Currently, the only way to unlock new weapons is via the campaign mode.
After unlocking the weapon, however, you do not own any of said gun. You also have to use the logistics cards for a chance on getting said weapon, and you also need to upgrade your squad to be able to equip the weapon. This is very much RNG based, forces you to play mainly with the default rifleman squad to be able to equip the abundance of rifleman soldiers you obtain and does not reward you for specializing in a single role. Lastly, you need to upgrade the weapons for them to be somewhat effective, further hurting progression.
I personally think Heroes&Generals did a pretty good job at a progression system. For those who did not play H&G, it works as followed:
Each soldier has a bunch of “ribbons”, that each have 12 levels. You can gain experience towards these ribbons by doing certain actions, such as ferrying other players in your vehicles for the chaffeur ribbon. At certain levels, these ribbons will unlock an item, weapon or vehicle for purchase for that soldier.
In Enlisted, I think global ribbons would be a good option. I propose the following as examples:
Format: Name - requirement to level up - rewards
Recon - Long range sniper kills - scoped weapons
Close combat - melee kills - melee weapons
Invader - capture points / get SMG kills - SMG weapons
Tanker - get tank kills while in tanks - tanks
Anti-tank - get tank kills as infantry - anti-tank weapons
Once unlocked, you could directly buy these weapons with some kind of credits/non-premium currency and equip them onto your soldiers.
Also, please remove the upgrade system for individual weapons (0-4 star variants) as it complicates progression unnecesarily. Instead, assign stars to weapons to indicate their rarity/power level.
TL;DR:
Please make progression more direct (so not having to do 3 things to get 1 gun) and remove RNG-based progression (loot boxes)
I agree with most of your ideas except the money. Don’t introduce it to the game. This is what ruined War Thunder for me. You can’t easily have fun because you have to grind money for vehicles, crews, upgrades, etc. Both Heroes & Generals and War Thunder also have maintenance costs, which is very irritating.
The RNG system should go though.
About weapons, maybe do it like in Red Orchestra 2? It’s simple there, certain weapons and your control of it “levels up” with kills. That’s it. The more experienced with weapons you are (=the more enemies you kill), the higher level it gets.
About getting them… Maybe make it as a tree unlock? So once you unlock it, you can equip every soldier of certain class with that weapon. That would probably make the game too easy though and I see this is where devs intended to put grind. I’ve played like 3 hours, got 4 assaults but no gun for them, only mosins. So adding money could be the last solution, but only when its limited to buying stuff, not maintenance things.
i think it is very hard to judge the progression right now.
we have played maybe 1 day so far i guess the design idea is not ulocking everything withing the first few days of the game.
however for testing purposes it might be useful to increase unlocking by a factor of 10x or something.
the biggest issues i have so far with eh progression is that nothing is well explained. and so many hoops to jump through.
you get a shiny new weapon lets say level 2 G43 and you think awesome. but how do i use it.
firs the squad needs to be able to use semi auto rifles, then you need to be able to equip level 2 semi auto rifles. all these options are tucked in the “tech tree”
same with “pre-war K98” i got a bunch of them now but the are almost the last unlock in the tech tree but when looking at the stats i dont see any difference between the normal K98 an pre-war K98 (or maybe i am blind and overlooked it).
so the problem ist you get stuff from the loot boxes but cant use it.
or once i got 2x Mp35 upgrade components and though nice i can upgrade my MP35 on the assault squad. bot noo i got 2 parts of 18 (or something like that) needed for the upgrade. but first you need to unlock the ability to upgrade and then the ability to equip the upgrade.
just soo many hoops to jump through. very tedious and annoying. i have no problem with “grinding” for some upgrades and them taking a long time to settle in but this is just annoying.
I’m not very satisfied with H&G grind system, you have to regrind a character to have a second set of weapon, vehicles.
i guess we will be able to load two different tanker squad to have different tank, but if the two tank you want to get are high tier vehicles that mean you have to grind twice a full tanker ribbon.
I understand that the idea is to not unlock everything straight away, but you must be very lucky to get the things you want. In one of the previous tests I unlocked a gewehr 43, and it was a joy to use. Now, I must be lucky if I want to get one again. Same with upgrading weapons. +20% damage can be the diffrence between a one shot and a 2 shot for the bolt action rifles. But some players might only have to scrap 3 guns (3x12) to upgrade 1 gun (cost 28), while others need to scrap 9 guns (9x4). Upgrading 1* to 2* weapons has an 20% chance to fail, so it’s not even guaranteed you get the upgrade. I imagine the chances only get worse the higher the rarity of the gun.
As my colleagues have said, progression becomes very expensive and the default rifle squad is a hassle to constantly climb.
What they propose is quite good although without putting money / lions.