Last year I was trying to find something to play daily, since I ditched Destiny a few years ago. Then I decided to try Warframe, I got 90h on it, even tho I know it’s very little I think I can have an opinion already.
I got overwhelmed by how hard the game tries to make me spend money, I might be exaggerating but I think literally everything has a way to be boosted or achieved by paying. This kind of completely kills that friendly competitive aspect of the game like you achieve something and you just can’t tell if it was legit or someone paid for it.
For example I remember there was this double resources boost and other kind of boosts that double many things you do in the game, and I kind of felt bad thinking “fuck man… look how much I farmed here, if I had paid for it, it’d be double”, which often was letting me down.
Then suddenly they show that daily offer, I got a 75% OFF offer on game currency and FOMO syndrome just hit, I bought it. I asked on Reddit sub if it’s worth it and everybody was just saying they pray to get offers like that, then I thought: well, it seems good I’ll do it.
And I did it, now I see how manipulated I got by this game. I didn’t spend too much, a 75% OFF was like an old game price, I thought it was fair to pay a game price for playing the game, at least once.
But then I realized if I kept doing it I’d lost myself and always want more. Then I just decided to ditch this game as well before it was too late. The game looks good overall but man… What an aggressive monetization, it’s definitely not just cosmetics, you pay to speed up things and way more stuff than cosmetic.
I know that late game you’ll eventually farm cosmetics and earn many stuff that at first is bought only by real money, but that’s a massive almost inhuman grind to achieve we’re talking like 1000-5000h. And then at the end you think again “fuck… I should’ve payed for a few stuff, I’d have double of everything now”.
I mean I don’t get it, this game isn’t all of this, it feels everything you do in the game there’s a part on the screen screaming “LOOK AT HERE IF YOU PAY YOU CAN GET IT EASIER AND WITH EXTRA STUFF WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?”.
I fell for it once and now I see how I was manipulated, Warframe somehow helped me on my decision to not spend a cent on extra content anymore. Btw I didn’t spend any of my game currency I bought with real money, I just made a mistake and cut it right away.
I have well over 200h in game now, and can honestly say that Warframe’s monetization systems is probably one of the best in the MMO genre. There is effectively no P2W mechanics in the game at all (save for resource boosting which… really isn’t that significant overall. Those are also given to you for free quite often too as daily rewards). You can throw pretty much all the money at the game you want to, and it won’t give you any real, meaningful advantage. Nor is any part of the story locked behind a paywall either, and it is now a story that will easily take you well over 100 hours to complete (this is a very conservative estimate). The monetization system is almost entirely cosmetic in nature, save for resource gather boosters, inventory expanders (which really aren’t needed, tbh…) and Forma for altering the polarity of mod slots.
I haven’t bought Platinum once in playing. Heck, I still have my ~50 starting Platinum that was given to me from where I first jumped in. You do not have to spend a cent to enjoy the game to its fullest. Warframe’s monetization is honestly one of the best systems you could ask for in the genre, and I’m fairly content in saying the overall gaming industry would be much, much healthier if they followed Warframe’s model rather than so many of the predatory systems we see being used now.