And this is the issue. No, a decently high percentage of the active player base does NOT buy these DLCs. Most map packs for Vermintide 1 and also Vermintide 2 do not sell well. FS has stated this before. While single people always scream “This game needs more maps” or “Just make map DLCs and everythings fine” the reality works differently. People are not interested in new maps. At least not if they have to pay for them.
Which leads us to this model: Some people buy the cosmetics and others gain the maps for free. Most people win. Unless we want to assume that there are dozen of impulse controlled buyers whose life gets ruined by this. Some people’s whole argumentation are based on this which I find kinda questionable. Do they exist? Sure. Are they playing Vermintide? We don’t know. Statistically we can safely say that they are at best in the low triple digit numbers. And if there are really people who have this have to buy everything problem they have a much bigger issue with an ever increasing Steam Store.
But yea, as described in the post above the cosmetics have an increaed profit margin on purpose. Reasons given.
I would’ve expected 3 - 5 quid for a new armour skin, not a pig glued to someone’s bonce.
The business model is tried and tested, the price point is a little sharp for me, and the hats don’t match the armour - my personal bugbear.
The fact maps don’t sell has more to do with the policy of people being able to play DLC maps for free-by-proxy than people not wanting to pay for maps.
At this point I’d stump up twenty quid for a map editor, let alone more maps.
I for one have never understood the whole “but people who lack impulse control” argument. There are so many worse things in the world that will negatively impact your life if you lack impulse control than spending more money than you should on video games. It isn’t up to bakeries to stop selling cakes, just because there is the chance an obese person will buy them.
Also I specifically said active player base. Map packs don’t sell well in regards to the total number of people who bought the base game, because many of those people aren’t active players, and likely aren’t going to return just to play a new map or two, especially if they have to pay for it. Out of the active player base though, the map packs sell quite well. This new business model is focusing on getting inactive players back by offering new free content, which I think is preferable for both sides.
The DLC maps being accessed for free should the host / someone owns said DLC is only part of the problem.
Main issue is how well the DLC is designed and whether or not it gets improved after release. Of the current DLC only Back to Ubersreik fared well when it came to it’s reception however it wasn’t without issue. Olyshea’s nattering voice every mission, Fortunes of War not having randomized spawns (despite it being an added level - still poorly designed imo), a redo of VT1 maps means nothing actually new, certain weapons being too powerful / imbalanced and so on.
A map editor released a long time ago would’ve helped the game’s retention and interest in Warhammer / Vermintide 2 as players could attempt to make actually good maps and even if they were just in the Moddedl Realm it would still have garnered a lot of interest imo. Fatshark missed that boat awhile ago due to sticking with defunct tools that are no longer supported so they can’t really license any map tools.
DLC content got never really improved after release, maybe bugfixes here and there but it never ever happened that FS actually responded to DLC feedback or changed anything… like you mentioned Olyshea’s Voice on BtU (you can only disable it via mod), final event of Blightreaper (ppl. asked so long for bossfights or smth. to make it more interesting as it is), pretty much every “skin” of Bögenhafen, no binding of Cataclysm to WoM, etc. For me that’s the biggest issue. Not even failures on existing maps got fixed anytime, like this gap on Halescourge, flying corpses on Warcamp or strange loot location (not sure if that got fixed) and many more.
After the last Patch some things in the keep got fixed atleast, like the flying chains in the room in front of Krubers or the flying tree in the mountains behind Cathrinnes tower, but in Siennas room they made some weird decision with the ceiling textures:
sry got a little off topic here, but maybe, if FS would put some effort into old content aswell ppl. will be more willing to buy those too… sry im just sick of those sloppy content drops
Yea the Bogenhafen finale should’ve been improved for sure. Again the trailer shows the possibility of some Chaos Warlords (upgraded base enemies but with better stats / different skin) coming to claim the Blightreaper but instead we just get a book hunt… The Pit and Blightreaper should’ve had a bunch of spawn points where you could come across such an upgraded enemy whether it’s a normal upgraded enemy or an elite.
Imo Fatshark’s programming is a jumbled mess so they dare not try and fix the old maps for fear of blowing the entire game up lol.
Athel Yenlui still spawning specials behind the final event door is probably still not fixed and that bug has been in the game since the very start haha.
edit: Speaking of trailer the Winds of Magic one also had a good set up for a Beastlord that you fight at the end of Dark Omens. Perhaps make it look wounded with a snapped arrow or two just to show it’s last run in with the 5 via trailer. Even better have it be some sort of recurring boss that can show up a few times in a sort of ambush/raid before retreating only for the final fight at the herdstone.
Yea, the policy doesn’t really help much in that regard. But you see what happens if Fatshark does not give such generous access to DLC content. Instead of being praised for giving access to maps without having bought them, they are getting flamed if actually DLC content needing the DLC to be played. This is actually normal in most other games. Why is Vermintide always hold up against the top buisness standard which are most often exceptions and not the norm?
Also, the map editor would do nearly nothing. At best there would be 1 or 2 more maps per year for the official realm. There are several reasons why community made maps would end in depression, so we don’t have to kid ourselves there. Sure one or two maps more are one or two maps more. So I would not go against a map editor if alone to see how the argument that the map editor is the holy salvation tool would crumble under the communities incompetence.
Your assumption on the map editor is merely that. A baseless guess. However there is evidence of map editors / modding that has done well so much so that an entire new game genre was made when it came to Warcraft 3’s editor.
1 or 2 more maps per year is pretty close to what Fatshark is capable of in any case plus most likely the map makers would actually continue to support said maps should changes / improvements need to be made unlike Fatshark who hasn’t touched Shadows over Burgertown finale.
Besides having the usual slew of terrible maps either due to figuring the map editor out or people just plain messing around, the only real concern I could see would be how easy a VT2 map editor would be and if it’s stable or not.
My assumption is as good as your assumption and it is not baseless. Like I said, I support the map editor just for this. To see the argument crumble. In comparison to other games with editor’s Vermintide has more issues, nameley the IP strangle by GW and the limited assets. For anyone more interested I will link an older topic. Under Act I - General Remarks you can read why I don’t see a map editor as overly succesful. These arguments are not baseless.
Yea, sure. You mean like people keep supporting their mods like the 5+ players mod and several others? I have no idea where you take your overconfidence in people from when we have actually examples of people dropping support.
I don’t think few paid MTXes are a problem, not at all.
Problem is that like 90% of big issues from 2.0 fiasco didn’t get fixed in Season 2. And we’re stuck at W94 since Saturday morning or something.
That’s the problem, the big core gameplay crap needs to get finally fixed… and stuff needs to get tested.
Nobody… nobody run that W95 once, since there is just error in spawning code, which could prolly be fixed by programmer in short amount of time also. Yet it neither got tested or it got promptly hot-fixed.
This is the big problem.
I just play played the game now after like month break and I’m thinking “Man… this is such a mess… I expected the crap to get fixed in S2, it’s the same old same old everywhere”
Have no problem paying few euro for hat but as milkandcookies was talking not so long ago in his vid about VT2 dying… they need to get their sh*t together.
ps: Not even talking about that performance issue, that’s going on since S2. Spend half a day on figuring out what’s bugged there. Who knows when that’s going to get fixed.
Well, I’m sorry for that, but they don’t work the week end, so at least, let them the time to “hotfix” the actual bug. But it’s way less buggy than it was in S1.
We don’t have the “No completed bar, find the remaining enemy in the whole map” anymore. Or the “Wait for the next wave to come, even if they spend 30 seconds coming and you don’t have enough time”.
I mean, season 2 is far better than the first right now.
As weaves are “repeated” every 40, we can also assume that the corresponding lower weave was indeed tested and it went fine (as we did passed it 2 times already to reach 95).
So it’s a “niche bug” probably difficult to find. And there will always have some.
It’s a new season launch, either it should be properly tested or someone should be rdy to hot-fix this kind of big errors.
What do you mean ?
I could again write down whole list of stuff that is wrong/problematic/bugged since S1 and not fixed in S2.
I guess only thing I can think of that got fixed is that now there is enough essence to actually finish the weaves, but like… that’s not wow clap kinda thing. Thats something that should not be in S1 at all or again should be hotfixed as soon as it got reported in frickin beta of S1.
I think there is more stuff spawning now in higher weaves, it’s not just higher dmg multi/tweaked modifiers.
They could either have group of ppl test running em all (would not be hard to get for free…) or dev could run thru the weaves fast with immortal mod and some speed hack. Like whatever, they should have some policy/system on testing this stuff.
Especially when we had similar issue in S1 … where like 92 or 3 or whatever it was was also crashing and it took damn ages to get fixed if it even got fixed, I don’t even know whether it got fixed in the end or not. The sound bug.
So overall I’ve essentially made the points I meant to make through this, but I will answer this question since it was directly asked:
Just a question: Would you feel better about the pricing if they added a single line to the DLC cosmetics like: “These DLC’s are meant as a support for potentially free future content.”
No. The issue here is with the business model in its entirety for reasons I’ve already stated. They’ve skated repeatedly on vaguely shady things in the past because honestly the game was genuinely good. And again: I don’t actually mind spending money to support a good dev. The thing is, I don’t believe they were insolvent with their previous business models and I don’t believe they’re doing this to enable “free” content in the future. They’ve been doing “free” content all along without adding in microtransactional nonsense. Fundamentally the fact that they chose to do this a year-ish after release means that I don’t trust a thing they say anymore because they’ve already shown themselves to be dishonest when it’s profitable.
Honestly this whole thing reeks of Tencent meddling to me.
A bug where everyone crashes, at the same time, with a clear error code, is not a niche bug. The s1 sound bug was a niche bug because it was hard to recreate on their end and not everyone got it. But i’d rather wait and it be fixed and they fix it quickly and break something else.
It’s all the same enemies, they didnt tweak any enemy numbers, they just used the same maps/fixed spawns/ and shuffled the winds around, the same winds. The way they fixed the essence issue is that objectives count more towards your pogress bar, they gave some numbers in their patch notes, 80% for objectives and 20% for enemies. Idk how much it was before.
I don’t believe they tested it like this, that would be very lazy. Every weave has different amount of enemies, and when the crash occurs on enemies spawning, it can be that they don’t happen on lower weaves. Also i don’t understand how it didnt crash in s1 but it does on s2? Does it crash because they added a different wind to it? It’s literally the same code from s1 just pasted together in a different order (not a coder could be wrong, maybe its difficult cuz of branches.)
I agree with this. Only if its a very specific bug, which i dont think it is because everyone is getting it from my understanding,i would kind of understand that there is a bug. But how hard is it to just let everything spawn once? Just run around in it with godmode or something. People with jobs have time to complete 120 weaves, but people with that job don’t have the time to test all 120. Or maybe it is a very specific bug which just happens to be happening to the couple groups at 95, which in that case i apologise and they just missed it in testing.
I really want Fatshark to go out of business. I hope everyone who put a hand developing this game loses their home and relationships. They will never see another dime from me again.
I never thought Studio Wildcard was a great company but I’ve given them half the money I’ve given Fatshark and they’re still pumping out content and free dlcs. Man, Fatshark are some lazy gits who really live in a world that’s up their own.
It’s funny, weave 95 didn’t crash for me on modded realm just running through it to see if it crashes, but the third mino didn’t spawn either, only two spawned in, pretty weird.
This goes way to far man… I mean it’s ok to be pissed sometimes but think about what you say next time. You’re still talking to human beings and just because they do not please your needs doesn’t justify such statements.
No, it’s deserved. Being a fellow human doesn’t excuse things and that statement never made any sense. We can excuse animals because its in their nature and we can excuse natural disasters because it’s a force of nature. Human nature is literally the only thing we can change, I’m not going to excuse greed because it’s human, I’m going to condemn it because it is human. If you don’t want to provide an adequate service for your fellow humans then you don’t deserve the benefits that entails.
And yes, if I made such a sloppy mess people were unhappy about, I’d want them to tell me even if they were just mad about it.
