Warframe’s design director just did something most live games never do: he wrote down exactly when the team will nerf something. In a post titled “Why do we nerf?” on his X account today, Digital Extremes’ Pablo laid out three rules, opened with an honest “Nerfing things always sucks,” and admitted up front that the lines are “quite blurry.”
“Nerfing things always sucks. We hate doing it and you hate it when we do it.”
Pablo, Design Director for Warframe, on X
He compared it to giving medicine to his cats: “they get angry, I get scratched, but it would be irresponsible of me to not do it.”
Too dominant, too disruptive, too AFK: the three nerf rules
According to the post, Digital Extremes only nerfs something when it breaks one of these:
- Too dominant: when an item “makes every other choice be wrong,” because the variety of frames, weapons, arcanes and mods is what keeps Warframe fresh.
- Too disruptive: when a playstyle “makes the game less fun for others.” His example is recursive Acid Shells, where one player could clear rooms before the rest of the squad got a chance to play. He calls this one “very tricky” and even names the cases players will throw back at him: “what about Thermal Sunder spam? What about Cyte? What about Influence?”
- Too AFK: anything you can “macro to play the game for you,” like infinite ammo setups where “you could set yourself up in a closet” with “a rock on top of your shooting button and the game would play itself.”
The key line is what is missing from the list. “You will notice none of them are really about balance,” Pablo wrote. “There are tons of ways to do cap damage or kill dozens of enemies with the press of a button, and we don’t nerf those.”
Players got the reasoning in plain language, not a patch note
Warframe has one of the closest relationships between a studio and its players in live games, and this is a good example of why. Instead of a terse patch note, players got the reasoning in plain language, including an admission that “some of you won’t agree with our rules, and even more of you won’t agree with when and where we apply them.” He closed by saying the team does it “because we believe it is our duty to care for the game,” noting Warframe has “been around for 14 years and hope to keep going.”
The post lands after a run of recent nerfs that players have been arguing about, and the reaction on Reddit is split. Some players praised how measured and direct it is. Others pointed out that the rules give players something to hold every future nerf against, and a few said their favorite builds were caught by the “blurry” line.
Pablo speaks out on “Why do we nerf?”
byu/Babydrone inWarframe
Players will get more chances to push back soon: Digital Extremes has two Devstreams for its next update, Warframe: Tau, starting October 30 at 2 p.m. ET.
