Games are supposed to be fun. Mods management is the opposite of fun right now, due to the early design choices made in their initial implementation. Let’s improve mods management through a very simple design fix.



Current mods management uses a "character centric" design.

Mods -> Assigned To -> characters. Mods Removed from Characters. To make changes, an individual mod is removed from a character, then assigned to another character.Characters are the center and mods move in relationship to characters.



In any "many to few" asymetric inventory relationship, good design should “center” around minimizing effort of managing the "many" by only assigning/reassigning the "few" Mods inventory deals with a relationships of "many mods" to "few characters." Therefore a "mod centric" design will be far more effective.



What is a "mod centric" design? The “many” Mods should be grouped in fixed “Mod sets” (the 6 slots) A user could of course potentially change which “set” a mod is a part of, but generally would not. This is similar to how characters are group into “teams” in the tabs of the team selection screen. Generally once set, a team in a tab stays as a group.



Once mods are all grouped into “mod sets,” single characters should be assigned and unassigned as needed to one of the saved "mods set." Assigning or unassigning one character would be a simple 2 step process (verses removing and reassigning all 6 mods per character now which turns into a far larger number of steps and can result in mods being misplaced or accidentally destroyed).



This design change make mod management, inventory tracking, and use on different characters far easier, lower effort, lower time, lower friction, and far more fun. Esp given how many mods must move during TB. Games are supposed to be fun. Mods management is the opposite of fun right now, due to the early design choices made in their initial implementation.



(note – one feature that may go beyond scope of any initial redesign but is also made possible, and really needed by a re designs is that mods sets should also be filterable and sortable based on the overall stat boost a particular set provides to each attribute like speed or offense CC, CD etc)



The title claims this proposal is low effort and low coding time. The required of DB design schema is pretty standard should be very easy to code on the back end for any engineer who knows what s/he is doing. Nearly all front end UI would remain the same, with very minor tweaks and so UX and front end QA of the redesign would again be minimal as you should be able to run nearly the same QA testing scheme. Overall this entire effort should be far less resource and time than is needed to redesign a character model, for example. Thus this is a low effort, low time, low cost improvement on the dev resources side, with a very large benefit for enjoy-ability of and therefore user engagement with, the game. User engagement can behave as an economic multiplier rather than additive factor, so the improved engagement from mods management could be a revenue efficient use of development resources. (depending on some numbers which I obviously don't have access to).





ADDITIONALLY, the economics of mods has been completely changed due to territory battles. Now mods are required across the entire collection and the need to reassign characters has been increased by 2 orders of magnitude (conservatively). Therefore the mod removal fees should be re-balanced and reduced to at minimum 1/10th the current levels, and ideally 1/100th of the current levels in order to effect the changes brought to the economy by TB. Alternatively, TB prize boxes should provide a few, up to several millions credits depending on starts to offset the effect of the in game economic changes vis a vis mods.



Post edited by Faroer on September 2017