Aaaaand, the game is still dead.
For there to be any return to the populated days of 2238, your main priority should be to fix town control. This means removing fucking Mercs/Militia (because having 20 AI-controlled NPCs with lightning fast reaction times and the best weapons and stats in the game all pile on a player after he alerts the horde is not fun, it's all well and good if it's a player because it relies on his own reaction times and not an aimbot who can shoot you the nanosecond you appear into LoS with only 1 hex before you disappear behind a building again) and bringing back something closer to the old "time window" system. The way it is now is and always has been just blatantly broken, especially with that TC points shit.
Listen to my-, no, listen to all our advice, Manero's especially because what he wrote is almost exactly what the game needs right now, as well as maybe another wipe along with more changes, such as making random special encounters not refined to certain zones but spread over the whole world map (who the fuck thought this was a good idea in the first place, it's just like you WANTED people to be constantly farming them for Gauss Pistols, the best sniper weapon currently available in the game, in an area where no one would find it unless they had prior knowledge because it's off the routes between towns), of course you would probably need to make them a bit rarer in this case.
Silent Death needs to have functionality removed from grenades so one guy can't melt a group of 4 people who have just entered a zone in one sneak critical. This is an even worse problem than sneak bursting was, because it has the exact same end scene of a player dead in one hit, but this time it's multiple players and you can do it from the grenade's max range, just make it work with Single Shot pistols and you're good, that's all it really needs, with .223 and 14mm it would still be worth using without being overpowered.
Caravans, Patrols, Brotherhood Armor and etc. NEED to be added back in, as much as you may hate people "farming" for items, for whatever fucking reason (it's an MMO, farming is GOING to happen whether you like it or not, in some form or another), your game still severely lacks content so the last thing you should be doing is REMOVING things for players to do. It's the same as BioWare trying to get people to stop farming in The Old Republic, except, for how bad that game is, it probably has more to do in it than 2238. Stop removing stuff so you can add a different way to obtain the items later, you're meant to ADD the different way to obtain stuff and THEN remove the old way. The game is suffering majorly because you have ignored this problem.
You're not supposed to remove grinding from a game with PvP like the way you have done, it ensures that nobody except the highest tier groups will be able to get ANYWHERE in the game due to stunting their ability to obtain items. While people with access to town control lockers get richer by 1000 Drug items and 10000 ammo per day or whatever ridiculous number it was. The last time the game was populated it was still like the same 3-4 groups all vying for control, and that's all it will ever be if you keep this stupid system.
Don't get me wrong, since the last wipe the game has been drastically improved over the old versions, with the new perks system, and the ideas of making areas with Advanced Workbenches and such more PvP orientated, but any reason to play after you cap at 24 is gone, thanks to Solar or whoever is in charge of TC's apparent lack of fucks given about said feature. This update, as has been said, has seemingly come out of nowhere, it's an update for the sake of there being an update, a bunch of unrelated features that have taken several months to implement. If you want this game to survive you have to start listening to the people who actually give a shit about it, otherwise you may as well give up on it because at this point it's stuck on failing life support and is just waiting to die.
P.S. The Pancor Jackhammer Shotguns in general still SUCK MAJOR DICK AND YOU SHOULD FIX THEM. There has been like a bajillion threads on the subject, but Solar's max 16 range baby refuses to change. Going on about how much damage they do doesn't mean shit when you have to run 15 hexes into Minigun range just to use it, and it does worse damage than a Minigun at that range. Maybe you could play cover-shooter if this game had any semblance of a strategical element to it, but alas, it does not. Give them some fucking ammo variants, it's a small step towards making them useful.
