Difficulty and progression

[Tabellen Peter]

Hi Battlezoniacs,

I just wanted to drop some thoughts for the developers here and maybe you can even add to it:

Enemy types

Why hide some of them behind harder difficulties? In the 20+ hours I played so far, I've encountered maybe 3 sniper turret typed enemies. Mole turrest seem to be hard/extreme exclusive. Why? As everything scales by difficulty and coop player count, you should'nt be scared to throw everything at us.

- Suggestion: Allow all enemy types and do not restrict them. Instead try to prevent abusive groups, like spawning those ♥♥♥♥♥♥ bikes and gliders in the same run. You get those unavoidable shots from the bikes paired with the unavoidable damange coming from gliders. Thats stuff for hard. Try to group waves of enemies by topic: It's an air wave, so slow snipers will be an annoyance, but it's managable. It's a heavy wave, try to concentrate on ground combat.

Loadouts

Not sure whats happening here. I've never seen anyone use EMP, also I've never seen the Ammunition restock module for sale. I bet only one or two players even know what the rusting module does by experience, same goes with flare. There is equipment that will never get used because it's highly unlikely you will purchase it on a whim just to test it out (if you can even find and afford it).

- Suggestions: Introduce random tanks. They take a unlocked tank level (started tanks, normal/heavy/extreme tanks) and combine it with a randomized layout of weapons and modules of the given maximum mk-level of tank level. So I could start with MK1 railgun and a MK3 single aimed rocket launcher and a MK2 Ammunition restock. I could communicate that to my team, get into my role, be usefull. Just having two layouts for a beginner might be fine, just having four on completed normal rank is critical. If that does'nt fly, provide a playground to test equipment. If that does'nt fly, provide videos of the effects and usefulness.

Respawns

By god, do not just spawn stuff near a player. VR is about awareness and not giving even the slightest hint (visual or audio cue, excluding the radar) that a turret respawned behind the player and some 1-2 seconds maybe to realize is problems will lead to pure rage. There are some missions where the turret spawn points are fixed, I get this. Vary it. There are even missions where the player and enemies start side by side, with the own team split in two on different parts of the map. What the hell am I supposted to do against 1 heavy and 4 light tanks on hard in a light tank just to the right of me? Also just spawning 4 differently typed turrets around the base really divides the players and their experience level. You basically have to warn them about the map layout on hard, because you get into revive-loops easily or hope the player leaves to decrease the difficulty level.

- Suggestions: Ease up! Maybe introduce a visual element that spawns the tanks (instead of the flare up/spawn effect) like dropping tanks with helicopters or so, give the players time to regroup and think about whats going to happen.

Enemy scaling

Boy this one hurts. I love a challenge, but as soon as it becomes a pure chore I'm out. Please base the difficulty on something else. Not exactly sure, but the abuse-o-meter is unbearable at hard with four players. I've yet to witness a single team that does not get wasted by a nemesis or gets stuck in a revive loop.

I've dragged my sorry body through solo extremes at this point and there is no reason for me to do it again. Absolutely none. It's no challenge when you encounter a nemesis for example, it's a search for flaws in the system. You dance around pillars, try to trick the AI, look for flaws aming and unit pathfinding because there is nothing else you an do. Last time I had a railgun MK9 with me, it did nothing against its regenerating shields. Hitting it from behind was impossible solo. You have to manage the last boss and the nemesis at the same time to even solve this riddle. Never even reached that point with two players and if I could the whole session had to be centered around how to abuse the system, avoid mission types completly, restart at live-loss and just restard at the get-go with commonly known seeds that do not throw you any escort or defend two bases missions in your way. It's no fun, it just feels like UX QA with extensive regression tests.

Suggestions:

- As lives are shared, give them more power: Using one will revive all dead. If only one is dead fine, if all are dead, also fine. Once you get three coop-players downed, nothing will solve it. Using a live is just a time waste. You either get angry at the just-joined beginner or it will have no effect at all. Most people have died within line of fire anyway, so 90% of the time you will rush there with no hope to solve anything (esp with medium and light tanks). By making lives based on teams, the whole team gets a new chance at solving things together, no peer pressure or false hope. Decrease the speed of heavy tank shells, they are one-shot material for most medium/light players paired with any other enemy type.

Content

I can understand your decision here, but please, do not lock players out of content. I paid for the game, bought a skin and some horns, but this is not a free to play game. We paid for it and not even Battlefield or Call of Duty does lock you out of content, they just introduce a barrier to unlock. Not making a progression after you got the two normal tanks unlocked, is disheartening. I love to play the game, but with all those points above, I can promise you: The next game I play will be normal, to help others. There is no chance, and I repeat that, absolutely no chance and no fun involved for me to reach the next unlock level in coop. Everytime I start a game on hard I know exactly how it will end. I will unlock maybe 1-2 weapons and that's it. Not chance on anything and as soon as I unlocked all the factory-unlockable weapons, I'm done. I'll just play for the sake of it but the progression will be gone. It's not about getting better at all. You need to have missions that spawn enough money, the right mission types, maybe good star mission positioning and get your stuff resolved within time, before the enemy level reaches 10+.

- Suggestion: Put skins and horns behind a simple percentage based drop on normal+ runs. Maybe even add the completed hexes-count into the percentage. Also let them be purchasable with real money, why not! Also put tanks behind normal. They are somewhat essential for beating the higher difficulties and teamwork. Locking them behind the highest, not even steam-archivement-worthy difficulty will just make them absolutely uninteresting.

Thats it. Thanks for your time, maybe something useful is in there somewhere. I just feel tired after the third normal run today, because co-oping hard is... just no fun right now.

[Rafport]

Differences among difficulty levels make totally sense for me, I wound't be interested in progressing without the hope to see different stuff. I beated three time the campaign on normal to obtain all tanks, now I hope to see something new on harder levels.