Question to Founders

[SirZorba]

56 minutes ago, trst said:

It doesn't matter what the Founders think about the issue. The fact is that DE sold them under the condition that they'll never return. And if DE went back on that it opens them up to potential legal issues but absolutely kills trust players have in what DE says.

Like it literally would make no difference if DE dragged in every single Founder and every one of them said it was fine to sell it again. It'd still be DE going against what they advertised and promised.

There's already plenty of things DE has said and done that have done far more damage to trust than re-releasing founder items could ever hope to achieve.

The state of Railjack compared to its 2018/1029 presentations and the general mishandling of updates like New War and Duviri.

Kickbot to this day being affected by the chat mod fiasco years ago, where the individuals in question got their personal issues added to it.

Saying they'll never do something like the founder pack again but "oops I just dropped this super cool heirloom skin bundle, you should totally buy it."

etc.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

6 hours ago, Gamer_Auto said:

I know it's pie-in-the-sky thinking.

if you know it's pie-in-the-sky thinking, why bother even mentioning it, when I'm sure you know well what mentioning founder's items does here?. even if you do genuinely want to have a meaningful discussion about it, this topic is a horse that's been dead so long it's unrecognizable, and you have multiple confirmations form DE themselves that they will NEVER re-release the items. the word "if" doesn't even come into it, and it's better off that way. can't blame others for thinking it's just another thinly-veiled  Bring Back Excal Prime thread, when that's pretty much all posts like this ever are.

 

 

[RichardKam]

Another thread of "I am not asking for the return of excal prime, but let's say.....", "maybe, just maybe", "if the founders dont't mind, can we just....."

Don't mind me, I am here just waiting for thread lockdown.

[Skoomaseller]

highly doubt they'd ask the Founders how they'd want excal/skana/lato p to be rereleased, because they'll probably just skip it entirely to avoid a S#&$show here and let it be obtainable somehow

but the chances of this even happening in the first place are slim to none, since they've already said they're not going back on their word.

maybe they'll rerelease it when Warframe reaches end of service, I guess. 

[ReddyDisco]

Why is it this type of thread always comes up from time to time?

EXCALIBUR PRIME IS NEVER GOING TO BE AVAILBLE FOR NON FOUNDERS!

[voltocitygel]

12 hours ago, Agall said:

I think they'd fix Excalibur Umbra before releasing Excalibur Prime to the public, effectively allowing people to disable his sentient passive and make him a simply better Excalibur Prime with that simple change.

Skana Prime is worthless post Duviri, since both Prisma Skana and regular Skana get so dramatically better evos than Prime that its effectively a meme at this point.

Lato Prime I doubt is that great, but I haven't bothered to pay attention and I don't see whiney rage videos about people complaining about how OP it is. Even then, there's several amazing Incarnon pistols already, so it would be like debating with OP Incarnon pistol 1 shot enemies faster.

 

This whole discussion comes up over and over, but Duviri's Incarnon adapter balancing really sealed the deal for their lack of utility, even for someone like me who kind of wished I spent the extra $50 for the Skana Prime back then but didn't. Once Incarnon adapters came out, that desire is basically dead, since I'd be gimping myself with a less useful weapon compared to Prisma Skana (which I use in my main build as a stat stick and melee weapon, mind you, with no firearms equipped).

Excalibur Prime though is dramatically better than Excalibur Umbra now a days, since Umbra's Sentience passive breaks a lot of necessary mechanics in min-maxed Excalibur builds. I do have builds where this doesn't matter as much and is mostly inconvenient, but the best of the best ones its a pretty major problem for higher end content.

An important point to make though, I doubt there's anyone else in LR rank in the game with >60% usage of any version of Excalibur, so whether or not Excalibur Prime is more powerful or not, people just simply don't play Excalibur Umbra or normal over other warframes with a lot better kits in 2024. Those kits are beyond necessary for SP, which Umbra does a great job with and has built in Umbra polarities to health tank with. I'm just a creature of habit who finds what I like in this kind of game and sticks to it. That's in almost any game I play, so Warframe is no different.

Lots of great points here, and eloquently said.

As a LR player who started back during the founders program, didn’t have the money to spare, and regretted it for a long time, this sums up my thoughts on it almost exactly. I’ve always been a volt player primarily so I mostly missed the skana and lato (besides having missed the opportunity to support the game and community I love) but the prisma skana has been working out for me quite well (especially after duviri as you said), and even after they released the incarnon for the lato, it hasn’t climbed my usage stats for secondaries much.
The equipment (though the longer the game goes on, more so the profile display) serves as identifiers of founders who supported the game and helped it get on its feet- if it for any reason ever became available to people other than founders, it would lose everything that makes it special (and as a result, wanted). 

[dEjAvU5566]

No matter how you asked, when you asked, where you asked, it’s not gonna happened.

[Birdframe_Prime]

8 hours ago, SirZorba said:

There's already plenty of things DE has said and done that have done far more damage to trust than re-releasing founder items could ever hope to achieve.

Eh... All the things you've named are bad, but fix-able. They can still update those things to make the game better. Whether they do or not? Ehhhhhhh... No clue. That's just bad releases. Under-delivering on a promise isn't unheard of, and they did apologise with updates that improved about sixty other things that the players weren't expecting them to. It's not great, but it's something.

The Founders Pack is an actual legal agreement that DE signed and was paid for. Other companies get around this by specifically stating 'timed exclusives' or 'early access to', which means they build the aspect of these items being not permanently exclusive into the contract.

Why do they do this? Because it is, believe it or not, a legally binding contract that can be, and almost certainly will be by somebody, followed up with legal action for breaking. We've historically seen this with companies that offered 'exclusives' without stating that they were 'timed' and players have gotten full refunds of the money spent, plus legal costs, plus damages for breach of contract. It's not a cheap process, and it does more than hurt the reputation of a company with the players, it affects investment into the company, because a contract's a contract, a pre-purchase is legally no different from what any actual investor is doing.

So... Yeah, when the option is 'attract a few more players by re-releasing exclusive items when it's shown that 80% of players don't actually buy into the game' and the counterbalance is 'open the company up to legal action from the breach of contract that could tally all the way up to a class-action lawsuit from a large proportion of the contracted players because internet outrage is a thing, causing follow-up repercussions of investments being pulled and future investment being reduced', there's far more of a leaning on the side of not doing that.

See?

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

1 hour ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

The Founders Pack is an actual legal agreement that DE signed and was paid for

People tend to say this but without mentioned where they got this idea from, can you point to where this is said or written by them? The founders stuff just looks like a promise than something legally binding

And no I'm not asking for it to come back just curious about this point that gets brought up often with this topic

Edited March 9 by (XBOX)C11H22O11

[Skoomaseller]

51 minutes ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

People tend to say this but without mentioned where they got this idea from, can you point to where this is said or written by them? The founders stuff just looks like a promise than something legally binding

And no I'm not asking for it to come back just curious about this point that gets brought up often with this topic

It is just a promise. Don't know if there is any legal document regarding the exclusivity of Founder's stuff, but they've made it clear in the past that they won't rerelease it.

They could go back on their word, but I highly doubt they'd do that. While I don't know if all Founders are okay/not okay with DE releasing the exclusive items, I doubt they wanna deal with the S#&$storm that could potentially follow. 

[Voltage]

44 minutes ago, Skoomaseller said:

They could go back on their word, but I highly doubt they'd do that. While I don't know if all Founders are okay/not okay with DE releasing the exclusive items, I doubt they wanna deal with the S#&$storm that could potentially follow. 

The Founders Program is just the last frontier/shred of good will for DE to continue honoring. If you've been playing the game long enough, you know that DE going back on the word of Founders pales in comparison to the several other situations over the years.

I'm not sure why people get so deep into the discussion. DE could technically give everyone the same access in an unconventional fashion, but they just won't, because this is their golden ticket to still retaining some level of difference to the rest of the industry (even though they're business practices have said otherwise in the last couple years).

They could sell the 6,000, 9,000 and 12,000 Mastery Experience relative to each tier of Founder for money/Platinum with the inability for Founders to buy them depending on their tier. It is completely within DE's power to buff Prisma Skana, Lato Vandal, and base Excalibur to having the exact same stats as their Prime counterparts. You could even release the weapon models as skins with completely different names. You can circumvent giving people the ability to actually buy these items while giving everyone the same gear opportunities. The package only states that they promise not to sell the gear items themselves. It makes no mention of exclusivity on skin models, Mastery Experience or stat superiority. Founders would still have their profile accolade, Design Council access, Platinum, Sigils and Emblems.

They recently did this with the Supporter Pack skins. Marketing stuff with the words used to imply something isn't returning, but using legalese to release them under the technicality that their wording implies allowance, even though it's just bad-faith marketing to use all those words to begin with. Given their track record lately and hinting at selling even more Heirlooms, they should just resell Founder gear in the legalese fashion and stuff it under the rug like they do everything else. People already forgot about the Heirlooms like 2 months after it happened, same with when they tried to substitute Platinum for Endo with Regal Aya. So many people would still hold them on a pedestal, and probably even praise them for this move because they are a new generation of Tenno that are not aware of, or simply don't care that DE used to be more respectful to their playerbase years ago.

[Birdframe_Prime]

6 hours ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

People tend to say this but without mentioned where they got this idea from, can you point to where this is said or written by them?

Yes, you can actually go to the Wayback Machine and look at the actual purchasing page for the Founders Packs and see the written statements by them of 'snag exclusive items that will never be available again'.

From there you can even navigate to the FAQ page of the time where it states that these items are exclusively for Warframe Founders and available for a limited time only.

It's also (apparently, because I wasn't one) on the confirmation e-mail sent to all purchasers to confirm what the exclusives are and that they will not be available to any other player, nor will they be put up for sale again.

This was re-iterated during the scandal of the Chinese release where the Chinese publisher temporarily offered the Lato Prime to that market for purchase, and all of those were immediately refunded and removed from those accounts because of this agreement.

Now that was a mess...

Anyway, we have their receipts, we have multiple interviews, DevStreams and even a standing rule by the Mods on the Forums that non-productive discussions about the topic get shut down to prevent the circular arguments. It's just that the newer players can only report what they've been told, they weren't around for the original statements by DE during DevStreams, or the actual Founders Pack era, and so on, like some of the older players ^^

[Letter13]

Unfortunately, Founders exclusive gear will not be returning.