The current NS system is doomed to fail. You are always on the lowest pop faction, your weapons loadout is extremely limited and on top of that you have to pay for this "privilege". I suggest you change how the NS system works as follows: - everyone can join them any time. It is handled as a fourth character. - there is a slot reserved for an NS character in the main character screen for everyone. - NS characters have access to all weapons of the faction they join. - NS characters have all weapons unlocked that are unlocked on other characters of the same account. This to prevent players having to spend certs on 3 factions simultaneously. You still want this system to sell subscriptions. For subscribers only: NS characters have access to all faction equipment they unlock, even if they aren't fighting for that faction at the moment. A purple Prowler on the VS, a blue and yellow tinted Betelguese on the NC augmented with a TR repeater side-arm. I think this would be a big enough incentive for players to get subscriptions without any imbalances hitting the game. Any advantages like faction MBT's having synergy with each other will only serve to help the NS faction reduce the population imbalance.
The NSO revamp is coming and I'm looking forward to it. To my understanding the currently announced membership benefit is that you can choose which faction you go to instead of being sent to the weakest one. It will be interesting to see how well they flesh out the canon fourth empire.
it is "kind of" today. as NSO you get cross-factions weapons purchased with DBC. On my NSO I can use the Swarm for example. I would be super happy with the default faction weapons ("gimme the Orion pls") + the faction-specific weapons purchased with DBC or Certs.
While writing this post you did know the NSOs will be updated right? That's the first thing that will change, they will become f2p for everyone. That actually happened when NSOs went live 2 years ago. This is a very bad idea because there is no need to start a default empire character, if you can just play NSO all day. As already stated this already works with current NS weapons. And your last paragraph. It may sound nice, but then again it will be just brocken as F. And I would not wonder if players would start calling membership pay to win then, I know I would. For example: Who doesn't want to run a Orion with a Jackhammer secondary and a Striker as a rocketlauncher. I would hardly call this bs balanced. And just a smal amount of information. I exclusivly played NSO for the last one and a half years and we already know they will get their own faction specific vehicles and at least 21 "new" weapons wich are NSO only. We know there will be 3 new weapons for each following weapon class: - LMG - Carbine - Assaultrilfe - SMG - Shotgun - Pistol - Rocketlauncher And the current starter NSX weapons will be swapped out for new defaults. Aparently the default LMG will be an equivaltent of the Orion/MSW-R/Anchor.
That would be simply great... You get used to the Naginata after a while, it is not so bad but just like the NS-15M2 it lacks kick. Either you are a HS Demi God, or you play conservatively/2nd line (my choice) so you have always some distance between you and the enemy - Orion, MAW, MSW-R, Watchman, Anchor, ... will skin you alive in CQC. And I would love a better carbine, The NS-11C is the carbine equivalent of the NS-15M2. The Yumi is garbage but at least the NS-11A is quite good. The Punisher is already an almost too good SMG...
Honestly rather than same weapons as the factions they join it should be weapons developed just for them. Fetures that no other faction has. Give them they yellow jacket as their fighter. Give them a NS specific MBT that can spawn NS operatives when deployed. Play with some nonstandard designs, why not have a second max that is not humanoid shaped. They are a faction of robots they should use that to do things humans can't. Maybe have their light assaults reconfigure into a flying drone body. Perhaps their infiltrators can reconfigure into a hover vehicle instead in the cloak slot. Or maybe on death the heavy releases a turret that friendly can man. Their engineer might have a nanite cloud that repairs near by friendly mechanical units. Their medic might have a resurrection pulse. Make getting them give your faction something beside meat in a grinder.
No I was not. Even so, would it have mattered? Now they are thinking about changing it is the perfect time to suggest improvements. Yey! Yes, for the subscribers who get extra character slots anyway as far as I know. I wanted to make sure non-subscribers did not have to make a choice between one faction and NSO. Excellent point, hadn't thought of that. A few options to let faction characters still be viable, pick one or mix-and-match: - it costs resources to acquire the faction-equipment. Say 50 resources for each piece of equipment. - you can only use equipment your alternate characters have unlocked. You can only upgrade and buy equipment from NS while NSO. - there is a cooldown after acquiring faction equipment, so quick deaths mean you have to use NS equipment for a while. - you are limited in the amount of faction equipment you can acquire at any one time, lets say 1. So you can't buy an MBT and carry a faction primary at the same time. - you don't have access to faction equipment that is unlocked on other characters, but you can unlock them with certs if you've unlocked them on other characters. This only counts for DBC bought NS weapons, not for cert-bought weapons. I am also adding the option to make sure that faction equipment becomes available this way. I would call that balanced, but it does need some limitations to make sure you don't play NSO all the time. the list of drawbacks above would work wonders. Yes you can equip an Orion with a Jackhammer and striker(assuming you unlocked the ASP) but it costs 150 resources for example. That is bad news. Unless a lot of players (25%+ at any point in time) will be playing NSO it will mean a lot of wasted time developing something that doesn't see a good amount of use. That is why it is better developing features that make NSO be able to use faction weapons, as any upgrade to the faction arsenal will help NSO's as well. If this change goes ahead then any time a weapon is introduced they would need to spend 25% of developer time extra designing and creating a new NSO weapon alongside it. Time much better spend on more features like improved spawnbunkers, countering spawncamping, adding new capture mechanics, improving the gameplayflow between fights etc.
I would not be too concerned: 1. Nothing is more volatile than PS2 next planned features 2. They could simply pick up existing weapons and reskin them. The NS-11A has already two re-reskin, both sold: one is in the pack with the LA armor from Arena (does someone remember it? Weird it was supposed to be the "cornerstone of PS3" ) and one with the last series of (quite expensive) bundles.
i'm actually gonna be super disappointed when NSO go F2P. even as the unfinished buggy mess that they currently are i still enjoy the exclusivity of things like Javelin (even though its pretty terrible!) i love the "wtf a hover bike!" whispers, i love people climbing over eachother to fight for who gets to sit on the back when i park near the capture point. all of the "special" feel of NSO will go away when they are opened up to the freeloaders. (plus i think its a huge financial blunder to finally get NSo in a finished state were people will actually be willing to pay to play them and maintain a sub...and then DBG give them away for free.) it kinda makes us current subbers feel like nothing but idiots who are paying to do beta test and bug hunts! i'd atleast want to get a few months of "sub only" for NSO when they get finished, as a reward for those of us who have been paying all this time to play the buggy unfinished version! (plus there will be huge hype around new weapons/vehicles, so if DBG said "they're subscription only for the next 3 months" i bet they'd sell a BUTTLOAD of 3 month subs, so why not?!)
Unfortunately, no. DBG has refrained from any character transfers since it encourages players to buy crates/ content and boost the bottom line. It's highly unlikely in the near future, if at all, we will see anything remotely close to a character transfer/conversion. It means less money for DBG.
devs, whatever you do, just give me more ammo. i am tired of clapping cheeks with the SR-l75 and having to run back to sundy or engineer for ammo. same with the javelin hydra, and PMG-200 i once paid for NSO to be a NC pleb main only so i can get acess to outfit material, subscription ended, and i still get to mess with outfit resources thankfully as well as use merit, for the longest time NSO couldnt use merit as a freelance. now they can thank god.
