Just some suggestions from a semi-casual with 400+ hours, around 550+ HWM, played in 20+ wars, and almost all hometown invasions on my server. I like OPR and open world PVP but also like turning it off when I farm stuff and do side quests. Part of a good company with semi-casuals on a low-med pop server.
Open World / Faction PVP
This was supposed to be the game’s selling point and really fun when it happens (watch “shroud biggest war new world” video on Youtube). IMO this should be more heavily incentivized without having PVE players feeling left behind.
Probably the best way to do this would be to consolidate WHEN this happens on a server and boosting incentives during this.There could be a passive event that gets announced daily during a town’s siege window that reduces equipment damage on death and greatly boosts coin/token rewards for participants. This makes it more appealing (time-wise) than farming Great Cleave for tokens and concentrates PVPers to that time slot and area. Finally, add more rewards from open world PVP, but keep it so that it incentivizes other PVP modes (OPR or Wars). This could be PVP only consumables sold at Faction vendor or keys to OPR (see below).
Outpost Rush
This was a really good idea but is bare minimum in terms of implementation right now. Overhaul the backend for this and make it so all players from all same region servers can queue with each other. As literally Amazon where other MOBAs are hosted, this should be VERY doable for you. Have a matchmaking system for lower levels not just 60s. Have ELO, rankings, emotes, and badges you can show off in open world. Have a roadmap to have more MOBA QoL features and better UI.
(Keys) Unpopular opinion. But once this game mode has been polished with the above suggestions, this should be gated with maybe 3 free games / day then you’d have to craft a key that can be farmed/bought from open world PVP tokens.
Invasions
Overall, this is very fun and the most underrated game mode IMO. This is the game’s equivalent of raids in terms of effort and socialization, from my experience.
Even as a company trying their best every time, winning invasions should stay very hard, however consecutive losses and town downgrades should be less demoralizing. Difficulty could scale with how many times you’ve lost since the last time you won. E.g if a town has lost 3 invasions consecutively (on the base difficulty), the 4th one should have slightly reduced difficulty. If the 4th is won, it goes back to its original difficulty. If you’ve won consecutively, it gets harder. Also possibly scale the difficulty with the defending town tier upgrades. e.g Towns with T5 stations should get harder base difficulty invasions than towns with max T4 ones to keep motivation to help defend. As it is now, some towns with low crafting stations don’t get defended seriously (or just get AFKers) because the difficulty is the same as defending maxed out ones and the pay off of keeping ummaxed stations is not as important.
Lacking end game/HWM farming
idk what to tell you. don’t do it until they make it more fun. this is a weakness of the game that unless they totally shift away to how it works, or some other end game grind replaces it. it will be what potentially loses end-game players the most as it takes away from other content that should have been incentivized more by AGS rather than this mind-numbing grind. Improve AI, fix spawn bugs, or even have the areas PVP only, idk. This needs the biggest overhaul IMO.
Low population/dead servers
YMMV but even without merges, many modes of this game still work well and are fun even on peak 200-300 population servers with a healthy player base and community. A quick suggestion here is to unify the trading post with all servers on that World Set to liven up the economy, and if OPR queue does becomes game-wide even better. But yeah, definitely merge servers soon.
Expeditions
Once the key crafting difficulty is adjusted and mutations are implemented, this will be fine. Just need it to be incentivized repeating and to having 60s help carry over newbies. And fix the drop bugs that exist. Improve the AI and mob variety as well and we’re golden.
AGS Marketing
Where is the marketing for this game (besides the opening week Twitch drops event)? Youtube ads where? Can be marketable as “Ultimate MMORPG + MOBA experience” or some shit. Cherry picked gameplay PoV can sell itself. Fix the bugs, improve your game, add content, then re-advertise hard. Believe in this game, because if you don’t why the hell would we.
That’s it. Thanks for reading. inb4 dead game