Grinding is one thing. Grinding and basing the game around drops is another entirely. PSO2 is grindy. PSO2 is also loving fun, which is why I played it for about the entire day and didn't notice that I hadn't eaten lunch.
I'm talking about the market. Where you can buy weapons straight out. Which is
stupid.Obfuscation of the drop tables, which in and of itself would seem innocent enough, except for the part where DE has on numerous occasions shafted the playerbase with low drop rates and gone "oh oops it the interns." The obfuscation seemed like a direct attempt at avoiding evidence by rendering it unreadable, making the drop rates difficult to find. In a game based entirely around RNG. Where the developers have on more than one occasion forgeted up drop rates so hard that it either varied between 33% or 0.68%.
Nekros and Hydroid being stuck behind grindwalls in the first place is a sign of poor game design. I would tolerate it if the bossfights were even fun (COUGH COUGH INVULNERABILITY STATES) but even then I'd get tired. Every other Warframe is obtainable through normal means but again, that's playing for the drops, not the game. I'm going to bring up another comparison to PSO2 because that game was fun as forget before the apparent IP ban. When I was playing that game I acknowledged that there were high value drops. I wanted those drops. In fact I would sometimes go into missions thinking "I want these drops." And then I'd come across a boss battle and that became much more important than the drops. Because the boss battles are
actually fun. They all generally represent some form of being well-designed, with little artificial difficulty in most of them (Banthers and Banshees are bullstuff that's a different story) whereas Warframe's bosses tend to present difficulty by adding invulnerability states and heavy damage that you can't avoid very well. It's poor game design and I'd like the game a lot more, even with the stuffty drop-based gameplay, if the game's bosses were actually... well... not loving stuff.
I'm complaining about the very fact that prime access exists. You shouldn't ever be asking your players to pay to not play, that's pretty loving silly. And that's exactly what Prime Access is. That's exactly what buying weapons and Warframes in the market is. "Hey don't play our game just pay money for it." That's a poor F2P model.
The biggest reason why Warframe is a bad game is because it's an absolutely
terrible F2P model. Pay2Convenience is fine. Pay2Look pretty is also fine. Pay2not loving play the damn game you're trying to play
isn't. And everything about the game is meant to
poke you towards that. The MK1 Braton is stuff hey go buy a gun. The Lato is stuff hEY you know what would be a great idea, goy? Buying a gun for platinum. The Skana is stuff. Buy some plat!
I'm not even going to get started on slots I've beaten that horse into a bloody pulp already.
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