History BrokenBase / Warframe

* The decision to make "The Duviri Paradox" available right at the start of the game, as soon as you finish the tutorial quest, has been questioned by many. Some feel that introducing [[WalkingSpoiler the Drifter]] so early on spoils a huge plot twist, especially with how [[spoiler:it reveals that the Warframes are puppeteered by humans]], and that it relies too heavily on information revealed later on to make sense to newbies. Others think that it's a good way to tease newcomers with {{Foreshadowing}} while letting them know that there's a lot more to the game's story than the ExcusePlot it seems to have at first, and keeps things fresh with some interesting new gameplay mechanics. Some players will urge newcomers to ignore the Duviri content until they've beaten "The New War", and others will tell them to ignore those saying to ignore it.

* DE's questionable balancing will forever plague Warframe, whether it be [[LowTierLetdown Low Tier Letdowns]] such as Hydroid or Caliban being completely ignored by DE, or their ever escalating power creep of new weapons turning the game's balance upside down once acquired, not to mention their staunch refusal to address the horrendous level scaling of enemies forcing players to come up with band-aid solutions such as stripping armor or shields in order to ''even damage enemies'' in late game content leaves a sour taste in the mouths of newbies and veterans alike.
* The developers' direction, or rather lack thereof when it comes to polishing the game's content is lauded to this day, as many systems of the game are either annoyingly obtuse or outdated, completely missing from the current version of the game such as important story and lore events or are completely riddled with bugs that will ''never'' be fixed because the team is more focused on producing so-called "content islands" that are by design disconnected from the rest of the game, forcing you to grind out the content from square one, only to move onto the next "island" to start all over again.

* Update 31, The New War, is made of this.
** While most players don't have issues with playing as Kahl, Veso, or Teshin, there are numerous complaints regarding the sections where you play as a fourth character, the Drifter. To avoid too many spoilers (this character is a WalkingSpoiler), the Drifter has roughly the same health as a base level Operator, has no parkour skills, and all of their abilities run on cooldowns rather than energy. Some players absolutely hate them because they are so weak and squishy compared to the Tenno, while others love them precisely for that reason.
** One of the Drifter segments is a mandatory stealth mission where you must avoid being seen by a new type of enemy known as Narmer Deacons. Detractors have bemoaned how dificult the section is as the Deacons are faster than you, have a OneHitKill as the only attack, and are impossible to kill in this segment. Supporters have pointed out that the segment provides the player with plenty of cover and that they can evade the Deacons even if they are noticed via usage of your second ability.
** The bosses of the Drifter segments, the Archons, are incredibly tanky, have lots of high damage attacks, have to be fought in two phases, and have moves that let them heal themselves. Some players view them as absolutely annoying, others view them as absolutely amazing.
** The biggest issue with the Drifter is the fact that they have a preset arsenal that you cannot change for all of their segments, which make up the majority of The New War. This annoys many people because they can't use the arsenal they prepped explicitly for the quest until the tail-end of it, though other people have found it to be a nice change of pace.
** The biggest base breaker for The New War, though? Once you start it, ''you have to complete it to access all other functions of the game''. Even though you are explicitly told this before starting the game, '''''and required by the game to acknowledge this''''', many players absolutely hate this one detail because it means that they cannot take a break from the quest without quitting from the game. It's gotten to the point that some players have tried filing support tickets to get them ejected from the quest so they can go back to the rest of the game. A lot of players have straight up quit the game over this. Discussions regarding this one detail have absolutely ''no'' civility in them, [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement and should not be done here]].

* Update 31, The New War, pretty much shattered the fanbase, which isn't too much of a surprise since it outright warns you of a large PointOfNoReturn once you start the quest. Points of contention include a mandatory stealth sequence, extremely limited loadout, several sections where you play as characters other than your Tenno (all of whom are noticeably less powerful than a warframe, and ''significantly'' less agile), and pacing concerns. The biggest issue, though, is that it is ''impossible'' to back out of the quest once it has been started, which has led people to send support tickets to DE requesting that they be ejected from the quest (at least one of which has been thrown out by DE because the game itself pointed this out before allowing you to start the quest). It's gotten to the point that while some have praised this update as the best in the game, others have flat out sworn off the game entirely after deciding to RageQuit the quest.

* The Nova Warframe. There are some player which consider her to be fine and advocate that the other Warframes should be buffed to her level, while other say that she should be brought down a bit more together with the former. It doesn't help that her Prime version got an increased energy pool ''and'' more shields.

While worth noting that a community as large as Warframe's has gotten will have some conflicting opinions about virtually anything, a few items in particular are quite polarizing.
* Prime weapons are starting to become one of these. On the one hand they're powerful item rewards for completing missions in the Void and they're aesthetically very pleasing with gilded edges and flowing lines like the rest of the Orokin technology. They make an excellent reward for the later game play. On the other hand, they're typically direct upgrades to default weapons with significantly better stats in a number of important fields like damage and fire rate. This wouldn't be so much a problem in and of itself but a lot of people have invested rare resources in upgrading these default weapons or even bought them with real money before the Prime version came out. This has lead to some players developing "Prime paranoia" and avoiding the use of Catalysts, Formas, or heaven forbid Platinum on something that's just going to be made obsolete later. The introduction of Prime Access that allows you to directly buy Prime gear with real cash only made things worse. There are also those who find that Prime weapons and Warframes are not powerful enough over their base counterparts and complain about DE's focus on new prime weapons.
* The Rhino Prime frame. Up until this point, Prime frames only had extra polarities, not counting the [[TemporaryOnlineContent now unobtainable]] Excalibur Prime. Rhino Prime has all the tanking ability of the original without the slower movement speed, making him a LightningBruiser even without the Vanguard Helmet. And now a Loki Prime with a bigger energy pool than the original has been released, so this appears to be the new standard for Primed Frames.
* If the controversy over Rhino Prime's advantage over his normal counterpart wasn't big enough, Volt Prime blows it out of the water. His energy pool doubled, putting him above even Loki Prime and Nova Prime with a whopping cap of 850 using a maxed Primed Flow. His armor also increased from 15 to 100. No other Prime Warframe even comes close to the same magnitude of buffs.
* The Soma assault rifle is this now, too. It's an assault rifle/light machine gun hybrid with low damage... but exceptional critical stats. A properly built one will beat most weapons in the game in terms of DPS. It's also available to low-ranked players and doesn't even need Dojo research. It's since been recently changed to be available to high-ranked players, but players who already had the Soma get to keep and can continue using it. [[SerialEscalation Then it got a Prime version which outpaced it]]. Eventually, both weapons started to fall out of favor as the power gap between rifles and other weapon categories began to show.
* The Nova Warframe, see GameBreaker below. There are some player which consider her to be fine and advocate that the other Warframes should be buffed to her level, while other say that she should be brought down a bit more together with the former. It doesn't help that her Prime version got an increased energy pool ''and'' more shields.

* The Nekros Warframe. Due to his ''[[PinataEnemy Desecrate]]'' ability (and playstyles that are built to spamming the key), he is considered something of a CrutchCharacter for [[RandomDrop rare mod and component farming]]. Even after his other abilities were buffed, the most common build for Nekros is to spam ''Desecrate'' with little emphasis on his other powers, to the point where the developers themselves show it to be [[https://warframe.com/news/numbers-warframe-powers the most-cast ability in the game]]. This has spawned several camps -- those who consider spamming 3 boring and want the crutch replaced with something less {{Metagame}}y (often requesting that regular drop rates be buffed to compensate); those who want to keep ''Desecrate'' (at worst turning it into a passive loot aura) but buff his other skills; those who are unimpressed with his {{Necromancer}} title and want him to be revamped to focus on pets and debuffs; and even those who believe removing ''Desecrate'''s drops will make Nekros [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks useless]] who want it to become the sole focus of the frame, with many willing to part with all three of his other abilities just to keep ''Desecrate''.

* The ''Gradivus Dilemma'' event. Partially because players were forced to choose between aiding Alad V who kidnaps, dissects and sells the parts of fellow Tenno or advancing the fascist Grineer empire in taking over another planet; and partially because getting all of the rewards required the completion of '''100''' Invasion missions, the highest single-player requirement of any event.
** Most players found it easier to side with the Grineer, their ''sworn enemies'', both because of their attachment to fellow Tenno and comparative lack of interaction with civilians the Grineer were supposedly enslaving (in fact, unless you looked at certain screens, you wouldn't even know they were going to enslave civilian areas), as well as the early rewards of the event favoring the Grineer (while scoring was based on loyalty to one faction).
* Once upon a time, the Orthos was by far the most powerful weapon, having high DPS, range, and speed, as well as cleaving, of course; then came the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Orthos Prime]], which is even better in all categories. Some argue however it's worse than [[DifficultButAwesome Galatine]], seeking to [[UpToEleven buff Orthos]]. Of course, between Melee 2.0 and power creep in general, neither the Orthos nor its Prime version register on very many top-tier lists anymore, rendering the argument moot.
* Update 15, Archwing, and then the Tenno Relays. Hoo boy.
** Most players played the first week of Archwing while it was still very rough, and dismissed it forever. Weeks later it's been improved and polished a bit, to be less broken.
** Relays, on the other hand were decried as being useless, despite having access to features unavailable elsewhere, like turning in Syndicate Medallions for reputation, and access to the Void Trader.
** Then an event starts, where Councilor Vay Hek reveals his Balor Formorian Fleet and threatens to annihilate the Relays. The PC players actually let Hek destroy Strata Relay over Earth, just to see what would happen. All told, all three systems lost four out of their seven relays, because a sizable chunk of players refuse to even set foot into an Archwing. The fact that the event occurred over the holidays, when many players were unable to participate because they were visiting family, didn't help matters.
** Update 17 drew quite a bit of ire with its introduction of the underwater lab tileset for Uranus. While the concept of switching between Archwing and normal gameplay sounded interesting in theory, the underwater areas slowed movement to a crawl, and the visual effects reduced visibility to a minimum. Many players were also upset that Archwing was now mandatory for progression, as opposed to an optional side mode.
** Just when everyone had started to forget about the game mode entirely, Specters of the Rail inflamed everything again. Questionable changes to the controls and camera ended up triggering motion sickness in many players, prompting a hasty reversal of the camera changes. Archwing was even further integrated into the game's progression with the overhauled Star Chart, and inventory slots for Archwing equipment were added in with no warning. However, there were a couple bright sides; Archwing equipment was made easier to get, and the much-reviled Archwing Defense mission type was scrapped in favor of the more enjoyable Pursuit and Rush missions.
** Apparently the game mode can't catch a break, because Plains of Eidolon brought it front and center for yet another round of complaints. This time, however, it was less about Archwing itself and more about how it was integrated into the new open-landscape area. The pre-release material for the eponymous Plains hyped up the ability to call in your Archwing to zoom around the landscape quickly, and indeed the distances involved almost necessitated this to prevent traveling from becoming a tedious schlep. The only problem? You ''really'' have to work to earn that privilege. First, your Clan needs to research the Archwing Launcher Segment; once that's done, you'll need to build the Segment for your ship, which requires materials found only in the Plains. Once you have that, you get to farm up more materials from the Plains to build consumable charges that summon your Archwing. Needless to say, that's a lot of waiting for what was supposed to be a fairly central feature. Oh, and to add insult to injury, your Archwing is much more susceptible to damage in the Plains, and taking too much damage (which happens to be less than your nominal health) drops you back to the ground. Did we mention that basically all the enemies have anti-air capabilities? [[SarcasmMode Have fun.]]

* Update 16.4 brought the False Profit event, which centered around the Tenno trying to bankrupt Nef Anyo by committing fraudulent banking transactions. It's about as interesting as it sounds, and that's only if everything goes right. Actually getting credit for the event meant hacking the Bursa, stunlocking it without killing it (with a penalty to the duration of most crowd control) for ''upwards of 10 minutes'', then finally killing it in a very brief period, all while the Bursa chains radial knockback attacks that slow down the process (as you need to stay close to advance the transfer). However, [[GameBreakingBug glitches are rampant]], and a third of the new Bursa enemies are quite capable of slaughtering an entire squad if the players lose focus for even a second. The other two thirds were nearly defenseless, stopped by simply keeping them next to a Frost or Loki. The end result was an event that alternates between sitting around doing nothing and resisting the urge to break something.
* As if Excalibur Prime didn't have enough controversy, the 2015 announcement that Warframe China (working title "Star Armor") would get their own special limited-edition Founder's Pack Excalibur frame called Excalibur ''Umbra'' Prime. Cue the fanbase exploding, with many people still sore over the original Excalibur Prime being [[TemporaryOnlineContent unobtainable]] feeling Digital Extremes is legally barred from doing this, [[CriticalResearchFailure somehow]]. [[MassOhCrap And then Warframe China started distributing the Lato Prime]], which was part of the same Founders pack as Excalibur Prime.
** The developers quickly patched up complaints about Excalibur Umbra by declaring that they were just giving Warframe China's founders a head start, and their intent as of October 2015 was to release a (non-Primed, but virtually identical) duplicate on the Global build "before the end of the year". Over a year and a half later, the frame ''still'' has not seen Global servers (aside from players exploiting server vulnerabilities to hack it in), or even had a formal announcement of when it will be releasing. The developers have since stated that they don't want to add him in [[GameplayAndStoryIntegration before they have a proper story justification for his existence]], and eventually declared they would no longer be fielding questions about him until it was completed.
** Umbra's release quest was formally announced at Tennocon 2017 (albeit with no ETA)... just in time to announce that Warframe China would also be shutting down later the same month. ''Hmm.''
* On the forums, there's an ongoing debate over whether or not Tenno are {{Energy Being}}s. It's one of those theories where the main game puts all of its evidence against it (all of the original Tenno were flesh-and-blood mutated humans who could not BodySurf), but the devs never explicitly denied it, so the supporters of the theory would tweak it however they need to to keep it valid. As of U18, the matter's been definitively settled with the Second Dream quest; needless to say, not everyone was happy with the final answer.
* Update 17 released Exilus Adapters, which can add a mod slot to your Warframe which can only hold utility mods, to combat player complaints that they could only fit stat-affecting staples (like survivability or power-affecting mods) into their builds. While the idea of adding more mod slots was already a contentious solution (especially due to the difficulty of getting a single Adapter), Update ''18'' then released "Drift" mods, which can fit in the Exilus slot [[DramaticallyMissingThePoint and increase power stats]]. While some players argue that the bonuses provided by Drift mods are small enough for the casual player to warrant swapping out, others have pointed out that it doesn't matter to [[MinMaxing min-maxers]], who are the entire reason the extra slot got added in the first place.

* While the Pacifism Defect event had a pretty smooth launch from a mechanical perspective, the way it handled scoring and rewards was rather controversial.
** In previous events, the Clan and individual components were pretty firmly segregated; each player's performance only affected whether they as an individual would get the individual rewards like cosmetics, mods, and weapons, while a Clan's overall performance only affected communal rewards like trophies for the Clan Dojo. The Pacifism Defect bucked this trend, tying the new event weapon to Clan performance instead of individual performance. Like Clan research, the score thresholds for each reward tier scaled according to the Clan's size category, but, as is traditional for events with a Clan-based component, Clan rosters were locked at the start of the event, preventing larger Clans from kicking inactive players and downsizing for a challenge more appropriate for the number of active members; since a Clan's score was based on the sum of each member's best run of the final mission, this made it progressively harder to reach the higher reward tiers as you went up through the Clan size categories.
** The next major misstep was the nature of the reward tiers themselves; while previous events had always bundled a weapon slot and pre-installed Orokin Catalyst with their weapons, the Pacifism Defect opted for three different reward tiers for the same weapon: the Participation Tier, which would only give all Clan members a blueprint for the weapon; the Victory Tier, which would give all Clan members a fully-built copy of the weapon with the traditional accouterments; and the Hardcore Tier, which would let the Clan research the weapon for an infinite supply of tradable blueprints. It didn't help matters that the score thresholds for the Participation and Victory tiers were set excessively high given the nature of the event missions, and while the threshold for the Participation Tier was quickly slashed to one-fifth its previous value, the Victory Tier threshold was not adjusted; meanwhile, the cutoffs for the Clan trophies were set so low that achieving the revised Participation tier would get your Clan the second-best trophy automatically (and only slightly higher to get the best trophy; a small clan required 250 points for Participation Tier and 2''6''0 for the Gold trophy).
** The icing on the cake was the Hardcore Tier, which didn't have a fixed score threshold at all; instead, once the event ended, the Hardcore Tier would be awarded to the top 10% of Clans in each category. By the end of the event on PC, the minimum score to enter the "Hardcore" Tier was nearly ''one-third'' the score needed for the "Victory" Tier, with more than ''five times'' as many qualifying clans.

** [[UpToEleven And now he has a Prime.]]

** [[AuthorsSavingThrow After some intensive feedback, DE has fixed some of the largest issues with Nightwave.]] Most notably, there is the newly-added "catch-up" mechanic where if you missed some prior weekly challenges, you can earn them back two at a time, provided you finish all the currently weekly challenges. They've also removed/revised some of the challenges so you do not need a friend to participate with you, although quite a bit of the more controversial ones (use Forma, gild a modular weapon, defeat 3 grove specters, etc.) still remain. As well, the amount of creds given early on has been boosted up so newer players don't have to bust their ass to get some stuff that they'd like. Finally, the actual BigBad and the new enemies have been received a lot better than [[DamageSpongeBoss the Wolf of Saturn Six]] and [[DemonicSpiders his refugee lackeys]], with the new boss fight being cited as fun and engaging without relying on the player having to minmax for damage. While people still argue whether or not Nightwave is a worthy successor to the alerts system, the improvements have sated some of the protesters and made Season 2 much more well-received than during its inception.
* Update 26.0. Just... Update 26.0.
** Firstly, it introduced the new melee rework, which has many, many players up in arms about how the status meta is now considerably weakened, if not gone completely. Condition Overload was heavily nerfed so that it has a cap on just how much extra damage it can contribute, and now has a form of overlap with Pressure Point, to the point where if you're building a status-based weapon, the prevailing school is "don't bother with Pressure Point, the flat damage increase is less useful than Condition Overload". Conversely, if you're building a crit weapon, Condition Overload is useless to you. Prior to the update, they synergized ''very well'' together. Overall, the consensus is that status is no longer king, a "crit-status" hybrid is, focused primarily on crit with some statuses for extra damage - and some weapons simply don't have the stat spread for such builds. In addition, weapon damage was rebalanced and in many cases reduced, and many favorites are no longer the raw damage monsters they used to be.
** The Catchmoon kitgun was also nerfed, and for very good reason. Until the update, it was such ludicrously powerful sidearm that in many cases, it made having a primary superfluous. It had amazing power, very good range, and was essentially a sidearm version of the Arca Plasmor, but without the small magazine size. It was ''so'' good that it had a usage rate of 51% by players. The next highest secondary had a measly ''6%'' usage rate by comparison. Its nerf was as forseeable as it was necessary - mostly by reducing how far its shots would go before the damage began to fall off - but it caused no end of complaining to those who felt the gun was perfect as-was, and that all the other guns should be brought up to its level.
** Kuva Liches were also introduced as a "nemesis" and as a pseudo-endgame for players who've little else to do. Unfortunately, they've been proven to be both buggy and heavily RNG dependent, in addition to just flat-out ''annoying''. Players need to grind new relics for new mods for the "Parazon" palm dagger to be able to kill their Lich, but while there are eight possible mods, the Lich requires three specific ones in a specific order to be slain. There's a method to reveal which mods you need, but it's also incredibly tedious; the player must kill thirty "Kuva Thralls" to reveal one of the needed mods, then another fifty for the second, and lastly ''seventy'' Thralls for the third [[note]] One could also stab their Lich for an increased amount of "murmurs" compared to Thralls to speed the process along, but that has its own downsides as can be seen later..[[/note]]. Unfortunately, this does not reveal the ''order'' needed. For that, it becomes pure trial-and-error stabbing the Lich until you successfully find the right combination. Unfortunately, when the player guesses ''wrong'' the Lich will kill them. Not "put the player into a downed state that others could restore them from", flat-out "time to burn one of your limited revives". In addition to that, every time the Lich is unsuccessfully killed, they level up and despawn, increasing their health, damage... and the levels of all their minions. A level one Lich will have nodes filled with level fifty enemies. A level five Lich, the current maximum, will swarm the player with ''level one hundred'' enemies. ''[[LongList And on top of that]]'', the Lich will be "taking over" planets and nodes on the map. If there's any influence at all on the planet the player is currently completing missions for, the Lich will outright ''steal'' end-of-mission rewards. They ''will'' get everything back once they've successfully defeated their Lich, but that alone could be hours or days later, and some players have even reported the Kuva Lich ''stealing the relics needed to unlock the Parazon mods''. This behavior will be patched out, but it's additional frustration on top of a very painful process, and many players feel the rewards are underwhelming - a ''chance'' at [[CosmeticAward ephemera]], should the Lich spawn with one, and "Kuva" variants of already existing weapons that ''can'' be powerful, but also have their own RNG damage modifiers, so that finding the "perfect" version of a Kuva weapon could involve possibly tens to hundreds of Liches. And did we mention that the weapon the Lich spawns with is ''also'' up to RNG? And there's an ephemera for ''every status type in the game'' save True and Tau damage...?
* Update 27 also had its fair share of controversies.
** For a start, Empyrean and Railjack in particular was pushed out before the holiday season to bolster usage statistics (and to keep the "it will be released by the end of the year" promise from Tennocon), resulting in a buggy, unbalanced, extremely RNG-heavy and punishingly difficult game mode that was left completely unpatched for weeks, because the staff was on a break.
** It also included the nerfing of Itzal, everyone's go-to Archwing for the open world areas thanks to its Blink ability. As per their usual modus operandi, instead of recognizing why that was the case, DE removed the ability from the Archwing and made a heavily nerfed version available for all of them, which resulted in slower Eidolon and Orb hunts, a clunkier open world experience, and a very irate fanbase.
** Staying on Archwings, as part of Empyrean, all AW weapons have been "rebalanced" for the game mode, which in practice meant heavy nerfs all accross the board, with forma'd, fully modded weapons taking ages to destroy even the common scrub enemies in Railjack missions. Not only that, but due to the different damage scaling formula used, and status effects simply not working for weeks after release, it meant that the only way to survive a Railjack mission in an arch-wing was by abusing Amesha's abilities and spending ages cherry-tapping enemies, made even worse by the fact that all other AWs became [[OneHitPointWonder uselessly fragile]] due to the same mechanics.
** The Intrinsic system, which was just Focus 2.0, but only useful for a single game mode.
** The game, for maybe the first time in years, received accusations of being pay to win due to the implementation of Repair Drones. In order to get Railjack parts, the player had to gather components, which in turn needed to be repaired for a hefty resource cost. However, by buying a repair drone for Platinum, it not only made the repairs instant, but it also waived the resource costs. Since the components themselves also had a hefty RNG element associated with them, it meant the most efficient way to kit out your Railjack was by either buying or farming for Platinum in other game modes, and then repair a ton of components with drones until you got a lucky roll on the stats.

** Kuva Liches were also introduced as a "nemesis" and as a pseudo-endgame for players who've little else to do. Unfortunately, they've been proven to be both buggy and heavily RNG dependent, in addition to just flat-out ''annoying''. Players need to grind new relics for new mods for the "Parazon" palm dagger to be able to kill their Lich, but while there are eight possible mods, the Lich requires three specific ones in a specific order to be slain. There's a method to reveal which mods you need, but it's also incredibly tedious; the player must kill thirty "Kuva Thralls" to reveal one of the needed mods, then another fifty for the second, and lastly ''seventy'' Thralls for the third [[note]] One could also stab their Lich for an increased amount of "murmurs" compared to Thralls to speed the process along, but that has its own downsides as can be seen later..[[/note]]. Unfortunately, this does not reveal the ''order'' needed. For that, it becomes pure trial-and-error stabbing the Lich until you successfully find the right combination. Unfortunately, when the player guesses ''wrong'' the Lich will kill them. Not "put the player into a downed state that others could restore them from", flat-out "time to burn one of your limited revives". In addition to that, every time the Lich is unsuccessfully killed, they level up and despawn, increasing their health, damage... and the levels of all their minions. A level one Lich will have nodes filled with level fifty enemies. A level five Lich, the current maximum, will swarm the player with ''level one hundred'' enemies. ''[[LongList And on top of that]]'', the Lich will be "taking over" planets and nodes on the map. If there's any influence at all on the planet the player is currently completing missions for, the Lich will outright ''steal'' end-of-mission rewards. They ''will'' get everything back once they've successfully defeated their Lich, but that alone could be hours or days later, and some players have even reported the Kuva Lich ''stealing the relics needed to unlock the Parazon mods''. This behavior will be patched out, but it's additional frustration on top of a very painful process, and many players feel the rewards are underwhelming - a ''chance'' at [[CosmeticAward ephemera]], should the Lich spawn with one, and "Kuva" variants of already existing weapons that ''can'' be powerful, but also have their own RNG damage modifiers, so that finding the "perfect" version of a Kuva weapon could involve possibly tens to hundreds of Liches. And did we mention that the weapon the Lich spawns with is ''also'' up to RNG? And there's an ephemera for ''every status type in the game'' save True and Tau damage...?

** Firstly, it introduced the new melee rework, which has many, many players up in arms about how the status meta is now considerably weakened, if not gone completely. Condition Overload was heavily nerfed so that it has a cap on just how much extra damage it can contribute, and now has a form of overlap with Pressure Point, to the point where if you're building a status-based weapon, the prevailing school is "don't bother with Pressure Point, the flat damage increase is less useful than Condition Overload". Conversely, if you're building a crit weapon, Condition Overload is useless to you. Prior to the update, they synergized ''very well'' together. Overall, the consensus is that status is no longer king, crit is. In addition, weapon damage was rebalanced and in many cases reduced, and many favorites are no longer the raw damage monsters they used to be.
** The Catchmoon kitgun was also nerfed, and for very good reason. Until the update, it was such ludicrously powerful sidearm that in many cases, it made having a primary superfluous. It had amazing power, very good range, and was essentially a sidearm version of the Arca Plasmor, but without the small magazine size. It was ''so'' good that it had a usage rate of 51% by players. The next highest sidearm had a measly ''6%'' usage rate by comparison. Its nerf was as forseeable as it was necessary - mostly by reducing how far its shots would go before the damage began to fall off - but it caused no end of complaining to those who felt the gun was perfect as-was, and that all the other guns should be brought up to its level.
** Kuva Liches were also introduced as a "nemesis" and as a pseudo-endgame for players who've little else to do. Unfortunately, they've been proven to be both buggy and heavily RNG dependent, in addition to just flat-out ''annoying''. Players need to grind new relics for new mods for the "Parazon" palm dagger to be able to kill their Lich, but while there are eight possible mods, the Lich requires three specific ones in a specific order to be slain. There's a method to reveal which mods you need, but it's also incredibly tedious; the player must kill fifty "Kuva Thralls" to reveal one of the needed mods, but this does not reveal the ''order'' needed. For that, it becomes pure trial-and-error stabbing the Lich until you successfully find the right combination. Unfortunately, when the player guesses ''wrong'' the Lich will kill them. Not "put the player into a downed state that others could revive them from", flat-out "time to burn a revive". In addition to that, every time the Lich is unsuccessfully killed, they level up, increasing their health, damage... and the levels of all their minions. A level one Lich will have nodes filled with level fifty enemies. A level five Lich, the current maximum, will swarm the player with ''level one hundred'' enemies. ''[[LongList And on top of that]]'', the Lich will be "taking over" planets and nodes on the map. If there's any influence at all on the planet the player is currently completing missions for, the Lich will outright ''steal'' end-of-mission rewards. They ''will'' get everything back once they've successfully defeated their Lich, but that alone could be hours or days later, and some players have even reported the Kuva Lich ''stealing the relics needed to unlock the Parazon mods''. This behavior will be patched out, but it's additional frustration on top of a very painful process, and many players feel the rewards are underwhelming - a ''chance'' at [[CosmeticAward ephemera]], should the Lich spawn with one, and "Kuva" variants of already existing weapons that ''can'' be powerful, but also have their own RNG damage modifiers, so that finding the "perfect" version of a Kuva weapon could involve possibly tens to hundreds of Liches. And did we mention that the weapon the Lich spawns with is ''also'' up to RNG...?

** [[AuthorsSavingThrow After some intensive feedback, DE has fixed some of the largest issues with Nightwave.]] Most notably, there is the newly-added "catch-up" mechanic where if you missed some prior weekly challenges, you can earn them back two at a time, provided you finish all the currently weekly challenges. They've also removed/revised some of the challenges so you do not need a friend to participate with you, although quite a bit of the more controversial ones (use Forma, gild a modular weapon, defeat 3 grove specters, etc.) still remain. As well, the amount of creds given early on has been boosted up so newer players don't have to bust their ass to get some stuff that they'd like. Finally, the actual BigBad and the new enemies have been received a lot better than [[DamageSpongeBoss the Wolf of Saturn Six]] and [[DemonicSpiders his refugee lackeys]], with the new boss fight being cited as fun and engaging without relying on the player having to minmax for damage. While people still argue whether or not Nightwave is a worthy successor to the alerts system, the improvements have sated some of the protesters and made Season 2 much more well-received than during its inception.

* With the introduction to Nightwave, fans are divided by not just its execution but by how it replaced the old alerts system. To elaborate, Nightwave is a "Battle Pass"-esque seasonal system where players must finish weekly and daily challenges to rank up and earn milestone rewards. You also occasionally earn "wolf credits" which you can use to buy items that used to be limited to random alerts, most notably Nitain Extract and Vauban parts but also many other such items like cosmetic helmets, aura mods and even Orokin Catalysts/Reactors. The problem, however, is the execution, which some people either love or hate:

** Then there's the fact that most of Nightwave's missions are more "veteran-friendly" and most newcomers or people who have yet to clear the star chart are unable to do most of those challenges unless they were grouped with veterans who were able to. Once again, the argument of "most of the higher-tier rewards are cosmetic" is brought up but others argue that the old alert system was a lot more lenient towards newcomers not forcing them to do huge challenges just to get so-and-so item. It definitely doesn't help that Orokin Catalysts/Reactors used to be more easily acquired before, and now require 75 wolf credits (of which you earn 50 of as an occasional tier reward) which means newcomers have to use a majority of their wolf credits if they want to get something that used to be "free" before.
** On a smaller note, the Nightwave's host, Nora Night, has a fairly split fanbase. Some see her as a charming and intriguing character who allures the listener with tales of such things like the "Wolf of Saturn Six", giving us an interesting narrative to follow as we do the challenges. Others find her to be lackluster and especially annoying because as soon as you would finish any of the Nightwave challenges, she'd pop in and tell you (and presumably any outside listeners to her radio station) about your incredible feat, even if said feat was something tremendously mundane. You'll find yourself finishing the "Catch 6 rare fish" challenge only for Nora to label you as a "bad-ass".

* Many argue that the Dragon Nikana, although being one of the more difficult melee weapons to acquire, is a bit too strong, as reports of players being able to massacre level 30-40 enemies with an unranked version are popping up. Things have only gotten worse with the introduction of the Nikana Prime, a straight upgrade to the Dragon Nikana.
* The new UI that comprised the bulk of Update 14 has stirred up some controversy immediately after it was released. In general, much of the criticism against it seems to have come from veteran players [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks who had grown accustomed to the old interface]], with a few cries of DarthWiki/RuinedForever flying around. While the complaints eventually died down, there's still a lingering degree of resentment.
** History repeats with the cursor-based controller interface introduced towards the end of Update 22 and the new UI being phased in at the start of Update 23. The main criticisms of Update 14's attempt were that it took too many clicks to access key functionality compared to what came before. In contrast, the cursor interface ended up removing many of the useful shortcuts that console players previous relied on in the name of homogenizing the interface between PC and console, while Update 23's new UI hid vital information from view, making it much harder to spot things at a glance.

** On that note, the actual challenges Nightwave offers are even bigger cause of bickering. A good majority of them are fairly feasible challenges such as "kill X enemies with Y elemental damage" or "do X mission 3 times". Then you have some of the more "Riven"-esque challenges like "fill 5 ayatan sculptures with stars" or "complete a 60 minute kuva survival mission without using life support". Then there's the more controversial ones like "Complete a Profit-Taker bounty with friends" or "Gild a Modular Item", the first due to the fact that anyone that ISN'T already maxed standing with Solaris United is effectively locked out of the challenge and the former seen as wasting materials/time just to finish a challenge. Some are quick to say that most of the challenges can be done and that you can skip a few if you don't want to do them, but others mention that challenges in general should not either take up a substantial amount of time at once or not force you to waste materials or incite paranoia about if future challenges will require such items again.

** Finally it seems that Limbo's team-trolling abilities have been subdued after a rework changed up his Stasis to no longer affect allied and self projectiles at the cost of halving the duration...but because of this, a new broken base has emerged between Limbo players who either see the change as pandering to the playerbase and lowering his skill ceiling and those who welcome the change and are more grateful to not be immediately shafted by teammates, albeit still having to get used to the new duration. Whether or not the freezing projectiles after-effect will be returned in one form or another has yet to be seen.

** [[UpToEleven And now he has a Prime.]]

* ''The War Within'' update is one even for the developers, who felt that the six months it spent in DevelopmentHell took away from updates they could have made during the year. For players, the new [[spoiler:Operator]] powers (and penalties) and randomly-generated "Riven" mods have had a mixed reaction, to say the least, with some players even voicing that [[HypeBacklash the update was not worth the delays]].

* The new UI that comprised the bulk of Update 14 has stirred up some controversy immediately after it was released. In general, much of the criticism against it seems to have come from veteran players [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks who had grown accustomed to the old interface]], with a few cries of RuinedForever flying around. While the complaints eventually died down, there's still a lingering degree of resentment.

* No single Warframe has generated so much controversy as Limbo. Ever since his inception, he's done nothing but break the community in half due to his DifficultButAwesome playstyle, which more often than not will get in the way of many people if handled poorly. To wit, his kit revolves around selectively banishing allies and enemies alike to another dimension, with his other abilities complimenting that. The problem is that if the enemy is in one dimension and you or your allies aren't, they won't be affected by anything aside from Warframe abilities, meaning that mishandling your Banish could make dealing with enemies a whole lot more frustrating than it should ever be. One ability in particular can freeze enemies stuck in that dimension...but also ''affect allied bullets'' meaning they would have to resort to either melee or abilities (as those are wholly unaffected by Limbo's rift mechanics). To say that Limbo is loathed is an understatement. Many people absolutely despise Limbo in pub matches, as he can singlehandedly dictate how everyone has to play the game. It's gotten so bad that people actually ''leave'' the game just at the mere sight of someone using Limbo. Of course, there are defenders of Limbo that say that he's also potentially one of, if not the, strongest Warframe in the right hands, allowing extremely easy and effortless victories, especially on Grineer/Infested missions or defense-oriented missions. He alone could make game-winning plays and turn the tides of an otherwise lost battle in favor of his team. Detractors often remark that while that may be true, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be ''fun'' for anyone that isn't playing Limbo and that you should either play him solo, keep your ability usage to a minimum or flat-out ''not play him''. To this day, arguments rage on whether or not Limbo should be removed, reworked to be less annoying to his teammates or left as-is.

* While the Pacifism Defect event had a pretty smooth launch from a mechanical perspective, the way it handled scoring and rewards was rather controversial. In previous events, the Clan and individual components were pretty firmly segregated; each player's performance only affected whether they as an individual would get the individual rewards like cosmetics, mods, and weapons, while a Clan's overall performance only affected communal rewards like trophies for the Clan Dojo. The Pacifism Defect bucked this trend, tying the new event weapon to Clan performance instead of individual performance. Like Clan research, the score thresholds for each reward tier scaled according to the Clan's size category, but, as is traditional for events with a Clan-based component, Clan rosters were locked at the start of the event, preventing larger Clans from kicking inactive players and downsizing for a challenge more appropriate for the number of active members; since a Clan's score was based on the sum of each member's best run of the final mission, this made it progressively harder to reach the higher reward tiers as you went up through the Clan size categories. The next major misstep was the nature of the reward tiers themselves; while previous events had always bundled a weapon slot and pre-installed Orokin Catalyst with their weapons, the Pacifism Defect opted for three different reward tiers for the same weapon: the Participation Tier, which would only give all Clan members a blueprint for the weapon; the Victory Tier, which would give all Clan members a fully-built copy of the weapon with the traditional accouterments; and the Hardcore Tier, which would let the Clan research the weapon for an infinite supply of tradable blueprints. It didn't help matters that the score thresholds for the Participation and Victory tiers were set excessively high given the nature of the event missions, and while the threshold for the Participation Tier was quickly slashed to one-fifth its previous value, the Victory Tier threshold was not adjusted; meanwhile, the cutoffs for the Clan trophies were set so low that achieving the revised Participation tier would get your Clan the second-best trophy automatically (and only slightly higher to get the best trophy; a small clan required 250 points for Participation Tier and 2''6''0 for the Gold trophy). The icing on the cake was the Hardcore Tier, which didn't have a fixed score threshold at all; instead, once the event ended, the Hardcore Tier would be awarded to the top 10% of Clans in each category. By the end of the event on PC, the minimum score to enter the "Hardcore" Tier was nearly ''one-third'' the score needed for the "Victory" Tier, with more than five times as many qualifying clans.

* No single Warframe has generated so much controversy as Limbo. Ever since his inception, he's done nothing but break the community in half due to his DifficultButAwesome playstyle, which more often than not will get in the way of many people if handled poorly. To wit, his kit revolves around selectively banishing allies and enemies alike to another dimension, with his other abilities complimenting that. The problem is that if the enemy is in one dimension and you or your allies aren't, they won't be affected by anything aside from warframe abilities, meaning that mishandling your Banish could make dealing with enemies a whole lot more frustrating than it should ever be. One ability in particular can freeze enemies stuck in that dimension...but also ''affect allied bullets'' meaning they would have to resort to either melee or abilities (as those are wholly unaffected by Limbo's rift mechanics). To say that Limbo is loathed is an understatement. Many people absolutely despise Limbo in pub matches, as he can singlehandedly dictate how everyone has to play the game. It's gotten so bad that people actually ''leave'' the game just at the mere sight of someone using Limbo. Of course, there are defenders of Limbo that say that he's also potentially one of, if not the, strongest Warframe in the right hands, allowing extremely easy and effortless victories, especially on Grineer/Infested missions or defense-oriented missions. He alone could make game-winning plays and turn the tides of an otherwise lost battle in favor of his team. Detractors often remark that while that may be true, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be ''fun'' for anyone that isn't playing Limbo and that you should either play him solo, keep your ability usage to a minimum or flat-out ''not play him''. To this day, arguments rage on whether or not Limbo should be removed, reworked to be less annoying to his teammates or left as-is.

While worth noting that a community as large as Warframe's has gotten will have some conflicting opinions about virtually anything, a few items in particular are quite polarizing -

* The Nekros Warframe. Due to his ''[[PinataEnemy Desecrate]]'' ability (and playstyles that are built to spamming the key), he is considered something of a CrutchCharacter for [[RandomDrop rare mod and component farming]]. Even after his other abilities were buffed, the most common build for Nekros is to spam ''Desecrate'' with little emphasis on his other powers, to the point where the developers themselves show it to be [[https://warframe.com/news/numbers-warframe-powers the most-cast ability in the game]]. This has spawned several camps - those who consider spamming 3 boring and want the crutch replaced with something less {{Metagame}}y (often requesting that regular drop rates be buffed to compensate); those who want to keep ''Desecrate'' (at worst turning it into a passive loot aura) but buff his other skills; those who are unimpressed with his {{Necromancer}} title and want him to be revamped to focus on pets and debuffs; and even those who believe removing ''Desecrate'''s drops will make Nekros [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks useless]] who want it to become the sole focus of the frame, with many willing to part with all three of his other abilities just to keep ''Desecrate''.

** On the other hand, prominent voices against datamining love to bring up that the receiver of the C&D went beyond posting droprates, and posted every file he decrypted, including spoilers for upcoming Warframes and weapon releases, and some of the dialogue for ''The Second Dream'' prior to its official release (having been pre-patched into the game files) onto his data repository for all to see, prompting additional rewrites by the developers for the final version. There has also been speculation that the datamining contributed to the perpetual delays behind Umbra and The War Within, since leaked early scripts for the latter included references to the former that were scrubbed by release.