Payday 3 Needs To Change
Intro
Let me start off by saying that if you clicked on this article expecting another rant about how Star Brits pulled off the greatest heist of all with Payday 3, you'd be disappointed. To be completely honest. I haven't played the game much in the last few months, frankly because the developers keep making bad decisions left and right, releasing Legacy content that feels undercooked, which is also still broken to this day, and a new Heist that is borderline unplayable on the high difficulties because of its oppressive, narrow design paired with the worst enemy ever conceived in the series.
The techie, but I am getting too ahead of myself. I want to start by addressing the biggest problem that looms over this game, and if not solved quickly, it might bring an abrupt end to our whole story: the constant bleeding of players.
How to keep players engaged
I don't mean to sound like a redditor who constantly posts the low player count stats from Steam charts, but it is Bing how hard it is to find a public lobby in this game considering that it is a crossplatform game, and even with the release of their first big update, which brought us a new Heist, new weapons, and new cosmetics.
The fact that the player numbers spiked and then sank even lower than before is extremely concerning. The developers need to find a solution to keep their audience engaged, and not being a massive studio, they can't pump out content fast enough to meet the standards of today's live service competitors.
So that's why I, a quote-unquote YouTuber who uploads every 3 months and who has no experience in game development whatsoever, will share with you my plan to fix everything for those unaware. There are currently some unused cosmetics sitting in the game files, and rumor has it that they were supposed to come out with a microtransaction system using an in-game currency called payday credits.
If they haven't already done that, which I sincerely hope they have, I would scrap the v-bucks. Clone: The game's monetization model has already received enough criticism from the DLC prices. Start by releasing each outfit one by one every week, making them unlockable by completing a set amount of challenges, or if you want to make it a simple grind, make it one main challenge where the player has to secure a certain amount of loot bags each week.
For example, let's say next Tuesday they release the island slacker. And I'm not just saying that because it's cool and I want it without spending 10 bucks on it, but let's just say that it gets released; however, instead of being purchasable with C Stacks, you have to collect 100 loot bags in the span of a week.
This. I think, would give players the incentive to come back for even an hour or two each day to complete a fairly simple task for a neat. Reward. All right all right all right all right I can hear the clanging of the pitchforks already settling down. I don't want them to follow the trend of creating virtual FOMOs.
I've personally missed out on stuff like the Doom Slayer in Fortnite, and that's just something that I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life, which is not too good for this world. To accommodate everyone, once the weekly timer expires. I'll have the outfit release on the vendor tab purchasable with C stacks for a fairly high price so that in the future anyone can access it; they just might have to grind a little harder.
Doing this every week gives players a reason to come back to the game while we wait for the bigger stuff to get released. Keep interest in the game high and work efforts to a minimum since most cosmetics are simply ready to go live. Now that we have somewhat fixed how to keep people playing, we have to get a little more technical.
Weapon balance
Okay, yeah, because Pan is asking about weapon balance. I'll start by saying that I do appreciate them keeping us updated once in a while with developer streams. But the game has been out for almost 4 months now, and we still haven't seen any major weapon balance other than a self-inflicted damage reduction on the Mamba grenade launcher.
It's nice that they're finally buffing the reinfield sniper because that thing is ass. But seriously, no decrease in the insanely slow ad time and rechambering speed. Trust me when I say I've tried to find a way to make this unviable, but the weapon attachments that claim to decrease the targeting speed do absolutely nothing.
I only found some positive results by using the speed aim skills, but even with that, it still takes almost two seconds to take aim, shoot the next bullets, and aim again. It might not sound like a lot, but unless you have godlike aim, good luck chaining back-to-back perfect head shots against an army of SWAT units, ironically.
The best way to use the sniper is with a hip-fire-only build because of the reduced scope time. The obvious solution here is to reduce the overall time between each shot or to at least make it possible to rechamber the bullet while already scoped in going back to the announced Buffs. How come, in the shotgun category, out of the three guns, the Moscone is the one getting a I mean.
I appreciate that one of my favorite weapons is going to be even stronger, but it's sip fire; it's already good enough, especially when compared with the relevant skills. Meanwhile, the Reinfield shotgun gets severely outclassed in its own category in terms of overall damage and rate of fire. I get it; it's a starter shotgun, but I think it deserves some buffs on the bullet spread cocking speed or at least some small damage increase.
And don't get me started on the zip commando, the weakest SMG that, for all I know, shoots foam pellets. But don't worry; they're going to give it some love, whatever that means. Are they at least going to take it out to dinner first? As I said before. I am not a game developer, and I don't know how the Unreal Engine works on a technical level, but they've proven in the past that the major plus of having an always online experience means that they're capable of changing numbers without needing to push out an update; clearly, they know how to do it since they've done it so twice already to adjust CC prices.
So my question is, why can't they do it for weapon balance? I am not asking for a full rework on a gun that's on the performer, but even going through the least used weapons and giving them some love by increasing the damage numbers will make players want to give guns that haven't been viable on higher difficulties a shot if they want this game to deliver a live service experience. They should start by making it look like one but nothing, which compares to the worst implementation I've seen in any PVE.
Fixing the techie
In the game, you can run, but you can't hide. I see them drones firing, pet taste of this, hide and seek Now you see me. Now you don't underestimate a drone, all right?
