Hi BIS-Team,
I would appreciate a lot if you would take a look at the following features and consider them in a future update of ARMA3:
>>>> "SHOW CHAT/STATUS HISTORY"
Problem:
The list of chat lines / status lines in the left lower corner is quite short.
It happens quite often that you are just reading a chat info of your team mates or that you have written a long meaasge (over 3 lines)
but the message is immediately overwritten/replaced by new message or status information, e.g. like a 4-line status message telling that a player has been kicked due to missing ticket blabla...
So you are missing a lots of message you were not able to read completely, or you have to write your message again, to tell your team mates..
Solution: provide a HOT KEY / TOGGLE key "Show extended chat/status window", which will then
extend the list of messages on the left side of the screen from the top to bottom of the screen.
Alternatively: provide hotkeys you can PAGE UP / DOWN through chat/status messages
>>>> "MECHANISM of THROWING GRENADES - controlling the power"
Problem:
The power you can throw a grenade with is just 0/1 (0% / 100%).
This is preventing from a more realistic gameplay, e.g. throwing/dropping the grenade on/from top of a roof, balcony, etc...
Solution:
I have encountered in the game "Operation flashpoint" a very good meachnism for grenades.
Please take a look at the following video I have found, which describes the mechanism in detail.
youtube.com/watch?v=l1FAoQEyGcE
Shortly:
- 1-click with mouse button is 'releasing'/throwing the grenade (like today)
- Keeping the mouse button pressed for 0,5 sec. and then releasing the button will release the grenade with 20% of power, any 0,5 sec. more will incrase the power by 20%
So keeping the mouse button pressed 2,5 secs will throw the grenade with 100%, again...
- 'Cooking' of grenade should be supported as well, see video
>>>> "FLASHBANG GRENADE"
Problem:
- Missing -
Solution:
Provide an additional type of grenade: "FLASHBANG"
Features of that type of grenade are well known, see other games like CS
>>>> "MAP: DISPLAY NUMBER OF PLAYERS for EACH TEAM"
Problem: To find out if teams are WELL BALANCED, you have to count the number of 'RED' and 'BLUE' players in the list of all players (ctrl+p)
This is very time consuming and annyoing.
Solution:
Provide a counter for number of players for each team in MAP|PLAYERS section (same like list with ctrl+p)
Alternatively: My suggestion even is to display the number of players in each team constantly on the screen, can be in small letters in a corner,
like the FPS info provided by steam.
WHY? > because team balance is very important for team play and FUN, for both teams. So this 'indicator' should be visible for all anytime,
just to 'suggest' to any player to keep the team balance in mind and to switch teams, in case of missing balance.
>>>> "MAP: Simplifying the setting of COLOUR and SYMBOL of a text marker"
Problem:
For a text marker you can set different colours and symbols (good feature!)
However, setting those by (i think) SHIFT+ARROW or CTRL+ARROW is quite time consuming and annoying.
Solution:
When you open the small dialog for TEXT MARKERS by double-clicking on the map,
this small dialog could be extended by two options, one to select colour from a list of coloured squares (like WinWord)
and a list of available symbols.
Additionally: the COLOUR and SYMBOL used for the player's last text marker should be used as default for new markers.
Constraint: maybe the MAPs might get to colourful, if the colour will be so easy to set....
>>>> "LOBBY SCREEN: TEAM SELECTION (and player slot)"
Problem:
Teams are sometimes staffed unbalanced, because especially new/unexperiened players do not understand the way to select a team.
To select the RED and BLUE icons is not very intuitive and often not recognized as items you can click on.
Therefore players are just entered the lobby are then selecting a player slot and move on, without realizing that they could also select another team first
Solution:
The usability and awareness of a 'team-selection' should be improved. Should be an issue of 'visualisation' / user interface.
>>>> "LOBBY SCREEN: Option ENSURE TEAM BALANCE"
Problem:
Teams are sometimes staffed unbalanced, due to many reasons.
However, despite of already unbalanced teams, new players are sometimes still joining the team which already has significantly MORE players than the other one.
This is negative in terms of FUN and fairness, as well.
Solution:
Provide a "ENSURE TEAM BALANCE" optin, that can be turned ON/OFF server side by the server admin.
ON: means, that a joining player can only join a team with has MAXIMUM +20% of players thean the other team.
That would mean when team balance is like 20 vs. 24, a new player gets a meaasge "This team cannot be joined due to team balance, plase select other team", when he wants to join the 24-team.
Of course, approach has to be adjusted for games of lets say < 10 current players
Alternatively: instead of preventing the user to join the outnumbering team, he could only get a warning message concerning "team balance", however he would still be able to overrule and join the desired team.
Alternatively: instead of ON/OFF the server admin (host of the game) can set the %-value by his own (from 20% - 100%).
Thank you for your attention
Kind regards
Chris
P.S.: Guys, I appreciate your work, effort and passion so much, you are all doing an awesome job!!
I am an IT pro, so I know about software projects of this size :-o ..... just TY!!
