Reducing Grind - Region Specific Mod Tables

[Letter13]

This is a rather recent concept I came up with after seeing a lot of the negative feedback about limiting things like rare stances to a very specific enemy type that rarely spawns (i.e. Powerfist). Sablesonata makes an excellent point in one of his posts on the issue:

The problem with that is that as a player, you have basically no choice in how enemies spawn. All having individual drop table does is force players to find that one node where a certain enemy inexplicably spawns more and do it over and over and over until they get the drop they need.

 

Aren't new players supposed to find these mods as they progress? If it's very difficult to find when you're stacking the odds in your favour and grinding for days at a time, what hope is there for the average player to ever get it?

It isn't just a problem with stances though, it's a problem with a lot of things. Recently on a mission in Mercury I came across a Streamline on the survival not 5 minutes in. Now don't get me wrong, Streamline is a fantastic mod... but it's not something that sort of yells "this is mandatory for early game areas". When I think "early game" I think of mods that directly influence a player's weapon combat ability and survivability... mods like Redirection, Vitality, Serration, Hornet Strike, elemental damage mods, etc. Common and some uncommon mods. Not rare mods. But a lot of these mods aren't really seen until later areas because the correct enemies don't spawn in at early game areas. 

 

Which is why I thought "Why not have the mod drop table be dependent on the planet, rather than the enemy?" You could have a separate table for every planet, and whenever you kill any enemy there's a chance it could drop a mod from the region's mod table. Of course considering there are way fewer regions than there are enemies, each region's mod table would be huge (think 5~7 enemies' worth of mods). However by making it so that any enemy can draw from this table, you're no longer limiting players to nodes, regions or enemy types (players don't have to "find that one node where a certain enemy inexplicably spawns more and do it over and over and over until they get the drop they need"). Players can play the mission types they want and kill all enemies equally. Additionally, come common and high-use mods can be repeated across regions (i.e. have Serration and Hornet Strike drop in Mercury, Venus, and maybe 1 or 2 other low/mid level regions), and have rarer mods limited to just 1 or 2 regions.

 

These tables could function like the resource tables--which happen to be planet specific. But unlike the resource tables, these tables would be hidden and would require unlocking them in the Codex in order to view them. This is where "Mission Scanning" would occur. First, create a codex entry for each planet/region; to reveal more of the entry all the player needs to do is run missions in that planet (perhaps a number of 20~50 missions would fully unlock the codex entry), the more missions they run the more of the table becomes viewable. 

 

Also, removal of skill mods from the tables would be ideal to reduce dilution (although skill mods are nice for transmutation fodder so I'm slightly on the fence about this)

 

I may try coming up with sample tables

 

Thoughts? Suggestions?

 

P.S. If such an idea is implemented, I'd suggest turning enemy-scanning for the codex into something that gives you mastery; when you complete a codex entry you get a bit of mastery, so there's still incentive (maybe even more than before due to people posting drop tables on the wiki) to scan enemies.

 

tl;dr ------ turning mod drops into planet-specific tables (like resources) does 2 things:

                     1. Make "mandatory" mods for early player experience available earlier on

                     2. Reduce the grind by having all enemies pull from a single table rather than individual tables per enemy

Edited June 26, 2014 by Letter13
Scanning enemies = should give mastery instead

[Senketsu_]

+1

 

[Sidathe]

Interesting. :v

[_Rue_]

it's a great start... i'd love to know where to go just to farm what i want... like the new stance... :3

[DeathKoala]

[Letter13]

Found the imgurian. Have some high-res bacon: http://imgur.com/gallery/9i2UW/

[DeathKoala]

Found the imgurian. Have some high-res bacon: http://imgur.com/gallery/9i2UW/

Now those are some megapixels I can get behind.

[Zachles]

I love you, Letter13.

[-Mr.Meeseeks-]

An interesting idea. A change I think i'd be perfectly up for.

 

Only issue I see is that scanning enemies would be even further useless than it already is now.

[Letter13]

An interesting idea. A change I think i'd be perfectly up for.

 

Only issue I see is that scanning enemies would be even further useless than it already is now.

Mastery. Make enemy scanning give mastery when you fill out the codex.

[dashashou]

well of life  - they don't want to reduce the grind  

Scott even said he wants it so u play for months before u encounter that rare stance . Months! 

 

 

ps- codex should be the next 2.0 

Edited June 26, 2014 by Ravel7

[magusat999]

Makes much more sense than how it is now - especially since you progress outwards from Mercury in difficulty, so it would seem the mods would be placed to match the way the game progresses.

 

Also is the issue with these invasion events - for example on Ceres its been taken over (mostly) by the Corprus - so where to get Beacons to find Ruk??? Only one enemy carries it - and the best area to find him has been taken over...

[Scherhardt]

Needs to happens asap.

[Letter13]

Also is the issue with these invasion events - for example on Ceres its been taken over (mostly) by the Corprus - so where to get Beacons to find Ruk??? Only one enemy carries it - and the best area to find him has been taken over...

This would be a different issue. For something like this it might be prudent to have nodes that cannot be invaded; so basically there would be 3 or 4 nodes which cannot be converted to the other faction, and these 3 nodes are 3 different mission types.

 

But yes, this would solve mod-drop issues due to enemy factions taking over an area (i.e. what would happen if Corpus took over all of Phobos? or all of Earth? It would become very hard to farm for the forest/desert variants of Grineer troops).

[Mak_Gohae]

You get Redirection for free from the tutorial now.

Base damage mods are not needed early game at all, enemies have too little life to need them.

The one thing that may be needed is pointing people to buy the Braton because that eases some trouble for soloers.

Streamline is actually very helpful because it get you casting abilities faster.

 

The problem with this is that progression is going to stop for new people playing through the game, they may run through a zone and never get a mod because they didnt know and go through the whole game not getting that mod until they find out.

 

But with the new lower powered version of mods Scott mentioned they could do some sort of tree system where the pool of mods in the lower levels is small giving new players a higher chance to get the drops of "required" mods and the deeper one gets into the game the pool becomes bigger and bigger as more higher powered versions get introduced. And you can make it so each path can have a better change at certain mod types.

[Phatose]

Seems like it would end up harder to get any specific mod you're after.  There are fewer regions then there are enemy types.  Dilution would be a tremendous problem.

 

I'd much rather they simply labeled regions with what enemies spawn in it.

[magusat999]

How about adding in player level / progression to the mix? For example, Mercury drops Redirection - but not any area at any time. Affecting the drop chance would be the individual player's level, progress, and stats. Not saying that is the complete solution, but just opening up the question for further discussion.

[Renegade343]

Good idea, but still remove the Warframe Abilities Mod/default Sentinel precept drops. It just feels weird that enemies have these in bulk, yet the lore states that they do not have/cannot use Warframe powers. 

 

EDIT: And if you are going to write up the sample tables, remind yourself to include at least one popular mod for each planet, so that each planet will be explored and used by the players, instead of having one planet chock-full of players while another one is deserted just because the former planet has a few popular mods and the latter planet has none. 

Edited June 26, 2014 by Renegade343

[Chupacabra]

RNG based progression is RNG based progression so I'm still against the system overall, but your onto something better then what we have.

 

I like having enemies with region specific tables (this would allow cutting drop tables and lowering dilution) however lumping all of the enemies into one bigger table will likely lead to some mods having low %'s ,and it's the low %'s that lead to fruitless missions. I'd say have tables vary by:

 

>region/planet

>mission type

>level

 

This would create smaller tables and would greatly reduce the incidence of fruitless missions and give some mission types some reason to replay them. Also, absolutely remove abilities from the tables, it's ridiculous that it hasn't been done yet.

 

P.S. So I've been tossing an idea around in my head... do we really need clone mods across different weapons? i.e. elementals, base damage etc etc for every weapon type? If we made all mods that exist for more than one weapon universal type mods, wouldn't that cut drop tables by ~50%? Obviosuly not every mod is applied and we would need some balancing, but think of how much smaller drop tables would be.

 

And to reemphasize: RNG based progression is RNG based progression, and that's bad.

Edited June 26, 2014 by Chupacabra

[Taranis49]

Seems like it would end up harder to get any specific mod you're after.  There are fewer regions then there are enemy types.  Dilution would be a tremendous problem.

 

I'd much rather they simply labeled regions with what enemies spawn in it.

 

That's not really the case. While it's the case for planets, it definitely doesn't hold true of individual nodes. There's about 180 enemy types in total, even counting reskins (and several of those share the same tables), by contrast, there's 239 total nodes in the solar map.

 

Nevermind that back in the days of Mod Drop 1.0 (where pretty much every enemy could drop any mod) it was actually entirely possible to level mods like Serration and Hornet Strike with duplicates, specifically because there was one less RNG gate (needing a specific enemy to spawn). It's an issue that's made even "uncommon" mods like Contagious Spread, Homing Fang, etc. harder to come by than a good chunk of rares.

 

The other issue with enemy-specific drop tables and region-specific enemies comes in the form of invasions. This was made most evident in the case of Prosecutors and beacons once Ceres was invaded, meaning it's entirely possible to have situations where given enemies simply can't spawn (particularly in systems like Eris for the time being, since it currently lacks so much as a boss node).

[Phatose]

Yeah, but he wasn't talking about unique drop tables for individual nodes.  It was per-planet, which was why you could select specific mission types.  If it's per node, that's an entirely different discussion.

[Me.Greedy]

The thing is that there is still trade...

 

i do agree that the enemies need to be aligned with a more direct easy, medium, hard; that way the mods could be dependant on region better than they are now. i would definately like to see the enemies better spread around the solar system like this. the problem i'm seeing is how do you determine which mods are a must and which is not?... there are a few for sure must haves, but in the end it can be frame dependant and playstyle dependant, game mode dependant...

 

the glaring situation is serration, hornet strike being uncommon. those need to be common and drop like crazy... (like ammo drum crazy)... that way it doesn't take a million dollars and 1000 fusion cores.

 

also about blanketing a whole region with 30 mods; it would still be annoying to search for one type of mod. look at the resources, there is only 4 per region and getting a rare per level is like 1. that would make a rare drop once every 7 games, adn it still wouldn't be the one you were looking for.

[Letter13]

the problem i'm seeing is how do you determine which mods are a must and which is not?... there are a few for sure must haves, but in the end it can be frame dependant and playstyle dependant, game mode dependant...

 

the glaring situation is serration, hornet strike being uncommon. those need to be common and drop like crazy... (like ammo drum crazy)... that way it doesn't take a million dollars and 1000 fusion cores.

 

also about blanketing a whole region with 30 mods; it would still be annoying to search for one type of mod. look at the resources, there is only 4 per region and getting a rare per level is like 1. that would make a rare drop once every 7 games, adn it still wouldn't be the one you were looking for.

Organizing the tables in a way that would improve drops while maintaining some degree of grinding would be difficult. But the idea is that in a planet, you'll see well over 5 different enemy types depending on the mission, which means you have a mod drop table of more than 5 different enemies; in a way you could say that the region's drop table is even more diluted.

 

The steps taken would be reducing the overall mods that a player could see drop from a region while expanding this new table to encompass all enemies. So instead of players having to hunt down that very specific enemy, they have a chance (albeit a smaller one than before due to a bigger table) to get that mod from any and every enemy (bring a Nekros or two or three). 

 

The real tricky part would be to offset the drop chance reduction from an increased drop table based on what % of the enemies beforehand dropped that mod.

 

For example, let's say that 1 out of every 10 Grineers that spawn is a powerfist. And each powerfist has a 2.5% chance to drop that mod you REALLY want. Roughly, that translates to a 0.25% chance to get that mod you want. Because not all enemies spawn equally, you get this skewing going on. Not only that, some enemies' spawns are dependent on enemy levels, so if you play too far in defense or survival you see certain enemy types drop out completely (resources farming is fine with this, but mod farming not so much).

 

That means that to achieve this, the mod table would have to be organized so that the drop chance of that specific mod that you really want would have to be 0.25% or above (preferably above). In fact, because the overall variety of mods that you'd see dropping from a region decreases, the chances of that specific mod dropping would be maybe 1% to 1.5% (4~6x more likely). 

 

Let's say that the table is comprised of 30 mods as an example. 5 rares, 10 uncommons, 15 commons.

Each rare is 1% drop chance = total 5% of 100%.

Each uncommon is 3% drop chance = total 30% of 100%

Each common is 4.267% drop chance = total 65% of 100%

Basically, because not all enemies spawn in equal rates, you have a bad skewing effect going on. This seeks to solve this problem.

[Zeromanicus]

One of the issues i think is that the current system encourages you to find a single node and farm it repeatedly, same mission, same enemies, same tileset, which gets boring. 

 

At least with Tranquil cleave which dropped off two types of butchers, you could mix it up with earth and then phobos which makes the it a lot less monotonous.

Edited June 26, 2014 by Zeromanicus

[Unknown924]

I like it.

Having a theme for mod drops per region could be interesting. Such as Earth having all the toxic mods as drops. Weapon and mod types could also be themes, such as one region only having rifle mods while another has only utility theme mods(ex no mods that directly influence damage but instead stuff like recoil and noise reduction mods)

Mod drops could also be adjusted based on the level of the region, ex Mercury as the starting area could have the weaker damage mods talked about on the stream for its common drops. While later regions don't have the weaker damage mods at all but do have the current ones.