Beyond tweaking the numbers for the approach, I loved how this mod added tons of levels to readiness beyond just the simple loyalty mechanic present in the vanilla game. The fact that I can help my squadmates in all sorts of different ways (not just by gaining their loyalty) really helped both the immersion into the story and my level of emotional investment into the characters.
Seeing my squadmates' readiness scores dynamically change throughout the ordeal was something really special. During my first unlucky run, I appointed some of my less-than-ideal squadmates as specialists... partly because I had no choice in the case of the biotic bubble, but also because I wanted to boost their chances of survival down the line (and also in the case of Tali because I hadn't yet realized where I was supposed to look on the interface to see readiness scores, and so I failed to see that she was only at Low at that point in the mission... it turned out for the best, as she succeeded at her job and her specialist morale boost gave her a MAJOR survival bonus that ended up coming in really handy down the line, but it was touch-and-go for a while there, lol)
Now I've seen some people in the general comments object to the fact that readiness goes UP after completion of a task, but I would respectfully like to disagree with that opinion.... The suicide mission is an ordeal, sure, you still get moments in the middle to regroup and make speeches (which obviously give your squad chances to catch their breath while you're talking)... and it is assumed, take bathroom or water breaks, even if that's not what the game actually shows you (squadmate dialogue on the Eden Prime mission in ME3 can lampshade this fact: "just because you never actually SEE us take bathroom breaks, doesn't mean it never actually happens".) And EVERYONE on this mission (with the possible sole exception of Kasumi... but it's awkward and non-gameplay-friendly to make an exception for her and no one else, when she wasn't even a vanilla squadmate to start with) is a seasoned combat veteran who has experience of surviving and holding up in a firefight in their own ways... even Tali has that kind of experience from serving on the SR-1, general squishiness aside. They've all got stamina, they know how to pace and breathe and condition themselves, they know how to use medi-gel (and if it comes to that, possibly stims).
What I CAN see change after you give someone a very important specialist role is morale, and that character developing a very strong bond with the commander who placed so much faith in them personally. And that, combined with adrenaline, is a hell of a performance enhancer. (Not to mention it has very positive implications for a lot of the story arcs continuing on into ME3, more on that in a different topic.)
As you've said in a previous comment, Shepard knows their team. It ONLY makes sense to me that they would check in with their squad throughout the mission to see what the status of each individual teammate is... and like any good military leader, makes changes to their plan according to what they see at each check-in. ("No general goes into battle without a plan, but only an idiot of a general insists on sticking to that plan.") It adds an element of "thinking on your feet" and responsiveness that is absent from the vanilla SM, and makes it play more convincingly like a high-risk military operation (albeit at the expense of some well-established RPG genre conventions, though for me personally that isn't a huge drawback... it's a positive, if anything).
Aside from the extra dimension of immersiveness this particular feature adds, it also enhances the emotional stakes of the SM in a positive way, to balance out the potential negativity of the tension that comes from not knowing who may or may not get killed off. It was massively heartwarming to see certain characters' readiness scores jump WAY up after I picked them for specialist roles: Tali and Thane especially went from pretty low readiness to quite high readiness. I'm pretty positive that that motivation boost was what got them through the ordeal.... the fact that those two are some of my favorite characters in the entire series just put the icing on the cake, because it really genuinely felt like I played a direct role in saving them. That was something that the vanilla SM doesn't quite manage to convey with the same level of conviction.
Even the squadmates at "Low" or "Medium" readiness who were left behind to hold the line, I still felt like I had more of a direct hand in saving them with the mechanics that your mod uses. Tying survival of low-readiness squadmates to high-readiness ones in that one-to-one way forces the player to put a lot more thought into the makeup of the hold-the-line group... again, if one insists on playing this game exclusively through "RPG genre conventions", it may feel like, if you left someone at "low-readiness" by that point, that's it, that's the verdict, the game has decided that you don't care about them and you're basically leaving them to fend for themselves (looking at you, Grunt). Which is why I personally consider your mechanics an improvement over the ones in the vanilla game (where it's just about taking a simple average, because you get an extra opportunity to really ponder how the strengths and weaknesses of individuals mesh with one another. Tying everything to readiness scores in this way is a great way to achieve this without taking too many idiosyncrasies into account and unnecessarily complicating the calculations.
In my case, I left Garrus (the romance partner in that run, as well as one of my top-ranked team members in terms of readiness) as one of the hold-the-line crew, to "cover" for Grunt (who only had loyalty going for him at that point)... obviously, there were other very-high and low-to-medium readiness squadmates in the door squad, so there's no guarantee that's how things actually went down internally. But the mod left me enough freedom to headcanon my Shep saying to Garrus "I trust you to look after our teenaged adopted krogan son while I'm gone", which was especially funny considering that Garrus had been the second squadmate on Grunt's loyalty mission (and knowing him, probably made a lot of sarcastic comments during and after about how crazy krogans are and about how Grunt really owes him one). And they both survived, so it felt like that worked out really well.
You can care about a character but still find them an awkward fit in your personal squad and thus end up not taking them on a lot of missions, and STILL want to be able to do something to ensure their survival during the SM. And I really appreciated that this mod gives players a chance to do that.
Hey! Sorry it's taking me so long to answer your comments. I've had a lot of other stuff to deal with lately. But in any case, I do appreciate these comments a lot. In many ways, you've understood the reasons behind my orginal design choices, confirmed that it ends up having an effect close enough to what i hoped, and also point out some things that I hadn't necessarily thought about explicitly.
Anyway, about the topic of readiness bonuses during the suicide mission, I think this is probably what I consider to be the central mechanic of my mod. I wanted to do something with the suicide mission, but initially I wasn't too sure how to go about it. So I thought about it for a while, and brainstormed different options. But it's really at the moment this particular idea surfaced that I knew I had something I liked, and started to work on it.
From a pure gameplay perspective, it gave the possibility to achieve an important objective: give the player full knowledge, with all the cards in hand at the moment of the choice (Shep knows their team, knows who is best fitted for the task, etc), but still leave a reason to hesitate between multiple valid options (since there is an actual incentive to send in a less than optimal squadmate). And as you point out, from more emotional and role-playing perspectives, those positive rewards given even when things go wrong have a pretty significant impact on how playing the mission can feel satisfying despite the risks and losses, and if does create a more dynamical aspect of the individual status of each squadmates (whereas in vanilla picking loyal Tali or Kasumi or Legion for the tech specialist just makes no difference whatsoever).
One thing that could be debated is how big those bonuses are compared to other things (doing the whole loyalty mission gives one readiness point, while picking for one specialist task during one mission gives twice as much, but picking as a fighting squadmate gives zero). All of this can be seen as a bit arbitry. But I think it's also practically a necessity, to make the choices more balanced, and to give more intensity during the suicide mission itself. In a way, picking a squadmate for one of those tasks during the SM has some symbolic value of Shep putting their trust in that squadmate, that goes beyond the nature of the task itself.
And another debatable thing is the way readiness goes up even if the squadmate fails but survives (and gets someone else killed). But I didn't want to punish the player even more when something goes wrong, and given the way things play out, there is a lot of room for the squadmate who is technically responsible for failure to not feel personally responsible, and/or to be reassured otherwise by Shepard.
No problem! Real life gets in the way (I know it certainly did for me) and the point of the feedback is for you (the mod creator) to get to see the comments and thoughts of the end users like me. I've submitted my feedback, you've seen it, and if you have any additional context to add that's great (I'd be particularly interested to see what you have to say about my comments re: the upgrade limit, as I think I've actually made a few points beyond just "I like it" or "I don't like it, get rid of this"), but either way, it's mission accomplished.
One thing that could be debated is how big those bonuses are compared to other things (doing the whole loyalty mission gives one readiness point, while picking for one specialist task during one mission gives twice as much, but picking as a fighting squadmate gives zero).
If the impact of loyalty missions are decreased (by the factor of "loyalty" not counting for nearly as much anymore), I think it's possible to make the argument that this mod dilutes the much-vaunted character-driven aspect of ME2 (and I think a few people have made that argument in the comments section already, actually). That being said... It's not an argument I would personally support, for a few reasons.
1) First, I would argue that the loyalty missions are meant to support the thrust of the overall narrative (defeat the Collectors), but since you have so few plotline missions in comparison to how many squadmates you have (most of them have pretty major recruitment missions and ALL of them get loyalty missions) the supporting material tends to swamp the main story by dint of sheer volume, to the point that it's easy to forget that the story is supposed to be about Collectors and Reapers.
ME1 has a superficially similar issue with a massive volume of sidequests and a much smaller number of main plotline quests, but the problem feels much less acute with ME1 because most of these sidequests genuinely feel optional. You can play ME1 by following only the main story quests and a select few of the sidequests, and not feel like you missed anything (other than the chance to get some extra thank you notes in future installments). If you skip recruitments and loyalty quests in ME2, you're basically missing over half of the entire game.
Now, due to the way it's made, I don't think ME2 can ever be reworked into a game where the sidequests genuinely act like sidequests, rather than the drivers of the "real" story and the bulk of the game content. But reducing the end-game impact of loyalty I would argue places them back in their proper scale relative to the whole overarching storyline, without changing how those missions play (which is frankly a lot more interesting than just driving through nearly empty landscapes in the Mako).
2) You still have lots of opportunities for both Shepard (on an in-universe level) and the player (on a meta level) to get to know your squad without being rewarded with a massive gameplay bonus for it, which is what I argue real character interaction should be about. The loyalty missions themselves do not change, only the level of incentive you are given to actually do them (but most players will probably do them all anyway for other reasons).
In this sense, I think it's players who have drifted away from the risk profile intended with the original story... in-game dialogue (such as right after the Collector Ship mission, when the game confronts you with a choice between "continue to build your team" and "go and get that IFF") implies that the original intent was to give the player a penalty for investing in squadmate readiness, but giving the player full control over WHEN to initiate the end game events (you get penalized for delaying going into the Omega-4 Relay after installing the IFF, but you can delay the Derelict Reaper mission itself for as long as you want with absolutely zero gameplay consequences) actually kind of renders that mechanic moot, so functionally it ends up getting ignored by most players.
(Which... I understand why it's necessary just to prevent the game from feeling unwinnable, and it's not a mechanic you can easily touch without changing the entire game for the worse. But for me IFF mission timing setup as it currently stands feels more than a little immersion-breaking.)
So I think what this mod does by reducing the impact of loyalty overall is actually quite appropriate... I don't think going all-out and actively penalizing time spent on loyalty would be a good idea, because again, that's just not how the game was built. But removing loyalty from being an instant-win condition (especially for the specialist tasks) definitely does a lot to make me feel like there's a lot more to squadmate selection and assignment than just "how much do I like this character" which is what vanilla gameplay can so often boil down to.
In short, I'm all in favor of separation of plot and characterization: if the player can develop better relationships with squadmates, that's a good thing, and if those good relationships can have some ripple effects on the larger gameplay, that's even better. But IMO characterization does a poor job if you're trying to make it also work overtime as plot development AND gameplay... like, it wasn't enough to get to see unique dialogue and more dialogue from a character I like, it has to translate into a gameplay bonus too. And I think the same thing goes when gameplay encroaches on characterization: there is a risk of making the relationships themselves feel forced and less-than-genuine if you're incentivizing developing them through dangling the carrot of more advantageous mechanics or plot progression.
3) Boiling everything down to 1 simple mechanic has the effect of flattening characters and their potentially unique contributions. As you say, in vanilla, loyalty and predetermined "appropriateness" are the only means to differentiate between specialist characters, and this completely erases any further possibility of plot development and characterization interacting with gameplay for a more satisfying outcome.
Feedback (Played) on additional readiness bonuses beyond the Omega-4 Relay (3 comments)
Seeing my squadmates' readiness scores dynamically change throughout the ordeal was something really special. During my first unlucky run, I appointed some of my less-than-ideal squadmates as specialists... partly because I had no choice in the case of the biotic bubble, but also because I wanted to boost their chances of survival down the line (and also in the case of Tali because I hadn't yet realized where I was supposed to look on the interface to see readiness scores, and so I failed to see that she was only at Low at that point in the mission... it turned out for the best, as she succeeded at her job and her specialist morale boost gave her a MAJOR survival bonus that ended up coming in really handy down the line, but it was touch-and-go for a while there, lol)
Now I've seen some people in the general comments object to the fact that readiness goes UP after completion of a task, but I would respectfully like to disagree with that opinion.... The suicide mission is an ordeal, sure, you still get moments in the middle to regroup and make speeches (which obviously give your squad chances to catch their breath while you're talking)... and it is assumed, take bathroom or water breaks, even if that's not what the game actually shows you (squadmate dialogue on the Eden Prime mission in ME3 can lampshade this fact: "just because you never actually SEE us take bathroom breaks, doesn't mean it never actually happens".) And EVERYONE on this mission (with the possible sole exception of Kasumi... but it's awkward and non-gameplay-friendly to make an exception for her and no one else, when she wasn't even a vanilla squadmate to start with) is a seasoned combat veteran who has experience of surviving and holding up in a firefight in their own ways... even Tali has that kind of experience from serving on the SR-1, general squishiness aside. They've all got stamina, they know how to pace and breathe and condition themselves, they know how to use medi-gel (and if it comes to that, possibly stims).
What I CAN see change after you give someone a very important specialist role is morale, and that character developing a very strong bond with the commander who placed so much faith in them personally. And that, combined with adrenaline, is a hell of a performance enhancer. (Not to mention it has very positive implications for a lot of the story arcs continuing on into ME3, more on that in a different topic.)
As you've said in a previous comment, Shepard knows their team. It ONLY makes sense to me that they would check in with their squad throughout the mission to see what the status of each individual teammate is... and like any good military leader, makes changes to their plan according to what they see at each check-in. ("No general goes into battle without a plan, but only an idiot of a general insists on sticking to that plan.") It adds an element of "thinking on your feet" and responsiveness that is absent from the vanilla SM, and makes it play more convincingly like a high-risk military operation (albeit at the expense of some well-established RPG genre conventions, though for me personally that isn't a huge drawback... it's a positive, if anything).
Aside from the extra dimension of immersiveness this particular feature adds, it also enhances the emotional stakes of the SM in a positive way, to balance out the potential negativity of the tension that comes from not knowing who may or may not get killed off. It was massively heartwarming to see certain characters' readiness scores jump WAY up after I picked them for specialist roles: Tali and Thane especially went from pretty low readiness to quite high readiness. I'm pretty positive that that motivation boost was what got them through the ordeal.... the fact that those two are some of my favorite characters in the entire series just put the icing on the cake, because it really genuinely felt like I played a direct role in saving them. That was something that the vanilla SM doesn't quite manage to convey with the same level of conviction.
Even the squadmates at "Low" or "Medium" readiness who were left behind to hold the line, I still felt like I had more of a direct hand in saving them with the mechanics that your mod uses. Tying survival of low-readiness squadmates to high-readiness ones in that one-to-one way forces the player to put a lot more thought into the makeup of the hold-the-line group... again, if one insists on playing this game exclusively through "RPG genre conventions", it may feel like, if you left someone at "low-readiness" by that point, that's it, that's the verdict, the game has decided that you don't care about them and you're basically leaving them to fend for themselves (looking at you, Grunt). Which is why I personally consider your mechanics an improvement over the ones in the vanilla game (where it's just about taking a simple average, because you get an extra opportunity to really ponder how the strengths and weaknesses of individuals mesh with one another. Tying everything to readiness scores in this way is a great way to achieve this without taking too many idiosyncrasies into account and unnecessarily complicating the calculations.
In my case, I left Garrus (the romance partner in that run, as well as one of my top-ranked team members in terms of readiness) as one of the hold-the-line crew, to "cover" for Grunt (who only had loyalty going for him at that point)... obviously, there were other very-high and low-to-medium readiness squadmates in the door squad, so there's no guarantee that's how things actually went down internally. But the mod left me enough freedom to headcanon my Shep saying to Garrus "I trust you to look after our teenaged adopted krogan son while I'm gone", which was especially funny considering that Garrus had been the second squadmate on Grunt's loyalty mission (and knowing him, probably made a lot of sarcastic comments during and after about how crazy krogans are and about how Grunt really owes him one). And they both survived, so it felt like that worked out really well.
You can care about a character but still find them an awkward fit in your personal squad and thus end up not taking them on a lot of missions, and STILL want to be able to do something to ensure their survival during the SM. And I really appreciated that this mod gives players a chance to do that.
Anyway, about the topic of readiness bonuses during the suicide mission, I think this is probably what I consider to be the central mechanic of my mod. I wanted to do something with the suicide mission, but initially I wasn't too sure how to go about it. So I thought about it for a while, and brainstormed different options. But it's really at the moment this particular idea surfaced that I knew I had something I liked, and started to work on it.
From a pure gameplay perspective, it gave the possibility to achieve an important objective: give the player full knowledge, with all the cards in hand at the moment of the choice (Shep knows their team, knows who is best fitted for the task, etc), but still leave a reason to hesitate between multiple valid options (since there is an actual incentive to send in a less than optimal squadmate). And as you point out, from more emotional and role-playing perspectives, those positive rewards given even when things go wrong have a pretty significant impact on how playing the mission can feel satisfying despite the risks and losses, and if does create a more dynamical aspect of the individual status of each squadmates (whereas in vanilla picking loyal Tali or Kasumi or Legion for the tech specialist just makes no difference whatsoever).
One thing that could be debated is how big those bonuses are compared to other things (doing the whole loyalty mission gives one readiness point, while picking for one specialist task during one mission gives twice as much, but picking as a fighting squadmate gives zero). All of this can be seen as a bit arbitry. But I think it's also practically a necessity, to make the choices more balanced, and to give more intensity during the suicide mission itself. In a way, picking a squadmate for one of those tasks during the SM has some symbolic value of Shep putting their trust in that squadmate, that goes beyond the nature of the task itself.
And another debatable thing is the way readiness goes up even if the squadmate fails but survives (and gets someone else killed). But I didn't want to punish the player even more when something goes wrong, and given the way things play out, there is a lot of room for the squadmate who is technically responsible for failure to not feel personally responsible, and/or to be reassured otherwise by Shepard.
If the impact of loyalty missions are decreased (by the factor of "loyalty" not counting for nearly as much anymore), I think it's possible to make the argument that this mod dilutes the much-vaunted character-driven aspect of ME2 (and I think a few people have made that argument in the comments section already, actually). That being said... It's not an argument I would personally support, for a few reasons.
1) First, I would argue that the loyalty missions are meant to support the thrust of the overall narrative (defeat the Collectors), but since you have so few plotline missions in comparison to how many squadmates you have (most of them have pretty major recruitment missions and ALL of them get loyalty missions) the supporting material tends to swamp the main story by dint of sheer volume, to the point that it's easy to forget that the story is supposed to be about Collectors and Reapers.
ME1 has a superficially similar issue with a massive volume of sidequests and a much smaller number of main plotline quests, but the problem feels much less acute with ME1 because most of these sidequests genuinely feel optional. You can play ME1 by following only the main story quests and a select few of the sidequests, and not feel like you missed anything (other than the chance to get some extra thank you notes in future installments). If you skip recruitments and loyalty quests in ME2, you're basically missing over half of the entire game.
Now, due to the way it's made, I don't think ME2 can ever be reworked into a game where the sidequests genuinely act like sidequests, rather than the drivers of the "real" story and the bulk of the game content. But reducing the end-game impact of loyalty I would argue places them back in their proper scale relative to the whole overarching storyline, without changing how those missions play (which is frankly a lot more interesting than just driving through nearly empty landscapes in the Mako).
2) You still have lots of opportunities for both Shepard (on an in-universe level) and the player (on a meta level) to get to know your squad without being rewarded with a massive gameplay bonus for it, which is what I argue real character interaction should be about. The loyalty missions themselves do not change, only the level of incentive you are given to actually do them (but most players will probably do them all anyway for other reasons).
In this sense, I think it's players who have drifted away from the risk profile intended with the original story... in-game dialogue (such as right after the Collector Ship mission, when the game confronts you with a choice between "continue to build your team" and "go and get that IFF") implies that the original intent was to give the player a penalty for investing in squadmate readiness, but giving the player full control over WHEN to initiate the end game events (you get penalized for delaying going into the Omega-4 Relay after installing the IFF, but you can delay the Derelict Reaper mission itself for as long as you want with absolutely zero gameplay consequences) actually kind of renders that mechanic moot, so functionally it ends up getting ignored by most players.
(Which... I understand why it's necessary just to prevent the game from feeling unwinnable, and it's not a mechanic you can easily touch without changing the entire game for the worse. But for me IFF mission timing setup as it currently stands feels more than a little immersion-breaking.)
So I think what this mod does by reducing the impact of loyalty overall is actually quite appropriate... I don't think going all-out and actively penalizing time spent on loyalty would be a good idea, because again, that's just not how the game was built. But removing loyalty from being an instant-win condition (especially for the specialist tasks) definitely does a lot to make me feel like there's a lot more to squadmate selection and assignment than just "how much do I like this character" which is what vanilla gameplay can so often boil down to.
In short, I'm all in favor of separation of plot and characterization: if the player can develop better relationships with squadmates, that's a good thing, and if those good relationships can have some ripple effects on the larger gameplay, that's even better. But IMO characterization does a poor job if you're trying to make it also work overtime as plot development AND gameplay... like, it wasn't enough to get to see unique dialogue and more dialogue from a character I like, it has to translate into a gameplay bonus too. And I think the same thing goes when gameplay encroaches on characterization: there is a risk of making the relationships themselves feel forced and less-than-genuine if you're incentivizing developing them through dangling the carrot of more advantageous mechanics or plot progression.
3) Boiling everything down to 1 simple mechanic has the effect of flattening characters and their potentially unique contributions. As you say, in vanilla, loyalty and predetermined "appropriateness" are the only means to differentiate between specialist characters, and this completely erases any further possibility of plot development and characterization interacting with gameplay for a more satisfying outcome.