Whose Game Is It, Anyway? How Community Relationships Shape Games: Lessons from Warframe

[Music] let's get started it is a long title for this talk whose game is it anyway is the question how community relationships shape games five years of warframe so that's what we're going to talk about today my name is rebecca ford i do [Music] i do live stuff i i paid them all to do that i'm yes oh no i do live ops in community at digital extremes uh i've been there for about seven years and i've worked exclusively on warframe in that time so there's two things on this that you might need to know a bit more about to understand the context of this talk and that is who are digital extremes and what is warframe so geographically digital extremes london ontario canada my beautiful i know we have a multimedia guy here on our team who probably hates this slide but that's an arrow pointing to us our closest u.s city is detroit so that

because of warframe so this is a marketing version of what the game is in my words it's free to play it's co-op it's a third-person action looter shooter and um that's what's you know we've been doing it for five years and i'm standing here today to tell you about that journey and i'll do it kind of structured in the classic agenda style this is sort of uh what we're gonna what we're gonna get through today we're gonna talk about how we operate with warframe as a free-to-play game that's been operating for five years uh we're gonna then we're gonna get to the hits and the misses this is sort of if you take as many swings at bat as we have with all our updates some of them are hits and some are misses and when i say misses this isn't you know disparaging work that we've done a bad job it's just the way the community responded to it and you know we have an amazing group of developers and just sometimes things don't go the way we had hoped and then if there

are questions at the end we can absolutely talk about those so again multimedia cringe but i tried to make my character look like the operation board game guy but it didn't work so anyway um we went from a 750 meg file to 30 gigs that's a lot of growth that's a lot of you know game changes and how did we do it i bolded the only word that matters which is consistency but the rest is you know good note-taking uh it's because we really do update consistently with warframe when you're a warframe player on pc every week you're getting something if you're a warframe player on console likely every month you're getting something and that consistency sort of makes its way in three areas it's either a fix a change an addition one of those all of those some combination of the two or the three rather and um that's uh that's a routine that our players really expect if it's a wednesday on pc and we don't have a hot fix no doubt the players start asking where is it what's happening this week and we tell them we say okay well guess

what we are a bit late with this week's update so expect it tomorrow or you know we tell them oops it's actually going to be friday or sometimes we say actually we can't do anything this week but the communication is uh is always consistent as well and that's with every relationship i think it's the first part that is a takeaway is that the community understands our routine of what we're doing with warframe and when they come to you know come to the forums to see what update we have they they know that we're going to have something for them to read whether it is the update or where you know status of where that is but that routine has um it has visuals it looks like this a weekly update for five years tends to change the way the game looks so in 2012 a player would have come to warframe and seen what's on the left there they saw some blue menus they saw their character in the middle and in 2018 if a player comes to warframe they see you know this is the same screen it serves the same function but they're seeing five years of growth and consistency they're seeing a ui overhaul they're seeing better lighting they're seeing a physical space for their character rather than

sort of floating in space and they see cloth physics which is great um that's a great from a dev lens you know you can see really clearly the improvement that the game has gone through from the hard work of the team but from the community lens because that's what we're talking about today it looks a little more like this it's space barbies now we have we have hot pink and we have purples and we have a very very nice stance going on here and i know it's a bit of a joke to say space barbies but the relationship that this picture shows actually is quite in-depth and it starts with something silly like a bobble head because you know when warframe added spaceships to the game uh players thought a good thing for a spaceship would be a bobble head so dev made it so and players are quite talented and the community can really foster some interesting artistic talent so we started doing user generated content and you know players had that idea we were able to do it so dev made it so we have my i think it's my right foot on my left thigh looking quite graceful because players

wanted more in-depth customization so they said we should be able to mix and match animation stances so dev made it so we i'm holding a gun here that is only accessible if you've played the game for a long time it's a loyalty reward of sorts a login reward system our original login system wasn't particularly rewarding so the players wanted a new one so dev made it so and now you can get weapons through it and the last sort of thing that's hidden behind all my other arrows i guess is a beautiful a beautiful cape you know what's a game without capes but that was something that dev actually wanted they thought having cloth physics and warframe being a little more robust would make it look better and players agreed so dev wanted it players thought hey that's pretty cool so again dev made it so and that's really the simplified version of how our relationship works the players can want something and dev makes it so but of course it's not that simple because there's you know sometimes thousands of players when we were starting and now we have millions of players so when millions of players want something

uh and you only have about 200 devs to make it so what what how can you solve that problem so what we try to do is empower our community team uh to try and make sense of all that to prioritize to learn how to say no or yes to either sides of this equation the beginning or the end and basically with this structure we've been able to have a lot of hits and misses with our community we have tried a lot of different things in warframe's lifetime and uh you know it's been a long and wonderful five years and we will start talking about what the hits and misses have been with the community relationships on these deployments and when i say deployments i truly mean a lot of deployments and a lot of swings over time this is some publicly available data from steem it's our concurrency on steam spy so uh you can see that we started and luckily we've grown and grown and it's going up and it's great and of course there's timestamps of years on this so uh we should talk about those years and we should talk about what happened what

good and bad things happened with the community relationship based on warframe so a bit more structure for you as time is linear i will start in 2012 and make my way over the years leading up to today to really give you a hit give you a miss talk about what we did and then recap it but all warframe stories should probably start at the beginning so to 2012 we go so once upon a time uh digital extremes the company is mid layoffs and warframe really is the last effort for the company to you know not go under so this year we were it's the hit of this year was infrastructure and this is something that isn't you know reflected in the game but it's reflected in the tools we built around the game to do it ourselves because we had no publisher we only had the sort of i'll say desperation to make it work so what did that mean we did a lot of research into things like zendesk having forums having you know a scalable back end which is some some fun stuff to work with for a

free-to-play game how are people going to download the game client how are they going to log in how are they going to authenticate emails so doing all that type of research um it was easy to it was a very accessible game in 2012 which was great if the game didn't have a miss such as bad free to play design so not that it was bad it was just we were making a lot of mistakes and those mistakes uh are scary when you're doing it yourself because to release a free to play game and have some of the first reactions to it be pay to win that's very dangerous and for us uh very early on we really spent a lot of time making mistakes that we didn't know we were making because we had never done free to play before which could be the case for some of you could not be the case but it's scary and it feels really bad to see that your community that was born two months ago is starting to say things about uh the game that you might not have realized uh was negative and it's really easy to pinpoint if you listen to the community what what what the mistakes looked like so another red arrow a different styled one this time this pointing at this gold icon which

our community calls potatoes which in early 2012 miss warframe signified pay to win it signified having access to power levels through real money and that was bad and that's not a good way to start your free to play journey so what did we do it's quite misleadingly simple in fact this year we just listened and changed very quickly so we're sitting at forums that of course we did not invent forms using software for support that of course we did not invent but we used it with the desperation of a company that was on its last legs to really do what we said we wanted to do and that was to make fair free to play and what we found was that relying on the community to decide what isn't isn't fair was a really important part of early warframe and we knew from you know as we learned from the error of our ways which had no malice behind them we were just simply we didn't know um we knew that we wanted fair free to play to be a part of warframe's dna

which leads us to the next year after 2012 which is 2013 which is a year that uh was really interesting for warframe we started doing some real-time communication with our communities that did change the relationship and the first hit of this year isn't an in-game thing yet again it's the way we talked about our game which was with dev streams so dev streams are something we started in 2013 we've been doing them for five years now bi-weekly this is a thumbnail from almost every stream we've done uh get all the devs on there sometimes the regular crew sometimes not and what we did was we just talked about the game we talked about what's changing and we used it as a scalable way to answer questions from our community if you have 200 forum posts asking the same question you can answer one and hope your answer spreads or you can see that there's clearly a need for a broader more scalable communication in which case ta-da we did devstream so we do them on twitch it's one of the many tools we use for community uh including you know you have your forms you have reddit you have

of course dev streams the wikia is good for us as well as you know your web tools that you can sort of customize for blogs and uh what it may be but these have been great and uh you know five years going with them however in the actual game sense a hit this year for the community was clans so this is an explicit social structure in warframe this is someone coming into warframe doing their missions but then staying in warframe because their clan mates are there and they're staying in warframe because they get to build this space treehouse dojo that is theirs and theirs alone and that's really great great for the social and relationship experience between clans but statistically we've found that the sooner someone's in a clan the actual the longer they play warframe the more they engage with so it's good for retention as well and it's actually also really interesting from a relationship point of view because clans have identities you know if you've been in a clan that's pvp focused or perhaps you know customization focused competitive it gives people on the

inside a way to access a member of that clan perhaps the leader of it and get really concise information about players with that goal set for the game so they're really useful if you can get close with the clan members sometimes they don't want to get close to you but that's totally fine you just got to make it work so um yes now the miss this is always the fun part because things go wrong this is a fun comic from penny arcade you know you got your player their warframe landing in and he looks over at his co-op buddy and he's all decked out in cosmetics because of course uh in free to play you'll often find cosmetics are a way to monetize and we have done that with great success but it's not always been a consistent success because early warframe stats had cosmetics and if you're buying something and it changes the way you play that's also dangerous for free to play so we stopped doing that in 2013. we said no more stats on cosmetics but the eternal war had only begun in that line of work because here i am in

2018 with a screenshot of my character with a helmet that has stats on it so in 2013 we got rid of stats on cosmetics but in 2018 i still have the item so how can that be how can these things co-exist and the answer is community relationships are complicated so this is when your eyes may begin to lose focus because it's a lot of words on a slide but it is a complicated history and that's sort of the the essence of change and community growth is that there usually is a history so in 2012 and 2013 our nice looking helmets had stats on them that dev decided but in 2013 we saw that the community didn't want that because they didn't want to have to spend money on things that changed the way they looked so we said okay no more stats but guess what anyone that had that item you're grandfathered in because you can't take away a loyal player's investment so then 2014 rolls around and those loyal players wanted to take off those stats so we added a tool for them to do that and then 2015 rolls around and you know what what if we put stats back on cosmetics but players could choose their own stats

so we did that and now it's 2018 and literally two weeks ago cosmetics don't have stats anymore so um if that's making your head explode um that's sort of the point uh community relationships are complicated and just a little slice of the work we do even it's something as simple as stats and cosmetics it has history and the history always in our case at least we try to respect the player investment up until that point so a loyal player that liked the stats on cosmetics they should get to keep them even though we're changing the way the system works um so yeah it can that's sort of 2013's miss that carries on to the eternal war to this day but what did we do in the same way that goku can take the energy of people and turn it into something useful on the community team we sort of tried to do the same thing it's you really just need to focus on the consistency across the players messages to you to make sure that what you're taking in and putting back out is useful and you know nothing's better than a spirit bomb sometimes but um great recapping that real quick

in 2013 what we found was for this relationship with our warframe players we had to grow our channels to communicate and we had to use them to talk about change we don't just sit on a dev stream and say here's a new thing you can buy in two months it's hey guess what this change is coming again and you know you see twitch chat explode with sometimes negativity but that's okay because you're there and you're gonna deal with it on the spot um great 2014 rolls around as you would expect and for the game this year things went a little rapidly crazy with change we're we're on um we're on a year where we're changing combat we're changing visuals and we're actually adding story to our little looter shooter so in you know 2014 we have our hit i'm not going to play the sound on this or will i because i don't have a choice okay i'll talk over it but this is melee 2.0 so melee 2.0 comes around it allows a player to equip their melee weapon and do combos they can block incoming fire and they uh they get to equip that sword

and that sword alone up until this point players had only been able to quick melee so their swords were sheathed and they could only pull them out quickly and maybe do a charge attack but that was it and we redid our melee system because the players wanted us to they were growing a collection of melee weapons that they felt were too similar and they thought it was about time that we redid that system so if you've been making a game for two years at this point and you hear it's time to redo systems well get you better get started if you're us so we we didn't just redo it we redid it sort of bi-weekly reports to our community we showed our team our community rather through the dev streams like here's a gray box of what i was working on two minutes ago and this is what it's probably going to look like because it allowed us to and then one on the other that's actually a really cool gift but that one is a newer melee thing that's coming because we're still working on this even in 2014 introducing the system was one thing but players still wanted more so we continued to revisit it to this day and that was a massive change for the

game because we added so much more to the system that players were asking for in the effect of i want to go out there by with my own sword like a ninja instead of always having to have a gun with me and we did it and we showed them the progress so amiss the words grind frames sometimes come to mind for people with warframe and it's not you know i play all the time and this is this is the world we live in but it's easy for us to sometimes contribute to that narrative if we're not careful and we're never malicious about anything but it's just really hard to balance resources in a free-to-play game because the way players engage freely with your game they have to earn their gear and they get to go collect resources and this particular resource you know it looks quite innocuous at a glance it's nice and crystally but it's actually called oxium and it's something we added to the game just to give players something else to go after to build the new content we were making because we're adding and in order to have people start all from the same place to get that gear everyone gets a new resource to go after

to do it and sometimes we miss the mark on balancing that and understanding um that a player doesn't maybe doesn't want to spend six hours doing the same thing over and over again or maybe they're okay with it if the gameplay is a little different but ultimately oxime represents sort of the beginning of the difficulties we've had with resource balancing and what's really interesting statistically is when the community notices uh which you know they notice the moments that something like this happens they keep track of it and there's often a point from the community where they'll say something like you guys must be raking in the platinum because you made this so hard to get and that's actually not true a lot of the data that we've looked into for this is if you look at something that has a you know high grind cost it doesn't actually sell any better than the things that are easier to make it's so we're not really benefiting from it at all all it's doing is giving the community um points of basically pain points to say this doesn't feel good and you shouldn't do this so you always need to think about that before you release something but if you're releasing an economy from

scratch you know you you do your best but it doesn't always go right so what did we do this year in many ways we just took it all in uh the great things that were coming from melee 2.0 were extremely positive feedback engagement with the melee system players were very satisfied with that but at the same time um we were taking in all the feedback about what warframe what players were saying warframe was becoming which was grind frame which has a negative connotation but ultimately um the way of the game is to get your resources so it's tricky so you just take it in and in 2014 we learned that change is one thing overhauling is another so don't just change of course you should overhaul and when the community does start to weigh in on grind tolerance take note so on our team we were taking note of how what was the difference between someone saying oh i can't get this now or the the more the more voices added to that uh particular line of feedback all right another year here we go 2015. this was a really interesting year for

warframe um we added our first cinematic quest this year as well as our first region locked content which simply put we added a really good surprise this year and a really bad surprise so the good surprise was the second dream and i do have a little video on this because of course the word community relationships were heavily in my title and having a good surprise for a player at this point who had been playing for three years the way they reacted to us surprising them with content that told an emotional story because up until this point you know you're going into different maps you're shooting you're getting your loot your character starting to feel really really awesome but there's no there's no emotional weight to what you're doing uh to the degree of what we unleashed this year with the second dream so i'll quickly play this video and it's just a collection well you'll see i'll shut up [Music] wow oh my god that looks

my sick that is mind fuckingly amazing just incredible oh what oh my god that's so cool oh you gotta be kidding me wow this is so cool this was unbelievably amazing oh my god i enjoyed that more than anything i've ever enjoyed in warframe right so if you are in a three-year relationship with your community and for the first time ever you get a reaction like that it feels great and the reason we were able to do it is because we surprised them so on the one hand you have these dev streams and you're showing the gray boxes of your melee animations you're showing you know just crazy things happening in the game that they expect and then to deliver the unexpected to that loyal player base yielded a reaction like that which for the relationship with the community really expressed um a turning point in

not only did they want us not they didn't just want the entertainment of warframe space ninjas they now wanted more story and they wanted to relive this moment again so we've been trying to do that year after year it's not easy but we'll get there so that's a good surprise but a bad surprise uh this picture again quite innocuous without context but this is umbra this is uh when 2015 hit warframe got a deal to launch in china and to hype it up we had added region exclusive content to that build and the global player base saw it and said when do we get that and we didn't have an answer because we didn't know so the you know everyone's google translating the chinese press release i'm reading them saying is this true what's going on here because we were we had a bad surprise in many ways and we weren't prepared to communicate this information to our loyal players who wanted nothing more than to know when they were getting this which by the way they still haven't gotten and even last year when we announced warframe's open world

on live television the most used words in chat were umbra because they had waited so long and even though we just minorly teased umbra last year that's what the twitch chat um really grabbed on to so you can see on the left-hand side so that's a bad surprise and um you know in height like there's always hindsight with community relationships i wish we had communicated differently i wish we had known about it in advance but that doesn't you know you can't you can't that'll never work you can never go back and redo something in a community relationship so we what did we do well we did two things on the one hand um it was you know with the dawn of streaming and youtubing i'm sure everyone sees how big that's getting having the players broadcast themselves playing our content allowed us to capture the moments that really you know the surprise and delight of doing a warframe quest for the first time and on the other hand uh you know we had to try and put out a lot of fires with umbra that we actually continue to do to this day and you know like what can you do bad surprises linger and but there's a thirst for it now which is kind of interesting to

observe but either way 2015 was all about taking risks and really planning to surprise our loyal players with the good surprises but not bad ones but what can you do if a bad surprise comes out because usually you're caught in the crossfire as well so on the heels of that inspiring reaction video about the second dream 2016 rolls around and the way that um the players reacted to the second dream was starting to sort of deteriorate the desperation dna we were having as a company because we really felt like we were on to something because when your game you've been working on for three years starts to elicit a response like that it really feels like okay we're doing this now let's let's let's let's see what we can do with this so of course what best way to take a a successful moment than to not just turn around and look back and say what did we leave behind along the way so 2016's hit was a little bit of nostalgia up until this point the game had continued to change grow i don't know exactly what our file size was in 2016 but you know point a was 750 and point b today is 30 so we're talking somewhere around 20

gigs probably and that's a lot of change in additions so we decided to redo our navigation system for about the fourth time this year because the players wanted us to we had given them this in 2016 and a bit earlier which was a console friendly we thought a user-friendly way to navigate our game you know what planet you're going to you pick your mission tile but it turns out the players didn't like it and had been telling us for a long time and not only that it actually was worse for retention statistically so with all great things go back to some nostalgic routes and return the star chart to its node and line form which was something the players had really wanted since we abandoned it for the tile system and this brought even though this was a bit of a bumpy launch as as it can happen the players saw our commitment to the past warframe vision and felt that even though we had changed the story in the year prior the roots were still there especially in the visuals access points to all things warframe every planet and every mission was

starting to look a little more uh like it used to and a miss this year so you know with every hit comes a miss this is something that um again that's a brief video that it was the most fun i think a lot of people at de had developing it which has you know that doesn't mean the players so let's take a look who have refused the blood of the conclaves i call to you to join us in honor bound tradition team aurora at the ready [Music] okay so we were at pax and we were coming off the heels of the second dream and we showed that video and we were all grinning because we're like yes players are going to love this and because we love you know you hear the chanting in the video that's the devs in the theater like having a great time we were adding

a sport to warframe because warframe is not a competitive game it's cooperative so surely the way to do competition is with a sport and it was just silent the reaction at pax east and it you know we had to release it of course and we still like even i still love it and i just know that even though we loved making it it did not resonate with our player base at all and you kind of had to acknowledge that and you had to look at it and look at the way it released and say okay i guess i guess we're not updating that content type anymore even though we had a lot of fun making it um which was sort of like what did we do right well in the same way that like we tried and i honestly the team worked so hard on surprising our players with different things and i i wouldn't have not done it ever because it was just so fun but the players understood that we were taking risks and trying and they're not going to be mad about your mom embarrassing you you know it's fine and we also found that this year 2016 we were really hitting our stride on our platform launches so not we're not just

a pc game anymore we're also on playstation 4 and xbox so things are starting to get a little uh muddy about who's getting what information so because we eat a lot of domino's pizza we thought we should do a pizza tracker for our builds so we built um because you know you get your pizza george is making it and tracy's bringing it to you so on our website we built a sort of that version for our platforms so on pc uh there's really only two states in development and live but on consoles you have development cert and live and these always point to a human source of information so one of our community members on that team makes a thread says hey everyone guess what the build's in the oven and it's going to have this this and this and we'll let you know when it's insert and we use this we just made this little widget it points to you know different statuses and different links for you to always based on our forms just to have these conversations with your players about where their builds are and of course if you have a complex multi-platform game with no build parity you might want something like this which is our case

so yeah 2016 what we learned that year was never stop changing and overhauling and as a group of devs who have at this point four years of lessons the fun you have developing something might not resonate with your players and maybe you should move on quickly from that if that's the case and uh so we did even though you know i don't think i've played lunarone like a year but i'm going to now because i got nostalgic which apparently was a lesson from 2015 so oh no actually 2016 sorry anywho uh so 2017 this is last year um and this was a year for warframe when we talk a literal community relationship we had one of the worst and best moments in the same year so i'm going to start with the mist this year and then i'll talk about the hit so whatever structure i gave the past years just not anymore um the miss so de versus data mining so for all these years now we had really turned a blind eye to the data mining side of warframe while we had done things under the hood um you know to make sure that we weren't leaking content that we weren't ready to

announce or anything we just really hadn't acknowledged it i suppose but when we literally ask the question whose game is it anyway if someone has a free game on their pc is it their is it within their rights to you know go through the files and start looking at things and you know that's that's the the community's vision of it so we're not one to say okay stop doing that unless it gets ugly and this year it got ugly we were seeing um some things happening that remember that umbra i was talking about that isn't in the global build it was in the global build somehow because somehow some people had hacked it and added it in and we were able to conclude uh where it was coming from and what the source of it was so we had to take action and it was in that time that the players had seen an action from us that they felt was the worst thing we had ever done by going after data mining we had become the bad guy because we were now trying to hide things and be any transparency that they felt data mine offer offered them as a community to see like oh de screwed up a drop rate or

whatever it may be had vanished by us taking action so it was really tricky because we like of course we would have handled it differently now and we just at the time were really scared because we didn't want things leaking because we again we were wanting to surprise and delight our community again with something like the second dream and that was the hit of this year which was open world so you have your sort of data mining scandal and then all of a sudden all eyes are on us because we have a big announcement for our community we want to tell them we have something really exciting for you guys and that was open world this was a day in warframe's history where we walked through a set of doors and showed the community what we were sort of being so secretive about and that was this this was the the plains of idol on announcement which we did live in front of our audience and it was wonderful and this was a really great moment for warframe and the community because they saw us do something that they and we had said was impossible and our procedural game had gone from that

thanks to the developers to now open world and that was a really special moment in the relationship because it was that surprise and delight without it even being released yet which was quite exciting and you know what did we do well we looked and we said wow people really liked that you know you released this most hype update in warframe's history and we took a look at it and we saw that it had put warframe in a position it had never reached before and it of course reinforces the you know ambition to do things like that of course leading into this year as well and that was a really really really exciting time for us because we had a community that was overwhelmed with support for the idea that we were going to do that but so of course you're excited and want to keep that alive but when it when i go back to data mining just now i'm just going to tell you what we did about that because data mining is really tricky and we're free to play game we have drop rates so what did we do in that situation when that happened we built a drop site repository uh because we saw

the most the most feedback on the uh the player's point of view about us going after dana myers was that we're not being honest anymore and we felt that the best way to be honest was to give them the info directly for what they were looking for so now the community team has a new routine every update thanks to some tools that dev built us that we basically run a script of every drop table in the game and output it to a web page and upload it to our web server and we update it anytime our drop tables get touched so we we did it because we recognized that the community wanted that information and they were getting it but if we could provide it ourselves you know we would show them that we didn't go after data mining for that reason it was a broader issue with hacking and this website you know even i use it all the time because it allows people just to get information about warframe more quickly and that's someone that's engaged in your game and they want to know more and you know it's very rare for someone to go which is actually quite surprising people don't go on this website and look at it

and you know send screenshots to our inbox about how rare something is because that's not what we want to do you know we have rarities of course but we're not in it to um to look to trick anyone into a rarity that they may or may not have expected so yeah this website is an interesting thing we only added it last year it starts with a disclaimer about you know we should we don't even know if we should be doing this but you guys want it so here we go and yeah but there's some people in the room that have helped build this so i can see them now thank you it's been great it's been great for the community relationship which i can of course succinctly recap in sort of the advice that if you become the enemy in a relationship work on repairing it with more than words uh which is what that website represents as an action because you can always say don't worry we're not gonna do x y or z but if you show a plan to address the community concerns it it is great for the community relationship and of course if you're years into your game like we are at this point you should definitely do things that

were once impossible so open world warframe for example which has been fun so you know whose game is it anyway that is the question that we are trying to answer and the best way i can talk about that in the context of warframe is that it's shared we've added so much to the game based on what the community has wanted and the community has seen that our ability to add these things is shaping morphing into what it is today and we you know you try and do it in that the community wants something the devs are the only ones that can do it so how do you make how do you reconcile that and that's where we stand in the middle with the community team and after five years what we've really tried to view in this relationship we have is that the players really are citizens uh when i was talking about dev streams you probably have been watching perhaps or put on devstreams of your own that are a bit political and title something like state of the game or other things that sound just a bit more hmm this is more than just a game because really you're you're dealing with a group of people your

player base that that have a voice and bring their loyalty to your game and their interest and their passion and they should be represented in the same way you know that other other governments work not that we're a government but you know citizens not government totally different words uh also so we also have um tried to have the community team have a seat at the dev table after these five years just making sure that um you know in 2014 if we had a resource problem maybe the next time we're introducing a new resource the community team knows about it and we're looking and we're we're trying not to repeat the the issues we had done in the past because really all it has been about is learning from our mistakes as early as 2012 when we weren't doing free to play right and that's continued year over year and with dev streams and you know whatever else we do in that capacity we've found that transparency is is painful but crucial and it's good to humanize and admit mistakes we find sitting down on the devstream couch or whatever

setting that is appropriate at the time to admit a mistake on camera is really humbling and it really shows the players that you are capable of making mistakes because one thing that happens and you often hear fan language is you know i have faith in this developer and when you get that sort of faith-based belief in a developer system it's dangerous because mistakes are frequent they are you know we try to make it clear it's not out of malice because that's the most dangerous part of a relationship is if they feel the decisions you've made are out of malice which we try very regularly to reinforce they're not but um i uh did that quickly because it's the last presentation at gdc perhaps for some of you so that is it so i have 40 minutes of talk for you guys so uh but [Applause] i shouldn't have talked over the videos they could have just run but if you do have any questions now would be a good

time to line up at either microphone side and if not that's totally cool too thank you very much you know you're talking a lot in the beginning about how the players ask for something and so the devs make it so and i was wondering how do you sometimes it seems like that might not be good for the game like maybe the players don't know what's best or maybe there's a vocal minority that isn't really speaking for the larger player base i was wondering how you you tackle those kind of concerns right so what we try to do is take the what the players want and make sure it's actually a scaled want so a dev stream for us is a really good example because when we generate questions for it we look to see what the actual most used words are and then if we see a high frequency of the same request we address it on air and then we literally on air say yes or no sometimes and try if we think it's bad for the game we'll say no sometimes we'll say

why and if we think it's good for the game we sort of build a wish list of things that are good good good victories to add to the game for the community and what's surprising about that in regards to you know players wanting things is they typically do want realistic things like there are things that you can of course say no to you know like turn warframe into first person or do something like that which we do say no to but generally if a player is at the point in this community to ask for something they they ask it and they typically they explain why they want it which allows us to you know address it more on the nose and the scheme of warframe's design in future thank you hello hi um have you ever had to tackle pockets of toxicity in your community either community to each other or community to dev uh yes so toxicity in the community is i think you know many games face it and we have had to deal with it time over time and we really look at

you know why it's happening and a lot of what we found in dealing with it you know basic moderation is really helpful of course you can read out um you know with all your tools get someone out of that swearing doing this doing that but if there's you know for example a clan that's particularly toxic that's harder to deal with because there's a lot more of the toxic individuals and we try to make sure that we're as strict with our code as conduct as possible so if we can clearly see like you've violated this you're out there's no disputing it but sometimes you know pitchforks come out right and toxicity can spread especially if it becomes an us versus them scenario and i always just try and work with that on our team as succinctly as possible in using our guidelines to work with it thank you very much hello hi are there any uh you talk a lot about engaging with the community in general are there particular platforms or communities that you uh find easier to use or or better for reaching a large audience or particular audience yes i i'm a really big so in terms of

tools to engage with our community i do think dev streams have worked out really well for that because we've just built this sort of five-year familial bond about what we're working on you know warframe is going to always change and grow so why not use a tool that's not super polished in our case but really honest about what we're doing and that one again has been huge i would say right now it's really nice to you know rely on discord a bit more and the forum our official forums are sort of like the library of alexandria they house everything we've ever done and they're not the best for conversing so you have to sort of pick your what your goal is for a particular engagement and use something more accommodating to that which discord's great conversations of course awesome thank you sweet hello hi um oh sorry hi it's uh most of the talk was about um the early years until up until 2017. um i'm just curious what's what are the challenges so far

this year and what's warframe like in 2018 with the community so 2018 has been actually really interesting because we haven't released actually tuesday of this week marked the release of new content we hadn't added a single weapon or warframe this whole year so far up until tuesday so the year has been one of you know i was talking about change and nostalgia in 2016. it's heavily been on that for the first part of the year we've gone and looked at every weapon we've released in the primary and the secondary capacity and rebalanced them so the devs have been working hard on basically doing spring cleaning but more winter cleaning for all the games content rather than adding a new gun or something like that so it's really been an exercise in revision and it's interesting to see how the communities responded because again they're used to consistency but the consistency this year the weekly updates have been cleanups rather than here's your brand new xyz so thanks and we told them that we said hey you're not getting new stuff this year you might have noticed and they were okay with it so

hello hi um so a company i worked at previously like the community definitely did not have a favorable view of us so frequently when we released even a positive announcement uh it would get twisted around and they so i was just curious uh what sort of like language was most twisted against you and how did you reframe your wording of it um the language is we are i feel like one it's not a tactic it's just a thing that's happened in terms of language we've used we talk so much on devstreams it's really hard to pinpoint the bad things we've said because we talked so much and they can't get mad about that one like oh we're listening because we say it we say it in so many different ways all the time but when it comes to the community you know picking a pit like a moment to think that de is doing a bad job of something and therefore what is coming should not be celebrated um it's typically in the growth of the game and the the idea of neglect right so if a player sees we're adding

uh something new they'll say that's great but what about all the other stuff you've left behind and they often criticize any uh any new things as bad because other things are being abandoned so for example when we added lunaro you could imagine that the pve players that wanted endgame were like what like why are you working on this and not that and you know there's all like the false dichotomy ways to talk about it but we just we try and address that like we we see the the bubbling um discontent and just say well that's actually not true because here's work that's also happening at the same time but sometimes you might not have that luxury because you've become the enemy so greatly like we had with the data mining situation and we you just don't give up like i just we just don't stop trying is the best way i could say that thank you so i was curious how early do you guys talk about the things you're like working on so like for our game uh we have a really hard balance between like we want to talk about stuff early and let people know we're thinking about the things they're concerned about

but if it's too early we don't know exactly what we're gonna do yet and then we're taking things away from them or breaking our promises when we change our mind and if it's too late then we're just being told that we're ignoring them but we're not so how do you find that balance so the the issue of showing something and never shipping it is a very frequent one for us i believe in i don't want to simplify this but if you made a list of stuff we've shown on devstreams versus stuff we shipped they'd probably be even um because we just show whips all the time and we make it clear that that's what's happening so if something's really close to being a shipped item we demo it a bit more confidently i would say whereas if something's like here's some concept art that could be a new faction in a year we kind of say that because we know our own work pace and we know that no matter what it's going to happen for us if we release something people expect it to come out so we're just we try very hard to emphasize the actual progress of what it is we're

showing um and we just want to show it like even if it is a year away we typically do show it just because we want to so it's at your call of course and it is a struggle and it's whether or not you're prepared to lower expectations about things that you yourself have doubt about like it'll be a time on a stream where someone's really talking optimistically about something and i'm like i don't even think i've seen work started on that and i'll say that out loud just to make sure players see that this is messy because things aren't easy all the time so does like the community now have like an expectation that like a lot of that stuff could not be that way and they sort of accept it now yep it's amazing the power of their own wisdom about how we operate at this point uh because they are able to set their own expectations sort of as a group which is nice cool thank you yes hello yeah sorry i just wondering as you have said you release an version later in china right yes when you're referring to the community you referring to the global community or

different country community as i know some players in some different countries they have different or conflict opinions or needs to the same released version so do you have any shared experience about the conflict openings it is tricky with conflicting regions the only true region restrictions are mainly in china for the that build and then the rest of the world is considered global and it's been uh in that respect there have been conflicting opinions about stuff we've released the way the community responds to it overall and it's always just a matter of luckily we have an in-house team that's able to help with region-specific issues um they do mainly do support but they also can help with community stuff and they bring that to our attention and if it's a developer issue we try and resolve it like if we accidentally released something that looked uh not appropriate for a specific culture we'll remedy that based on the advice of those region-specific communities well

okay thank you hi um yeah what the uh data mining stuff that you were talking about when you released the tool and when you released the plains of eidolon um did you see a large reduction in people complaining about not being able to data mine or are there still people complaining about that uh it still happens so we didn't stop it we just tried to stop it which i think is i think they call that the streisand effect or something like if you try to stop something it actually makes it worse so it's just what we what had happened was umber had gotten into the global build and we had to address that situation so with the plains of eidolon launching we were maybe made sure that the tool could accommodate the new reward structure style so we needed dev bandwidth to update the tool to make it read this new world and at the time players you know look to that site and they actually now build i think one form a former data miner builds their own tool based off of our data now just to make it more readable because it's just an html table and you know but

now it actually is the source of a lot of other player tools that are just built on it which has been really wonderful to see it being used in still a player-owned way because they of course make their own websites and everything off of it which is nice thank you hello sir do you find that um console and pc communities have different wants and if so how do you address priorities of that so we have specific teams for each of the platforms which is great but the pipeline is always pc first then console and what's happened on console is when i said region locked content that's one thing because no one can have it but there's also console specific content which is more it's received fine like if a console player has their version of skins players don't mind um xbox has their version of skins it's okay and same with pc and the way that they speak of the game and their needs is typically the most common it comes down to ui usability and working on having an experience that is more controller friendly

and that always is that's essentially been something we've had to work on since the day we launched on consoles and players continue to say it's not not quite good enough so we still try thanks hello uh so i was just in regards to uh players being vocal or less vocal um how do you deal with i guess the comfort level of certain players just commenting on their opinions of various builds because some players might be a little more vocal and more uh confident in talking about the content they want or their opinions on updates whereas other players might be a little bit more less vocal about it for a variety of reasons maybe just accessibility well there's different ways you can get broad communic like broad player communication or specific not everyone wants to write a long form forum post some people just want to click a vote on a poll some people just wanna but just by showing up they're showing they're interested right if we do a dev stream on a certain topic if the viewership is quite large we know

that there's maybe some players that aren't talking to us about that that are still interested in it so we just gauge based on traffic and you try and use you know social media with the pull features and everything that's a good way to get you know you never want to commit a poll to design gospel but it can happen and you just have to make sure that whatever tools you've built and you own are being used frequently and be aware that players that may not want to use those tools like we don't have an official discord but we're on discord and we've found that there's a lot of value there and people behave differently and more themselves there perhaps than on an official forum so just acknowledging that the tool changes the you know attracts different types of players thank you and i totally forgot to say uh turn off your phones and i just realized that and also that you can rate the talk after so i just realized now sorry hi uh i was wondering how you guys handled international communities um our game for example i think 60 of our player base is chinese and russian

we're all english speakers on the dev team primarily so we don't have a great way of communicating with them i was wondering if you guys had a second team in those regions or how you handled smaller regions that you can't really communicate with but have very different and special feedback or we're all in-house the community team is a seven-person english-speaking team at this point in time but we also have an in-house support team which is run by a gentleman sitting here that has all the languages that we support and we're able to use them as a lightning rod for really specific issues in that community with warframe's growth as it is today i expect that we will start trying to have dedicated community people in our bigger regions like russia but we don't have that right now and we just try our best with the resources we have to make sure the main developer updates get translated and ultimately we could be doing a better job of including those communities but we still haven't figured it out very well so it sounds like we're in the same boat okay thank you welcome

all right i think that's it hello hello uh could you reflect a little bit on the twitch event that you had in the fall alongside playing survival on and because it obviously exploded um it also exploded your servers so the success of that how you would do it differently would you do it differently again right so the twitch event we had so twitch is exploding as we all know and there's something called twitch drops which allows you to have the viewers of your game get rewarded with items in games simply for watching so we launched a twitch drop campaign with the launch of our open world update to reward people watching warframe streamers and if you get free loot in warframe you're going to show up so we launched it at such a scale that it did bring our servers down the first day and it did expose a vector of exploit for people to have six windows open and watch our stream and there was a drop table that had 30 items in it and they were getting

multiples and i wouldn't have done it differently because it was so ins well i'm sure everyone on the teams like never again but um and it was it actually created two levels of issues for us obviously technical but there was also the court of public opinion that we had paid for view bots which simply wasn't true people just didn't understand the draw of free warframe loot of course and the streamers were having fun with it they were gamifying it a bit and we have refined the tools since then it is no longer exploitable it's a lot less crazy in the campaigns we do we still use it to this day just at a much more sane level and i think it's worth looking into if you have a a game that on twitch drops that could utilize the system because it is pretty cool hi great talk um you talked about a seat at the development table with the community team can you talk in a little bit more detail are you just collaborating with leaders or individual contributors small teams big teams and just how that all coordinates so slack has made it really easy to sort of have a virtual seat at

every table so we always try and include a community team member in the features channels and the community team at warframe is also also works on live ops so when deployments go out and when people are debating whether or not to include something in a deployment we are involved in that so in many ways slack is sort of the simple answer to that and i think the dev team is okay with it because it's kind of annoying to be the person in the room that's like well the players aren't gonna like that so don't do it but it's just the nature of our relationship with our community that we need that you need that temperature check of grind tolerance for example or you know well there's not really a lot of pvp players right now and it goes both ways if we know that dev is really focused on doing something change-wise we need to prepare the community materials so having a seat at the table isn't just about being the fun police it's about being the okay this is really good information to start working on like we removed a content system from the game known as trials because there was a rapid exchange that you know we just couldn't support it

anymore and the devs really knew that it just was not being given the love they wanted so we from that moment had like to get ready to break that news to the community so and just a quick follow-up did you find that it was a sort of development cultural evolution at your studio when you were getting involved this way um i think the so the early early early warframe it was community i was there on the community team and there was like eight developers so we were all in it together from the start so it was yeah so before all that we had been doing publisher stuff work for hire we never had a community team so it was there at the foundation of all this so it wasn't added later it's been there the whole time which may not be the case for everyone great thank you you're welcome all right i think that's it thanks everyone thank you so much