Suggestions

[Ecko]

Ring of Death & Sudden Death

First of all i would like to say good job on making the ring of death a HP degen instead of a timer, this needed to be done long ago and will improve gameplay a lot. It will mostly impact the end of the match by making it harder for people to hide and avoid fights, but there is still room for improvement for sudden death and the ring.

I would suggest making the ring stop at the edge of middle platform on all game modes and advance towards the center during sudden death, allowing players time and room to make plays happen and fight their opponents. I am suggesting this because in matches stacked with top players a lot of players with big tames are going to make it to the end and it is going to be so crowded that people will barely even fit their tames in the small ring that FFA and 2v2 has to offer, which is going to be a problem now since the ring makes you lose HP.

A second suggestion would be adjusting sudden death timer based on number of players who made it to the end of the match, this being especially needed in 2v2 and 4v4 where the 10 minute timer was not even close to long enough for high ranked games. A timer based on player count could also save time in matches where only a few players make it to the end and then one of them tries to stall as long as possible because he has nothing or for some other reason. In case the number of players making it to the end is small enough, then the ring of death could even be set to go all the way to the center like it currently is in FFA and 2v2.

The last thing i have to say about sudden death is the removal of the draw from the game and replacing it with game ending event, such as a removal of all buildings + a giga drop or any other game ending combination of events that can guarantee a single winner.

Events

Making acid rain a sudden death only event. This is only my opinion and I don't feel too strongly about this, it's just that i never see acid rains during the match doing anything other than slowing players down a tiny bit or getting some of the inexperienced players killed. Another thing to mention about acid rain is that it should not be able to happen twice in a row (there should be some time between acid rains) during sudden death to give players some time to regenerate health and also shouldn't happen more than 2-3 times max during sudden death because that would just be ridiculous, everyone would be running around naked with low hp and any random arrow could kill even the strongest players. Other than this, i like acid rain during sudden death because it tests how prepared you are when it comes to extra armor sets, blood packs, healing brews and it also gives players with guns a chance to snipe others.

Hail to the king is one of the most loved and hated events in the game that has been discussed by many people. I have always thought that it should drop the same explosive for everyone and not random ones for the sake of balance. Recently i have come to realize that it sometimes prevents action because of the fear of IEDs and C4 which depending on graphics settings and placing can be hard to spot sometimes. To make hail to the king completely balanced and still encourage fighting would mean making it drop only grenades, but then where would the fun be in that? Another thing i thought about was making hail to the king drop explosives in the center of the platform, like the boxes in the beginning of the match, but that may come with it's own issues and I am not completely sure that it would be better like that. One thing that i know for sure though is that hail to the king is not needed in 4v4 and should probably be removed from that game mode, because there is already the super loot crate which offers explosives and encourages fighting for the control of the center.

Supply Drops

Right now the drops can be pretty damn ridiculous, the craziest one i have seen was 7 focals, 12 enduro, 38 shotgun ammo and lots of other stuff (compared to unlucky ones which only give basic resources + 2 chitin boots), which made that match a lot easier for my team. In my opinion drops should have the range of the item count in them narrowed down and they should be split into categories (for example soups/ammo/gear), meaning that you will no longer be able to get everything you would ever want from one single drop.

This could be taken one step further for competitive gameplay purposes and reducing the RNG aspect of the drops even more by making different colors for every type of drop. (exmaple: red for soups, yellow for ammo, blue for gear) I for one like it the way it is now with not knowing whats going to be in the box before i open it. I mentioned this idea just for the fact that it could possibly improve competitive gameplay.

Survivor League

I believe the survivor league tournament matches may be a bit too crowded and could use a reduction of the qualifying spots for the matches, but i don't feel too strongly about this. The only reason i am even mentioning it is because having less people will mean having a gap between the player spawns in the beginning. A gap in the player spawns offers players who want to go mid a sort of safer area that they can head to and drop down with less fear of encountering people with spears/bows while they only have what they grabbed in mid.

I suggest having multiple preset handpicked spawn patterns for each tournament out of which one will randomly be picked for the match. This way you can make sure to spread out viable end game tames across the entire map so that people heading to certain areas aren't simply out of luck and can't find any tames in the tournament match even though during practice they found rexes/spinos there 10 games or more in a row.

Another idea i had was giving players option to pick their spawn point at the start of the match depending on the place they qualified on (#1 player/team picks first, #2 second and so on), although i don't really care much about this and i prefer the gamble of not knowing where we spawn so that players have to be prepared for anything.

Other stuff

The way the shared experience works for dinos is very unintuitive and makes no sense to be the way it currently is. No new play can ever figure out how experience gain works for dinos unless they do tests on their own or find some post that explains it (which i tried looking for when writing this but didn't find any proper information at a quick first glance). Why should dinos only gain xp when you are riding them? Why should a ridden dino gain more xp when a tribe mate kills a wild dino than when the ridden dino gets the kill itself? How do these things affect gameplay and balance? I for one am at a loss when it comes to why these things are the way they are...