Good for you chadz. You are absolutely right, the changes are good and you still have my undying faith and support.
I have been enjoying cRPG massively in the last two months. During my recent vacation the second half of december, i exceeded 40 hours per week, i think.
Now, you must understand, playing the game from my perspective is a quite different from most players, because i am a Merc and my main character was indeed 40+ for quite a while now. To add to that potent mix i've been doing tactics: i've been trying to get teams to organize and try different simple strategies together to encourage teamplay.
Honestly, this whole tactics thing started with my desire to win more rounds. But as time passed i started to realize that it's insanely fun and very, very satsifying to lead the troops and actually get good results! In the beginning, the feedback has been mixed. Some players disagreed with my attempts to play tactics together, especially at the beginning... but lately it seems the community has gotten used to it.
So, as a decked out tincan on an armored horse, leading the troops has been fantastic. It's been the main reason why i play so much.
But i totally agree with your analysis. The game was all about getting to level 40 and characters really only became usable after like level 25 or maybe 30.... and you still often were at a serious disadvantage until you got to 35 or even 40, making the game a bit of a grindfest.
When the .200 patch came, at first i was a bit shocked at how radical the changes were. But soon i was all exited about the repair costs. It forced me to rethink my gear choices... every round! Did i dare to use my good stuff? How confident was i that i could make our team win this round? Did i dare to gamble and risk paying 10k or more repair costs?
So cRPG was all new and exiting again. Tactics was on a low simmer for a while, becauase people need time to settle down and get used to the new system... but at least i really felt challenged once more!
Then the .201 patch came and winning the round didn't matter anymore: gear decays anyway and so rethinking my gear and the 'gambling' aspect vanished.
However: you did add the ingame voice commands! Thank you for that. They are great! My team now uses those a lot. I remember a scene where i run up a hill, plant the flag and from various players in my team the 'Hold this position' voice command sounded. Great stuff! It really works and helps the tactics aspect of the game.
Hopefully you can find a way to change the repair system back, so winning a round means no repair costs. Or maybe winning a round minimizes repair costs somewhat. Other than that, i'm really looking forward to getting back to my old game of playing mr. commander and trying to get all those random people to play as a team. It's been great fun and still is.
Anyhoo, i really like all the work you've been doing on cRPG and fully support your choices. You are right to change it. It's your mod!
Keep up the good work, don't listen to all the whiners too much and know that we support your choices and love your mod.
P.S.: Personally, i still think you should get some sort of a salary from the community and i'd love to see more people donate. Or maybe not a salary, but maybe you can take out a small percentage of the donations to buy yourself a decent pc and pay for the heating costs at your place. You deserve it.
P.P.S.: Looking at Thomek's post suggesting to split cRPG servers into different 'tiers'. No! Don't split. The great thing about cRPG is that every round you play against a mixed bag of players. Newbies, pro's, highlevels and lowlevels thrown into a big brawl. Keep it that way. I like that.