Warning, long post incoming.
TL;DR: Warframe is awesome despite it’s many flaws.

Hello, fellow Tenno,
a few days ago I’ve hit Mastery 22 and while that isn’t really extraordinary, the fact that I achieved it in just under 4 months and by only buying a 2k plat pack once might be. This is my story, the way my Tenno took and what I encountered on the road.

First things first; how I got to play the game in the first place. A good friend invited me to play Warframe somewhere mid 2015. I never really took interest, he didn’t explain it well and I was turned off by thinking it was an MMO, which I didn’t want to get into. He physically first showed it to me when I visited him in early January 2016 on some defense mission and again I was somehow turned off. Too many effects, I couldn’t make sense of anything and he just showed me OP stuff that one-shotted all enemies. The mission choice didn’t help by just jumping back and forth, which seemed rather boring, so I stopped paying attention quickly.

Now, me and my friend were always looking for games to play in co-op and on the 11th of September 2016 (exactly 4 months ago today), he finally conviced me to just give it a try; it’s free to play so I wouldn’t lose anything except some time. I was like ‘aw, whatever, might as well give it a try’.

The first missions were actually quite fun, I chose Excalibur, Braton, Kunai and Skana. I quickly regretted my primary choice, as my friend loves Paris Prime to death and I envied him being able to silently take down enemies in stealth missions (which wasn't really possible with MK1-Kunai).

I was however quite confused on what to do after the Vor’s Prize quest. I wanted to do another quest, but there were none in sight and no description or tutorial on how to get there. It seemed there were no real goals.
My friend told me to just unlock nodes and planets, I’d get the quests naturally - so I did. Set goal to: unlock all planet nodes.

At some point I also checked out this reddit and found in the FAQ that Rhino would be the first frame to build, so my friend took me to Jackal a few times until I had all the parts.

Now, while farming for the resources, he obviously taxi’d me all over the place (also to alerts and affinity farming missons) and with my MK-1 weaponry and low ranked mods I felt quite useless. He also rushed through the levels while I wanted to explore every nook and cranny, open every chest and container and always had to wait for me, while bickering about me being too slow.

Excalibur was still my main go-to weapon, as the exalted blade was just killing everything, compared to my very underpowered regular weaponry.

Eventually, he gifted me all parts for Nova Prime, Paris Prime, Carrier Prime and Orthos Prime (and later Soma Prime) to speed up my progress. This obviously made me change my playstyle a lot and I got a very different feeling for Warframe through that.
I enjoyed the game a lot more and at some point decided that it was worth spending money on. So I set myself to wait until my first 75% plat discount to buy around 20€ worth of platin, which is just how much I would’ve spent for a game of this style when it wouldn’t have been F2P.

My goal at that time was to own one of every Warframe type, Pokémon-style. About two weeks later, I was rewarded for my patience: a 75% Platinum discount login reward. True to my initial thinking, I bought the 2100 plat bundle, half of which I rather quickly spent on slots for Warframes and weapons.
I’m usually a rather economically minded person, so the rest of the platinum resources only dwindled very slowly - whenever I found something that I either couldn’t get regularly (vaulted Prime parts) or sometimes just for a Forma bundle or some potatoes as those were the only resources that I couldn’t really farm for myself quickly enough to be relevant. I also gave some amount of platinum to my friend which roughly equaled the amount he gifted me in Prime parts earlier using warframe.market prices.

My friend had also invited me to a clan and around MR 7 or 8 we started raiding the Law of Retribution. At the beginning I was rather useless and probably the cause for a few failures in the room with the 8 platforms, but I learned quickly and had also finished a Trinity Prime for myself. I usually enjoy playing healers in online games and RPGs, so Trinity seemed like a perfect choice - if I only could always see the health bars of my team mates. A few days later I randomly stumbled upon the info on a random reddit thread that you could actually activate them, while being stupidly turned off by default. Mind = blown.
To this day I still remind newbies that this option is available and have been thanked for that quite a few times.

Anyway, when I hit MR13, I had finally done it: I had overtaken my friend in Mastery Rank who was 12 at that time. He said he didn’t really care for Mastery, just so he could use all his weapons. But sure enough, he started leveling MR a bit more actively afterwards (he is currently at around 18).

At some point I had all the Frames and my goal was complete. What next though?
I always need a goal in a game and the obvious next goal was to keep on leveling Mastery until I can’t level anymore. Which I currently am at, still.

This Saturday on the 8th, I finally managed to hit MR22. Which is the milestone for me where I say the rest would become quite difficult, since some of the last pieces of gear are restricted behind events or other things.

I’m missing only two Prime frames from the available roster (Loki & Rhino) which I plan on acquiring soonish, my platinum balance allowing.
I’ve leveled all animal companions (which are still very annoying to use due to missing Vacuum), sentinels (missing Wyrm Prime though) and am currently finishing the rest of the Archwing and syndicate weapons. Then all that remains are some Prisma/Dex/Vandal/Wraith and some odd vaulted Prime weapons and I might be able to hit MR23 around next month.

On my long way I’ve encountered thousands of Tenno, some of them were super nice and helpful, gifting me stuff worth dozens of Platinum when just asking for a fair trade ("nah, you don't need to pay me anything, it’s fine!").
I always try to give back to the community by being as helpful as I can be, even if may sometimes seem patronizing to other Tenno, but I’m always happy when I can actually help or improve someone’s experience. I'm actually writing a beginners guide at the moment and am also compiling a Warframe video, both which I'll be posting here when (if) I finish them.

There are many more small stories that I could share but this would take way too much space - I mean this is already a friggin' wall of text. Suffice to say I've lived through the progress of Warframe with all the ups and downs from Vacuumgate to the Hema grind (that for us is still going on with about a quarter of the Mutagen Samples left to go).
Especially in the beginning I was quite surprised on how quickly things were changed and patched, sometimes having as many as three patches in a day.

Anyway, in the end I want to thank my friend for making this possible and not giving up on trying to get me into the game, my clan Kabuki that has some really cool people, Quiette Shy for making the best Warframe videos ever (no contest) and Digital Extremes for creating the game itself.

It’s been a cool ride for me, so I’ll keep on enjoying the game and want to remind you all: Always help a fellow Tenno in need. :)