Sounds like the xp rewards are quite strong i.e rewards time played over skill.
Hopefully not. Stuff like muzzle breaks and grips with affect weapon stats are all unlocks you get very early in the game, so effectively “everyone” has them. The stuff you get later in the game are completely new weapons, and these don’t provide more power, just more options.
That’s for weapons. For abilities, yes, the longer you play, the more you will have. BUT, as players level up, they’re automatically matched with other players who are at similar levels (so ‘majors’ fight against other ‘majors’, not against ‘privates’). that’s if you’re relying on the default ‘find me a game’ functionality, but if you’d rather, you can filter for you own games, and then opt into matches where other players are higher level than you.
Seems abit like a wall hack, maybe you could further explain how this works.
It kind of is, though that was an upgraded (high level) version of interrogation they were seeing in the demo… the low level one puts enemies only on radar for a little while. but it’s important to remember that when someone does do a successful high level interrogation against one of your teammates, you know about it (“one of our squad as been interogated. be careful!” autochatter from the squad commander), so you KNOW that the enemy is aware of you, and you can react appropriately. plus, there’s cool down - operatives have to wait awhile before they can do it again, as a further balancing measure.
Unfortunately, this is not as smart as it sounds. Remember medics who would keep healing themselves and be out of medpacks when asked for help ? It’s like that, only 2 times worse. If someone starts using ‘pips’ (whatever they are) on himself, he’ll be out of pips (for buffing teammates) twice as fast.
First, clarificaiton on ‘pips’. Basically, our life meters and power meters aren’t one solid bar, but a collection of individual ‘pips’. so in the case of power, when you look at your meter, if you see it’s 3 pips long, that means right now, you can do exactly three class actions. and the life meter works like the one in farcry 2 did, where it’s split into pips, and each individual auto-pip can self heal, but to get a full heal of your entire meter, you need to rely on medics.
Second, the selfish medic issue is dealt with mostly again with ability cooldowns. If i can only heal my self once every, say, 30 seconds (that’s not a real final number, mind, just an example), then generally i’ve got power to heal others in the meantime. that, plus the fact that healing others gets you a LOT of xp (more than you can earn by killing, by a long shot), and healing yourself gets you nothing. those two things are about the only things we can do to try to address selfishness. probably won’t handle all cases, but it’s better than nothing…
If you don’t want to recieve in game chat then you can turn it off. ETQW had the option to receive global, team, and fire team chat. Even if you want to have voice chat on and there is an indivdual who is annoying you can locally mute them in the limbo menu.
First of all, a little more about the ‘default’ voip setting. This is effectively a server setting in our ‘standard’ match, which is what the game puts you in if you simply say “i’d like to play the next mission in my storyline online, please”. same as no FF. so players who just want to jump in and play online with no hassles, they choise the “next mission” option, and boom, they don’t hear anyone calling them f******, they don’t have assholes shooting them in the back, and they have a good time. are they missing some of what makes multiplayer great? yes. but they’re having a good time.
for pretty much every single one of you guys on this board, i suspect that simple “take me to the next mission” option will not be good enough, and you’ll all instead opt for the “take me to a server browser” choice. once there, you can find missions where voip is on by default (for everyone), FF is on, player ranks are restricted or open, high level abilities are allowed or disallowed, etc.
i expect the majority of console players will opt for the former (the standard ‘friendly’ matches), and the majority of PC players will opt for the later (the let me play the game without restrictions, i’m a big boy, i can handle it matches). so hopefully everyone will be satisfied… 
Regarding voip, i feel this is a better way to go, because doing the other thing (allowing individuals to selectively turn voip on or off) works at a disadvantage to everyone, including the players who want to speak. what good does it do you to talk into your mike and give strategy/tips, if, for all you know, half your team has manually decided to turn voip off. you might think a player is a complete asshat by ignoring your repeated requests for ammo, but in fact, it’s just that they’ve turned voip off because someone called them a n***** in the past, so they don’t take chances anymore. and they have no idea you’re asking for ammo.
a weird system where “maybe” sometimes people talk, and “maybe” sometimes other people can hear them, but no one is every sure about either, doesn’t help anyone. a more strict system where everyone knows that either a) no one is talking or hearing, or b) everyone can talk and everyone can hear, and letting players gravitate to the choice they prefer, strikes me as a bit clearer all around.
and if you opt for the “i’d prefer not to be called a m*********** again, thanks” server option, you can still team play because our auto-chatter system automatically says 90% of the common stuff players say to each other anyway. and for the 10% that it can’t cover, you can either a) step up to the ‘non-standard’ servers, or b) open up local voice channels with just the people you want to talk to.
