Warframe - I'm Breaking Up

Dear Warframe,

stuff like this is never easy, so I'll be blunt and come right out with it: I'm leaving you. I know our 4th anniversary is around the corner and we've been through a lot of stuff together. But over the years you've cared less and less about our relationship and I feel the only thing you are ever really after these days is my money. I should have seen this coming when I saw you hanging out with your weird new friends. I knew Perfect World would be a bad influence on you, but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Big mistake.

You've taken a lot from me during our last year and given very little in return. You've been teasing me with The War Within since July, only to release it months later, at the end of the year. And sure, it was good, but the whole thing lasted less than 90 minutes and introduced questionable new mechanics like Kuva farming and Riven mods, where a bit of rebalancing would have been so much more effective and less frustrating. But you didn't want to tweak your underused, underappreciated weapons. Instead, you've added hundreds of new mods, one per weapon. You can only obtain said mods by completing three challenging endgame missions. The chance for a drop is about 15 percent. It's much more likely you'll give me completely useless rewards instead, insulting me for my time and effort.

-80% damage dealt by my weapon. Now that's a nice endgame upgrade! Thanks!

Let me repeat this: hundreds of weapons. The chance I'll obtain a Riven mod for the weapon I want is 300something to one. After the initial 15% chance to obtain a Riven mod in the first place. One chance per day, if I can beat the three daily Sortie missions. And in the incredibly unlikely event I'll actually get a mod that is relevant to me, it's entirely possible said mod will reduce my weapon damage by up to 120%, effectively healing my enemy when I shoot them!

But what else am I gonna do, apart from farming worthless new mods? It's not like you had any interesting new events or content for me. Your new quest, The Glast Gambit, forced me to play the exact same "pvp with the AI" type of mission six times in a row. You're so painfully aware of your broken, stupid AI, the final mission actually required me to beat the AI by a margin of 10 points or less. Defeating them with any more points than that fails the mission. This is laughably awful game design! The mission objective was literally 'beat the AI, but go easy on them' instead of raising difficulty and giving me competent opponents.

Speaking of forced, faux pvp - remember how you used to say you'd never want to become a pvp game? How you added it anyway and then said you never want pvp to become invasive, be forced on the players who don't care about it? As a direct result, your pvp lobbies are empty, dead, deserted pretty much all the time and we're okay with it. So why did you think it was a good idea to make the tactical Xmas alert pvp only? Sure, murdering one another is totally in the spirit of Christmas, but come on now, what were you thinking?

The warframe on this image is walking away, because symbolism or some shit.

You refer to me as a loser. And you're probably right, because you're charging me up to ten freaking Dollars for a fucking skin or a new cape. Your current Prime Access Package costs 70 Dollars. If I want Nidus, your newest Warframe, the cheapest variant costs me a whopping 13 Dollars. You know what else I can get with 13 Dollars? A whole month of World of Warcraft, SWTOR or any other MMO that doesn't charge me an arm and a leg on top of that monthly fee.

I used to defend you, speak up for you, tell people you're one of the fairest Free2Play games out there in my reviews. Because you used to be. If I wanted a new warframe, all I had to do is farm a certain boss for a little while, wait 72 hours to craft my reward and I was good to go. I could skip these steps by throwing a bit of cash at you if I wanted to. But you've lowered the drop rates, made it ever more difficult to even reach the missions where new warframe parts drop, raised the crafting resource cost to levels where it's simply impossible for most players to ever get their hands on the new stuff unless they buy it with real money.

Making all your favourite MMOs shit.

I used to like Free2Play. There were some black sheep, sure, but this model used to be an affordable alternative to subscription-based games. Today, getting all the new content on Warframe requires me to spend AAA-money every other month. Add a new skin, a bit of premium currency for boosters and I've spent so much, the same amount of money would have bought me Battlefield and Titanfall 2. My friends are playing these games right now. And I can't join them, because of you. Because I'm playing Warframe. Alone. And you've taken all of my money.

I'm done. As a matter of fact, I'm already seeing someone else. For the past couple of weeks I've been with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Sure, SWTOR ain't as pretty as she used to be and even her flashy new trailers aren't enough to turn many heads these days. But you know what? SWTOR lets me do what I want. SWTOR gives me endgame, gives me all the content, all the story, everything there is for 13 Dollars a month. Heck, I can still go there even if I can't pay up and do most of the stuff I like. With you, 13 Dollars are merely enough to buy me a booster or two, which I desperately need, because you think it's great game design when I'm forced to level up every single weapon up to eight freaking times!

SWTOR doesn't hide the action underneath an ever-increasing amount of particle effects, either.

Speaking of endgame: SWTOR lets me get powerful gear when I complete its story and clear the content. It rewards me and gives me a chance to obtain the best stuff in the game. It doesn't care whether I play solo instances, raid content or space battles. I do what I want and get neat items as a reward.

Meanwhile, your brand new endgame mission type, Infested Salvage, grants me the exact same mods, resources and rewards I've been getting in level 10 missions all over the game for the past four years. I have to complete every single story mission, clear every space junction, be content-clear in order to even start an Infested Salvage and you throw worthless, meaningless rewards at me, which I can obtain just about everywhere else in the game. Sure, I just might luck out and get one crafting component for a new Warframe (14% chance) if I stay for 20 minutes. But I need three different ones of those. Plus a massive amount of rare resources. This isn't fun. This isn't entertaining. I'm doing my fucking taxes here, Warframe.

Will I spend my next four years with SWTOR now? Of course not. It's just a fun little fling, we're not ready for a commitment. But I'll be seeing lots of other games. Play with my friends. Try new stuff. Because I'm done throwing all my money at you and pretending you're really not taking that much from me. Over the past year you've added almost zero content, but you've steadily raised prices, offered more premium packages than ever before and created artificial scarcity by arbitrarily putting items in the 'Prime Vault', making it entirely impossible to get certain weapons and frames, unless you pay for them. This isn't fair, it's not fun and it sure as fuck isn't Free2Play. Now, if you'll excue me... I've got a galaxy to save. Far, far away.

Tolerating SWTOR

I hate MMORPGs. I quit WoW once and for all the moment the community shifted from spamming cringeworthy Chuck Norris jokes to simply posting 'anal' followed by the name of an item or a skill. Anal [Raging Blow]. Fucking hilarious. And followed by dozens of people trying to be even more inventive and disgusting than the last. It's a pretty stupid thing to get annoyed at, but between that, a naked weirdo named Pwnerizer dancing naked on a mailbox and a bunch of level-capped guys in full raid gear camping around your corpse to gank you over and over again, I have found that other players tend to harm my immersion more than help it.

Then there's this whole forced 'endgame' nonsense. Repeat the same content dozens of times in order to obtain gear, which will become useless as soon as the next content update goes live. Mostly in order to impress a bunch of people you hate, who will inspect you, judge you and know every tiny detail about your character, whether you like it or not. The item treadmill, the carrot on the stick, the big motivator to keep a bunch of idiots attached to a game for as long as possible. And yes, I believe you have to be a bit of an idiot if you manage to spend all of your spare time in a single game for several years, always doing the same thing without getting bored of it, never trying anything new.

Azeroth. Where the community's greatest morons are celebrated as legends.

The reason why I hated Star Wars: The old Republic in particular is my job. I had to play this game 12+ hours a day, reach the level cap within a few days, then write up 30something pages about how and why you should play a Sith Warrior. Back then the game was basically WoW with lightsabers and a lot more talking. People who wanted a good BioWare RPG hated it for its MMO aspects, people who wanted a good MMO hated it for all the forced solo stuff and the inflated stories around every boring fetch quest. It was the perfect compromise - combine the worst of both worlds and annoy the shit out of the entire playerbase.

We were about a dozen people back then, one for each of the eight classes, as well as a bunch of extra guys tagging along, because heyho. The deadline was brutal, the server queues took several hours every day before we could even log on and after a while we all hated each other. My boss threw several massive bitchfits at me until we ended up on opposite teams in pvp and I murdered the fuck out of him again and again. My team lost by a mile, because killing people wasn't the main objective and of course he called me out on it, but it felt good at the time. We've always been cool around each other, but ridiculous amounts of pressure can make people go psycho.

"What dark side corruption? It's a skin condition and I'd appreciate if you could stop bringing it up!"

By the time my first character was done and the guides were written, I couldn't even look at the game anymore. Which was weird, because being able to 'just play' was my motivation. Just finish the damn guide, get this over with, then I can finally enjoy the game, take my time and just do what I want. But I simply couldn't stand another 10 minute conversation before every simple kill or fetch quest. Not another corridor full of awkwardly-placed baddies, which always attacked in groups of three at a time. I was done.

That was half a decade ago. Then I had to get my first smartphone ever, because of work. Yes, in 2017! And that damn thing plays Knights of the Old Republic! My last mobile phone played fucking Snake! So I dicked around on KotOR for a bit, enjoyed the nostalgia, whilst hating how poorly that game and its sequel have aged. Containers play a five second animation before they open, forcing open a lock forces me to watch my character attack a door for 30 seconds and missing most of the time, main protagonist is the only character without a voice, yada, yada, yada. Meanwhile, SWTOR had reminded me that it's still a thing with some badass trailers. I mean, just look at this shit:

In German, SWTOR KOTET literally means 'SWTOR is pooping'.

So I downloaded the game again and the first thing I had to do was rename every single one of my characters. I think it's okay to take away the names of inactive users, but you try and find a unique new name in a five year old MMO, which had undergone a ton of server consolidations. 

To be fair, the Star Wars universe probably doesn't even know what a wolf is.

Each of my characters also had about 16 messages in their mailbox. Anniversary presents, free pets, fireworks and other tat. I also received a bunch of generic companion clothing. The attached letter said there had been a problem with that. And what do you know, I found most of my companions without pants on, so now I could spend an hour playing dress-up with the lot of them. I also had a ton of free outfits and other stuff for Galactic Starfighter, a new pvp mode, which had been added and left to rot in my absence. I genuinely queued up for it and waited a half hour or so, but nothing ever happened.

In fact, the entire game felt a bit dead. I bumped into three other players in the Republic's main hub, two of which were lowbie characters, the third guy was labelled a 'legendary player' who was just posing with his lightsaber out like he was in Ironforge and there were any players around to actually see him. Inspecting people reveals their achievements, so you can still laugh at them for not completing any raids, but you can't see their gear, which I like. 

You don't have to be epic. Just hot.

So after a frustrating hour or two of sifting through tons of shit in my inventory, obligatory respecs and figuring out how stuff works, I decided to finally go and complete my Jedi Knight's story. As a subscriber you can now just play one story mission after another and receive enough experience to keep on leveling up without having to play all of the boring MMO filler crap in between the good bits. How weird is that? You skip 90% of each planet, hours upon hours of dialogue, monsters and mini dungeons somebody had to create for this game to have content and you can ignore all of it. Somebody at BioWare actually must have said, "Our shit is so boring, people don't want to touch it. So let's allow them to skip it."

I went from level 37 to 50 and a completed class storyline in a day. And that was okay, because the story was actually really, seriously good. Sure, all of the fighting was still incredibly repetitive, boring, outdated MMO-combat, especially since SWTOR suffers from ability cancer. I just don't like it when a game slowly but surely fills an entire three or more hotbars with shit. Here, have two interrupt attacks with a long cooldown instead of a single quick one. Have two different AoEs, one strong and with a long cooldown and a weak one with a short cooldown. Have a quick resource builder that generates a low amount of power and a slow one, which generates more power. Why do game designers still put multiple different attacks with the exact same effect in their MMOs? Combat doesn't get any more strategic or complex that way. You just get more buttons and shit gets tedious.

Not fun.

Despite being a goodie-goodie Jedi Knight, my character could force-choke bad guys to death, thanks to the game's legacy system and my completed Sith Warrior storyline. Completing the story of any class will grant a heroic ability to all your other characters on the same server. That's pretty cool and really motivates me to complete the stories of some of the other classes, allowing me to unlock more and more heroic abilities. And now that I can just enjoy the story missions and skip all of the filler crap, I don't even have to force myself to do it.

As for the new content - no idea, haven't even tried it. From what I've heard, the current new story expansion is in every way as epic and exciting as any BioWare RPG, but story mode difficulty is laughably easy, yet Veteran difficulty is downright impossible to most players. And that's a step up from the previous story expansion, where total joke difficulty was the only option. I'm still gonna play it eventually to experience the story, but right now I just want to catch up on the class stories I had missed out on since launch.

I'm having fun. I never run into other players outside of the main hubs, which are also ghost towns most of the time. I can't tell whether it's just my server or whether the game is simply deserted. General chat is dead, save for the incessant gold spam you get in every poorly-moderated MMO. I turned it off. Companions are now ridiculously OP and most Flashpoints (read: dungeons) have a solo mode now, so fuck all the other players, if they really exist.

Ironically, my favourite thing about SWTOR is its low subscription fee of 9 Quid (or 13 USD or whatever). I used to hate shit like that, but when I see how Warframe releases new premium packages every month, ranging from 20 to 130 Quid, as well as all the overpriced skins, costumes and premium tokens you get in all those other 'free' games out there, 9 Quid for everything seems pretty damn reasonable all of a sudden. Yes, apparently there are paid lockboxes, which randomly contain ultra rare shit like crossbar lightsabers. You can't obtain those any other way and that's a bit awful. But it's only fluff, while you can get all of the character story content for free if you're willing to live with a few restrictions.