Riven Mod Feedback and Recommendations

[Xavier]

Hello, everyone!

Today I am going to be discussing my views on the addition of our latest mod type, the Riven Mods.

What Went Right

First, I want to discuss what I believe the Riven Mods did right. In particular, these three attributes are most notable: meaningful unveiling quests, the potential for the MR requirement, and the increase in build diversity. It is worth noting that all three of these benefits predominately affect late-game players (and in this regard, I say "Well Done, DE!"). Late-game still has a great deal of issues to overcome, but I believe that Riven Mods can help assuage the concerns felt by the community regarding late-game content, especially by veterans feeling disenfranchised and forgotten.

Unveiling Challenges Reward Empowering Gameplay

The missions required in order to unveil the Riven Mods empower players by providing a niche for specialized builds (such as an Ivara with Covert Lethality) which encourage refinement, communication, and collaboration on these builds, in turn expanding the limits of what the player can accomplish. I believe that this niche provides a unique crucible in which players can refine optimal builds for particular tasks, and look forward to more content produced with this design philosophy in mind in the future. These challenges have been criticized for their variation in difficulty and how they introduce additional barrier-to-entry to new players, but I believe both of these costs are more than worth the benefit gained.

With respect to the concerns about the variety of mission difficulties, I think that many people understate the degree to which skill, experience, and proper builds can affect the ease with which these tasks are completed. If I rely on traps in order to perform synthesis target scans, for example, then I would find the synthesis challenge more difficult than some other players. I have yet to see any challenges that cannot be completed with a proper build and a bit of patience by a low-to-moderately skilled player. In addition, as of 19.0.3 several of these concerns have been addressed directly. To the allegations of barrier-to-entry, I would point out that Riven Mods are explicitly designed to be late-game content; just as DE does not design Raids to be accessable to new players, nor is it reasonable to expect Riven Mods to accommodate experienced veterans and blooming neophytes alike.

MR Requirements (Can) Reward Player Progression

The MR requirement for Riven Mods accomplishes two tasks at once: first, it establishes that these mods are late-game content, indicating to newer players that they should aspire to acquiring and including these mods at a later date after they have experienced more of the content that Warframe has to offer; second, it provides a gratification for players that can meet these mastery rank requirements that legitimizes their efforts and investment in the game.

Most notably, though, is the impact this has on those that are *just under* the mastery rank requirement for a particular Riven Mod. I believe that these mods substantiate and encourage the investment that players around MR 15-20 have put into the game right around the time they begin to encounter severe diminishing returns. At this rank, the extra 1000 daily standing or one (or two with potatoes) starting mod capacity loses a great deal of its significance and most if not all weapons have become available. Thus, Riven Mods encourage players that have already invested this far in the game to continue playing by rewarding them for the progress that they have made and providing incentive for them to progress.

Raising the Ceiling for All Weapons Increases Build Diversity

There have been many vocal concerns raised about how part of the community feels that it is inappropriate for "good" weapons such as the Tonkor, Soma Prime, or Synoid Simulor to receive these benefits along side less powerful weapons. I vehemently disagree. Making all weapons more powerful increases the amount of options and interactions that can occur in mid-to-high level content. Sorties in particular benefit greatly from the combination of new weapons and the mission restrictions imposed, allowing for new and interesting builds to surmount or subvert difficult challenges.

While these Riven Mods allow for strong weapons to become even stronger, these weapons were already excelling at level-100 Sortie missions. Even endurance runs tend to rely less on the damage of weapons and more on the utility (such as Akstilleto Prime to deal with nullifiers, or Covert Lethality daggers that kill regardless of damage or health amount) when reaching the threshold of available high-level content. The only real issue I can see with allowing these weapons to become stronger is the impact that it may have on future late-game content; I will address this issue in another section down below.

What Went Wrong

The "elephant in the room", of course, is the RNG variation that these mods introduce into an otherwise relatively-stable build environment. If we describe certain attributes and gameplay within Warframe in terms of the genres from which they originate (such as the clans and raids fostering a collaborative community akin to an MMO or the implicit roles and classes within squads that resemble MOBA teams) then this change seems to borrow from the aRPG style of build progression and customization. I don't believe that this is an inherently bad thing, but it's important for us to understand this change within the context of aRPG game design.

aRPG's rely upon a very constrained statistical buff or debuff for any particular item in order to facilitate the variation inherent within that genre. Scott and Steve have discussed on previous devstreams how one of the things that they would do differently if they could go back and change the design of Warframe would be to reduce the amount of benefit that an individual mod provides on a pure mathematical level. Anecdotally speaking, it is much easier to accommodate the fringe cases for variation when the buffs you provide are 3% instead of 187%. It is important to consider, then, how the issues with random variation in any game become exacerbated in the context of a game like Warframe where these values, and the results of compounding them together, are heavily increased.

This section will focus on discussing how the variation described above can be mediated as well as addressing the poor communication that the players have suffered thus far and how Riven Mods may negatively impact the design of late-game content in the future.

Taming the RNG Beast

I believe it would be a grievous mistake to leave Riven Mods as they exist presently in the game. To allow the number of benefits, the number of detractions, the types of benefits and detractions, the values of the benefits and detractions, the maximum rank, the polarity, the MR requirement, and the weapon to which the mod is bound to *all* vary randomly is too much. It is simply too much. After a certain point, this amount of variation impedes rather than enhances the identity of each mod as unique and interesting. In the list below, I have collected recommendations that I hope DE will consider when implementing the next iteration of Riven Mods.

• The MR requirement and maximum rank both vary with little correlation to the value of the Riven Mods (in terms of damage or utility). While I would strongly recommend for any standardization of both of these attributes, I offer one solution in particular: scale the MR requirement by two or three with each rank of the mod. This would allow someone who is below a particular MR threshold to still be able to use a lower-rank version of the mod and further encourage that player to progress to unlock its full potential (see the above section on the benefits of MR requirements).
   
• In addition to the above point, please standardize the maximum rank of the Riven Mods. I maintain the unwavering position that both Auras and Riven Mods should have consistent maximum ranks. To do otherwise unnecessarily inhibits the potential for build permutations and in the case of Riven Mods, prevents the identity of a particular attribute combination from being fully actualized in a manner that overcomes the opportunity cost of traditional, pre-existing mods.
   
• Re-rolling is currently exceptionally heavy-handed and punishing. Having a geometrically compounding kuva cost with no upper limit potentially punishes players for investing in Riven Mods for weapons that they would like to use in a wider variety of situations. Thus, establishing an upper limit on the cost for re-rolling (for example, 5000) would prevent the feeling of gambling on potential lost investment when the kuva cost becomes too great to reasonably surmount.
   
• Re-rolling can also benefit from greater granularity. If there were options to re-roll a particular attribute for less kuva, or all attributes *and* the weapon to which the mod is bound for more kuva, I believe these alternatives would help lessen the frustration that players feel with this new system. Both Destiny and Tom Clancy's The Division serve as relevant precedence in this regard that demonstrates the community benefit afforded by greater granularization of customization.
   
• It is possible for "beneficial" attributes to provide no bonuses to a particular weapon. As a glaring example, gaining additional flight speed for a hit-scan weapon provides no real buff whatsoever. If these Riven Mods are balanced around the benefits outweighing all costs and detractions, these cases should be eliminated to prevent unbalanced combinations of stats from occurring.
   
• Given the amount of variation currently present in the Riven Mods, I find it hard to justify the necessity for the value of the benefit to fluctuate along with everything else. If I have a mod that gives damage, toxin, and status chance, while having decreased ammo capacity, that feels like a complete and cohesive mod identity. I fear that allowing the value of these attributes to change does little more than provide hidden, intangible power to certain mods that is not granted to others, while failing to allow for any meaningful decisions on the part of the player with respect to this variation; if someone is going to re-roll a mod in the current setting, they're going to do it because they don't like the attributes it has, not because the values are not as high as they would like. Please reevaluate the extent to which this variation provides value to the Riven Mods.
   
• It is currently possible to have a Riven Mod that gives damage, critical damage, and critical chance... on a crit-based weapon. It is also currently possible to have a Riven Mod with two (potentially useless) benefits and a glaring detraction on a nearly-universally desired attribute such as multishot. I do not see how this variation contributes to the identity, value, or niche of Riven Mods and would strongly recommend one of two alternatives: the first would be to standardize the number of benefits and detractions for each Riven Mod (e.g. all Riven Mods will have 3 benefits and 1 detraction); the second would be to assign relative values to each attribute to attempt to balance very strong benefits with equally meaningful detractions while avoiding overwhelming modest benefits with debilitating detractions.
   
• Sentinel weapons are currently included in the Riven Mod drop table. While I consider this to be a lower priority issue, I still believe that the consistency of the scope of the Riven Mods should be resolved. If the sentinel weapons are to be included, then shotguns, secondaries, and melee weapons should also be included if for no other reason than design consistency and functional orthogonality. If the scope of the Riven Mods is intended to be refined to primaries or even rifles, then sentinel weapons should be excluded from the drop table in the future.

My Kingdom for an Explanation

Many of the issues that I have with how Riven Mods were integrated into the game stem from DE's failure to effectively communication pertinent information to the players. There is currently no clear, in-game explanation (or reminder) for the fact that you need to have the Riven Mod equipped in order to complete the challenge to unveil the mod. Nor is it communicated outside of the "Mods" UI that Riven Mods can be re-rolled. Though perhaps more grievously, it is not possible to tell how many times a mod has been re-rolled yet. Apart from being inconvenient, this facilitates scams regarding re-rolling a mod and passing it off as having never been unveiled. Finally, a storage capacity of 15 has been established (seemingly arbitrarily) for Riven Mods, but it has not been explained whether that capacity can be increased and if it can, how to do so.

All of these lapses that I have listed can probably be supplemented by the wiki, the forums, and other third-party sources of information. But they shouldn't have to be. DE should be clearly communicating this information to the players as soon as new features like the Riven Mods are implemented, and failing to do so bleeds far beyond a simple inconvenience to negligence that facilitates dishonest trading and breeds frustration from players who don't understand why their mod has yet to unveil. I know that DE can do better, and I expect that they will do their best to improve in the future.

Into This Brave, New World

The greatest issue I have with respect to game design is how these Riven Mods may affect the scope of late-game content in the future. If new late-game content is being made with the assumption that Riven Mods are readily accessible for powerful, meta weapons, then it is entirely possible that a large section of the community will be left unable to effectively complete and engage with that content. This, I believe, is the greatest risk incurred by these mods. However, there are additional concerns as well. As several other people have pointed out, if and when DE decides to transition into "Damage 3.0" the grandfathering of all the damage-inherent Riven mods is going to make things more complicated than they were previously. I would urge DE to strongly consider omitting Riven Mods from the equation when assessing the scope of content in the future (and the present issues with late-game scaling). Only time will tell if this will become an issue.

Edited November 15, 2016 by Xavier_Rayne
Errata

[CorrinAvatan]

Need to fix previously opened riven mods being able to be sold as "fresh"  veiled riven mods to a buyer, without the buyer being able to confirm.

Say I unveil a riven mod, and it's for Panthera.  I don't like Panthera, and I know it won't get a good price on the Market.

I spend the kuva to cycle/Veil it again.

I find Bob, who wants to buy an veiled Riven mod, and sell it to him.

Bob buys it from me, unlocks it, finds it's a Panthera mod, when he thought he was buying a mod that could unlock to ANY weapon.  He has no indication during the trade that it has already been "locked" to a weapon he won't care for.

 

I've tested this with friends; no matter how many times the mod is cycled and made "veiled" , it is locked to the first roll for the weapon, and the buyer has NO idea it happened, unless they look and see that when THEY try to re-roll it, it's already more expensive than it should be.

I agree that as soon as you get a Riven mod, there should be a tutorial for it in-game.  I'm really not cool with DE not providing tutorials for their systems that explain how things work, in detail.

As a person who plays Diablo 3 and can compare the riven mod to how Kunai's Cube works, (re-rolling stats on Legendary Items), I honestly don't see the fuss about the RNG portion of it.  If you get one for a decent weapon, and you want a powerful roll on it, you're gonna have to invest time.

As far as the plat prices, those will normalize as more people get them, and more people do Sorties.

Edited November 15, 2016 by CorrinAvatan

[Multicom-EN-]

Rerolling should be similar to The Division IMO. You get a select few stats to pick from when you re-roll but it can't be overly OP stats like you can't have +x damage with +xcrit chance and +x crit damage. Balance it out. One, maybe two good stats and one or two QOL stats like +x reload speed, +x projectile speed and so forth. Once re-rolled, it should NOT have to be "unveiled" again. This is stupid. Removing this will also stop tradescam.

If you decide to use Kuva to re-roll it, the stats will be slightly better. Also, maybe lower the re-roll prices slightly.

Furthermore, Riven mods should be catered towards specific weapon classes like crit weapons, shotguns, cannons, status weapons, BEAM weapons, rocket launcher weapons, weapons  without crit chance but still for some ungodly reason get Riven mod that give it crit chance but it doesn't work (Panthera) etc etc. This way you can use the same Riven mod on multiple weapons of the same type such as crit weapons.

 

Doing this will simplify the system and bring the trading to a reasonable level (and price) and stop scamming. Most importantly it will make everyone happy.

Add-on: Increase the cap also. 15 is way too low in the current stage with this BS RNG implementation.

Edited November 15, 2016 by Multicom-EN-

[Nonkalonk]

1 hour ago, Multicom-EN- said:

Rerolling should be similar to The Division IMO. You get a select few stats to pick from when you re-roll but it can't be overly OP stats like you can't have +x damage with +xcrit chance and +x crit damage. Balance it out. One, maybe two good stats and one or two QOL stats like +x reload speed, +x projectile speed and so forth. Once re-rolled, it should NOT have to be "unveiled" again. This is stupid. Removing this will also stop tradescam.

If you decide to use Kuva to re-roll it, the stats will be slightly better. Also, maybe lower the re-roll prices slightly.

Furthermore, Riven mods should be catered towards specific weapon classes like crit weapons, shotguns, cannons, status weapons, BEAM weapons, rocket launcher weapons, weapons  without crit chance but still for some ungodly reason get Riven mod that give it crit chance but it doesn't work (Panthera) etc etc. This way you can use the same Riven mod on multiple weapons of the same type such as crit weapons.

 

Doing this will simplify the system and bring the trading to a reasonable level (and price) and stop scamming. Most importantly it will make everyone happy.

Add-on: Increase the cap also. 15 is way too low in the current stage with this BS RNG implementation.

I love this :)

[Nonkalonk]

Also this thread is amazing and if i were going to pick a thread to show to DE this would be the one.

[Multicom-EN-]

21 minutes ago, ZZYZX_ said:

I love this :)

Why thank you, kind sir.

[Sorenxoras]

I'm fine with the randomness of what weapon the mods can apply to, but after a while it starts to get kinda infuriating. I'v have had 4 Riven mods. 3 of them have been for weapons that i didn't have and will never buy/build/use and the very first one i had was for the Snipetron. A weapon that i had to looking outside of the game to know what it was because it wasn't in the codex and i couldn't link it, and discovered that i had no way of getting without spending stupid high amounts of Plat for it. While the RNG aspect is mostly fine, i think it should be confined to what the player actually owns. These mods are very rare and expensive to do anything with. But with as many guns as there are in the game, more often than not players are stuck with a mod they can't use without buying a new weapon. There should be something in place to make sure a player can actually USE the mod after the pain they have to go through to unveil it.

[Peacemuser]

I really like the risk and direction that DE is trying to make. However, there is definitely a couple of implementation problems.

The first big problem involves the heavy amount of RNG this system involves. Acquiring these mods involves a RNG roll in the sorties and the type of weapon it is tied to. There is another set of RNG behind the types of challenges, and another for the mod stats. If the mod doesn't improve the weapon's stats in any way (which can most likely happen to a vast majority of players), they would have to attempt to find Kuva, which is in itself another process of RNG to re-do another cycle of RNG. While the intentions are to motivate achievement and innovations, not all mod can be worked around, especially for specific weapons (Miter can't take advantage of critical chance and damage, unless critical chance is additive). The Riven Disposition is suppose to prevent a power creep towards meta-based weapons, and the challenges would limit the pace of such re-rolls. Xavier_Rayne's suggestion gives a pretty good direction of controlling some of the RNG to give a more consistent and desirable result, while ensuring variety and experimentation.

Currently, The Riven mod cap is pretty unnecessary. There's more than 15 different Rifle-type weapons, around 21. This isn't including beam-type weapons, snipers, and launchers, on top of the fact that some people would like to have more than one Riven mod per weapon for different play-styles. Then there's also other types of Riven mods that DE has yet to release, including Shotgun, Pistol, and Melee mods. The fact that there's a heafty emphasis on RNG with a large combination of stats and weapons is already a reason to mainly ensure players to most likely keep their Riven mods, apart from trading. If anything, being able to have unlimited Riven mods provides more encouragement to use more varieties of weapons without being bound as "mastery fodder", and possibly fun ways for meta-based weapons (zero damage Ignis status build, fast reload Tonkor, large Magazine Rubico, etc). It encourages people to keep more weapons, which might correlate to more investment in weapon slots (more money for DE).

Another minute problem includes the difficulty of the challenges. Ideally the difficulty of the challenge is tied to the Mastery Rank of the outputted mod, and the Mastery Rank requirement also determines the Mod's power. However, players with lower Mastery Ranks might receive extremely difficult challenges, only to be ineligible for use once completed unless they'd like to keep it for future use (referring back to the mod cap). It would be nice if challenges was randomly generated to include three random different challenges of easy, medium, or hard difficulty for each roll that the player can choose from. RNG is still there, but some control is provided.

The riven disposition currently seems strangely implemented as well. Supposedly the type of weapon that the mod is tied to also affects the power of the stats, where supposedly weaker, lower leveled weapons with lower mastery rank are more likely to get stronger stats. However, this doesn't seem to be entirely the case. Hopefully they tweak it appropriately in the future, especially for weapons that seem to require almost exponentially huge statistic buffs in order to be usable for sorties.

Some people wanted to see new and more unique stats in these mods. A current example is Status Damage, which is unseen in other mods and really nice for Slash and Gas proc builds. However, people would like to see more exclusive and unique stats. Examples include but not limited to Headshot/Weakspot Damage, healing percentage per shot, combo damage, combined elements, armor-piercing, shield-penetration, status effectiveness, accuracy, conditional stats, additive physical damage (much like how elemental damage work), hit-box size, additive blast-radius, projectile bounce (being able to damage multiple times), projectile tracking, etc. The sky is pretty much the limit here! With the proper implementation of the Riven Disposition and a larger room for experimentation and combination, the game wouldn't have to worry about the chances of the majority of players achieving Rank 30 Tigris Prime mods with an insane amount of damage, additive critical chance, critical damage, and status damage.

Edited November 16, 2016 by Peacemuser

[Peacemuser]

Currently, I can understand the risk and direction that DE is trying to make. They envisioned to have a system where any weapon can be uniquely modded, specialized, and balanced for multiple situations (including end-game), while making each and every weapon distinguishable. However, there is definitely a couple of implementation problems. Most of it revolves around the complicated implementation of the Riven Disposition. Supposedly the type of weapon that the mod is tied to affects the power of the stats, where supposedly weaker, lower leveled weapons with lower mastery rank are more likely to get stronger stats. These mods are also affected by the stated Mastery rank. Higher ranks correlates to larger stats. The Riven Disposition would also have to take into account the balance of the randomly selected stats on the mod, and other mods that would be built around it, including Prime mods. With all that in mind, this type of algorithm for randomizing Riven mods is pretty complicated in itself, thus resulting in what has currently been released.

The first big problem involves the heavy amount of RNG this system involves. Acquiring these mods involves a RNG roll in the sorties and the type of weapon it is tied to. There is another set of RNG behind the types of challenges, and another for the mod stats. If the mod doesn't improve the weapon's stats in any way (which can most likely happen to a vast majority of players), they would have to attempt to find Kuva, which is in itself another process of RNG to re-do another cycle of RNG. While the intentions are to motivate achievement and innovations, not all mod can be worked around, especially for specific weapons (Miter can't take advantage of critical chance and damage, unless critical chance is additive). The Riven Disposition is supposed to prevent a power creep towards meta-based weapons, and the challenges would limit the pace of such re-rolls. Hopefully they tweak and fix this algorithm appropriately in the future, especially for weapons that seem to require almost exponentially huge statistic buffs in order to be usable for sorties.

Lowering the overall Kuva resource cost and allowing players to choose which stat to randomize at some extra cost can control a big factor of RNG, especially with a large pool of different stats and variables the players can receive. This might introduce some power-creep, motivating players to seek specific stats rather than utilize other stats. Limiting the amount of positive and negative stats in their respective form factors can be a further improvement, but is somewhat going to be hard to implement. For example: I would like to have a negative projectile speed Lanka mod for easier use of Ivara’s Navigator, or a Ignis Mod with extra status and multi-shot, but negative accuracy and fire-rate for more area-of-effect and ammo efficiency. Positive (e.g: + Damage on the Ogris), neutral (e.g: + critical chance on the Miter), and negative attributes (e.g: - Fire-Rate on Daikyu) would have to be extremely well defined for each weapon, which might take forever.

The Riven mod cap is pretty unnecessary. There's more than 15 different Rifle-type weapons, around 21. This isn't including beam-type weapons, snipers, and launchers, on top of the fact that some people would like to have more than one Riven mod per weapon for different play-styles. Then there's also other types of Riven mods that DE has yet to release, including Shotgun, Pistol, and Melee mods. The fact that there's a heafty emphasis on RNG with a large combination of stats and weapons is already a reason to mainly ensure players to most likely keep their Riven mods, apart from trading. If anything, being able to have unlimited Riven mods provides more encouragement to use more varieties of weapons without being bound as "mastery fodder", and possibly fun ways for meta-based weapons (Long duration Radiation proc Ignis build, fast reload Tonkor, large Magazine Rubico, etc). It encourages people to keep more weapons, which might correlate to more investment in weapon slots (more money for DE).

Another minute problem includes the difficulty of the challenges. The difficulty of the challenge is supposedly tied to the Mastery Rank once unveiled. However, players with lower Mastery Ranks might receive extremely difficult challenges, only to be ineligible for use once completed unless they'd like to keep it for future use (referring back to the mod cap). It would be nice if challenges was randomly generated to include three random different challenges of easy, medium, or hard difficulty for each roll that the player can choose from. Again, RNG is still there, but some control is provided.

Some people wanted to see new and more unique stats and mechanics in these mods. A current example is Status Damage, which is unseen in other mods and really nice for Slash and Gas proc builds. However, people would like to see more exclusive and unique stats. Examples include but not limited to Headshot/Weak-spot Damage, healing percentage per shot, combo damage, combined elements, armor-piercing, shield-penetration, status effectiveness (e.g: corrosive removes more armor), accuracy, conditional stats, additive physical damage (much like how elemental damage work), hit-box size, additive blast-radius, projectile bounce (being able to damage multiple times), projectile tracking, additive stats (if better weapon scaling is needed for the Riven Disposition to work), etc. The sky is pretty much the limit here! However, some mechanics would have to be left for future warframes. Also with all these unique stats in mind, some might want to have more than one Riven mod in their weapon. To prevent power-creep, each additional Riven mod will consume around e.g six more extra mod points (affected by forma). This way players can’t fill all the mod slots with extremely powerful Riven mods and requires careful application of Forma.

With the proper implementation of the Riven Disposition and a larger room for experimentation and combination, the game wouldn't have to worry about the chances of the majority of players achieving Rank 30 Tigris Prime mods with an insane amount of damage, additive critical chance, critical damage, and status damage and nothing else.

Dang it Forum! Why copy this post twice!

Edited November 17, 2016 by Peacemuser

[Electrolite123]

I really like riven mods, the power creep in this game is real, for example i was so happy to get my dakra prime just to find out it`s completely inferior to the Nikana Prime, but the RNG is terrible, it`s impossible to get a riven mod for what you want.

First you need to make 3 missions on sortie and ONCE per day, even then it`s not a guarantee chance to get me mod, latter you need to be extremelly lucky to get a riven mod for what you want, and finally pray for the buff on the mod itself to be useful.

Unlike farming prime parts where we can focus on what we want riven mods are pure RNG without any chance for us to go after what we want. Imagine if we had only one relic that drops all the prime parts, that`s kinda how it feels.

For me there should be an option in game where we can choose what type of riven mods we want to get like meelee, primary, secondary etc like selecting a focus school for the operator. I wanted a good riven mod for some guns I like but because all this RNG wall it seems plain impossible

[Radeon22]

I haven't even unlocked a single riven mod, and I can already tell what went wrong.

They included the requirement of finding 4 rare syndicate medallions.
How are we supposed to work with that kind of RNG ?