"Alright Nerd, calm down... still love the game... still got a few things left to talk about... breathe. There's still Arbitrations, another harder level, high-end game mode with these annoying ass invincible drones. The enemies here drop Vitus Essence, which is kinda like Steel Essence in that it can be spent in a storefront at the Arbiters of Hexis. You can get a lot of Ayatan Sculptures. In fact, there are a few places to get Ayatan Sculptures. Maroo has a daily mission where you can get an Ayatan for free by running a quick and simple mission. If that's not enough for you, you can also get Ayatan Anasa Sculptures, as well as a couple of different rewards, from running Sorties.

"I don't believe I've talked about Sorties. Every day, there are 3 missions of increasing difficulty to play through, with various modifiers, and upon completing these, you can be rewarded with anything from a Riven, to a Forma, to copious amounts of Endo, to the previously mentioned Ayatan Anasa Sculpture. If you're really lucky, you can get what's called a Legendary Core, which is capable of leveling ANY mod for absolutely free, no credits, no Endo. I find that most of the time I only get the Sculptures or the Rivens, but it doesn't take too long and most of the time it's worth it to play them.

"You can also play Railjack, a whole other game mode with its own star chart and everything. You can build this big ship, hire a crew, and go out on big missions out in space. It's really cool, but the enemies can be hard as balls. Still, it's ambitious and a ton of fun once you get your guns ranked up, obtained a good crew, and a top-tier ship. It had a rocky start but really shaped up to be a pretty fun mode. Many of the standard mission types that show up in the regular star chart are present. One new mode, called Skirmish, is mostly an exterminate, with additional side objectives like disabling an asteroid base and taking down reactors. You'll also find side activities that will net you extra loot.

"There is an entirely new mode exclusive to Railjack called Volatile, which involves breaking gauges as a reactor accrues heat buildup. Engineers will try to fuck you over but it's fast and frantic. The ship is equipped with 2 side turrets, the main turret, and a slingshot that allows you to shoot your Tenno in the trajectory of a target so that you can quickly infiltrate crew ships and detonate their core from the inside. You could do that, or you can man the giant canon at the front of your ship and utterly decimate them with a single shot from your Forward Artillery known as the Tunguska Cannon! You're equipped with an Omni that you can use to make repairs, or, you can utilize any of 3 crew companions, obtainable by a character named Ticker in Fortuna. Ticker likes to call people Stardust, and reminds me of David Bowie. You can also run these missions called Void Storms as an alternative to running Fissure missions to obtain prime loot, although running standard Fissures is usually faster and more efficient.

"You can also choose to hire any Sisters of Parvos or Liches you want. Hold on, put on the breaks for a second, what's a Sister of Parvos, or a Lich? The Sisters of Parvos and Liches are Corpus and Grineer nemeses, respectively. Liches can be accessed by playing high-level Grineer missions and triggering the appearance of a Grineer Larvling, If you take down a Larvling and finish them with your Parazon, a Larvling will become a Lich, and will proceed to rob you blind until you can uncover the arrangement of any of the 8 available Requiem Mods needed to finish them off. Unlike standard enemies that can be taken down relatively quickly, taking down your Lich, or Sister, can take hours.

"To spawn a Sister, you must participate in the Granum Void and obtain a good score for the Larvling equivalent of the Corpus, a Candidate, to appear. It's pretty much the same thing from here. The only real difference is that in addition to the weapon and possible ephemera that can be obtained by either, A Sister of Parvos is also capable of providing you with one of 3 different types of Hound companions. You can get a lot of really good weapons out of this. It's also worth noting that the melees of the Sister's weapon type, the Tenet weapons, all 4 of them can be received from Ergo Glast at a relay in exchange for 40 Corrupted Holokeys. Both Lich and Grineer weapons, like the Paracesis and the Necramechs, can go up to level 40, so you better start getting all those Forma ready. To elaborate a little on the level 40 thing while I'm on the topic, each time you use a Forma on one of these, you gain an additional 2 levels per Forma up to level 40 from 30, so that means you need 5 Forma on each of these if you want to hit the level cap, and you do, if you want to get all that Mastery Rank from them.

"What is Mastery Rank? Mastery Rank is the total combined experience gained from leveling everything that can be leveled up to its maximum level for the first time. To keep it simple, anything that can be maxed at 30, you gain all the mastery from it upon hitting 30. Any experience after Formaing it will not count towards mastery. Anything that goes up to level 40 grants you the mastery of each of those levels until it hits the respective level cap of each Forma cap. From levels 1 through 40, you only gain experience from those respective levels once. Mastery can also be obtained by completing missions on the star chart and the Steel Path star chart for the first time. You'll know when you've done this because the node will no longer flash blue.

"If all this content isn't enough, there's always Nightwave, which is a free Battlepass type system where you can perform challenges in exchange for rewards, as well as purchasable goods within the Nightwave store for Nightwave credits. Nightwave is provided through radio transmissions via Nora Night, a sexy radio DJ loosely based on the DJ from The Warriors. Nightwave actually had stories tied to it for the first 3 seasons. The first was called The Wolf of Saturn Six, about a maniac that escaped from a maximum-security Grineer space prison near Saturn that gets enhancements from the Sentients through Alad V. The second is The Emissary, which is about a mysterious child called Arlo that develops a following after surviving an encounter with the Infestation, only to lure unsuspecting victims to the hivemind themselves. The third story is a mystery surrounding people of both Grineer and Corpus factions that have been glassed, uncovering the existence of an Orokin executioner named Nihil being behind the glassings.

"If you feel kinda lonely, or like all you're been playing with are some random dipshits, and you'd like to make some friends, you could always join a clan. There are 5 sizes of clans: Ghost, a 10-man clan, Shadow, which is 30 people, Storm, 100 people, Mountain, 300 people, and Moon, a whopping 1000 people. I gotta be honest, making your own clan is a vertical uphill battle. It's a matter of finding people that want to join, coercing them to donate resources to build labs, reactors, and all sorts of shit, and on top of that, you have to do all this research. Some things can be filled by a single person, no problem, but then there are other things that need to be researched and I swear the dev team was on crack when they came up with the requirements. The Hema is probably the worst offender of them all, requiring a fucking INHUMAN amount of Mutagen Samples, that can only be obtained from Deimos. Fuck grinding all those resources, just find yourself a clan that has all that shit done! You'll thank me later. A clan can also be part of an alliance, a group of clans that assist each other. There's no practical reason to have an alliance anymore, but having more people to help is always a good thing. All you have to do to get in a clan is request an invite from a promising clan via request from a recruiter in recruiting chat. Once you get an invite, all you have to do is build a key, wait that shit out, and then you have access to a Dojo. The Dojo contains a vast wealth of weapons research and all sorts of resources at your disposal, such as a trading dock, a fighting pit for you to do your fighting, a vault to store stuff like resources and decorations, and even a dry dock for housing and managing your Railjack."

The Nerd lays back, thoroughly exhausted from having spoken at such length about a game. He stares up at the ceiling before turning to the camera.

"There is a bi-monthly trader that shows up at relays by the name of Baro Ki Teer. This guy brings new stuff every two weeks that you can buy from him in exchange for Orokin Ducats, only obtainable by turning in primed gear farmed from Fissures. For a new player, it's a sacrifice to make these purchases, but for an endgame player, it's worth the trade-off, because he can have really good shit like primed mods, accessories, decorations, and even exclusive weapons, though most are tradable. By tradable, I mean you can trade them at the Dojo. Many things are tradable: relics, mods, weapons, weapon parts, Arcanes, Liches, and Sisters if you have a Crimson Branch, etc. Trade chat uses short-term speaking for initiating offers, WTB for want to buy, WTT for want to trade, WTS for want to sell, and PMO for private message offer. Most people are gonna want plat in exchange for their goods because it's the premium currency. I find that people are about what you'd expect. You can meet some real assholes in trade, but most are fine. Just be aware that some people want absolutely outrageous prices for certain things. You gotta be smart and be aware of the true value of the things you're purchasing from others.

"I'd like to talk about some stuff that USED to be in the game, such as Alerts. Before the whole Nightwave system got integrated into Warframe, we used to get what are called Alerts. They'd pop up at random times of the day in random parts of the week, usually during the active hours on the east coast though. Through Alerts, you could get such things as Orokin Catalysts, Reactors, Forma, Nitain, which used to be a real pain in the ass as you needed that stuff to build certain things, and probably most egregiously, a Warframe named Vauban, whose parts would only show up in these alerts one at a time, which means you couldn't actively farm him. You just had to wait for his parts to show up in the Alerts. That shit was a huge pain in the ass and for that reason, I'm glad Nightwave exists where I can just actively farm him now. The last remaining shred of alerts exists in the form of Gifts of the Lotus where the devs throw you a bone on free resources every so often.

"We used to have Tactical Alerts and Events, which were story-related missions that involved a certain gimmick, with exclusive rewards only obtainable from the Events. Back when we had those, people would hoard the rewards and sell them long after the Event, driving up prices on the rewards drastically. It got so bad that a mediocre as all hell mod called Primed Chamber, which existed solely to realistically boost only one weapon, The Vectis, went for upwards of tens of thousands of platinum! What a fucking joke! I never purchased Primed Chamber and I feel bad for anyone else mentally ill enough to allow such a scam to exist by purchasing one. Ironically, the mod was brought back but was available for nearly 3000 ducats via Baro Ki Teer! What the actual fuck? Why is that mod so highly valued? It's shit! It's a shit mod that I wouldn't wipe my ass with! Still, I did part with the 3000 ducats, solely for collecting purposes, knowing full well that it was still a hell of a lot better deal than something like 10,000 plat from some shyster in trade.

"We used to have Solar Rails, which was kind of like a much more fun version of Conclave, but that bit the dust too, causing many people that like that mode to flee the game. We also used to have Raids, 3 to be exact. There was the Law of Retribution, which tasked you with shutting down Chancellor Vay Hek's schemes to destroy the earth with his vile Grineer toxins. The second was a hard mode of that. The third was a Raid called The Jordas Verdict, where you had to stop a massive Infested space monstrosity known as the Jordas Golem from plaguing a massive Infestation-controlled Corpus ship. You infiltrate the ship on Archwing, sabotage the reactor, and fight the Jordas Golem. The cool thing about Raids is that you could play with up to 8 people, and it was up to you to cooperate and bring the bad guys down. But not everything worked out with it. First off, the Raids were very buggy, and DE had a daunting task with maintaining upkeep on them. Also, it proved to be pretty confusing and chaotic managing the parties with their specific roles. For those two reasons, the Raids were shut down.

"It's probably for the best though, as all you really got from the Raids was a Sekhara, a shoulder emblem thingy that appears in 3d for everyone to wear, and ONE of any arcane. Now, mind you, Arcanes back then could only be installed on accessories. Back then, it really wasn't worth it. Gatekeeping Arcanes within Raids was just a bad idea. They weren't worth all the work needed to complete a Raid, especially because each one could only be completed once a day. It drove up prices, and that's just a bunch of shit. I'm glad they got moved over to Eidolons, where, even with the day/night cycle time gate, you could actively farm them a lot easier and quicker. There were also Arcane Helmets, which were the same as regular alternate helmets, except that they had mostly useless side perks to wearing them. Arcane Helmets have since been reduced to collector's items, still in trade every so often for outlandish prices, but fuck them.

"What else is there to really talk about except for some of the endgame stuff? What's really left after you did ALL THAT? Well, there's Rivens. I've only talked about Rivens slightly, but Rivens are simultaneously the most satisfying things and the most frustrating things about this game. What they are are essentially randomized mods for your weapons, that can have 2 or 3 randomized buffs and a possible negative 4th statistic. The idea is to get the ideal combination of statistical buffs and a negligible negative. A Riven Mod with a negative modifier also means that the positive stats are higher in numbers than they would be without a negative. Really, there's only a handful of stats you want on these: damage, multishot, critical chance, critical damage, status chance, fire rate, or attack speed. Everything else is basically a worthless stat, and the odds are that you will most likely get worthless stats on a majority of your rolls! In order to roll your Riven, you need Kuva, and it's not like the game hands you Kuva constantly, it's very stingy with it, and because of that, Riven-rolling can feel like a gigantic waste of time. There was one point where farming Kuva was satisfying, and that was between the introduction of the Steel Path, and the introduction of the Acolytes to the Steel Path. During that time, you could use a Khora with a particular setup and farm tons of that shit and roll Rivens pretty easily, by getting all this Steel Essense from the Eximus units and dumping it on the Kuva bundles from Teshin's store. Sadly, they fucked that up, and now farming Kuva is just miserable again.

"You can continue to help other players, you can form your own clan or alliance, or, you could even just decorate your ship. As you've likely noticed, I've decorated my ship with all this shit that I've accumulated over the course of the game. My ship looks like an episode of Hoarders set in space. It can be a fun little downtime thing decorating your ship. There are tons of free decorations you can get, as well as paid ones from the Market, and stuff that's only been available for a limited amount of time. My ship is kind of like a time capsule with mementos of past events that may or may not ever come back. I hope they do, in some form or another. You know, as you progress through the game, you eventually find yourself hitting the content wall, and then just waiting for updates. I would think that means you essentially beat the game. But why do I keep coming back? Could it be because the devs have shown, time and time again, that they love this game, that it's their passion project, and that Warframe is essentially their baby?

"I spent a lot of time talking about the game, but not really enough about the team behind the game. Digital Extremes, up to this point, have been open and transparent about their passion from day one, making sure that the game gets constant attention and fixes. This isn't to say that it's all been sunshine and buttercups, but for all the hardships and trials, they've persevered and continued to make Warframe more than just the blue-covered corridor shooter it started out as. They listened to the fans and built the game in a way that they enjoy, took aspects of the game that people exploited, and used them to build a magnificently fun parkour system. They took aspects of the game that were greedy and manipulative in the long term and got rid of them because they felt it was unhealthy for the base. Look, I never got that kinda stuff from devs like LJN or Titus, or any developer that published trash game after trash game, when they made the game and excreted it into the world for people to suffer, all they were looking for at the end of the day was a paycheck. Maybe it's the fact that these guys care enough about their game to keep it from turning into a steaming pile of dog shit, maybe that's why I continue to play. I guess, I never really thought about it that way before.

"With that, I believe I've said absolutely everything there is to say about the game. I could talk at length about such things as individual Warframes or weapons, but no, I'd be here for a goddamned century doing that, so with that, I think I'll call it a day and simply state that if you have the time and patience for a game with fun mechanics, cool graphics, and a quite interesting science fictional story, and you're not too bothered by some excessive amounts of grind in areas, to check out Warframe. It's not perfect by any means, but it managed to wrangle me in and zombify me for over 3000 hours, and I enjoyed a vast majority of it, and honestly, how many games can claim that? How many games can keep your attention for THAT long? How many have that much longevity? Not many, that's for sure."

The Nerd's Timex watch shows that he has new mail.

"Huh, what's this?"

He looks at the message. The Stalker has sent the Nerd hate mail for killing him so many times. Now, he vows revenge.

Your actions have consequences.

"Oh, yeah? I got a message to send back to this fuck nugget."

Come anywhere near my Nerd Cave, and I'll shove that Dread so far up your asshole that you'll be shitting arrows for a week!

The Nerd scowls at the camera, holding the controller as a grey light flickers, startling and alerting him. He stands up from the couch. A raspy voice echoes through the room as it fills with smoke.

"I know your every move", says the Stalker with a drawn-out hiss. "Prepare to suffer, Nerd."

"Come and get me you black and red bastard!" the Nerd retorts, gritting his teeth in hate.

As the Stalker readies his Dread, the Nerd dives onto the ground, looking for stuff to attack the Stalker with, spotting the Rob the Robot gyros on the floor. He grabs them, tossing them at the Stalker's face like throwing stars. The Stalker raises his arms, defending himself from the abusive, explosive gyros. The Nerd flips over to the back of his couch. Grabbing the NES Zapper and the Superscope, dual-wielding and lighting the Stalker up. He blasts the Stalker relentlessly, causing him to fly back into a shelf. Video game cartridges spill off the shelf and all over his body.

"Like that, bitch?! Want some more?!" He yells, his eyes wide like that of a psychopath, and he's covered in sweat. He stands over the Stalker. "No, this is not possible!" the Stalker pleas. "This next one I learned from Halo!" The Nerd shouts as he stands over the Stalker's face, tea-bagging him. "Yeah, how do you like my nuts in your face!" The Stalker is repulsed. In another cloud of smoke, he disappears, leaving his Dread behind. "Great, another fucking Dread." He throws the Dread into a pile of Dreads he has in the corner of the room.

The End