As we are moving into the OBT soon, I’d like to voice my current opinions and concerns regarding the state of Enlisted as of right now and why I think it should take another quick re-evaluation of itself before OBT arrives.
This is an open letter to the developers.
(This was written over several days and may be a bit of a rant, but just a bit)
- Monetization and premium squads
Firstly, the new gold monetization system. As I’ve had a chance to personally try it out, I don’t have too many concerns about it.
Regardless of what kind of problems anyone has with this new system, it is very much the same as war thunder’s monetization, where one can pay to skip the grind.
Some players have raised concerns over being able to buy your way to the top where gear and soldiers perform better, but the amount of money that would take would be quite ridiculous, and while there will definitely be those who will afford it, I’m not entirely sure they would be willing to.
The amount of gold per level seems to be cumulative, so going from start to end just on gold alone should easily go into the hundreds of euros spent on a single campaign.
It may not seem like it costs a lot at a first glance, but the higher level you are, the higher the price it is to jump to the next level.
In sharp contrast to this, the current premium squads can achieve that state of better guns, better soldiers and better perks for a mere 30 euros.
Therefore, premiums are undermining the gold system.
I understand the founders packs are going away, but from my understanding the last 2 premium squads will stay, which is a problem. Even if that’s not the case, due to the nature of the game, new premiums will surely be available eventually, and so I hope that any new premiums in the future will not start out with maximum stats and overpowered unique weapons.
This is a fundamental imbalance otherwise, where people just have more incentive to buy premiums and won’t bother with the gold system at all. It may as well not be there.
In war thunder, this same system works out for the majority of early tiers, because early premiums aren’t too expensive or overpowered; and even in arcade, they are no longer usable in that game once they die, unlike in enlisted where premium squads can eventually be used again in the same game if you die a few more times.
It works better there because of the nature of their respawn system compared to here, but it is still not an ideal monetization system, as seen at endgame tiers in war thunder, the system breaks in the same manner.
However the gold system alone is not as bad as people make it out to be. You could have came up with something better, but I understand your budget may constrain and force you to prioritize getting more funds as soon as possible, in which case this system works.
Regardless, the premiums are a problem to the gold system, and I believe that premium squads here should be limited to having unique or quirky prototype weapons, instead of better variants of what everyone else can unlock in the vanilla game.
Furthermore (and this ties into my next point) the respawn system is especially at fault for making the premium squads stronger than they should be, as they are infinitely re-usable within a battle.
Infinite respawn is not a solution. I’m guessing it’s here because the maps are small and combat only happens over a single small front that is cramped and gets everyone killed very fast.
Yes, infinite respawns does patch up this problem, but it also causes other problems of its own, because it makes people more likely to not care about dying and gives their premium squads too much power.
Which leads us to:
- Maps size and game balance
If you make the maps more open, increase the number of players inside each game, and limit the respawns to only the squads you bring with you, then premiums will not be as broken.
At the moment players don’t seem to have any regard for their safety. They charge in, kill as many as possible, die and then respawn over and over.
This is far too arcade for a realistic game; and even war thunder chose not to allow infinite respawns in their arcade game mode.
And it’s a shame because I feel like you see our pleas for larger maps, but you may be misinterpreting what we really want.
Whenever we ask for larger maps, we don’t ask for a huge map where we’re all restricted to one quarter of it by an invisible damage wall that just moves along with capture points.
The entire map should be open and the objectives should be spread out over the size of the map in an asymmetrical pattern.
I believe the invisible wall serves as yet another means to patch up a problem that shouldn’t even be there to begin with; namely spawn campers. But spawn campers wouldn’t be a problem on a larger map, especially with limited respawns.
If you’re still that worried about spawn campers, then make the area around the spawn points kill anyone who approaches it, but please don’t box us in to just slices of a map when we know the maps we play on are actually the same huge map.
Planes spawn camping are arguably a worse issue right now.
- Team play and cooperation
And speaking about planes; currently there is very little reason to cooperate with each other or even play strategically. For all of its realism, enlisted is reduced to an arcade endless gore fest or tug of war.
One good example of very poor coordination are the air planes.
There should be an incentive for players to mark targets for those in air planes. I barely ever see it happen; save for a handful of good people, the vast majority of people are entirely absorbed in rushing in and getting kills, and whoever is in the air plane doesn’t see anything and is left to do guess work, which is what I believe often prompts one to go spawn camping in a plane. Soldiers in WW2 had radios you know; air strikes were coordinated.
There should be an extra small reward if a target you marked gets killed by a friendly air plane, and there should be tips in the main menu or on loading screens reminding people that they can and should do that.
This is especially important as even enemy gun fire is pretty much invisible inside the air plane, with exception of tanks shooting, which are anyways fast moving armored targets.
Without proper render distance and no markers of any kind, using a bomber effectively boils down to lucky guesses. Planes would be plenty balanced already with just the need to fly to a resupply point.
- The interface controls in battle
In my honest opinion, this needs major reworking. While I am used with it by now, I’ve found it very difficult to adjust to and very counter-intuitive at first.
For the guns, it breaks free from established standards for seemingly no reason. There are gaps in the numbers and their order makes no sense.
I’d expect either 1 and 2 to be my main weapons and 3 the pistol, 4 the knife, and 5 the grenade; or alternatively 1 the knife, 2 the pistol, 3 and 4 the main weapons and 5 the grenade.
Either one of these control schemes would work; instead I feel like the current interface forces me to rely on the mouse wheel more.
Except the mouse wheel doesn’t seem to cycle between the entire inventory, only the main guns, but will irronically cycle to the knife too, making it very hard to switch to the weapon or item you want exactly when you need it.
For planes, W and S need to adjust throttle, instead of moving you up and down, which is just unnecessary when we have mouse controls to begin with. Throttle adjustment is very important for air players, as we don’t want to be stuck in WEP all the time. Sometimes I need to stall, and sometimes I may even need to reduce the noise I make so I can hear if there’s any enemy airplane around me.
Also, I believe flaps should cycle on the same key instead of having to give it multiple keys for up and down, though this is something I can live with and it’s just my personal preference.
- Tank shells
Lastly, a more miscellaneous issue I have is how useless HE shells are against infantry soldiers at the moment.
They’re obviously unfit for destroying other tanks, as they lack the penetration required, yet we’re forced to take them into battle with us. They serve virtually no purpose as they are right now.
They were designed to explode on impact instead of over-penetrate, and they would fragment on explosion causing damage to soft targets.
Directly from wikipedia: "The fuse detonates the bursting charge which shatters the case and scatters hot, sharp case pieces (fragments, splinters) at high velocity. Most of the damage to soft targets, such as unprotected personnel, is caused by shell pieces rather than by the blast.
Ending notes
To the developers:
Despite the recent controversies, and some problems that have been brought up many times before but haven’t been fixed to date, I am still very much enjoying this game and see a lot of potential in its future.
I can tell this studio is doing what they can to make the game enjoyable for everyone.
What we get may not always be what the community wants, but we also don’t know about the potential time constraints, engine limitations, financial situation of the game or any other issue you may be facing.
I sincerely hope this game will succeed.
And to the active people on this forum:
In the short few months since I’ve joined this community I’ve came to enjoy logging on daily to participate in the conversations ongoing here or just to see and read your fascinating ideas.
We may not always agree with each other, but I see myself here to stay for a long while, and with a potential influx of new players just around the corner, I’d like to say that I’d very much like it if you would all remain a part of this community too and try to change it for the better, regardless of which way the game may go in the near future.
(I’d be very sad to log in knowing I’ll never see a poll by @73507743 again, or to go on a random thread and know there isn’t a 97% chance that @5762269 replied before I even knew the thread existed)
There are too many of you to openly list, but no matter which way you may all be going, your active support in this community so far has made it great and enjoyable.
Thank you!