[2019] MORE FUN, LESS WORK!

Edit: I know its strange to put edits at the start of a post but it needs to be known that actually the suggestions, ironically, are not the main point of this post. The goal isn't to get a reply from epic saying 'cool changes, we'll try to make them', the goal is for them to say 'we hear you, we'll try to make the game more fun and less work'. To try and change the game so people would actually choose playing over farming, or even worse afk, in public missions at least.

I feel like the flair should be suggestion, rant and discussion but I'll try and keep it as short and simple as I can...so be gentle...please.

I'm Max level, played since launch and I love this game. BUT....I hate this game and worst of all...it hates me!

For context, the main games I play are all loot based, gear chasing, grindy games. Monster Hunter, Path of Exile and Warframe to name the biggest offenders. I love games like this, the continous feeling of satisfaction you get from steadily upgrading your gear and seeing that effect in game is second to none. But the main thing these 3 games have in common is...they've mastered the art of MAKING GRINDING FUN.

In all these games the gameplay is king, all of them require lots of farming/grinding BUT the farming consists of you being rewarded for PLAYING THE GAME.

The fun part of monster hunter is...hunting monsters. So how do you get better gear? You hunt monsters. You do the fun thing so you can get better gear for doing more fun things. The same rule applies for the other games. So when you join a public game in monster hunter or Warframe why should the other players you've never met help you? Because they want to have fun. And they do, because these games make it easy to have fun and the fun is (normally) risk free that's why leechers are much rarer in these games, but I'll come back to that.

Save the World makes you work to have fun and even then doing what is fun is very risky. On top of that you only spend a fraction of your time actually doing the fun thing! The fun part is setting up creative traps for your enemies to get past and using your weapons and hero skills to kill the rest. However, this part is normally the last few minutes of what is usually a 15-20 minute mission.

The big, core problem is that the fun requires lots of tedious farming and even after that, you're never Garunteed that time isn't wasted. This is because every time you place a building or trap you take a risk, if you make an elaborate trap tunnel but you miscalculated and the enemies manage to avoid it, then all the resources you had to gather to make it are just gone. If there's a rotating storm and you need to build multiple trap layouts to defend every angle, what if half those layouts never get used? All those materials are also just gone. What if even after you built a lot of defenses, the worst happens and you lose? All those materials are ALSO JUST GONE. So all your time and hard work is just wasted, you not only failed and got no rewards, but you are also heavily punished by losing everything you used.

So what happens when you join someone's game? These are strangers, you can't trust them yet. What do you get as a bonus if you do all the work? nothing. What happens if you do all the work and your team fails? You're punished. So what should you do? Absolutely nothing, because why should you? And thus a leecher is born.

That's probably the saddest part, in this game , I don't even blame leechers. If anything they are rewarded, all the gains with none of the losses, it's a win win! But it shouldn't be! They should want to play the game! but they don't because it takes an hour to get enough resources to defend an objective for just a few minutes! And if they fail that hour was a waste of time!

On top of all this, a game where you spend most of your time preparing to have fun, rather than actually having fun, a game where literally everything needs to be crafted by you...you also have to worry about inventory space! Its not enough that you could lose hundreds if not thousands of materials if your tools arent used or get destroyed, you also can't just carry everything, so you rarely have a huge stash just waiting to replace your wasted materials because you have limited space to store it.

The other games I mentioned earlier also have very resource dependant systems but, for the most part, they know you need lots of stuff, so guess what, they just let you store lots of stuff. You'd have to try extremely hard to completely fill up your box in monster hunter and if that ever happened you'd definitely never have to worry about running out of materials. And as for warframe, a game where you don't have to craft new items that could be wasted every mission, has no resource cap. You find it, you keep it, simple. No counting stacks when you need to know how much you have.

At this point I'm rambling and many of you will have stopped reading, but essentially it boils down to this. SAVE THE WORLD REQUIRES FAR TOO MUCH FROM YOU IN ORDER TO HAVE FUN, THE COST OF FAILURE IS FAR TOO HIGH AND WE SHOULD GET MOST OF WHAT WE NEED FROM THE FUN PART OF THE GAME. tedious resource management, relentless mind-numbing farming, and constant fear of wasting what took you so long to gather all combine to create a game where the best way to do something...is to do nothing at all...

Some ideas I think would improve the experience:

1. FASTER RESOURCES (maybe tie to upgrade tree) Multiply resource gain, 10 herbs per plant etc, hundreds of material per object e.g tree, rock, car etc. Enemies also drop resources in much higher numbers.

2. REPURPOSE OUTLANDERS In a game about farming, just make all the characters good at farming, make outlanders better at something that helps complete the objective so I dont have to pray the archeolojess won't just ignore the objective and farm...yet again...

3. INVENTORY REWORK Backpack should only be for equipment/usables, reduce slots if necessary, but all resources should be uncapped on how much you can hold (or at least have very high cap) and it appears as one stack with a total number.

4. FAILURE AND TRAP REFUND (ON FAIL) your resources/quest progress/equipment durability will return to what they were before you started that mission. (ON VICTORY) Any traps you placed that have 70% durability and higher are returned to your inventory. (This isnt an important number, Its just the idea that your traps shouldn't be placed then wasted)

5. PROPER REWARD SCALING You can literally see how much each person has done after every mission, and it's infuriating seeing leeches with hundreds of score getting the same rewards as the people who built and or killed everything. The chest system should be more prominent, and be on a per player basis, getting a high enough score gives THAT player a better chest depending on the score and the better chests should give MUCH better rewards. So the people who do nothing get flimsy chest with little reward and the actual players get what they deserve, making leeching unviable.

6. FLUID DIFFICULTY SCALING Currently missions are either 1 player difficulty or 4 player. I think it would be better to replace this rigid system with a more versatile one. Just make every mission scale, join any mission alone and it should be easy enough to 1-man, with each player that joins, increase the enemy spawn count and level but also increase the reward at the same time, no matter what the mission, automatically. This would open up so many more nodes to be used as currently people only look at what rewards drop from 4-player missions, as they are generally the only ones worth the time, so you get a situation where people dont play for days because they're waiting for a 4-player mission, at their level, that drops the mats they wants, it all comes back to accessabiltiy, there are too many layers to finding a mission with the rewards you're looking for. You should be able to farm whatever material you want, whenever you want, with the relevant initial difficulty tied to that material of course.

I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH, THESE ARE JUST IDEAS! I won't pretend my ideas are the perfect solutions to these problems and they would definitely need balancing, they are mainly just something to point DEVS in the right direction. I just want to get people thinking on how to make the game more fun and accessible because It's currently closer to a job than a game. I just want changes to be made to incentivize actually playing the game and encourage creativity rather than punishing it. I just hope to enlighten the guys who so lovingly made this game that has so much potential so that they can make this game more fun for us and more profitable for them. But essentially the game needs a serious shift in the core gameplay, from preparation focused to action focused and also not punishing strangers for trying to work together...and failing sometimes. The challenge should be in the objectives and the gameplay not in the time it takes gather what is needed to prepare for them.

On a side note. War games and frostnite are things in the right direction, games modes that reward smart gameplay without the risk of losing everything at the drop of a hat, I'd love to see frostnite come back in some form as a permanent game mode, having to build using only what you find really captures the spirit of what this game is about!

Despite its glaring flaws, I still love this game to pieces and I just want people to enjoy playing it together and WANT to play it together, for our sake and the guys in the save the world team!

Thanks for reading!

TL;DR: Skew focus more towards active/action gameplay rather than farming/resource management, Reward active players and stop punishing creativity and failure, losing that time is already enough punishment, you dont need our mats to.

Edit: oops, not so short and simple, sorry!

Edit #2: Holy ****! Thanks for platinum! Its my first Reddit award and I truly appreciate the support!

Edit#3: Question. Can I trade this plat award to summon magyst?

Edit#4: I'm blown away by everyone's support on this post, I really hope all these awards let epic know how passionate we are about changing this game for the better, everyones ideas have been very helpful and constructive, I really hope epic see this and appreciate all your passion as much as I do!

Edit5#: Added another suggestion, Fluid difficulty.

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