Okay, while I don't have any news most of you would care about I just heard something really interesting. For those of you who don't know about Wrel he is probably the 'leader' of the Planetside community so to speak. Well, now apparently he officially works at DBG. I strongly suspect he's part of the reason we got the leadership update in the first place, since he's been working 'behind the scenes' since November.
Basically I'm helping do whatever needs to be done. Burness shoulders a lot of the burden on the balance and construction stuff, so I'm able to help with that. Players Studio stuff getting processed, that's a big (easy, but time consuming) task to take care of. Designing new weapons, abilities, items and features, floating ideas and being able to speak with the team about how feasible they are/are not, helping plan for the future. I can potentially do anything that isn't code, UI, or art.
The perspective of a three year veteran is helpful for a number of reasons as well. The biggest one is just that, when you work on a game for a long time, you get really close to it and your vision narrows. So a "fresh set of eyes," is a good thing to have from time to time.
I won't be working with Daybreak forever, but I'm happy to help for as long as they need me.
So maybe we can expect a balance pass to occur soon. The devs also mentioned they were reskinning the old Annihilator to look better and to take less system resources, so maybe in the future we'll get even more diverse/better weapon models and textures as well? Maybe we'll even see ladder sights on rocket launchers some day.
Wrel has some pretty good ideas for the game, it's only a question of whether or not he can help implement them. People already complain about how bad the game runs and crashes, but the more complex you make a machine the more likely it is to break and it's hard to get around that.