It’s always something I like to do: brainstorm to find ideas that might be useful. So here I give some ideas I had recently, not many since I have all my exams currently. I invite you all to do the same exercise.
MAPS:
Or mostly routes. In networking we make the distinction between node-disjoint paths and edge-disjoint paths. In green a node-disjoint path (two routes cannot share the same nodes), and in red and blue edge-disjoint paths (can share some same nodes, but not edges). Where am I going with that ? Well, paths that share nodes are prone to congestion. This means that they are bottlenecks and if one shared link is compromised, the all the paths sharing this node will fail.
Illustration of node-disjoint and edge-disjoint paths
If it happens in networking for routing packets, it also happens in games when packets are people. In the above illustration a node is shared by the blue and red paths, so they are actually only a single path since they join at the same place. These routes should be considered only for side objectives. The green path is a real access route and there should always be two of these for each main objective. I know you are aware of this @SD, but maybe a different perspective can bring ideas.
MERCS
Field ops: would be fun to be able to cook the airstrike marker. It could affect the distance at which it is thrown, allowing for better control over ballistic throws. Maybe there could be an audio feedback of the power of the throw.
Aura: really not a big fan of her shotgun’s damage distribution curve. She is way too powerful at close range since it’s basically one shot but behaves strangely at longer ranges. She is globally a good idea for a merc, but the shotgun does not respond as one could wish on such a merc.
RedEye: it’s hard for me to know if this is a close range or long range merc. I cannot count anymore the number of times I lost against a RedEye in close combat or how many times I got headshot before I could even see the red thingy. In close range in the hands of a good player RedEye is even better than a soldier because of the insta-gib headshot. I feel like this is unbalanced. I believe reducing his firing rate could solve this issue.
WEAPONS
Desert Eagle and Rhino’s pistols: maybe too much kick in. They are very hard to use and usually it’s a penalty already to have to switch to the pistol. Maybe they could deal a bit less damage but have less recoil ?
Grenades: why use an orange halo around the grenades to indicate them ? It kind of defeats the purpose of landing a delayed-grenade. This is even more true with Nader. Also it would remove some clutter in the field of view, which would be nice.
Idea: would love to see a weapon with double magazine attached to it with different types of ammunition (incendiary, toxic, armor piercing against the EV, etc.)
MATCHMAKING
Will there be an option in matchmaking to be matched with greater skills servers ? Something like after winning a few games in a row you can ask to be matched against better players. There could be greater rewards for playing such games and it would motivate players to perform better in games (I would be).
MUSIC
On this point it’s very strange to me how this is currently done: no music in the menus (probably not a priority) but Trainyard has his music running when the objective is 1 minute away from timeout. I would rather have no music at all in the game but more ambient sounds related to the action. Indeed paying attention to the right sounds can give a tactical advantage and is for me a skill.
PROFILE STATS
This is probably an on-going work, but the statistics currently are not placed by association: wins are 4 cells away from the losses, etc. Maybe the left black matrix could be reordered into a 3 columns matrix featuring for each row the two variants (kill/death, win/losses, fired/hit, etc.) and the ratio in the third column.
