bacon blaster wrote:[...]
Let's start a list here.
First, 4 days before your game went commercial, you guys released Uprising, and in it, you completely redid EVERYTHING from fixing a few bugs to nerfing the crap out of the radius for nanite injectors. Now, toward the end of chromosome, there were a lot of things that actually worked pretty well, with only some adjustments that needed to be made. What was done was liked by no one, and created a lot of problems that took a long time to fix (what you guys did to the heavy was ******* stupid). Now, the way you can do this better is to not completely change everything right before you end beta. I feel like that should be obvious, but you guys did it once, sooooo.... Yeah..
Second, the new player experience has been terrible. Since Uprising, new players have not been competitive in any way. I had tried creating new characters a few times to try it out when you guys said you had made a fix to it, and it was never really improved any. I would create a new character, get out of the battle academy, pour a whole mag from an ar into some jerk's back, and then, while I reload, he turns around and does the same, except I am dead in 3 rounds. The disparity between new and old players is extravagant. Now, I know, players need to be able to power up and have advantages over new players. I get this, I support this, it's basically expected in gaming.
HOWEVER, if you are going to do this, you need to either make new players competitive, or to separate them in pvp. You guys did neither of these, and new players were able to show up, die repeatedly, and really do more harm than good to their own team. Now, sure, they could stick around and get more effective and unlock better skills and equipment.
Problem: last time I heard someone crunch the math, if you hit the weekly sp cap every week, it would take 6 months to get competitive. That's not putting you on the level with the top dogs in terms of gear and such, but you can now be useful. This is an absurd amount of time it will take people to actually be able to play the game. A lot of people looked at this and said, "sure, dust "sounds" like it will be an interesting game, but I could spend 6 months dying all over the place and just have a **** time for 6 months, or, I can cod or battlefield and have fun *NOW.*"
That massive wall of sp that kept people getting pub stomped is what kept people from staying with the game. There were never really enough people to separate out players based on their sp or the gear they used and still effectively have people to run games. So, what you needed to do and never really did was bring the disparity between new and old players down to a level that made rookies competitive. If you should express interest in my suggestions, I can add on in another post.
Third, your game balance. There are so many things that you have broken here, and some you did fix, but some you didn't, last I played. I'll try to look at specifics and big things for now, and break it down with it's own set of bullets.
You completely changed things between chromosome and uprising. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it's the way you changed things. For example: you went from all different types of weapons having their own prices different from each other to everything costing the same within it's tier and trying to balance things around this same price. This was something that I never really thought about until recently, actually and came to hate fairly quickly. The varying pricing allowed a lot of different weapons and gear to really pop out and into their roles, but without making them in danger of being op for their price, like hmg's and assault rifles.
The ar was a good, well balanced and easy to use weapon that had a smaller price tag. Anyone could use it, there were really no complicated tricks to working it, but it didn't really overpower other weapons and invalidate them. The heavy machine gun, combined with the heavy suit, was a weapon of raw destruction. In the right hands, it could rampage through ranks of infantry and demolish whole squads in the right range, while reducing player mobility to a crawl, really, and having a reduced range to other weapons. It functioned like a heavy should. The thing that kept it from invalidating all other weapons and fittings was the price tag.
A good player you understood how the gear and weapon worked could make a good pile of cash with it and have a lot of fun, but most people could not. Most players could not use more than 1 heavy fit per match without going into the red. After that, it was free fits, or lose money. This is what kept you from seeing a **** pile of heavies all the time. Over all, it worked pretty well. Then, along comes uprising. (I know, I fugging hate uprising.) You guys put everything on the market for the same price, and tried to balance things around this mechanic so that nothing was really more powerful than others and everything worked on the same level. This has just never worked. For the longest time, the assault rifle was king of the game, while other weapons saw buffs