Playing with (Mostly Silent) Randoms

When I started playing Warframe, I would do so under two circumstances. I would either play completely solo or I would be dragged through missions by an old friend of mine. Mostly unwillingly. I can’t complain at being dragged through though, because all these years later, Warframe is my most-played game on Steam, beating out the hours upon hours I’ve spent troubleshooting Skyrim. Thing is, it took a very long time for me to start playing missions with randoms,in public matches. It can be daunting and scary, especially when you’re matched up with people who are way fancier, way faster and way more murder-y than you are.

In fact, for new players, it’s often recommended to play solo until you get stuck on a mission. When you play solo, you can go at your own pace, spend time opening lockers and breaking containers and, most importantly, you can pause the game, which does in fact pause enemies, timers and even whoever is currently speaking to you (although it can look very weird if you catch Lotus mid-sentence).

But eventually a new player will get stuck. Even when I was playing on my little account (does anyone remember Phovos the Excalibur? Because I kinda forgot about him…) I eventually got stuck. I actually got stuck on the Hijack mission on Ceres, simply because Excalibur doesn’t have the shields to be able to reliably push the power core all the way through the map. After that though, I went back to playing mostly solo.

As you progress though, you slowly realise that playing with randoms is the fast way to do things, especially when you are farming things like primed parts from relics or things like Invasions. You can’t always find a dedicated squad to do specific tasks and newbies asking for help in Recruitment chat rarely get a response, apart from very, very lucky players. So randoms might mean a bumpier experience but you’ll at least finish the mission.

Thing is though, most public missions go incredibly smoothly. On the rare occasion that you do run into an angry, pissed off or toxic player, you can very easily mute and ignore them and once the mission is over, you’ll most likely never see them again. Assuming anyone ever actually says something.

Most missions you do, apart from things like Eidolon Hunts that require a bit of cooperation and specific roles, will be deathly silent. No one actually speaks to you and it’s often very hard to get someone to break the ice. This does depend on the mission – people are more likely to speak during a Defense or Interception mission than an Exterminate or Capture because there’s less moving around and lulls in the action – but most of the time, no one speaks.

Really, when you think about it, it makes us more ninja-y. A squad of four silently running through a mission as efficiently as possible, slaughtering all in our path.

But the great thing about all of this though is that, whether you’re a newbie or a veteran, you’re bound to have a good, quick, clean mission 90% of the time. And if you want to increase the chances of having a good mission, then not saying anything goes a long way.

That’s on top of the fact that, when most people do talk, most of the time it is about rewards (“ugh another common part!”) or how long people are staying for (“20 waves?”). It’s rare that the conversation is ever about something not Warframe-related. Heck, I’ve noticed that few people ever really reply to “Hi, how are you all?” whenever I’m in missions, but they will respond when it comes to when you want to extract.

So yeah, most of the time, most missions are eerily silent. Honestly though, that’s probably a good thing.

“But Medic! What about Conclave? Surely that’s full of toxicity since it’s PvP!”

I dunno, because I can’t tell you. I’ve never even managed to get into a match.