Difficulty – Time-to-kill is really only an issue so far as ammo capacity is concerned. I prefer the current NPC toughness a bit because it encourages organized team play and thoughtful use of skill. NPC lethality is the biggest single issue with current difficulty levels, especially heroic underground and DZ05-06 in the 231+ bracket. At these levels NPC lethality is just too frustrating and unforgiving.
Character Scaling – Non-optimized vs optimized players. I would be careful before normalizing gear and weapons too much. The character optimization process is one of the draws of the game.
Gear Score – Assigning Gear Score to weapons and equipment is ok. Transferring Gear Score to characters is useless and not informative. I recommend creating a composite score for characters that reflects firearms/toughness/skill power and then displaying that score instead of gear score. This will more accurately reflect character strength.
Directive and Target Intel – These need to be removed altogether. They serve no purpose other than introducing grind. They are just one more example of how the development team flips the finger at its player base. Show a little appreciation and restore goodwill in the community by removing these things.
Matchmaking – It is the biggest single issue that is limiting the longevity of TD. 1.2 introduced HVT/HRT but no means to matchmake specifically for that content. Why would you create content that you can’t matchmake for? 1.3 introduced the underground and splintered the community by the inability to matchmake between the open world and the DZ and the Underground. Further the players in the underground are unable to matchmake from within the mission in the event that a player gets disconnected and leaves the group. This causes players to have to abandon their underground games on heroic mode if a player gets disconnected. The bigger issue is that by introducing products that you cannot matchmake across Massive is fracturing the player base. Below some number of concurrent users TD will lose viability because of difficulties in matchmaking. If Massive continues to splinter the player base with each new content product then they will make it increasingly difficult to matchmake for any of the content.
Let me illustrate somewhat. Let’s just say TD has a maximum of 4000 concurrent users and Massive releases Underground. Now there 2 separate matchmaking pools of 2000 concurrent users. Then massive releases Survival. Now there are 3 separate matchmaking pools of 1333 concurrent users. In 2017 Massive releases Last Stand . Then there will be 4 separate matchmaking pools of 1000 concurrent users each. Add to this issue that the number of maximum concurrent users is shrinking all the time and you can easily see that by introducing new content without providing the ability to matchmake across all content with a single pool of players then Massive is actually hastening the demise of the community and erasing the investments that have already been made in TD.