Warframe’s servers have been having intermittent issues due to a DDoS this weekend, which leaves me time to ponder a blog post, while feeling twitchy and restless and almost cast adrift.
The irony is that I didn’t get back to playing Warframe till a few days ago, when I decided I’d check it out and scored the 75% off for some Platinum discount I’d been waiting for for ages.
I promptly bought some to show my support for Digital Extremes’ hard work and care for their community, then played the anniversary missions to nab the free weapons. Said weapons turned out to be fairly awesome in their utility and power level, managing to replace temporarily the maxed out Soma Prime I couldn’t function without, which gave me a reason to start playing with a tiny change up of playstyle.
Oh yes, I also bought the Rhino Palatine skin. Fashionframe has never been sexier.
(Captura mode rocks, btw. Is this something being on PS4 demands or what? Both Warframe and Horizon Zero Dawn rock this so hard.)
I’d hit a wall around Jupiter since I’d mostly ignored purposeful modding beyond the basics of dumping in an endo’ed up Serration and throwing in whatever else seemed good from my random assorted collection of mods.
Thing is, I urgently needed -another- Serration, because I can’t exactly max out my only Serration for higher mastery weapons and then leave the to-be-leveled weapons out in the cold with zero functional damage mod.
I’d also mysteriously managed to cut paths through Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Phobos, bits of the Void, Ceres, Jupiter without scoring something as basic a Steel Fiber mod that increases Armor for my Rhino.
Obviously, some purposeful targeted mission farming was way overdue.
Some wiki reading and a failed solo Excavation attempt later, I settled on solo Survival missions for a 7 or 8% chance to drop what I wanted, and level up the new weapons at the same time. After some testing with Tier 1 and Tier 2, I eventually found a comfortable Tier 1 Dark Sector in Venus/Malva that had Infested that beelined straight for you, making Survival a lot easier than having to chase down other faction mobs.
The nice thing about new weapons is that their mod slots are more limited, so I sat down to mod them well, from a more limited list of options. The straight damage increase goes in, then maybe something to improve their handling like faster reload, and if there’s space, increase whatever damage type the weapons do and figure out what damage 2.0 type does more damage to Infested (Gas, apparently.)
Badabing, even shinier new weapons purpose-built for destroying hordes of Infested. Stay 15 mins for a shot at the Rotation B prize, linger 5 mins more for Rotation C if I somehow get delayed or distracted, extract, rinse/repeat.
Granted, the prize excites no one but me at my newbie “solo self-found” level but hey, it’s the core loop of Warframe and it’s fun in its own way.
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In the other screen, I watched teams of streamers get up to shenanigans I’m not willing to experience firsthand myself in Sea of Thieves and it’s the best of both worlds. A solo experience on this end, and a delegated team experience on the other side.
It’s odd, but it seems some computer games these days are catered towards being something in a “spectator games” genre.
The actual number of players might be relatively small, as compared against the obsessive attempt of WoW-like MMOs to capture -all- of the players (which seems doomed to failure the more games fragment into various niches), while another proportion of consumers “play” them virtually by watching said players go at it.
In this case, I guess the money stream goes from the audience => streamers => game, and through advertising and tie-ups with platforms that allow said spectating (cough *Twitch* cough).
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Over in Path of Exile, things are chugging along happily. I hit level 86, lucked into a few teeny upgrades with plenty more improvement to go, alternating between going back and forth through white and yellow maps to unlock them / play some Shaper/Elder-influenced maps, with Tier 8 as the current main unlock goal.
It’s virtually impossible to take a good screenshot of my current build. It’s just blackity black and blue everywhere. Black ravens (SRS), two lightning golems which spawn phantasms on kill, the phantasms shooting bolts of black darkness, a Hatred aura which gives all the minions blue circles and bonus cold damage… It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s sure fun.
I did a quick duelist alt to level 19 or so, thinking that I might do a really tanky melee ancestral warchief champion to put some of the STR-based and Axe uniques that have been dropping like candy for the SRS necromancer main to good use. I’ll get around to it. Eventually. Maybe. If the league doesn’t end first. (I’m sure there’s still a month or three to go.)
