[Suggestion] This game need content, not balance. Personal wish list

I don't think Routers and jumppads are equivalent.

The former required prior infiltration of the base (or wherever) to place the terminal teleport pad. It also only allowed a player to go from point A to point B. The possibility to slip to a point C or a point D that was unanticipated was not possible. The unit was specifically designed to assist in base assaults.

The latter allows for far more unbridled access, even in the instance of requiring a complementary landing pad to make the initial vaulting pad operational.

id like to see a flying flash, like a quad copter drone type thing

It's not a bottleneck, you just have various ways to balance a game and each has their own time consumption.

Simply changing the numbers on weapons: Least time consumption but this also can't solve problems with the weapon design. For example a homing weapon who's accuracy makes it a far more valuable than it's non-homing counterparts.
Adding to existing design: Takes more time but can solve much more balance problems. For example by adding new abilities and functions to existing weapons and vehicles to counter previously mentioned homing weapon, or by adding functions that increase accuracy of the counterpart weapons, or by adding wholly new weapons to vehicles.
Revamping existing design: Can take more time than adding to design, but can also take far less time depending on what is revamped. Repurposing some existing fluff elements to build the Glaive IPC for example to reduce the time required to build models etc.
Making new designs: Most time consuming, add a new vehicle, a base, a continent, the construction system or whatever. Some of these things could completely revitilise your game if done right (Construction system for example), others could ruin your game (a new continent).

Ok, so because you had a bad experience with art designers, you now hate design as a whole. The real bottom line is that you need to use all ways to balance a game to actually balance it and progress it. The only way you can get away with just number balance is if your game holds the perfect balance of features, vehicles, weapons and abilities and they just need to be tuned to each other. But as we've already seen, the construction system can't be balanced with just number balance, you need to change it's design and how the entire feature works to incorporate it into the game. They are using a combination of revamping and adding to achieve this: They revamp parts of the continent with already existing design elements (vehicle cap points) and give the players the freedom to construct their base around them.

Binoculars for the empty primary slot on Infiltrators!
All over it.
Already posted long ago for this.
I hate that empty slot. No reason for it be empty when 'something' could be there that was non-combat oriented could be there.

Implants to not trigger mines?!
It's hard enough to catch anyone with mines with the mine detection implants!!
I used to catch people with mined all of the time before letting people detect them!
Now you want to make it so that they don't even set them off?!
Go back in time and drive a harasser!

It's a similar concept nonetheless and the point being we had other ways to assault bases in PS1 that we lack in PS2. I think it should be similar to the teleporter in that you can't jump back and forth only in one direction. It's a meh idea in the sense that it could ruin the game or make it more fun for the attackers to get through chokepoints and stalemates.

It is a bottleneck. It is a point of congestion or blockage, because it is multiple features in development, that each have time demands on the same limited resource.

I dig the write-up. That is a good, comprehensive method at breaking down how to review balance.

Though I do think that SOE/DBG are flip/flop on your time estimates. They are the slowest at changing the numbers, while they are the fastest at pumping out new designs.

I had a bad experience with art-centric game development. Art-centric could probably have been ok, but this one was extreme. Most game dev is probably bad when it's just one department not listening to any others.

"Art designers" do not exist.

Developers break down to:
Art Department (2d, 3d, animation, world building, etc.)
Design Department (gameplay, mechanics, content, itemization, balance, (usually) instructions with art, (usually) instructions with programming, etc.)
Programming Department (tools, engine, net code, etc.)
Producer Departent (sometimes they order other departments, sometimes they let other departments run on their own, provide data reports, facilitate work of other departments, etc.)
Other Departments/Roles (HR (maybe), IT, QA, Publisher/Investor Relations, Sound, Music, Community Rep, etc.)

I don't agree that number balance is innately limited outside of "perfect balance of features". I believe that SOE/DBG is (1) very bad at number balance (slow, bungling, sometimes ignorant, and unable to see big picture), and (2) prone to pushing contradictory number balance based on individual agendas and schizo.

This is called "allocation of dev time". You don't need to "congest or blockage" by simply doing one feature at a time. However since usually each dev has their strenghts, it makes more sense to deliberately have multiple things to be working on and let each dev work on the part of the feature they do best, often creating a higher quality rather than have someone who's bad at modeling try to create an entire tank including it's model.

This is more because DBG (and SOE before it) had a different focus. PS2 can gain a fornicationton of balance and game quality by simply balancing by numbers if only because they've neglected it for long periods of time and only occasionally tried to fix it with grand redesigns of certain weapons or game facets. But the premise that some people gave that content =/= balance (or of the OP that content should be focused on and somehow that excludes balance) is wrong. That's all the point I've been making.

And the way you do 2D, 3D, animation and world building can be done by a design. It's arguing semantics what you call it. If you say the official name is Art Department ("Hi, I'm a dev and my work is Art Department! Yep, that's what describes what my job as a dev is!"), then the official name is Art Department.

I don't see how number balance as a whole has anything to do with the skill displayed by SOE/DBG at executing it, same as I don't see how an Art Department that calls the shots somehow invalidates the addition of content to balance the game.

Welcome to Dev world.

You have finite resources. Those resources can fluctuate wildly over time. Your target resource type/amount estimates-for-tasks can fluctuate wildly over time. Your resource ingredients are routinely fluctuating beyond your control: politics, laziness, agenda, illness, culture, sun tax, crunch, oversight, project management process flavor of the month, ego, vendetta, greed, animosity, power grabs, incompetence, sloppiness, spite, grandstanding, layoffs, morale, other project taking your labor, promotions, bad chemistry, harassment, in-office "dating", publisher/investor/stakeholder meddling, feature creep, vendor price changes, the economy, reorganization, micromanagement, paradigm shifts, personality conflicts, too many chefs, absentee landlords, too little/much management, change in leadership, change in direction, etc.

The "mythical man-month" is real. And it creates natural bottlenecks when you try to just throw "units of labor" at problems.

This is not to say that you can't manage all that with "better" results. You can. But you can't divide 1 by 2, and expect to get 2. If you assign Design to 2 tasks, they don't magically have full time to give to both tasks. And your notion of synergy and specialization hit the brick wall of all the fluctuations I listed above.

One of the problems with SOE/DBG, is that they don't fix their ongoing problems. And one of their problems is that Dev personal politics > Company product. Which is to say when a mid-high level Dev decides to ignore an issue they have control over, that issue is gonna be there for the long term. They aren't gonna fix it, and they prohibit others from fixing it.

SOE/DBG is full of people who prohibit others from balancing the numbers to run in ways that would make more players happy, and make more players join the game. ESF is probably one of the easiest examples of this: what % of players (or potential players) like the ESF that has been in the game for years?

2D, 3D (characters, objects, etc.), animation, and world building are all usually different groups with different people. Sure, there can be overlap depending on workload and talents, but even then it wants to conform to a specific hybrid role designation. And not just everyone doing work ad hoc.

Think of it like a restaurant. You don't want your cooks, servers, valet, managers all doing each others jobs all the time. It would be confusing to organize, you'd mismatch talents, there would be in-fighting for choice roles, your target criteria for hiring would be a nightmare, etc.

"Design" doesn't even do 2D, 3D, animation or world building. Art does all that.

It's an industry. It has standardized jargon, roles, titles, structure, etc. You can work with that standardization. You can try to re-invent the wheel. But your choices will have consequences.

SOE/DBG typically has people in mid-high level positions who persue their own agendas over commercial product improvement (these agendas are not what most the players want). These same people typically have control over balance across the game. So they end up butchering the number balance relative to what we'd like to see.

Specifically in the game I worked on where Art called the shots, you could only freely add new content that did not require art... or code. For any new content that required art, it would have to be approved by art. If that meant using existing art and zero artists having to spend time on your request, then you were often, sometimes ok (unless you put an Orc on a boar or some other art usage they didn't like: I wasn't allowed to use barrels on the Arabian continent). If that meant new art or something modified by art, then the answer was "no" or even "NO!" (though sometimes you could call in personal favors and get an asset once in a while). If your change required code, then you had to petition both the code department leads and the design department leads, and the answer was pretty much "no", unless you could really lobby for something or (again) if you called in a personal favor.

It all gets very Machiavelli very fast. SOE/DBG was the sister company of the one I worked for. Many of the people I worked with are now/still at SOE/DBG. SOE/DBG is the game industry culture I know the best. I live in SD. I've been in the SOE/DBG buildings many times.

The reason for the company I was at having an Art focus was unique to that company. I do not think SOE/DBG has that same issue (it was a very weird circumstance). But I still know the culture and many of the people well.

Balance #1.

Without that, content or anything else is meaningless. I speak from witnessing balance neglect in another PVP FPS game, and it led me to discovering ps2.