1. Make it a veeeeeery long process to be able to get to top tier, in such a way that even is someone gets all his frames to top tier, it will take him some years.....and this SUCKS! You will lose casual players as they wont feel they are progressing in the game at all and infuriate active players as grinding will become law.
Yes this sucks indeed.
Long grinds reward only those who invest lots of time. Skill becomes less relevant (unless skill massively increases rewards) and progress becomes boring.
2. Make some sort of competitive. Make players compete in something, in order to make them want to get better gear and, after they got everything, to want to come back to the game and prove over and over they are the best.
Yes please.
One way you cound do this and NOT be PVP is kinda like a arena: 2 teams of 5 (or more) players take on..let's say a cat. 3 Kaiju. First team that kills it wins (reward, currency, maybe some decal etc). Could also make it a spectator "sport" have a arena filled with other players, maybe new players that can learn from the pros in the arena.
There could be tournaments and events and you dont have to recaliber the frames for PVP, as the players will fight a Kaiju.
MK said that there is no plan on making any instanced content at all and that it would be hard on the budged.
However, i do think that some kind of instanced content is almost a must have, in order to provide a certain challenge to coordinated groups of players.
If there was an arena like instance that hosts an event (like normal open world events) which starts hard and gets harder very fast, that might be easier to code than more complex instanced content.
There could be a leaderboard, based on rounds, kills or points.
Top groups (of the week and of the month) could get special currency for cosmetics, boosts, titles, or something like that.
Watching might be problematic, since multiple groups should be able to fight at the same time.
However, the arena could always show the fight of the most successful (currently competing) squad.
Content like that might cause a number of people to stay away from the War itself, but there are ways to solve this problem.
-make it too hard for most people
-limit it to a certain time (i.e. only open within x hours after event y -in the open world- happens)
-limit the number of max entries per player (within a week or a day)
I just dont want to get to a point in game and be like "well, that was fun, time to move to something else" and your attitude towards competitive kinda scares me...
If the game has a end, a point where players wont be able to progress at all, players will leave.
Now, this is my point of view and i hope that this wont even be a problem...but it might and i can see you guys are passionate about this game and i am too and dont want it to die 3 years after launch.
I see the same problem.
Simple open world war worked in Planetside 2 (to a certain degree), but it is PvP, which makes a huge difference to pure PvE.
There are achievements that unlock special items (which do not just look differently), there are multiple classes and vehicles to play, BUT STILL, the community is shrinking.
I was one of the players, but the game got boring.
Even if the war in Ember is dynamic, there has to be some kind of competition.
There has to be something that makes people want to get skilled and that makes skilled players want to try harder.
There has to be something that requires coordinated teamplay with a squad or an army.
Something that makes you play and communicate with others.
Many people stay in a game, because of army and friends.
I have played and left many games.
The games i played the longest, where those where i made friends and had an army (or where there was some kind of ranking).
In all of those games, coordinated teamplay and communication in squads/platoons were highly rewarded and sometimes even required.
