So now that we get okri’s challenges and globadier’s revamped for DT.
Do you think the crafting change will be breaking down weapons for materials and possibility to get red’s for doing the pussles and running books.
Or do you think we get a whole new system?
the good start for 2024
they never said crafting, they said itemization, i’m betting the do something about getting more control over the gear you receive after a mission so your ogryn doesn’t receive 80 power mauls in the span of time you get a single folding shovel as a reward to cut down on peopleusing brunt to endlessly farm greys to level at stupid cost.
I think it will change 3 things:
I don’t think that Locks will change, but if they fix how to get good grey weapons it’s fine enough
Mates, I know "Ackchyually "-ing each other and guestimating suppositions on what FS mean in their scarce communication is a favorite passtime around here, but at least “Ackchyually” properly and fully, for the sake of the argument.
That said, I see what you mean. Just because they said it, doesn’t mean it means what we think they think we thought it means…
See, I’d interpret “With the new system we want to remove a lot of the unpredictable grind that came from an RNG heavy system whilst giving players more agency and a steady manner to progress toward specific loadouts, blessings, and stats refinement.” as, well, less RNG and control over which blessings I can swap around. It’d also read “stats refinement” as the ability to increase certain STATS on my weapon. But my readings have been wrong before, as has been the entire community’s…
My money is on - Locks are staying. But I say this mostly to be wrong again and actually gain something out of it…
Remains to be seen, but I dare to hope for something as evolutionary as the talent tree update.
We definitely won’t get a whole new system. Someone at FS has a deep fetish for RNG slot machines, and they’ve built that functionality through too many things for them to change in anything under a year at their development pace. I don’t expect we’ll see any changes to blessing acquisition or the like.
If I wanted to be cynical, we’ll get some rejiggered RNG acquisition. That won’t solve anything, but it would be classic Fatshark. (It will also be me uninstalling the game)
If I were thinking “quick and dirty” solutions that won’t leave huge portions of the community butthurt and actually meet their stated design goals, we’ll get some sort of way to break the locks with additional resource investment and maybe some way to recycle weapons for materials.
I genuinely can’t see Fatshark going any further than that when it takes 6 months to make a stickerbook and tier-tracker for outsourced cosmetics.
they didn’t like how VT2 had pretty much turned into mathhammer (because people were harassing other players for not picking meta loadouts) and introduced the RNG to reduce that. they had the choice of adding it to the enemies or the gear and went with the much less frustating choice of gear.
Why am I quoted there ?
I was agreeing about the locks. It felt appropriate since the “FS never said what they said, and what they said meant something else” conversation a while back. Even though Catfish alludes to more control, she didn’t say anything about locks. That was one of the overarching points of that conversation. Gotta pay attention, instead of assuming and projecting. At least, that’s one of a few things I took out of it.
Where is that particular anecdote sourced from?
Even if that was their intent, adding RNG doensn’t reduce math hammer, people do it just as hard, except its more frustrating to the end user, and makes adding RNG to enemies even more attractive to smooth out spikes in weapon performance via breakpoints.
the RNG is meant to make people abandon mathhammer by putting too much difficulty in the way of doing it, which doesn’t work on everyone but is really the player’s fault for being like that. a player whose approach to the game is “i will math out and acquire the optimal loadout for desired gameplay of hitting breakpoints to kill super fast at all costs” complaining when the game makes it difficult because they don’t want people doing that has no actual argument but will complain anyways.
adding RNG to enemys is massively worse because you end up with “spikes” of much tougher enemies at random which actively hurts the actual gameplay experience. this is a huge problem for new players, people using the public queue, and players that get screwed by stupid/ragequitting teammates and would be the far worse option than randomizing weapon stats.
the whole “max out at 80%” is an indicator of that. you aren’t meant chase maxing out stats, and they objectively made it impossible for you to do that to remind you.
I don’t think that it’s that much of the case, break points are some thing that FS has been working with for example when they introduced Cata they increased the power level to make it still possible to have Beeak points
It’s also a possibility, and hear me out now, I know this may be farfetched, that the increase in RNG from VT2 is in direct response to a need to artificially inflate player time, as a function of mtx exposure and quarterly reports. A need that sharply increased the more the game was delayed and entire systems were cut and redesigned, leading to a barebones launch.
These, ummm, let’s call them “Player Retention” tactics, for lack of a different term, would have nothing to do with the group of players applying math and game theory to DT, but rather with the average time spent on the Mourning star for each and every player of the game.
Hmm, now that I’m running with this farfetched idea, imagine if instead of menus we had actual hubs we had to run towards, in third person at that. And while we’re giving this idea even the slightest benefit of the doubt, wouldn’t such tactics greatly benefit from uncertain numbers, changing enemy stats AND imperfect gear? Like, say… caping the stats to 80% max, introducing multiple tiers of a blessing and rerolling perks randomly?
I’d say that’s a great plan, since ways to increase stats can be introduced later, perk rerolling can be turned into a dropdown menu and in case these tactics don’t yield the required quarterly or yearly results, FS can, you know, introduce changes away from the RNG little by little, as a form of… redemption?
Ah, nvm tho. I’m prolly talking out of my behind…
It must be these pesky math nerds after all, making builds and hating on the rng. Psh.
Nowhere on any dev blog I can find is there any source for any of this.
And the RNG was in no way successful at that, Math-hammer is here just as hard as it ever was, people chase it just as much, and reflects in gameplay just as relevantly as it does in other games. No rational game designer would expect otherwise, and blaming that on the players is simply a crass demonstration of a fundamental inability to understand one’s customerbase. That’s an even worse explanation than pushing slot machine mechanics to artificially increase grinding.
Yeah, this is just the latest thing Jakal has latched onto in his attempts to justify the terrible state of Darktide’s ‘crafting’ system.
Any game will get optimized by its players, or at least the die-hards. You don’t need to throw obstacles in their path, all that does is make them more stubbornly determined to wring the last few bits of power out of the system.
That being said, Jakal does have a point.
A lot of the earlier builds and development pointed to the devs not wanting to give players information. Stat bars were almost entirely opaque in numbers and effects, there was no Brunt, and blessings and perks were entirely randomly acquired.
Alongside stuff like interview comments about how people optimized the fun out of games, it is clear that at least some of Darktide’s devs hated the fact people kept going for bigger numbers, and initially designed Darktide’s systems to deliberately frustrate that…which was frankly a very stupid move, because people are, again, going to optimize stuff.
This also served as a player retention mechanic for the people who actually wanted good builds, and I would say that later implementation (blessing tier hunting, random drops, Melk weeklies) was far more focused in this direction during the full release and subsequent patches. But the initial closed-beta stuff in Darktide seemed far more intent on obscuring as many mechanics as possible in order to keep people from deliberately optimizing.
I feel the improvements we’ve got into the visibility of weapon performance vs various armor types through DT’s weapon inspect UI is pretty definitive proof that FS is “pro-math.”
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Vid touches on so many game design choices FS chooses to make… obfuscating details only makes it irritating figure out mechanics, it doesn’t actually change player behavior. Meta-game influence is always going to appear in games no matter how much the devs dislike it. Bitching about how people engage with the game is pointless.
You can ignore your community and how they play; in this case ignore the community base of Warhammer/40k as a whole because the ttwg IS either math-goons playing the meta, or people who enjoy painting (the latter of which a good portion don’t even play the game, they just paint).
I mean, if they didn’t want people to Mathhammer why not…you know…provide bonuses that are not only meaningful if you math hammer it?
Like believe it or not people tend to like abilities and bonuses that aren’t just % to peanut allergy