Warframe’s creative director Rebecca Ford opened today’s Devstream 198 by naming the thing the community has been fighting about for ten days: the Riven and Kuva changes. Her answer was not a reversal. It was a request. “Don’t be cruel to each other or to the DE team,” she said. “We try for home runs and sometimes we strike out, take breaks from Warframe.”
The stream, the first of two for the December Tau update, aired at 2 p.m. ET on October 30 with Ford, CEO Steve Sinclair, community director Megan Everett and design director Pablo on camera. The community-facing segment was clipped and posted to Reddit by the Warframe community, and the quotes below are taken from that clip.
“Can any Warframe decision be final?” Ford asks after the Riven backlash
Ford framed the past week and a half as a pattern Digital Extremes keeps running into. “Debates about Rivens, Kuva, all these things, it kind of creates a really uncomfortable paradox of can any Warframe decision be final?” she said. “Any decision we make, is it allowed to be final?”
She called the back-and-forth “the will they, won’t they, why not loop” and said it “is a big health toll on the community.” The Riven conversation, in her words, is “a pretty good case study” of how it goes: “okay, well, you didn’t do anything with Rivens for 10 years and suddenly you’re doing all these changes, but now you’re ignoring Kuva sources.”
Her answer to the Kuva question was a wait, not a fix. “The truth is, you kind of just need to wait for what happens next. We’re gonna show up, we’re gonna figure it out.”
“We keep working on our updates. We are always here for the good and the bad. We try for home runs and sometimes we strike out, take breaks from Warframe. Figuring things out takes time, resources and planning on our side, but we do our best.”
Rebecca Ford, Creative Director, Warframe, on Devstream 198
The backlash started with a 75% ammo cap and the end of Riven Disposition
The heat traces back to a Dev Workshop published on October 20, which Digital Extremes turned into Hotfix 44.1.3 two days later. Two changes landed at once:
- Ammo Efficiency is capped at 75%. Only one shot in four now consumes ammo, no matter how many sources you stack. Effects that intentionally gave 100% Ammo Efficiency, like Void Relic cracking buffs, were reworded to grant Infinite Ammo instead. The studio’s stated concern is “the possibility for automated gameplay,” and it wants infinite ammo to be “a limited buff you experience occasionally in-mission, not a guaranteed part of your build.”
- The Riven Disposition system is retired. Every Riven now uses a single multiplier equal to the old 1.2 Disposition value, so a weapon’s popularity no longer decides how strong its Riven is.
Everyone who logs in before December 31 gets a built Forma and 100,000 Kuva as an “Arsenal Retuning” inbox, and players who had already installed a Riven Splicer get a second Splicer and another 100,000 Kuva. The Workshop thread on Reddit passed 1,000 comments, with the top reply calling the Disposition change “massive, but I really think it’s for the best” and much of the rest arguing over which builds got caught in the cap.
Pablo had already tried to get ahead of this. A week before the Devstream he posted his three rules for when Warframe nerfs something, with infinite ammo builds as his example of “too AFK.”
Sinclair: “the bargain is that you’re not gonna be cruel about it”
Sinclair, who was Warframe’s creative director before becoming Digital Extremes’ CEO, backed Ford up and put the relationship in plain terms. “We always try to acknowledge the sentiment, even if it’s not in our favor,” he said. “We’re always making sure that we are taking your feedback seriously. And the bargain is that you’re not gonna be cruel about it.”
He added that “the people on the other side of the conversation are devs” who “do have intelligence and emotions,” said he is “very proud of the positive community Warframe has,” and offered an exit for anyone who can’t keep it civil: “take a break if you can’t… sometimes you just need to step away or change the channel for yourself.” His suggestion for the channel change was the studio’s other game. “Go play some Soulframe, all right?”
He closed the segment on intent rather than policy. “We’re on the same team and our goal obviously is to entertain you guys and to give you something that feels valuable in your life and worth your time, and if you pay, worth your money.”
The dog name poll is “for fun, it’s for charity,” and Sinclair joked a 10 Platinum rename would end it
Ford’s second example of how the “cruelty can manifest” was smaller and stranger: the vote to name the hound that revives Brysko, the detective-themed Warframe coming with Tau. The poll runs on the official forums with ten shortlisted names, and the race has come down to Laika, after the Soviet space dog, and Basker, a nod to a famous fictional detective’s case. One snapshot posted to Reddit had Laika at 4,280 votes to Basker’s 3,400, and the argument over which fits a detective’s dog has been running hot for days.
“I think everyone just needs to disarm a little,” Ford said. “The poll is for fun, it’s for charity. All the choices are going through a general shared compilation of your ideas and our final choices. Whatever wins, don’t worry about it. Just call it dog at the end of the day if you want.”
Sinclair’s follow-up got the loudest laugh of the stream: “For 10 Plat, we’ll let you rename it, so none of this matters.” Ford’s reaction was an “oh my God,” and someone on the panel answered with “CEO crew, I love it.” It was a joke, and nothing on the stream suggested a paid rename is actually planned.
Reb and Steve talk to us about recent heated topics within community.
in Warframe
Tau lands in December, and the second Devstream is November 27
The rest of the stream was the Tau showcase: a two-to-three-hour questline built around the Operator, two new regions in Perita and Fornax, six new mission types, Tau damage combinations with Slash, Puncture and Impact, and Brysko himself, voiced by Matthew Mercer. Perita also lets players farm ten older Prime relic sets directly instead of waiting on Varzia. Digital Extremes gave Tau a December window and set Devstream 199 for November 27, when it will reveal the next Prime Warframe.
The Riven and Kuva question was not answered today beyond “wait for what happens next.” Given how directly Ford put the problem, the next four weeks will show whether the studio’s answer is a Kuva source, or whether this one stays final.
