Look, I don’t know about how anyone else feels about having to reach 1,000,000,000 kills in a 16 day period, but I think it was a major overshoot for the devs to set this number based on how the Tide games are going, as well as other factors they introduced during this skulls event. Let’s take a look at the facts:
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The 24h Peak and 1m Ago Averages: An event is going to bring back some of the community for a short period of time, but the 24h peak shows that at best, we’re barely cracking 5500 players, with the 1m Ago Averages clocking in anywhere between 4500 to 5000 at any given time outside of that peak. That is a huge ask of a dedicated fanbase, particularly when many of us work or have other engagements or priorities on our table. Tomorrow we reach day 8 which is the halfway mark of the Skulls event in V2, and we’ve barely cracked 1/3rd of the goal. Current trends put us finishing at roughly 900m kills in 16 days, which is close but won’t net us the prize, particularly when you consider the other factors at play, like V2 not being the only tide game anymore. Darktide has a higher average for 24h peak and 1m ago categories respectively, and there’s a plethora of people juggling between the two games to get their weeklies in DT at the cost of missing out on the Skulls event challenges. There’s nothing wrong with this, but clearly it is something that FS failed to take into account.
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Versus Alpha Another Hurdle to Overcome: I haven’t played versus, but I’m fairly certain from what I’ve seen of other players engaging with it, the hordes aren’t nearly as numerous as they are in the skulls event. Take into account that they nerfed the player experience (which was necessary for VS. balancing), and players aren’t surviving long enough, generally speaking, to add any significant numbers to the 1bil counter in any meaningful way in comparison to the other game modes. All this to say that’s if VS allows you to add kills to the counter, and there’s no confirmation one way or the other. Dividing a player base by providing us with an entire new game mode that people are excited for instead of the same event we’ve been doing for multiple years at this point is not going to encourage anyone to farm for the kills the way we need to.
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Skulls Event Not Engaging/Being Engaged With: I love the skulls event. It allows you to do some really whacky builds that you wouldn’t otherwise normally get to do (been running 1h Axe + TA on Ranger Vet, e.g.), but most people aren’t actually engaging with the skulls because “It makes the game too easy”, while those same people are running meta builds and not mixing it up. This is a perfectly reasonable complaint about the event, but the whole reason in my point of view for the skulls to be there is to essentially speedrun the maps and trigger as many events as you can and jump back into another round and do whacky, off-the-wall builds. The faster you kill, the faster you move, the faster you finish, the faster the tracker goes up. But the majority of the people I’m playing with are tilted at the fact that I’m picking up skulls so I can play the long game rather than the round in which I’m slotted into. Even in the community I’m in, people would rather be doing Cata Deeds instead of Cata QP or Map Picks, and this is a huge issue with a 16 day event. An easy fix for this would be additional modifiers being added instead of just SITNW, such as Vanguard, Seek & Destroy, Nurgles Rot… there’s a number of things that can be done to increase the difficulty of the experience so players actually engage with it, while also massively increasing enemy numbers so we might actually be able to finish it. As it stands and the way the community is playing a round of Vermintide instead of the long-haul 16 day event, we aren’t going to make it.
We’re going to get close, but we will not make it as a community with the way things are going right now, and I can all but guarantee the prize at the end of the road will not be obtainable, because we’re just over 1/3rd of the way there and approaching the 1/2 way point of allotted time.
If we don’t make it, I sure as hell hope FS realizes the mistake they made with rolling out so much content all at once, resulting in a divided player base and lower numbers, and don’t take it out on us.
Let us purchase the new weapon cosmetics in Lohner’s shop, because if I can’t get my red warhammer or grudgeraker, I’ll be as salty as the players getting miffed at the fact that I’m actively engaging with the event :\
