New things keep occurring to me so instead of making a separate thread for each one I figured I’d just make one thread with a few.
These are a few ideas for minor changes that I think will improve the game.
- First, a silly on: There should be a ‘Return to Main Menu’ button on the first ‘after game results screen thingie’.
There are 3 of these screens and the last two have a button that takes you back to the main menu, and I don’t know why the first one doesn’t have it.
It’s a tiny little change, but I still reckon it makes sense.
- Non-fighting servers.
There should be a few servers were all damage is disabled, and people can just run around, or there needs to be a way to host local games that you can run for yourself, or a small number of people who you invite.
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it’ll be a great way for experienced players to teach new players about the game. As it stands sharing knowledge with newbs in the midst of a firefight is difficult, and often requires you to neglect your team. When I was a Wolf:ET player I would often just stand still and die so that I could type advice to the new players who were struggling. But I’m sure there’s a better way, preferably one that won’t make my team yell at me and hurt my feelings :’(
Secondly, this game already has a few trickjumps, and the Devs have said that the finished version is going to have lots of them.
These will take a lot of practice to get right. And, just like above, practicing them during a firefight is tricky and will require you to neglect your team while you repeatedly fling your face into the side of the building.
Non-fighting ‘Practice’ servers can fix both these problems.
- Bushwacker should get a notification when his turret is active, or dies.
At the moment you sometimes don’t know if your turret is up or down because you don’t have time to scan for the icon, or because you’re dead and speccing someone who just isn’t looking in that direction.
And listening for its firing doesn’t work because you can’t tell one turret’s fire from another.
I propose that there be an icon on Bushwacker’s HUD that lights up when he places the turret, flashes when the turret fires or takes damage, and goes dark if the turret is destroyed.
- Campaign Gold
Players should get a small amount of bonus gold (or XP, or ‘credits’ or whatever) for staying on the same server over several matches.
Balance is currently a major issue. I know that the game shuffles after each match, and I assume that the shuffiling either has, or will have, some way of trying to arrange the new teams so that they are more balanced.
This is great because it means that over successive games the teams will become more and more equal.
But the problem is that people enter and leave games so often that this dream of better balance is rarely achieved.
What is needed is some incentive for players to stick around.
Back with Wolf:ET the incentive was that maps were arranged in ‘Campaigns’ of 3 or 4 maps, and you unlocked abilities that carried over to the next game ONLY IF you stayed to finish the campaign.
It feels like that won’t work in ‘DB’ because there aren’t really campaigns, but other options for incentives do exist, and the simplest is to just give players an extra bit of gold for staying on the same server.
It could be something as simple as 5 gold for two games in a row, 10 gold for three games, 20 for four games and then that’s the cap.
Players who are farming (which will be all of us 
) will want to stay on the same server to maximise their gold return.
This will let the balance shuffling work, and it will also discourage people from quitting early if their team starts to lose.
Well, those are all the suggestsions I’ve got right now.
Let me know what you guys think
