This is long, but if you are a Developer please read through this. I know you guys try your best to listen to player suggestions. I feel these things would really improve quality of life and player retention without affecting the balance of the game.
Currently, there are a lot of aspects in this game related to squad management that I believe are neither good for the Devs nor the players. Some things that many don’t like, like the steep grind, is at least understandable in that its good for the Devs as it incentivizes players to buy premium. I feel these things below are just bad for all parties as they are unfun, drive away players, and don’t make the Devs money. The game is a first-person shooter so players should spend more time in battles and less time managing/worrying about their building their squads.
- Locked Squad Upgrades. Currently, once you select one of the trees, such as additional soldier type or backpack/secondary, it locks that choice until the use of a rare change order. With the merge of the campaigns, more often than not, the choices you make are different for the different BR brackets. Not allowing players to change their selection limits the player’s ability to adapt to the different BRs and experiment for almost no reason. Change orders currently can’t be purchased for gold, so it’s not like this even makes the Devs money. All it seems to do is cause a lot of players a lot of stress when having to make these decisions, as evidenced by the number of people asking which choice to make.
I feel a solution for this is to simply let players flip their choice for free for any of the nodes after they have maxed out the squad.
- Backpack/Secondary slot. Related to the issue above. With the merge of the campaigns, it is often advantageous for players to make different selections for different BRs, for example, a secondary grenade launcher may be preferable at BR III whereas an ammo pouch may be better at BR V. Once again this limitation limits the player’s ability to experiment and have fun, for no monetary gain for the Devs.
I feel the solution for this is to just combine the secondary/backpack node into one. Once unlocked, players can either equip a secondary weapon or a pouch. Once one is equipped, the other will just be greyed out. Each soldier will still only be able to have one or the other, so balance is not affected, but this gives players the ability to experiment more.
- Soldier Perk Tree Lock. While reduced from what was initially suggested, changing soldier perks is still very costly. In this case, I do understand that it may make the developers more money as it costs the player silver. I feel that this is such an unfun mechanic that it hurts the game more than it helps the developers. Once again the ability to play at multiple BRs makes this an issue. For example, at low BRs bolt action fire rate is nice where as at BR V stuff like recoil control is much better.
I feel they should just make wiping the perks free as, once again I feel that limiting the player’s ability to customize their soldier is never a good thing.
- Soldier Reserve Limit. With the merging of the campaigns, many players, including me, now have way more soldiers than their reserve cap. This currently forces players to either not buy any more soldiers or sell a lot of their old soldiers.
I don’t see what the solider reserve limit adds to the game, it feels like an unnecessary holdout from an older version of the game. I feel removing the cap and removing it from the squad upgrade tree is a no-brainer.
- Disarm Reserve weapons/soldiers. Recently the disarm reserve was added. I think this is actually a really nice change overall but it still has some issues. If a player does not have enough of the tier one bolts to fill every soldier, the game will start giving soldiers low BR guns that a player may still want access to like Winchester rifles for example. Melee weapons like shovels and axes are even more of a nightmare.
Solution. Just allow for the full disarming of soldiers. I don’t see any harm of allowing players to remove the rifle from the primary slot of all soldiers. The same goes for the melee weapons. Players would spend a lot less time searching for weapons like this. I think the same should go for soldiers. Allowing people to fully unequip all soldiers from a squad would also make finding the soldier one wants a lot faster and easier.
- BR Switching. Currently, switching between the BR, while easier due to some changes, is still a pain. This makes it difficult to quickly hop on with friends or simply switch to play new maps. This means players spend more time managing squads, which is not as pleasant then actually playing the game.
I think the solution is just allowing for full save states for lineups. Rather then just saving the squads which can be done now, it should save the squad, the soldier in the squad, the weapons etc. Allowing the full disarming of reserves would make implementing this a lot easier.
Overall I really enjoy this game and I do not feel that most of these issues alone rune the game, but I think together, it can make the game that much more unfun that it can drive away both veterans and new players. Implementing these changes will not only make the game more enjoyable and allow players to spend more time in battle, but also likely help with player retention, which allows Darkflow to make more money. Win-Win.