1.) If I'm looking at someone's profile and want to buy them balls or perhaps I want to buy the driver they are using, I should be able to click on any piece of their equipment on their profile and have it take me directly to that product in the pro shop. We're just linking up some images here, so that shouldn't be too difficult.
2.) WGT (or name brand) range balls. White/Yellow balls with a big fat Red/Black stripe.
3.) A "Reset Grid" button on the putting aimer opposite of where the "unlock grid" button is now. This would "reset" the dots to their starting position. This can be accomplished using the directional arrow control now, but that involves a lot of extraneous mouse movement back and forth across the screen. That's time consuming when you need to read and re-read a certain spot multiple times.
4.) Turn down the volume a little on "That's a huge drive". It's significantly louder than any of your other sound bites.
5.) Adjustable drivers. They're all over the place nowadays. Players should have the ability to buy drivers that feature a customizable loft angle (adjustments only allowed pre-round).
6.) You're extremely stingy with the free stuff compared to other micro-transaction games. The only thing you get is XP for consecutive days played. That's not really rewarding. Other games I've seen are constantly giving away cheap freebies left and right. You should come up with some type of "daily task" system where you earn daily points for completing the tasks. As you reach certain milestones for the day you collect a cheapo freebie a little better than the prize before it (perhaps a 1hr XP boost, or a CC pass). Give people something to chase after every day and you give them a reason to come back every day because they know they'll miss out if they don't. The consecutive days XP bonus really isn't going to wow people into coming back every day.
My wife plays this ridiculously successful game called "League of Angels", and they are constantly giving out the freebies. Sure enough she and tons of others log in every single day to get 'em. Go check out that game, there's like 4 pages of goals/tasks for freebies. It's ridiculous and easy to see why they are so successful. People like free stuff, which leads to buying stuff, which leads to more free stuff and so is the circle of life.
7.) In Country Clubs, let us build our own mash-up courses (e.g. Best of Par 4) to play within the club. Perhaps the number of courses a CC can create can be dictated by club level. Perhaps a course build permit must be purchased by the club (bank coming soon!) before a course can be built. Customization would include custom tee placements per hole, pin placements per hole (when available, as in specifically selecting the pin you want), green speed (including decimal stimp speeds), fairway hardness (if you do this, I dunno how this isn't in the game yet) and whatever else there may be.
8.) Allow us to save CC tournament configurations. If you want to customize a 72 hole tournament, you're gonna be pickin' tees for a while. It would also help if the course scorecard (at least hole yardages) could be shown when you choose a tee, so tees can be selected intelligently rather than by random guess.
9.) Allow us to copy settings in CC tournaments from Round 1 into Round 2 and so forth. This would help to avoid the sometimes lengthy setup of long tournaments.
10.) Club shaft customizations. Maybe all future clubs come with a basic steel shaft, but upgrades can be purchased per club type (same as you buy them). Various better steel and graphite shafts would be available (each providing a slight boost to some part or parts of that club's stats). Clubs could also need to be re-gripped twice a year (let's not get ridiclous, no regripping every 2 weeks), with a range of grips available providing relevant, but slight boosts.
Perhaps the 3rd level graphite shaft requires "50 Graphite Tickets" and an "Equipment Upgrade Pass", or "250 Graphite Tickets" for a "Special Equipment Upgrade Pass" for the extra nice club shafts. Oh hey look, now we have stuff to earn for the daily tasks or we talked about earlier. Say, what, 250 daily points for an upgrade pass? What could you do to earn a graphite shaft ticket every day? Play (complete) a 2-player match play?
You see how this just builds upon itself?
11.) Sell "putter meter increments" instead of having to create
duplicate items (Nike M1/M2) just so they have different meter increments. So, for
example, maybe all future putters come with a standard set of increments of 15/30/60/120. We
would then purchase additional increments on our own to customize it. I
would personally supplement the above with 10ft, 45ft and 200ft
increments. That could be 3 more purchases out of me.
I know the last request is a bit of a task, but I think players will enjoy the ability to customize their putters (and aforementioned other goodies) at least to some degree. I've been waiting forever for a 10/30/45/60/120/200 putter that isn't a MAX, but chances are you'll never make that. Let me build it myself.
Let us micromanage equipment and customize things. I'm sure a lot of
people would jump at the chance to have a special blue graphite shaft with a 2yd distance boost and .3 better forgiveness (or
something).
Start thinking of MMORPG-like concepts like I've mentioned here and alter them to work in this environment. Just remember, a large gap of inequality will kill the game. As long as you take care not to over-do it with the paid stuff (no super stats) and have a lot of free stuff being offered for tasks/goals/whatever then you'll be alright. Let people work slowly toward the same good stuff that others might not be so patient (and open up the wallet) for. Ultimately everyone ends up with more or less the same stuff, some just took longer to get there than others. I'm not advocating pay-to-win, but pay-for-a-very-slight-advantage. I think people will do that.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you could potentially do here. How you can evolve the game to the next level, both from a playability and profitability stand-point.
Anyway, that's my $1.50 on the matter.
Thanks