I like it and want it, so you appear to be wrong.

@robincitin23

the experience system is unnecessary and doesn't add anything to the game

You're suffering from a severe case of, "everybody else likes what I like, and only what I like." It really should not be that hard to understand that other people like different things from you; can you not see the evidence of this right in front of your face in every facet of your life?

I like the Experience system in general, though I do have some qualms about the implementation of certain parts of it (the upgrades, essentially). Others seem to as well. So you're clearly incorrect that everybody thinks it adds nothing to the game. Perhaps you can think about this insight for a while and come up with some better game design ideas that are likely to appeal to more than the narrow group of people who have very nearly your exact same preferences.

the essence of the division is the dark zone

Again, if taken as a general statement, incorrect, no matter how often you repeat it. The essence of Division for you may be the dark zone, because you ignore other parts of the game, but I am not a fan of the dark zone and hardly ever go in there. (I didn't enter it at all in my first year of playing.) For me the essence of Division is the excellent game mechanics combined with an extremely sophisticated equipment system.

Again, you're going to be completely unable to give useful suggestions if you can't even imagine that other people have preferences different to yours, much less take them into account. You're basically doing the opposite of what a good game designer does.

I can actually go on like this for over a week, writing and giving ideas to make this game better, but why waste my time?

No, you can give game ideas to make this game more like you want it, while making it worse for many other players. You have the right suggestion here: please don't waste our time with that.

@n3mb0t For me just having another place to "level up" something and spend some resources is carrot enough. I'm easy that way; just seeing the numbers go up, even if I get little else from it, makes me feel all warm inside.

(I'm at Shepherd level 30 right now, too.)

@latenitedelight Your points about the external issues that make the current development team much less effective than the original one are dead on. The current team almost certainly much smaller, with a lot of detailed knowledge lost in original members who've been moved to other games.

Given what they have, I don't think they've done a bad job at all in the general direction. The Expertise system adds a whole lot of new stuff to progress via looting and shooting, and the new game mode seems to add an easier and more friendly way to pull people into 8-player sessions, which I hope will lead to more people doing raids once they get used to building 8-player groups.

Some of the things that change the design and balance are pretty worrisome, such as all that extra armour
and seemingly OP pulse. This makes me wonder if they've lost some critical knowledge about the current balance in the meta.

The armour thing is particularly difficult to deal with because it looks hard to test how new or inexperienced players deal with the massive change in the meta from the lv.1-30 campaign to lv.40 endgame.

• In the level 1-30 campaign the obvious way to go is to stack on as much armour as possible, with a somewhat less obvious choice being to go heavy on skill cores and use offensive skills. Damage buffs at the lower levels (excepting those from Brand gear) are so small relative to armour and skills that it's correct to ignore them.
• In the level 30 end game you can finally attempt with some success to do "red" builds, but they're still not nearly as powerful as they get later.
• In the level 40 endgame this all changes and red builds become something like 70% more effective in doing damage than the best ones from World Tier 5. (You go from +70% weapon damage to +115% weapon damage, with even more relative increase in critical hit damage etc.)

This makes playtesting pretty difficult, since ideally you want be using players who've got a reasonable amount of level 30 experience but are new to level 40. That's not just gamers off the street, who will be both overwhelmed by the breadth of options at level 40 and not be stuck with now-incorrect preconceptions and instincts from many hours in the lower levels. I don't see any obvious way around this.

Perhaps one thing that could be done would be to introduce some missions that train players by forcing them towards a particular meta, such as by making armour ineffective. (I've dealt with some new players reaching level 30 and 40 recently and, unsurprisingly, many of them simply do not know how to make good use of cover and avoid taking damage. I have to tell them to do a minimum-armour build, dial down the difficulty until they're at least barely surviving most of the time, and then practice from there.)

I'm sure that over the years there's been a million requests already for more loadout slots, but I wanted to point out that an apparent design goal of of the Expertise system is to get people to use a wider variety of gear, and the limited number of loadout slots works directly against this goal. I have a couple of suggestions for mitigating this.

One that looks fairly cheap is to move any of the character-specific stats involving interaction with other players to account-global stats. In particular, I'm thinking of Shepherd Rank, as that's the main thing that keeps me playing most of the time on my main character, rather than one of the alts. If I bumped an account-wide Shepherd Rank when responding to a call for backup I would feel free to use my alt characters a lot more often and that would effectively give me more loadouts to play with. (This would also make collecting resources easier since you could collect equipment on an unmerged character directly rather than transferring it through the stash for deconstruction. For me that's a good thing; you may have different opinions about that.)

The more obvious (and possibly more expensive) option is to increase the number of loadouts. There are obvious UI issues with just making that list longer which is possibly one reason it's not been done to date. I see two sub-options here, one of which might be cheaper than the other.

Moving to a hierarchical system where you have eight loadout groups (with names and icons selected by the user, as we do for loadouts now) each of which has eight loadouts associated with it, would allow expansion from 16 to 64 loadouts while making it even easier than it is currently to select a loadout slot to load or to which to save. This requires a decent bit of UI programming work, but seems to be the most flexible and have few if any side effects otherwise.

Another option would simply be to add more loadout slots in the current UI but sort them differently. A good start (even if no new slots are added) would be to have newly created loadout slots added to the top of the listing rather than the bottom; I reckon that most players are like me and tend to use their more recently created loadouts more often. Better I think would be to have any loadout slot moved to the top of the list when it's written; this would allow players even to easily move existing loadouts to the top of the list by loading it and immediately saving it again to the same slot. This allows user sorting of the loadout list in a somewhat awkward but still usable way. And I think having even just that would make a 32- or 64-slot loadout list somewhat usable, even if it were only single-level instead of hierarchical.

@robincitin23
I have no idea what you're talking about in your point 1.

Does it bother you that the dark area is what sets this lottery shooter apart from the rest?

How could it bother me when that's not what sets it apart? Plenty of other games have similar PvEvP systems.

If you're asking if the inclusion of the Dark Zone itself bothers me, no it doesn't. I approve of having it in the game, in fact, because clearly a reasonable number of players like it. (Unlike you, I don't want to deny players things they like just because I'm not particularly fond of them.)

the game is dead or you don't see it? , the ideas are not my personal tastes , it is reality

No, it's just dead to you. You are so disconnected from reality that when a bunch of people stand in front of you and say, "we like this feature," you refuse to believe that they exist. (Or imagine that they're lying about their own preferences. Or whatever.) Your "reality" is apparently not the real world.

Having now actually used this a bit, I prefer the old layout too, but mainly because it's just a lot less busy and so one can more easily read the text. Here there's the background image, other images and icons all over the place, lots of different fonts and sizes, etc. etc. and all this just distracts from what this site is supposed to be doing, letting you read what others write. It looks like the usual case of some people valuing how things look "in the shop" more than how it works when you actually take it home and use it.

BTW, your post is very difficult to read because for some reason you've put it into a scrolling box with each paragraph on a single line that must be scrolled left and right.

@oatiecrumble

my point is exotics are RNG based...

Well that point is wrong.

There are three projects a week that each guarantee you an Exotic, and each these can be done up to four times (once on each character). Season events also regularly hand out Exotics: getting just 60 stars for the current Reanimated event gives you two Exotics from the track plus five more from the store, and as long as you care to keep earning stars you can buy more. (It's not hard to reach 100-120 stars; a friend of mine who's a relatively new player had 110 by mid-week.)

Combine all that with the additional exotics you get from random drops and even a moderate player can probably be averaging a half dozen or more Exotics per week. If you get serious about it you can do a lot more.

It's nice that the game is offering something to serious Exotic collectors, and not just a little smidgen that's going to quickly run out. I don't chase after Exotics myself (I usually do just 3-6 of the above projects per week), yet I have over 100 Exotic components right now after spending a couple of hundred components to re-roll all my Exotic items to get near-perfect versions. I had no idea what I was going to do with all of them; now I've actually got something to spend them on and a reason to keep doing those projects.

@oatiecrumble I am not nitpicking, and if my interpretation of what I read ("it's entirely up to chance how many Exotic items you get") is wrong, then no, I don't know what you meant.

Yes there is the projects but i choose not to do them...

Well it's hardly the developers fault when they provide you with a way to get several Exotics a week and you won't do it.

i play open world as that is my playstyle, never been a fan of linear missions.

And yet you refuse even to do projects that can be done entirely in the open world.

To this day since launch of TD1 & TD2 i have been 99% solo....so summit and the new zombie mode is not for me.

The Summit works perfectly fine solo. I'm not a big fan of The Summit myself, but I've done many dozens of floors solo without any problems beyond my own skill at playing. (And those are easily solved by turning down the difficulty level if I just want to clear floors.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "new zombie mode." Perhaps you're referring to the current (and not at all new) Global Event, Reanimate? That, in particular, works fine both solo and in the open world (in fact, I've done most of my Reanimate play solo in open world), so I don't see why it's such a problem for you.

You seem to be fairly ignorant of and uninterested in large swaths of the game. There's nothing wrong with playing only a small part of what game offers, but there is something wrong with complaining you can't do something in the game when you can, but just won't bother to learn how. And anyway, you ignore so much of the game that ignoring one tiny bit more (the very highest levels of Expertise upgrades) ought not be a big problem for you.

Incidentally, you can quite easily craft several Chatterbox Exotic SMGs per week with little time investment (easily more than twenty if you're willing to put in a few hours per day), and do this entirely solo in the open world. But given that you've rejected every possibility I've given you so far, I'd imagine you're going to reject that too, and rest unhappy until the developers just give you 250 Exotic components per week without even logging in to the game.

Thanks to the mod who moved this post to the correct place. I'd looked around to try to find a "forum feedback" section, but didn't see it.

This is actually another demonstration of the poor design. On the front page of Ubisoft General literally half the page I see in my browser is non-content bling, and half the content area is devoted to showing two massive boxes (each of which is about 40% empty space) for two of the six sub-forums. The eye is not guided to the dots and arrows that indicate you need click a scroll arrow twice to see the remaining four sub-forums. The six short hyperlinked sub-forum names could easily fit in half the area you devote to just two; what on earth is the advantage of hiding behind buttons the most important information on that page when it could be easily out front?

Apparently the phase 2 PTS has started, though I had no idea even though I follow the "The Division / The Division 2 - PTS / News & Announcements" forum here. (And I've just checked it; there's nothing there about the new PTS starting. It also seems not to contain the post I saw a while back giving details of what was in PTS 1.)

Please announce these things in the obvious place.

@xcel30 Thanks for linking to that post from the developers; I'd missed it.

The developers mention nothing about the global increase in player power with no corresponding difficulty increase anywhere except to note that some people felt it was too expensive to become OP. This is quite worrying; surely they cannot have missed the several long threads that cover this (derailed as they got at times). You mention that you

 ...don't personally don't think it will fix the power gap between builds....

Well, it will in a way, though I see it more as decreasing the specialised skills needed to run, e.g., low-armour builds. I'd love to hear the developers' analysis of this, particularly about raising the armour floor for all-red builds by 60-90%.

As for the other stuff:

some stats are still going to be dead investments like health, so it really feels like a dumb number go up scenario instead of an actual improvement ot the game

I think that buffing stuff like health is actually pretty good, since it's not directly buffing the most important stats. I think that the improvements would be better as a "dumb number go up scenario" if they would otherwise make the game difficulty balance even worse (i.e., make the hardest content easier). It's going to be a lot of difficult work to keep the game even at the current balance if they're going and giving the ability to characters to have substantial increases to damage output, armour and the like over what can be built now at the extremes, and I don't know if they have the time to really do a good job of that kind of rebalance.

Even if it's just a "number go up" thing, that still appeals to a lot of players (especially if there's some way for other players to see that number) and gives something more to do in the game. I think making the game easier for the players who play the most is not going to keep players playing, but do the opposite.

We reached a point where loot has become more material/currency for other upgrades than actual gear we wish to keep, i don't think that new functionalities will expertise will freshen up looting experience and will just agravate people as loot is just trash to be used.

It's been there for a long time for the players who have played a lot, and that's a natural consequence of simply having collected so many of the good items in the game (and doing Recalibration and Optimization). I regularly deconstruct even god-rolls, as well as almost all of the "90th percentile stats" items I pick up because I've already picked up better in the last thousand hours of play. The only way I see around that is to start adding even more powerful gear to the game than the current god-rolls, and there again you blow up the balance and have the problem that you're then making the hardest end-game content easier.

The "grinding" related to expertise will be completely unbalanced, due veterans have stockpiles of items and will be able to bypass a lot of the grind,

I don't really see it, no. There is just isn't enough inventory and stash space to maintain huge stockpiles of trash items suitable for donation. I have enough difficulty keeping room just for my best gear for current and planned loadouts for four characters and a moderate pile of Named items to sell for cash to boost a new alt. (Those named items might be the one area where people will have a stash, as I do.) Most of the donations will just come from stuff I pick up, and that's where the people who play a lot and pick up a lot do have an advantage, but it's also something that anybody can start doing.

That said, I wouldn't object to somehow limiting the use of donations to increase Proficiency in order encourage people to play items rather than donate. I'd even be fine with removing the donations mechanism entirely. But if they want it there to encourage people to pick up stuff and bring it back to the Base of Operations, perhaps they could limit it to a certain number per day, or make the Proficiency you get from each item decrease as you donate more items to the same Proficiency group.

@noxious81

We're already pretty powerful agents – and after level 40 we get to level up Keener's watch.

Actually, Keener's watch is the least of it. Perhaps I noticed it more because I spent considerably more time than most playing the level 30 endgame, but there's a huge amount more relative power (i.e., ignoring the power gains from level differences) given to level 40 characters than to level 30, mainly due to attribute and mod buffs.

One obvious one is that the maximum weapon damage buff has gone from +9.9% to +15%; that alone can easily give 20-30% more total weapon damage output to an "all-red" build. But more subtle things affect this, too. Since the cap on CHC is 60%, but individual CHC buffs are bigger and the Česká brand has been added, players now spend relatively less of their build increasing CHC, freeing more of the build to increase CHD or other things, giving essentially a multiplier (more attributes in the build available for CHD or other things, and each of those attributes is higher). You'll really notice this if you compare level 30 and level 40 high-crit builds: you give up a lot more in the level 30 build to get your CHC up into the 55-60% range.

And then of course there's Optimization, making it considerably less work to have God rolls on all your gear.

To compensate for all of this they seem to have added a reasonable amount of inherent difficulty increase at level 40. (You can see this fairly easily if you take a level 40 character back into level 30 endgame (World Tier 5) Heroic missions via grouping; they're noticeably easier than the same missions at level 40.

So as long as we are not getting new, harder content or difficulties, additional power supplied should at least limited or hard to achieve to not break the current game balance.

Precisely.

And we need to keep in mind that we're not likely to get more difficulty. It's pretty hard to add; Legendary has already attracted plenty of justified complaints about simply adding sponge. (Some people enjoy that; many don't. I don't find it particularly enjoyable, but better than not having additional difficulty at all.) Once you've achieved a game balance, adding difficulty is not as simple as just turning a [censored]; it's much easier to provide difficulty by having a weak player than it is via strong enemies.

@suspiciouspixel

How the hell do you know what my intention is for this game?

I try to work that out from what you say. But I'm not stating what you want from the game: I'm stating what the developers appear to be aiming for by looking at what they do and using standard principles of game design that the developers are clearly well aware of.

I think the whole expertise system is unnecessary, it doesn't add anything to the game in terms of "meaningful" content especially when NPCS aren't getting any stronger and there isn't a difficulty being added higher than Legendary to counter the power creep players are gaining. 

That's a fair opinion, and one the developers are trying to accommodate. They've not changed the game difficulty balance, so Expertise upgrades are not necessary to continue to playing the game as-is. What Expertise gives you is not a necessary path to the power required to be able to complete game objectives at the hardest level, but merely something to do that gives you some sort of "progress," in this case Expertise levels increasing and (unnecessary, even potentially harmful to game balance) upgrades. Increasing Expertise levels alone, independent of the upgrades, will appeal to some people; upgrading their characters will appeal to more. Even the pair of these will not add appeal for everyone (including you, apparently) which is unfortunate but expected: not everybody will want to do everything available in the game. But developers do what they can to add reasons to play the game for those who have already been playing a long time; doing this for many players, though not all, is still an improvement.

I've said before I think some of the material requirements are high in it's current form but don't mind the grind.

So we seem to be in rough agreement here, then, so long as your understanding is that though Expertise doesn't appeal to you it does add something to the game for some not-insignificant number of players and that it's worthwhile doing that, even if imperfectly.

@TxDieselKid

For you to imply your opinion as what the devs intend, and to down play the numbers of people who don't think like you within the playerbase is ludicrous.

I am not clear what you mean by "imply [my] opinion." I'm not "implying" anything, I'm coming right out and saying that the developers designing these changes are trying to achieve particular aims with them, and that based on the changes we all can see and the standard principles of game design that are widely known and documented, they are what I stated for the various systems. If you disagree you are free to present what you think their goals are and support this. If you think that the developers don't have a goal with these changes (i.e. are basically complete idiots with no understanding of game design), you could present that argument, too. But being unable to work out the general goals from what the developers present would probably say more about your lack of understanding of basic game design than anything about the developers.

People play the same game for different reasons.

I am well aware of that, as you would know if you read my posts where I explicitly say that, over and over again.

For you to imply that your reasons are more popular and along the lines of what the devs intend....

These are two different things. I don't know that that what the devs do will be considered "more popular" at the conscious level, i.e., when looking at what people think they want. I do believe that they will be "more popular" at the level of what keeps people playing more. The difference between the two is that often people with a poor understanding of game design don't actually know that what keeps people playing is making it hard for them to get what they desire.

...is an extremely closed minded way of thinking.

I'm quite open to other ideas on this, but most of the major disagreements with me I've seen presented so far have a) ignored standard and well accepted principles of game design, b) ignored the preferences of any players not exactly the same as their own, and c) not offered any other opinion of the higher-level goals of the game developers. Feel free to present your own theory if you like, taking all the above into account, and I'll take it seriously. But if you're going to come out with theories such as "no player will want to upgrade anything but his one favourite loadout," "players will completely ignore expertise unless they can realistically upgrade everything to the maximum possible in a short time," (both of which posters here have actually said) and "there's no problem with making the game significantly easier at the highest difficultly levels for many players" (an obvious consequence of some of the proposals here), you need to support those.

You're free to explain what you think the developers' goals are, or should be, and propose things with explanations of what the consequences would be for a wide variety of players, not just you. And you're free to contrast those with what I've said. The irony in saying, essentially, "I'm not going to address CategoryTheory's ideas because I think he's close-minded" is enormous.

@xcel30

Could be that i always felt that i was playing a shooter first in destiny 2 PVP, while division 2 i felt i was playing rock-paper-scissors-dynamite and spoilers everyone uses dynamite because it wins against everything else

That's not a bad description of Division 2, actually. One of the most prominent differences between Division 2 and most other shooters is the variety and complexity of loadouts, particularly the huge effects of interactions between multiple loadout items and skills. I don't know of another game where it's possible to take a dozen of the best items in the game, put them in a loadout, and end up with something worse than a dozen low-quality items that have better synergy.

Those kinds of interactions are already hard to balance for just PvE or PvP; when trying to balance for both, even with the assistance of "hacks" such as differing damage output or defence levels for PvP, it's going to get more difficult yet. I don't think that you can make a truly great PvP game under such conditions. It's certainly never going to compete well with games dedicated to PvP where the developers of those dedicated games simply don't have to deal with a whole host of balancing problems brought in by trying to make good PvE with the same system and items.

@suspiciouspixel

If expertise levelling was account wide and applied to "type" instead of individual items would the high material requirement be an issue for players?

The current costs would be an issue for me, not because they would be too high, but because they would be too low. Especially if a single upgrade applied to all of:

Gearset (Hunters Faith, Aces, True Patriot etc) includes mask, chest, holster, knee, gloves, backpack

Now the gear in a single typical gearset loadout would be upgraded for half of what it would have cost in the original developer's proposal (only three classes, instead of six items, to upgrade) and the problem of supplying more power without supplying more difficulty gets even worse.

When supplying upgrades, unless the intent is to make the game easier for pretty much everyone, the amount of additional power supplied must be heavily limited unless more difficulty is supplied as well. The current system provides lots of upgrade opportunity and thus lots of reason to continue playing by making the higher levels of upgrades very expensive; only the most dedicated players who focus on the upgrades will achieve maximum upgrade on even one item, and virtually nobody will fully upgrade more than a handful of items (though many can, and probably will, do smaller upgrades on a wide variety of items).

The main complaint here seems to from handful of posters (including you) who have a different goal from the developers: upgrade every item they own to the max. They seem not to consider whether they're actually aiming for the right goal, much less question whether their proposed goal is a good idea or not.

You really need to step back and state explicitly what your goal is here (it seems to be, "most non-casual players should be able to add +60% Total Armor to their loadouts) and explain why you think that's a good idea. Make sure you address the complaints from a number of experienced players that the game isn't hard enough, even if it's just to explain why the game will be better overall even if more people end up having that complaint.

I wondering if we can, just to help the devs reading this, stick to the topic of the Expertise system here and start a different thread for everybody's weapon preferences (and whatever game DutchLMB4ever is playing that has only one enemy at a time who is always next to cover)?

I think we've collected plenty enough evidence in this thread that DutchLMB4ever judgements on weapon quality are not canonical and it's not the case that anything he determines to be "trash" is (or should be) universally considered to be so.

@dutchlmb4ever

Or weapons that are trash compared to the 2 or 3 that are the best of their type....
Same with rifles (only the Classic M1A)

Yes, I used to think that the Classic M1A was far better than any of the other rifles, back when I was doing the level 1-30 campaign for the first time. I know better now because I've actually taken the time to learn where other rifles have advantages. (For example, faster-firing rifles are much better with Negotiator's Dilemma. You may think that you can't proc that effectively with a rifle, but you'd be correct only in that you can't do it; I can.)

Like I said, this guy WANTS to upgrade his build and therefore IS FORCED to play with everything else.

He can get plenty of upgrades by playing just the few builds he likes. If he wants upgrades beyond a certain point, he's going to have to learn to play things he doesn't think he'll like. That's the game. Learn to play or don't, but don't complain you can't get something just because you don't want to put in the effort. Those that can learn new things are rewarded, those that can't, aren't.

You just happen to be one of those chill guys that think:
I don't want to use every item, so I guess my expertise level stays at 10, who cares...

Quite the opposite: I don't mind being encouraged to use items I'd previously ignored, and I fully intend to get my Expertise Level up to the max.

@au_nexus691

I feel this change will ne the nail in the coffin for the PvP....

Well, some would disagree. They'd say that nail went into the coffin a long time ago, and no longer beat the dead horse inside that coffin.

...and once heartland comes out the playerbase will migrate over to it if it's what we all hope it to be

You mean what's left of the player base that prioritises PvP over PvE? It could well happen and, if so, power to them! (As well as to the PvP-lovers who already get their PvP needs from different games that do better PvP.)

I don't bedgrudge the resources put into PvP in Division 2; it is a moderately interesting side dish for the main course, and even I wander into the Dark Zone from time to time. But I think that the developers are correct to make their main focus the PvE part of the game, where they've got one of the best things going in the business. PvP could easily turn into a time sink that hurts PvE and yet still doesn't make PvP as good as competing PvP systems.

@oatiecrumble

You summed it up by saying "It's rare for you"...

That's not a correct summary. The correct summary is, "It's rare for you because of the way you choose to play."

....and that is why i have a problem, they are rare for me and when it comes to exotics RNG is not on my side....so just because you seem to get lots of them in the open world does not mean it applies to everyone, why i don't know neither do you.

Again, incorrect,. I do know why, and I've explained it to you several times.

Reason i mentioned the SHD requisition is well, because it's pretty much the only exclusive open world weekly....

It's not exclusive to open world, it's just as easily (probably more easily) done in the open world than in missions.

I did give you another thing you can do nearly daily that can be done only in the open world, and as usual, you've ignored that.

Both of those have very little RNG involved. I also expect you're not doing the one biggest thing to increase your open world RNG chances of an Exotic drop (opening faction crates), but I mention this mainly just for others, since you seem intent on refusing any advice I give you.

TLDR: me having a lot more exotic components than you in about half the playtime is not due to chance or RNG. (RNG doesn't even differ between two players such a large number of events, or it's not a statistically random number generator.) It's due to me playing in a way to increase the number of exotic components I get and you not doing so.