I’m a teacher at heart, and something that I really love about warframe is helping new players to learn the game. However after spending hundreds of hours doing this, there are a few things I’ve noticed I’m doing all the time which makes all the difference to someone actually trying the game… and is a big loss if its something you have to struggle through by yourself. So I’ve typed up a few ideas for things that I think would be fairly easy to implement (from a non-coder perspective, I have no idea actually how easy this would be to implement) that would make a big difference to new players.

Chat

Nearly every new player’s first experience is of typing “Hey guys I’m new!” in recruiting chat and being ignored as what are essentially lines of code blitz your screen. Recruiting chat is a stupid place to put new players, I’m sorry but its true. Q&A would be better, but what I actually suggest is a new channel, the newbie channel.

You would get automatically put into it as a new player, and automatically taken out and put into region as soon as you end The Second Dream. You could enable it again in the settings menu (say, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys helping newbies) but otherwise it would create more of a safe space where people could chat about the game, ask basic questions, maybe do recruiting for early missions (eg. anyone wanna do a defence on venus?). What would be even better would be if the community could vote to have some /commands put in so that people could reply to common questions.

Sprint & Aim

Honestly for a game that prides itself on having the best movement of any 3rd/1st person shooter (thanks for ruining apex for me you bastards I was never able to get into it because it just felt like bad warframe) I don’t know why toggle sprint is not only hidden away in the menu systems, but also why is it off by default? Like, why do I have to press ‘sprint’ every time I load into a new mission? This is a game where you take a moment to slow down, not a game where you occasionally choose to speed up. For new players I think it would be amazing if the toggle/hold choice was a part of the tutorial. Have them choose, 30s later have them confirm if that’s how they want it. Easy Peasy done.

Nightwave

One of the main things new players should be doing is the Nightwave, but aside from her chatting away at you all the time, its not immediately obvious where she is. A Junction requirement of “buy an orokin catalyst from the nightwave and install it on a weapon” would go a long way towards helping players get started with this really core aspect of the gameplay loop.

Mods

Mods are one of the key elements of Warframe. Its part of what makes it so diverse and exciting to play, but there is almost no reinforcement of it. We are shown how to mod precisely once, and after that you’re on your own. Most people need to see something three times in order to learn it, and one of the most common points where people drop warframe is when they fail to kill the frost spectre because their weapons aren’t modded properly.

And that’s good, people should fail to kill something. Up until this point they’ve been unkillable gods, pretty much, the spectre is a good lesson, however it doesn’t actually teach them anything.

If after you lose to the spectre, ordis messages you saying that your gear needs modification, telling you he found a ‘damaged mod’ that can be dissolved for endo.

If not that, then once again, junction requirements. “Have a gun with at least 3 pips in [serration].” “Have at least two elemental mods in each weapon.

Endo

With mods being as important as they are, no one has any idea of how to get endo. Adding a small section onto the end of [stolen dreams] where they have to complete the maroo weekly would be great for this. There’s so much content for warframe, I think signposting things like this is really important.

Secondly, I think another junction requirement should be to DISSOLVE specifically (because honestly you should get rid of selling mods for credits its a terrible idea) a certain amount of endo out of mods.

Archwing Launcher Segment

Okay this shit is just straight stupid. The Archwing launcher segment from the quest [The Archwing] shares a name with the Archwing Launcher Segment you can build to fly your archwing in open world. The number of new players I’ve seen burn out because they went to plains, spent ages farming this thing they didn’t need in a high-level area, then finally, after joining a clan, waiting 24 hours for the clan key to build, buying the blueprint, waiting the 24 hours for the blueprint to build, learn it was never the right thing in the first place? That’s something I know I’d quit a game over if it happened to me.

And its a simple fix. Rename one of them, and make it so that you cannot even buy the blueprint from a clan dojo until you’ve completed [the archwing]. Bonus points if you make the quest way more obvious about the next step, no one ever knows.

Relics (& other operations)

I’m sure there was a really great operation back in the day when these first came out, but these days there is no introduction to what relics are, why they are happening or what to do. A short quest introducing this would be great.

Thank you for listening to my angry rant about new players.

While I have your attention, if I may politely request:

Access to Q&A chat from dojos.

As an architect I have spent hundreds of hours working on my dojo, but if I’m there I can’t access Q&A, which is one of the things I really enjoy about the game.

Multiple login points.

The game is 11 years old now, we’ve got the drifter camp. Surely you can figure out how to let players choose whether they automatically log into orbiter/camp/cetus(fortuna/Nekraslisk/etc.)/relay/dojo/dormizone. I would like that. I would like that a lot. I want to log into my dojo.

Dojo

Am I still banging on about this shit? The navigation room in dojos is ass to load back into, even on my high end PC it lags to hell and I use this thing for fully-modded VR skyrim. Can we have an alternate room that doesn’t try to microwave my GPU?

On the subject of dojos

Okay I’m completely off-piste now, but can we have the rando NPCs that you find hanging out around relays as a dojo decoration? Maybe they could do one animation of our choosing. My bar is really empty without anyone in it. Although if you really loved me you’d let me put a fashion frame in instead of a rando NPC. That would be amazing.

[weapon slot] doesn’t link in chat. Please fix that.