How the Mod System Failed Us, and a Suggestion

[CrownOfShadows]

3 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

So please tell me:
What stops your system from falling into the exact same problem?

Once people fill up these "dedicated trees" with the BIS mods, why would anyone bother with any other build or attempting to put anything else into those slots?  After all they would just be competing against the current BIS for those given trees.

 

Sure you now have increased the number of mods that people use!
But you really haven't done anything to help with actual mod diversity because now you just have "This is the 100% BIS setup for the ability tree!" and then watch 99.99999999% of players copy that exactly for literally every single frame in the game because that is what players tend to do.

Once one person comes up with "This is BIS according to some math" then it's done and over.  The experimentation phase is done and everyone glomps onto that one superior build.  Then when new mods come out they are either better the current BIS, in which case they are put into the trees, or they are not and therefore never make it into any of the builds.
After all why would players put something that wasn't BIS into those slots?

 

This doesn't solve the issue you want to solve in any meaningful way, it merely kicks the can down the road a bit.
And it won't take long for players to catch up with the can again.
The only thing that this idea will achieve is a bloat in player stat numbers.  That's it.  More power creep with higher stats and with nothing to show for it.

Well, mods aren't infinite, so kicking the can down the road a bit is all that needs to be done until another 20-50 mods appear, and DE seems to have mostly stopped innovating with mods so I don't see that happening anytime soon. No matter what you do players will always tend towards efficiency (despite what people try to claim on this forum about 'building to have fun').

I introduced the effectiveness gradient, the bonus activation, the valence and the corruption to all combat this natural efficiency proclivity by creating meaningful trade-offs. The more difficult it is to decide what mod should be used where, the better it is imo. It's far from perfect, but I'm just throwing the concept out there. What would YOU do about all the forgotten mods and the tightness of builds?

[Tsukinoki]

1 hour ago, CrownOfShadows said:

What would YOU do about all the forgotten mods and the tightness of builds?

Just a warning the ideas below are largely just off the top of my head and probably have a lot of issues and most likely completely sucks...but it's a rough idea:

Make mods actually have trade-offs and benefits so you have a reason to choose one over another depending on your playstyle.
Have mods that have a base bonus that is always in effect but then have an activation required for a larger bonus (or the entire bonus in some situations) similar to how primary and secondary arcanes work.

 

Give mods different bonuses with different conditions and have a choice of "If you play this way you might use mods X, Y and Z.  On the other hand if you play this other way you might want to use mods A, B and C...."

From there you actually open up the choices and build diversity based on how players want to play the game.

For example have a mod that increases shield regen, but provides a much greater increase but only if you're parkouring and jumping around a lot.
Or have a mod that increases your shields DR, but only while moving slowly with a build up of effect.
Or a  mod that has an effect based on number of enemies with X radius that is under cc/status effect/etc.

 

You could even have mods with conditions similar to the incarnon upgrades, where they have a base stat improvement but also include a secondary bonus such as "If you have X armor or more you get this bonus..." and so on so that you could have powerful bonuses that require you to actually go "Do I want to use up X mod slots to get this benefit?"
Or the "If you have overguard you get this additional benefit...." and so on.

 

They could even have mods with downsides that can synergize together for various effects, such a mod that is a tradeoff of stats and another one with a "Get A% bonus to B stat, If you have less than X armor you get this additional benefit....." and so on and so forth, making it potentially worthwhile to equip a mod that lowers your armor.  Would a mod like that work best on frames with already low armor?  Sure...but you could make it work on frames with higher armor with a bit more work and it might be a good combination depending on how you play the game.

 

 

Sure this would add a lot of complexity to mods....but on the other hand the player would be left with actual choices and how they play the game.
At that point you would see people building and going "I use these mods because I play this way..." and another person going "Well I use these other mods because I don't like to play that way and instead use helminth to play this other way....", meanwhile a third person goes "I use these mods because I can use a specific frame/ability to keep the bonuses up nearly all the time...."

 

At that point it becomes far less clear as to what mod is "better" because at that point it depends on how you play the frame, what abilities you use, and so on and so forth.
It also becomes harder to determine "better" because is solid baseline performance at all times better?  Or what about spikes that are decently higher than that but require certain actions/playstyle to achieve regularly?
Are you the type of player who wants high alpha damage?  Or do you not mind having a primer that sets things up so that you can reap a lot of benefit if you spend a little bit of time setting it up beforehand? (or taking advantage of what other players in the mission are doing to potentially do the setup for you?)

 

There will still be "core" mods that most people will slot in (basic health/armor/shields depending on the frame, and so on) but even those could have some diversity similar to the archon mods with bonuses for doing certain actions.
I mean look at Stretch vs Archon Stretch.  You actually have some argument around which one is better to use, even on frames that can do electric damage without helminth, because sure energy regen is nice, but is it worth the extra cost?  Maybe, maybe not.  Depends on the player.  I've seen people drop energize over it, but also seen people reject it because of its higher cost and keep using energize instead.  Depends on how valuable energy regen is to the player and how much they spam abilities with the frame in question.

 

 

I know that this won't completely solve the issue, but it would actually provide a solid amount of diversity between players.  Yes there will likely always be mods that people "always" slot into their frames and you can't completely stop that...but as long as most of the slots actually have people going "Should I use X or Y?"  and the answer is "Depends on how you play the game...." that is a marked improvement over the current system.

And with conditionals and such added on it becomes harder to say "X is the BIS" because sure, it might be if you play a certain way, but if you don't like to play that way then Y might be your BIS instead.

Hek depending on various things this could also allow for team synergies to actually become a thing.

 

Again this idea is deeply flawed...but I feel like it would increase build diversity more than "Here, have a dozen more slots to fill up!" because the only thing that'll do is just allow us to put the next meta mods into the new slots and then cookie-cutter it across everything and everyone in the game.

Edited October 18, 2023 by Tsukinoki

[(NSW)Greybones]

6 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Well, mods aren't infinite, so kicking the can down the road a bit is all that needs to be done until another 20-50 mods appear, and DE seems to have mostly stopped innovating with mods so I don't see that happening anytime soon. No matter what you do players will always tend towards efficiency (despite what people try to claim on this forum about 'building to have fun').

I introduced the effectiveness gradient, the bonus activation, the valence and the corruption to all combat this natural efficiency proclivity by creating meaningful trade-offs. The more difficult it is to decide what mod should be used where, the better it is imo. It's far from perfect, but I'm just throwing the concept out there. What would YOU do about all the forgotten mods and the tightness of builds?

Let the players who value efficiency to their own detriment rot.

They aren’t victims, they’ve weighed what they currently do (singular focus on efficiency far beyond anything the game asks for at cost to the very things they’re grinding for) versus what they can do (variety of build and playstyles where efficiency isn’t the main focus but the grind happens anyways and everything they earn is potentially a new thing to play around with), and they’ve made their oh-so-logical decision to not waste time in a time wasting videogame chasing things they’ll never use in a way they claim to hate but can’t stop themselves from doing because they love it too much

Have you seen how proud players are about their various ways to turn the game off? Have you seen how they fight with tooth and nail against anything introduced to get them to stop doing what they’re doing? Have you seen how much they love the FOMO to the point they invent reasons to chase g-roll rivens and keep up-to-date with the unnecessary Meta?

Have you witnessed some newbie jumping in, asking “Is grind all there is to it, when does the game get fun?”, and the much-vaunted “Veterans” of the game tell the newbie that they better get used to it and then proceed to push the newbie into the very playstyles that can be fun in moderation, but end up causing veterans and newbies alike to complain about because those who should know better literally don’t know how to have fun when they want to turn a game into a job, and thus what should be an every-so-often unique aspect of this game becomes a permanent playstyle that wears out its welcome all too soon but they can’t bring themselves to actually play around because someone convinced them that they’re doing bad if they’re not efficient?

Personally I think your idea would be interesting from an experimenting perspective, but I think it would also be a nightmare to experiment as much as I do in this game, so if you want to replace the mod system, the replacement would benefit from simplicity and flexibility, which the mod system already has for someone who wants to use it instead of cutting out the build-crafting for fun portion of this buildcrafting Third Person Shooter game

Edited October 18, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones

[PublikDomain]

On 2023-10-17 at 6:35 PM, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

The simple act of there being freedom isnt really something you can argue against. Any type of restriction would just reduce the amount of freedom we have. 

But what I'm saying is that there's a difference between freedom we have and freedom we use. Having a ton of freedom on paper doesn't mean anything if no one uses it. Would you have more freedom if DE added a thousand new Aim Glide mods? On paper yes, you would. But if no one uses them then what's the point? If having less of that on-paper freedom means that people make more use of the freedom they have then that's a net positive. Restrictions would reduce the amount of on-paper freedom we have, yes, but could increase the amount of freedom people actually explore.

23 hours ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

This thread was about diversity by altering the modding system. OP didn't suggest balancing mods only which ones we can equip simultaneously. Restricting mod choice doesn't create diversity, it removes it. Not sure what you are trying to correct me on.

Consider this: you can take Damage, Status Chance (and Damage), Multishot, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Elemental x2, and a Riven on any and every Primary/Secondary. Just the bog standard hybrid Heat/Viral build that does everything. You don't have to choose between A and B when you can just take both. There is nothing to choose when the choice can be "everything". And while you might replace one or two mods here or there, it's still the same overall build layout. There is shockingly little diversity. You can see this if you look at your own builds, builds linked in chat, builds from content creators, builds DE uses in streams, builds on build sites like Overframe, etc.

Now consider: what if you can only take four of those stats? Which four do you choose? Do you take D/MS/CC? CC/CD/Elemental? D/Elemental/Elemental? MS/Elemental/Bane? There are suddenly more choices because you have to choose, and the choice is much more ambiguous. Some people will choose one way and others will choose another. Now people are actually using different builds. There is now more diversity. Yes, you're not free to just take everything anymore so on paper there are fewer total options, but in exchange you have to think and choose an option that isn't the one "everything" choice everyone chooses.

It's not dissimilar to what OP is showing in their example images. There for example you can't take eight Ability mods - so which four do you take? All Power Strength? All Range? An even mix? While I don't agree with OP's example giving players 25-mod Warframe builds, I do agree with the underlying principle of having a build limit to certain types of mods.

[(PSN)Joylesstuna]

28 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

But what I'm saying is that there's a difference between freedom we have and freedom we use. Having a ton of freedom on paper doesn't mean anything if no one uses it. Would you have more freedom if DE added a thousand new Aim Glide mods? On paper yes, you would. But if no one uses them then what's the point? If having less of that on-paper freedom means that people make more use of the freedom they have then that's a net positive. Restrictions would reduce the amount of on-paper freedom we have, yes, but could increase the amount of freedom people actually explore.

Consider this: you can take Damage, Status Chance (and Damage), Multishot, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Elemental x2, and a Riven on any and every Primary/Secondary. Just the bog standard hybrid Heat/Viral build that does everything. You don't have to choose between A and B when you can just take both. There is nothing to choose when the choice can be "everything". And while you might replace one or two mods here or there, it's still the same overall build layout. There is shockingly little diversity. You can see this if you look at your own builds, builds linked in chat, builds from content creators, builds DE uses in streams, builds on build sites like Overframe, etc.

Now consider: what if you can only take four of those stats? Which four do you choose? Do you take D/MS/CC? CC/CD/Elemental? D/Elemental/Elemental? MS/Elemental/Bane? There are suddenly more choices because you have to choose, and the choice is much more ambiguous. Some people will choose one way and others will choose another. Now people are actually using different builds. There is now more diversity. Yes, you're not free to just take everything anymore so on paper there are fewer total options, but in exchange you have to think and choose an option that isn't the one "everything" choice everyone chooses.

It's not dissimilar to what OP is showing in their example images. There for example you can't take eight Ability mods - so which four do you take? All Power Strength? All Range? An even mix? While I don't agree with OP's example giving players 25-mod Warframe builds, I do agree with the underlying principle of having a build limit to certain types of mods.

All I'm trying to say is every you have mentioned can already be done instead of forcing or shoehorning people into doing it.

[PublikDomain]

21 minutes ago, (PSN)Joylesstuna said:

All I'm trying to say is every you have mentioned can already be done instead of forcing or shoehorning people into doing it.

I know, and I'm saying that it doesn't matter if it can be done when no one actually does it. If no one will do it because no one has to do it, then forcing it is the only way.