An Open Letter to Digital Extremes

[meggarox]

Hello, I'd like to preface this letter with a pre hoc response to those in the community who would wish to say "Don't be so negative!", "But I liked the update!" or "You should be thanking DE!". You people have made your point, in fact I just stated it for you, you don't need to point out that you dislike my negative feedback, you don't need to remind us that you personally favour the SotR update and you don't have the right to tell other people to appreciate an update based on the effort that went into it rather than the result that it has had. Thank you.

 

To Digital Extremes

To you, I am nobody, and that is fine. You must remember that most of your players are so far as you are concerned faceless, nameless, almost immaterial. We may as well not exist, however, it is not you - DE - who make this game, it is we the players. You are the beneficiaries of our continued support, for finance and for recommendations. We have never felt betrayed by you in the past, for you have always somehow known the right direction that the game should take, your past updates have been largely successful simply because they improve the quality-of-life for us within the game. You are a business and we are your customers, most of us have jobs, we do not have free time all of the time, and we do not want to spend money simply for the purpose of making progress or keeping up to date in this game, but we spend money when you provide us with game-play that we enjoy, not when you remove game-play that we enjoy.

I personally did purchase the Vauban Prime pack 2 months ago, I enjoyed the game then, I wanted to support this game. You then released Specters of the Rail (SotR) which felt like a betrayal to my confidence in you as a company, a betrayal to me as a customer. I did not give you money so that you may feel free to do with this game what you will, but under the illusion that I was supporting an enterprise that truly cared about quality of service above all else. With this update, and the subsequent hot-fixes and updates to it, I no longer feel as though you care about quality of service, I feel as though this game has been taken in a direction that I, as a customer, do not want it to move down. The marketplace changes, for one, concealed the ability to purchase blueprints, and also advertise Platinum purchases. I feel as though such decisions are being forced by the stock holders, given that 61% of Digital Extremes was sold for $73m to Leyou, a Chinese company in 2014.

With SotR you have received an avalanche of negative feedback, and we have had no tangible response to it. I don't know if I should expect anything from you, given that you only own two fifths of your own business and it is without question that the Chinese could simply strong-arm you into changing the course of the game in a direction that nobody wants, eventually destroying it, all for the sake of making a return on their investment. My primary concern and question to you is whether or not you will be able to, or willing to, reverse some of the more devastating changes which the player base are not enjoying? Relics, as another example, simply feel like an attempt to monetize Prime Parts, Void Keys can't have been making much money since they were common drops and one-per-party. Forcing the usage rate of them to increase would make them more scarce, which would raise their value and thus raise their sales. Consider the fact that "waste rewards" have increased three-fold since three relics are effectively discarded each run, also consider that getting multiple Prime Parts from a single Key/Relic has also been made impossible now, both factors have driven Relic consumption through the roof.

As a customer whose primary concern is quality of service, I feel as though we are not getting it. More and better content is all that we ever ask you for, and with SotR you did not deliver this. Fissures are not "More" content, and in the opinion of some people they are not "Better" content either, they are simply content replacement. We no longer have access to farming systems which we enjoyed not because they were easier to farm from, but because the missions were enjoyable. We play this game to kill enemies and look good doing it, that is why cosmetics are popular and that is why defense, survival and excavation missions are popular too. People did not play the tile-sets which you claim to want to bottle-neck them into for the very reason that these tile-sets consisted of missions that did not and do not give good rewards, nor provide access to additional content. The remedy to this was not to destroy the void, but to create new content separate from Prime Parts which could be reached through some means involving the least popular missions. But bare in mind, they were unpopular specifically because people did not enjoy them, and they did not enjoy them - not because they weren't being pushed towards it - but because the content is poor. Yes, you are a great company who creates great things in a great game, but you are all human, and so you are also capable of creating poor content. 

Thank you for reading.

 

Yours sincerely, A Concerned Customer.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Dark-Vortex
Refining

[Omega-Shadowblade]

hmmm no tangible response. Does that not include the posts they've made on subjects, devstreams, and hotfixes?

[meggarox]

Just now, Omega-Shadowblade said:

hmmm no tangible response. Does that not include the posts they've made on subjects, devstreams, and hotfixes?

No, "no tangible response" refers to them not speaking of removing anything related to SotR. A non-tangible response is a vague one, where a band aid is put over the gaping wound as though that somehow puts things right, such as the tiny edit they made to Fissure game-play.

[Omega-Shadowblade]

Just now, Dark-Vortex said:

No, "no tangible response" refers to them not speaking of removing anything related to SotR. A non-tangible response is a vague one, where a band aid is put over the gaping wound as though that somehow puts things right, such as the tiny edit they made to Fissure game-play.

ok that is very very specific defining there. So basically them not saying they are going to remove a sotr feature makes it irrelevant?

[meggarox]

Just now, Omega-Shadowblade said:

ok that is very very specific defining there. So basically them not saying they are going to remove a sotr feature makes it irrelevant?

It's not as though their response is irrelevant. What I'm writing about is not the hotfixes or the decimal updates they made and their responses therein, but the end result of the update overall. No major changes have been made nor mentioned to this update, despite the "avalanche of negative feedback" which I mentioned in the original post.

[aheavysigh]

To preface, I am neither a huge supporter or detractor of SotR, I think it has it's fair share of problems, but also improvements. But I'm not writing this as a pro-SotR player who is triggered that someone doesn't like it.

You have some reasonable points, but the one thing that derailed your train of thought for me personally was your comment about DE being sold out to a Chinese company. Yes, they (Leyou) probably do have a degree of oversight, but there is no definitive evidence of exactly how much, unless you can provide some and invalidate my point. I've seen far too many threads with players blaming many of the changes in Warframe (or just stuff they don't like) because "woe is me, DE was bought out, they now of zero creative freedom/it's just money now". I'm not saying you are in that extreme camp, but I think you should be careful about speculating about things you don't have definitive proof on (unless, again, you do have proof).

Just my thoughts. I do agree that SotR lacked quality, and I'm really hoping the same doesn't happen with the Titania update and The War Within.

[Omega-Shadowblade]

Just now, Dark-Vortex said:

It's not as though their response is irrelevant. What I'm writing about is not the hotfixes or the decimal updates they made and their responses therein, but the end result of the update overall. No major changes have been made nor mentioned to this update, despite the "avalanche of negative feedback" which I mentioned in the original post.

Tell me, how much of the community in a % was that avalanche I see a lot of players who like the new system. Others like it and are simply a bit lost without something similar to the rewards set the old provided. Devs already said they are working on changing things for that issue. Other people are simply waiting for more content like titania and the war within. Overall, It seems you are trying to say the entire community is of one opinion. It simply is not.

[Teridax68]

Take away the pompous, overblown prose, the baseless China-baiting and the entitled melodrama, and we have... what exactly? You don't like the new Prime part system? Okay, sure, that's a valid concern, but why not simply put that forth and discuss it rationally instead of making a whole wall of text about how DE apparently betrayed you, Dark-Vortex, on a personal level? On top of this, the whole "lack of response" line is bull: DE have discussed this, and have been scrambling to adjust the game after SotR. When the update was released, DE was working around the clock, on weekends, to address player concerns and fix the largest issues. I personally have a lot of criticisms about the update, even if I really like it overall, but the last thing I'd do to reach out is to call the developers corrupt, dishonest and uncaring about the community, accusations that are all demonstrably false and insulting even to the players reading your post.

Also, just because DE hasn't reverted the exact change you wanted out of the game does not mean they haven't provided a "tangible response". They've provided one, it's just not one you want to hear. If you disagree with their decisions, then discuss directly what you'd like to see in the game, and why it's good. Tirades like these create a lot of drama but, ultimately, lead to very little productive discussion, and I highly doubt the OP was intended to foster a proper conversation in the first place, which is the exact opposite of what an open letter should aim for.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Teridax68

[trunks013]

Allright this one i must admit is well written.

You are not just bashing on stuff saying its not good you have some good points there.

Bringning a solution would have been good too.

Sadly now its hard to find one.

DE said they will make relic Dropable more easly but still missing something.

My idea about this is if Relic were like super easy to get ( i dont know like in the void you get like pack of them as reward and they literaly raining that would help the current void) and we could have endless fissure mission that consume relics  every 5 waves or 5 minutes for survival and on each interception round for interception that would give the tenno the oportunity to choose at each ( 5 waves , Interception round )

For survival it would be like at the end you have a scrooling grid with like 4 choice for every 5 minutes made and you just pick like in a buffet.

That would probably make a lot of tenno happy but bring other trouble.

 

That would be cool

I honestly think that SOTR brought a lot of awesome stuff personaly not having to recruit to drop prime part or even just joining random new player to help them i have a blast with that. But the fact that the endless mission were not implemented the same way as they were before in the new system make a lot of angry tenno. I totaly understand that.

 

I'm pretty sure DE is working on something ^.^ 

Be well tenno thanks for your feedback

 

Edited August 17, 2016 by trunks013

[DrBorris]

Oh no... it is another person who thinks DE is being controlled by an Evil Chinese company. No, it ain't like that, I am pretty sure none of the shares sold have voting rights in pertinence to Warframe.

 

More on topic, I feel like everything in SotR was a marketable improvement, and for some reason whenever people complain they seem to forget to actually describe what is bad beyond "it is bad".

Are you seriously asking for DE to NOT rework old broken systems? No... just... no. Keeping a bad foundation means that a game will be weak, no matter how much icing you add on top. You got your content with Lunaro, you'll get more content with TWW, and I am personally VERY happy with the rework of old content in SotR.

 

And I still don't get how Relics are such a nerf to Prime farming...

 

[CrudShuzKong]

35 minutes ago, Dark-Vortex said:

A Concerned Customer

Sounds just like "concerned citizen" which is basically what right wing extremists call themselves when they plot underneath their cloak of populism in my country...

You are basically just saying that you didnt like the last update and use lots of words to mince it in order to look like your post is better than any other of these we had before...

[cannonfodder1982]

i have to agree with the OP here, maybe not his wording but his overall message. in my opinion DE have made a few massive mistakes here. the game to me feels like its gone from what made me start playing it, to a money grab. it looks like DE has made the grind wall so big on purpose to try and pressure people into spending more money. i started playing this game as everything none cosmetic was accessible to me without feeling like i had to put money in.

it started with the crazy vauban prime saga. as a long term player i had the resources required minus alertium to build him, but the "rng" made gaining his parts a nightmare. then archwing slots happened. not i know that slots have been a thing for a long time, but DE screwed us on this one, they should have made slots a thing since the launch of AW or not at all, not just change it mid way through, that was a bad move imo. i think they made slots free to start as a way to deflect a lot of the flack that came with AW and how crazy buggy it was on launch.

i dont see the Chinese company bit as relevant at all, as long as what DE said about them still having total creative control as the truth, but we will never know if this is true or not.

Another huge issue we have is they way DE choose to talk to us, the dev blog is a good idea but it does not reach the masses in a way that it should, firstly the time zone thing makes it an issue for people that dont want to stay up till the middle of the night to watch it. i personally know that there is usually some thoughtful individual that will make a forum post outlaying the main points from the dev blog, but again not everyone wants to have to interact with the forums to find out what the future holds, i mean i didnt for the first year or so of playing, but i am generally interested in the future of WF and ther forums is pretty much the only way to find stuff out.

SOTR was a massive flop, sugar coat it anyway you like but its the truth and the numbers show this, none of the "it happens with every update BS will wash here" bit i can honestly say as a huge fan of WF i hope that TWW smashes it out of the park. im just not sure it will be the killer new update to save this game which i love so much.

lastly id like to say that as someone who has pretty much done all there is to do in WF i hope so badly for some new content...actual content and not just more frames and weapons, the rails were boring and a massive let down...

 

[Serafim_94]

I always found it funny how people spending money in F2P game start to behave like develoeprs are now obligated to them. They are not. Their obligaions end with providing the thing you paid for. Nothing more. Not like you are paying subscription or bought the game

Edited August 17, 2016 by Serafim_94

[(XBOX)Prime Pedestal]

4 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

 

Oh no... it is another person who thinks DE is being controlled by an Evil Chinese company. No, it ain't like that, I am pretty sure none of the shares sold have voting rights in pertinence to Warframe.

 

Generally as a rule of thumb one share equates to one vote. So, if for example there was a vote on making the game more profitable, then yes, the shareholders would have a say over Warframe, as more than likely it will be a change that does affect game play, be it in a small or large way.

Im not necessarily agreeing with all points the OP makes by the way.

Edited August 17, 2016 by (XB1)AnnoyedHaddock

[(XBOX)SLIM PR1ME]

For me on Xbox one this game is dead.  I am about to hit MR22 soon as i decide if i can play this update again.  I have about 15k plat and over 2500 hours played.  If UNO hadn't been released yesterday last night I wouldn't have anything to play.  Spectres of the Rail has over- hauled the game in a way that is ridiculous.  Earning syndicate standing appears to have been nerfed.  Focus will be harder to earn now.  Credits harder to farm.  The way you farm prime parts is just bad.  Rare parts are not rare anymore.  Non rare parts are rare now.  Ducats values changed.  This game is just bad now.  Seems they want you to buy everything with plat since they keep nerfing ways to do things.

[Omega-Shadowblade]

Just now, (XB1)GHOST AG3NT SLM said:

For me on Xbox one this game is dead.  I am about to hit MR22 soon as i decide if i can play this update again.  I have about 15k plat and over 2500 hours played.  If UNO hadn't been released yesterday last night I wouldn't have anything to play.  Spectres of the Rail has over- hauled the game in a way that is ridiculous.  Earning syndicate standing appears to have been nerfed.  Focus will be harder to earn now.  Credits harder to farm.  The way you farm prime parts is just bad.  Rare parts are not rare anymore.  Non rare parts are rare now.  Ducats values changed.  This game is just bad now.  Seems they want you to buy everything with plat since they keep nerfing ways to do things.

They reverted  the credit "nerfs" you know they were bugs. How is focus harder to earn now, cause draco isn't draco anymore? rare parts not being rare tends to be a thing that changes constantly just as it has in the past. 

[(XBOX)SLIM PR1ME]

All I am saying is this update changed everything about the game that sucked me in or kept me playing.  After 2500 hours I felt like a complete nooby of the game yesterday trying to figure out all the changes.  Some things were improved like the market and a few others but overall the game has changed completely for the worse I feel.

[chaotea]

Just as a point of discussion as your letter is based on the idea that your a paying customer, ive bought every prime pack, i payed for grandmaster founder status, and ive bought about £100 worth of plat outside that. I like the changes they've made recently, and want them to continue in the direction they are going.

[OniDax]

1 hour ago, Dark-Vortex said:

We play this game to kill enemies and look good doing it, that is why cosmetics are popular and that is why defense, survival and excavation missions are popular too

I agree with some points in your post, but especially with the above.

To all those players who think the only reason to play Warframe is to farm stuff, read this. Playing Warframe is about more than just farming.

Edited August 17, 2016 by AntoineFlemming

[Omega-Shadowblade]

Just now, (XB1)GHOST AG3NT SLM said:

All I am saying is this update changed everything about the game that sucked me in or kept me playing.  After 2500 hours I felt like a complete nooby of the game yesterday trying to figure out all the changes.  Some things were improved like the market and a few others but overall the game has changed completely for the worse I feel.

Opinions differ between people. Not sure what else I could say.

[BiancaRoughfin]

59 minutes ago, Dark-Vortex said:

To you, I am nobody, and that is fine. You must remember that most of your players are so far as you are concerned faceless, nameless, almost immaterial. We may as well not exist, however, it is not you - DE - who make this game, it is we the players.

Ok, i stopped reading here. This started very wrong. If we were nobody for DE, they woudlnt even put so much effort into making the game so great in the first place right?
And yes, it is us players who make the game, at least who decide which way it is taking. If someone is upset about the path the game took, they shouldnt be blaming or bashing on DE as we have witnessed for the pass few weeks but instead with the rest of the community.

[DrBorris]

-Wait, gotta do more reading-

Edited August 17, 2016 by DrBorris

[(XBOX)Prime Pedestal]

Just now, DrBorris said:

Gotta read the fine print. Not doing so leaves us just as good as chickens with our heads cut off.

The fancy paperwork: http://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/SEHK/2014/1014/LTN20141014641.pdf

 

So yeah, the only think that Multi Dynamic Games and Perfect Online get is some of that profit, they have no say.
 

Thankyou for clearing that up :)

[artemisfortune]

1 hour ago, DrBorris said:

Gotta read the fine print. Not doing so leaves us just as good as chickens with our heads cut off.

The fancy paperwork: http://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/SEHK/2014/1014/LTN20141014641.pdf

 

So yeah, the only think that Multi Dynamic Games and Perfect Online get is some of that profit, they have no say.
 

+1

This has been known since the debacle when someone accidentally stumbled on an incomplete contract.

 

To reference the original post, this is not your game, and it still has thousands of people playing, eagerly awaiting new updates, the forums are incredibly active. This is DE's game and they'll take it in the direction they see fit. You cannot say, however, that DE does not take community input, and that they don't regularly inform us with changes.

[Calvyr]

"OH-EM-GEE!! The game changed and I'm too lazy/stubborn to adapt to a new system."

Is SotR perfect? Nope. Is it apocalyptically bad? Nope. There are many improvements to the game that I really like. I know that a lot of people really like endless missions. Personally, I get bored of them and want to do something else after 40-60 minutes. So yeah, I like that they aren't the be-all and end-all. I have my own complaints about the relic system, but overall I think it's a good change that adds to the game more than it takes away. As to complaints that some evil Chinese overlord is steering development in some way. please take off your tinfoil hat. I also have to love the entitlement, the attitude that developers owe you something and have to listen to what you think. They don't. At the end of the day, it's their game and they can do whatever they want with it. If they make poor decisions and alienate the entire playerbase, their bottomline will show that and they'll either have to make more changes to try to retain players, or go out of business.

And by the way, remember that this is still a free to play game. Of course they're going to encourage people to spend money. How else are they supposed to pay for development of new content, as well as fixing bugs, ongoing support, etc.? It's still entirely possible to play the game with minimal investment, but if you can't be bothered, you can pay for convenience.

tl;dr - Please stop whining that the game isn't exactly as it was, or how you envisioned it; if you're that unhappy, vote with your wallet and playtime.