Mod Cap Hot Take

I write this as a separate post because I don't mean it to be a takedown of any one particular person who is asking for a higher mod cap. I don't know you or your situation, and I'm not talking about you as an individual. 

Instead, I want to make it all about me. 

Back in the day I didn't worry about mods. I mostly cared about speed bc it was obviously great to get all or most of my own toons to take a turn before the first turn on the other side. You got your synergy going. If you had a TM train you could get that going. With enough speed you could be hard to stop. 

When I hit the mod cap the first time, I just sold mods that were slower than other mods. It was really pretty ignorant, but I viewed modding more as paperwork. I have enough paperwork in my life. I wanted to play a game, not do more inside the GOH universe. And while I still view modding as paperwork, my initial view was that because it's paperwork, I shouldn't have to learn anything about it. And it's that second part that was wrong. 

Then I became active with 50 Shards of KAM (and some of you may know me from there). It was the first event where I could see how really rigorously modding your toons made a remarkable, observable difference to one's success. It wasn't just about going first, because you were never going to go first. It wasn't just about health, because the Reek gained stats whenever it got hurt, but it didn't gain MORE stats if the hit was bigger, so fewer big hits was way better than many small hits. That meant balancing offence and crit chance and crit damage. Every mod, then, had to be balanced between speed and survivability and offence, all three at once. But protection was mostly irrelevant and Tenacity entirely so. A mod with Tenacity was using up a secondary slot that could provide a more useful boost. So many things to consider!  

For KAM it became an issue of recognizing that you could go through entire inventories for some players and only find half of a good mod set. People had offence sets with defense primaries, and defense sets with crit damage primaries and there was such an illogical jumble that if you really wanted things to work together and really put in the effort of combing through the available mods, you still couldn't find the 30 you really needed for a well-kitted KAM squad. 

The point here is that it takes a knowledge of what makes a mod truly valuable for people to build up collections that can serve them well when the game gets difficult. 

I've seen more mod inventories from more players than most of you can ever imagine, and I'm telling you that the mod cap is doing players a tremendous favour. It's creating a limit and insisting that, at this point, you have to stop saving mods mindlessly and create a system for deciding which you want to keep. 

Different ppl will use different systems, and that's fine. But without a cap, there's no point to have a system at all, and that means that a larger mod cap just delays the day when a player has their epiphany moment, the moment when they understand, "You know, that Defense set triangle with 14 speed, a crit chance primary, and Tenacity and flat protection secondaries isn't really worth saving." 

I've said elsewhere, and it's true, that an increased mod cap just delays the day when you have to have a system for sorting your mods. But more importantly, it also delays the day when players learn what a good mod is. 

The 500 mod cap is doing players a favour. Let's keep it.