A Little Ramble About Those 2020 Warframe Stats
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to watch Devstream 151 live. I was too busy decorating my dojo! There’s only two rooms left! However, I did however read some of the Devstream highlight threads, and I stumbled across the 2020 stats page. Turns out, DE has uploaded a (trimmed down) version of their usage stats for 2020. And what I saw at the top of those lists wasn’t at all surprising. What interests me the most though is the list of Warframes and how they’re used. You can view the data yourself here.
Wukong Prime being most used didn’t surprise me that much at first glance.
I mean, why wouldn’t people use Wukong Prime? His base form is incredibly cheap and easy to both get and get rid of. Wukong Prime is a good-looking frame with a lot of powerful abilities. And Wukong Prime is widely accessible in relics. His usage rate starts picking up at Mastery Rank 6 and remains strong all the way to Mastery Rank 30.
The only thing that does surprise me is by how far. On all platforms, Wukong Prime consists of 7.5% of all Warframe usage, a good 2% more than runner up Mesa Prime. But Wukong is only the most played on PC. On all other platforms, he trails behind Excalibur.
Normal Excalibur’s and Volt’s usage rates are higher than I expected.
On all platforms except PC, Excalibur comes in first place, simply because he’s the starter frame. Why? Because the populations on consoles are far, far younger. The new generation consoles also bring with them a TON of new players, many of whom pick Excalibur. For obvious reasons. Nintendo Switch’s rankings are heavily skewed by the newer player base so much that Mag comes in 8th, and Volt comes in 3rd. At the same time, Volt doesn’t trail by nearly as much as I thought. At a rough estimation, Excalibur’s picked 60% of the time, Volt 30-ish percent of the time and Mag once in a blue moon.
On PC though? The older population means so many more players have access to more than just starter frames. And I think this is reflected in the 2020 stats.
What’s also curious though is how long it takes for a starter’s usage to drop below 1%. For Excalibur, that usage is at MR10. Which is when most players have completed the Sacrifice. Volt however doesn’t drop below 1% until MR16. Mag drops below 1% at MR7.
The frames at the bottom though are the ones that really interest me.
Trinity and Atlas are at the bottom for all platforms. The only exceptions to this are Excalibur Prime (a one-time-only frame released years ago) and Lavos (wasn’t released on consoles until 2021). Trinity and Atlas are all alone.
But what I find more surprising is who else joins them. Frames like Chroma, Equinox and Ash make sense, because they are hard to obtain and build. On top of that, their Primed versions are far, far easier to get. So it makes sense that these frames are rarely used. But Zephyr and Banshee are both genuinely very easy to get. They are both purchased via clans.
There’s nothing wrong with the normal frames being at the bottom though. I just assume that people tend to sell and upgrade these frames quite quickly. The more worrying thought is just how low down the list Banshee and Zephyr Prime are, only slightly above their normal non-primed counterparts. That being said, there will almost always be a frame at the bottom that’s mostly unused, because getting all frames to be used somewhat equally is impossible.
As for the weapons? That’s a whole different can of worms.