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.