Suggestion to even out early game shield imbalance
Whilst I believe that good play can override the fact another player has lucked into objectively better weapons than you (Peacekeeper Vs Re45, or Hemlock Vs 301) that belief is significantly reduced when it turns out they also have twice your HP... nothinig is more disheartening in an early game battle when you only have a few rounds of ammo to be victorous than seeing purple damage numbers rising up from the Lifeline behind that R99 + extended mag!! In order to even that out a little I wanted to suggest the following...
You still have white, blue and purple shields, but
1) For the first 15 seconds of the round ALL shields are only charged to 1bar (+25 hp)
2) From 15-45 seconds they slowly auto-charge up the second bar (10% every 3 secs)
3) From 45-75 seconds blue + purple charge second bar
4) From 75-105 seconds purple charge their final bar
Everything else remains the same, they stop damage the same and can be charged the same... but NOT past the point of where the autocharge would be if no damage were taken (you could display the "unusable" part of the shield bar in a different color or greyed-out, showing the player how much they can charge their shields at any time). If you're downed the shield will keep charging whilst on you and you will benefit from that if and when you are revived. If you're in a fight the shields will keep recharging at the same rate, so you could break a players shields and chase them down, but 10 secs later they will have regained 30% of a bar of their shields again.
This would effectively prevent any player from having full purple shields until 1m45 into the game, which would leave mid and late game shield mechanics completely unchanged but would just even out the differences in those early fights.
Sure the point of this game is it is partly luck, but given the limited early game ammo, shields make too much off a difference imo.