Our author Leya spoke with the Community Director and Live-OPS of Warframe during Tennocon 2018. Rebecca Ford discussed the impact of continuous growth on the community.
Warframe is an incredibly diverse game that offers a lot of content. Especially as a new player, one can easily feel overwhelmed by the flood of information, mechanics, and content. Warframe is still growing and changing. At Tennocon 2018, the developers presented their latest content update – and it’s massive:
Warframe builds on its community: One of the strongest pillars of Warframe has always been the community. Every player who joins quickly realizes that others are willing to help and enjoy doing so. They explain, guide you, and travel the path of the Space Ninjas together. A form of co-dependency has developed between the developers and the community.
I was curious how the Warframe community has evolved in Rebecca’s eyes with the constant growth.
We started with 1,000 players – Now we are 40 million
Mein-MMO: I have read some interviews of yours where you explain how you built the Warframe community in the beginning. However, I am curious if you have noticed changes in the community since Warframe has grown so much with Plains of Eidolon?
Rebecca: I would like to say the family has simply grown larger. We started with 1,000 testers in the closed alpha and now we have 40 million players. That’s quite a big difference. I believe the biggest change lies in the comfort level for players to help each other.
What we are trying to achieve, however, requires the community’s help. We work at a high pace and change things quickly. We simply do not always have the time to create the perfect marketing package. We try to communicate innovations to the community as quickly as possible. They listen and pass everything on to the rest of the community.
Our community has thus taken on the role of ambassadors. They also help new players start with Warframe and teach them the many aspects of the game. They assist each other, which also helps us.
We are players ourselves and show it
Mein-MMO: So you mean that it has become a bit more complicated in the community since the growth and that players are no longer as willing to help each other. How do you address this problem?
Rebecca: I would say another problem is that there are currently three platforms (PC, PS4, Xbox One). A common issue is that players ask for help but do not specify which platform they are playing on.
Additionally, there is a conflict of interest since Warframe has so much to offer. There are different worlds, mastery ranks, competitive vs. cooperative, and sometimes you have to meet in the middle. We have observed that some players are inclined to deny help to others if they are not on the same platform.
It is important for these players to realize that we are a large community playing Warframe together. As developers, we need to set the right tone that we help each other.
Mein-MMO: How do you plan to set the right tone?
Rebecca: We have our Devstreams and our Prime-Time. When we find that something is frustrating for the community, we talk about it live. We also want to show that we are players ourselves and can empathize with the community when they are facing a problem. We farm our Prime items ourselves and do this live. If something isn’t working, you can see the frustration on us, and we yell things like “Damn RNG!”.
It’s a game, and when you are confronted with random rolls in a game, sometimes you get angry. But we go through the same frustration as you. Players who watch us in the streams understand that we go through the same things as they do and can empathize with their problems. We do not want an us-versus-them scenario.
Mein-MMO: How do you actually gather feedback and become aware of issues with so many players?
Rebecca: It is definitely true that we do not catch every piece of feedback. We actually miss a lot. However, there are often issues that we have already addressed, and it may have been a while ago. Then players often feel that we are ignoring the problem, and someone from the community jumps in and explains that we might have already talked about it a year ago. There are also always new ideas that we want to discuss, and then players think that we have forgotten the old ideas.
Here too, we rely on the community to sort through the mass of information and relay it back to other players. As long as that is given, the community will understand what we are about: growth, change, and sometimes saying no.
My biggest fear is that we forget who we are
Mein-MMO: As Warframe continues to grow and attract new players, now also with the new Fortuna update, do you ever fear that this sense of family may break apart?
Rebecca: Yes, it can. That is really my biggest fear. My biggest fear with Warframe is that one day we reach a point where we forget where we came from. I fear that we will forget why we do what we do.
As long as we sit on our couch and do our Devstreams and ensure that the heart is where we want it to be, everything is fine. Even though we are bigger now, we want to remain the people whose biggest interest is to do everything for the community. It would surely go wrong if one day we stopped doing that.
The scariest thing we could do would be to stop being ourselves. If we stopped doing our Devstreams. If we stopped writing our network shops. That is a lot of work for us, but I believe that it is also the most important work for us.
I must recognize when and how frustration arises in the community
Mein-MMO: By remaining grounded yourselves, do you aim to save the community before it breaks apart?
Rebecca: Yes! You know, with every online community… Ah, it’s such a cliché to say: “There are toxic people in every online community.” That’s actually a statement I don’t want to make.
I believe that in reality, every community consists of humanity. People have emotions, people are intelligent, people have fears, and they have frustrations. That is normal. When they have these feelings, you will feel them in the community too. Something like the perfect, always happy community does not exist.
For me, it’s important to recognize when these negative feelings arise due to our fault and when players need to identify the source of their problems themselves. I know exactly when we have frustrated our players. I know what is going wrong, and we are working to fix it. But when I see that we have done nothing wrong and everyone is toxic, then I must ask myself what the source is this time.
Then I need to search for the pain points. Perhaps I find out that players cannot trade but have not communicated the bug to us and are just in a bad mood.
We ensure that news is as visible as possible
Mein-MMO: You mentioned that you maintain this communication with players – about things like the Devstreams or your social media. But not everyone is part of that. It’s not that everyone watches these streams or is active on Discord, Twitter, etc. Do you have plans to integrate this kind of community building directly into the game?
Rebecca: We do not have concrete plans. But we ensure that news is presented as visibly as possible in the game. We also have hints in the game that these community channels exist outside.
We have ideas, but we do not have anything concrete that we could present on a silver platter to help see through the chaos of Warframe more easily. At least not yet. Maybe one day.
Mein-MMO: Thank you for the conversation and your openness, Rebecca.
If that’s the biggest concern of the developers, the signs are good
Rebecca appeared refreshingly open-minded and honest in our conversation. That is one of her greatest strengths in community building, which she also imparts to her team. She stands behind Warframe and its players with all her heart.
Recognizing danger, banishing danger: Who wants to grow must be able to identify its problems and also accept them. Not closing oneself off from them. Rebecca openly addressed the growing pains of the community. She knows that the co-dependency with the community is one of the strongest pillars of the game but also carries its dangers.
This interdependence helps to strengthen cohesion. It is based on a relationship of trust. However, the larger a community becomes, the stronger the likelihood of alienation. The coziness, the little cuddle factor eventually falls away.
It’s all the better for Warframe that the Community Director fears disintegration through alienation. Because if the community were to break apart, that could indeed mean the downfall of Warframe. There is no system in place to bring in new players. The community catches them.
This also means that this problem is addressed before it blossoms and can be extinguished before it even sprouts. This makes me optimistic about the future of Warframe.
What do you think about the growing pains of the Warframe community and how do you find the developers’ approach to it?
