A User Interface Change To Dramatically Increase Equipment Sales (2000 Words)

[securitywyrm]

Hello, my name is Robert Patrician. I think Warframe is a great game that I always leave happy, and I see a lot of potential in it being my dominate game for years to come. I'd like to propose a system that would give players a significant incentive to purchase and use more Warframes, weapons and even color packs. Thank you in advance for your time, and I hope you find value in what I have to say.

 

Current system issues to be addressed

 

1. It is significantly tedious to change equipment based on what mission you are about to do. The interface for changing mods is beautiful and easy, but not quick to use. Currently, fully changing over the mods on warframe, long gun, sidearm and melee could take an average of, assuming 5 mods in each, roughly 100 clicks (counting a click-drag as two clicks worth).

2. Using a mod in multiple pieces of equipment requires removing it from one, changing equipment, and then re-equipping that mod on the new piece of equipment.

3. Colors on warframes are lost when changing warframes. Players have no way to save sets of colors.

4. One of the hurdles of a ‘quickjoin’ button to randomly find a team is the problem of starting a mission with the ‘wrong’ set of equipment, such as anti-Corpus weaponry on an infested mission.

 

System objectives

 

1. To increase the number of warframes and weapons that each player purchases.

2. To multiply the value of existing item content by providing an incentive for players to use warframes and equipment other than their ‘best’ set.

3. To enable a player on a random mission to bring appropriate equipment.

4. To encourage players to stick with random teams for a longer period of time through various missions.

 

To reach these objectives, I’d like to propose a three stage implementation. The first stage establishes a system of saving sets of equipment and their mods, the second stage establishes an interface to make this selection timely and practical, and the third stage creates an incentive for players to use a wide variety of equipment and thus increase their exposure to game content.

 

Stage 1 implementation: Loadouts

 

The loadouts system is commonly used in games with quick respawn, such as Planetside 2 or Call of Duty. The player selects a set of equipment and labels it in advance, and thus can quickly pick the one they want before they spawn.

To implement this in Warframe, mods can no longer bound to equipment. Instead, a set of mods on a piece of equipment is saved as a 'loadout.' For a simplified example, let's take the standard MK-1 Branton and the Snipetron. To build your first loadouts on your MK-1 Branton, you add armor penetration and a large magazine and label it 'grineer.' You swap those to a rapid fire mod and electricity damage and label it 'corprus.' Now you can easily swap between the two combinations of mods without having to individually replace each mod. You could also put that electricity damage mod in your Snipetron, save the loadout, and easily swap to that set of mods without having to load the MK1-Branton, unequip the electricity mod, equip the Snipetron, and then put the electricity mod into the Snipetron. Though this seems a simple thing to do, consider how many mods would need to be unloaded and then loaded again for a full changeover of equipment under the current system.

This would be especially potent for warframes. A player could save a selection of mods, and even give different colors to the saved sets so they have a visual reminder of which one they're using. For example a player using a particular warframe may want a different sets of mods for soloing, defense missions, spy missions, and soforth.

In regards to the issue of when a mod is used for fusion or sold, a small warning will appear if any of the saved loadouts utilize that mod and would be unable to equip it afterwards due to either a lack of that particular mod or lack of space to equip the new upgraded mod. When the player is reviewing their loadouts, an icon will appear next to loadouts that require attention to fix an issue. When a mod is looked at in the mods view, it will list what loadouts that mod is used in.

 

Stage 2 implementation: Loadout selection screen

 

Stage two revolves around making it easy for a player to fully take advantage of their available equipment loadouts for an upcoming mission, such that equipment can be chosen after the mission is selected. A player in a team might not know what their next mission is before it starts under the current system, and a player would be more likely to stick with a good team, regardless of what mission they are running next, if the player could see what the mission is and grab their preferred equipment before starting.

The loadout selection screen appears between the player clicking to start a mission and the mission starting. The loadout screen can also be accessed at other times. The player is presented with the option to ‘use current selection’ or to select a new equipment piece for each slot. This occurs for all five pieces of equipment (Warframe, Sentinel, long gun, sidearm, melee).

 

Example of presentation

 

The player is presented with five icons in a row at the top of the screen with their currently selected equipment. A big button to ‘accept’ the current selection is on the screen at this point, and launches the mission. It starts with a 30 second timer, thus the mission will launch after 30 seconds or when the button is clicked, whichever is first. The player can click on any one of the currently selected equipment to reveal a menu of the loadout options above and all of the options for swapping below. Let’s say a player clicks their currently selected warframe, a Mag. The loadouts this player has for the Mag are soloing, Grineer, Corprus, and defense. Below are all the other warframes they could select. They can click on one of the loadouts, or they can click on one of the warframes which will pop up a menu of the loadouts for that warframe. Clicking a loadout selects that warframe with the selected mods equipped.

 

Stage 3 implementation: Random equipment incentives

 

Stage three is where the players are offered an incentive to purchase and level-up more pieces of equipment, as well as use equipment other than their preferred set. In the loadout selection screen four icons will appear at the bottom of the screen, each displaying a randomly selected (not necessarily owned) piece of equipment of the categories of warframe, long gun, sidearm and melee. For each of these pieces that the player selects, they receive a 5% bonus to health and shields, and weapons selected this way receive a 10% damage and 25% affinity gained bonus. If all four randomly chosen pieces are selected, the entire team gets a 5% bonus on health, shields and damage (including the player. In order to consistently take advantage of this bonus, a player would need to own every single warframe and weapon. An endgame team of all four players using all four random pieces of gear would result in a 40% bonus to health and shields, and a 30% bonus on damage, but all four would be using randomly selected equipment as a balance. If a player does not own one of the pieces of equipment randomly selected, a large X icon is across it. Clicking on a random selection icon shows the loadouts for that equipment piece.

Of note, the bonus from randomly selected equipment includes bonuses by mods, rather than a bonus on the weapon base damage. Thus a weapon that has mods increasing base damage 25% and fire damage 20% would see those bonuses also multiplied by the random selection bonus.

Of note: Equipment not available for general purchase such as the ‘prime’ equipment versions does not appear in the random selections, but a ‘prime’ version of that piece of equipment may be selected instead and still retain the bonus. For example if Excalibur is the selected random warframe, selecting Excalibur Prime will retain the bonus.

Of note: The random selection is set by instance ID. Thus if someone gets a random selection that doesn’t benefit them, they can’t leave the team and then rejoin to try their luck again.

 

Sample of full implementation experience

 

Player “JohnSmith” has just finished an infestation defense mission. He has blasted through it equipped with a rhino, boar, furis and scindo, with his wyrm sentinel. He hits the ‘find a team’ button and is put into a Corpus spy mission. He is taken to the loadout selection screen. He decides to play this one stealthy and easily selects his Loki warframe, paris, akbolto, heat dagger and shade sentinel, each on their anti-corpus loadouts. This takes him 10 clicks. Looking down at the bonus equipment, he sees that he doesn’t own the bonus warframe (mag), he’d rather not use the MK1-Branton this mission, but the aklato is the bonus sidearm and the bo is selected as the bonus melee. He clicks the aklato icon and picks a loadout, and then the bo icon and picks a loadout, four more clicks. His equipment set is now Loki with paris, aklato and bo, with a shade sentinel. He will receive a 10% bonus on his shields and health, and a 10% damage bonus on the aklato and bo, along with a 25% affinity bonus on the aklato and bo. All of this has taken 30 seconds or less. It would have taken him several minutes to do this same reconfiguration in the arsenal screen. The player is thus able to enjoy the mission a lot more due to feeling in control of what equipment he approached the mission with.

In the mission he found a fusion core, and decides to upgrade his ‘redirection’ warframe mod. It is enough to level it up, but a warning appears that it will exceed the mod capacity on the loadout on his Saryn(soloing) and Rhino(soloing, Grineer, Corprus) sets. He takes a quick look at these and sees he can still make it work. He runs the fusion, and has an option to pull up those loadouts. He swaps out a lesser mod (Thieves wit) on the Syrn(soloing) loadout, as well as the Rhino(soloing) and Rhino(Grineer) loadout. The Rhino(corprus) loadout has other mods he’d rather keep, so he leaves that mod out and instead tosses a different lesser mod in.

 

Changes to player behavior from full implementation

 

1.       Players will be more likely to purchase weapons and warframes they might not otherwise buy in order to take advantage of the random selection bonuses.

2.       Players who find a good group are more likely to stay with the good group because they don’t need to worry about what mission will be done next.

3.       “Endgame” players would need to purchase and level-up all pieces of equipment in order to consistently take advantage of the random selection bonus.

4.       Players would be likely to leave a bit of mod capacity unused on equipment they do not frequently use to reduce the number of loadout warnings when doing fusion on mods.

5.       Players would have a larger incentive to purchase color packs and customize the colors of their warframes, as the color of a warframe can serve as a visual indicator of what loadout is selected.

6.       Players will be more likely to enjoy a wider variety of missions due to the ability to select appropriate equipment easily.

7.       Players will experience more content by the incentive to utilize equipment they wouldn’t normally use.

 

Thank you for your time in reading this proposal. If there is interest I will gladly make a visual representation of the various phases to better illustrate the implementation.

[SolluxCaptorTA]

The random selection seems a little harsh. Imagine going into a Defense mission with a Grakata, a Viper, and a Furax. Full bonuses, but you'll last five minutes before the ammo runs dry. Maybe only semi random.

[cyrus106]

Holy...Holy S#&$.

 

I really like this idea. I'm impressed. The Bonuses are perhaps too high, but besides that....very nice!

[wayneo]

looks like your trying to make the game less reason to play making it easer by random weapon giving more hp  and shields when players already have way more then enough to do ever stage easily, having loadout wont realy make it more reason to stick with random teams, random teams is random teams and the reason to stick to it will be low, the map voting system does not help that much, if the map people choose is not one they want they leave, if they got what they want from stage they leave, there many reasons why people not sticking to random teams.

like all games if people like to stick to there one warframe because is there style then they will stick to it, as for people who wants to use other warframes they will buy after grind, grinding is part of all games and people should just get used to the fact

also planetside 2 is one of the worst grind games i seen in ages had to grind just to get a decent sniper that can one hit another sniper, also planetside 2 dont know why anyone even plays that game when level makes massive diffrence like battlefield.

this is also PvE game so ideas from a PvP game like COD, Planetside 2, Battlefield etc and its load out system seems stupid will make this game to easy i think as it this game is still very easy to solo nearly all stages without great mods and credits value just nearly non existance cause of speed runs and how easy it is to get credit.

They made to many big changes and blances and should do a force reset after Beta and give everyone some kind of compensation, also reduce credits rewards back down and make it so that players have to open lockers for more credits effcientcy instead of just speed runs.

 

p.s. after a match they have time to cahnge there equipments so there is possiblity to change warframes and weapons quickly before next game/votes. this wont be a problem for premade teams.

your random equipment could cause people to leave the instance and just not play that instance and do another. if there premade they could all leave.

as for colour pack that just depnds on the player i doubt im going to waste plat for colours, if they did implant a loadout system and it does not having naming feature i would be complaining.

 

Also im not much of a reader and im sure im not only one so some visual would be very nice if you intend to try push your points forward

Edited April 23, 2013 by wayneo

[DrCashew]

This encourages abandoning missions pretty hard, how do you think they should deal with that?

[securitywyrm]

The random selection seems a little harsh. Imagine going into a Defense mission with a Grakata, a Viper, and a Furax. Full bonuses, but you'll last five minutes before the ammo runs dry. Maybe only semi random.

 

Then you wouldn't pick those weapons. Bear in mind that the random option is just an option, not a requirement. A player is unlikely to do all four random items just for the sake of the bonus unless they got very lucky with the selection. The random bonuses is not meant to 'compensate' for picking random gear, but rather provide an incentive to use weaponry that you might not normally use. Bear in mind, nothing stops you from picking whatever gear you want. The random gear is just a 'bonus mode.' 

 

This encourages abandoning missions pretty hard, how do you think they should deal with that?

 

Why would it encourage abandoning missions? The team random bonus is set by team ID, so if you quit a mission and then rejoin it, you'll have the same random selection. Also the random selection isn't worth quitting and joining repeatedly to get something 'good.' It is just a bonus to give a bit of encouragement to use other equipment.