Thoughts On Mods (Capacity, Polarity, Slots), Motivation, Challenges, Gamestyles And Endgame...

[zelgaris]

EDIT-01: Added Mod Rank Adjustment since I forgot it for some reason...

 

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Before you start reading, I would like to shamelessly point you to the first of three "wall of text" threads I prepared - Thoughts On Controls, Movement, Customization, Melee, Ninjaing, Etc.

Also, most of this was written before the livestream on 10th April 2013, yet I decided to leave everything the way I wrote it no matter the news, i.e. S#&$ changes all the time :)

Introduction and History

We already have a new mod system (Mod 2.0), which replaced the old skill-tree-like one. Mods were remade into new upgradable ones and each having its unique, and probably completely redundant, name and (in most cases) pretty generic picture. But what's next in terms of mods? There are already players, who have their stuff maxed out and they are all the rage about how the game is easy and how they don't have anything to do in the game anymore. It's easy to discard these voices, but clearly the demand for some kind of the challenging/rewarding endgame content, for motivation to play further, is here. There are numerous ways to tackle this issue and I believe DE is already working on one possible "solutions". But since we are still in the beta, there is a lot of space for feedback. This is my feedback and take on the topics mentioned in the title.

Let's start with summarizing the current situation with mods, because, as far as I can say, and it's obvious from the current state of the game, mods play and will continue to play pretty important role in Warframe - and many of you, who joined the community lately, maybe, don't have any idea about the rage surrounding the new mod system.
We have warframe mods, sentinel mods, weapon mods and fusion mods (and probably soon some weapon/warframe specific mods) - basically mods everywhere and up until latest hotfix patch (7.6, https://forums.warfr...te-76-hotfixes/) there was no continuous and stable progression and improvement in anything not-mod related. Yes, there are people arguing "But you can use more mods and better mods, that's the stable progress" - well, that's not enough, because it is still based on randomness the mods are given to us.
Everything was mod based and thus heavily luck based, random, in comparison to the old tree-mod system, which on the other hand hasn't provided so much obvious variability and customization - maybe the lack of variability was the main reason for leaving it.

After the update 7 and before above mentioned hotfix 7.6, some got their then-mandatory Vitality (health increase) and Redirection (shield increase) mods after few missions, however, some of you don't have them even yet, although both are marked as common mods and were pretty fundamental for survival.
DE listened to the community and tried to solve this problem by adding warframe rank based improvement for warframes, i.e. increasing of health, shields and energy. (For some reason they neglected stamina, hope they add this sooner or later.)
If you ask me, it wasn't exactly the best possible solution, but more like the best possible step toward the better game at the moment... but they forgot to nerf the Vitality and Redirection mods in the process, possibly to prevent another rage from "veteran" level 80 Paladin players, who are still mad over loosing their mods when new mod system arrived...

Anyway, here we are in current situation. It's far from perfect but considerably better than before. Mods drop tables were adjusted, players finally understand the benefits of the new mod system, more players are plaiying, etc.

Related to mods there is Polarity. Some of you hate these little symbols in the top right corner of mod-slots, thinking it's too complicated or completely redundant. Yet there is a reason behind this polarity and with proper care, this initial sort-of-restriction can be expanded to provide more variability. I alreedy wrote down some opinions on this, but more on that later.

And also, pretty limiting factor, in addition to the obvious "mod capacity" based on the warframe/weapon/sentinel rank there is the amount of slots we have available.

So far you can see, there are lot of possibilities to widen the variability without adding more complicated systems or doing it the easiest way possible, i.e. increasing the max rank as is pretty common in other games (I hope this in particular never happens).
These possibilities are not that important or evident in early to mid-game content, because even now, there is a lot of stuff to do already, but they become more important later in the game, especially in the so-called endgame.


Enhancing the Mod System Variability

As mentioned in the introduction, this can be done in lot of ways, but we always have to consider the following important factors:
- Capacity
- Slots
- Polarity

Let's look closely on these.


Capacity
Right now, the capacity is based on the rank of the warframe, weapon or sentinel. The easiest way, and also the one I really don't reccomend, is to increase the maximal rank for the warframes, weapons and sentinels (so naturally the mod capacity increase too).
I would leave the rank alone, 30 is good, enough, leave it that way. Instead allow us to get our hands on improved versions of Orokin Reactor and Catalyst. Since we already have this "Mod 2.0" system, why not adding an improved version of both mentioned items? I see Oroking Reactor/Catalyst 2.0 as pretty obvious and convinient way to solve the "how to increase mod capacity" problem without changing the rank cap.
- The 2.0 version will not double the mod capacity but multiply it by 2.5 (75 capacity) or 3 (90 capacity).
- The blueprint would be really rare and would require the normal Oroking Reactor/Catalyst as a one of components.
- Also it couldn't be bought in the market (not even for platinum) to make it more rare and to surprise the players with it's existence - players on low level shouldn't even know, items like this actually exists :)
- There should be a global rank requirement to use them
(I am using the global rank requirement on lot of places in this text, because the way DE made it, is the perfect way for high-level stuff like this)


Slots
We have some slots and we can put our mods into them, if we have enough mod capacity points. Currently it's 10 slots for warframes and 8 for weapons (I won't talk much about sentinels, haven't used them yet). Some of these have a polarity, while most of them don't (mostly weapons).
The obvious step in widening the variability is to increase the amount of slots. For this purpose, we can use similar system to the already implemented Orokin Reactor - let's call this "Orokin Capacitor". It would work the same way as the Oroking Reactor/Catalyst, but instead of doubling the amount of mod capacity, it will simply add one more slot.
Unlike the Orokin Reactor and Catalyst, there could be only one type (i.e. Oroking Capacitor), which is usable for warframes as well as weapons and sentinels. No need to complicate it.
Using this simple approach is effective, because it looks and feels like it is just an improvement to the already established system, rather than complety new system/addition - it looks consistent, and consistency is pretty important.
As I already suggested for O Reactors/Catalysts, this could also be available as "Orokin Capacitor 2.0" version, and it would provide not one, but two additional slots.
So when fully upraded, there would be 12 slots for warframes and 10 for weapons.
- There should be a global rank requirement to use Capacitor


Polarity
As mentioned, I've already written some thoughts about polarity in Suggestion - Polarity Changing Mods. The original idea mockup looked like this... http://zelgaris.com/_temp/wf/wf-polarity-changer.jpg (for some reason, after edditing It told me "Sorry, but you have posted more images than you are allowed to", which is strange since there was only one image here...)

I am still confident that allowing us to change the polarity of slots is another of the good ways to widen the variability in the frame of current system.
However, thinking about this a lot since I've started the original thread, where I suggested making a unique and consumable mod, that would allow us to change the polarity, we can as well use and item instead of mod.
Both approaches have their benefits and limits and both would need some kind of special interface added for them (see below). Whether mods or items, there could be many types of them to increase/limit the rarity and usage and there could be additional limits or requirements to be able to get them and use them (such as global rank limit, which is alredy introduced for some weapons and warframes or having only a random changer and no specific ones (suggested in the original thread)).

Features and purpose:
- Used to permanently change the polarity of a slot according to the variation of used polarity changer
- Permanent effect - can be changed back only by different polarity changer
- Usage could possibly reduce the rank of the warframe/weapon by 1 (so it has to be ranked up again)
- Rare - originally supposed to be an endgame content, so not only it should be rare to get them, but further requirements could be added for their usage, such as "can be used only by warframe rank 30" or "global rank requirement 4" - which is actually the one I would recommend, since this way, we can forbid new players to use them (while motivate them to get the rank to use them), while we allow experienced players to use them even on the newly purchased/constructed mods after they already try and level some warframes and weapons.
(A bit unrelated, but there shold be more obvious difference between warframe rank and global/tenno rank, too many ranks everywhere :))

Possible variations:
Random polarity changer
- Changes the polarity of slot to random polarity
- Can (or cannot, it depends) remove the polarity from the slot
- Most common from polarity changers

POLARITY-TYPE changer
- Changes the polarity of a slot to particular POLARITY-TYPE and the polarity type of the changer cannot be freely chosen, i.e. there is ATTACK Polarity changer, POWER Polarity Changer, etc.
- Rare

SET-POLARITY-TYPE changer
- Changes the polarity of a slot to particular polarity type, while allowing a player to chose the polarity.
- Rarest

Polarity "remover"
- Changes the polarity of slot to none
- Rarity between random and PARTICULAR-TYPE


The difference between mod and item version is basically in the interface, that has to be created and in ingame availability:

Mod version
- Mods cannot be constructed currently, so only way to get these would be through drops in missions, alerts, random rewards and purchasing a mod bundle (platinum choice). There could be additional limits like "can be dropped only from boss enemies", "can be dropped only from enemies level 30+", etc.
- The variations can be achieved by upgrading the mod through fusion, i.e. rank 0 "random polarity change" (polarity not known until already used), rank 1 "remove polarity", rank 2 "set polarity" (picture of the polarity changer changes according to randomly chosen polarity - i.e. basically random, but it is possible to know the outcome before actual usage), rank 3 "player can freely choose the polarity before usage".
- The UI could be much easier to implement:
1) We grab the changer from the "compatible mods" and place it to the slot we want to change
2) After we place the polarity changer in the slot, prompt according to type of the mod, appears and we make our choices and agree or disagree
3) Polarity changer is consumed if used

Item version
- Can be constructed as well as bought in form of blueprint as well as found as reward, so actually getting it would be more of a matter of patience/grind rather than luck (according to chosen components).
- Cannot be upgraded the same way mods can be, i.e. there would be individual items for each variation, but again lower (less rare) versions can be used as a component for more rare (better) one
- UI considering - We can do this directly from a weapon/warframe mod screen, by doubleclicking an empty slot a special prompt will appear with choices according to type of available polarity changers. Or, similar to Orokin Reactor, there is an icon, which expand on hover/click with a list of clickable options and once the option is chosen, we have to chose a slot, where we want to apply it. There are more and maybe more suitable ways to approach this, but all seems too unique to me, and having a special unique system for one item only is not the best solution (anyway, if implemented, I would go for the last one with oroking reactor (expanding button is actually introduced directly in main menu - the SOLO/PRIVATE/ONLINE button)).

As said before it's matter of choice. I like the foundry and the way you would be able to construct the item, so I would chose the "item" version, buth in both cases some additional modifications and "new" systems have to be introduced. On the other hand, I we can introduce system for consumable mods, which can be used in future for other consumable mods. This really depends on the choice of a designer.


Mod Types and Specific Mods
So far you probably noticed, I am talking about mod system, polarity, etc. in general rather than about particular mods. The thing is, the mod system right now is so flexible, it is completely unnecessary for me to suggest some particular mods here. Yes I would really like to see dual mods, weapon specific mods, a melee mod, which would add splash damage to my plasma sword as much as "silencer mod" for weapons to act as "stealth kills" and more POWERS to chose from for each warframe as well as cross-warframe/common Powers and possibly even a mod, which wouldn't drain the capacity but instead adds the amount but takes the slot without any other effect, or bonus dmg/accuracy/rate mods, that can be used on weapons but also on warframes, etc. There is just too many ideas here... so maybe later in future in "What Mods Still Weren't Implemented" thread :)

 

Mod Rank Adjustment  

For increasing the rank (upgrading) of a mod we have a costly fusion, but currently there is no way to lower the rank of the mod - and there should be. This was already mentioned several times on the forum and for good reason. Maybe you find being able to do it redundant, but tell, how many times you upgraded a mod only to find out you miscalculated and upgraded it too much, so you can't use it at all. When this happen before you max the rank, you can tell yourself "will wait for next rank, no problem". When this happens at max rank, the only option is to change the loadout or grind for the same mod over and over again. And notice, that when you are in mod screen, you aren't aware about the amount of free mod capacity points of a given warframe/weapon (i.e. GUI problem).

You can also argue, that grindin for the same mod again is making you play the game more, but isn't this a bit too forced and annoying? Especially when you have the original mod almost maxed and it's one of these high rank mods (and rare).

 

As usual, there are more ways to do it and it can be done as a part of interface (so far we are not using RMB or doubleclicks for anything) or as a special mod ("Diffuser", could be used in fusion but will degrade the rank by 1 rather than increase) or item:

1) Permanent degradation

- allows you to lower the rank of the particular mod permanently

 

2) Free adjustment 

- allows you to change the rank (and thus a capacity consumption) freely

- the  "free" doesn't strictly mean it can be done for free, but it can be done anytime

 

Availability depends on the type of implementation:

1) Mod

- uncommon drop and usage would cost something during the possible fusion (consumed when used)

- could be purchased through market

 

2) Item

- could be purchasable through market and usage wouldn't cost anything (consumed when used)

- wouldn't give this as a alert drop, because it's not that good and not for everyone, so market is a good place for it

 

3) Interface (without any need for mod or item)

- would be always available, obviously, but usage could cost something (credits and platinum can be used)

 

I don't have a personal favourite in the possible implementations. Free adjustment is great for players, but permanent degradation makes them thing before usage. Mod (the above mentioned "Diffuser" should be really easy to implement) but hard to say, whether this shouldn't be just a part of the interface.

 

 

Motivation and Gameplay Styles
A little side tracking before we return to the endgame topic.
We already have these little personal goals ingame, like kill x enemies with y, use x power y times, etc. These are nice and sometimes encourage us to use weapons, we don't usually use. Stealth kills were also added as was a ranged weapon for stealth play (yay, Paris), yet the stealth itself is not done very well right now and there is no reason to play stealthy.
Talking about stealth, there are lot of suggestions how to change and adjust the game for stealth play (there are also really $&*&*#(%& suggestion like "reduce ammo size for Paris to 5, so people can't run and "gun" with it and can only use it in stealth gameplay" because somebody thinks that limiting the usage of weapon this way is good idea), but again, if you complete the level in stealth, there is no special bonus for it, actually it's the other way, because you don't get as much experience for killing (but maybe I missed some affinity bonus for stealth kills - if it isn't thre, it should be there). So yeah, you can do it, but there is no motivation to doing it.
In general, the motivation is just important - what we should try to do is give a player some kind of risk/reward scenario rather than "you can do stealth kills". And we should definitelly not improve the one game style at the expense of others. Maybe it's my subjective look, but whenever I read about stealth in the forum, it is commonly descibed as "limit this and limit that, so the stealth is the true way"... that's major bullS#&$. Motivation not limitation is the key.

Let's start with the stealth and call this risk/reward stuff...

Advance Mission Challenges
They are basically the more complicated and strict cousins to already implemented simple random challenges. Unlike the random and simple ones, these ones would be available in every mission and players have to fullfill given requirements or not-exceed set limits to success and get a thematic bonus at the end of the mission. Stealth play is one of these, but there could be more, some easier to fullfil, some much harder. Some are exclusive, but some can be achieved together (e.g. Pacifist and Stealth). There could be even more difficulties of the single challenge, i.e. normal challenge, which is easier to achieve and hard challenge, which is harder but the reward is bigger.
Below are some general suggestions described in pretty general way (i.e. numbers, rewards, etc. just for the basic idea - some of them are stupid, such as still alive, but I still left them there, also haven't included rewards where I didn't know what should be the reward):

Terminator
Challenge: Kill every enemy in the mission (disabled in Elimination missions and defense missions).
Reward: Bonus affinity for the weapons.

Ammo Saver
Challenge: Don't spend more than 50% of ammo with all ranged weapons.
Reward: Random ammo box.

Still Alive
Challenge: Don't use any revives.
Hard challenge: Don't use any revives and don't get downed at all (only in multiplayer).
Reward: Small or big health item.

Stealth
Challenge: Don't trigger the alarm more than 3 times in the whole mission and a single alarm cannot be triggered for longer than 1 minute (timer can appear somewhere on the screen).
Hard challenge: Don't trigger the alarm more than 1 times in the whole mission and the alarm cannot be triggered for longer than 30 seconds (timer can appear somewhere on the screen)..

Pacifist
Normal challenge: Don't kill more than 5 enemies durring the mission (mision bosses are excluded from the amount).
Hard challenge: Don't kill any enemy during the mission (mission bosses are excluded from the amount).
Reward: Affinity bonus to warframe and something pacifist related, dunno,

Speedrunner
Challenge: Finish the mission under given time limit (estimated on the combined map chunks).
Hard challenge: Finish the mission under give time limit (even more strict than the normal challenge).

Collector
Challenge: Open every locker in the mission
Reward: Bonus credits

Destroyer
Challenge: Destroy all containers in the mission
Reward: Bonus resources based on the mission difficulty

etc.

The Endgame

After the small side tracking in the realm of motivation and gameplay styles, let's talk more about the endgame. As mentioned before, people are hungry for the endgame and for logical reasons to play the game again and again. Warframe is no Diablo, so there is only limited loot to be found and sooner or later, the player will hit the ceiling. The question is how to interest a player, who already been everywhere and seen everything - frequent updates are nice way to do that, but there should be also some ingame solutions.
Again, there are many different ways to tackle the endgame and here is the list of the options I like and prefer:

- Frequent Concent Updates
- Hardcore Mode
- Mutators
- Mission Related Leaderboads
- Community Created Content

Frequent Content Updates
It's here even it's already happening and I like it this way. Keep it up - giving as mod a week is something that takes basically no time and it will make people happy :)

Hardcore/Ironman Mode
Adjustable difficulty for missions was already suggested many times at the forum, but I think we have missions with higher difficulty for this purpose and simply changing the strength of the enemies and raising the reward is just not enough in my eyes to defend having a simpel "hard" difficulty there.
Hardcore mode is something a bit different, because it would not only make the enemies more dangerous, but there would be other differences from the normal mode. I would like to call this difficulty "survival", but that could get easily misunderstood.
Not all levels must have the hardcore difficulty available and it should be unlocked only after beating the boss of the sector (or possibl cleaning all missions in the sector).

Features of the hardcore/ironman mode:
- Harder enemies (more damage, shields, etc. but rather make them do more damage than changing them to unkillable ones - remember, more dangerous, not more boring)
- More advanced AI (if possible)
- No revives (no matter how much revives player has available)
- Limited reviving of other tennos - time penalty for subsequent reviving for each warframe (50% for each after the first one); or only one assisted revive per tenno (but limit the revives in some way) - Trinity could get some bonus due to her nature (but that's a basis for different topic)
- Only mod and resource drops from enemies - no health globes, no energy globes, no ammo (players have to check the containers and lockers for these ones or just play in an economic way and use ammo boxes)
- Bigger reward at successfull ending
- No common mods, just uncommon and rare ones
- Possible others I forgot to write down when I have this idea while driving in bus from work...


Mutators, i.e. Mission Adjusting (or Cursed Artefacts)
These are well known from the time of orignal Unreal Tournament so I think DE is pretty familiar with them. Considering the endgame content, players could be able, after meeting some requirements, getting a particular item/artifact, to modify the challenge of the mission in a limited way to increase the risk/reward. See some examples:
- "Full Shields", which would equip each and every enemy with proper recharging shields
- "No pickups", which would remove all containers, unlockable lockers and all non-mod drops from the enemies
- "Quad damage", which would boost the damage of enemies considerably
- "Forced challenge" - this is related to the "Advance Mission Challenges" I was writing about above and it would force the players to fullfill a particular challenge to get the better reward, but failing to do so will result in no reward or even penaly to reward for accomplishing mission
- "Low stock" - half ammunition
- "Jammed" - melee weapons and powers only
etc.

These mutators could be basically quite similar to a hardcore mode, but while the hardcore mode is composed from more limitations applied at once, these mutators couldn't be used in great numbers. Mentioning artifacts before, these mutators could be as well represented by some "cursed" artifacts, that grants not a benefit but penalty, but greater reward if the mission is finished successfully. So in case of four players, four different mutators could be used to provide four different penalties to the mission.


Mission Related Leaderboards
Lot of people don't care about leaderboards, but I have to tell you, there is also a lot of them, who cares and when they care, they care hard - I think it's a really imporant part of the endgame.
Adding the leaderboards to endless defense missions, elimination missions, boss missions, etc. is pretty natural and for many players could be the sole reason to play again and again to get better and beat other tennos.
I would personally limit this to the endgame planets/sectors, but there is basically no reason to not have them in all missions - depends on the thinking behind it.
We can have a lot of them so different groups will be on the first places in them (I assume it's not in the powers of individuals to be best at all missions constantly, but I wouldn't put my hand in fire for this statement) or we can focus on few ones.
The leaderboard for a particular mission should be unlockable after first successful accomplishing or maybe, as is the case of hardcore mode, after the sector is cleared.

There would be necessary reward for getting to top ten/five/three/first for a defined duration, so the basic human need to be better is not the only reason to do this. This reward can depend on the placing as well as time spend on that position (or in the range of positions) and the reward could be as well better with increased time on the position.

These leaderboards could be also somehow incorporated to the "wars" between clans, when the clans are implemented and keeping the top places in the maps could grant clans some bonuses - it could represent their power in the fiven sector, or something abstract like that.

There would be also different type of leaderboard and scoring mechanics:
- For endless defense missions the wave achieved would be the fundamental factor, while speed of clearing the last wave or total amount of revives/downed tennos could be the secondary factor in case of a tie
- For elimination missions, time would be the main factor and damage taken secondary
- For boss missions the time it took to kill the boss from the beginning of the mission (time after the boss is dead is not important)

The leaderboard versions of missions should, contrary to the normal missions, keep the same map layout to encourage planning and to assure the basic conditions are fair. This would sooner or later lead to wikipedia pages full of special tactisc for the missions and would add another second of metagame to the game.

There would be two individual leaderboards for the mission - one for players and one for coop, where four players is the optimal number. This would force/encourage the player to play with others to achieve common goal - to show the others, who's the boss here :)


Community Created Content
I just had to add this in the end. I assume you are all familiar with the theory and opinion by the Gabe Newell related to community created content, i.e. no matter how the team is skilled, big fanbase will produce more and possibly better stuff. What they are doing with the TF2 is making the favourite community maps, weapons and hats official.
I am not saying, accept everything creted by the community, but arranging monthly/bi-weekly competitions related to mods, weapons, maps, tilesets, warframes and other aspects of the game, takes amount of time, which is basically insignificant to the possible result. This way you can engage us players even more. And although TF2 and Warframe are completely different games, both have passionate community and randomly-generated maps from Warframe are in a sense similar to arenas in TF2 and therefore I think this approach is really suitable for Warframe.

BTW it's nice, you have this design council, I'm a member, I believe in this game, but I hope that one day all players could participate in polls and some design decisions later in development (mayba after the release).

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Before I end the opening of this thread, I have this urge to repost a topic I written few weeks ago. Contrary to the main theme of this thread, i.e. endgame, the topic is for early game, especially for new and non-paying players...

Warframe Test Drive

The reason for this is in allowing players, who are thinking about buying/constructing new warframe, to test drive them before the purchase/construction to prevent completely necessary and possible dissapointment. The following suggestion is just one of many ways to do this - there are also much easier to implement one, as some already commented in the original thread, like allowing us to test all powers with unlimited energy in a practice room. While this would fulfill the point of being able to test the warframe, I didn't wanted to only test the warframe, but also play and prepare it for further usage.

Basicaly, nobody wants to "buy a pig in a poke" in case real money are included (and sometimes even when the "fake" ones are). So how about allowing players to test drive warframes they don't already own.

The player can freely choose the warframe, from the "Test drive Interface", however, he could use this warframe only for limited time - this limit could be time-based or rank-based:
- In case of time limit, I would say 4 hours of mission game time (for logical reason, including a time spend in lobby would be stupid).
- In case of rank limit, i would go for 5 or 10.

Other limits/restrictions could be also applied to this test driving, since the warframes aren't cheap and the test driving provider (let it be some kind of powerfull hidden organisation, who is in charge of the market) is dictating his terms. You wouldn't believe, how powerfull the game backtround and lore can be in this - it's about choosing right words, believable stories and immersion.

List of possible restrictions:
- No orokin reactor modding (easier for implementation then solving the uninstalling or loosing of one)
- Only random colors (hehe, I know it's cruel)
- Particular warframe can be chosen only once per month (we want them to try other warframes)
- This warframe gets only 15% boost to experience (optionable, not sure about this, but motivation to try it)
- It is possible to tryout new warframe only when there is a free warframe slot (i.e. softly poking players to buy new warframe slots, but it's essentional to keep the tryout itself free of charge)
(All these information and limitations should/must be as clear and accurate as possible.)

With the end of the tryout/test-drive, all necessary warframe related information/stats (i.e. experience level and warframe rank) would/must be kept for later usage, when the player actually decides to construct/purchase the warframe. Also all mods would be stripped from the warframe, when the test drive ends, so they are not lost temporarily. This can also work as a way to prevent repeating of Mercury levels with other warframes, because repetiton is not only the main content of this game, but also the biggest evil of game like this :/

This kind of test driving could not only lead to prevent the above mentioned dissapointment, but more importantly, it could also encourage the players to actually spend some cash for platinum (and we know you need it to keep this game alive) to purchase the warframes (and other things), so they don't have to wait and grind.

It's a win win situation.

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That's it for now, feel free to leave a comment.
See you soon in the next "Thoughts on" thread focused on GUI and HUD, with lot of mockups :)

Edited April 12, 2013 by zelgaris

[Pixues]

(Edit: For this post creating a paragraph seems to be not possible. It just squishes everything together)Impressive thread. Can't reply to everything.

The mod capacity capabilities:..yes i would like something like that.

Community crafted:..A warframe workshop could be very interesting. User made level tiles. User made weapons. Good ones get into the game.

This game definitely needs a good endgame...Right now it's collecting. Heck, Hardcore mode should have things that can make you lose things. If you die in a mission. You lose, credits maybe. No revives. But the rewards for completing it should be great. But yes, the game needs excitement. The only time i felt excitement was when i was doing a solo run, and i had my first encounter with the stalker. After that, pretty much never again.

Edited April 11, 2013 by Pixues

[Naqel]

On one hand, I like what you're doing...

 

On the other, I hate how you're doing it...

 

See, your ideas are all kinda cool on paper, but most of them would MURDER the game from a balance standpoint, both current and future...

When reduced to it's core concepts, your post looks something like this:

 

-Let us change polarities:

Dangerous to the point of 'nope'. Being allowed this kind of min-max'ing(or max-max'ing as it stands in the current system) would enforce a massive power creep from the mobs to keep the game any sort of challenge, making the supposed endgame gated-off from players by an even bigger chasm that has to be filled with credits/platinum.

 

-Let us get even stronger:

On top of all the power creep reasons mentioned above, your idea to tie this to the 'potato' makes the game less friendly to a non paying player.

The higher your player retention is, the more people become paying users. This idea basically murders retention.

 

-Let us do other cool stuff:

This is the part I have the least issues with, since at least your heart is in the right place.

However, your concept of cool stuff is still mostly based on power creep: do things faster, kill more dudes, kill dudes with better ammo efficiency, kill dudes that are harder to kill, ect.

Sure they don't make my 'game design tragedy' sense tingle, but they are simply additions to the current system(most suggested by others already), rather than any truly new feature worthy of such a massive post.

[zelgaris]

4Nagel (not using quote, since it's not working properly)...

 

Well, I don't agree with your opinion, as I am confident ideas here would definitely NOT MURDER the balance. And I am not saying DE will implement anything from this thread, but in the last livestream, there was a mention about allowing us to change the polarity. Whether it harms the balance or not depends on careful implementation.

 

Considering the min-maxing, getting stronger, etc., that's usually the often unavoidable secondary effect of making things variable and flexible (and often also one of the goals). It looks like you are familiar with this topic so let's mention Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. In Diablo 2, we can chose, which stats/skills we increase (i.e. variable), yet in Diablo 3, this wasn't possible. Why? To make it different from D2? How about "because limiting variability it's way easier for balancing the game". Maybe it wasn't the "true reason" someone come up with that, but the fact is, balance issues almost always come with variability and, I would repeat, solving them is matter of careful implementation.

 

Also getting stronger for the future endgame was one of the obvious goals - of course you get stronger, when you increase your mod capacity, amount of slots and change polarity, i.e. improve the variability in this way.

 

You are talking about "gating off the endgame content by a chasm, which has to be filled with credits and platinum". Where exactly is the problem in this? Why are you mentioning platinum? You get credits by playing the game and except for some colors and "skins" (and unfortunately slots for warframes and weapons), everything is available for credits in market or through rewards/alert missions - last time I checked, I had 5 catalyst blueprints and 1 reactor blueprint and I am not playing this game nonstop.

Considering the reactor/catalyst requirement , I understand, why there are no blueprints available in Market, but changing that would fill the "chasm" you are talking a lot - you know, without the BS about killing a player retention.

 

Not sure whether you've actually read the whole opening post, because you are saying "your concept of cool stuff is still mostly based on power creep: do things faster, kill more dudes, kill dudes with better ammo efficiency, kill dudes that are harder to kill, ect." - seriously? And let's say you are right in this theory... have you noticed the game is based on killing things?

 

In the end, of course the "ideas" here are meant to be mostly additions (I prefer modifications) to the current systems - I already stated that in the introduction, so good observation...

[zelgaris]

Shameless bump :)

[Zenneh]

I disagree with you with most of the changes to the mod system seeing that DE are already planning to add more to it which will remove your concerns of unable of fitting every mod of the highest level on it:-

 

DE mentioned about adding more polarities later on via the Paragon system (think of prestige system of COD)

 

DE said something about rarer than rare Mods. Potentially these will strengthen weapons and Warframes more without adding the need for a higher mod capacity.

 

And when I asked DE Steve during the Livestream event they may add Dual effect mods (again) which will again strengthen weapons.

 

However I love the idea of:-

 

A hardcore mode with mutators - with a leader board.

 

Not to mention the advance mission challenges would give a lot of re-playability and bragging rights when used on assassination missions

 

And I admit mod rank adjustment would be nice I mean no one wants to farm another mod that you already have and can't use because you upgraded it once too many times.

[zelgaris]

I disagree with you with most of the changes to the mod system seeing that DE are already planning to add more to it which will remove your concerns of unable of fitting every mod of the highest level on it:-

 

DE mentioned about adding more polarities later on via the Paragon system (think of prestige system of COD)

 

DE said something about rarer than rare Mods. Potentially these will strengthen weapons and Warframes more without adding the need for a higher mod capacity.

 

And when I asked DE Steve during the Livestream event they may add Dual effect mods (again) which will again strengthen weapons.

 

However I love the idea of:-

 

A hardcore mode with mutators - with a leader board.

 

Not to mention the advance mission challenges would give a lot of re-playability and bragging rights when used on assassination missions

 

And I admit mod rank adjustment would be nice I mean no one wants to farm another mod that you already have and can't use because you upgraded it once too many times.

 

Not sure, where I expressed any "concerns about being unable of fitting every mod of the highest level on it" - I've just proposed a potential way to expand the possibilities in the frame of current system.

The same applies to more mod slots - yeah, dual mods would be fine, but dual mods and allowing us having few more slots aren't mutually exclusive features.

Variability and having more options to chose from is my point of view - in case some paragon system is implemented to change polarities, that's great. But I personally wouldn't mind, and I would welcome, and alternative solution to this system (although, if the system is really good, alternative is not necessary). This logic can be applied for other things I've written about.

 

About mod rank adjustment) The biggest issue I see now is, as already stated, you don't see the remaining capacity points during fusion, while you should be definitelly able to see it, so you don't have to remember it or write it down on paper...