I have been thinking long and hard about why a game that is so well made is so frustrating…
Many people will point to balance, variation and modes to why the game is not fun…
While I would say the aforementioned systems are the reason the game is not great I do not believe that they have much direct correlation to the fun factor itself. I feel more work could be done on communicating what is happening both to the players doing damage and to the players receiving damage in order to reduce certain frustrations from play. Some of these will come from slight system changes and others will come from cosmetic changes such as animation and telegraphs.
A great example with this is the current revive shield system… If you remove the shield revived players get frustrated but with the shield here the people shooting the revived person are frustrated and you end up running out of ammo, hearing lots of hit beeps and doing little damage. The way around this would be to make a decent compromise that hardly effects the game but reduces frustration for both groups of players. Obviously there are lots of issues with performance when doing multiple traces per shots (hence why only slow firing weapons do it) but that is not to say a simple solution could not work.
Add a “getting up” animation to revived players and give them a revive shield for 2 seconds (animation should take around 1 second) but during this time have the player not block traces… The player being revived is still getting the spawn protection, the player shooting the revived player is not getting the hit beeps and the player shooting the revived person can still shoot at people behind the revived player without his bullets getting blocked. At the same time when FF is online it will prevent the reviving medic from shooting his own team mate. Providing this is done with a simple animation such as the revived player having his arms coving his head till the end of the duration in third person providing he does not try and fire.
Also doing a simple Camera check clientside to determine who the enemy is trying to look at and then doing local animation offsets would prevent some of the frustration involved with getting killed by people not looking at you.
Making the hit beep volume scale of damage done better communicates the damage you are doing. Base it off percentage of the enemy you are shootings hp you have removed (so beeps would appear quieter shooting heavy set Mercs). That way when you shoot someone with a shotgun at 10feet and do 10 damage you know instantly and can easier believe you only did the 10 damage rather then dying and seeing the enemies hp and being like “WHAT I HIT HIM 5 TIMES!!”
Have visual tracers every few bullets from a SMG and AR to give a better idea… Some people think this can be bad communication as it can look like a tracer hits when the actual bullet trace missed. However, I believe if you que the trace (do the same trace twice but at different times) you can actually sync the tracer with the bullet trace based of its hit location. This would allow for much higher tracer accuracy then most other systems and will better show bullet spread than the current system.
Having sharper subsounds on third person weapon fire can also give slightly better audio awareness to where people are positioned in a room.
There are many small things that will not effect gameplay much that will reduce frustrations.
Normally I would be writing 10 more paragraphs right now but you basically hit the nail on the head with each point right away. Just one quick little mention.
this Match Making and Larger Player Base and lets say RANKED* games will take away the spook pub star aspect and I will be forced into a more team based play? Correct 