#warframe confession

my honest reaction

We're still waiting Steve- or rather Rebecca. 👀 https://fxtwitter.com/sj_sinclair/status/1035662678147166208

Okay this isn’t a confession (or maybe it is I guess) but I’m about to give my 2 cents on an incorrect take being paraded around by salty noobs and people who barely touch the game. “No one plays steel path.”

You’ve never tuned into a Youtuber or twitch streamer’s content before, clearly. 🙄 No one you know plays steel path because you play with people at your current progression in the game who either don’t have it unlocked or refuse to get good and if truly no one played it, it wouldn’t be getting updates every time new nodes and content dropped. We also wouldn’t have at least 2 secret steel path boss fights in game with multiple trophies built into them.

The problem isn’t that “no one plays steel path,” the problem is this Valkyr rework is out of touch with the current state of the game as a whole. It amounts to the developers over exaggerating a problem that isn’t as much of a problem as they’re advertising it out to be to make an attempt at lessening justified community backlash and slapping a bandaid over the cyst that is the current state of health, armor, and survivability in this game.

Some backstory & needed context: The devs clearly saw people losing interest in the base star chart content between constant back-to-back open worlds and no higher end difficulty built into the game. Player retention was dropping, it was the late 2010s content drought & veterans were leaving the game in droves or just stopped playing. This resulted in less money being spent on the game and DE saw what an impact that had. Warframe felt too samey and was boring for dedicated and veteran players alike.

People like Mogamu suggested a battlepass with special challenges and rewards to keep players coming back to the game, to give the dedicated players something new to do. Around that same time was the constant criticism that Warframe is too easy past a certain point, there’s just no real difficulty once you become a dedicated player. DE was taking notes, they heard the community’s problems with the game and saw how it was indeed hurting the game.

Timeline is a bit blurry for me here but sometime in the late 2010s they made railjack (launching with enemies being way too tanky for a lot of people and outpouring way too high DPS), steel path, and Nightwave. These were all made to address the issues that members of the community rightfully pointed out. Then Steel Path kept getting updates to make it actually incentivizing to play!

Power creep happens over time but people are more satisfied with the state of steel path as a whole seemingly. DE cared about making higher end difficulty and we saw that also with Duviri’s circuit mode even in more recent years. They care about the game’s health but there’s been an underlying problem even before steel path existed, health and armor just don’t cut it the further you go in the game.

You can mod for strictly survivability but then your damage can go out the window. Enemies at a certain point just one shot you which leads to players picking up frames that have high energy costs & upkeep for more survivability. Shield gating is but a bandage on the larger injury of late game just not being feasible regarding survivability.

Invulnerability isn’t the fix-all to Warframe’s end game but it is with the current state of difficulty in the game. Taking it away to “test out” slapping shield gate on a frame and nerfing her is just silly and out of touch. I get they spent budget on reworking her & they’re making the excuse that they wanna see how she feels on launch, but dedicated players have already done the math and builds to test her in steel path and it’s just not looking good. Also, we already have frames like Nidus & Inaros if they’re actually going to do something about reworking health & armor.

Is Valkyr just going to have to stay nerfed until more updates are out? How long will that take? How long does she have to sit on the base star chart shelf gathering dust while you “track stats?” If the goal was to sell as many thirsty skins as possible (not getting into the discourse about how it doesn’t look like Valkyr or how it doesn’t suit her idc about that right now) and have as many people playing her as possible in turn, this just isn’t the way to do it. Once those people DE pays to try out Warframe can no longer run her juicy thick self on steel path, they’ll just play a different frame instead.

She won’t get recommendations to be played anymore beyond base star chart and maybe early steel path. People won’t buy an expensive skin for a frame they barely play. Fashion the frames you play most is just common sense and economically smart! That social media influencer you paid to get into Warframe is not gonna stay a casual base start chart player forever. You’ll get your temporary influx of thirsty skin buyers with Isleweaver & whoever DE gets to promote the game to some corner of the internet, but long term? It’s not financially wise because it’s not a solution. It’s putting a sparkly little bandaid over a gaping wound and I’m tired of people pretending it’s not.

Warframe didn’t get to be this good of a game because of reddit white knighting or blind defense of their every decision as developers, it got good and stayed live on servers this long because of the veteran and dedicated players who rightfully criticized the developers choices, gave feedback on why x thing isn’t good and/or how x thing could be improved. Warframe is only good & has only been good when they listen to their dedicated and veteran players.

Covering up a problem in a thirsty purple pink bow isn’t gonna make the wound go away, the blood of the core issues in the game is gonna leak through that fabric. Those new players won’t stay new forever and they’ll soon also see Warframe for what is is, the good and the bad.

I’m also gonna go on record and say that she was not an inactive play-style, managing the energy economy of her is a task and one you have to sink a lot of time into to build for. Her damage is fine as is too; she can hit damage cap, you just don't wanna learn how to build her. The spin melee problem wasn’t really addressed with this and neither was anything else Pablo brought up, but hey at least Warcry is recastable without an augment now; so, it must be good, right!? RIGHT!?

Not listening to dedicated players is how Digital Extremes loses money, dedicated players keep the game alive. I’ve said my piece.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS & OPINIONS

Also before any trolls try to say “who hurt you?” Digital Extremes did, by making the game boring as all Hell in the late 2010s for at least a good year or so à la content drought. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it even in the Warframe community.

The problem is power creep and that problem is far more expensive to fix than a warframe rework or two. If the devs want a warframe to be played a certain way, they’re gonna make the community play that frame that way (even if part of the game’s appeal is player choice and build variety, but I guess that’s not really being considered here). While yes I hear you bringing up my earlier point about energy econ as a counterpoint about player choice, at least current Valkyr is something more unique than a rework that doesn't really change her kit all that much and is essentially just a nerf with sheild gate being once again shoved down our throats. All frames for steel path must be built similarly, this is good game design, right?

I get they wanna make her whole kit useable & I can respect that part, but right now the Hysteria invulnerability nerf is only going to make the game slightly worse overall, not better. Also it hardly seems to set out to fix what it's trying to supposedly fix, but I'd have to get my hands on the first 3 tweaked abilities to really know for sure,

Also don’t even get me started on how disingenuous Pablo’s Hysteria talk felt. "It also had this whole section where at the end of it, you could die if you hadn't done like a certain process that was very confusing for most players. So a lot of people would just end up like once they were running out of energy, they would just hide in a closet and just wait it out, which was pretty bad." I would like to see the stats for how often this actually occurs because I've never seen a Valkyr player do that, even base star chart default colors ones. I felt like I was being PR spoken to and that just makes it feel so wrong.

In a world where health and armor are at a good spot in late game this rework is an acceptable trade off, but right now it shouldn’t be shipped.

Also another thing about you level cap buzzword haters out there... Warframe does care about endurance runs/late game or at least used to back when the Kuva fortress tileset was released. People were doing max cap survival endurance runs, going for world records, and playwarframe was present in the chat cheering them on as well as some of the devs personal twitch accounts at the time. I remember Smashley's stream in particular as an example though it may be lost to time because the internet is not forever, much in contrast to what our parents told us as kids. Also, like I stated previously, Steel Path is consistently getting updates.

Easier financially to try to make small changes and seemingly ignore the bigger issues than to tweak bigger core parts of the game, I'm sure any developer would much rather do the former than the latter. It's smart budgeting even if it hurts the game's longevity, but this Valkyr issue has truly pushed this larger problem into the lime light; hopefully so much so in that they actually do fix the bigger problem. Huge changes are needed for the game's health if the power scaling is going to keep increasing, but Valkyr getting nerfed shouldn't need to come first. Fix the core issues before you put a perfectly good frame in the shredder.