Warzone SEASON 4 Changes - Really?

[QuickC5]

Be warned - this is just a bitch: With the Season 4 upgrade, this weekend was the most frustrating change in game play I've experienced in a long while. Because this is appears to be purposeful change to cater to COD hardcore gamers, and complete newbies (?) - I'll lessen my play and expenditures on the game.

I'm 54 - and I'm probably an above average player (I've won WZ a few times), but definitely not in the professional realm - and not in the elite golden gun twitchy finger bounce off walls spin around makes you sick 12-24 year old gamer (respect), either.

Though it seemed to piss off hardcore COD gamers, I found a different game in Warzone. I found a game that had strategy and patience blended nicely with high energy gameplay. It caused high energy players to be patient, and slower players to plan for the inevitable multiple gunfights coming as the gas closed... I enjoyed the strategy, working through contracts to gain money, working against the closing gas, and I like the basic guns that lead to the need for your loadout... I liked the fact the hardcore gamers had to work on strategy, not just play the game in a bounce around shoot 'em up style. Sometimes avoidance is a better strategy then trying to fight out-manned or out-gunned. I found the game a hoot to play - having both the strengths of COD, and Battlefield.

Then... I literally spent most the weekend either in the Gulag or watching the one live player on my team play. Most of the changes negate any strategy the game had and primarily turns Warzone into just a big multiplayer map. I'm sure this was the intent. But, there are already plenty of multiplayer maps. Go play those. Works better anyway with a smaller map. Warzone was new, provided a different style, and fun - but then, the changes:

• Too many high powered weapons available. Who cares or needs a loadout? This also turns into a whole other issue - this one business. Why should I go to the store, buy blue prints when I can carry guns I find in the crates?
• Jailbreak - it's like saying the first half of the game is pointless. Hang on, you all can come back. Team mates drop from the match anyway, so what's the point?
• Supply Helicopters - we don't care you're just running and shooting with no strategy, here's supplies to keep you going
• 1/2 Price - we don't care you didn't take the time to find crates, or do contracts (little grasshopper) - have all some 1/2 price stuff everyone else worked and paid full price for.
• The fact none of these bad ideas are consistent - you can't even strategize around the new features

I realize the reason for the changes are trying to cater to both the hard-core COD players, and to let the newbies in and play with some good weapons, while helping everyone along.

I think the changes were a mistake. Warzone hasn't been out long enough to make changes, and sometimes it's good to let players acclimate to the game, then the game trying to make constant changes to cater to any one particular group. I think the game was going like gang busters, so I'm not sure changes were warranted this soon, especially ones this drastic to the original gameplay.

 

[CMCFLYYY]

Be warned - this is just a bitch: With the Season 4 upgrade, this weekend was the most frustrating change in game play I've experienced in a long while. Because this is appears to be purposeful change to cater to COD hardcore gamers, and complete newbies (?) - I'll lessen my play and expenditures on the game.

I'm 54 - and I'm probably an above average player (I've won WZ a few times), but definitely not in the professional realm - and not in the elite golden gun twitchy finger bounce off walls spin around makes you sick 12-24 year old gamer (respect), either.

Though it seemed to piss off hardcore COD gamers, I found a different game in Warzone. I found a game that had strategy and patience blended nicely with high energy gameplay. It caused high energy players to be patient, and slower players to plan for the inevitable multiple gunfights coming as the gas closed... I enjoyed the strategy, working through contracts to gain money, working against the closing gas, and I like the basic guns that lead to the need for your loadout... I liked the fact the hardcore gamers had to work on strategy, not just play the game in a bounce around shoot 'em up style. Sometimes avoidance is a better strategy then trying to fight out-manned or out-gunned. I found the game a hoot to play - having both the strengths of COD, and Battlefield.

Then... I literally spent most the weekend either in the Gulag or watching the one live player on my team play. Most of the changes negate any strategy the game had and primarily turns Warzone into just a big multiplayer map. I'm sure this was the intent. But, there are already plenty of multiplayer maps. Go play those. Works better anyway with a smaller map. Warzone was new, provided a different style, and fun - but then, the changes:

• Too many high powered weapons available. Who cares or needs a loadout? This also turns into a whole other issue - this one business. Why should I go to the store, buy blue prints when I can carry guns I find in the crates?
• Jailbreak - it's like saying the first half of the game is pointless. Hang on, you all can come back. Team mates drop from the match anyway, so what's the point?
• Supply Helicopters - we don't care you're just running and shooting with no strategy, here's supplies to keep you going
• 1/2 Price - we don't care you didn't take the time to find crates, or do contracts (little grasshopper) - have all some 1/2 price stuff everyone else worked and paid full price for.
• The fact none of these bad ideas are consistent - you can't even strategize around the new features

I realize the reason for the changes are trying to cater to both the hard-core COD players, and to let the newbies in and play with some good weapons, while helping everyone along.

I think the changes were a mistake. Warzone hasn't been out long enough to make changes, and sometimes it's good to let players acclimate to the game, then the game trying to make constant changes to cater to any one particular group. I think the game was going like gang busters, so I'm not sure changes were warranted this soon, especially ones this drastic to the original gameplay.

This game is not catering to the hardcore sweaty players, it is catering to the n00bs to try and maintain as wide of an audience as possible. Bringing in (and keeping around) as many players as possible means more eyeballs shopping the in-game store and buying crap they don't need.

Everything you just described is catering to n00bs to make the game easier and more forgiving to play.

- Who cares or needs a loadout? Good players don't - not only can they just as easily kill you with the bad weapons, they know the maps and better loot locations and would find the good floor loot weapons more often than the bad players. It's the bad players that consistently need their loadouts in order to stay competitive. If not they'd be running around with Uzis and 725s going against guys with an MP7/HDR or M4/AX50.

- Why buy blueprints? Because they let you use attachments before you've grinded to unlock them. Potatoes don't play the game as much as the sweaty players so they haven't grinded as much to unlock all the attachments for every gun. And in order to complete that grind you have to do so without the good attachements that you don't unlock til later. This is a lose-lose for a bad player/n00b. The blueprint, while costing real dollars, gives you access to those higher tier attachments included in the blueprints you buy, before you unlock them, and then essentially you can use those higher tier attachements to grind and actually unlock them permanently.

The entire point so far is, bad players cannot rely on looting good weapons from floor loot. They need access to loadouts to stay competitive and buying blueprints help skip the grind to unlock better loadouts.

- Jailbreak lets all the bad players and n00bs have another chance. Sweaty players with 2k hours are not going to be benefitting from the Jailbreak hardly ever. If they do die, they likely win their Gulag, and if not their teammates are good enough to loot and do contracts to have enough money to buy them back. Jailbreak exists purely to help bad players by giving them another free chance to come back. It also does help prevent people from abandoning teammates if they die early because they might be able to come back for free later.

Supply Choppers: I'm not entirely sure how I feel about these yet. I do like map events that force teams to converge together for better loot. I wish they'd get rid of the random loadout drops that only your team can see (which doesn't force anybody together) and replace it with the Supply Choopers, only instead of having to shoot down the choppers they just fly around the map for a minute and drop a couple legendary crates tied together in a few places. And teams can then follow the choppers around and flock to the legendary drops for loads of cash and elite floor loot.

Fire Sale: I like the idea here - the purpose of this is to have teams converge together on Buy Stations and result in combat. But the Fire Sales happen too late so by that point there aren't as many teams left and you don't wind up with 2-3 teams converging together on every Buy Station. Instead what happens is it winds up discouraging teams from continuing to loot/do contracts/kill teams for cash to buy UAVs/Self-Revives/Armor Boxes because they can just wait for the Fire Sale. But hey at least they didn't discount loadouts too lmao.

 

[CMCFLYYY]

In my opinion I would like to see them do the following:

- Customize loadouts based on what you're buying. Not all loadouts should cost a flat $10k. If you buy a pump shotgun and a pistol, it would be nice and cheap. If you buy a fully-kitted Grau and AX-50 using overkill, it should cost you significantly more. Charge more for using the better perks like Ghost and tacticals. That way if players want to save money on a class they can go with a flash or stun instead of the HB Sensor. Or they can skip out on Cold-Blooded because something else is cheaper and makes Cold-Blooded not worth it.

What's missing from this game's weapon balance is rarity. Some weapons were better than others - that's just how it is in real life. Instead of trying to tweak gun mechanics to level the playing field, games like Pubg just make the better guns more rare in terms of finding them in the floor loot. However in Warzone you don't loot to find rare floor loot, you loot to find cash so you can buy a loadout. When building loadouts nothing is rare and every weapon/attachment has the same rarity. You can build whatever you want and cash is easy to find by looting and doing contracts so everyone has their loadout and no weapon in the game is more rare than others. At that point only the raw weapon stats are left to determine balancing, and then you get where we are now - sweaty players research the shit out of the stats of every weapon and attachment to build the best loadout. That's all that matters in this game.

Charging more for the better weapons and attachments would level the playing field between weapons. Would you pay $4k more for a Grau or just run a Kilo instead? Would you equip a Monolithic over a Tactical Suppressor if it costed you an extra $3k, when the only benefit is 7.5% extra range (2-5m)? Would you buy that 8x sniper scope for your AX-50 or stick with the 3.5x so save $2k. Do you really need the 100-round drum mag for the Kilo if it costs $2k more than the 60-round mags? Every time you equip a "better" attachment you have consider how much longer in game-time you will need to be looting in order to afford buying this class. Is it worth the extra cash to buy a loadout with an HDR when you could save $5k and get a Kar instead?

And the net result of that would mean Loadouts cost more. $10k for an entire squad is accomplished with 1 Scavenger or just a few minutes of early-game looting. It should cost closer to $30k for a team to get their loadouts, if they're all buying Overkill Grau/AX-50s fully kitted with Heartbeat Sensors. More expensive loadouts means less cash to buy UAVs and Self-Revives too, so you have to balance that in as well.

It would also create a risk/reward for how you build loadouts. If loadouts are cheap and require hardly any looting, then you wind up with 95% of players in the final circles having loadouts. If loadouts cost significantly more to get "good" loadouts, it would mean final circles where not everybody has their fully-kitted Graus/HDRs. would mean having your loadout is actually an advantage at that point. And it would obviously then be beneficial to build cheaper loadouts so if you have a bad looting/contract game you can have some cheaper loadouts to buy. Maybe you set up a Kilo/M19 class with just the 60-round mag so you can afford a suppressor and Ghost. Maybe you set up a red-dot Kar class and skip the suppressor/ghost so you can afford overkill and have an Uzi as a secondary. So maybe by the final circles everyone does have a loadout, but some of them had to settle for cheap loadouts because they didn't find the cash to buy their precious Grau/AX-50 class.

- As mentioned before, get rid of free loadouts that only your team could see. Via some mechanism (maybe the Supply Choppers), drop off a few legendary crates tied together at various random points around the map. All teams can see these and converge on them if they want. Do you go after the chopper dropping 5 legendary crates 200m from you, to possibly get $20k cash and some elite blueprints, while possibly running into 2 more teams, or do you not chance it and just continue your normal looting. Risk/Reward.

- Nerf the Heartbeat Sensor. I say this as someone who takes advantage of how overpowered it is. Give it a limited battery life - maybe 10 uses. Why should stun/flash grenades only work once or twice while you can have an unlimited UAV in your pocket? What if equipping stun grenades meant you could carry 100 stun grenades. Pandemonium. If it only had 10 uses you would be encouraged to save it for when you truly need it, instead of using it every 5 seconds to check every building around you.

- ARs need a huge recoil nerf. You should not be able to laser someone from >100m at full-auto and out-perform a DMR or sniper at that range. Recoil should be causing you to one-tap like the DMR/Snipers, and their higher damage is going to wreck you if you're all one-tapping at each other.

- I just had an idea for how to deal with players getting so many "lives" in this game. Make it so if you down an enemy player, you have a choice. If you kill them, you get nothing but that player is permanently eliminated from the game forever. Or...you could "capture" them instead. This is what would send them to the Gulag, where they can fight their way out. The benefit to capturing downed players instead of killing them could be a cash bonus - in essence you get paid by the Gulag to "deliver" inmates to them for their illegal fight clubs. So players could wind up getting sent to the Gulag multiple times by different teams if they keep getting downed, as long as they keep winning their Gulag fights. Get rid of the buybacks from the Buy Station. I do like the idea of the Jailbreak, but it should only apply to the dozen or so players that are currently in the Gulag when it happens and not all dead players.

Your philosophy could change as the game goes on. Maybe early on you just capture and send players to the Gulag to get cash payouts to save for your loadout. Then later on when you get your loadout, now you start killing downed players instead because you no longer need the cash. But then maybe you get downed and sent to the Gulag and when you come back in the final circles you'll still be sending enemies to the Gulag because now you need money again.

- If you down an enemy via a headshot, it should skip the down phase entirely. It makes absolutely no sense that getting shot in the face with an anti-tank rifle can be "cured" by stabbing them with a syringe. Getting downed and revived is for players near death - you aren't near death when you get domed by a sniper rifle, you are just plain dead. This would also tie in with the above Gulag prisoner idea. If you find a floor loot sniper early, you are aiming for headshots but that would not allow you to capture any enemies you beat because your headshots would be skipping the downed phase. So you may not want to pick up that AX-50 blueprint because using it would mean acquiring less cash from sending teams to the Gulag.