[Level9Drow]

Now that our weapons get stronger and we have to get blueprints to get them stronger there is a sort of passive lockout of characters. If you have 2 or 3 characters with the cards and your favorite weapon on them maxed out you are basically suicidal to use any characters who DON'T have upgraded weapons, or at least any useful ones. This means that the EFFECTIVE character roster has shrunk and can only grow depending on how lucky you get with blueprints and how much gold you get.

The one thing I can say about the pre-patch game is that you could play any character you had and the only thing limiting its potential is you. But now you can really only afford to play the characters the RNG gods tell you to play.

I have blueprints but not enough gold to build them. And until I do build them that character is off limits to use, unless you want to gimp your team. And even IF you have blueprints for the heroes default weapons, many of the characters default weapons are abysmally terrible. Alicia's default and Eager come to mind. If this is all you have for her in terms of blueprints, don't bother upgrading them unless they're just loot magnets used to AFK as antagonists.

So in a passive way, I have to earn all the characters again. You have to Buy the character, upgrade one of their GOOD weapons (some characters, like Doldren start with good weapons, others like Alicia don't) and then maybe some ok cards, and THEN the character can be played, otherwise they're trash.

I only play a tiny fraction of the characters I have, and I have all of them so far, and at first I dodn't mind, but now I find myself avoiding ANY hero that does not have one of their effective weapons upgraded.

This problem gets worse and worse as you gain levels. My suggestion, please give us more gold. More ways to get it.

[TheBrentWoody]

Also the characters whose special should scale with weapon damage because if you take damage it becomes useless are nerfed.  (Mikah and Lycus) (Personally, I think this could be solved by just making the shield take a certain number of hits and accounting for speed of shots.  It means it would counter slow firing snipers, but be weak to Constantin or Kuzzman.  Or you could give it armor and cause it to be weak to snipers and strong against fast firing low damage per bullet.

[Level9Drow]

Yea I thought about that to; does the damage of Ayana's special go up? Iunes healing, Loaht's damage and health in beast form, Hive's bonus health. There's a lot of characters that I can see their abilities become marginalized as the MMR goes up.

The rest of the characters besides the ones you and I have stated have abilities that are universally useful. I'm not sure how to solve this problem.

I always thought that if a game get's harder the enemies would just get more skilled, but health and damage would be universally the same. Like in Halo, the enemies on medium would have low accuracy and not be intelligent when they dodge, but on higher difficulties they become more accurate and fire more. I dunno.

[Giomancer]

I’m a fairly new player and, while I lack your experience, I have put some thought into the matter of progression vs resources and generally agree with your conclusion.

Unfortunately, I believe the shortage of gold was intentional; the ability to convert Mercury into gold was likely meant to cover the gap as well as generate an income stream. I can’t say I’m fond of that, but it’s common enough in F2P games.

However, assuming we wish to tweak the economy so that alchemizing Mercury into gold wasn’t necessary (leaving Mercury the province of skins and similar cosmetic goodies), increasing the amount of gold by (x)% for the Raider pool and (2x)% for the Antagonist pool as well as lowering the amount of Faction points by at least a third for both would change the current dynamics.

Why lower Faction points? You may need a lot to reshuffle or lock cards, but with gold at such a premium you can gain enough Faction easily since you won’t be forced to split your earnings. Like I stated initially, however, I don’t have much experience, so my argument here may be flawed.

For a deeper change, not offering the missions a la carte for gold would reduce demand slightly, at least I think so. However, keeping the “mission of the week” is fine, though depending on how many campaigns get released a “campaign of the week” idea might be better. Furthermore, for those that have invite tickets, perhaps allowing them to be used on an entire squad of people during matchmaking (in other words, you’re not bringing a friend along, but extending the invite to random Raiders) would be interesting. I have tickets but nobody to use them with. Invites would earn gold on success or failure, and Mercury on success.

These are just some thoughts I had; I personally think that only the primary idea of adjusting the faction/gold ratios could be implemented without very serious analysis, but perhaps the rest may be of interest.

[TheBrentWoody]

I do very much like the "Let a random play a map" idea.  Should be an additional quickplay option