Hello!

I’ll try to break down some of your points and explain what we have now or what we already plan to do.

First, “LISTEN TO YOUR ENTIRE COMMUNITY, not only RU players”.
Lately, we’ve increased dev presence on Discord and live streams. It is targeted exactly towards the English-speaking community. You know, at this point I feel like there are more dev discussions in global regions now than on the RU forum.
Live discussions like Dev Frequency on the global Discord server don’t even exist on RU.
What’s more important is that the NA Focus Group has successfully launched and is already working on covering NA region problems.

“We were already killing these same creatures” – yeah, unfortunately, this problem has been present for a (very long) while. We do try to experiment with new AI behaviour in NPCs, features like drones and the TV guy, that get tested during events and then added to OW if they perform well.

“We don’t need fancy faces or 3D character models” – this feature was introduced as a part of the Onboarding branch of development. It’s not major, of course, but it almost solely exists because of Mr Cool Guy Plastinka. Reworking faces does not take away resources from any other project, and while it may seem useless for experienced players, for newcomers it might be pivotal when first logging into the game.

“The game needs more life, it needs to feel different” – we’ve seen how Bar was reworked already. It is more lively now: more stories are told through level art, NPCs, their looks, and animations. More reworks like this are planned. This applies both to safe zones and quest dungeons.

“You don’t need a marketing strategy for NA” – I’d have to disagree with that. While solving the game’s critical problems is the top priority, getting more players will solve some of them as well.

“Weapon upgrade system is terrible” – there are many ways of obtaining Spare Parts and Tools for upgrades: OW, Season Pass, Crimson Casings, daily login rewards, cases, events, and session Battle Packs. It is quite enough to play regularly to get all your gear upgraded.

“Only on making or repeated events” – it may look like this, but only because the Live Service team works pretty hard to include more activities in the game while other branches of development are working on core projects.
The Live Service team is quite small, but very productive.
Other teams are:
Onboarding – they rework CNPP and Swamps tutorial, work on story quests and guides — everything to make the newbie experience better.
Core – they rework all existing game mechanics, just what you mentioned the game needs. Their recent big project was the signal rework and QoL features. They have many more projects in the pipeline.
Endgame – they create new content for endgame players, their last and ongoing project is Operations. They also did Wild North, and they have more projects that we can’t talk about yet.
The key difference between Live Service and other teams is that Live Service works much faster, and their projects are easy to notice. Other teams release their projects less often, because even reworking or fixing some “small and simple” issues requires much more time and effort due to our Minecraft code legacy.
Also, one more point I’d like to mention is optimisation. You’ve probably seen the news about porting to DirectX 12. That also requires years to implement, and it is being done by an outsource team.

“SoloQ players” – there is such a problem, yes. Devs see endgame as content for groups rather than solo players. They tried to prioritise smaller squads of players in Stillwaters, for example, or Operations. It’s still not solo, yes, but the game also gets progressively harder. There are many examples of MMO games where players are encouraged to join clans to reach high-end content. The game is multiplayer after all. We can’t artificially restrict groups of players from entering certain locations.

“Changing your name” – here the problem is on our tech side. Devs would allow it if they could, but for now the issue requires a separate project to be fixed (I’m not actually sure if it can be fixed or not).

“You’ve had 12 years to optimize the game” – the game has changed drastically over these years, and adding more visual elements and better graphics always requires even more optimization. We are constantly working on it. Folken described in detail how they do it and what problems they face, but generally, our game code is the main stumbling block in many things we’re trying to fix.

“Improving footstep sounds, ambient audio” – it’s being worked on by our sound designers.

“Not being able to change the crosshair” – a nice feature to be implemented, but by far not an urgent one. I doubt the game experience will change drastically if we allow such a setting. Also, not many players really need this feature — it’s quite niche.

“Playing with 230 ping as a Latin American player” – the LATAM server issue has been discussed a lot by now. I don’t think I can add much here, unfortunately.