Introduce Yourselves to the Neighborville!

Welcome, and thank you for taking care of the PVZ community @EA_Shepard,
It could be a long read, but I would appreciate it if you could read it through.
I am a content creator for the PVZ shooter series and I have just reached 50k followers on Bilibili (I also have douyin (28k) and YouTube (1.8k) channels). I have been playing Garden Warfares since 2015 and started uploading gameplays the next year. I play the games on PC and I have spent over 2000 hours on the PVZ shooters combined.
The games were joyful until recent years when cheaters and hackers made the games mostly unplayable on PC. Garden Warfare 2 regained popularity after its release on Steam, and many of my videos gained over 100k views because of that. However, without effective anti-cheats, Garden Warfare 2 is the game where cheating is most rampant, especially in 2023. Most cheaters cheat by bringing frostbite mods online, and many of them are devastating to online gameplay on PC. Cheaters can crash the online game lobby so that all the players are kicked out and lose the progress. You may know of the complete server outage of GW2 multiplayer (MP) modes that lasted for months in the first half of the year, and it was caused by excessive lobby crashing by the cheaters. Even if the servers were not broken, one or two cheaters could be enough to ruin the games for all MP mode players because they can change around the servers and game modes and crash all lobbies in the middle of the games and no one gains any progress. And this has happened multiple times, not a theory. Other disgusting cheatings include round-ender that ends the game in the middle of the game and loads the next map, control lock that disables any keyboard or mouse input to the game for anyone in that lobby and players have to force stop the game, freeze-all that makes your character frozen and unable to do anything. There are many more forms of cheating in Garden Warfare 2 on PC such as instakill, immunity to damage, and using Boss characters. It is extremely hard not to meet a cheater if you play the game continuously for an hour.
The cheating problems are discouraging people from playing, buying, and content-creating the Garden Warfares. Two years ago, I was able to stream the game and many of my followers would join and play together just like any other game. Cheaters started to target me last year and now it will not even take 5 minutes for cheaters to crash the lobby I am in if I start to stream Garden Warfare 2. They would also use the ban exploit to ban me every day if they knew my ID. These cheaters not only ruin other players' experience in the game, but they are also constantly threatening and assaulting non-cheating players on social media. Since I am the biggest active GW content creator in China, some of the cheaters are defaming me and spreading altered images of me. I may need to sue them soon to stop them.
As a fan of the PVZ Garden Warfare series and a player with over 2000 hr of gameplay, I sincerely hope that the game experience of PC Garden Warfares improves. I know it might be hard and time-consuming to build an anti-cheat system for the game, but I would like to know if that is possible. There may be easier ways to lower the effects of cheaters, such as lifting the player limit of the private play from 4 to 24. The private play mode in GW2 and BFN only allows 4 players to play in the customized lobby with AI-filling options, however, 4 human players, which make 2V2, are not enough for any kind of VS game mode. I would suggest kindly lifting the player limit for the PC private play to prevent encountering cheaters. I am not sure how much work needs to be done, but I would assume it is relatively easier to achieve. And if EA is developing a new sequential of the GW series, I would suggest improving the private plays as a plus, by increasing player limits, adding more configurations and spectator functions etc.
Speaking of sequential, Many PVZ shooter fans including myself have been looking forward to a new authentic GW sequential after the final update of BFN. Personal speaking, many good designs from GW and GW2 are missing in BFN, and some bad designs were kept in BFN. I may need to write another essay-long post to talk about it if it is happening. I went to EA Vancouver last November just because it was the birthplace of PVZ shooters during my stay in Vancouver waiting for my flight back to China. I could not enter the building of course, because I was not invited.
I sincerely hope that the current issues regarding PC GWs can be solved and I appreciate your time for reading through this long post.

I started playing the game on PlayStation 4 but now I play on PlayStation 5, it'd be nice if you had a version for the PlayStation 5 but I can't ask for everything lol. On neighborville, it seem like y'all stop giving us things to do so I stop playing the game but actually I love the flower because of her healing abilities they're better than in PVZ 2. I stayed playing PVZ 2, because it had more things to do in it and I love playing the ops on both games, I maxed out all my characters on PvZ 2, and I wish there was more things to do so I'd still play the game but I replayed it over and over and over again cuz I loved it so much. There's a three coming out that'd be awesome. After neighborville I just kind of got tired of playing the games once I maxed out everything that I wanted to. But if you continue on doing the ops which is really a good idea cuz I'm a single player and I love playing in groups with people, the sound system started breaking down so I don't know if it was my machine or what. Hopefully on the five it'll start working better again I just redownloaded it to see how it plays and thank you very much for making this game fun.

I love all the replies. Especially the lonnnngggg ones 😂 Makes me have the feels because y'all care about this series quite a bit!

There's certainly a lot of people, I can't go a day without seeing many many people, not asking, but begging for Garden Warfare 3, I never knew about Garden Warfare 1 and 2 until I heard about Battle For Neighbourville, but I absolutely love all of them, if EA can incorporate everything people love about GW1/2 and Battle For Neighbourville in the next game, whether it's called Garden Warfare 3 or Battle For Neighbourville 2, I'm personally not fussed at what it's called, or maybe there's a different name for the next game, either way, you'll be in for big pay rise 😁 

@JosephPopper1 get your friends in to share their stories of what they love about the series, send in photos of their character builds, their best memories of some battles they've had, what they'd like to see added to GW2 and Battle For Neighbourville, the more people we get here, the more likely we are to see updates.

Me too @ZorbaKing64  we have to wait for an announcement for either the Unicorn Stuffy hat for Switch players and Garden Warfare 3 or Battle For Neighbourville 2

Hey hopefully it's not too late to do this I just saw a video about this and wanted to come here too, first of all, welcome @EA_Shepard and I wish you the best of luck.
I have been a fan of PvZ for some time, mainly the shooters as It was the first PvZ game I ever played, I have been playing pretty much since GW1 first came out. I love this game and would love to see it grow, I understand that from a company's point of view, the shooters did not deliver as expected especially Battle for Neighborville. I am not here to blame or complain but I am sure we can all agree that there were some not good decisions made with this game, I like the game and love to play it but I always felt like removing the variants was the main reason why the game didn't do well (ofc there were many other reasons but this just felt like it was the biggest one), I remember seen back in the day how a lot of people complained about the variants being removed and all that. My point is that GW2 always had the potential to be one of the biggest and it should come without saying that people really like the variants, there are mod communities that make their own variants and it just feels so refreshing to play. I am trying to say that GW2 could easily be revived into a game that matches big names, especially nowadays when titles like Call of Duty, battlefield, battlefront, and many others have flopped and become mediocre games. I am not saying make GW3 I am just saying that just simply adding new content can revive the game and make people want to come back. it could be just adding 2 new variants or a new character every couple of months and maybe a new map here and there, that would just be enough to get the game back up on its feet. Of course, I understand that EA is a company and money is the final goal.
By adding new variants you could easily make the typical move of the first 2 weeks of the new variants coming out there is a pack you could buy that gives you the variant straight up but you can only buy it with real money or else free to play players can just grind it out like any other character in the game (of course the more characters and variants the more money can be obtained this way).
EA can also implement crossover variants that can only be obtained with real money, like how GW1 had the Cheetos variants and the blue peeshoter that was all bout fruits or something like that.
There could also be a second Rux but call him something like Xur and it is Rux's twin brother who is way cooler, Xur's thing is that he sells things that you can only buy with real money like he could sell legendary hats at "discounted" prices, but Xur is a very high-class gnome and he only sells the best of the best but he doesn't just spawn these items he has to go find them, this means that Xur has periodic shops, meaning that he comes with items once every month and a half or something like that, this would be so Rux who is there all the time doesn't get overshadowed by Xur, while Rux sells 5 items Xur only sells 3 items. I was also thinking that on top of this, the game can take inspiration from some of the character abilities that are in BFN and you can unlock these abilities by doing challenges for the characters they are meant for, these challenges take some time and are not that easy to get so that if you put them on Xur's shop a lot of players might just decide to buy the ability with real money rather than do the challenges. Xur could also sell variant parts for example that one part that you are missing so you can just finish the set and get the variant. Making Xur be smart and targeting the player's preferences, if the player is been playing a lot of Cactus then there is a big chance that Xur will be selling something Cactus-related in his shop.

I wouldn't suggest making a battle pass as this could result in the team focusing only on the battle pass and then everything else gets boring and then the game dies again. but if you must DO NOT make it a paid battle pass, this is because the game is already pretty free to play and now just out of nowhere starting to lock things behind a paywall is not what the game is, on the other hand making it a pretty grindy free battle pass could lead to a lot of players just paying to instantly finish the battle pass and well that's good because money. you could make it so that when a new character is realized into the game, you can unlock it on the battle pass and have it released with a variant so that the variant is the last thing you unluck on the battle pass, and when the battle pass is over, all this cosmetics and the character and variant go into the card packs and now you can get them there making space for the next battle pass. 

Now there are also many ways to keep the community engaged apart from new characters. Make communal events by making the player base separate into 2 teams either you are with the zombies or the plants, now this month's challenge is seeing which team gets more kills in online matches (if you play plants or zombies in the match it doesn’t make a difference, what matters is the team that you pick on the lobby of the game where all the kills you get in the match will go to) and the winner gets a cosmetic that can only be obtained by winning the challenge it could be like a golden cosmetic or a emote with a cool victory aura effect or something like that and if you are on the losers side there is a chance you can buy it on Xur's shop but its a less cool version of the actual item, like this one is only silver color and or the victory aura for the emote is less flashy or a different color. 

There could also be something like a Boss battle event, where there is a boss that is pretty hard to kill and either you play only plants or only zombies, or who knows maybe the boss is a massive gnome or a massive shark or something that makes plants and zombies work together to destroy and yeah there should be something that the players win after beating the boss or maybe if you can beat the boss at a certain speed you win a cosmetic like for example if the boss is the massive shark if you beat it in less than 10 minutes you win a shark helmet that has a bubble effect or something that incentivizes players into playing and make it so many players can join and fight the boss, maybe the boss has a new character trapped and you can only unlock the ability to use the character by beating the boss, (but of course you still need to get the character first, people can still play the event even if they don't own the character). 

New maps, like a funny map where the characters are the size of ants and they are fighting on top of Dave's table, and there are massive tacos everywhere and soda cans, a TV remote, spoons and forks, and all that. or a map in an abandoned mineshaft made by the zombies where they were trying to find new materials to make their weapons with. If it really comes down to it this could be DLC maps that can be bought with money but maybe make it so it is a bundle of maps and maybe you also unlock the new character or something like that or crossover DLC in which you unlock a new map to play on and the new variants or characters. 

New game modes, like making a game mode where each team has a king, the goal is to kill the enemy king first. But maybe to make it more interesting each team has a certain amount of lives and they can only replenish these lives by getting their king to kill players too, each kill that the king gets turns into one life for his team, and the king has 100% more health and they regen slower and get 50% less healing from any sources, the king of each team is chosen randomly and if the king is getting healed by 3 or more sources, the healing becomes damage as we do not want teams that are all just scientists and sunflowers, and maybe it makes it so that if the king is staying too long in the same place a massive cannonball will hit that place and deal a lot of damage to anything there.

Lastly, I want to touch on new characters and variants again, as for some time you can just take the chargers from BFN and put them in GW2, with some minor changes and they are ready to play, and you can add variants to them like I would love to see a Toxic NightCap that shoots 3 Poisson stars every click, it does less damage than normal NightCap but every third hit on the same target will activate Poisson damage. Or a special Action Hero that shoots 1 arrow but his attacks don’t do too much damage even the charged attack, but every third attack on the same target will activate all the arrows to explode and it will deal % max health, like maybe 7.5% or something like that. 

But yeah these are all just crazy ideas I always had and I know it's a lot to ask for but GW2 truly has the potential to be good again. And this is not only for this game a lot of ideas can also work for Titalfall 2 and also make that amazing game come alive again. Thank you for reading and have a lovely day everyone.