My background is in self-protection instruction and human services my job basically is to find a simple solution to multiple problems, so I apologize in advance if this post is wordy; I wanted to treat this like I would a report for work because I care about this game and I feel it deserves my best. Here we go.
First, I want to say thank you to our new community manager, Karen, for keeping us updated on new developments and reading our posts. You're greatly appreciated, and it helps the community a lot when there is some form of direct communication between us and the studio. Second, the recent 1.03 update I feel was a success and a big step in the right direction. I personally have seen less purposeful disconnections on the prologue level, (though it still happens more often than it should,) and much stronger players as well. Thank you for the update.
The people that are reading this far into the post most likely know what I’m talking about, so rather than going too much deeper into the details of what these problems are, I will touch on a few key points. The problems that I see players constantly talk about on the forums and in-game is the rewards system; most players go for the ‘Gold’ or ‘Blueprints’ because both Faction and Character Points are very easy to grind out quickly and become useless. Gold is needed for everything in the game, so everyone goes after it first—leaving small amounts being split between players. In addition, the grind/cost for items is frustrating to many players because many of the items require an Antagonist rank that has to be maintained. It is very difficult to maintain this rank because the Antagonist has little to no true advantage aside from working with NPCs, and it is very difficult for the Antagonist to win against competent players. The prices are inconsistent across the board, as well; for a quick example, Dr. Kuzmann costs 60,000 Gold, while Mikah costs 120,000 Gold. This can also be seen with other items/characters.
What I see as the consistent link between all of these problems is how the game values its content. Instead of doing major changes to the reward system or balance changes to characters, since this would require a lot of time and resources, what if we change and average the unlockable items in the game to use more of the Faction Points and Character Points? Similar changes could be made to the Antagonist rank, to make it feel more important and worth obtaining.
Starting with cards, instead of using Gold to lock the cards, we could use the resource originally associated with it in place of gold without changing other values. ‘Faction Points’ could be used for Faction cards and ‘Character Points’ for Character cards. Also, I think it would be better to have the additional loadouts cost either 15,000 Character Points or 250 Mercury points, to give players the option to grind for it or buy it instantly.
Now, before I give my suggestion on what you should get with the Antagonist rank, since it ties into these next few changes, I'd like to make a couple of suggestions regarding Playable Characters and Weapons. {Please bear with me for a moment and read through to the end.} As stated earlier, Dr. Kuzmann costs 60,000 Gold, and Mikah is double that at 120,000. I believe these Gold values should be reduced set closer to each other, as well as having them cost some Faction Points. For example, have Dr. Kuzmann cost 15,000 Faction Points and 45,000 Gold, and have Mikah at 20,000 Faction Points and 50,000 Gold. Splitting up the cost would make the grind easier to deal with for players. Now for Weapons, I'll be using Lycus’ “Shit Happens” weapon as an example. The current cost to make it is the Blueprint, an Antagonist rank of 6 or higher, and 12,500 Gold. I would recommend that you keep the Blueprint and Gold cost, but remove the required Antagonist cost and make it cost Character Points equivalent to the Gold cost. This would put the cost for this particular weapon at one Blueprint, 12,500 Character Points, and 12,500 Gold. I'll get into the 'why' behind having the Antagonist rank removed from the cost next.
As far as the Antagonist rank goes, keeping all of these other changes in mind, I think there should be an equivalence between the Antagonist rank and the Faction and Character Points when purchasing weapons or characters, to enable players to choose how they grind, instead of feeling forced into certain game modes in order to get the items they want. The reason I suggest the equivalency is so players with differing playstyles only need to spend the Gold value for any given item. Just as an example of what I mean, using the prices I suggested above, if you have Antagonist rank of 14, have Dr. Kuzmann only cost the 45,000 Gold instead of 15,000 Faction Points and 45,000 Gold. Likewise, have a player with an Antagonist rank of 15 only have to pay the cost of 50,000 Gold for Mikah, instead of 20,000 Faction Points and 50,000 Gold. To continue, the “Shit Happens” weapon would essentially have the original way of unlocking it with the Antagonist rank of 6 or higher, and 12,500 Gold.
These changes would not only make the Faction and Character Points more desirable, so less players are splitting Gold, but it would also allow players to choose how they want to progress in the game: do they want to earn rewards through honor, cooperation, and hard-work as a Raider? Or, do they want to take it with greed, determination, and by causing the Raiders misery as an Antagonist? In this way, people who want to play as the Antagonist are free to do so as often as they want, and not feel like they have to play as a Raider to get the things they want; likewise, people who prefer cooperative playstyles and prefer not to play as an Antagonist will not feel like they are being punished for their decision.
Thank you for your time and this wonderful game.
