I think I can finally name the two major problems in Warframe thesedays

[Knavenformed]

So I've been playing Warframe for years now and the grind has become progressively worse for a year or two now.

The first major problem is the *heavy* grind gating of new Warframes

I think the point it started at was Titania where you got all blueprints from its mainline mission, now you only get the main blueprint from a barely related quest and have to grind ridiculous grinds if you're new.
And for me a "Warframe" is the biggest part of gameplay, each day you log in you have to play with one and you most likely have your favorite frames, and before I asked new players "go check the market and choose a Warframe and we can progress together to get it for you" but lately the frames have become such grind fests that I don't want to tell them "yeah how about no takes way too long"
It's like if in Destiny 2 you had to choose between the Hunter and the Warlock but Titan was behind a paygate or a month of grind.

I already thought Hildryn and Baruuk were too much to ask from new players if they wanted the frames, a whole faction grind and then a high leveled bounty grind for ridiculously low drop rates for the second faction, now Xaku forces players to do the faction grind and mining in all locales.
Yeah it takes like an hour or two if you had done it already, but it can take a good month for a new player who wants to advance the story first because the faction reputation is heavily timegated each day for low rank players, and it's still too much compared to old content drops.

The second is underdeveloped gameplay pulled straight out from other games

You know I absolutely love the "Shadow of Mordor/War" games, and I was genuinely hyped to play Warframe again after they announced Kuva Liches aka randomly generated arch villains for you, like an orc from the shadow games who's killed you a couple of times and you get to know them, but even to this day the Liches have like 2 personalities depending on their gender and they constantly talk the same things over and over.
I just ended up starting a new game in Shadow of War.

Same with Railjack, I liked it myself, the grind was easily way too much but it was fun, but I ended up buying and learning to play Elite Dangerous.
And now I want to play Titanfall 2 again because of the Necramechs.

I just don't think I'll even bother logging on to see the new updates if they're blatantly taken from from other games now, because that's just damaging to the artistic integrity of Warframe and is never as good as what they're trying to imitate, I want to play Waframe but in a way where it feels natural, having to grind some "minerals" for hours or tracking an animal the same way for the umpteenth time is not fun gameplay in a ninja looter shooter if you just sit around wasting time like that in new content, and all that to get a new Warframe? Okay what then? You use the Warframe in new content which is again just doing the same bounty cycle over and over again or just sitting semi-afk finding minerals or animals.

[DLOZanma]

First point fails because the majority of frames is obtain through RNG bosses, even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ initial frames. Your Destiny comparison is also completely stupid. Uh hello? There are 3 initial frames to choose from, Excalibur, Mag and Volt.. You don't get advanced subclasses or top tier weapons immediately in Destiny either. Baruuk and Hildryn are for late game players or those who have the plat. Fortuna's syndicates are the fastest syndicates in the game as well so the only thing required from the player is dealing with standing caps. We all went through it, why should a newbie get it easier than me? Should we erase the little brain power that this game requires? Why does a new player need an endgame frame immediately in the first place?

You're right on the mining though.

[No_Quarter]

New player has many different standings to worry for, you seem to be forgetting where you were.

Syndicates, Ostrons, Fortuna, Simaris, Onkko, LD, now 2 on Deimos - it is not like you complete ALL of them in 2 hours, no no no no.

As Mr 30 -
Syndicates are passive farm but let's count the time for it - one round of ESO, 20 minutes.
Ostrons are about 10 minutes of fishing.
Fortuna is about 10-20 minutes of hunting
Simaris is about 10-14 minutes for Daily standing, you can take 20 to do the target and get bonus
Onkko - you gonna do a Tridolon, that's 10-14 minutes in a public squad
LD is 3 runs of Profit Taker, solo that's less than 15 minutes, finding group for it takes longer and public is a revive simulator.
Entrati is about half an hour or so for daily.
Necroloid is like one T3 Iso vault so 30-ish minutes.

That is 2-3 hours for me to farm it, I do not think it can get much more efficient than that and new player does not have best gear, best baits, lures, they have to farm regular toroids for LD, iso vaults are a no no. You can prolly ignore Syndicate farming and hope you will farm it while you do other things, you may, or you may do RJ or something a tad faster maybe, it's not a huge difference and as a new player - you likely need ESO more than Railjack cause focus.

So daily standing is only the problem for people who are done with everything and are presented with a new update - they seem to only want to be done with it too.
Mr 10-15 player will never get all the daily standings in one day, there is no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way.

So maybe look at it from a different perspective. 2-3 hours is way above average playtime.
And I am running a resource booster making some of them easier and faster like LD

As for open worlds, I think DE did an okay job and they are improving it step by step. What sucks is that when I want to mine or hunt I end up getting attacked for no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason - I am trying to ignore them and because Ai is so simple once somebody spots you entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map has their eyes locked on you.

I think they could do better with that, notice when player is just not engaging in a fight - it would be a more realistic scenario, if I was Corpus or Grineer I would not attack Tenno unless Tenno asks for it, you should be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ smarter than to try fighting something that hasn't been killed for thousands of years over a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fishing spot.

Bounties do fit with Warframe's procedural levels and how "regular" Warframe feels and I think that's fine, just manufacturing engagement by spawning dropships every 3 seconds when I am invisible and fishing as Ivara is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying at best.
They could do better to make those open worlds feel alive, maybe not with random spawns every 5 seconds but with predictable travel routes.

I guess that sums up my big issue with Warframe - enemies lack any predictability, they have purely random decision making and I think game as a whole would benefit A LOT more from improved Ai than anything else. It would even fix companions which are dead ass worst things in the game as they only 2 pros but endless list of cons.

[Knavenformed]

Originally posted by No_Quarter:

New player has many different standings to worry for, you seem to be forgetting where you were.

Syndicates, Ostrons, Fortuna, Simaris, Onkko, LD, now 2 on Deimos - it is not like you complete ALL of them in 2 hours, no no no no.

So daily standing is only the problem for people who are done with everything and are presented with a new update - they seem to only want to be done with it too.
Mr 10-15 player will never get all the daily standings in one day, there is no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way.

So maybe look at it from a different perspective. 2-3 hours is way above average playtime.

I don't have a problem with daily standings themselves really, just that the Warframes become increasingly harder and harder to farm for no reason, and Xaku is made to have a complete faction grind and then mission grinds in a completely different enviroment compared to where his blueprints drop.

Sure standing grinds can take a week or month no biggie, but I don't think a Warframe should have a timegated grind that long at all.

[Knavenformed]

Originally posted by DLOZanma:

First point fails because the majority of frames is obtain through RNG bosses, even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ initial frames.
We all went through it, why should a newbie get it easier than me? Should we erase the little brain power that this game requires? Why does a new player need an endgame frame immediately in the first place?

You're right on the mining though.

I don't mind the old RNG fights at all, it's not much to ask of a player "go here by doing mission after mission grind the RNG blueprints in the closed content" Clearing the startchart doesn't take that long.
Also Xaku is not even close to being "end game viable" at all, and tbh outside of Steel Path any frame can be used for content outside Eidolons that are designed for group play. Warframes are just a matter of player identity and everyday enjoyment, and I don't think that should be something you timegate too long.

Also "We all went through it, why should a newbie get it easier than me?"
Because the grind is getting so ridiculous that it's now out of touch from the general concept of the game for veterans too.
Also LITERALLY ANY CONTENT DROP WITHIN THE 2 YEARS HAS BEEN MADE EASIER MONTHS AFTER THEIR LAUNCH BY A LONG SHOT
Coming from a player who has done Railjack/Liches/All open worlds day 1
At first the open worlds were cute, a bit off from being a "space ninja" but now it's not even a joke compared to the older content, seriously compare how much grindier every Warframe has become after Titania.
Don't be such a selfish donkey when it's clear the content has been half baked and been made increasingly grindier for no apparent reason and it's been actively killing the game for 2 years straight.

[FAArscape]

Personally, I think they should add som sort of 'counter' to the RNG...
Something that keeps track of how many times you've done a step... and after a set ammount of tries, the player will get the item in question...like frame parts...

I mean due to the mechanics of RNG, some ppl will NEVER get some parts..
While others get the parts every time they do the mission..

And I mean, do same mission 5k times, and still no drop is a 'tad evil'...
At least when it comes to stuff with extremely low dropchance....that requires 'rotaion 3' oir something...

[Knavenformed]

Originally posted by FAArscape:

Personally, I think they should add som sort of 'counter' to the RNG...
Something that keeps track of how many times you've done a step... and after a set ammount of tries, the player will get the item in question...like frame parts...

To me I don't mind RNG rewards too much unless it's a progression blocker, I did the profit taker bounty 2 for over 150 times to get the systems necessary to rank up to 3 and that felt bad, but I have never gottent the Despair from Stalker and that's honestly not too bad imo keeps me playing.

But yeah depending on how key the items are for progression there should be more trading incentives to fix it.

Like honestly I think the game gives way too much access to power compared to effort thesedays, so a overly done grind for min maxing stats is cool, but I don't think Warframes should be behind a grind like Hildryn/Baruuk/Xaku.

If they added the systems requirement to the Necramechs instead I would be perfectly happy with it because they are a side system for fun that already use gravimags as a component.
But a Warframe is something you log in every day for and use them to grind the things you want after, not having a reasonable access to frames is like eating the ingredients for a sandwich without the bread of your choice.

Like I exclusively play Harrow these days and I can bear like one grind here and there without him, and I just fear that some players who would have the same enjoyment with Xaku as I do with Harrow will stop playing way before they get the list of boring and mindnumbing chores done.

[主​​​Miͥภgͣcͫℝ♚]

and the third problem is called danielle

[Vex]

*Laugh*

[wavel54]

Originally posted by Knavenformed:

So I've been playing Warframe for years now and the grind has become progressively worse for a year or two now.

The first major problem is the *heavy* grind gating of new Warframes

I think the point it started at was Titania where you got all blueprints from its mainline mission, now you only get the main blueprint from a barely related quest and have to grind ridiculous grinds if you're new.
And for me a "Warframe" is the biggest part of gameplay, each day you log in you have to play with one and you most likely have your favorite frames, and before I asked new players "go check the market and choose a Warframe and we can progress together to get it for you" but lately the frames have become such grind fests that I don't want to tell them "yeah how about no takes way too long"
It's like if in Destiny 2 you had to choose between the Hunter and the Warlock but Titan was behind a paygate or a month of grind.

I already thought Hildryn and Baruuk were too much to ask from new players if they wanted the frames, a whole faction grind and then a high leveled bounty grind for ridiculously low drop rates for the second faction, now Xaku forces players to do the faction grind and mining in all locales.
Yeah it takes like an hour or two if you had done it already, but it can take a good month for a new player who wants to advance the story first because the faction reputation is heavily timegated each day for low rank players, and it's still too much compared to old content drops.

The second is underdeveloped gameplay pulled straight out from other games

You know I absolutely love the "Shadow of Mordor/War" games, and I was genuinely hyped to play Warframe again after they announced Kuva Liches aka randomly generated arch villains for you, like an orc from the shadow games who's killed you a couple of times and you get to know them, but even to this day the Liches have like 2 personalities depending on their gender and they constantly talk the same things over and over.
I just ended up starting a new game in Shadow of War.

Same with Railjack, I liked it myself, the grind was easily way too much but it was fun, but I ended up buying and learning to play Elite Dangerous.
And now I want to play Titanfall 2 again because of the Necramechs.

I just don't think I'll even bother logging on to see the new updates if they're blatantly taken from from other games now, because that's just damaging to the artistic integrity of Warframe and is never as good as what they're trying to imitate, I want to play Waframe but in a way where it feels natural, having to grind some "minerals" for hours or tracking an animal the same way for the umpteenth time is not fun gameplay in a ninja looter shooter if you just sit around wasting time like that in new content, and all that to get a new Warframe? Okay what then? You use the Warframe in new content which is again just doing the same bounty cycle over and over again or just sitting semi-afk finding minerals or animals.

I wouldn't personally say introducing mechs is copying titanfall, introducing spaceships is copying elite dangerous etc. These things are all just scifi concepts.

The kuva liches thing is a fair and genuine comparison - and it definitely falls flat at this point due to lack of personality in the liches, and lack of interesting kills as promised in the original tennocon.

There's only so much they can do in terms of bounty cycles and open worlds, because they want to keep the worlds populated etc.

Edit. I think the concept of puzzles within bounties and open worlds as we have is really cool, and the soundtracks for this world are pretty good also. Mechs are fun and will soon go anywhere, I'm pretty pleased with this update

[Knavenformed]

Originally posted by wavel54:

There's only so much they can do in terms of bounty cycles and open worlds, because they want to keep the worlds populated etc.

Edit. I think the concept of puzzles within bounties and open worlds as we have is really cool, and the soundtracks for this world are pretty good also. Mechs are fun and will soon go anywhere, I'm pretty pleased with this update

Yeah I didn't mean to come off like Railjack or Mechs were straight copies just that Liches were.
But the problem still is that the content has been done so much better before in games built around them, in Warframe it's like a "this is cool right" but it makes me just go for the full thing.
Railjack is the closest concept that could be turned into a part of Warframe, like us actually doing ship sieges to start missions like we do on the starchart.

But for me the open worlds were a cautious experiment during Plains of Eidolon that needed a lot of polishing, but here we are on the third open world with the same content with no actual polish at all. Why can't we have more action oriented ninja stuff instead of "fishing" and "mining" like having outposts in the open worlds that are like heavily protected with important capture/kill targets in them and it's a constant action for the "capture" instead of just sitting around looking for a dog randomly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the wild.

And yeah I do like the art and puzzles of Deimos and I do like the mechs, but the grind is clearly being bloated more and more while us getting nothing actually "new" for the time we have to consume in the game.

While I do enjoy the art and lore of Deimos and general updates to farm like stashable standing with tokens, this is still the third open world that asks for us to do the same undercooked minigames from the first one when it was clear they were bad then and are bad now.

I don't feel like I've got to play "Warframe" again in any of these updates beside Liches and the Baruuk game mode.

[wavel54]

Originally posted by Knavenformed:

Originally posted by wavel54:

There's only so much they can do in terms of bounty cycles and open worlds, because they want to keep the worlds populated etc.

Edit. I think the concept of puzzles within bounties and open worlds as we have is really cool, and the soundtracks for this world are pretty good also. Mechs are fun and will soon go anywhere, I'm pretty pleased with this update

Yeah I didn't mean to come off like Railjack or Mechs were straight copies just that Liches were.
But the problem still is that the content has been done so much better before in games built around them, in Warframe it's like a "this is cool right" but it makes me just go for the full thing.
Railjack is the closest concept that could be turned into a part of Warframe, like us actually doing ship sieges to start missions like we do on the starchart.

But for me the open worlds were a cautious experiment during Plains of Eidolon that needed a lot of polishing, but here we are on the third open world with the same content with no actual polish at all. Why can't we have more action oriented ninja stuff instead of "fishing" and "mining" like having outposts in the open worlds that are like heavily protected with important capture/kill targets in them and it's a constant action for the "capture" instead of just sitting around looking for a dog randomly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the wild.

And yeah I do like the art and puzzles of Deimos and I do like the mechs, but the grind is clearly being bloated more and more while us getting nothing actually "new" for the time we have to consume in the game.

While I do enjoy the art and lore of Deimos and general updates to farm like stashable standing with tokens, this is still the third open world that asks for us to do the same undercooked minigames from the first one when it was clear they were bad then and are bad now.

I don't feel like I've got to play "Warframe" again in any of these updates beside Liches and the Baruuk game mode.

This is totally an idea that could work with more 'ninja' perhaps 'stealthy' style level based stuff. In the case of deimos, smallest open world yet (I think, it appears that way) I think they've done more with it; it's far more full of stuff to do than POE, bar eidolons (Though I'm sure this will get stuff similar soonish), and shown a lot of improvement. How you can store standing in tokens, the puzzle stuff I mentioned, new enemies that aren't just copied from the rest of the game, that perhaps take different tactics to kill I like too.
The problem i see with the ninja stuff is warframes are too powerful - Now a zone that disables certain things about your warframe, like when you have to escape the infested tunnels in the deimos campaign, that you can optionally enter and have to stealth around to get to a target, disable those defenses (I'm imagining a giant zone like those blue shield things corpus have, but maybe allowing you to keep your energy) could work. So you lose your ability to go really fast, perhaps lose your shields or reduced armour, etc. to bring you down to size, with the reduced speed or loss of bullet jump could change the flow of gameplay in these optional assassination zones - and create that ninja feel you're describing. Otherwise I'd say warframes just go too far and too fast to be restricted by a tileset, without wait zones etc.

Sieges in Railjack is another really cool idea; I can't personally tell if they've now abandoned it as dead weight, but I think a good integration could be involving railjack in the open worlds as shown in the Tennocon trailer, put a node above each open world, to interact with an open world bounty (and if no-one is available to squad link, just simulate with an npc). But sieges too, like in scarlet spear but maybe more of the going into ships and tilesets, and less of the sitting in one place (Like a mobile defense) could work?

I'd say there's a lot of promise with a lot of the content variety atm, just gotta keep throwing out those good ideas and hope they get picked up right?

[Knavenformed]

Originally posted by wavel54:

I'd say there's a lot of promise with a lot of the content variety atm, just gotta keep throwing out those good ideas and hope they get picked up right?

I don't know how long you've played but history has shown that [DE] does not listen at all to the community in execution, if something gets too heated within the community it will be changed, but never has it been changed in a way that's logical or actually good.

The thing is there is promise, there has been promise for nearly a decade, but Warframe is not the game that can ride on endless promise anymore.
We have been regurgitated the same open world formula for two years now and the progress is not at all showing, entire games get developed into an alpha state in the time it has taken us to get from PoE to Deimos, and open worlds still feel like promising alphas than fun areas to actually play for more than a day.

[wavel54]

Originally posted by Knavenformed:

Originally posted by wavel54:

I'd say there's a lot of promise with a lot of the content variety atm, just gotta keep throwing out those good ideas and hope they get picked up right?

I don't know how long you've played but history has shown that [DE] does not listen at all to the community in execution, if something gets too heated within the community it will be changed, but never has it been changed in a way that's logical or actually good.

The thing is there is promise, there has been promise for nearly a decade, but Warframe is not the game that can ride on endless promise anymore.
We have been regurgitated the same open world formula for two years now and the progress is not at all showing, entire games get developed into an alpha state in the time it has taken us to get from PoE to Deimos, and open worlds still feel like promising alphas than fun areas to actually play for more than a day.

I've played around 1000 hours according to ingame time, 2000 according to steam. Played since 2014 I think, though took a fair break, hbu?

I disagree with your analysis, they've done a lot to improve older content, fix it etc. In the past year. Last year was definitely not their finest, this year has been an improvement imo significantly. Replacing the old tile sets, adding interactive things within said tilesets have been especially good in the last two main lines. Improvements to railjack etc. Kuva liches seems to be pretty dead in the water. Scarlet spear was meh. They also intentionally didn't show off stuff they weren't adding at tennocon, which is better than making promises they can't keep. Heart of deimos has had some great stuff in it, story focus etc. And the vault missions are good fun. Also stuff like mechs being usable across open worlds and soon tilesets is an attempt to combat content islands - again something they're obviously listening to the community on.

There has been promise since launch and the game is infinitely better than it was initially at launch, so let's not pretend promise gets you nowhere.

[No_Quarter]

Originally posted by Knavenformed:

but I don't think a Warframe should have a timegated grind that long at all.

I admire your enthusiasm young padawan, however, live service games have to have it in order to maintain playerbase.

F2P game that give you everything right now and for free is a dead game.

So learn about game design a little bit, may help you give better ideas that can actually be implemented in reality we live in. Cause F2P game with no timegates and long ass grinds is not a game that will even get any updates cause it cannot pay devs to work on it.

So it's an instantly dead game.

Any farm you do not like you can skip, you can buy everything for money but if you do not like the game then why would you buy it? Cause completionist mind hurts you?

Expected time to farm Xaku is not that bad tbh, he is far from the worst so I am not sure what are you aiming at there, maybe look at stats.... If you ever farmed anything in this game...

Tho what kind of logic are we expecting from person who thinks F2P model can work if you give away everything to everyone the moment they create an account, hell, give it at people's birth, send codes to every newborn and tie it to their ID - they own everything in the game you've made.

I'd like to see you try that.

Originally posted by 主Miͥภgͣcͫℝ♚:

and the third problem is called danielle

is there something I missed?

[Voodoojedizin]

People who want to get something without working for it.
All MMO's are a grind, you should know that before you even start playing. I have seen so many complain, that they can't just run through the game. Or be almighty powerful in a week. They want everything to just been given to them.