Warframe: A great game with some unfortunate balance issues and bandaid solutions.

[(PSN)NicolaiBM]

Warframe is a fantastic game, it have plenty of experiences to offer, it got plenty of loot to get and it allows you to play as you want and still get progress done. It's for the most part a journey for the player base to an arsenal of emense power and wealth. But it's not without flaws, just like any game on the market, it have it's fair share of them and the path Warframe have been on the last years is only adding on to them and quite often only offering a bandaid solution rather than addressing the core issues at hand. I would love nothing more for the game and the community to have a healthy and productive debate on all actual matters concerning this and work towards a common goal of improving the game, I believe this will attract even more players allowing the game to develop even further in the future.

I myself have a few items I believe needs urgent attention from DE or for the community as a hole to understand. I'll do my best to reason them and I'm hoping the developers themselves is interested in taking part in this debate, explaining their choices and helping the community understand the vision or intensions behind their actions.

 

About those rivens and the nature of them.

@DERebecca said this about rivens: "The exponential Cycling costs are there to encourage players to try the existing stats before they embark on the journey to the ‘perfect roll’. For those of you who want to find the best Mod possible, that avenue is available to you, but that is not the goal behind this system.". Rebecca, considering how rng is affecting how the rivens are cycled, it's a bit naive to believe there's an actual journey for the "perfect roll". In fact, it's naive to believe the such thing actually exsists, it's more a question of "is this a riven I can settle for?". To emply there's a journey is to say there's a path of progression when in reality there's only a path of lottery.

She also said "The current maximum number of 15 Riven Mods is a reflection of this, as limitations encourages creativity and choice.", while I understand DE is a business and need to make money, just be honest about it and don't make up excuses. Otherwise DE would have to start reasoning why new players only get 2 warframe slots, is that too to encourage creativity and choice?

The solution I see for this problem about rivens and their complete lack of progression is to allow us to lock in stats we want/need on our rivens. The economy of which of course should require more farming, since it would otherwise be too easy to farm up 100k kuva and just make that riven perfect. This is a journey, a factor by which there's progression. While I do understand there will be millions of rivens that's just going to be the same, I also understand this is because it's what works very well for that particular weapon/the mechanics of warframe. This is by game design the only realistic option for many players to strive for with their rivens and while the intention where to allow players to be creative, it's once again naive to believe the player base wouldn't go for what they believe to be the most powerful. I understand there's players who's against this, because they do have that perfectly rolled riven, which is 1:1.000.000, would drop in price on the market and while that is true, I am confident in saying that the base price of any riven would go up, significantly, because each new riven offers a guarantee to be crafted to suit the individual player.

 

The new focus schools and their already demands for changes.

Looking at the focus schools, I am very happy with the vast majority of changes, it allows for a unique set of bonuses to suit the role each player have in a team. To reason my logic behind this, lets have a look at what determines the success. For this we're talking extreme levels and not just level 50-100 which can be done with any given weapon with no concerns to much else. A team is a group working together for a greater goal than individual performance. By this I mean you can't have a successful team, if 2 players is competing to be the best supporter/healer, as that would affect the team negative in other areas, you can't have 3 damage dealers running wild all over the place competing for kills as this would leave team mates vulnerable if they're set up for another roll to play in the game. A succesful team is a team that works well together, understand their purpose in the team and stick to that purpose.

That being said, Madurai offers additional damage, I see this being a great focus school to use if you're the designated damage dealer, Vazarin offers a short period of invulnerability and instant heals, this would be an ideal focus school to pick if your roll in the team is support. Unairu allows a percentage of incoming damage to be returned to the agressor and more armor for the operator and warframe, this would be a great focus school to use for the agro player of the team or in tandem with the invulnerability gain from a Vazarin player if your roll is to collect life support in survivals, run Power Cells in excavation or similar situations. I would believe Naramon is at this point well recognized as a melee focus school, but in any case, the increased affinity and critical chance gained from this focus school is pretty self explaining. Zenurik on the other hand is a bandaid to a much larger solution, because the 4 energy per second it used to offer have been available for earlier than focus even got created; Energy Siphon.

The bandaid Zenurik offers is because of another mod many players feel is a must, Corrosive Projection. This mod is yet another bandaid to the armor scaling and lack of introduction to the mods and mechanics in the game. We have armor bypass damage types aswell as weapons and warframes capable of removing armor from the equation in the first place, if just modded for it. This perfectly highlights a statement I see lacking in the tutorial of the game, but I'll get back to that. I would see Zenurik much better balanced if it offered a slight efficiency bonus rather than energy per second bonus. This mechanic will encourage players to play around quality of ability casts rather than quantity, as the energy isn't just around the corner as a guarantee, instead you're utilizing the energy you have better. While I know there's an efficiency cap of 175%, I'd suggest this allows us to go above 175% with the use of Zenurik.

Choosing the right focus school should depend on your roll in the team and I find the way-bound passives be focused strictly on operators to be a fantastic bonus to have, warframes are strong enoughs, operators arent.

 

That tutorial and what it fails to include.

Our current tutorial to warframe is very basic, in fact it is extremely basic and leaves the players uninformed about the importance of mods and functions of mechanics. It does a great job of informing how to move, but that's really it. Having to go to external references for any basic information is in my opinion very bad design, the game should at the very least inform us on the absolute basic mechanics of critical chance and their grades, status chance and proc functionality. Perhaps not in the very beginning phases of the game, but at least at some point during the star chart. This lack of information on how to successfully deal with armor, shields and enormous health pools even further promotes the use of a bandaid solution, Corrosive Projection. Perhaps it's time to revisit the tutorial, informations found in the codex instead of adding another warframe for the next update? A well informed player is far more capable to tackle a task than a player with basic information. Perhaps this could also give some insentive to play support in warframe, as right now there's not really any outside of the raids.

 

Lastly a touch of the casual/hardcore balances.

Making a game that have content to the casual player and the hardcore player can be a hard task to accomplish and for the most part I think DE have pulled this off very well. If a developer doesn't care for hardcore players aswell as casual players, they will loose either one or the other part of their player base, while this is unfair to players with limited time to play how ever unfortunate that is, hardcore players still need something to keep them going. Login rewards being one of the mechanics, the option to create more rivens and cycle through more rivens being another. It's just how things work out when 1 person have hundreds of hours to play and another only have a couple. I don't think the hardcore players should have access to better items, all items should be equally available, they should have some kind of item to collect and strive for or progress through to aquire.

 

I hope this will spark a healthy debate leading towards a development goals for the future and a better game caring for casual and hardcore players alike.

[Infi_Reborn]

some parts of these so called "solutions".

look and sound definitely wrong... and I'm not going to go into detail. Something is very wrong, with this post...

[(PSN)NicolaiBM]

2 hours ago, AegisArclight1999 said:

some parts of these so called "solutions".

look and sound definitely wrong... and I'm not going to go into detail. Something is very wrong, with this post...

If you're not going in to details and giving your opinion, then how's your response supposed to help develop a game that isn't riddled with bandaid solutions? And why say anything in the first place?

[BlackCoMerc]

2 hours ago, (PS4)NicolaiBM said:

Warframe is a fantastic game, it have plenty of experiences to offer, it got plenty of loot to get and it allows you to play as you want and still get progress done. It's for the most part a journey for the player base to an arsenal of emense power and wealth. But it's not without flaws, just like any game on the market, it have it's fair share of them and the path Warframe have been on the last years is only adding on to them and quite often only offering a bandaid solution rather than addressing the core issues at hand. I would love nothing more for the game and the community to have a healthy and productive debate on all actual matters concerning this and work towards a common goal of improving the game, I believe this will attract even more players allowing the game to develop even further in the future.

I myself have a few items I believe needs urgent attention from DE or for the community as a hole to understand. I'll do my best to reason them and I'm hoping the developers themselves is interested in taking part in this debate, explaining their choices and helping the community understand the vision or intensions behind their actions.

 

About those rivens and the nature of them.

@DERebecca said this about rivens: "The exponential Cycling costs are there to encourage players to try the existing stats before they embark on the journey to the ‘perfect roll’. For those of you who want to find the best Mod possible, that avenue is available to you, but that is not the goal behind this system.". Rebecca, considering how rng is affecting how the rivens are cycled, it's a bit naive to believe there's an actual journey for the "perfect roll". In fact, it's naive to believe the such thing actually exsists, it's more a question of "is this a riven I can settle for?". To emply there's a journey is to say there's a path of progression when in reality there's only a path of lottery.

She also said "The current maximum number of 15 Riven Mods is a reflection of this, as limitations encourages creativity and choice.", while I understand DE is a business and need to make money, just be honest about it and don't make up excuses. Otherwise DE would have to start reasoning why new players only get 2 warframe slots, is that too to encourage creativity and choice?

The solution I see for this problem about rivens and their complete lack of progression is to allow us to lock in stats we want/need on our rivens. The economy of which of course should require more farming, since it would otherwise be too easy to farm up 100k kuva and just make that riven perfect. This is a journey, a factor by which there's progression. While I do understand there will be millions of rivens that's just going to be the same, I also understand this is because it's what works very well for that particular weapon/the mechanics of warframe. This is by game design the only realistic option for many players to strive for with their rivens and while the intention where to allow players to be creative, it's once again naive to believe the player base wouldn't go for what they believe to be the most powerful. I understand there's players who's against this, because they do have that perfectly rolled riven, which is 1:1.000.000, would drop in price on the market and while that is true, I am confident in saying that the base price of any riven would go up, significantly, because each new riven offers a guarantee to be crafted to suit the individual player.

 

The new focus schools and their already demands for changes.

Looking at the focus schools, I am very happy with the vast majority of changes, it allows for a unique set of bonuses to suit the role each player have in a team. To reason my logic behind this, lets have a look at what determines the success. For this we're talking extreme levels and not just level 50-100 which can be done with any given weapon with no concerns to much else. A team is a group working together for a greater goal than individual performance. By this I mean you can't have a successful team, if 2 players is competing to be the best supporter/healer, as that would affect the team negative in other areas, you can't have 3 damage dealers running wild all over the place competing for kills as this would leave team mates vulnerable if they're set up for another roll to play in the game. A succesful team is a team that works well together, understand their purpose in the team and stick to that purpose.

That being said, Madurai offers additional damage, I see this being a great focus school to use if you're the designated damage dealer, Vazarin offers a short period of invulnerability and instant heals, this would be an ideal focus school to pick if your roll in the team is support. Unairu allows a percentage of incoming damage to be returned to the agressor and more armor for the operator and warframe, this would be a great focus school to use for the agro player of the team or in tandem with the invulnerability gain from a Vazarin player if your roll is to collect life support in survivals, run Power Cells in excavation or similar situations. I would believe Naramon is at this point well recognized as a melee focus school, but in any case, the increased affinity and critical chance gained from this focus school is pretty self explaining. Zenurik on the other hand is a bandaid to a much larger solution, because the 4 energy per second it used to offer have been available for earlier than focus even got created; Energy Siphon.

The bandaid Zenurik offers is because of another mod many players feel is a must, Corrosive Projection. This mod is yet another bandaid to the armor scaling and lack of introduction to the mods and mechanics in the game. We have armor bypass damage types aswell as weapons and warframes capable of removing armor from the equation in the first place, if just modded for it. This perfectly highlights a statement I see lacking in the tutorial of the game, but I'll get back to that. I would see Zenurik much better balanced if it offered a slight efficiency bonus rather than energy per second bonus. This mechanic will encourage players to play around quality of ability casts rather than quantity, as the energy isn't just around the corner as a guarantee, instead you're utilizing the energy you have better. While I know there's an efficiency cap of 175%, I'd suggest this allows us to go above 175% with the use of Zenurik.

Choosing the right focus school should depend on your roll in the team and I find the way-bound passives be focused strictly on operators to be a fantastic bonus to have, warframes are strong enoughs, operators arent.

 

That tutorial and what it fails to include.

Our current tutorial to warframe is very basic, in fact it is extremely basic and leaves the players uninformed about the importance of mods and functions of mechanics. It does a great job of informing how to move, but that's really it. Having to go to external references for any basic information is in my opinion very bad design, the game should at the very least inform us on the absolute basic mechanics of critical chance and their grades, status chance and proc functionality. Perhaps not in the very beginning phases of the game, but at least at some point during the star chart. This lack of information on how to successfully deal with armor, shields and enormous health pools even further promotes the use of a bandaid solution, Corrosive Projection. Perhaps it's time to revisit the tutorial, informations found in the codex instead of adding another warframe for the next update? A well informed player is far more capable to tackle a task than a player with basic information. Perhaps this could also give some insentive to play support in warframe, as right now there's not really any outside of the raids.

 

Lastly a touch of the casual/hardcore balances.

Making a game that have content to the casual player and the hardcore player can be a hard task to accomplish and for the most part I think DE have pulled this off very well. If a developer doesn't care for hardcore players aswell as casual players, they will loose either one or the other part of their player base, while this is unfair to players with limited time to play how ever unfortunate that is, hardcore players still need something to keep them going. Login rewards being one of the mechanics, the option to create more rivens and cycle through more rivens being another. It's just how things work out when 1 person have hundreds of hours to play and another only have a couple. I don't think the hardcore players should have access to better items, all items should be equally available, they should have some kind of item to collect and strive for or progress through to aquire.

 

I hope this will spark a healthy debate leading towards a development goals for the future and a better game caring for casual and hardcore players alike.

Warframe is a mish mash of isolated mechanics that each exist for...reasons. Most were thrown in half baked and forgotten about. This isnt an insult to the devs; its a simple observation of the situation as it exists. I'm not judging; just stating.

Let me take a moment to address Rivens speficially: This system has SO MUCH potential. And its ALL being squandered. Here we have an infinite loot system, with NO WAY players can ever possibly find ALL Rivens, because they are randomly generated. So naturally, what you would do is:

1. Create tiers of Rivens. Common Rivens give 2 bonuses. Uncommon, 3; Rare 4; Legendary 4+ or a Legendary Tiered bonus plus others. 

2. Spread Everything up to Rare all over the star map, Void and PoE.

3. Put BOTH Rare and Legendary on Sortie reward lists. 

4. Give Rare containers a chance to drop Legendary Rivens.

5. Guarantee at least one Rare Riven from Any Parkour Room container in the Void

6. Put Kuva in the Kuva Fortress drop tables

This would get players out running all manner of missions, because we have an infinite loot system to chase. Suddenly, after years of Rubedo and Polymer Bundles, players have the possibility of useful loot from EVERY mission.

But no. Instead, they locked Rivens behind BOTH the godawful, tedious Sortie system, AND utterly ridiculous, unfun Unveiling "challenges" most people dont find fun. They took an infinite loot system that could have gotten people excited about running missions all over...and made it about as frustrating and unfun as its possible to make it. 

As for balance and the game in general...DE needs to slow down. Back off new content. You can always just tell people (apparently truthfully, according to the Dev stream) that the next open landscape is in development now, and in the meantime, to make Landscapes work better, you NEED to spend some time on balance adjustments and tweaks. It needs to happen anyway, you've got a good reason to do it...and its HIGHLY unlikely that the same people performing the rebalance will have anything to do with designing open landscapes anyway. 

Warframe has potential to be a truly great game. IF the parent company will back off shoving the business model into the game every chance they get (seriously, I know people who have quit over Warframe slots and I frankly dont blame them), find some way to create a loot system that is engaging and fun and take some time to balance their game. 

[Volinus7]

Riven was an attempt to inflate the game, it has nothing to do with balance. 

Doesn't a system that let players nerf themselves based on popularity sound irresponsible? 

Procedurally generated stats are just shameful length extenders.

 

I requested total riven removal within few hours of implementation, yeah you knew it, they "intentionally" made rivens tradeable upon the update to use irreversible damage as an excuse to continue the facade.

[peterc3]

1 hour ago, Volinus7 said:

Riven was an attempt to inflate the game, it has nothing to do with balance. 

Doesn't a system that let players nerf themselves based on popularity sound irresponsible? 

Procedurally generated stats are just shameful length extenders.

 

I requested total riven removal within few hours of implementation, yeah you knew it, they "intentionally" made rivens tradeable upon the update to use irreversible damage as an excuse to continue the facade.

Did DE also rig the US election?

Edited November 6, 2017 by peterc3

[(PSN)NicolaiBM]

I completely agree @BlackCoMerc, the riven system have such potential just squandered away by both poor implementation and poor mechanics, although I don't think rivens should be found as a guarantee in the void. Rare containers yes, definitely, it will have us run missions and actually look for them, instead of not even looking a second time. Raid containers should be excepted from this, as I see this would make people farm the raid for rivens and completely flooding the market.

As for the half cooked stew of mechanics in warframe, I believe it would be a huge quality of life improvement for DE to rework it and tie it all together, it would make warframe go from a diamond in the rough to possibly one of the all time great games ever made. This would require DE to be holding back on releases, this action would give a lot of the new players a chance to catch a bit up to the veterans of warframe, thus not making a financial problem with potential for bankruptcy. I think or hope the revenue will still be there, if DE took 3 months to work on old mechanics and rivens. After that, I see a new item release in order and then another period of overhaul for the tutorial and teaching new players the game.

@peterc3 how's that supposed to be productive and helpful towards a better game?

[peterc3]

4 hours ago, (PS4)NicolaiBM said:

 

@peterc3 how's that supposed to be productive and helpful towards a better game?

Peddling conspiracy theories with nothing to back them up is equally unproductive, but is likely to get some upvotes. The player base regularly plays a game of telephone with what DE actually says. An offhand comment on a slow moment in a devstream becomes an ironclad promise that is completely DE's fault if they don't honor the obvious promise. A joke is taken completely seriously. A system explained as bridging the gap between the state of weapons now and when they get around to balancing the others is now definitely a means of DE extracting plat from the poor, innocent players who have no choice but to buy and sell the Rivens for thousands of plat.

4 hours ago, (PS4)NicolaiBM said:

As for the half cooked stew of mechanics in warframe, I believe it would be a huge quality of life improvement for DE to rework it and tie it all together

This is what every update is trying to do. Unless you can show me somewhere that shows an easy way of totally integrating new features into every permutation of old features painlessly. All the while fixing things that sometimes just break on their own. Also while entertaining the super serious discussions on how X isn't a real <weapon>, <weapon> is actually 15 ft long and clearly DE doesn't care about their game.

4 hours ago, (PS4)NicolaiBM said:

This would require DE to be holding back on releases, this action would give a lot of the new players a chance to catch a bit up to the veterans of warframe, thus not making a financial problem with potential for bankruptcy.

Can we, as a group, go 1 day without pretending to know the financials of DE and how a super obvious thing would totally not hurt DE's bottom line. There will always be new players... unless you stop adding shiny bits in new updates.

4 hours ago, (PS4)NicolaiBM said:

I think or hope the revenue will still be there, if DE took 3 months to work on old mechanics and rivens. After that, I see a new item release in order and then another period of overhaul for the tutorial and teaching new players the game.

Do banks take hope as payment on a loan? How about the supermarket? This game is DE's revenue stream. They cannot and will not do something based on hope.

When did DE invite players to dictate how they should run their game? You see that then would be an appropriate time to release something new. The person I responded to personally requested DE listen to his obvious rightness. How dare they not listen to him.

[Burned-Toast]

11 hours ago, BlackCoMerc said:

Warframe is a mish mash of isolated mechanics that each exist for...reasons. Most were thrown in half baked and forgotten about. This isnt an insult to the devs; its a simple observation of the situation as it exists. I'm not judging; just stating.

Let me take a moment to address Rivens speficially: This system has SO MUCH potential. And its ALL being squandered. Here we have an infinite loot system, with NO WAY players can ever possibly find ALL Rivens, because they are randomly generated. So naturally, what you would do is:

1. Create tiers of Rivens. Common Rivens give 2 bonuses. Uncommon, 3; Rare 4; Legendary 4+ or a Legendary Tiered bonus plus others. 

2. Spread Everything up to Rare all over the star map, Void and PoE.

3. Put BOTH Rare and Legendary on Sortie reward lists. 

4. Give Rare containers a chance to drop Legendary Rivens.

5. Guarantee at least one Rare Riven from Any Parkour Room container in the Void

6. Put Kuva in the Kuva Fortress drop tables

This would get players out running all manner of missions, because we have an infinite loot system to chase. Suddenly, after years of Rubedo and Polymer Bundles, players have the possibility of useful loot from EVERY mission.

But no. Instead, they locked Rivens behind BOTH the godawful, tedious Sortie system, AND utterly ridiculous, unfun Unveiling "challenges" most people dont find fun. They took an infinite loot system that could have gotten people excited about running missions all over...and made it about as frustrating and unfun as its possible to make it. 

As for balance and the game in general...DE needs to slow down. Back off new content. You can always just tell people (apparently truthfully, according to the Dev stream) that the next open landscape is in development now, and in the meantime, to make Landscapes work better, you NEED to spend some time on balance adjustments and tweaks. It needs to happen anyway, you've got a good reason to do it...and its HIGHLY unlikely that the same people performing the rebalance will have anything to do with designing open landscapes anyway. 

Warframe has potential to be a truly great game. IF the parent company will back off shoving the business model into the game every chance they get (seriously, I know people who have quit over Warframe slots and I frankly dont blame them), find some way to create a loot system that is engaging and fun and take some time to balance their game. 

dont forget that rivens should be able to be turned into kuva or something actually useful so that it's a little more appealing to get rid of your rivens that way

[Volinus7]

3 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Peddling conspiracy theories with nothing to back them up is equally unproductive, but is likely to get some upvotes. The player base regularly plays a game of telephone with what DE actually says. An offhand comment on a slow moment in a devstream becomes an ironclad promise that is completely DE's fault if they don't honor the obvious promise. A joke is taken completely seriously. A system explained as bridging the gap between the state of weapons now and when they get around to balancing the others is now definitely a means of DE extracting plat from the poor, innocent players who have no choice but to buy and sell the Rivens for thousands of plat.

There's no conspiracy, it's just a copy paste of procedurally generated stats system from old games, easy to predict that the price will soar high too there're plenty of case studies from games that used the similar loot system.

Balancing all weapons is simple and straight forward, make all of them reach the same kill/min in the normal gun play. If it's an aoe weapon, take the average number of targets affected and apply multipliers on stats. Crit/Proc ratio can be adjusted when the maximum amounts of shield/armor/hp of enemies are determined. Warframe abilities that can suck enemies into one point will be weighed accordingly. DE prefer to let their messy dirac sea of unbalanced and un-tiered items continues because it induces players to go "gotta catch'em all" even there're so many unnecessary redundancies and obsolete items. 

Ease of access stopped having meaning for people who already farmed everything yet it still affects stats in riven system, early or easy to obtain weapons get popularity based on new players ratio. Riven is basically "nerf yourself accordingly by popularity".

"DE extracting plat from the poor, innocent players who have no choice but to buy and sell the Rivens for thousands of plat."  Nope, DE don't care a single bit about who's poor/innocent, they don't look at players as individuals they look at players as a collective. Add these stuffs and "some" people buy plats, add these grind bars/RNG and "some" people get frustrated then buy boosters. Data analysis is behind every accretions in Warframe, systemically rigged RNG isn't impossible and DE have no obligation to tell anything. (yes, rigged rng is normal in videogame industry)

[(PSN)fullblast35]

1 - Rivens aren't mandatory.  I only have 18 for myself and don't use the weapons which have them that often.  unless you think it's the best way to make more platinum,  your initial build without them is fine as long as you know what you're doing.  

2 - you can't handle the riven culture, keep away from it.  I don't use arcanes, I've been playing for 4 years and again, still doing fine without them.  you want to sell rivens?  check this out : its an investment on the long run.  you need part of your time to get kuva, you need to buy riven slots whenever you exceed your slot capacity,  you need platinum for either slots or resource boosters.  Again, as long as you know what you're doing, rivens aren't even necessary on your builds. it can take low tier to mid tier, mid tier to high tier.  theres nothing else about them besides absurd prices just to have a stronger weapon, which alters your perception of what's a challenge.  to each his own opinion but with common sense.

3 - an unbalanced game i read.  besides the fact that a dev is not necessary a hardcore player, the community is the catalyst to this issue/solution.  you find a trick to be afk on a tile set, devs will change something before the whole community just sits somewhere to get everything.  you abuse a frames abilities or a weapon, they will "nerf" them until you figure out something else to abuse with.  Devs design a game to be played as intended, not the way you want it.  its basically action/reaction and vice versa.  Basically whoever debunks or  can't handle a system has something to complain about.  that's fine, because it turns out what we only do at the end is challenge the devs at their own game, and trust me you will never beat this master at his own creation. 

 

Balance isn't perfection.  Try to put yourself in the devs shoes.

 

4- "DE extracting plat from the poor, innocent players who have no choice but to buy and sell the Rivens for thousands of plat."

nonsense.  you probably hate the idea that the more plat you need the more DE makes money (which is true), just tell me which business/corporation/enterprise doesnt take advantage of consumer demands. cosmetics and prime access have always been DE's bread and butter while platinum was always something you could earn in the game or spare yourself the time and just buy it with real money.  you have options.  either you accept the game as intended or you bypass your way through it at a cost.  what makes a piece of gear/cosmetic appealing  is your perception of its necessity.  wether you want to show it off or actually see the need to acquire it is not ruled by standards but by your feeling.  you have a choice, its just not you setting it up.

 

Please try to see the result of your demands, on the long run.  you might want to play the game and decide to quit it after a month or a year but DE doesn't  stop because you did. they will do their best to bring a better gaming experience, however its not an easy job when players reject the experience with inconsequential limitless imagination .  I know nothing about game coding but i know its not a common thing done by just anyone.  and I know if DE reads my comment they know they must have done a good job and will get even better at it.  you was them to understand you, try to understand their point of view first.

[ShortCat]

17 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Did DE also rig the US election?

11 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Peddling conspiracy theories with nothing to back them up is equally unproductive, but is likely to get some upvotes. [...] A system explained as bridging the gap between the state of weapons now and when they get around to balancing the others is now definitely a means of DE extracting plat from the poor, innocent players who have no choice but to buy and sell the Rivens for thousands of plat.

There are no conspiracy theories, just common sense. In the DevStream right after Riven introduction Rebecca said (not jokingly) "Rivens are there to breath life into weaker weapons". Did it really work out though? No, not really. Some selected weapons moved up, if you are lucky enough to get the right stat combination others stay in the dirt. A proper stat change did way more than a RNG mod could ever achieve, as an example look at Sicarus, Glaive and Bronco P.

You see, what is said and what actually happens don't mash together. So, what actually happened?

• Rivens introduced a new goal for capped players. A new carrot an a stick, a much better than a regular one ( I mean gear with static stats vs gear with with RNG stats), since there might be an even bigger carrot out there. More grind as endgame content.
• Rivens revitalized trading market with a lot higher trading volums. This would naturally require higher plat influx - revenue. Additionally there are high costs for Riven slots. Not that I am agains DE making money, they need to do it, telling fairytails in my face is kinda disappointing.
• Rivens did not revitalizy the Arsenal, especially this "try existing stats before new rolls..." is amazing.

It is not uncommon in every area, that higher ups meaningless state what the mainstream wants to hear. It is not like DE did not do this, ever:

• Primed Frames are just cosmetics
• Exilus slots won't include power mods
• There will be universal vacuum
• PoE is for newer players

11 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Do banks take hope as payment on a loan? How about the supermarket? This game is DE's revenue stream. They cannot and will not do something based on hope.

Yes, banks actually work with hope. It is called risk. You either get a huge revenue or burn your money (well, it also includes more than blind risk, but this is not a business forum).

11 hours ago, peterc3 said:

This is what every update is trying to do. Unless you can show me somewhere that shows an easy way of totally integrating new features into every permutation of old features painlessly.

Yeah, because including Archwing in PoE (a machanic already so disconnected from the mian game), but also limiting it by usefulness with strange and new controlls, Archwing gear as well as finite charges is totally not a painless integration of old and new.

Edited November 7, 2017 by ShortCat

[(PSN)NicolaiBM]

11 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Can we, as a group, go 1 day without pretending to know the financials of DE and how a super obvious thing would totally not hurt DE's bottom line. There will always be new players... unless you stop adding shiny bits in new updates.

Do banks take hope as payment on a loan? How about the supermarket? This game is DE's revenue stream. They cannot and will not do something based on hope.

When did DE invite players to dictate how they should run their game?

Your sarcasm isn't very helpful in the first place, but as for what you did have to say, we don't know the financials of it, but with common logic and the amount new players having entered warframe, there's plenty of growth at the moment. Logically that should mean business is good and can sustain a small downtown while they catch up with quests and weapon grind/mod grind. It's not based on knowledge of DE's finances, but on logic and experiences with other business models. Warframe, and every other game for that matter, have some small portion based on hope, hope that it catches a large playerbase and doesn't become a complete flop, even before this latest growth in the playerbase, DE managed to keep going for years, in large parts thanks to the veterans of the game, are you telling me, that if DE announces they are going to make some fixes to the core mechanics and make the entire game more smooth, fix their bandaids, those veterans that have supported DE so far, will go "Nope, we're not having any of that, goodbye"? Do you think newer players that come from games with a yearly update will go "What? Are we having to wait half a year for the next stuff? We just got this and haven't farmed all we can farm, we haven't upgraded everything and now that there's time to do so, there's no point in doing it!"?

DE have always invited players to come with requests and opinions, because they attempt to listen to the community how we would like the game to proceed, how we would like the game to evolve and which direction we would like it to take. I can understand how it's a confusing concept, but it's none the less reality, just look back through the forums and compare that to the changes made in warframe, good and bad changes.

Since you think it's all a conspiracy towards DE, how about you get the tin foil hat off for a second and look what this thread is meant to accomplish: A better game with smoother mechanics and better information about the game mechanics without having to resort to data mining and external pages. Tell me where the codex or a quest teaches you about corrosive damage vs corrosive procs vs viral procs and where the game teaches you about affinity allocation and how that affects focus gain?