I think now, at a time when morale seems rather low, some focus should be on what I would call the "easy wins". I don't mean they're necessarily "easy to develop" but that they're QoL additions and tweaks that are not that deep functionally but add a lot in terms of player sentiment towards the gameplay when taken as a holistic view of the game.
Recently, we got the ability to decouple secondary interact from weapon swap on controller binds... something that had been requested since basically year one (or after the introduction of barrels 2.0 anyway). Similarly, we also got the [optional] ability to see our health and ammo now on voyage banner screens. Again, this was something that had been requested since the early years.
These are only two examples of QoL additions that have been requested multiple times over the last 8 years. There are many, many more that keep popping up regularly.
To name just a few:
- Clothing presets (this is one we've been told has been on the whiteboard for a very long time)
- Weapon skin favouriting, hiding, and preset loadouts
- Pet interaction prompt disabling
- Sitting emotes (edit: clarification... this means emotes you use when you are already sitting, so you're not just sitting there doing nothing)
- Fishing while sitting
- Fixing the RNG of the merchant crate requisition voyages (bottles)
- Direct-linking of unlockable items in stores with their corresponding commendation(s)
Of course, I'm not saying you can build an entire season around these, but I do think adding a couple of these or similar long-requested QoL features every month or so would go a long way to making it feel like the game is actually improving... and that Rare is considering the actual moment-to-moment experience of players engaging with the game.
(I know some will mention "hitreg" and, while I do think improvements there would be welcome, I don't personally believe it will ever be great. I've said as much for the last 8 years. The game was never built to be a competitive FPS. I believe it's an underlying issue with the networking code, which is also responsible for the supplies not appearing problem. At least they have made some QoL improvements with the introduction of server-side authenticated hitmarkers.)
