Concerns & Constructive thoughts - The big BIG post.

[Orbytel]

Brilliant post, very well thought out and constructive.

The only suggestion I would add would be for further character customization in the form of clothing options and appearance. One under-appreciated aspect, of previous MMOs I have played, is the ability to tailor your avatar to be as unique as you like. Rather can simple clothing sets of an outfit and a hat, individual clothing slots would be great.

This may also help with the immersion factor, which you discussed. At the moment, everyone looks near identical and, if it weren't for the hovering names above people's heads, I wouldn't be able to tell anyone apart. Some of my favorite past times are being in groups with people of all different shapes and sizes, and being able to identify they by what they LOOK like. Half the time I don't read people's names and, for example, running into some guy at a store front, who I recognise from an arkfall would give me a chance to strike up a conversation and give a deeper sense of player community. It would also help the player economy, and potentially make trion more money, with people purchasing and trading gear, dyes etc.

From a re-playability point of view, having certain items of gear that were only obtainable at certain ego levels, specific instances, arkfalls etc would also be a bonus. Giving people the ability to obtain something and show off as an achievement, which can't be obtained at lower levels, gives them something to work towards.

[AZAG0TH]

Amazing post, I would love to see the Devs actually implement some of these ideas.

[Anim]

Read the entire original post and wanted to share my thoughts, minor criticisms, and added suggestions:

Thanks, exactly what the thread is here for, I'm gonna cut out all but the titles to keep the thread kinda tidy

1.) Liked the OP's idea about emergency events being rarer

Usually I'm not the kind of person to care what I look like, the ingame costume items of various kinds rarely pique my interest but the idea of clan/faction decals for the cars is really awesome. They're something small, but noticable, plus it hits home because I've done similar to my own car :P

2.) Liked the OP's idea about leaderboards

Tired boards would add a few people who would try to game the tiers a bit, timing their own played time to not get bumped over the tier requirements but I can see where you're coming from. For things like the challenges you could easily have them reset once a week or month and whoever was top on the boards (top100?) gets a little something, a title related to the challenge maybe or something like that. Something you wouldnt want to win twice perhaps so that once people have won then others have a fair shot at getting the reward next time.

3.) I did find the OP's perk overhaul idea to be a bit too complicated

Unfortunately I may not have explained it as clear as it can be, maybe I'll draw a picture sometime because in my head it's super simple for users to see what they want to specialise in and follow that path down gaining the passive bonuses as they go I'll see what I can do with my mad paint skills.

1.) EGO Grid expansion: Ability Specializations -

I would also love to see a bit more depth to the EGO powers in the form of picking up perks. They have a lot of room to play with and making people add a touch of uniqueness to their EGO power would be pretty awesome, a perk that makes cloak last twice as long but you dont restealth after shooting, or goes invisible twice as fast but has some negative I cant think of right now

2.) Expansion of the Salvage Matrix and the addition of E.E.P. -

The idea of using the ark experience mixed perhaps with salvage to increase the power of mods/weapons sounds interesting, it would need a lot of work to keep it balanced but it does allow people to go on the hunt for something they need and boost it when required. The issue is though that you would be negating the need to find upgrades? Unless you mean a green scope had a +0.10 to +0.15 aim bonus and you would channel the experience in to the mod raising it by 0.01 at a time from .10 to .15? Once it's at that cap for green items you'd have to find the blue equivalent to get any better, but again the blue would start at the base effectiveness and you could increase it up to the top of the blue bonus band. I could see that working with a little explanation to players, it's not something that is initially intuitive but perhaps it would increase trading, people selling off mods that they've worked on to cap it out and sell for a profit.

3.) Utility Items -

I kinda love this idea, grenades are nice but throw down a little stationary shield repair drone and you're on to a tactical winner for PvE content. Things like the auto-loot utility hoverbot thing would be a nice-to-have too, not sure how it could be implemented from a technical standpoint but players like it when the game does the monotonous things fo them.

One last thing: they should get rid of the EGO ranking requirement on items or make it mean that the 1000 ego rank required item is in some way better than the 150 ego rank required item…

I'm not sure they need to do away with it all because there is a small thing running behind the scenes that adds to the weapons potential at certain ego level points, I think its like EGO 1, then 1600, then 3200 or something but someone made a nice graph on the forums to explain it somewhere. It's all about the hidden bonus I think, but a less obtuse method of showing how the weapons are improving would be really good.

Thank you, Anim, for creating the topic. Hope that it doesn’t get lost too quickly in the episode 2 thread barrage.

Yeah, people are replying to it at nice intervals to keep it in the spotlight which is awesome. Also now with the dev reponse people should see it in the dev tracker I think? Either way, thanks for reading, was happy to write it and more

[Drewbud]

I personally love going threw the main quest line over and over and would also like a better set of rewards after you run the whole thing for the 3rd 4th or even 5th times.

As an aside, when I was driving my car to go to the bank today I thought, actually having an in-car view would help with immersion.

[Tgreen]

Liked the OP's idea about emergency events being rarer

Be very careful here. Preception can be a bitc h.
People driving by ignoring most emergencies make them seem overly common.

However, some of them respawn way to fast ... on occasion it can happen to get your scrip and the new emergency already spawns.

Combine these two points and you'll see the answer is not as simple ... you can overdo it on either end of the dichotome scale, too rare and a gimmick or too common and you travel to other places.

EGO Grid expansion: Ability Specializations

No. I disagree with any ideas on this topic.

The first step here has to be fixing all the useless and out of place perks. Then and only after careful evaluation a honest discussion is possible.
Of course we can fantasise about complete overhauls, but Trion won't pour in that much effort into something that's not broken and has a enjoyable mechanic.

Expansion of the Salvage Matrix and the addition of E.E.P.

You are very specific about your ideas, but I won't go into them.
After the UI is improved to not leave a taste of *** in your mouth everytime you salvage something there is a lot of room for the matrix to be used to not just break down items but mold them together or introduce any new resource (like your example) to bring a real crafting system to the game.
Not necessarily for items to equip, but definately for mods.

Utility Items -

I like the grenade slot. There are some concerns with flashbangs and especially bio'nades, but there's nothing wrong here.

So 'no' from me to removing the grenade specific slot. On utility items you express what I thought to myself for a while. I never mentioned it because it's either already planned or far off or not wanted by Trion.

But since you brought it up, this would be a major change to overall gameplay, especially for groups.
Maybe once the loot system is fully fleshed out there is a chance to get items for one utility slot by doing more advanced Arkfalls.
But no matter where these items would come from, it would be a huge opportunity to enhance cooperative gameplay.

Personal turrents with no secondary use, like the Borderlands 2 version, seem a bit generic for my taste and don't go well with Decoy (moving turret that can't shoot basicly).

But a immobile object that regenerates 40-80% over 2-6 seconds in a certain radius that you can drop sounds really good med kit choice.

An item that dispenses flying bombs that home onto random targets in range and hover near them ... and explode when shot like the yellow barrels do.

A box that you can place and anyone standing next it will not use up ammo as they shoot giving you the ability to supply a snipers nest with bullets.

A needle gun with one charge that you can shoot at an ally to take him into a frenzy and give him hardened skin, reducing damage taken and increasing reload speed by a significant amount, but when the effect runs out his health drops to minimum (shields are not effected).

A flamethrower turret (this would combine the wish for flamethrowers and turrets), that you lob like a grenade to either a point on the ground to be deplyed after a short delay. Unlike pyro grenades a team mate could pick it up and can carry it as a weapon for it's duration, giving him additional shields to counter the short range.

The list could go further and I tried to mold your ideas into more specific solutions.
Anyway you put it it should be something that enhances team play. Either by giving other players the option to use whatever you have equipped or target them or deploy any device that is fully interactable by any player.
This is also the reason I disagree with generic turrets ... they are cool to have but don't aid the game in it's weakest area of gameplay.

Hope that it doesn’t get lost too quickly in the episode 2 thread barrage.

Just subscribe to the thread or remember the title and it will be easy to find.

[Multigun]

Thank you for the wonderful constructive post. Breath of fresh air and a nice break from all the doom and gloom/demands/whining posts. I'm glad to see some admins also respond to your post as well! I thoroughly enjoyed the read and hope that at least some of these idea's eventually make it to us!

[Tgreen]

Thumbs up for the Dev post, taking the effort to spell out your thoughts and inspire others to answer deserves the attention.

Admittedly I've pretty much exclusively used runners, the quadbike looked kinda cool and you can scale vertical cliffs on it so it just makes getting to objectives that much easier. Could well try the Duni in SF but I think even in that some of the rubble in the most annoying places will still be a pain, it's definitely worth noting for most players though.

I love the quad, it's really good looking - especially the white and black ones - but the Duni ignores some of those spots that make your ATV jump straight into the air leaving you with no momentum.
And Rollers are faster, just not as easy to maneuver.

Yeah you can definitely see where they went 'random all the things' and just took it too far.

Sadly I'm to much of a realist to hope for a crafting system that lets us make those mods, giving us resources to obtain through grinding but with a specific goal that one can see on the horizon.
They did the 'set types' part with faction vendors, but that didn't go too well since you can't tell which weapon type or slot you'll get and they're too expensive for a gamble like that.

Overall though, a broader array of synergies that promote a bit more usefulness rather than extra damage from behind or stuff like that.

Some could see a little buff, but the way the 'level up' boni are and the 'good' synergies make items distinct enough ... there are many synergies that are more complex than 'damage from behind', perks and stats that proc on full reload for example make you play very differently.

The only downside I can see is that [T5 lockboxes] would reduce a lot of the revenue for Trion if people just stop buying lower tiers, this is something I'm sure they could manage though with a bit of thought behind it.

Easy fix ... nothing stops Trion from selling the proposed T5 in addition to T2-4 in the bit shop at a relatively higher price. If anything it's win/win for them ... right now I guess the last person has realized that gambling money on the lockboxes available right now will lead to frustration.

The problem is the rewards, people only did the emergencies due to the fast completion, high reward rate.

And it's tagging Arkfalls and doing Mine 99 now. Yes, this is always how it will be ... I can assure you of that since I'm usually one of the first to alter my gameplay for more efficiency.
But it's not as fun as before and get's old a lot faster than the different emergencies on top of Arkfall hunting.
Now, make Arkfalls harder to tag giving rewards in a proportion to your effort with the end event and give back key rewards to emergencies and you couldn't go 200 meters without something to shoot, kill and earn.

Dont forget about decoy for the emergencies to protect civvies, it would give decoy an actual use in open world because for now I see them mostly just used in pvp and occasionally in the busier sections of the co-op maps.

But what if you don't have Decoy unlocked because your EGO isn't high enough to have multiple powers? Should you suffer because of this?
One player with decoy can be really nice in co-ops if he knows when and how to use it ... I'd use it more if my current build wouldn't be so mind blowingly overpowered in the damage department.
Decoy is probably the trickiest power, but effective in the right situation and if used at the right angle and used again for the teleport at the right moment.

I think people are just a little let down with the grand scale of arkfalls in the trailers compared to the mundane stuff we have now

Yes and no. It's a zerg fest, no doubt but Trion has to test the waters how players on the live server are coping with these kind of events and learn whether or not and how much room for complex design and difficulty there is for the Arkfalls that will be released in the feature.

We agree a fair bit here, although I'd like to see some more 'unique' rewards for the more difficult instances. Just getting masses of rubbish still wont promote the instances on to peoples radar as 'stuff to do'.

More key codes isn't exactly rubbish. A random purple weapon with a chance on being orange would be appropriate as well.
Personally I would love specific and useful loot, but I fear the tears of all of those who prefer everything handed to them with no risk of failure might stand in the way of that. I played WoW too long not to know better ...

[mcwjimbo]

...........snip........

Yeah, people are replying to it at nice intervals to keep it in the spotlight which is awesome. ............

I admit nothing :-P

[Khel]

Good Read, thoughrougly true. I still hope for a late bloomer.

[Anim]

make this the first season DLC patch notes and i think we have a WINNER...... u can keep your new character for another date lmao

If only this was in DLC territory of game updates

Another note, the game seriously lacks of background content.

For instance it wouldn't be very hard to :

• some REAL PvP content : aka CONTESTED OPEN PVP ZONES. Ubber loot shouldn't be dropped by HELLBUGS, but found in relics of old times ! People would have to carry some "treasure chests" out of the contested zone to claim it ! Killing someone wearing such loot would make it drop at ground ! Bring your friends and go loot godammit ruins !
• some PvP contest about RESSOURCES, either alien or from earth (I saw sulfur pools in SF, could it be of any use ? It could be energy based, such as solar panels / wind stuff, gulanite mines, etc) in order to craft your godamn weapons, if you can't found them directly crafted on mutants (bunkers) or Votan arks (see previous point).

I was talking to a friendly guy named Cohh who streams Defiance a lot lately about some PvP changeups. It has been briefly touched on within the forums before but I could go in to a lot of detail about it. The basic premise was that there was an instanced area similar to the shadow wars style where it's real world but phased away from normal play. In the zone it's a free for all and the world carries on like it would normally but the rewards are better, there are other events which promise slightly better rewards (blue mods etc). You'd have people working in groups for survival, or trying to solo it for the challenge. All entirely voluntary, as its instanced, so nobody can complain about griefing etc.

Currently gameplay is really cheap. I saw some interviews about Trion ppl speaking about Defiance, I doubt they would say the same if they were expecting current game at current state.

I'd love to see an interview with a really honest approach to what Trion envisioned and what the release was like, what hurdles were along the way and how they were overcome .. or not.