I get that you feel the need to justify your decisions first to try and convince the community you didn't make a mistake, but come on. This is ridiculous. 1. "Give players the freedom to experiment with builds, while also requiring players to make creative choices when putting together those builds." Mission failed. Having to wait for an Arc energy class item to use my Hands On mod is not a creative choice. Not being able to combine Auto Rifle loader and Enhanced Tether Defense on my raid armor is not a creative choice. Having a third of the armor drops I see be ENTIRELY useless for my build on their face, regardless of stats, is not a creative choice. If the goal was creative choices, it has not been met. 2. "Give players the ability to balance mods above and beyond pure effectiveness." An interesting theory that's instantaneously undercut by the Artifact circumventing literally the entirety of this concept by throwing players functionally five free Enhanced Reload mods. Also, I figured the energy cost of mods would be related to how much they do, but apparently without being limited to a third of my random armor drops Invigoration would cost as much as Absolution. That's believable, sure. And as for this nonsense about being worried about combinations, ignoring how the Artifact snaps that in half like a Slim Jim, for some reason my gut says combining, say, Hands On with One-Two Finisher is slightly more threatening than combining Auto Rifle Loader with Machine Gun Loader. Just a thought. 3. "Relieve information overload pressure on the mod UI." Easily the strongest point raised, not that that's saying much, but it reveals a glaring flaw about HOW you test these systems: Throwing every single mod at testers unfamiliar with the system is obviously going to be confusing, [i]but that's not how players are going to experience the new mod system, is it?[/i] See, in general, unlocking systems exist to give players time to acclimate to complex systems, limiting their initial choices to avoid overwhelming them and opening up while they gain familiarity with it. I.E. Once a player had put the time in to unlock all of the mods, odds are pretty good that they'll be familiar enough with each tab to know where what they're looking for is. Especially if the list is organized well and has clear, easy to understand iconography, which it does! A+, gold star on the team who made the icons for these mods, they use a series of simple, consistent symbols to convey ideas. And because they convey information so well, you can lean on them to make a more complex system, because you can trust players to be able to find things more easily. Sooo yeah, basically all I got from this section of the TWAB is that your flawed testing gave you low expectations for how much information players would be able to handle, and instead of having faith in your balancing teams' ability to curb troublesome combinations purely with cost you decided to arbitrarily segregate mods into three piles. Basically the feeling I got when I first saw the system, but it's nice to have a theory confirmed, I guess. #removeaffinity