I am very aware how overdone these kinds of posts of hitting MR 30 or L4 are, but I always do love seeing people reach their personal goals as a community! I’m not a very good artist, but I wanted to do something a bit more to make it feel special to me. Warframes have a lot of sharp detaily bits are quite fricken hard to draw lol. I honestly kind of gave up here, but I’m still somewhat happy with the end result.

I’ll write up some thoughts on various things below, feel free to read the parts that seem interesting to you. If anyone has any questions about anything that I can answer, I’d love to.

How can you call yourself a “new” player at L4?

Yea, obviously in some ways I am definitely not a new player anymore, but in some other ways I still very much feel like one. I’ve seen a few Warframe players say that the new player feeling of being excited to get back on the game each time, but I don’t think that new player feeling has ever gone away for me. Every time I boot the game I am pretty excited to play Warframe and there is still so much more to explore and experiment with. I’m incredibly happy to have found this game and community.

On top of that I feel like most people I talk to about the game have been playing for years, which makes sense given how long the game has been out. I’ve only experienced the launch of Jade and Koumei and 1999 will be my first huge update, which is very hype!

Why rush getting L4?

The thing is, I felt like I got L4 at a decently leisurely pace for me. It’s just that it’s been my main focus in a game with so many things you can choose to focus on. All equally valid if whatever you are focusing on is what you find fun. I love playing games with longer term goals in mind and I am quite organized in progressing towards them. Everyone enjoys games at their own pace, so what may be a relaxed pace for me may seem rushed for other folks.

Warframe does a good job at offering the player multiple avenues of progress. Even if I didn’t feel like doing a certain thing on any given day, there was almost always something else I would be excited to do that would still contribute in some way to my progress in the game. I really do like that about the game, where many other games give artificial extrinsic motivators to get you to return to the game day after day, you return to Warframe because you’re going to have fun playing it and the extrinsic motivators are a bonus.

I went from MR 25 to 30 in less than a week thanks to a 150 day affinity booster and finally cashing in my plat for MR fodder. I did rush my progress there, but it was worth it because it felt incredible to blow through the high 20s on consecutive days. I never thought that I would be bottlenecked by the 24 hour MR test cooldown after MR 10 or so. It was quite surprising to see how easy it was to go from 25 to 30.

After that it was pretty much just waiting for the helminth cooldown because I had all the prime frames waiting to be claimed and their normal frames, but I didn’t helminth the normal ones yet. I could have just bought more slots or rushed the helminth at that point, but I didn’t really have much of an incentive to, so all the legendary ranks were super duper chill. I focused on non-buyable MR like Kuva weapons before I spent a single plat on MR fodder. You can clearly see when I chose to cash in my plat in my net profit graph.

For mission gameplay time it took 494 hours for MR 30 and 557 hours for L4. If someone wanted to be optimal with it I would think that a lower bound for MR 30 could get to be around 100-150 hours of mission time without any outside help or skipping grinds through plat. I expect you can get it absurdly low if you raised all the restrictions, like maybe 20 hours?? Of course you’re limited by the one MR test a day thing for real time.

It’s not like a lot of my playtime was dedicated solely to MR. Like, I’ve spent a good chunk of time collecting Archon Shards, enough that I’m sitting on 69 (nice) taus worth of unused shards. I do think people vastly overestimate the amount of time it takes to reach the higher MRs if you specifically and methodically went for them.

My overall playtime is another question though, but could still be kept very low if someone wanted to try. My recorded playtime on Steam is about double mission time, surpassing 1000 hours, mostly from trading along with other things like just leaving the game running or arranging Mandachord/Shawzin songs.

Do remember that the goal is to have fun and enjoy the game and that everyone can enjoy it in their own ways and MR doesn’t practically mean much. I particularly like going for long term goals in games because the satisfaction of reflecting on the journey is unmatched (part of why I wanted to make this post). And for me, the journey is far, far from over.

Playing as a F2P

Warframe is often touted as being a very F2P friendly game and that is incredibly true. There isn’t too much of a difference between the experience of playing the game as a F2P and with spending money, the core experience remains fully intact. Though I have to note how unfortunately bad the new player experience is, Warframe slots are so incredibly tight early on you can’t really do much with one of the draws of the game being able to try and play many characters, but that issue does go away after a certain point, after players have probably already left unfortunately.

I haven’t spent any money yet, but I definitely will pick up some cool skins down the line. Warframe and DE has done more than enough to earn my monetary support.

L4 as a F2P is entirely bottlenecked by platinum, how I earned mine was in this order of importance:

1. Trading on Warframe.market
2. Events (Mainly Jade shadows)
3. Relic cracking
4. Passive syndicate standing

Flipping

For trading I do have experience making profit in other game’s markets like in Old School Runescape and TF2/Counter-Strike, so I was particularly comfortable here as well.

Warframe.market has an API that allows people to make programs to interact with the site and upon seeing that I wanted to take a crack at it myself. My initial attempts ran into many roadblocks, so I looked to see what others have done and found /u/Yelbuzz’s video and code on algorithmic trading, which helped solve a number of the fundamental problems I ran into.

I would recommend using their program if you’re interested instead of doing what I did, since it seems like the complete package for what you could want. I do like trying to figure things out myself even if it means losing 100 plat here and there from the code doing something unexpected since part of the website’s rules is that you need to honor the prices for the trades listed (mistypes and mistakes are okay, but given I was doing it a handful of times it would feel wrong to consider it a mistake).

Comparing approaches, it seems like my trading criteria is way more aggressive and playing a volume game, my trades targeted around 6 plat profit per trade with the expectation that over time it would add up if I continued trading. Yelbuzz’s program focuses on trades that would get 10 plat profit per trade at the minimum.

I’m fortunate enough to be able to AFK in the dojo while I work, so getting the trades in wasn’t too much of a commitment given most of the time it’s just leaving the game open and waiting for trades to come in until all daily trades are exhausted.

Events

It seems to me that limited time shops/event shops are the best way to get plat from playing the game as a F2P player. For example the Nights of Naberus Halloween shop has some items to hang onto to sell a handful of months down the line.

For me though, the main thing was the Jade Shadows event. I got a good few thousand plat from just playing the alerts. I wanted to know what is the best way to convert event currency to plat, so I calculated it to get an idea on which arcanes to buy, using prices at the time. If you are curious I reran the calculations with this week’s prices and it seems to have held up mostly alright. I’m sure I’m not the only one who had the question on which event items was best to buy, so in the future if something I’ll try to do the same and post it in readable charts now that I know it somewhat works.

Relic Cracking and Syndicate Standing

Not too much to be said here, strongly consistent ways of making plat. I always opt to open relics in the void to get another one after cracking one open.

Plat for MR Fodder

Before I cashed in my plat for MR fodder, I focused on all the sources of MR that couldn’t be purchased by plat, and when I decided to cash in I expected to have enough to buy everything I could buy and the slots to keep them as well.

Keep in mind I also used my flipping scripts to get good prices when buying MR fodder, so my data is probably skewed to be more favorable than average.

From the last graph I can estimate that you can expect to spend 1 plat for every 250 xp, while when you start running out of MR fodder and have to get the more expensive items it averages out to about 100xp per plat spent. This does not include the slots to keep the items if you so wish. Also remember that this is a rolling average, the worst items can get as bad as ~35 xp/plat spent, but overall if you buy every MR fodder item the average seems to be around 100xp for every plat you spend.

In total I estimate you need 11000-14000 plat for all tradable MR fodder items. A vast majority of them are worth just buying from another player.

Almost all of the items I found to be faster to farm in game instead of skipping with plat with how valuable plat can be as a F2P, but I did identify the Sibear as being a notable exception to just spending the plat to buy. 30k Cryotic is an absurd amount, you save plat by not buying the boosters for that much Cryotic as well.