It’s great to have you all with us. Why not tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Dustybit: My name’s Dustybit. I’m an officer rank which is the second highest rank of the Clan. Unfortunately our Clan leader Salzza is not with us right now. He`s not too fluent in English. I’ve been with EGT since November or December last year. I do a lot of the forum administration stuff, talking to you DE guys and running the server and bug reports here internally.
Lenzoid: I’m Lenzoid, I’ve been an officer since when Dusty joined. I’ve been playing Warframe since March 2013, and I’ve basically been here for every event. I do a lot of administrative work with Dusty on technical stuff while having fun when I can.
Velym: My name’s Velym and I’ve been playing Warframe since Open Beta began. We just talked about that Gamescom actually, the first patch notes that I remember are the Dual Ether blades. So I guess I’ve been around the game for quite some time now! I’ve been with EGT since June 2013 and I do a very similar job to Dustybit. Foreign affairs, talking to other Clans, all that diplomatic stuff.
Voodoo: My name is Voodoo, I started playing Warframe around Update 7. Had a lot of trouble with all the video guides showing different tech trees than I found in game, haha. I joined EGT around Update 8, I think. The Dojo update. I’m a mentoring officer here which means I help newer players with learning the game and progression, nailing down builds and specific combos.
Tyeodor: My name’s Tyeodor and I’m actually quite new in this Clan. I started because a friend of mine said they’re a nice friendly Clan. I’ve never done an event with EGT, so the next one will be my first. I make the graphic designs for their Clan emblem and their Alliance emblem.

And where are you all from?

Voodoo: I’m from the beautiful capital of Berlin!
Velym: I guess it’s pretty obvious that all of us are from Germany, or at least German speaking countries. We do have members from other German speaking countries as well, but mostly definitely Germany. I’m from Hannover myself.
Lenzoid: Well we have some Austrians, and Switzerland players.
Voodoo: With a small number of international players we cover almost all of Europe. In my job as international recruiter I’ve even recruited from Romania, Egypt and Serbia.
Dustybit: Yeah and from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which is quite awesome.
Velym: Recently our direction has been going back to being a mostly German Clan. Let’s see what our future holds.

Now I know Tyeodor said he’s pretty new but otherwise you all have been playing together for a while now.

Voodoo: This is evolving. You meet new guys in the game and in Teamspeak, make friends, and are happy if you get to play with them again.
Warframe is one of the few games that you can take a break from. If you want to go and play something different you can go away for a month and come back and have the same great experience as if you started it new. This game does not punish you for taking a break.
Dustybit: One of the great things is that you can watch out for an event, come back and play and grind out the event and then feel satisfied.
Voodoo: Exactly! You’ve got us hooked even if we are not playing, hahaha.

Did you all meet each other in Warframe?

Dustybit: For me that’s true. All of these guys I’ve met via Warframe. I came to Warframe the week it came to Steam. I saw the game and went ‘waaaah!’ Co-Op and great graphics. Me and my people came over for a couple hundred hours fun but none of them joined EGT. I’m the lone survivor of that group. I wanted to continue, so I went out to find a Clan that could show me...let’ s call it endgame? I wanted to see three digit numbers on mobs, and well now I see four digit numbers on mobs.
Velym: That’s pretty much the same for me. All the people we’re talking to now I met in Warframe via EGT.

How many Clan members do you have?

Voodoo: Exactly 300!
-everyone laughs-
Velym: Right now we’re sitting at around 296, I guess? It’s always close to the maximum and we have a second Clan in the Storm tier to keep in some additional members that can play with us whenever they like. They just have to drop into our Teamspeak and look for a group, then they can hop into the action.

What drew you into Warframe?

Lenzoid: The fact that it’s space ninja co-op shooter
Dustybit: Yeah the co-op feature was very important.
Lenzoid: The first impression I had from the theme of the game was that it involved space somehow. Now with Archwing coming out, the circle finally closes.
Velym: I joined Warframe same time as Dusty, when the Steam ads went up. I liked it because the free-to-play co-op PvE aspects. Those three aspects are what makes Warframe, Warframe for me. Afterwards, I stayed because I really love the parkour elements.
Lenzoid: A lot of people love the aesthetic of the game. The design is so extravagant.
Voodoo: You can play it in different ways. If you had a hard day at work you can just play it with a group and blow heads up and talk trash. Or if you want you can dig deep into strategies and outfitting your stuff to do something crazy. You can have what you want. Do hard work, or just blow heads up.
Lenzoid: I enjoy the scenery.
Dustybit: Yeah. We had one guy sitting in the Dojo looking at the new space shutters all evening, it was kind of hilarious.
Tyeodor: A friend of mine started to play this game, so I started with them. I thought it had nice graphics and there’s kind of an RPG feel. There’s also a story that you can go into and get to know more about. It’s something I really liked when I played the game for the first time.
Lenzoid: Oh yes, Warframe has huge potential in the lore corner.
Tyeodor: It’s like, you still have so many questions as to how the story will go on or how it even started. About the Tenno, who they are, what their origin is. That makes you keep on going.
Lenzoid: Warframe draws you in lots of times. The first time for me was because a friend showed me the game, but I’ve stayed for a long time on my own. That’s because you guys surprise us again and again.
Voodoo: The whole concept of the Beta and being part of growing the game is just great. You take the whole game and turn it upside down every three months and I like it very much.
Lenzoid: I had a great experience with DE as a developer because I’ve had three or four bug reports that had been fixed after four weeks or so. That’s incredible. It’s why I’m always going to the forums and giving feedback because I know you guys are reading this.
Voodoo: And I hope this game never comes out of Beta.
-everyone laughs-
Dustybit: But yeah, it’s the graphics. The co-op. The animations though, when I first saw that I thought this is world class. It reminded me of very old games with superfluid animations and I originally thought, this must be motion captured. But when we got to speak to the Devs at Gamescom they said no, it’s all coming from their minds. That is literally mind blowing. I absolutely love it.
Velym: Well, let’s face it, the main aspect is that it’s free. Of course the trailer and all the information you could get via the web was awesome.
Voodoo: Mike B’s videos about Warframe, yeah!
Lenzoid: The sheer amount of Warframes and different play styles we’re able to do is something that drew me in as well.

Is there a memory that’s stood out in your time in EGT so far?

Velym: There was a time when Nekros being reworked when it came to Desecrate scaling, and that was when a bug appeared with Nekros. You were able to unlimited cast his spell, and it drained so much energy but it was so much fun. Trinity had to tag a target and kill it immediately afterwards, and Nekros would just drain all that energy into using Desecrate.
Dustybit: That was sort of an internal event for us -laughs-. Not even a hundred people got to participate in it because we knew it was going to be fixed quickly. It was definitely a bug, but we had fun with it. Kind of an event week!
Lenzoid: It wasn’t officially a Clan event of course.
Dustybit: No, but word of mouth spread like crazy. All you had to say was, you can get five hundred Mods in 30 minutes. Everyone was in.
Velym: For the record we always report bugs once we find them.

With many of your members speaking German do you find it difficult to interact in pickup groups?

Lenzoid: Yeah, it’s difficult because even within the Clan there’s a huge language barrier. Most of the more sophisticated players play Warframe in English, and they don’t know the German words anymore. The German translation for many terms in Warframe are odd.
Velym: I guess for us as a Clan it’s actually pretty easy to get into groups and to get to know other German speaking players. We are a pretty large Clan and our Teamspeak is pretty active as well. Whoever takes the step onto our Teamspeak server and looks for a group usually gets one in a few minutes. On the other hand, for me personally, interacting with the whole Warframe community is ok because I don’t have any problems with English.
Tyeodor: The thing is also that when you’re playing with random players there are missions you can’t do. When you want to do Survival or Defense and want to get to a high number you really need a team. I search people within the Clan, because if you go to the chat in recruitment it’s mostly not the right people.
Lenzoid: There’s definitely a language barrier. You can play with anyone really, but if you really want to do something specific instructing people is hard when they don’t understand you. I’ve seen a lot of people to join a party and just leave because they can’t interact.
Voodoo: We have some guys in the Clan that actually want to learn German! -laughs-
Velym: Same with Adam over here, right?

If I start learn now I’ll probably be able to order from a menu by then. At the very least.

Velym: You’ll just have to say, one currywurst please!
Voodoo: Speaking for myself, I just want to say that I am having quite a lot of fun playing a game and learning to speak English. Learning pronunciations and stuff. So I don’t have to do any work, I just play and learn.
-everyone laughs-
Velym: It’s not that simple!
Dustybit: Lotus also covers as an English teacher.
Velym: One thing I will say is that having a German speaking Clan like ours is quite an asset in a game like Warframe. There are a lot of German players who would be way too scared to join a random Clan because they would be forced to speak in English.
Dustybit: I find it’s the spice in the soup to find people with other mentalities or cultural backgrounds here as well. It spices things up. Even though we have only two dozen international players I do like to see them. There’s few guys from Eastern Europe among them, since we still have a language barrier between the Slavic languages and the common languages from Western Europe. Imagine Russians typing Cyrillic you can’t understand and vice versa.

You guys place pretty high in a lot of our events. Is getting a high ranking difficult to organize in a Mountain Clan?

Velym: It’s definitely a challenge, but depends on the event. There were events that were easier to organize than others. The fact that before they are announced we know close to nothing makes it very hard to prepare. Once the update hits live we have to set everything in motion to get all of our members into the event and briefed as fast as possible. That’s the greatest challenge, to get the necessary intel to every player.
Dustybit: Sometimes the whole Teamspeak gets reworked to kind of represent a conveyer belt. It’s definitely a challenge but it’s doable.
Voodoo: The biggest challenge is to be efficient. We get a set of rules and then we play and find our own set of rules to get the points as efficiently as possible. This is an easy thing. We do this every event. But if you change the rules in the middle of the event, this is the point where it gets loud and scary in the Teamspeak.
Velym: Changes in the middle of an event is the worst thing that can happen to a Clan like ours. When an event goes live we have our best players there sitting down at day one and they make up our strategy. We go by that strategy, and if we get a change to the event afterwards our whole strategy might break down like a card house.

Would you say it’s more rewarding to compete as a larger Clan then, compared to a Storm or Shadow tier?

Dustybit: I would say the most fun comes from constructing that conveyer belt we talked about for hundreds of Tenno and seeing it work out.
Velym: This is mostly work done by the top players of the Clan. I don't know how the players that just obtain the required score and are not involved further feel, but seeing hours of organizational work coming to fruition is definitely a big reward.
Dustybit: It’s probably more stressful than rewarding for players if it’s their first event on EGT. But they are free to rank up and go to the top one or two dozen players. One part of what EGT is: What you do between events, we don’t care. We only really rely on you on the events.
Velym: In the Mountain Clan tier it’s definitely hard to keep an eye on all of your members. It’s too high of a number to keep everyone in check, so to speak. That’s definitely a problem.

As one of our oldest Clans you’ve seen a ton of changes to Warframe over the last year. What do you think has been our most successful Update?

Lenzoid: I think in general what you’ve done with Warframes and how you changed them has been very good. You listen to the community and change them so that they are not broken or ridiculously overpowered. If you know your Mods and abilities then Warframe can make you a god, but it’s getting harder and harder to do that. Giving the bosses some really strong auras, I think that’s paid off very well. It’s made the game so much more fun because we have to work together. Like it was in the beginning.
Voodoo: Also the damage 2.0 change, at first it was really stressful. But in the end what’s there is just bigger, strategically.
Velym: I guess 2.0 was a really big change to the game.
Voodoo: I quite like it. When you take the game and turn it upside down and see what happens -- I am a fan of this.
Dustybit: I would like to add something way back, that took away the 42 pages of Mods I had in the loadout. The loadout times were longer than the playing times!
Voodoo: -laughs-
Dustybit: It was crazy, but also funny. There was all kinds of stress going on in the Teamspeak. “I have to change my Corpus layout to Grineer!” No you don’t have to it’s just level ten. “But I’m going to do it anyway!” Being able to have loadouts that are Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie has taken a lot of strain out of playing.
Velym: I guess my favorite would be the change of the mission type Raid over to Survival. Survival is my favorite game mode, and I’ve really liked it since its addition. That’s the major change for me.
Tyeodor: Well I just came in now when the Kubrows came, so I cannot say much! I do like the Kubrow though. They are cute.
Voodoo: I would say the trading aspect made it easier to help players get their required Mods.
Velym: Same goes for me. I had 250 hours played in this game before I got my multishot Mod on my rifle. That’s insane. But now we don’t have this problem because if a new player hits Mastery Rank 2 we can give them some of the required equipment that they need in the end. It’s their business to level up their Serration, but we can give them a head start so to speak.
Tyeodor: I was really lucky to find two nice guys in this Clan to give me those base Mods. It’s nice that you can trade. You have this ecosystem where you can buy things for Platinum or sell them when you get stronger.
Velym: Trading really helps us get new players into the game as fast as possible.

It sounds like you guys have a really good support system for new members, trading them Mods when they hit a point where they need one...

Velym: It’s not strictly organized but in most cases it goes like this: A new player that joins the Clan drops into our Teamspeak and plays some rounds with veteran players who have been around since ages. We start talking about things like, “Oh you still don’t have your Split Chamber? Well I have five so here, have one of the spare ones.” We really get our new players into the game pretty fast. Same with trading weapons.
Tyeodor: And also, when you have these nice things but don’t really need the Platinum I don’t post in trade chat. Instead I write in alliance or Clan chat and will sell the item for a lower price.
Voodoo: We work together. We want to compete against the others, not each other. We all need to be best. All 300.

What’s your favorite Warframe?

Voodoo: When I started playing Warframe I watched all of Mike B’s videos and I bought myself a Nyx. She’s my favorite Warframe. Nothing is better than the bad guys shooting each other.
Lenzoid: I find Nyx’s Absorb pretty annoying. It’s always eating up my bullets.
Tyeodor: I agree. Her orb stops the Quanta, and I think messes with the tentacles on the Phage.
Lenzoid: My favorite frames? There’s a couple of them. Excalibur, Loki, Nova, and Banshee are my basic four. Vauban may be the fifth. I like defensive frame’s that can blind, stun, disarm, slow etc. Plus I like using weapons a lot, so I’m a big fan of Sonar and Antimatter Drop.
Voodoo: You like defensive frames but you hate Nyx?! Nyx has Absorb! Absorb is like the best thing in the game. -laughs-
Tyeodor: I think instead of single favorite frames it is best when you have frames for a single purpose. For example you can do Nyx, Loki, Trinity and Nekros very well if you want to go far in survival. For solo play I often use Rhino or Loki because Loki just goes invisible and kills everything with a melee attack. Rhino is just so tanky that he can go through anything.

So you don’t have a favorite, Tyeodor?

Tyeodor: I like all Warframes because with the right Mods you can play every Warframe well. Those Warframes I play most of the time because of the group needs.
Velym: My favorite is definitely Nekros. I really like the design of him, especially the art and the special Syandana with all the ‘dangly bits’ as Steve calls them. Close to that would be Nova because of the helmet and the portal.
Dustybit: I did my first eight million experience points with Excalibur. I don’t know why, it seems I came late with trying out other frames. It seems I was very satisfied with Excalibur, but that was before I joined EGT. Since then I’ve been using a lot of Loki and Nova. What I like about Nova is you really need some skill to not be a squishy Nova. You need to be able to slide, jump and wall run into the middle of the enemy, place your ult, and still live. She`s become more my favorite with those negative power strengths that can speed up the enemy...
Velym: Oh yeah!
Tyeodor: Thats hilarious.
Lenzoid: Yes, making Nova's slow effect scale with Power Strength was definitely interesting. Players have wished for something like that for a long time.

Whats your favorite event?

Voodoo: What was the event called where we had to protect the moving pod?
Lenzoid: Tethra’s Doom.
Voodoo: That one. This event was all about skill. Blocking every shot, taking out every mine, keeping all four players under the pod so it goes as fast as possible, fighting for the leaderboard over those last two points...It was very good.
Lenzoid: It was very hard to win this event. You can look at the scoring, it tells everything. It took a tremendous effort. The win was only possible due to the amazing display of dedication from most loyal members of this Clan.
Voodoo: Those last five points we were like...this is not ok! But it was pure skill and I liked it very much.
Lenzoid: I just want to give our respect to the other Clans. There were so many Clans competing in the event, and it was great to see on the top there were so many Clans. We knew what it must have been like to have a full active amount of members you’re trying to organize.
Velym: For me my favorite event is probably Breeding Grounds. At the same time it was kind of the worst event experience I had, but in terms of fun and design it was really top notch. It was the change to the point scoring that made it the worst experience. When you make a really low wall to get to the top on the leaderboard it was not so much fun, but in terms of the mechanics and atmosphere of the event it was definitely an awesome event.
Dustybit: My favorite event was the Survival event. I wasn’t in any Clan at the time so my record was 45 minutes, but that was with randoms! I am very proud of it. Then came Breeding Grounds. That was the closest to a perfect event DE has ever had, until the bug hit. I would like to redo it with a few tweaks.
Lenzoid: I hope we get it. Breeding Grounds Corpus Edition. Haha!

If you could write our next Update notes what would they say?

Lenzoid: Maybe a physics patch. I know there was a similar kind of update done in World of Tanks that gives players greater freedom of movement. It would be nice to have something like that in Warframe. Make you feel freer and more fluid in movement.
Velym: I would love to see a feature that lets player design their own levels. That they can put together their own levels from all the different tilesets that are available and maybe put in some custom objectives. Like user generated content.
Dustybit: If I may add to Velyms concept, I would love to see some kind of option to change a spawn rate or individual difficulty of a level. Like if I wanted to fight lv 120 Infested at 150% spawn rate -- that would be great fun.
Voodoo: That’s a good idea.
Velym: We also need a custom armor set that lets your Warframe buy pink shorts. -laughs-
Voodoo: To add to that I think if you add level scaling to player created quests, you have your endgame right there. Start the quest and all mobs are level 500. You will have fun because you will open the door, and then you are all dead if unprepared.
-everyone laughs-
Lenzoid: The ability to switch what language you’re speaking in trade and recruiting chat. To choose where to go and which channel you want to be in. Maybe give us a chance to choose what map we go to, because there are so many maps but sometimes you don’t see them all.
Velym: Well I like to go bigger. Instead of these small changes like conclaves I would like to see a new enemy faction. The Sentients of course. That was my guess for the big reveal at TennoLive, but of course I was wrong. We got the Archwing instead, but I still hope to see the Sentients one day in the future.
Voodoo: Most important thing: Infested can now run on walls.
-everyone laughs-
Voodoo: Players can now set the starting wave of mission. Overridden polarities are stored in the swap system. PvP is finally balanced. Player avatars are matching equipped frames of players. And my final note is the Focus System is finally implemented.
Dustybit: Mine already came true! Loki has been taken away from beginner frames! That was always a heartache of mine because I lost a player to not understanding why Loki doesn’t really have supportive or easy to use damage-skills, and new players don’t have the Mods to make Loki work right away.

Last question, if you had a message for anyone looking to join what would it be?

Velym: Come to the dark side, we have cookies? I don’t know, haha!
Lenzoid: If you’re looking for a German speaking community that has a lot of players online in Teamspeak...
Voodoo: A pack of crazy friends! If you want to be part of a crazy pack of friends playing Warframe casually but going all crazy when a leaderboard event starts, then join us.
Lenzoid: I think we should talk about that. -laughs-
Tyeodor: Come and join a friendly community with crazy people.
Lenzoid: Eingreiftrupp is a Clan that offers a lot: Helpful environment, allied internal events for the "newbloods" as well as the more experienced, cross-alliance German speaking Teamspeak community chat, world-class event record (8 of 9 times gold), strong partner Clan KG Kranke Gamer (Shadow Clan that won gold in Operation Cryotic Front) and a well-organized leadership.