Draco Dustflier wrote:Do what square enix did with ffxiv and take dust offline for a few years to rebuild. What we have now is an unfinished game that even the PLAYERS hate. Broken aiming system, inconsistent hit detection, major framerate issues, and a number of other glaring flaws in the games core mechanics are driving away 90% of new players, and veteran players are wearing out faster than vets of any game i've seen so far.
All of this can be solved by fixing a couple of things, but those things will take forever to fix unless you take dust offline.
once you read the list, you'll see why.
What i suggest is porting the game from unreal engine 3 to unreal engine 4, and rather than releasing the reborn version of dust on ps3, release it on ps4. You'll have less hoops to jump through on the technical side, and there is a LOT more possible on ps4.
The core mechanics (aiming, hit detection, collision, etc.) have to be at LEAST on par with competing games (blacklight retribution, pS2, BF4) before you do anything else. if thhe game feels as "slippery" as it does now, nobody will play it. I don't care if you have to copy and paste the source code from Unreal tournament, you have GOT to make it work. I cannot stress it enough. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF ANY FIRST PERSON SHOOTER! DON'T EVEN ATTEMPT TO CALL IT A COMPLETE GAME IF IT IS NOT!
With regards to weapon balance, you need to take into consideration what the original purpose of each weapon is. the assault rifle, for example, is the most versatile weapon, with AVERAGE performance in all situations. it shouldn't be good at any of them. When you have one weapon that is vood at everything, it will be spammed like crazy. That's what happened with the tac rifle. Not only was it good in all situations, but it OUTPERFORMED the specialty weapons (shotguns, mass drivers, laser rifles). What you need to do is make it so that each weapon has one thing that it does better than everything else, and one weakness (eg. laser rifles should be good at long range but terrible at close, like they were in chromosome, shotguns should murk up close and not even touch anything at long ranges, mass drivers should be good for crowd control but not so much for 1v1, hmgs should obliterate single targets, the list goes on and on.) the rock paper scissors idea should also apply to the suits: scout beats heavy, assault beats scout, and heavy beats assault. Logis shold be weak to everything so they can't be pseudo assaults like they are now. you might even have to make so they can only use sidearms.) It would be fantastic if this applied to vehicle combat as well: derpships beat tanks, tanks beat mavs, and mavs beat derpships. lavs should stick to running people over.
When it comes to equipment, there's really only one thing that needs to be fixed: nanite injectors. they are absolutely useless. The only fix is to get rid of them entirely and have the repair tool do the reviving. Make it work like it does in planetside 2. get in range of the dead guy, start repping, and he gets up after 3 seconds. this will also allow logis to keep their teams supplied with both clones and ammunition rather than having to carry an injector and a rep tool.
Modules. whats wrong with those? a couple of things. Fiirst off, damage modifiers have no place in a first person shooter. Battlefield, uncharted, killzone, hell, even Call of Duty have removed any form of damage increase from the equation, because if you give people a perk or booster that gives you extra damage, nothing else will be used. Secondly (not sure if thats a word) Shield extenders need to give a percenttage boost (5% militia, 20% complex) instead of a flat increase. There should also be a stacking penalty, just like dqmage mods or kincats. And scout suits should vet some kind of bonus so that they aren't hit as hard by this change. Armor can stay the way it is, as it doesn't regenerate and the movement penalty is enough to drive most players away. There should also be some kind of "ammo pool extender" that lets you carry an extra clip per mod. prototype versions should consume less pg and cpu.
On to the skills. As of now, the amount of time it takes for a player to get into a complete prototype fitting can range anywhere from 6 months to a year. for vehicles its even worse. All this does is restrict people to a specific playstyle for a a ridiculously long time. That's one of the main reasons the game gets stale so quickly. You need to allow for at least SOME variety. if you're adamant on the no respec policy, you need to speed up the skill rate to about 10x what it is now.
This is going to be the most contrraversial part. None of the isk or sp earned on ps3 should carry over to the ps4. I know this is a painful proposition, but think about it: 99% of newcomers are stomped on so badly after the acsdemy that they quit the game. i got about 20 of my friends to try the game, and all of them left because they realized the beta players got a ridiculous head start and they would never catch up. the amount of players you lose because of this will probably not exceed 500. the amount of players you will gain if you do this right on ps4 will be enormous compwared to that.
I know i may have bashed the game in the past, but it's just because i feel like every single constructive post on the forums either gets ignored or shot down by CCP because it's too hard to implement. I want the game to succeed, but right now it seems like it could take 20 years before its actually playable. in that time, i could make my own game.