[Questionnaire Results] How do you feel about Riven Mods?

[di0n08O8]

Hi Tenno!

A few days ago, I made a post where I asked for your opinions on Riven mods. I excpected a few dozen answers at most, but I ended up getting over 300! Because of that, I want to thank everyone that filled in the questionnaire. As promised, here are the results from that questionnaire. I'll show you some graphs and I'll tell you what I think they mean. I don't have a lot of experience with collecting and analyzing data, so there is a chance I might miss something or draw a wrong conclusion.

 

These graphs show that the vast majority of answers answers came from PC players and players that were MR 23 or higher. That means this sample is likely not representative of the community as a whole, since this isn't a realistic ratio between categories. Because of that, every conclusion you can draw from these graphs should be taken with a grain of salt. 

I think the type of person that answered the questionnaire is relatively one-sided because I posted the questionnaire on the Warframe Forum and Subreddit, which are mostly used by more experienced and less casual players. It was also filled in a lot more by Pc players, though I don't know how much of it was because of the websites, and how much was because of the actual size difference in each platform's playerbase. I didn't include an option for Mastery Ranks below 8, because that's the minimum MR required to use any Rivens.

 

 The amount of people that often or always use Rivens is larger than the group of people that almost never or never use Rivens. From this, you can conclude that Rivens are pretty popular and that, more often than not, people use Rivens on their weapons.

 

The enjoyment of Rivens is relatively even across the board, far more even than the usage. To me, this is a bit strange, since that could mean that there is a disconnect between how much players use Rivens, and how much they enjoy using them. I expected these graphs to be relatively similar.

There is a large group (almost 25%) that doesn't like using Rivens at all. Meanwhile, there is only a group of 10,5% that actually doesn't use Rivens. That would mean that almost 15% of people said they don't like using Rivens, but do use them at least every now and then.

 

In this graph, you can see that the general opinion on balance is split relatively evenly, but slightly weighted to negative. The difference is especially noticable when comparing the amount of people that entered a 1 or a 10. From this, you can also conclude that while people might like using Rivens, that doesn't necessarily mean that they think Rivens have a positive impact on balance.

 

One of the questions asked participants to briefly summarize their opinion on Rivens. I've put all of those answers into a word cloud to get a better idea of what is important. I've removed a few of the most popular words that don't mean anything without context like 'weapon', 'make', or 'game'. Of course, keep in mind that the rest of the words are also without context, but it does show some concepts and topics that came up often, so it's safe to assume people think they're important.

 

_{(Complete List of Graphs)}
So, that's what I think about this data. Let me know what you think about it.

I might do more stuff like this in the future if you guys are interested in that. Of course, feedback and a different perspective is always welcome! Again, thanks to everyone that filled in the questionnaire.

[-JT-_-R3W1ND]

That's intresting. 30% almost never use rivens, and 30% more only somethimes. And this is for "high" ranks and active playerbase.

 

4 minutes ago, di0n08O8 said:

There is a large group (almost 25%) that doesn't like using Rivens at all. Meanwhile, there is only a group of 10,5% that actually doesn't use Rivens. That would mean that almost 15% of people said they don't like using Rivens, but do use them at least every now and then.

I can say more. I did use rivens all the time (mostly) but want them to leave forever, with passion.

I hate everything about it. Market, rng, stupidity of balancing, the way DE work with (like new guns now suxx just because).

And yeah, i don't think about this as a contradiction. That's a major idea behind this game — create the best mod config. I will follow this idea, but i don't like the way i should do it.

[Caobie]

I would like to see how this data would change with a significantly larger portion of the playerbase, say in the thousands range. Not much of this data can be applied outside of those that answered with a sample size so small sadly, however as a base to compare proportionally with it might be valuable. I think the only thing that might be applicable to the community overall might be the general feeling that rivens affect the balance negatively since that data has such a heavy skew but even that might be affected by the bias of the type of people who answered the questionnaire.

 

Well done overall and very nicely presented 🙂

[DrivaMain]

8 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

It's almost like there was nothing wrong with rivens at all, and some people just need to get with the times.

Some people used riven because they are “lucky” to get it. For example, I have a wolf sledge riven because the “wheel of fortune” somehow landed on the thing I wanted. 
 

This worse than lootbox level of RNG needs to stop.

[chaotea]

5 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

It's almost like there was nothing wrong with rivens at all, and some people just need to get with the times.

Its more indicitive that 15% dont enjoy using Rivens, but feel they need to regardless.

[(PSN)Mofojokers]

A questionnaire won't get the desired results on the forums or reddit. However if this stuff was done in game it would have very intresting results. Throw a free three pack of forma and boom many results.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

10 minutes ago, chaotea said:

Its more indicitive that 15% dont enjoy using Rivens, but feel they need to regardless.

Or just more forma and better modding. You don't need rivens for most of the games content, if not all, not even for whipclaw. 

I could all of a sudden "feel" like I "need" a BMW....but would that make it true lol

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

13 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Some people used riven because they are “lucky” to get it. For example, I have a wolf sledge riven because the “wheel of fortune” somehow landed on the thing I wanted. 
 

This worse than lootbox level of RNG needs to stop.

Worse than loot box? I've seen how bad loot boxes can be....how would you feel if warframe started putting weapons and cosmetics in actual lootboxes that you paid for with real money? 

Unveiled rivens, veiled rivens, and plat aren't hard to obtain for anyone that isn't completely new.

[-CdG-Zilchy]

31 minutes ago, -JT-_-R3W1ND said:

I can say more. I did use rivens all the time (mostly) but want them to leave forever, with passion.

I hate everything about it. Market, rng, stupidity of balancing, the way DE work with (like new guns now suxx just because).

And yeah, i don't think about this as a contradiction. That's a major idea behind this game — create the best mod config. I will follow this idea, but i don't like the way i should do it.

Your thoughts and usage mirror my own.

[DrivaMain]

17 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Unveiled rivens, veiled rivens, and plat aren't hard to obtain for anyone that isn't completely new.

So, the only way to engage in the riven system is to not to engage on it at all? That’s bad design. The odds of getting a specific melee riven from a veiled melee riven mod is 1 out of 163 (0.06%). That’s not even taking Sortie Drop RNG.

The Riven mod intention is not bad. It’s the RNG that made the system bad. Eliminating this single element is enough to get rid of the negativity that surrounds it.
 

 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

1 minute ago, DrivaMain said:

So, the only way to engage in the riven system is to not to engage on it at all? That’s bad design. The odds of getting a specific melee riven from a veiled melee riven mod is 1 out of 163 (0.06%). That’s not even taking Sortie Drop RNG.

The Riven mod intention is not bad. It’s the RNG that made the system bad.
 

 

Maybe one day we can progress to videogames never having any RNG, but it's a long hard fight. For the moment though, this particular game isn't even 1/3 the evil that games can be.

Besides someone feeling they're entitled to a "groll"....most rivens can be acquired with a couple to a few weeks of patience and work.

The CC, CD, MS -corpus really isn't the end of the world. 

[Acos]

Forums naturally bias towards people who are unsatisfied with some aspect of the game and would like to see changes. It's important to keep this in mind as the data you are gathering may not actually be representative of the player base as a whole. 

[chaotea]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Or just more forma and better modding. You don't need rivens for most of the games content, if not all, not even for whipclaw. 

I could all of a sudden "feel" like I "need" a BMW....but would that make it true lol

I dunno. I feel like whenever you look at videos or guides of people doing 5 min tridalons or whatever, they're heavily relying on Riven builds. And for clarity I forma every weapon, trash or otherwise, up to the point i can fit a full set of mods. And potato them.

(Also, the BMW example..... its like, sure, you dont need a new BMW, but anyone who ever gets promoted in your workplace has a BMW, and everyone who doesnt never gets promoted. And no one says you need a BMW, but whenever they talk about their success the BMW comes into the conversation. Thats a more accurate analogy.)

Personally I have some dissatifaction with Rivens. I own alot of them, but everything about them makes me not want to engage with the system. While I didnt vote, i would fit into that 15%.

I mean I like the idea of them, but unless they're in an alert or i just happen to have enough slivers to trade i dont go after them. I rarely roll more than 5 times. Basically, i dislike everything except using them.

I did a rework idea a while ago, which pretty much sums my thoughts on it if your interested. Not essential reading, but a few ideas. You can just look at the Riven section if you are interested.

Do note im rasing this as a long time Vet, MR30, but also a casual player. I'd like the system to be more engaging, but not to the point i'd white knight it forever one way or the other. Rivens are, as i see it, a cool idea implimented badly (Well it is warframe, hur hur and all that).

[PhiThagRaid]

10 hours ago, di0n08O8 said:

 The amount of people that often or always use Rivens is larger than the group of people that almost never or never use Rivens. From this, you can conclude that Rivens are pretty popular and that, more often than not, people use Rivens on their weapons

First off, thanks for putting in the effort to gather and present this data.

I found this question hard to answer.  I have 1 riven that I rolled for my Zenith months/years ago and it's been sitting in my load out ever since. A year or two ago I made a few builds with rivens that I happened to have. In the past 6 or more months I definitely haven't opened/rolled a riven. 

Do I state that I always use rivens, since there is one on my favourite weapon or do I state almost never, since I don't bother interacting with its systems.

I just chose sometimes, being the average.  An additional question could've been: "How often do you interact with riven mechanics?" Or "How often do you reroll rivens?". Riven rerolling should be more correlated with actually "using" rivens mechanically.

10 hours ago, di0n08O8 said:

In this graph, you can see that the general opinion on balance is split relatively evenly, but slightly weighted to negative. The difference is especially noticable when comparing the amount of people that entered a 1 or a 10. From this, you can also conclude that while people might like using Rivens, that doesn't necessarily mean that they think Rivens have a positive impact on balance.

For this, I selected 1, but theoretically based on what they were designed to be they should've been a 10. If I see a subpar weapon riven, I don't see it as worth the effort to make it good, but for an already good weapon this allows 2/3 useful stats in one mod. So you can still get a riven that is better than what could be in that 8th slot of your weapon build no matter how good the weapon is, and I think that is bad, a great weapon's riven should always be worse than whatever would've been in its slot. Whereas a weak weapon's riven should let it compare with the actually good weapons.

[PublikDomain]

Thanks for doing this! For the future, the choice of pie chart colors is definitely not r/dataisbeautiful. It's hard to tell at a glance which shade of purple is MR18-22 and which is MR23-27, for example. Otherwise the charts look pretty great.

[Alpha_Tango]

12 hours ago, Acos said:

Forums naturally bias towards people who are unsatisfied with some aspect of the game and would like to see changes. It's important to keep this in mind as the data you are gathering may not actually be representative of the player base as a whole. 

I can't agree with this more. 

If I am a new player and disqualify rivens outright relying on this results, I'll be missing a lot on one of the major customization options offered in this game.

I acknowledge that they are not without faults. I never even used them when MR 27 was the highest MR back then. But I did hoard a lot while ignoring the system. Slowly, I enjoyed doing missions unveiling and can do any of them and now have around 160 plus pieces collected. 

People play however they want to, but with self control and knowing first hand how not to be a victim of preying opportunist or stop short before addictive rolling sets in. You can actually enjoy beating the odds against RNG drawing that god roll in a few or grabbing that cheap riven haggling in the market. These are some of the few niceties I learned to like in this game after not conforming right away with what I read in these forums.

i have nothing against the OP, actually, thanks for the effort. I just like to add that players tend to miss a lot unless they try it themselves.

 

[GEN-Son_17]

15 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

So, the only way to engage in the riven system is to not to engage on it at all? That’s bad design. The odds of getting a specific melee riven from a veiled melee riven mod is 1 out of 163 (0.06%). That’s not even taking Sortie Drop RNG.

The Riven mod intention is not bad. It’s the RNG that made the system bad. Eliminating this single element is enough to get rid of the negativity that surrounds it.
 

 

It's not the rng neither. It's the "I wants it" syndrome. People always want the riven for their favorite or meta weapon. That's no different than people wanting the "ultimate sword" in an rpg but it's ultra hard to find. DE actually offsets that buy allowing free trades or market sells. Other players determine whether it's virtually unobtainable, through upselling plat costs. In essence, it's yet another community problem blamed on DE.

[DrivaMain]

1 hour ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

It's not the rng neither. It's the "I wants it" syndrome. People always want the riven for their favorite or meta weapon. That's no different than people wanting the "ultimate sword" in an rpg but it's ultra hard to find. DE actually offsets that buy allowing free trades or market sells. Other players determine whether it's virtually unobtainable, through upselling plat costs. In essence, it's yet another community problem blamed on DE.

That’s why disposition exist. It’s there to combat the “I want the best and only the best” syndrome.

The goal of the riven system is to lift up forgotten weapons and potentially diversify the meta. But the sheer amount of multi layer RNG and too many uncontrollable combinations it made players don’t even bother to engage on the system without spending platinum.

That’s DE mistake to put that in, not the community. The RNG also one of the cause of the “I want the best” syndrome. The risk is too high, so people would rather just play safe and buy the best of the best.

[ReddyDisco]

Never was a fan of the way rivens worked, its all rng and require a huge investment in kuva and many prayers to RNGesus. I always hoped DE would give the option of locking a stat for a hefty price or with riven slivers(damn things have become meh) but that never happened. I do own a fair number of unveiled rivens i got from sorties and countless veiled rivens sold for plat.

[Aazhyd]

Last graph:

"In this graph, you can see that the general opinion on balance is split relatively evenly, but slightly weighted to negative."

If you look at the huge number of respondents that gave a 1, and a relatively low number giving a 9 or 10, I'd say that this is _heavily_ weighted to negative.

 

[Birdframe_Prime]

I think the overall problem is this: Riven Rolls are genuinely too much RNG.

On game balance, for example, the number of stats that Rivens can manipulate at once can mean that weapons can gain a disproportionate amount of power compared to their base. Weapons with already powerful mechanics, such as radial attacks, multi-hit projectiles, or even just base-high supplemental stats, can be shifted incredibly far from their base even when they're not the strongest Disposition.

This means that DE, while putting in a surprising amount of diligence with relative DPS for their weapons (surprising considering the amount of power creep we've had over time) cannot balance their game at all for the relative power that the player base will actually have. It results in their scaling not increasing difficulty, only stats, for their enemies.

On the player-to-player interaction it means that there are 'god rolls', 'acceptable rolls' and 'everything else' which has a vastly disproportionate value on the costs of these while trading.

From a player's own enjoyment of them, that's more subjective, because they might put in all the time for a good roll on their weapon, but find that it doesn't actually make it compete with other weapons, or that the Disposition is being adjusted negatively due to the popularity of a weapon at the time. Or they might even resent the fact that the weapon isn't base useful enough on its own and the only way to make it a better functioning weapon is to actually use a Riven, but again the RNG stats make doing that harder and time consuming.

If Rivens were to lose some of their RNG, for example always giving a negative to a supplemental stat (rather than to things like base damage types, fire rate, flight speed, zoom) and would always include three stats that can only be one damage increase, one supplemental stat increase and one utility stat increase, this would produce more easily calculated and balanced Rivens. Enabling something like a Stat Lock for a given stat that you want on the Riven would further allow you to roll it for something that's overall positive, and yet the negative would always balance it out a little.

(What I mean by that is that you would always get the first stat increasing the damage, like giving an Elemental, IPS, Base increase. The supplementals would always give something like Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Status Chance, Multi-shot. The Utility would always affect Zoom, Fire Rate, Magazine, Reload and so on. Meanwhile, the negative would always be based on the Supplemental, so increasing the Crit Chance would mean that one of the other stats, like Crit Damage, Status or Multi-shot would be decreased.)

The end result of this is that the reduced RNG nature, the more reliable acquisition of valid/desired stats, would allow for the easing of those earlier problems.

DE would better predict what stats would appear on a given Riven and be able to adjust the Disposition better on release to the predicted power, and be able to balance enemies a little better for the damage that we could potentially deal out. (This would mean that releasing a weapon at a certain Mastery Rank would actually mean something more, because an MR 5 weapon's base power would be low, but its Riven Dispo might be higher to compensate, and the players could see at a glance the kind of content DE meant for it to take on both without the Riven and with it.)

The market would balance out because the high end Rivens would have far greater supply, driving top end costs down, and the low end would be more accessible because just acquiring one for the weapon would mean you have a better chance of just rolling the stats yourself.

And then the actual usage for the player would be a little more satisfying because the time investment would be better rewarded, the end results would be more to the player's own preferences, and the usage would be better because they would have the balance on the weapon from DE that more suits the situations they're going to apply it to.

Wouldn't solve everything, I know.

And I'm personally more in favour removing random-roll stats in the entire game... but.

I would rather have a fair and balanced system to the RNG, if we're going to keep it, than the chaos it is right now.

[(XBOX)InductiveBag46]

Riven are like the niche thing i invest useless kuva into every now and again

[Aldain]

I never liked word clouds, feels like it completely annuls any text feedback and turns it into buzzwords.

[GEN-Son_17]

12 hours ago, Aazhyd said:

Last graph:

"In this graph, you can see that the general opinion on balance is split relatively evenly, but slightly weighted to negative."

If you look at the huge number of respondents that gave a 1, and a relatively low number giving a 9 or 10, I'd say that this is _heavily_ weighted to negative.

 

Trolls and external influence exist though. In my field of work, a personal bad hair day can cause an entire production to receive a "1". A single disposition shift can quickly trigger a "1". 

[Aldain]

1 hour ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

Trolls and external influence exist though. In my field of work, a personal bad hair day can cause an entire production to receive a "1". A single disposition shift can quickly trigger a "1". 

As a small note, I was one of those 1's and I hold the opinion because of years of ongoing balance issues, forum whining when said disposition rates change, lack of true support for weaker weapons, and the general mess it has made of any attempt at trading in-game because of the copy/paste flood of desperate and/or obnoxious Riven sellers.

Don't lump every "1" into a false selection because with the controversial nature of Riven mods as they pertain to the state of Warframe it is more than believable to me that some have had their perception of them marred by the history of them, be it from interactions with the system itself or the people who use it.