LONDON, ONTARIO—After a week of data collection during the Operation: Rathuum Event, Digital Extremes published a report detailing the most commonly used equipment. Much to the chagrin of the team which had designed the event, players were not utilizing the established meta for the event.

OPERATION: Rathuum launched on Warframe last week on Friday, April 29th and drew players together as a community to take on the challenge of Kela De Thaym’s fearsome executioners. Highly anticipated as the return to competitive events, Rathuum presents a challenge for Clans to once again compete with one another for dominance. The event also paved the way for the long-awaited Kela De Thaym rework, complete with her own custom battle arena and new mods. The reworked Kela De Thaym Assassination mission, the new mods introduced in the event, as well as Rathuum Missions 1, 2, and 3 will be permanent additions to Warframe once the event is over on May 9th. Though many Clans have been adhering to the Meta as they push higher on the leaderboards, DE’s internal data reveals the shocking truth that many solo players are not adhering to the pre-established meta for highly optimal Judgement Point farming to access Kela De Thaym.

The data shared this morning (which excludes the “Endless Rathuum” mission) can be viewed below:



Though Ash was the most used Warframe in the event, the amount of players relying heavily on the cutscene-based finisher attack to do all of the work for them was far beneath DE’s expectations. Likewise, though Valkyr was among the upper percentile of usage, the invincible slasher was used less than Mirage, Rhino, Excalibur, and Chroma, ranked as the 6th most popular Rathuum warframe. Furthermore, only 1% of players were using any rank of Arcane Energize, 4% using Arcane Trickery (only 42% of Ash players were using this Arcane), and only 66% of players were using at least one max ranked Rank 10 mod.

“Honestly I’m just disappointed.” said Scott McGregor, Warframe’s Design Director, when asked if DE had anticipated such diverse results. “We made this event specifically for Ash and Valkyr players to run around with their ultimate abilities, but the majority of players are just doing, like, whatever.” The Rathuum event was considered a failure by DE after seeing such diverse results and McGregor later told reporters that further development for Rathuum has been temporarily suspended until DE can figure out how to force players to play certain warframes for the certain missions and events.

The Rathuum Event Team at DE were not the only ones to be disappointed by the average player’s lack of concern about the meta. Several players have raised concerns that they are being forced into non-meta groups when using the public hotjoin feature. “evry fkn grp i join has liek a frost n inaros like wtf why bring those” said edge_master69, MR14. “srs y not just brng ash its so ez.” Many other players share edge_master69’s experiences and long for an improved version of matchmaking which would allow you to handpick players you would like to invite to your group. Rallying together on the Official Forums and the Warframe Subreddit, these players share their meta Ash builds to encourage other players to participate in the meta to improve their experiences with Rathuum. “I don’t know why they would even think to bring Mirage or Ivara to this event. They shouldn’t be allowed to ruin my experience like this.” said LastFish, MR19, in support of one such thread. “What’s worse is that they’re taking kills that I should be getting. Why are they being rewarded for ignoring the meta?”

Though Rathuum has been a disappointment for DE and players alike, it has become a critical reference point in regards to event design. Going forward, DE plans to “make the meta more obvious” by giving players suggested loadouts or forcing certain equipment to be used in order to participate.

Our Field Reporters spoke to some of the non-meta players across different event groups. An unnamed Tenno had this to say: “The event is really fun! You can pretty much take any gear you want and still do well as long as you’re modded up properly. There really wasn’t any need to cheese the event and it turned out some frames were surprisingly strong for fast clears!” It is shocking to realize tens of thousands of Tenno had convinced themselves these delusions were real.

With just a few days remaining, we would like to encourage our readers to embrace the meta and continue to remind players that Ash is like totally faster and people using Mirage are just like cheating because that doesn’t really count.