A case for Friendly Fire's removal

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
1

Hello! I’d like to propose the removal of Friendly Fire.

I’ve 2,081 hours in Vermintide 2 and most of those hours have been spent with lovely and agreeable people but there have been some bad eggs along the way, some lobby ruining and in much of these instances there’s deliberate friendly fire involved followed by other disagreeable behavior.

I won’t name drop of course but there is a player I have met semi-consistently now who is easily agitated by accidental friendly fire, something that we know just happens and is only truly regrettable in certain scenarios but are still accidental, this player however takes such happy accidents on a very personal level and has, in nearly every time I’ve met him, decided to vent his frustrations on the whole team until they are down or he is kicked to which he’ll try to re-enter the lobby and continue his vengeful crusade until he is finally blocked.

Naturally this thread isn’t about him but he remains the most prime example I have for suggesting the removal of FF. Not everyone who engaged in malicious FF was like him but in my 2,000 hours I have been Friendly Fired for innocuous acts such as:

  • Picking up healing (yes I’m serious, when the situation was agreeable for me to do so btw, not that I took it from low HP player)
  • not picking up a book in a timeframe dictated by a player (one time I was FF shot to death because I did not pick up a tome that was right next to me whilst I was distracted by an horde)
  • suggesting that someone share healing with someone who needs it
  • telling someone the strengths and weaknesses of their career or weapon per witness to them struggling in some situation
  • calling out toxic behavior
  • being accused of rushing ahead when I was not
  • casting SOTT’s bush wall (we’ve all been there, I understood I used it inadequately but I don’t think being ulted down was fair…)

While Friendly Fire exists to enforce proper positioning, accuracy and caution etc I think its become too exploitable by toxic players and its driven me to paranoia in-game when I should be more trusting of my teammates considering its a co-op game lol.

Unfortunately, votekicks to get rid of these sort in a lobby is not always easily attainable either because it just so happens the host is the toxic one or the other teammates aren’t paying attention and blocking them on steam I believe doesn’t work to stop them from joining lobbies you’re in if you are not hosting. I’ve had a case where a blocked player joined a lobby I was in so whether that’s how it is or I encountered some rare glitch I’d like to be educated on the technicality of this.

Regardless; I’ve had enough and I’m sure many others have too if they’d like to chip in to this thread!

Appreciate the time.

2

Sounds like you’re playing mostly on Legend which is where Grimoires make FF more punishing. It’s also (for some reason) a bit of a cesspit of players who, despite needing to farm books, jeopardize the team by playing selfishly.

Sadly, I think you and I are in the minority when it comes to wanting FF gone, as many other players see it as a necessary skill check and way to “balance” the game.

I’ve been playing a lot of modded with friends, and making mods. I just turn FF off entirely and all I can say, is that our experience of the game is much better without it. There are plenty of ways to challenge the team without adding friction between the team. When I go back to official to play with randos I mostly play Cata, and even there, I am keenly aware of having to stand aside and feel forced to play around ranged players, or vice-versa, playing the ranged player and constantly having to watch for and maneuver around dodging allies.

Does FF require some more skill? Sure. Does it make using spam/AOE weapons more challenging? Yes, but it also makes sure that you often get punished for another’s mistakes. There’s a tunnel vision that happens whether you like it or not, where often enough, hitting an ally because they dodged into your shot makes you look like the bad guy, or vice-versa, when another player shoots me in the back, and though it could be through no fault of my own, I now have to adjust to avoid getting shot all the time.

Fortunately for me, I’m at a point where I prefer to play modded and right now I have people to play my mods with (many of which are still in development), and from there with access to modding knowledge, I’m able to change just about anything I don’t like about the game to suit me and my friends. So, I don’t play with friendly fire, and I can only speak for myself, but it makes the game much more enjoyable.

3

Sometimes I think FF needs to either be removed or be much higher.

Before Vermintide I played a lot of Left 4 Dead and there the FF is very high, incapacitating teammates with a single attack from stronger weapons. Thus, preventing FF is a big part of the team-based gameplay; positioning, crouching when in front, etc. It helps that there’s no melee, just pushes, so whoever’s in front can crouch and push while teammates shoot over them.

Similarly in Helldivers the friendly fire is “realistically” high. It works a bit differently there as “accidental” team kills are often hilarious and the victim is back in action in under a minute.

But in Vermintide the friendly fire is mostly just annoying chip damage, other than the occasional hard-hitting attack from certain builds. It creates a “try not to shoot your teammates but if you do it’s not a huge deal” gray area, and the line for “too much FF” is different for everyone :melting_face:

4

I wanted to exclude mentioning difficulties since its a problem across all difficulties where FF is included. Toxic users enjoy having power over users in-game lives from champ to cata.

I forgot to mention the topic of reports, I have tried to report problematic players but nothing of substance came up. I really just think taking away one critically lobby ruining tool would make the game less of a nightmare for everyone involved. Both the (brave) lone wolves who use QP or just lobby browser (we exist!) and friend groups (ever been 1-shot by an accidental BH ult when going in for a Shade ult kill on a Monster? lol)

5

While I can understand your position, I think FF is here to stay for various balance reasons, not least of which I think this is a Melee game with ranged classes (where I think DT is a ranged game with Melee classes).

A) Engineer. He’d be even more obscenely powerful if he could just fire directly into anything and everything with impunity.

B) Things like Elf Poison Bow would also develop the same behaviour, Fireball staff too I guess.

C) There is the meta-damage of FF > Triggering Bardin’s Gromril Armour, Zealots avoid death and so on.

D) At the risk of reopening an old wound that appears to have healed, Green Circle Chasing would be back on the menu big time and easy to achieve.

All this as well as the obvious points : FF is there (in theory) to stop people being arses to each other although playing as Slayer, GK, WPOS obviously compounds it a little.

In 4k hours I’ve had one person who was awful at FF, a poison bow elf that just seemed to genuinely NGAF about it. They took a BH ult to the face for their trouble from another player and we just rolled on by their respawn. My personal opinion is that removing FF across the official realm would cause more resentment than keeping it.

6

I’ve played the alternative, and I’ve got to say, just try it out. The game isn’t worse without FF in any of the ways people predict, it’s just better. If it has any effect on balance, it’s small or negligible. It just reduced the annoyances and friction that FF can cause down to 0.

As for players’ manners, your “one bad actor in 4k hours,” sorted by the team rather than the mechanic, says more about the player base holding official together than FF does. People credit FF for civility that the community would have anyway. Others like blame FF for the lack of civility they encounter. I’ve got over 4k hours myself, plenty of it in Legend early on before I stuck mainly to Cata, and the bad actors I’ve run into were going to be bad actors with or without FF, it just gave them another tool.

8

“FF forces civility” is definitely a myth. I’ve heard tales of lobbies in L4D being griefed by players who just grab a shotgun at round start and down everybody because FF is 100% on Expert.

I’m all for removing it. It doesn’t add anything interesting to the game experience. It’s just annoying. The only case I could really make for it is that it’s funny when BH nukes the elf.

9

I find the arguments for removing FF to overlook fundamental balance realities. On the other hand, Argonaut14 brought up crucial balance points that show a real understanding of the game’s core mechanics.

10

And again I say I’ve played modded without it, and the realities of balance and FF are overstated in my opinion. The amount of power and damage dealt by not having to worry about hitting your fellow players isn’t that much.

Admittedly, I am playing modded with friends and other mods too, so it’s hard to say for sure, but all the arguments on “balance” are not very convincing after having experienced the game without it, and I feel I can safely say, the game would be a bit less frustrating and more fun without it.

The way people argued about it, they had me half-convinced I’d be having a miserable time when I turned it off, but it was better. Just as I see in a lot of media, I think at some a certain argument or perspective that is widely held turns performative, and people just advocate for or against something because others do without fully knowing what it’s like with or without it.

11

This is a fair comment, and maybe very insightful. Friends are less likely to wildly machine gun each other (apart from the lolz) than some PUG randoms in QP.

To be fair I’ve only seen FF removed in Champ - obviously - and haven’t been there since 2018 so, another fair comment is I’m postulating rather than actually trying it. I still have a feeling those in Modded are going to generally be Good Eggs™ and as such not be wildly annoying about it.

12

that’s literally a great argument for the removal of FF right there. you had a teammate who FF’d the team a lot with the hagbane, and in turn, FF’d right back to the point of downing them and leaving them behind once they respawned. not only is that toxic as hell, it’s also a great reason for there NOT to be FF in the game. if there wasn’t any FF, it wouldn’t have been a problem for the elf to be poison spamming and you all could have just continued on as normal. your story and your reasons for wanting FF are contradicting each other. “i think we should have FF because if an elf FF’s the team, we can just kill her and not rez her LOLZ” and if the game had no FF to begin with, there wouldn’t be a reason to even get mad at the elf in the first place. you create a lot of resentment from players when you do that, believe it or not. make it make sense.

13

FF has advantages and disadvantages. For me, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. By quite a lot. And I haven’t encountered a toxic amount of FF.

I did, IIRC, block someone once - I guess via Steam? - for chat behavior. I’d be inclined to do the same for toxic FF, thinking of it as a player problem more than the game’s problem.

Otoh, I’m glad Ensrick has a no FF mod. It’s easy to understand not finding FF fun.

If it was a toggle when setting up a lobby, it’d be interesting to see how many chose to play without. (Same goes for beastmen. Hmm … and Outcast Engineers.)

14

@Tarquelne the toggle idea is the most interesting thing anyone’s floated in here. I’d love to see the actual split if turning FF off was a one click option at lobby setup. My bet is it lands a lot higher than people assume, even among the folks defending it right now.

On “player problem more than the game’s problem,” I half agree, and it’s close to what I said earlier up the thread. The bad actors are going to be bad with or without FF. But that’s exactly why I want it gone. The mechanic is the weapon you’re handing them. Take it away and the worst they can manage is being annoying in chat.

The “I haven’t encountered a toxic amount of FF” part is where I always get a little skeptical. Not aimed at you specifically, just it hasn’t been my experience. Here’s one from earlier today:

Got into a Cata quick play game. The very second I load in, there’s a monster on the team along with a horde, so I do the obvious thing and start going ham on it with my grudgeraker and invis. The host is an invisible Huntsman, low hp, standing just barely inside the line I’ve got on a Rat Ogre’s head in front of him. On Cata the FF is just high enough that my Grudgeraker clips him. I drop everything to res him, then go down myself while the two bots get dropped instantly. He kites the horde for about 30 seconds, dies anyway, and kicks me right before the defeat screen loads.

That guy had over 3,000 hours. That’s the “mature” playerbase that supposedly doesn’t do this sort of thing. One host doesn’t speak for everyone, and most people I play with are good, but it happens a lot more than the “one bad apple in a bajillion hours” posts let on. I’ve watched hosts ragequit midgame, kick someone for not running a specific talent, or hold the whole lobby hostage until everyone agrees to boot a player they’ve privately decided did too much FF.

In fairness, I often play mid-day during the work week. I’m mostly retired and just squeeze games in around my kids before summer break hits, so I’m just speculating, but I think I’m on sometimes when the lobbies skew toward the less mature; kids home from school or unemployed people. So no, this one game isn’t representative of most of mine. But it happened, and the only reason it could play out the way it did is the mechanic we’re talking about removing.

Like I keep saying, I’ve played plenty without it. Pull FF out and this kind of thing just goes away. The game doesn’t get worse, the FF friction goes away, and players like that host lose might not let a one off thing turn into a personal grudge.

I would stick to hosting games myself or discord, but there are times when there’s just not enough players to even do that.

15

I like the idea because of bounty hunters ult. BH can kill team mates when they walk into BH’s model and BH ulting, and the player of BH don’t even see them. Not to mention the lag issues.

But I would keep the self-inflicted damage so that it has some disadvangate to throw a grenade under our own character. Or the elf shooting hagbane arrows too close.

16

I tend to play morning or evening. And, much more importantly, really don’t play with randoms very often. And never higher than Legend with randoms. I’ve had just barely a handful of negative online VT experiences of any sort at all.

the Toggle: My wife, sitting by me ATM, says she’d play without FF. “I wouldn’t have to learn how to aim.”

I wouldn’t be my choice to play with FF off, but I wouldn’t really mind unless the group started shifting toward indiscriminate ranged use.

A good chunk of why I like FF might be my hex-and-counter/sim background. I relish that “unfairness”: “War is the province of friction.”

It’d be interesting to poll the depth of feeling. People who don’t often play Kerillian, for example, might feel much more negatively toward FF. :slight_smile:

I would really, really, like to see FF in DT. The way the game is now … perhaps everyone should get to pick one massively unpopular addition.

17

Even when I turned off friendly fire in modded, self-inflicted damage was still on; not by my choice. That’s how the game works by default; so that’s what I’d expect

18

Maybe a creative solution would be to have an FF buffer, so that your FF doesn’t do team damage if you don’t do it more than once in 30 seconds and the damage is below a certain threshold. Then one-off mistakes and AOE attacks wouldn’t be quite so destructive.

19

Here’s a good example of why FF is unfun. WS accidentally shoots me with her active ability and instantly downs me, through no fault of either of ours. I think it’s important to note that a lot of FF is usually the victim’s fault, or sometimes nobody’s fault, because you were just in the way at a bad time.

20

An elf dumping her ult in a choke point? Wow. Truly a mystery how I got downed there.

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21

Ironically, this clip is the perfect proof of why Friendly Fire must exist.

Without the FF penalty, the meta in tight spaces would completely collapse. You would just have a tank Bardin holding a choke point with a shield, while a Waystalker or Sienna stands directly behind him, spamming ults and AoE weapons through his body with absolute impunity to delete specials and hordes. It completely removes positioning, line of sight management, and spatial awareness from the game.

This clip shows exactly what happens when someone tries to abuse that brain-dead spam style anyway. Friendly fire didn’t fail here; it functioned perfectly by punishing terrible positioning and a complete lack of trigger discipline. Removing it wouldn’t fix the game, it would just reward players who refuse to learn basic mechanics.