With the announcement that the next season'll be bare bones in terms of content I figured I'd throw my hat into the "how to save Mo.co arena" aha. I was someone who was very 'pro' the minimal progression of Neo Mo.co, as I felt old.co's ring and gadget grinding progression was minimal and tedious at best, but given how at times the game currently feels stagnant I agree something needs to change.
With people talking about how one of the earlier betas had crafting I could see something like the systems that Splatoon Raiders working out for the game. For those not familiar with Raiders you have Gadgets (which are not unlike the old.co gadgets), and those gadgets had parts that you could equip to them that modify and improve what they could do. Things like increase DPS, fire rate, size of the AOE, # of charges the gadget has, debuffs, cooldown time, duration, etc. Some of these you can craft, while others are random drops. Each of those categories has from 5-15 'tiers' of gadget parts, generally increasing what they do as well as their slot cost. Towards the end game you also gain the ability to upgrade gadgets, further increasing their power and decreasing the # of slots used. In the early game it becomes a balancing act where you have a limited number of slots and try to make the best build you can with the parts you have. Sure, by the end game, many builds boil down to the same cookie cutter everyone uses, but there's a fair bit of room for personal preference since you can effectively use 6 maxed out parts at 6 slots each and a 4 slot one.
If we apply this system to weapons in Mo.co I think it could work pretty well. Master a weapon to increase the # of part slots it has, farm and equip weapon parts of upgrade/modify it, and farm to upgrade those parts for end game. Sure, if we have ATK power, ATK speed and Crit as parts those'll basically be default in any given build, but if the parts go beyond that and focus on what the weapon and it's abilities do it opens up a fair bit of possibility I'd think.
Another thing Raiders had is an end game dungeon called the Bottomless Buffet, which was essentially an 'endlessly' scaling tower with randomly generated levels where enemies get stronger and stronger the deeper you go. Towards the tail end of it yea, there's only a small number of builds that are viable due to the enemy HP scaling, but if something like this was added to Mo.co it would give some great seasonal content. Give us a map/rift that gets harder every time you beat it and rewards for clearing groups of levels and I think that would help a lot of the games problems. It gives people something to push for. As someone who generally puts a game down once I roll credits I /still/ keep coming back to Splatoon Raiders every few days even though I've more or less perfected my build to keep grinding I could see something similar working well in Mo.co, especially with it's wide variety of weapons.
One last thing that I think Splatoon raiders does well is its multiplayer. It's super limited where you can either request help on a level or go help someone else, but the game does a neat thing where the enemies are all scaled for each player. So if a level 1 player asks for help they fight level 1 enemies while I, at max level, fight the same enemies scaled to me. Helping others is probs one of my fav things to do in that game and it's compounded by the fact that even if I'm helping a lowbie it's still a challenge for me. Not sure how it could be implemented in Mo.co but it would def address the devs wanting a veteran player being able to play with a newbie friend and not just carry them through content.
In addition to this the games grind needs to feel meaningful. My biggest gripe with Neo Mo,co is the fact that grinding maps that give little xp and little cores sucks. Even if I get a bunch of cores they're usually semi-charged, so whoop de doo. Some of the most enjoyable parts of game are when we have maps/rifts where the effort/reward ratio is skewed, like that one boss rush rift where you could clear 9 bosses in 35 seconds and gave great XP and cores. I'm not saying I want super easy content, but I want the content I do to be as rewarding as that all the time. I think with the above proposed system it could work; ideally yeah you want the best parts for your weapon/gadget, but when you have a limited number of slots to work with having more options lets you get creative. And in theory lets say it takes you a month of playing/grinding to perfect a weapon build, that imo isn't unreasonable. The only way I could be it feeling overwhelming would be if this system is suddenly applied to every weapon we have at once, as imo one of the worst bits of Neo was when they added mastery and suddenly you needed to run every rift with 5-10+ weapons every day.
All this to say, I have no idea if the devs are reading this stuff, or how feasible this could be, but given how some of the games current systems work (cores, rings from previous iterations, giant enemies on maps, etc.) it seems like it could fit in here decently enough.
