Community Suggestions and Feedback
With the long awaited expansion now on the horizon, its time for me to implement an idea I've had backburnered for the past month or so, the Community Suggestion thread. I'll be scouring the forums, digging up the best ideas players have had, and posting them here to make it easy to see. Yes, it is kinda like a suggestion forum within the suggestion forum. No, you cannot make an inception joke.
Lady_Pebbles (and likely many other, but she's the first one I found):
Included the items from the Weapons Design Contest.
New Gear (shields, armor, weapons, implants, ect) in the plat store.
Add a Daily Login Bonuses & Allies.
Anecat: AL style mini-game, like the the bard's tales, and some items that can only be earned via mini-game tokens.
Suggestion #1: Equipment
Grenades: not just for damage, but with effects, like stun, knockdown, or gravity well. Could provide a little bit of skill exchange between classes.
Deployable shield: Need a moment to catch your breath, let your skills recharge, ect? Just toss down a shield and be protected from enemy fire for a moment. The catch is, you can't shoot back. Could also be used to trap a troublesome foe inside it, or prevent enemies from chasing you when you retreat.
Turret: The Scorn get to call in turrets to support them, I think its time we get to return the favor.
Suggestion #2: New Vanity Ideas
"Equip as vanity". I got this idea from Spiral Knights, which allows you to wear any items as a statless vanity item or a regular item, and switch between the two at will. For SL, I'd suggest having this be an add-on property that you can buy and equip onto an item, kind of like how strange parts work in TF2. So you would buy the "vanity equip" mod, then apply it to a item in your inventory, which would let you use that item as a vanity equip.
Trophy Vanity items: After do some task or another (beating the boss, or killing a particular enemy a certain number of times) you would get a vanity item related to it. So if you kill 100 of the guards in the dynastar level, you might get one of the helmets they were as a vanity item. Or after beating the Numa Prime boss, you get one of the melee weapons used by the bad guys as a vanity shield.
And to cap it all off, another round of sci-fi vanity items. Maybe sell a vanity set based on the merc armors from Mass Effect, or a Halo style vanity suit, or maybe some Star Wars inspired vanities.
Suggestion #4: Because sometimes it can get a little difficult to tell classes apart (though its not nearly as bad as it was during Voleria), classes should get a class icon either on the avatar page or visible in gameplay (maybe stick it next to the name).
Suggestion #6: Crafting. Instead of just upgrading your equipment to a better version, we should be able to just tweak it slightly by adding new parts onto it. Weapon mods would let you boost the weapon's passive stats (like adding a scope to boost you hit%), or function as additional abilities (so a stopping power mod would let you knock enemies back or knock them down). You could also have armor mods that would boost your stats directly, or apply another ability, like damage resistance (so you could upgrade your armor to make you move faster, or give you a damage reduction from cannon damage). A few ideas:
Scope: boost to hit% and crit%.
Silencer: Boosted dodge rate.
Extended magazine/canister: Boost to fire rate and damage.
Plus some new parts:
Grenade launcher: Fire a potent AOE shot. Very slow recharge
Napalm canister: Gives weapon fire stun effect like napalm rifle.
Health Drain: Gives you X percentage of damage dealt as health (Would really help commando survivability)
Increase Damage resistance vs X (where X is a particular weapon type, like cannons or pistols).
Enhanced Traction: Make it harder to apply knockback, or make knockback effects throw you a shorter distance.
Upgrade parts could be transferable between weapons, or might be permanently attached, and would be found in drops or crafted (I suggest crafted). because some players (read: me) will want to equip every single possible mod, I suggest letting them do so, but make the cost of mount additional mods increase rapidly. Mounting one mod might cost 500 credits. adding another one would cost 700. mounting a third would cost 1200, a fourth would cost 2000, ect.
As for how STS could make money off this, I have a few ideas. I don't think making the parts plat-purchased would be a good idea. Instead of constantly purchasing new and better parts, most players will buy only the best and highest level one, stick them in the stash, and then craft them after they cap. I have an alternate proposal. I used to play Crimecraft Gangwars (then I unlocked the TF2 cross-promotion hat and quit), and they had a similar weapon/armor/uprgrade part crafting system. Players could purchase a license to craft weapons, upgrade parts, and armor. The license was a one-time fee, and after that they could craft to their hearts content. If STS created a similar system, I'd gladly pay for it. 20 to 30 plat is fair price for the ability to continuously build and add new upgrades to my gear. I would recommend having the license apply to all crafting, instead of being only able to be used for one type of part. That would be really annoying, espically if the price to buy additional lincenses was too high (I quit Crimecraft for pretty much this exact reason).
Suggestion #7: For guilds, add a guild bank that players can add and remove things from, with some kind of system to prevent a player from looting the bank and stealing everything. To borrow another idea from Spiral Knights, have each item a assigned a value based on its rarity and CS price(for example, a primed flux cannon might have a value of 8, while an over-clocked keystone 19 has a value of 3), and players would be only be allowed to remove an item if they have place an item of the same value into the bank.
Suggestion #8: Do something like the Cyber Quest from PL for players who've reached the level cap. After a player caps, they get the option of taking on a quest to obtain a new item set of level 51 gear, obtained in a similar way to the Cyber armor (killing the AO3 bosses about 2000 times). Make sure that players who have reached the level cap have something to do.
I know that most of these suggestions come from me. That will be changing in the future, but after a quick search these were the only ideas I could find. I'll be keeping this thread updated until the expansion comes out.
