Recoil and loot seem to have been the two biggest topics of discussion/criticism this wipe. The current values for recoil are way too heavy to make it worth using builds that neither fall into the meta category or are pure budget. It also means that higher calibres are really the only worthwhile options because you're either in semi-auto anyway, in which case, might as well use the biggest bullet available, or full-auto which is going to be full of jumpy, unpredictable guns… so again, might as well take what will hurt hardest. It's why the Mutant and RD-704 have been so dominant, along with so many psople budget running the RFB and SR-25 up until very recently. Not to mention the increases to scav HP that mean they'll laser you while you're sitting there hitting them with what might as well be pellets. It just encourages people to stick to a select few guns. The thing is, the recoil changes we got in 12.12 were literally just an extra +20 base recoil to everything. That's it. It'd be so damj easy to revert them and finetune it, but nope.
Loot. Loose loot has been particularly bad the last two, maybe three wipes, and it means there's not as much a draw to get players to meet for geared action anymore. I've gone into this in more detail before, but look at Interchange. It used to be that people would come in heavy and the middle of the mall would be a bloodbath. What now? It's mostly just people hitting containers on the inside. KIBA has been pretty mediocre for a few wipes now, but it feels like it gets worse with every major update. I don't even bother hitting it unless there's a modded weapon on the wall anymore. I make more money hitting the two weapon boxes under hole and I don't have to bother with pulling power and making myself an easy target. To get back on track, this is again, a simple variable modification. All maps have a loot modifier variable that controls the loose loot anounts present, it'd be so easy to bump it enough to get people moving again… nothing.
Bosses. They should be a key part of late game gameplay where people will take gear to engage them and take away hopefully some decent armour and good ammo. Instead… they don't spawn. Most of them are at 20%. When you consider that even if you run straight through to see if they're there, that equates to about an hour of searching before you might see them once… it feels ridiculous that we're in the stage where most people actively playing have hit level 30-40 and you still hear of so many people missing kills for their quests. Christ, I'm level 53, have 1000 raids this wipe, and have seen the Goons once, despite the fact that I run Woods, Customs and Shoreline pretty damn often. I don't understand how they expect anyone who isn't putting 8+ hours into the game a day to do most of the boss tasks in their current state, especially any that require multiple kills or require specific circumstances, like Hunting Trip. Again… a 2-minute variable change.
We're 2 months in, for Christ's sakes. How hard is it to get the entry-level guy to type a different number nad send it to servers? For these they don't even have to do a client update, it isn't a new version or anything. It's not like they can't do it more frequently, either. Look at prewipe where we get an event every day a week or two weeks in a row. Oh, on that note, those are low-effort and at least get people to change up their playstyle a bit. Why are they saved for end of wipe when nobody is playing? Why not right now, where there's still a decent amount of people, but are probably going to be winding down if nothing new happens?
It's just so baffling. We know BSG monitors their social media channels, we know it shouldn't be much effort for them, why is it so hard for us to get extremely simple changes that would spice up the game and get people more excited to play?
