This was hopefully to give some feedback and suggestions about the main Vermintide.com website and how information is being distributed around it instead of through it.
The website is pretty bare-bones other than looking great. The news section is quite good. But the issue is that the things you need to find on the site aren’t there.
When I first started, I was looking for builds and info on stats, which I couldn’t find. When I did learn, I had people asking and PMing me about builds. It’s still not clear to me where I might find specific builds or real information regarding careers. The website linked should be a feature on the your website, so people are drawn through it to get to builds.
http://verminbuilds.com/#create
This could include:
- interactive strengths/weaknesses depending on stat/weapon/talent/career
- videos of gameplay
- links to guides
- images of cosmetics
What’s also missing is any mention of Twitch integration. This should be your biggest selling point as it’s very unique. There’s no mention of it on the Steam page either. This feature is a snowball that needs a push. Once you start incentivizing it, you’ll be getting free advertisement. No Twitch Prime loot either (maybe DLC?). Twitch edition of the game with some other mumbo jumbo in addition to the game?
There are even W0W private server websites that have the right idea. The website below is linked from the players online accounts to the website and Twitch accounts. While they’re offline they can’t be featured on that page (to avoid streaming other things). People passing through the website often find themselves drifting to that page to see if anything decent is going on. This should be on the Vermintide site. You could also have your own stream overide the top streamer. This also greatly benefits the streamers. Having used the linked page, I found that it granted viewers at any time of the day. (don’t make the same mistake as them and have a moving graphic on the stream page. RIP CPU and browser)
You could even try to add buttons for voting. This would help people who aren’t getting loads of viewers to feel like they can benefit from the feature too. Also make it give more red loot/cosmetics.
https://www.warmane.com/stream
Much like me, sadly, most people will ignore the ‘Follow Us’ tab. As I did, they will be thinking “Could the information I need be displayed more clearly in the first place I look?”, and I think it should be. The website should have a forum, Reddit or Twitter feed. Most casual people won’t be bothered to start following loads of different information outputs just for one game they may be playing with a free hour they have. Even if it’s just more news and memes, it makes a difference.
The point is there’s not one solid hub for the community. It’s very much scattered over many platforms. It would be nice to have one place where all of the information flows and if something happens on ‘x’ platform it all goes through ‘y’ platform. Using sites like Reddit puts people off because it’s a seperate thing to ‘Vermintide’. Even the ‘Fatshark’ forum feels like a seperate thing.
If more information and discussion were flowing through one source and you had featured Twitch streams amongst other things, it would make the whole process much easier for the casual consumer and benefit you.
The roadmap page is just a bit of a mess and I don’t think it’s necessary. I think there must be a better way of showing people what you’re working on or towards. If you show people start and end dates they’ll just go mad if you’re one minute over.