[SUGGESTION] My Xonotic suggestions!

8. Idea:
The ability to switch firing modes (manual, semi-automatic and auto) on the machine gun, hagar and various other guns.
Reason:
It would spice-up the gameplay and would add variety.

Actually I am not sure this would benefit the gameplay. We have primary fire and secondary fire for each weapon, if we start adding manual/semi-automatic/automatic fire modes to weapons those would end up with six fire modes (primary and secondary each in 3 different versions...). I don't know about anyone else, but if I would be new to this game and would be looking for fast paced arcade style action, it would be far too complicated to me if I'd see I can fire one of many weapons in six different ways.

Apart from that, adding those fire modes would need some justification for their existence, some characteristic strength in a particular situation. It cannot be that one firemode is the best and is always used. What would be the point for the other ones then? So we'd have to really really carefully work out a balance for those fire modes, that in turn needs to be balanced against the other weapons.

Last but not least we'd have to have one button for each fire mode, as cycling through the fire modes would be too slow for this game imho. I wouldn't even have enough space around my fingers anymore...

9. Idea:
The possibility to bind the action of firing the laser weapon to a button on the keyboard.
Reason:
This would make jumping up high and increasing your speed while bunny hopping a lot easier, without the need to manually select the weapon and press fire.

Interesting idea, but that would make the laser an off-hand weapon that could be used always, even together with other weapons. That way it would completely change the current weapon balance, as the laser actually still is a weapon by itself that can kill a player (trust me ). A solution might be to turn of the laser impact on other players if used off-hand, but then it would start to get confusing again...

And again, we already have to be careful about additional keys to be used, since you need to bind your weapons to keys and this already takes up a lot of space on the keyboard.

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I don't mean to bash at those two ideas, I only try to elaborately outline my concerns about their impact on the gameplay. I think you're presenting your ideas and outcomes in a very good way and would appreciate if you'd keep them coming, don't let me discourage you :o)

About the other ideas you had I am personally rather indifferent, some things would sure be nice to have (like better or multiple map pictures for the voting screen) but nothing I am really missing from the game.

Edit: coming to think of it we could have multiple pictures for each map in the voting screen that change depending on the position of the mouse over the picture - like if you have it on the left area of the picture you see pic1, if you move the mouse to the center of the picture, you see pic2, and if you move it to the right area of the picture you see pic3. But again this would be a cool gimmick that would be nice to have but nothing I'd really miss from the game.