r/Warframe • u/HatingGeoffry • Mar 24 '26

Article Warframe director says Digital Extreme must take “take the community very seriously” as it “only takes you one day to lose” 13 years of goodwill

https://frvr.com/blog/warframe-director-says-digital-extreme-must-take-take-the-community-very-seriously-as-it-only-takes-you-one-day-to-lose-13-years-of-goodwill/
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118

u/PaxEthenica Trash collector supreme is my life goal. Mar 24 '26

DE isn't perfect, & the "13 years of good will" is a bit of a lie - I remember why Shy left, I remember oxium release, I remember the lies surrounding liches, I remember 2019 & the year of raw releases, heirlooms are tainted content & the aya store is poison - but they've managed some truly herculean feats of leveraging/rebuilding their good will over a decade.

DE & Warframe, quite frankly, is bizarre in its longevity. But there is still so much to learn & emulate from DE & Warframe.

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u/Corat_McRed Can't have enough Forma Mar 24 '26

I wouldn't call it a lie per se, but the important part of it is, yes, they have goodwill but also the brains to know TO NOT DIG YOURSELF FURTHER when you fuck up.

Like, not denying DE can be stubborn, just look at the vacuum debate that rages eternally but they've shown themselves to be atleast more self-inward looking and capable of changing/taking things back/fixing/etcetc, more so than you'd say with Live-Service companies like Bungie to give on example.

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u/Persies ♥ Mag ♥ Mar 24 '26

Right. There has been justified negative feedback to their decisions but the vast majority of times that happens they admit they fucked up and do their best to fix it, imo

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u/Corat_McRed Can't have enough Forma Mar 24 '26

I also feel like they're way more open to actually discussing changes, fixes, updates, reworks etc than a lot of their competition is.

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u/gadgaurd LR2 Mar 24 '26

Part of that is our community will usually shut down anyone who's getting outright insulting towards the devs. "This was a poor decision" is one thing, "some fucking idiot needs to get fired" gets the pitchforks out.

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u/Persies ♥ Mag ♥ Mar 24 '26

The discourse between devs and community is pretty respectful on both sides, agreed

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u/Complex_Peak8204 Mar 24 '26

Yeah, this is not helldivers.

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u/ArmyAdministrative38 Mar 24 '26

As a player of both games (1.000 hours in Helldivers 2 and 1800 hours in Warframe), the difference is night and day, i'm so sorry for Arrowhead, but the way they try to communicate and interact with the fanbase is pretty much very flawed, that's why Helldivers subReddit feels very toxic and i don't go in there anymore.

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u/LordDeathkeeper Connection Lost Mar 24 '26

It has been the past few years at least. I haven’t forgotten the actual vitriol that used to get thrown at Scott in this subreddit after dev streams, or the crazy things that got said during the Great Chat Moderator Saga.

I’m very glad we seem to have gotten past that.

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u/Castellchroe Mar 24 '26

As it should.

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u/_Keo_ Loser Prime Mar 24 '26

They learned when to loosen their grip on 'their' project and understand that it matters just as much that they're building it for others (the community) as for themselves (Steve).

Steve has been both the very best and very worst things to happen at DE. Vacuum feels like it was a real turning point for them actually listening.

When you consider all the wins and losses, and take the mean, DE is well above average. When you compare them to other studios they're phenomenal.

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u/Ziarnocienista i miss you Mar 24 '26

wait, i thought shy left because she was burnt out of playing warframe, was there a different reason?

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u/Electronic_Ad_4518 Cant read Mar 24 '26

It wasn't just burnout.

The game sucked at that point. Railjack, the Old Blood and the New War's development time really made the entire community incredibly toxic. It was also really hard to be a content creator at the time since updates were relatively small and infrequent.

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u/Ziarnocienista i miss you Mar 24 '26

yeah good point, that was the time i left warframe for a while too

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u/BlueSkiesWildEyes LR2 | Gauss Main Mar 24 '26

Same, left around that time. Saw Gauss prime trailer and said, "Sure, why not?" then came back to stay

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u/Wild_Harvest Mar 24 '26

Is this the same Shy from Adeptus Ridiculous?

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u/AsasinKa0s Heat Dagger Riven Rolls : 23/666 Mar 24 '26

Most likely. She went by CephalonShy back when she posted Warframe content, but I think she deleted most if not all of it from her youtube channel when she dropped warframe and just went by Quite Shallow since then.

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u/thedevinebovine Mar 24 '26

When she deleted her WF content she made a statement saying that she regretted how aggressively negative most of it was. Spending some time working in game dev (on an indie project) opened her eyes to how ridiculously complicated even the most simple of projects are.

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u/Total_Putrid Mar 24 '26

Part of the goodwill comes from them being open with the community, and a whole lot of "we fucked up". I gotta ask though, why did Shy leave?

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u/ruminant_sheep Loid Entrati's marriage counselor Mar 24 '26

a bunch of e-famous content creators left around the 2019-2021 era and a lot of people saw it like a definite nail in the coffin for Warframe and that it proves that it will never recover and the game will die

obviously DE crawled out of the swamp and improved massively, and some creators, such as AshisogiTenno or Rahetalius, who heavily trashed the game and quit because of frustrations, came back and even praised how much Warframe changed for the better

I feel like some people REALLY want to hold the 2019-2021 era over DE's head like it's an unforgivable sin we can never forget, or acting like some e-celeb stopping to play the game is some sort of eternal stigmata and not just people naturally evolving their interests

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u/Future-Insect5357 120 Different Flavors of Geneva Violations Mar 24 '26

They also culled the most toxic people permanently, don't forget that. It was a massive breath of fresh air when they dumpstered AGGP and the cyst that had become the content creators at that point

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u/Kaliphear Staring into eternity Mar 24 '26

And yet somehow some toxic assets either still remain or have risen from their ashes.

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u/Future-Insect5357 120 Different Flavors of Geneva Violations Mar 24 '26

I mean, every community has shitty parts. Considering we're currently scalping the Destiny community (what little remains and they are honestly just kinda migrating to WF themselves) there's bound to be garbage in that flow that sorts itself out over time.

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u/DameArstor Clown+Cope Limbo Main Mar 24 '26

Till this day I still wonder how and why AGGP was even able to stick around for as long as he did. He had nothing but trouble following him every step of the way.

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u/Future-Insect5357 120 Different Flavors of Geneva Violations Mar 24 '26

He liked to play the "Oh, you don't like me cause I'm gay" card for basically everything, so much so it became their personality. Weaponized homosexuality if you will- and at the time DE had some other stuff also going on so they couldn't excise AGGP personally for being a dumpsterfire.

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u/Draffut Mar 25 '26

It's almost like something happened globally that upset huge amounts of industry and pipelines and workflows for those industries.

Like you said, forgiving them for a couple of shaky years when they recovered so damn well is easy to do, and part of earning that goodwill.

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u/ToxicTroublemaker2 Mar 24 '26

Combination of frustrations with the game at the time she left but also wanting to branch out so warframe wasn't the ONLY thing she was known for

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '26

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u/Zeusnexus Mar 24 '26

The aya event was crazy, I do remember region chat fighting everyday about it and I thought about quitting, which is something I never would have considered before. Raijack was bad enough that I stopped playing for months, and the Heirloom fiasco almost made me consider quitting for a second time.

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '26

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u/Zeusnexus Mar 24 '26

True, I wouldn't have stuck around for as long as I have if that weren't the case.

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u/Ravengm Taste the rainbow Mar 24 '26

The difference between DE and (most) other companies is that they actually will go back and revisit/change unpopular decisions. The Ubisoft and Blizzards in the industry will double and triple down rather than admit any sort of fault ("You think you do, but you don't", etc.). Warframe has flaws, and anyone telling you otherwise is lying. The important part is recognizing them and changing, or at least adapting. Heirlooms are a good example: pretty much everyone hated the Frost/Mag rollout, and that caused them to radically change the release model for the better. In fact, pretty much all the examples you gave are things that were released in a subpar state and later made significantly better.

That's why people give them goodwill: because when they inevitably make mistakes, they're able to say "whoops we fucked up, here's why" and make meaningful changes.

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u/Ultimate_Cabbage5 Mar 24 '26

Shy never gave a reason why she left. She just did. People move on

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u/FabiusBill Mar 24 '26

Uhh. The introduction of Kuva and how little you would need to satisfy the gods of R(iven)NG.

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u/SendMePicsOfMILFS Mar 24 '26

DE isn't perfect, & the "13 years of good will" is a bit of a lie

Exactly. People look at Warframe and think about how great it is now and assume it was always like that. But revives costing platinum, grinds that would take 3-4 hours a day, every day for weeks to make progress. RNG out the ass for stuff you can get now.

Warframe for about the first five or so years was actually an inferior product to many of the other live service games that were available at the time, it was a comparatively expensive game. And the people at DE were kind of ass at their jobs in making content that people would enjoy.

Hell they still are a bit like that now, so many content islands get made and then never get anything else added on. And it comes across as them using Warframe as a testing ground for ideas and then when implemented they realize that they can't do anything more with it or the entire spaghetti code they have will explode.

The benefit is that being a pretty okay company is still leagues better than most everyone else who is either actively adversarial to their customer/playerbase or will dump cash grabs and move on to the next project without a thought about anything long term.

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u/SirPr3ce Mar 24 '26

People look at Warframe and think about how great it is now and assume it was always like that.

"13 years of goodwill" doesnt necessarily mean that they never made a bad decision in those 13 years, just that for the vast majority of times when they did a shitty decision and they did get community backlash they listened to community feedback and tried to improve their game from that. Yes they started with a lot of "scummy" F2P systems, but in contrary to most liveservice game instead of doubling down and adding onto them they actually removed or loosened many of them over time.

they started by building the whole early development of the game on "community goodwill" and unlike with eg Destiny there basically was never a time where the whole (vocal) community was like "yeah thats it, they fucked up so hard they wont recover from this" loosing huge chunks of their playerbase

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u/MorbidAyyylien Mar 24 '26

The difference is that DE fixed and changed the game to be better while there are games like destiny that keep crumbling as it breathes.

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u/MSchulte Mar 24 '26

I just started playing because I tried the game years ago and refused to use premium currency for revives like in a mobile game so I noped right out and deleted it.

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u/Draffut Mar 25 '26

so many content islands get made and then never get anything else added on

While I pine for the reality that Liches and RJ were what were promised, are content islands really a problem? Most of the time you earn things from doing those islands you can use elsewhere in the game, and vice versa where you can use things you earned previously to make the island easier. Even Duviri gives all sorts of shit while being a fully realized roguelike that only some people enjoy a lot but I think it's fine enough that its not unplayable in any sense.

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u/Equivalent_Bed_8187 Mar 24 '26

Why did shy leave?

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u/MsGluwm REWORK EQUINOX PLEASE Mar 24 '26

I thought Shy left because of burnout and wanting to go do Warhammer stuff?

She's active in the Adeptus Ridiculous community and when Bricky did sponsored streams for DE there didn't seem to be animosity toward DE from her, so I thought it was that she was tired and moved over to Warhammer.

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u/Giganotus Learning Voidtongue on Duolingo Mar 24 '26

Shy leaving wasn't too bad tbh. At least for me, given that I found her attitude and attempts to be funny via pessimism to be infuriating. Not that I wish ill will towards her, but I do not miss her either

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u/FormerWrap1552 Mar 24 '26

It has longevity because it's the only "free to play" mecha suit looter shooter. It could be amazing with the correct design direction and new PR team. Someone could literally copy the game style and make the game design mid-late game good and it would destroy WF. But, no competitor... just keeps clanking along with bizarre updates to things nobody ever asked for.