01-26 at 6:41 AM, Graavarg said:

Today the login system threw me an interesting offer (and not for the first time). Interesting from a timing and meta-perspective, and so "in tune" with my personal Warframe "situation" that my first thought was that it is actually someone at DE who does this manually. Which it of course isn't, but that just accentuates how well the programming is.

I am, once again, basically "done". Almost all interesting content is acquired, all the new stuff collected and maxed, standings maxed, Nightwave done and any interesting stuff left in the game is unfarmeable, unachievable or locked behind other arbitrary walls. I'm just finishing up (a couple of Duviri arcanes left, a few missions to fully unlock Nami Solo Incarnon, get the other Incarnon adapter, force myself to do the %¤%¤#! "worm mission" for Pathos clamps a few more times and then that's it. I even have plat left enough to fund another potential future re-visit to Warframe, if that were to happen.

And at that moment the login system drops a 75% plat offer in my lap... 😀. I'm on my way out, I don't really need it, I basically don't even want if (the trade system sucks and is full of schysters, I have cosmetics up the wazoo and all I use plat for is boosters and slots). But I am still going to buy that damn plat, and pay real money for an in-game made-up currency which I might never need or use.

My reasoning (which is a bit surprising even to myself) is that it is a good offer (which it is, if you need the plat), that it is a way of "tipping" DE on the way out the door, for years of fun and mostly very good service, that it is a way of supporting DE (which is one of the better developers out there, even though I disagree a lot with some "Warframe decisions") and that it will be a nice surprise (to have a small pile of plat) if I get back into the game in the future. And because whoever wrote those damn algorithms really deserve some credit 🙂.

Somewhere in that analysis also lives a faint hope that DE really will come to it's senses and unlock the current content potential in full. Explicitly from a diversity perspective, I couldn't care less about the self-defeating, ever-increasing and inherently stupid "power fantasy". No matter how "very human" it is to always need "more, more and more", giving in to it is just as destructive for Warframe "the computer game" as for the IRL planet we are pillaging to death. In Warframe it is functionally "totally dumb", as climbing that fantasy ladder leaves more destroyed content behind you and less left to play at the same time, from a "fun and challenge"-perspective. And from an "human ethics" viewpoint it enforces not "power" but rather our virus-like behavior, destroying the host that feeds us (in this case the fun and enjoyment to be had in Warframe). It just doesn't taste as well as it once did, for me. And that part also reeks of "sheer stupidity and greed".

But back to happier things. If DE unlocks the arbitrary riven limit I just would have to come back, I have so many interesting weapons that need that little extra. The same with the incarnon system, which I "hated on sight" when it was introduced but which in actuality have provided a lot of fun (so my initial take was wrong). I still hate having to acquire Pathos clamps through one of the most meaningless and boring missions in the game, but otherwise the Incarnon Adapters have been a great addition. I don't need the "extra power", but the selection of older weapons was a brilliant choice (from my perspective), allowing me both to use my old favourites and use my just as old rivens in new ways. Not all Incarnon "effects" are created equal, and the system of switching really is a bit "clunky" (to say the least), but making the Adapters buff the basic weapon specs has been downright fantastic. Hmm, what else... well, the two new "18 months of farming"-arcanes will either be irrelevant or possible to acquire in some other way/event (they are the only ones that won't be fully upgraded, so my completionist soul is complaining...), and the shards are still both unnecessarily OP (they REALLY shouldn't affect weapon damage, whoever came up with that idea... well, Marie Antoinette and so on...) and sort of fit into the game only for players using one or a few warframes. If you try to use even half of the warframes (in order to maximize the fun, instead of POWER!!!!) you are screwed. This boils down to being able to put together a "complete build" for any warframe (and that is 5 shards + full modding + the Helminth) WITHOUT making a few warframes insanely more powerful than the rest. Having shards enough for just some of them forces you to select between a few power-up favourites and other non-sharded favourites, which is a negative experience. In short: if you start using shards the limiting acquirement (of shards) will turn a large part of the warframes into "MR fodder" (using an older term). Which is downright dumb if you play Warframe for the great sandbox diversity it offers.

Anyway, thanks for the coupon offer, and all the fish...!

The coupons are programmed to show up when you haven't given them money recently, that's literally all there is to it. "Oh you haven't bought plat for a week, here is 50% off, haven't bought plat for a month here is 75% off"

[Zakkhar]

2 hours ago, ShockTNC said:

The coupons are programmed to show up when you haven't given them money recently, that's literally all there is to it. "Oh you haven't bought plat for a week, here is 50% off, haven't bought plat for a month here is 75% off"

What if I havent bought plat ever? Also, got any evidence for that statement?

 

Edited January 27 by Zakkhar

[Graavarg]

18 hours ago, ShockTNC said:

The coupons are programmed to show up when you haven't given them money recently, that's literally all there is to it. "Oh you haven't bought plat for a week, here is 50% off, haven't bought plat for a month here is 75% off"

I don't think so. None of us knows, of course, but I had a sh*tload of plat for years and almost never got plat coupons while some of my "poorer" clan members got them all the time. Then I decided to just run my plat heap down (as an arbitrary endpoint to Warframe), which took a couple of years, and after a while I did start to get "lowly" login offers. It might be random chance or it might not, there is no proof either way, only speculation. And then there is this "connection" between not playing for while and rejoining (and not having a lot of plat), which a lot of players think they have noticed.

As I said, it is not a big deal either way. But from my perspective it would border on incompetence if DE just used a random generator for a mechanism that is of core importance, and DE is far from "incompetent" (even though some of us claim that they are, every now and then 🙂). Together with us, DE has kept Warframe running and developing for over ten years. That is basically with "our" money, which we voluntarily chose to put into a F2P game. The login coupons are one of the mechanisms at the center of that. Ergo: a finely tuned "algorithm" is used to decide when to offer what to whom. It doesn't matter, but that would be my logical hypothesis...

Edited January 28 by Graavarg

[Corvid]

18 hours ago, ShockTNC said:

The coupons are programmed to show up when you haven't given them money recently, that's literally all there is to it. "Oh you haven't bought plat for a week, here is 50% off, haven't bought plat for a month here is 75% off"

I got Gauss Prime Access then received a 60% coupon a day later, so I don't think this is accurate.

[Graavarg]

On 2024-01-26 at 11:02 PM, Zakkhar said:

Wrong and more wrong.

There have been multitude of theorised systems/corelations and literally all of them were disprooved. In order to disproove a system you just need 1 case where system does not work. 

And yours (big pause) was made up and disprooven the most.

I think you are mixing the really real world and the scientific world together. There can exist things in the really real world without ever having been proven statistically and logically, even though those things do not exist scientifically at the same time. If there are no "unknowns" (and no, I am not referencing a certain American defense minister) we would logically already know everything there is to know. Claiming that we know everything would clearly be ridiculous (bordering on "insane"), so there is (a lot of) stuff that has never been proven.

Second point: you cannot, even scientifically, prove anything by disproving something else, with the exception being that your are 100% certain that all possibilities are included in your logical setup. The basic example of this is a coin toss, and the theoretical possibility that the coin would land on it's edge. You cannot therefore with certainty state that "if it isn't heads it has to be tails". Depending on how you formulate the hypothesis you might even have to include an option of "the coin not landing at all" (in other words a "null result"). It's a type of "trick question" that's been around for ages (in courses on scientific philosophy, logic, experiment design etc.): "If you throw a coin and the result is not heads, how... ".

In the case of the existence or non-existence of a DE algorithm for login rewards the correct (scientific and logical) way of setting it up is as two competing hypothesis:

1) DE has an algorithm that affects what login rewards you will get (for coupons)

2) DE does not have an algorithm that affects what login rewards you will get (for coupons)

You cannot prove (or deduce) that one of them is correct by claiming that the other isn't proven (that is one of the greatest logical fallacies, btw). If one of them can be proven, the other will also be proven false as such a logical setup (as above) is mutually exclusive. But you have to prove one of them correct in order to get a result.

So, to my knowledge no-one has ever been able to do just that, for DE login coupons. Which means we are left with opinions, even reasoned opinions, but we simply do not know.

For the record: I'm not writing this to get into a slinging match and this isn't explicitly about your post. 

Edited January 28 by Graavarg

[Graavarg]

On 2024-01-26 at 6:46 PM, UnstarPrime said:

My spouse and I both play Warframe on consoles, but she plays it much less frequently than I do and can go months without playing it.  If memory serves, literally every time she has logged in for the first time after one of these breaks she's had a coupon, usually 75%, sometimes 50%.  And with others reporting similar things, it seems like there's something going on there.

However, there are also people who have taken long breaks and reported that they came back to no coupons.  So assuming that everyone is telling the truth, what could be going on here?

My pet theory is that functionally, even when you're not logging in, Warframe still does a dice roll to see what your daily login bonus is.  And if that roll is a coupon, instead of discarding it when you don't login, that coupon gets kicked down the road until at least one of two things happens:

• A better coupon is rolled, which replaces the lesser coupon.
• You login and your coupon reward is claimed.

That would explain why folks seem so much more likely to receive a coupon after a lengthy break: because in essence, the day that you login from that break gives you N+1 different rolls to try to get a coupon, where N is the number of days you've been absent.

If I were to write such a login algorithm, I would include stuff like the player's current "plat balance" and general shopping behavior, and put that in relation to what is currently going on in the game. Simply because what you do NOT want to do is offer a player "50% off" if they would buy the play anyway, and what you would WANT to do instead is make "an offer they can't refuse" (and no, I do not think DE resembles the Corleone business model 🙂). That includes offering them a deal that feels good enough to buy some plat, or if they were going to buy some play anyway a deal that is so good they buy more plat (for a bigger sum of real money).

If "my algorithm" were used in a parallel universe, players with a lot of plat or players who doesn't generally use plat for "current active options" in the game would have a lesser chance of getting an offer, and so would players that tend to plunk down money for plat regardless of getting an offer or not. For instance in regard to "new primes", "new warframes", "new cosmetics" and/or "events" or "new major content". But there would be an other group of players that instead would get a higher chance. For instance a player that occasionally buys plat, but (almost) only with coupons, that have a "low plat balance" and that "mains" a warframe that just got primed. Or a player going all-in with cosmetics, mainly using coupons to get plat and when a "new line of cosmetics" becomes available.

I wouldn't use an absolute function, just an algorithm that affects the overall chance for plat drops, increasing or decreasing it depending on how it sums up the "situation". That way it is also still random, or at least semi-random.

In a way this is a win-win mechanism, considering Warframe is an adult game and one can expect "adults" to have a general grip on what they use their money for. We get cheaper plat right when we want it (if the algorithm is good enough), DE gets some "real money" and both can enjoy Warframe continuing it's existence.

Edited January 30 by Graavarg

[UnstarPrime]

4 hours ago, Graavarg said:

If I were to write such a login algorithm, I would include stuff like the player's current "plat balance" and general shopping behavior, and put that in relation to what is currently going on in the game. Simply because what you do NOT want to do is offer a player "50% off" if they would buy the play anyway, and what you would WANT to do instead is make "an offer they can't refuse" (and no, I do not think DE resembles the Corleone business model 🙂).

With respect, if you wrote such an algorithm and this functionality was revealed, you would be rightly criticized and suffer blowback for not being even-handed.  And beyond the social ramifications, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing was illegal in some locations.  So broadly speaking, I wouldn't recommend it; the juice isn't worth the potential consequences.

[Graavarg]

4 hours ago, UnstarPrime said:

With respect, if you wrote such an algorithm and this functionality was revealed, you would be rightly criticized and suffer blowback for not being even-handed.  And beyond the social ramifications, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing was illegal in some locations.  So broadly speaking, I wouldn't recommend it; the juice isn't worth the potential consequences.

With respect, I don't think you know what you are saying, since such algorithms are everywhere at the moment. The (somewhat inflated) value of several of the biggest internet companies depends to a large part on their ability to deliver the data that drives them. The idea that it would be illegal for a company to use their own data seems a bit absurd since it is legal all over the world to sell such data commercially. And use it to profile potential buyers and deliver specific online marketing to them, including all kinds of "special offers".

Personally I think all that should be prohibited, and couldn't care less if that meant a lot of the social media platforms would disappear (their main reason for existing is to gather such data, after all). But that is just my opinion and not how the world currently works.

[ShockTNC]

On 2024-01-28 at 2:54 AM, Corvid said:

I got Gauss Prime Access then received a 60% coupon a day later, so I don't think this is accurate.

Its always possible I am wrong, but back when I still purchased platinum directly this is how it always worked for me. It was so consistent I would plan my purchases around it.

[ShockTNC]

On 2024-01-27 at 10:48 AM, Zakkhar said:

What if I havent bought plat ever? Also, got any evidence for that statement?

 

Yes, my bank account statements. (No im not sharing)

[rapt0rman]

You have an -increased- chance to get -a- coupon when you havent logged in for a while.

No gaurentee that you'll get one let alone a 50% or 75% ( though there does seem to be an increased probability of that too), nor does it mean that you won't get one if you do log in regularly.

[sly_squash]

The coupon BS is nonsense but I agree we're due for a riven cap increase.