Hi, as one of the thousands of players on this board, I don't expect you to know me, but I have thought for a long time about PM with some of my suggestions after playing this game for two months or so.
First I would just like to thank you and ur co-workers for everything your guys did for this game and provide the best service for the players. You are one of few game DEVs I know that really listen to the players, otherwise I wouldn't be sending this PM.
Without further delay, here are some of the suggestions I have gathered over the period that I am playing the game. I personally think there are three areas that I can see a lot of improvements to be made, one is cooperation, second is depth, third is balance.
As you know, balance is the most important game in a multiplayer game. Obviously, since the different ATs have their own defining roles, this is hard to achieve. Defenders/Controllers(pre-pets)/Tankers of certain types will sometimes definitely feel weak when they see blaster/scrapper dash out tons of dmg. U can say 'well, their roles are to support and so it is justified for them to be weak on their own.' That is true, but there is more than that than what meets the eyes. To truly understand the problem here, we need to understand the heart and sole of D&D type games, which is to kill monsters, lvl, get cool skills/equipment, kill more, repeat. So the ultimate goal here is to constantly gaining lvls and get cool stuffs, but in order to achieve that you need to gain xp. The common way of getting xp as we know is to kill or have mission rewards. Mission reward at current stage is just way too little. I will get back to that in a second. So the primary way of getting xp is to kill no matter if you are doing missions or street hunting. Blasters and scrappers' roles are related directly to killing, where as the supportive AT are there to make killing smoother/more efficient. The problem here is that in order to kill, the supportive characters need dmg dealers a lot more than dmg dealers need the supportive characters. This applies to teaming and soloing. Suppose blasters can't take much dmg, but he can still kill, maybe at the cost of dying more and killing slower, but he is still killing and gaining xp. It is even easier for scrapper as they already carry defensive ability on their own, but as their abilities get better, they will definitely able to kill packs of mobs by themselves. For them, offense became their best defense. This however, can not be really applied to the supportive ATs. They need the dmg dealers most of the time (perhaps not the controllers after 32) in order to kill, and that's about their only way to gain xp. So in this apect, it is forcing them to group, but grouping for supportive characters aren't really easy. This is due to the supply and demand issue. In a team of 8 players, the best team would be one tanker, 2 defenders/controllers and 5 blasters/scrapper. As you can see, dmg dealers are needed a lot more than the supportive characters. So if you assume there are equal amount of every ATs, the supportive ATs will eventually be left out with no group to join. I have some personal experience with it, when I play a blaster, I am asked to join a group a lot than when I am a controller. It gets worse as game progress and dmg dealers eventually become strong enough to solo and supportive characters are needed even less. So what I am promoting is not to force players to group but encourage them to group. The encouragement came in two ways, xp and dmg. One way is to give each member of the group more xp than they have even when soloing, but that logically doesn't really make much sense. At the current stage, the game provides teaming up bonus because it is assumed that even though every member gets less xp, but since they will kill faster they eventually get more xp anyway. It sounds good, but has its own problem. The biggest problem is number of mobs. If say you are doing street hunting, big pack of mods don't come all that often in most zones. So a team even though can take down this pack faster than one person, but then you are left with really small groups, which eventually degrade the xp gain. So increase team bonus, helps, but it is not the ultimate solution. That's where the other solution comes into play, which is dmg. At current stage, dmg comes in the form of buffs for supportive AT, but not really every buff boost dmg and it is not really practical and does sound silly to have every buff boost dmg. So what I am promoting is combination attack. Such as a group of heroes active their certain attacks at the same time to generate a even more dmging attack. One should distinguish the difference between dmg boost and combo attack. Like I said, supportive char don't have much dmg to begin with, so have dmg boost really doesn't make too much of a difference. I want there to be a brand new attack option avaliable only when certain types heroes come together and require the endurance and concentration of all heroes involved. The number of combinations should depend on the number of heroes involved and their ATs, this means even if there are a group of just 5 defenders they can still do a combination attack. I believe this will eventually provide a way for suppportive character to deal dmg when grouped together even if no dmg dealing AT is involved. This way, you not only solve the problem of game balancing, but cooperation as well.
Besides combo attack, I think another good way to promote cooperation is world events. A problem I see with a lot of mmorpgs is that the world is like a big chat room. There aren't really much interation between heroes you are not in a group with besides chatting. Game play wise, there aren't really anything. It is possible that two totally ungrouped heroes came together and mop up the street, but with so many dmg dealers around and rare big group mobs, if one soloer/a group see a group, this group of mobs are considered theirs and if you try to kill when you are not part of the team, it is considered 'kill steal'. So I really wish there is something like a world events, such as Rikti invasion, giant monster spawned in the middle of the city and such. This way, all the heroes can be requested to rescue the troubled places and they can all join the fight even if they aren't teamed. The xp of the kill should then be distributed on all the heroes in the radius of the kill, just ones dealing the dmg, this is to be fair to supportive characters.
The third area is depth, so far, the game has taken a lot of steps eto nsure more depth in missions, but as I have said before, missions are really a big way to gain xp. Some people argue that not everyone is a power lvler and missions and story are interesting, but the problem is this may be cool if you are on ur first character, but if you start another character and go through the game a couple times, it eventually gets reallly boring no matter how interesing the story was to you in the first place. Increase xp is a nice touch, but it needs to be a lot, I mean like a 10 times increase to just raise people's interest to play the mission. Missions also gets really boring because it is always just the office building/warehouse/cave/cotcave/5th base/sewer, after you do the mission for a ton of times, they really get old and boring. Of course, it is not practical to design one unique map for each mission, but I think another way to make missions more intereting is the interactive enviroments, the radioactive plant that generate random buff is a good start, but there needs to be more of them, a lot more. Mission reward wise, besides giving xp, gaining new powers, costume options, visual effects can be other good options. Giving enhencement is good, but honestly I don't think most people have problem just to buy them from stores, so they aren't really very attractive. In terms of new powers, I think they should be permanent, not temp like in the current game. The reason is that temp power sounds good in the first place, but it may in face hinder player from completing mission, so that they can always reset the mission just to get the temp power again, also kown as milking temp power. Either be it as unique looks, new powers, or whatever, the reward needs to be something the player can show for, not like the suveniors that no one can see but you in the current game from doing story archs.
The last and final suggestion I have is interactive outside enviroment of the zones. So far the cars on the street, buildings, trees, waters, people walking in the side walk are really just decorations, they don't enhence a player's game play too much. A good example is from the game "Freedom Force", perhaps you have heard people comparing this game and the other one. In that game, you can pull out light polls and pick up cars which I think are just awesome, you can also climb buildings like spider man, which can be implemented in this game as a new power. I know my suggestion for interative enviroment sounds really nice, but from a software/game engine point of view, I also know some of them are just impossible, but I do hope yall do your best. Also I hope there should be new things added to Super Groups, so far, to me, it is just another 'friend list'. I heard when CoV comes out, there will be SG headquarters and such, this is truly an awesome idea, but I also want to suggest that it maybe better to have SGs use their influence to buy different buildings in the actually zone, and decorate the building with their own design and such so that other people can see it too and not just the SG members. Also the long waited SG vault should also be implemented, so that members can share their enhencement easier.
Well, that's about all I have to say, I really hope this game can go as far as the game engine allows it too. I know my PM is long, perhaps a little too long, but I have spent a long time writing it and I hope it can be some help to yall to make this a better game. Thank you again for reading this and good luck.
--------HaifanK
