Pave the freakin' lakes. Or find a water rendering effect that doesn't cause the entire mission to become an unplayable lag-fest whenever the action is over or near water. The water effect you have now appears a dull, flat gray (or black, as some have described seeing it) until you get down to within inches of it, say, in a tank. It's only at that range. nose pressed against the surface, that the detail of the water is visible. But it's always there sucking bandwidth and causing overall game performance to suck.
As comparatively primitive as it was, the original water effect from last year and earlier this year, served the purpose visually and didn't punish the frame rate as SkyDavis points out. Also, that old version of water was the last one that featured a "beach", the transitional area between lake and land. Using that narrow strip was a key to effective tanking. With the deeper, harder carved topography lakeside tanking can now only be done from high ground. Maybe I'm alone, but I miss having the option of staying high and lobbing or gunning for the water's edge for an eye-level shot from closer to the boat.
I take back everything I've suggested about groovy new missions, plane customization, new plane types...if we can only get rid of these crippling glitches and bugs that make existing missions impossibly frustrating. I watch thousands of new players streaming in through the front door and running for the exit as soon as they realize that we all just grit our teeth and endure things like inverted spawn points, backwards damage meters, vulnerability from one side of the map while parked, brake on, on the other side of the map, blue carriers turning red and red carriers turning blue, flying tanks, airborne carriers floating over dry lakes, jumping-bean planes and streaking laser-lag-fire in zep missions...six separate server zones, often all claiming to be full although we know they aren't. Quit bugs, no-hit bugs, split screens, spawn crashes, dropped connections...and on and on. We've all always had something to grouse about, but this is a level of brokenness we've never seen...and it's the first and only Dogfight all these scores of new players are seeing or will see as they move on to other, less broken games. It kills me to watch all that potential return revenue abandoning Echoboom because the product is in shambles. So...
Never mind snappy new stuff. Get the stuff that's already there nailed down, bulletproof, completely bug-free, running smoothly with stable, accessible servers and a minimum of server-side lag...so we won't have to struggle to explain to baffled noobs why it is we love Dogfight as much as we do.