Money rewards can snowball too hard

The more kills you get, the more money you can spend on gear. Strong players who get more kills get more gear to get more kills. Meanwhile, weaker players who hang back or spend a lot of time being dead struggle to afford the equipment that would help them be more effective teammates.

In my lobby, I routinely had the situation that I had 4k+ and nothing to spend it on, while my teammate was complaining that he couldn’t afford stuff. The problem, of course, was that I was getting way more kills than him, but what was I gonna do, stand still and let him kill the enemies? This bizarrely created a situation where he felt bad for being bad at the game, I felt bad for being good at the game, and both of us were left unsatisfied even though we won the run.

The dead drop system addresses this a little bit, you’ll almost always earn at least 1k and the drop will almost always give you something to make your gameplay more interesting and easier, but sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s no replacement for a proper way to help out your teammates. It’s really unfortunate that carrying your team in this game also means denying them the opportunity to have good equipment and participate in the mission properly, despite their lower skill level.

Some may say “git gud” to this, but I think in a PvE game letting teammates help each other out is more important than strictly rewarding good players and punishing bad players.

Some suggestions for how to address this:

• Let players send each other money, maybe with reduced efficiency (I send 1000 and you only get 800)

• Let players pay for each others’ dead drops

• Let players drop and pick up weapons in-game (I give you my AK and only play with my pistol)

• Introduce a wealth limit. All money earned by a player who already has X money (something high like 4000) is evenly distributed among players who have less money than that. Or maybe it could even be weighted so the players with the least money get a bigger share.