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Factions - Factions need to be better than what they are now. Sure, anyone could paint themselves purple and call themselves a Marik, but even that is not enough. What factions are now is just eye-candy on the forums. I wouldn't mind that but in the game that means little. There is no reason to be in a faction, even if you can muster up the excuse that you love the faction due to the books it still doesn't add that much of an incentive. The factions need to have rivalries and fanfare to make people want to go out and try that faction. They have to be unique.
One thing you could do is give us some faction NPCs as portraits. This would replace the old boring lore text of the faction and actually make it believable as if we we talking to an employer. HBS Battletech did this and it felt like we were mercenaries. CW Phase 2 did this to a point, but with no portrait. Just give us a notable personality like this:
Give them the Captain Adam treatment and put them in the FP screen. Even if you can't add voice actors/actresses, then text is good enough.
To make factions more unique give the command voices different dialogues based on what faction the player is with. For example, the player is with House Steiner so the dialogue would go like this for skirmish: "Soldiers to House Steiner Command, the Archon wants you to sweep any patrols you find. Good luck." If you were with Clan Smoke Jaguar, then you would hear something like this: "Warriors to Smoke Jaguar Command, wipe out these barbarians with the fury of the Jaguar! Show no mercy."
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Rewards - The rewards we have now are lackluster and boring. Getting cockpit Items as rewards are pretty bland and uninteresting. Instead add in some faction colors, decals, faction mechs associated with that faction. That would certainly get a rise out of people. Imagine playing Clan Ghost Bear only to unlock the Ghost Bear Decal, then colors, then later on a Kodiak. For every rank a player progresses a new reward would be offered. Now if a new player wanted to bypass this with paying for real money, fine, but it never hurts to encourage new players or returning players with free stuff.
Rivalry Bonus - Every Faction has hatred towards each other, Davion hates Liao, Steiner hates Marik, Wolf hates Jade Falcon. Let players who kill their neighbors receive bonuses in XP, Loyality points, and so on for doing so.
Unit Coffers - I really think that the unit coffer need a better purpose. Taxing units is a poor way to use the system. If you are going to do that, than at least let the money being taxed go to the player I am hiring. Maybe give us something more like paying for our own colorable dropship or a customizable unit banner we can put on a planet. Anything better than unit taxing.
Heck, I'd even pay for coffer stuff like this.
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Miscellaneous Stuff:
Faction Dropships - It would be nice if dropships had different colors depending on the attacker and defenders of the world. It makes sense because you are using their assets to travel on. For example on scouting on behalf on House Kurita, you manage to extract, only to see a red colored dropship with the Kurita logo firing at your enemies. Or imagine if you were a ghost bear player, and you had a white and light blue colored dropship covering your escape. HBS BattleTech also did this with their dropships showing different colors for extraction. So for faction dropships, just use the colors from the Resistance and Clan Wave II packs.
So please, PGI use the rich resources you have at hand from factions to personalities, to rivalres, etc. Use Sarna.net if you have to.
Edited by Will9761, 03 August 2018 - 04:28 PM.
