I would start with the forums.
A better setup for ease of discussion. Right now it is very easy to lose anything that isn’t the current divisive thread. I would make people have to link their in-game accounts to their forum accounts so we can get rid of the problems we have had with people making many different accounts to mess with folks. Anyone who’s account isn’t linked would not be able to post in anything other than general chat so they can still ask questions about the game, though they can still see all the threads. This stops people from creating troll accounts without spending real-life money. It also helps keep people honest because we know who they are in-game. Maybe cut down on the mudslinging from folks.
Then I would start with the basic skill system. I’ll edit this post in a second with what I already had sent to a few people.
Skill system change ideas:
Primary stats - free point every level up to level 50 or something like that. Only for the stats. At level 50 everyone would have the same stat points. It would help create a baseline for armour or the hunting classes that are to follow while still showing people progression as they learned the game. It would also allow you all to tune new combat and planet experiences (t6+) with a baseline everyone has. (Or just upgrade everyone’s stats every 5 levels until they hit 50, lots of ways to do it.)
Crafting and QoL skills - Much like our current skills work. Building, movement, exploration, farming, crafting of all sorts and whatnot. Turn each different activity into a skill tree and allow us to slowly work through them. Right now we just switch alts when we need a different crafting type, so there isn’t really a reason to stop us from doing them all on a single character. This also allows you to add in things like fishing and other non-combat activities while going deeper into their skills. A 10% increased output is great, but it’s also very bland. With us being able to get infinite skill points into QoL things, it wouldn’t be so much a choice of what I get, but rather what I find most important to get first.
Hunting skills - This is where our skill pages come in. Everyone starts off with a basic hunter skill page. It’s not anything special, just basic damage and sling bow skills. Then you create other classes that specialize that would allow people to choose if they want to be a healer, tank or ranged/melee DPS. It would allow you all to make combat much more entertaining and in-depth. This is where you can make the player make choices really matter. Do I want a sling bow that charges up or has a rapid-fire attack? Do I want to make it so my shots cause a .5m/s slow or do I want them to add 10% damage? Do I want to move .2 m/s faster in combat or add an additional 10 points in kinetic armour? Do you want healing bombs to heal more or do you want a healing aura when you are holding a staff? I think this could make for much more engaging combat decisions instead of just doing as much damage as possible and try not to get hit. Non-combat related decisions are bypassed by switching to alts, but combat decisions directly affect how you fight.
I think doing this would give the devs more leeway in being creative while adding new skills and talents. I currently like how it is, but I feel we are going to get very constrained as additional activities are added to the game and we won’t be able to get as creative as we could in a pure sandbox game. With both the combat and non-combat skills in the same trees, it makes it difficult to increase skill points to a tree without just giving everyone everything. I also feel like alts are a requirement for most players, and are considerably more useful than skill pages right now for early players. It feels pretty bad having 8 alts I never log onto now that were indispensable 8 months ago.