Everything that I think could potentially improve the game. But it is just an opinion, and feel free to write your own list, and we can put everything important that the developers could do to make this game more appealing in one thread. And if you disagree with a suggestion, feel free to tell me why and we can think through a change to it. Infantry Suggestions: Make knives more effective. Make it so that it will hit a target almost no matter what so long as it is within a certain range. Or change the mechanics of the knives entirely. Make Jet-packs more effective (Make Icarus jump faster, Jump Jet regular mix, and make drifters work even longer) Make climbing onto buildings/areas after jump jetting easier. Reduce recoil on NC weapons or make them more accurate. Make NC weapons harder hitting (More damage per bullet) Make TR weapons fire faster, and reduce recoil slightly or improve accuracy (in the case of the larger weapons). Make mines able to be layed down per person limitless, but extremely costly in nanites. This will allow for traps to be set for a huge amount of enemies- making zerg swarms less effective. Remove recon darts on crossbow- why does anyone use the recon tool when they can use the recon crossbow + ammo pack? Make less movement in sniper rifle while scoped (Add Prone position). (Would love a cover system, but it isn't going to happen) Make MAXes far more expensive. Make the MAX have much better special abilities. Add Jet-packs, Self-destruct, (Change lockdown to make it extremely damage resistant). Reduce movement penalty on MAXes. Make MAX anti-Infantry and anti-Vehicle weapons more potent. Make grenades more readily available, improve their AOE (Except specialized grenades. But improve the smoke grenade). Reduce fall damage significantly on MAX suits. Vehicle Suggestions: Make all vehicles have critical points on them that are easier to damage, and make animations to match damage in areas. Give Lightnings empire specific designs and change the name. Make flashes a more viable weapon. Make the VS MBT gun fire faster, and make the MBT move faster strafing. Increase armor on NC Vanguard. Make the Prowler faster. Remove Magburner ability, add a similar thing to NC and TR tanks while allowing VS players to adjust the height of their tanks. As in, from 3 meters in the air to ten centimeters. Make the Valkyrie have guns on the side to be used in conjunction with weapons held by players. Remove bottom gun. Make Valkyrie wingspan slightly larger. Make the Reaver less like a brick. Make the Harrasser not set off mines unless it's tires run over them. Make all vehicles be able to climb hills better- especially Sunderers and Flashes. Make galaxies have belly guns as well, and drop the Galaxy model and mesh and replace it with something less like a whale and more like a fighting machine. Make some sort of Platoon Leader (With at least 24 people in the platoon, or else it would be ridiculous.) air vehicle that is massive- Like the a flying base, almost. Make all air vulnerable to small arms fire. Make the top side of air vehicles far less susceptible to damage. Like seriously, I scraped the top and the whole thing blows up? And I receive a rocket to the engine and it's like nothing even happened.... Make Liberators more susceptible to C-4. Add artillery. Add orbital strikes. UI Suggestion: Improve medic notification system. As to who is a medic, and who needs medical attention should be dead obvious. Allow platoon leaders to suggest a path to be taken on the map, not just a location to get to. Allow them also to denote what they want their members to do there. Show the UI for Ammo/Grenades left on the gun being held (Unless it is a secondary weapons). Make this like the COD: Advanced Warfare gun UI. (Make this OPTIONAL- some people might not like it) Layout and Map/Base Design Suggestions: Vary environments more on each continent. Create flying base. Give it a huge amount of weapons and put it over the crown. Add the Volcanic continent. With a city on one side and small outposts around the edge. Allow fights on beaches. Increase size of wide open desert on indar, add more abandoned bases like the one near Abandoned NS Offices, and make these bases chokepoints. Make some bases, like the Skylance Battery, actually fire those huge AA cannons they have in them. Visual Suggestions: Remove hitching, use GPU pre-render for frames so framerate will not drop from 50-ish to about 20 for a couple of seconds. Fix textures when zoomed in on back of guns. Make shadows more fluid, especially on Ultra settings. Improve bullet decal system. Show bullet holes better. Fix flora and fauna textures, especially trees. Work on ground textures, add more anti-aliasing capabilities. Differentiate models on weapons. Make each base look unique- Like make the NC Arsenal have weapon racks, VS archives look like an old Vanu base or a library, or the Warpgate a huge warp portal. Make the Terran crash site a huge TR ship. Little things like that are what makes any game special. Bring back Phys-X. OPTIMIZE!!!! Not only for Nvidia (Which I, myself use.), but for AMD as well! Progression and Leveling: Make the directives weapons less stupid. Who needs a shotgun on a shotgun? Only the VS weapons are better than the originals, as they have infinite ammo and an overheat mechanic. Make the leveling curve much easier for newcomers. Allow them to reset all of their certs at like level 20, in case they made some stupid purchases. Give the better players, around level 60+, the ability to work on special missions for special rewards. Like- 100 certs payment if they go end a fight which has been raging for an hour or so by taking the base for their empire. Make some weapons level rewards- after 25 levels, you should be able to pick any weapon you want for free. 1.5x the cert gain rate. Permanently. It is too difficult to gain certs right now for newer players, even with the 100 certs per level up to 15 bonus. Story: Create faction leaders. Give us a reason to fight over whatever patch of land we are fighting over. Please make the call-outs by the radio operator of whatever faction we are in sound less stupid. Especially the constant NC Woman who yells incessantly whenever we are losing. Make special objectives for each empire. Create special missions- such as go retrieve and secure this Vanu artifact, or unfreeze someone in a cryopod, or go and reactivate some ship or cannon. Misc: Make VR targets outside the shooting range move around- and possibly shoot back? Remove the ability to spot. It's stupid, and reduces the ability for any stealthy gameplay. Make redeploy have some sort of consequence like a nanite cost. This will reduce the anger at the fast redeploys. If continents ever get latticed together, add naval warfare.
Oh, and fix collision detection. Why can't I run over a MAX with a flash, or why do my bullets just fly through the enemy sometimes? And why can't I kill anyone with my Lightning running them over, but with a Harasser, it's always an instant kill?
You wrote too much information in one introductory thread. I tried to genuinely give it a sincere read. There may be a few good thoughts in there, though it's too heavy in words and to light in format. As far as I can sumise, you want to change the whole game. Baby steps my friend.
What I would like in game? I have mained engineer since the beginning of the game. Engineer is finally approaching a fleshed out class. ARCHER for Anti max. 2 manned turret types. A light sentry gun. Ammo dispenser. Repair gun. Explosives! Engineer can do many tasks and be a fun and useful team player. The easiest addition to the game that I would like to round out the engineer? A placeable aa turret. Could be like an AA spitfire, an aircraft alarm and weak slow trackimg coyotes or flak. Or one that can be a manned, like a small AA base turret. For "skill" based play.
I'm just going to cross out things with which I do not agree. I will exercise the same level of exposition skills as you have. To make it easier to peruse, I will separate into sections and change the color of remaining text to white. I'm only leaving the last one un-struck because I don't understand, even after checking a screenshot. I'm not even going to start on the Visual Optimization section because there's no way to validate what is actually a good idea with the performance limitations of the game in mind. Assume all crossed-out. Everything under Progression and Leveling is also crossed-out. There are faction leaders - the specific voice in your comm. The last point in this section is crossed-out for the same reason that all of Visual Optimizations is assumed crossed-out. PlanetSide has a standard of what constitute Auraxian naval combat already - we just need to import it properly. And we'll probably never get performance good enough to physically link all the continents together unless we reconstruct every map to work with a customization of the EVE Online cluster algorithm.
Sorry, mate. I read about half-way before I gave up. Pretty much all I saw was terrible idea after terrible idea, most of which indicate a substantial lack of understanding of either a) what the game is; or b) what Planetside's meant to be (based on history etc.). It also seems very one-faction-y. Spend more time on other factions as well before you decide to change the whole game.
Reduced to suggestions that might be more acceptable: Infantry: Make climbing onto buildings/areas after jump jetting easier. Reduce recoil on NC weapons or make them more accurate. Make NC weapons harder hitting (More damage per bullet) Make TR weapons fire faster, and reduce recoil slightly or improve accuracy (in the case of the larger weapons). Vehicles: Give Lightnings empire specific designs and change the name. Make all vehicles be able to climb hills better. Make the top side of air vehicles far less susceptible to damage. Like seriously, I scraped the top and the whole thing blows up? And I receive a rocket to the engine and it's like nothing even happened.... UI: Improve medic notification system. As to who is a medic, and who needs medical attention should be dead obvious. Allow platoon leaders to suggest a path to be taken on the map, not just a location to get to. Allow them also to denote what they want their members to do there. Show the UI for Ammo/Grenades left on the gun being held (Unless it is a secondary weapons). Make this like the COD: Advanced Warfare gun UI. (Make this OPTIONAL- some people might not like it) Level/Base Design: Vary environments more on each continent. Add the Volcanic continent. With a city on one side and small outposts around the edge. Allow fights on beaches. Increase size of wide open desert on Indar. Misc: Make VR targets outside the shooting range move around. Make redeploy have some sort of consequence like a nanite cost. This will reduce the anger at the fast redeploys. Visual Suggestions (If possible under performance limitations): Remove hitching, use GPU pre-render for frames so framerate will not drop from 50-ish to about 20 for a couple of seconds. Fix textures when zoomed in on back of guns. Make shadows more fluid, especially on Ultra settings. Improve bullet decal system. Show bullet holes better. Fix flora and fauna textures, especially trees. Work on ground textures, add more anti-aliasing capabilities. Differentiate models on weapons. Make each base look unique- Like make the NC Arsenal have weapon racks, VS archives look like an old Vanu base or a library, or the Warpgate a huge warp portal. Make the Terran crash site a huge TR ship. Little things like that are what makes any game special. Bring back Phys-X. OPTIMIZE!!!! Not only for Nvidia (Which I, myself use.), but for AMD as well!
This list should be a new thread called "The actual list of stuff that will actually make the game better"
Looked at a few and there where plenty there that was just "increase the power of X". So no, the balance in the game is IMO at a great place atm. The first year of this game had LOTS of balance changes and at every turn someone complained that the way they where getting 200k xp an hour way of playing shouldn't be nerfed "CUZ I HAZ FUN AT EVRYONES XPENZE". Hell even the Striker "nerf" I enjoy immensely. I'm actually scared of what they might do to it as I saw somewhere that they where going to tinker with it again. It's like a rocket launcher shotgun now with small unavoidable tracking to air targets it the rocket gets close enough. I LOOOOOVE shooting Reavers/Schythes that hover and rocket spam just 20 meters above a base with it. It's probably my favorite thing to do in the whole game right now. Rock > Paper > Scissors in effect finally in a combined arms game, I just hope the other factions have something similar. It's like having a Burster MAX without needing nanites for it. Also it's not completely OP since the Striker can't do much else than kill close stationary air targets and I'm not getting 200k xp an hour doing it.
The reason nobody originally posted is 37 months after this title went into beta most of the normal population has moved on. And even the hardcore have accepted that this is it and the dead horse has been flogged into atoms, so why continue to continually discuss it? There is no 'what if' there is only 'what is'. If you want Daybreak Games 'what if' I would suggest you try out H1Z1 and the forums over there.
