A new feature in Warframe saps its social aspects greatly

Warframe added a lot of quality-of-life features with the Techrot Encore update. In fact, almost every mainline update since Jade Shadows has had QoL features snuck into the game. One particular feature in Techrot Encore, however, might be Digital Extreme's biggest swing-and-a-miss this year. We are talking about the Auto-Disband Public Squads feature imposed upon all players since patch 38.5.

The devs have gone back and forth with rolling back this feature due to bugs between hotfixes but ultimately settled on keeping it.

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Why Warframe's Auto-Disband feature does much more harm than good

Making a friend in Warframe is now harder than finding a Styanax in the wild (Image via Digital Extremes)

Warframe is, at its core, a co-op game to be enjoyed in a squad of four. Sure, most of the content can be beaten solo due to the power-fantasy nature of the game's balance, but being in a squad still makes it much cozier to breeze through. More to the point, squad gaming is the distinctive feature of an MMO-lite.

So, what did Warframe do to curb this aspect? Well, after the Techrot Encore update, the developers made it so that any public squad will be automatically disbanded after a mission concludes (except for Sorties, Archon Hunts, Deep Archimedea, and Temporal Archimedea).

A lot of players, including myself, do not have friends or a well-organized guild to party up with. In these cases, the public matchmaking system was a godsend. Sure enough, the matchmaking still works as well as ever. The problem is that you'll have to wait to be put into a randomized public lobby for every mission.

This is directly detrimental to gameplay if you want to, for example, farm a specific Warframe. That usually involves grinding the same mission type, and in some cases, one isolated mission (such as the Koumei or Jade farm).

This means other players are, more often than not, also farming these missions. Before the update, you would be matchmade with a public squad, and you would instinctively gel together with the shared purpose of grinding that mission. After the run ended, you'd usually just re-queue with the rag-tag band cobbled together in the first attempt.

In a wordless exchange, I have played a string of a dozen Saya's Vigil runs with the squad provided to me by the system. When you play Sorties or Archon Hunts, you tend to stick with the same public squad if things go smoothly in the first mission.

All of this, however, is a thing of the past thanks to the Auto-Disband feature. If you want to re-queue with the same party members now, you have to open up your menu, find the player from your Recents list, and then invite them to form a party. With so many menu clicks the playerbase is not accustomed to, most would not go through the trouble.

Moreover, this also narrows the scope for interaction. Before the Auto-Disband, it would be common for teams to strike up a chat three or four missions deep into a farm. This way, even a stranger in a public lobby can bud into a long-term co-op buddy.

Now, you cannot even have a post-mission exchange, since the squad is automatically dissolved the moment you load into the Orbiter.

As much as it curbs the social interactions a veteran would have enjoyed pre-Techrot Encore, a bigger axe falls on fresh players who seek out Warframe on their own. They tend to not have the prvilege of a network of ex-guildmates or friends playing Warframe — and now, they will need to fully rely on a guild community to shepherd them.

One could see some use for the auto-disband feature, but these problems eclipse the limited benefits of not getting your party hijacked by pub squad members. For that, an alternate solution exists in the Invites-Only option, which is a choice.

Auto-disband, too, should be a choice — an opt-in toggle rather than an enforced feature. There are many ways to implement this provision, but for what I can only guess to be technical reasons, Digital Extremes hasn't chosen any of these ways yet.

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The developers did not bring it up in Devstream 186, but I'm sure it will be brought up in the Reddit AMA on April 2, where we might get some answers. Meanwhile, check out our other guides on the game:

• All Warframes tier list
• Warframe Incarnon weapons tier list
• Warframe Kuva weapons tier list
• Warframe Coda weapons tier list
• Best weapons in Warframe for each Mastery Rank