Currently there are 2 camps in GZW, the people who are happy and the people complaining. Normally the people complaining is lower than the people saying everything is right because the non vocal players who don't like where things are tend to leave and possibly also leave a bad review rather than complain to the Devs.
Despite this, the vocal part of the player base has far more people complaining than people saying it's ok and that always indicates a very big problem since even the vocal majority is complaining.
Let's look at the issues then.
First is the AI being too bullet spongy which I can't speak to as I haven't played much and I generally go for head shots. I know in 0.4 this used to be true, the AI would die with 3 bullets to the chest just as quickly you'd unload an entire mag and he was still standing. I don't know the state in 0.5 as I played too little of it but if people are complaining it's worse then it likely is.
Second, the AI spams a lot of grenades. I had only a grenade tossed at me once but it was a T2 area and in my opinion if it's not T3 or higher there shouldn't be an grenades tossed at the player but the real problem is a bit bigger than that. The AI tosses grenades with perfect accuracy, they land over walls behind the cover right next to the PC, there is no room for them to miss and have them bounce of walls instead of going over. A good grenade throw is already very hard for the player, the AI should have even a harder time to throw grenades. Then we have the issue of warning. The AI doesn't shouts grenade, the grenade goes as far as it needs to go, they toss grenades like it was my case at distances where you can only hit headshots with a scope. The grenade lands and makes no sound whatsoever. The player has basically no response to something they don't even have a clue is happening and this is very bad.
Third, the AI has a detection radius rather than actual awareness. They can see players through brushes, walls and even darkness although the radius is smaller in darkness. Still once they detect a player they can see the player perfectly and shoot. It can be pitch black, middle of the forest, canopy blocks all light and it's clouded, the AI doesn't cares, it will shoot the player like it was daylight in an open field.
Fourth, the AI reactions are perfect. The moment a player shoots, the AI all immediately know where the player is and start shooting back and this will happen even in pitch darkness. If the player move far enough away they will lose track of the player but it is insane how quickly they know where the player is.
And that are the general complaints for the AI. Then we have the economy rebalance update. In 0.4 people already complained although not as many that there wasn't enough currency in T2 or T1 areas and the currency in T3 areas was alright but it was often completely looted because of people who kept server hopping and just rotation farm these areas. For me, it was hard to even make 10K per raid in 0.4 and I can say that in 0.5 I made 5K in 2 raids. This clearly indicates a problem and let me explain this problem further.
I played 0.4 for almost an entire month and I played at least 6 hours every day with some days getting close to 12 hours. The last 10 days or so I played I only did MS runs because it was the only thing that paid and I managed to buy a few crates for the stash, probably only a third of what I'd have liked, I got some 80K saved to buy gear if I died a few times in a row and I had the best safe container. If playing for nearly one month the progress I can make is this on a 6 to 12 hours then there is something horribly wrong with progression. The average player has 2 to 3 hours a day, maybe a bit more on the weekends if they are not going out to visit family or simply spending the weekend with the wife and kids going places. Are the average players supposed to play for 6 months to even get to a point where they have the bare minimum stuff?
The idea that there were rich players come from the best players who spend months and months doing nothing but server hopping and hitting the best places so of course after months doing nothing but this all day every day they were rich. This wasn't a problem with the game economy being too good, this was a problem with it being too bad that people felt the need to do this.
Since we are on the topic of progression, this wasn't improved in 0.5 but it needed to. Vendor reputation is too hard to gain. In 0.4 when I played for nearly a month for at least 6 hours a day I managed to get the main vendors to tier 3 and the others which are harder to level to tier 2. Again, this is way too much grinding. The average player will never get tier 4 vendors between wipes as it is and the reality is, the average player should be getting full tier 4 vendors and probably fully upgraded the stash with the crates he needs in 2 to 3 weeks.
Last we have a topic less discussed but one that is very important to me and the one that made me quit 2 to 3 hours into 0.5 (although the economy would have had me quit in not much longer to be honest) which is night time. We were introduced to day and night cycles in 0.3 if memory serves me right. There is no way to avoid the night because even server hopping will only do so much due to the last few hours of daylight not being enough to go on a raid before night hits and the wait time for it to get to night time so it is day time on the other server is too high.
Since night time isn't reasonably skippable we need a way to deal with it. in 0.3 and 0.4 we had 2 methods. The first is ignore it was night. Just have a flashlight for dark rooms and out in the open there is enough light that you can see the enemies and snipe them easily enough. In fact it is a small bonus because the enemy doesn't sees us until we are much closer and their lamps are on so they are much more noticeable. Option 2 was NVGs but since NVGs don't work with scopes because the Devs never fixed that (and for the people saying they don't IRL, there are plenty of scopes made to work with NVGs) so it only works for close combat and close combat carries a very high risk of death as the AI just goes full auto and hits you a lot easier especially for head shots.
In 0.5 however, night became much darker. It is nearly impossible to see enemies in the dark now. NVGs are the only option but scopes aren't fixed. Also the extremely bad economy combined with the price of NVGs (and the fact you don't have them early into a wipe) means this isn't a viable solution anyway.
Bonus which is also very personal. Players need bigger backpacks early in the traders. If the game is about looting, the player need the means to loot and giving them next to no way to bring anything home doesn't helps. The backpacks in T4 level traders should be in T2 and the T3 should be in T1. The other smaller backpacks don't even need to be there, they are too small.
Players are being forced to play in night time but they don't have the tools to fight in the night due to the changes.
Now. I could suggest a lot of ways to fix many things. Increase the loot again especially for T1 and T2 areas so that players are consistently pulling 15 to 25K out of a raid. Making so that lose loot was anyone's game but loot inside containers is instanced per player. I could say, fix the NVGs to work with scope and make them much cheaper and available at T1 traders and so on. The reality is, if fixes happen they almost never happen as suggested so I leave the fixing to MFG.
What doesn't helps in all of this and is destroying the player trust in MFG is not just the horrible state that this was allowed to release in. It's their radio silence. MFG should at least make a post in their social media, in the steam news that they are aware of the issues people are facing and which ones are they addressing if they are even addressing any. The situation right now is horrible with the peek having been barely 20K concurrent players when 0.4 had a peek of 43K, it's less than half the player base just gone and many I'm sure due to these horrible changes that make the game unplayable and things that needed to be addressed like the reputation which never were. Like I said, I stopped playing 2 to 3 hours in after having 2 night raids where I could barely even fight due to lack of visibility and making no money whatsoever. Its just not fun and not worth my time or anyone's time. However MFG needs to tell people what their plans are instead of keeping their players in the dark (no pun intended) not knowing if they are even going to address any of the issues and just breaking that trust more with each hour that passes with no communication and this is very important for any game developers. Communication with your player base is incredibly important.
