Warframe, The Mainline Update: Changes in the meta, and in prices – Lucas Margarejo (Eco-003)

With the new mainline update fresh in the hidden gem which is the free to play RPGMMO sci-fi space ninja looter shooter game, Warframe, many players are speculative about the implications which the update brings to the current meta, on all fronts. Status weapons in Warframe will be stronger than ever before, and squishier frames will be brought along to higher end content due to shield gating preventing you from being one shot (getting one shot was not fun), and the ultimate Eidolon hunter Chroma is no longer as strong as he used to be due to the removal of self-damage. That’s probably a lot to take in for someone who isn’t an avid player of the game (or someone who doesn’t have any inkling on how the game works), however what I’m curious about and what I will be discussing here is the effects which the update will bring to the Warframe market.

In economics, the price of goods and services is determined by the law of supply and demand. Consumers want to buy the most goods for the least amount of money, as producers want to sell as many goods for the highest price they can sell it at.

As the price for a product increases, consumers will buy less. However, when prices decrease, consumers will buy more. For producers, when the prices go up, they will want to produce more so they can profit from the high prices. However, when the prices are low, the producers will produce less as there isn’t as much profit from the product they’re producing as something else they could be producing.

Taking this into account and applying it into Warframe, and the recent update and change in the meta, we can see a change in prices of several items due to various weapons and frames entering and exiting the meta.

Chroma is a Warframe used for Eidolon hunts, and is almost a must-have for anyone going to out slay these giant sentients. The recent update however has seen a decrease in his usability, meaning another Warframe may replace him such as Rhino. Checking the statistics on the Warframe market we can see a slight downturn in his pricing.

However, upon inspection, the price of Chroma was already low before (sitting at around 40 platinum), why is this? Well since he was such a commonly used frame, there was high demand for him, leading to an increase in price, which lead people to produce and try to sell as many Chroma sets as they could (such as the law of demand states). However, since there was a now enormous supply of products, Chroma, the prices were driven down.

This mainline update has caused a change in the demand of other frames however, such as Volt and Mag, both of whom are now more powerful than ever due to shield gating coming into play. I’ll let you find out for yourself how they’ve changed. (You can click this link to go to a useful website with analytics)

In my opinion, Chroma wasn’t (and still isn’t) a good frame to invest in if you wanted to make platinum (the premium currency), and people who had bought Volt sets are certainly in a good position now. One thing which you should take into consideration however is the nature of DE, the game developer. They know the community and if they think a Warframe needs a buff or rework, then they will do it (like they did with Nezha and Wukong). I’m keeping my eyes open for a Chroma rework sometime in the future, which may lead to an increase in prices for his sets, which I can obtain at the moment for the cheap price of 35 platinum, which is a mere morsel compared to Volt and Rhino sitting on the 150-200 threshold.

For more specifics on the mainline update, feel free to click the links below 😀

• Scaling, Self Damage Gone, Shield Gating, 100%+ Status chance, Events, Arcane Nerfs & More – Dev 139, (Tactical Potato)
• Shotgun Status nerf, Arcane Nerf, Armor scaling, Self-damage, Shield Gating | Devstream Abridged 139, (Quite Shallow)
• Devstream 139 Overview on the Warframe Forum