However, I feel this change only addresses one reason a player might want to experiment.
Boredom.
But there’s another, more common reason, and that’s to find a better solution to a problem.
I was struggling greatly in this season with a “Meta” build until I stopped worrying about deranking and experimented. Much like how Deranks make people more angry and prejudice towards strangers, it also instills a fear of change.
This is what folks mean by Deranks hurting experimentation. The core reason to experiment in Havoc should be to find a way to beat Havoc, it becomes much less an issue when you’ve already beaten Havoc.
If you insist on half-stepping your way towards removing deranks. Might I recommend adding “Locks” to Levels 20 and 30 that prevent players from deranking past them once earned. These are where massive difficulty spikes occur, and where a player would likely need to experiment the most.
Consider the unlikelyhood of someone deranking through play alone from a 31 to a 19 and understand that this change would in no way significantly impact whatever nonsense you use to justify the deranks in the first place. The Derank mechanic’s main impact is psychological. I’d not be surprised if you had some “Expert” or “Consultant” on psychological manipulation weigh in on it between their “How to increase FOMO” brainstorming sessions.
Much like all the Machiavellians in my life, you’re wasting effort manipulating me for no reason. Havoc would remain tense without the deranks. And the stakes of losing a match are high enough without it.
This is what I keep coming back to. There’s a lot of code, record keeping, development effort, and community angst going into a feature that fundamentally isn’t adding anything of value. It just throws additional frustration into the mix when things already haven’t gone well, sharply reinforcing negative experiences with the game.
But, it’s not like we haven’t seen Fatshark do something silly and then double, triple, and quadruple down on it before, sometimes for years. Big RNG crafting vibes here.
At least the RNG crafting system stimulated my gambling vice, and allowed me to continually sink resources for slight gains which did hit the ol’ dopamine receptors a smidge.
Granted, it did way more harm than good and I’m glad its gone, just illustrating the fact that deranks have zero positive impact whatsoever.
Unrelated note, I kinda miss the Dice/Lootbox mechanic of VT2.
The function of deranking while fighting up the ranks is to level people out to where their skill level dictates they should be. If no amount of failure would drop someone down the ranks, it’s just all upward mobility…which sounds nice until you consider the other people in the group carrying the people who just fail up.
There was no doubling down on RNG crafting, they just didn’t make sweeping changes to it for too long…only smaller changes to alleviate various bits of the RNG that didn’t fix the underlying pain points.
That’s doubling down. They committed to the core problem everyone complained about and refused to fix it, or even discuss why they weren’t fixing it, for YEARS.
Hmm, I don’t recall them making any significant changes prior to the update.
They later enabled us to exchange one perk and one blessing and choose the perk rather than RNG roll it (or use a mod), as I recall, but you still had to be extremely lucky to have a god roll for the perk and blessing you couldn’t alter, as well as the stats or camp Melk with the Armory extension.
Feel free to correct me if I’m misremembering.
I remember playing the Armory extension more than the game itself ;).
I do not believe gatekeeping a few boosted players justifies making the entire mode significantly worse for everyone else. Checkpoints at 20 and 30 would not benefit such players as much as you think, since they’d still have to be boosted at ten level increments. Which good luck getting a squad of randos to stick around that long, and if they’re playing with a team of friends there’s nothing stopping them from being boosted straight to 40. If they’re only being boosted a few levels at a time, through luck of the draw, then they’d inevitably derank back to 20 or 30 until their skill improved.
Worst case you get a level 18 playing 20 or a 27 playing 30. Which I’d argue is good for them, as playing harder content is the best way to improve ones skills. I suppose after a campaign reset a 39 might derank all the way down to the 20s, but this could be solved by resetting everyone 30+ back to 20 instead of 30.
Otherwise the system would be no worse than it is now.
This is hard to believe as an original design intent when the mode launched in such a manner that someone could hop straight from 1 to 40 if they joined a 40’s party and were able to be carried.
Likewise, it’s not a competitive game or a public ladder, there’s no comparative “standings” of players put on display, and all of the rewards tied to rank (aside from the weekly resource drop) are one-time achievements that people don’t need to repeat, so it’s difficult to see a need to “level people out”.
As others noted, they did largely nothing to it and let it sit for two years (and two of three platform launches), for a product where the bulk of your sales are within the first few weeks of launch, that’s doubling down.
Also, they still have a system for higher-level players to boost lower level players multiple levels. If the goal was to dissuade boosting then this mechanic contradicts the reinforcement system. So does letting people skip straight to 20 if they complete an Auric Maelstrom which you can just QP repeatedly until you get a carry. So does stopping Deranks at 40. I mean, what if a 39’er gets carried to 40! Oh, the horror!
The “Leveling Out” excuse might be what FS uses to help them sleep at night (Although I’ve not seen that in any comms), but it’s not why Reinforcement Deranks exist. These deranks exist to inflict psychic damage on the players. To make them artificially more invested in their matches. To “Add Tension and Raise the Stakes”.
If they really wanted to measure and sort player skill, they’d need to make a much more involved system that accounts for radically different team-skill-vs-player-skill levels. Otherwise good players would remained bogged down by bad teammates as much as bad players might be boosted by good teammates.
Agree to disagree. They never defended it, and they certainly didn’t ever make it worse (which is what I would consider doubling down).
They added perk selection as you mentioned but also the ability to buy specific weapons/marks, changed how locks functioned, increased material drop rates, and made wallets account-wide. These are all significant in my eyes.
It’s not about boosted players, but about players who, because of their actual skill level, shouldn’t really be playing at higher levels playing match after match at those higher levels until they get dragged into the next level.
The 1-40 boosting always felt like a bandaid solution to people inevitably pissed off that they couldn’t start at 40.
Hmm.
I play lots of boardgames. Lots and lots, including hex-and-counter wargames. I’ve designed a boardgame.
What you write isn’t implausible and, thinking about other FS decisions, it makes me see there’s a huge difference between designing and executing a kick-ass combat video game, and designing a decent set of rules. Not a situation with many transferable skills, it seems.
depends on what scale we’re talking? it was already a complaint in vermintide, and then darktide absolutely doubled down. tripled down even. took like a year or more to get them to loosen the vice and make it more like vermintide, which at this point everyone accepts despite it being very similar to the pointless rng that was complained about in vermintide already.
so if viewed as a whole franchise i do not think their crafting system improved at all. it became worse, then put back on the level of the previous game which everyone still hopes might improve one day
Definitely a lot more moving parts! I think that’s clearly why we’ve got the sacrifice system too, and why some things take a long time to come out (but they’re loads better when they do).
Aye, that’s what I meant by boosted. Being boosted by chance instead of by friends is still being boosted. I accounted for that in my response.
With the checkpoint solution, if a 19 Brute Forces to 20, they’ll never derank back to 19, yes, but they’d also be stuck at 20 until they made it to 30, which would requiring brute-forcing 9 additional levels.
If that doesn’t please you, consider this.
The best way to get better is to play harder levels, deranks always ensure you’ll reach a point where you’re just being batted back and forth between a level you can easily beat and the actual level you want to practice at. That’s what “Leveling Out” actually is here. There is no sitting at an ideal level, if you play you’ll either move forward or move backwards. The needle never stops.
A better way to ensure a player has “Earned” the right to advance would be to tie Reinforcements to Progression instead of Regression. I suggested something like this before, but here’s another solution:
A player can only move onto the next Havoc level if they beat the current level or higher with 3 reinforcements remaining. Every loss results in them losing a reinforcement, every win gives them 1 reinforcement back. You cannot lose more than 3 reinforcements and you cannot derank to any previous level outside of choice, decay and season resets. The needle stops where you get stopped.
(You do not lose or gain reinforcements from playing below your havoc level)
I really like the idea of checkpoints quite a bit, but I’m not sure about the idea of only leveling up on wins with 3 reinforcements…sounds kinda funky.
I do hope we’ll see more iteration on Havoc, and checkpoints sounds like a great addition.
Yeah, after skimming through all the responses/reading the post, I will say I think if they are so hell bent on not letting people play where they want to play, at least putting in ‘locks’ would be great to me. If you’re so married to the idea of having ‘competitive’ in your PvE game, go all in and have ‘competitive divisions’ too.
Add a ‘checkpoint’ to 20, 30, and even 40 I’d say (though it seems they did that for 40, so that’s neat!). Make it a ‘seasonal pursuit’, and make it so you’re doing your best to climb up and ‘lock in’ to the difficulty you feel is best for you. I say make another one at 40 because again, as you say, they want to ‘encourage experimentation’, but when you drop down game after game because of it, I never want to do that. But if I ‘clawed and scrapped’ my way to 40, suddenly now I can get into ‘for fun’ games that have people trying to see what he best way to beat 40 right now is. And suddenly there’s no pressure to be ‘the best’, just be what you think will work.
Sure there’s still ‘boosting’ there, but hay maybe make it more restrictive to where you’ll only go up 1 rank per clear above 30/35? Thus the ‘hard stuck’ would still very much be so, while the good players would just clear their way to the checkpoint and get to have fun. I feel this is the best way of doing it for sure if they aren’t going to get rid of rank decay entirely. You are encouraged to get back to the rank you want to, don’t have to worry about getting launched TO far below it so long as you play a bit during the season, and are actually encouraged to have fun (what a novel concept) once you achieve victory.