Imagine if you will a game where there is a finite amount of ammunition in a game where 4 strangers are brought together to never see each other again.
Now imagine more than one person relies heavily on ammunition.
Now imagine, if you can, strangers on the internet not being considerate, or team-oriented.
You now have Darktide’s ammunition system.
So you spend 20-30 minutes of your day sprinting around the map, throwing your safety to the wind, in an attempt to grab those precious ammo drops before that little goblin gobbles them up.
Then you never see them again. Did you block them? Doesn’t matter. You’ll never see them again either way, but there are far more goblins in this world than you can ever block.
This isn’t too common a problem for me, unless there’s 3 or more vets. There’s a lot of classes that help. Any that’s melee focus. Stealth Zealot, Melee Ogyrn with rocks, Staff Psyker and Psyker in general… all should help reduce team ammo strain. I do find some people as you describe it, but I find it’s more an issue on lower difficulties. The higher up I go the more observant I find people, tagging ammo for those with less. But sometimes I also see some people wasting plasma gun on a melee mook. Sometimes ammo issues are their own. Or shooting into a harmless pox walker horde in a choke point with no specials, elites, etc. nearby. Just use melee.
I say this as someone who pretty much only plays:
Staff Psyker
Stealth Zealot
Melee Ogyrn
Support/Revolver Vet
I pretty much only grab ammo as the vet. I would suggest, as others have, that vet should have the innate ammo regen. Give core class abilities at level 1 for all classes (or explicitly show them all, like zealot having toughness damage reduction on slide, Ogyrn carrying objectives faster, more wounds, etc.)
One thing I would say, additionally, is people taking ammo not for malicious intent but because they were trying to open the chest at the same time. Or trying to grab plastic and diamonds at the same time. Maybe holding E for picking up ammo when you’re above yellow threshold or something to make you reconsider.
Ammo goblin teammates don’t mean that the ammo system is bad. It just means you’ve got bad teammates. If you think you’re playing with one, the only behavior you can control is your own. Play more conservative with your shots, let high ammo teammates deal with threats, engage in melee more often to secure kills, and generally know item spawns so you can push ahead to secure ammo for yourself.
And you can throw the preemptive dismissive statement out but, for real, I do rarely run out of ammo. I pub T5 Auric Maels, for context. I think a lot of casual gamers tend to overuse their ranged weapons because 1) it feels safer and 2) they’ve heard “Darktide is ranged and VT2 is melee”. They often overlook the value of getting into melee with those pesky shooters and beating the bad men to death with a club.
I have had this problem exactly once in the past. And we kicked that person because they were being malicious spam stealing all the ammo just to be a jerk
Most of the time it’s fine. But it is funny hearing the characters banter about the same things. The character banter is a way of dealing with the issue since. The game is publically shaming you for doing so. But it’s also kind of funny at the same time
Try running a MG IV Las gun with The crit hits consume no ammo perk.
If your willing to stack a ton of stamina from. Curios and what not. You can take deadshot. I think it is. The one that gives 25% crit while draining stamina
Then take weapon specialist and only take the perks that give you stamina when you switch to your melee weapon.
I think you can see where I’m going with that concept
You can run a helbore setup aswell. And have quite literally. Infinite ammo because surgical can push the crit chance to 100%.
The mk III helbore is the best for this because of the slower charge time. But at the same time. the gun has a slow charge time so it simply cannot deal with hoards at all.
If you want to take down specialists with it however you can
Don’t run weapon specialist with helbore run the middle keystone that gives 5% back per stack when you kill a market target. The helbores animation is too slow to be switching between mele and back to ranged
With that being said. You will need to melee hoards with this setup
our group once kicked somebody for hogging it. I also blocked somebody for it after I told them to be more considerate with the ammo and they kept klepping it, ended up literally wasting 90% of the pickups according to scoreboard (probably one of the few instantly relevant metrics it provides). It thankfully doesn’t happen in a lot of my runs, mostly bc I just play w friends these days, so there’s some bias in my data there, but my few pug games had mostly considerate people. If I’m stuck in a pug where a guy is absolutely trolling the ammo, I’ll either leave the run, or just let them solo the map while I play a walking simulator. I attribute it to people chasing scoreboard numbers.
But then to compensate, they would have to spawn lesss often and then all the annoyance from having the one ammo bag stolen that you needed more, gets compounded all into a single occurance.
The problem is that most people do not ask themselves if they are the best person to take the ammo, they just take them.
One change I’d love to see to ammo bags though; they should give you their specific %-ige of ammo (small bags 15% and big ones 50%) while taking your magazine size into account and not just look at reserve ammo count.
This would change very little for most guns but would make a massive difference for something like the plasma gun.
Survivalist should also take magazine size into account.
I think the devs had the right idea with having voicelines to call out ammo hogs. IMO they need to expand on this.
Lower the threshold for the voicelines to be triggered.
Have similar callouts to thank teammates who tag ammo and then let someone else pick it up.
Attach some kind of gameplay penalty to people who repeatedly get called out by the automated voicelines. Lower their rewards at the end of the mission or something.
I don’t get why we can’t have a scoreboard because of toxicity, but then they have an ammo system that literally just encourages people to sabotage each other. Even better is when the pug vacuum stocks up immediately before dying because he’s been sitting on last wound since the last time he zipped ahead of the group in search of the bag.
They should use the ravaged art system full stop - I don’t care if you and your group of friends play nice and share well together, mine does too. That also isn’t the experience of the game for the vast majority of players.
This would also allow them to get rid of horrible auras like Veteran Scavenger that completely demolish the difficulty curve. Veteran could be balanced to have more ammo, because he would uniquely get more ammo off his restocks. There, no need for regenerating Ogryn shotgun shells for him because he would feel bad for picking up a bag on you. There is none of any of these stupid bad balance interactions because they are accommodating for an already bad asocial ammo system. It would also let players feel less like they’re wasting ammo if they’re new, because the only ones able to collect the bags they see on their screen would be them.
I recommend bringing it to people’s attention in pubs when it happens. Sometimes, it’s by accident or they simply weren’t aware of the team’s needs at the time for whatever reason. Most people I’ve encountered who were ammo greedy were willing to help me find ammo for myself or even drop an ammo crate if the need was bad enough. Something I noticed helping friends underneath the hi5shock or auric maelstrom difficulties is that pubs often refuse to loot the map: I’ve often got more ammo than I can handle and often abandon ammo (after pinging it for others) because so few people want to backtrack, let alone take detours off the main route to find chests.
I know but c’mon, you really think FS wouldn’t change the spawnrates of ammo packs but increase their effectivenes by 600%?
Another great example of a decent idea that was implemented in a very lazy / bad way.
The ammo hog lines always play if someone is in non-white ammo state (below 60-ish % total ammo) and someone else picks up either bag when they didn’t need 100% of what the bag gave them.
This ignores so many circumstances it which it was still correct to pick up that ammo bag and hearing them in such a situation is only annoying.
If you are missing 65 ammo and picking up a big bag gives you 66 while your shocktrooper helbore teammate is a single ammo below the yellow treshold, he will call you out eventhough you wasted as little as 1.5% of that bag.
If you would’ve shot that single bullet, that voiceline can’t trigger and your teammate would’ve never realized that you “wasted” that pickup.
They also completely ignore if the “correct” (most optimal) person took the ammo and just lost the team the run because of that.
All of this also ignores that it can happen on accident, either when you’re not aware or when you were aware that someone needed the ammo more.
The point is; the voicelines are not looking at other aspecrs than the remaining ammo and wheather the full amount of the bag was useable.
And because the triggers for the voicelines are not smart, attaching penalties for triggering them is a really bad idea.
Ngl, I wasn’t with you at first but you’re right.
Ammo pickups should work like the ravaged art.
That system wouldn’t allow for the removal of survivalist (and shouldn’t) but having ammo pickups work like ravaged art would remove any and all “you took my ammo!”" Problems.
what if, ammo pickups were just shared with the team IE excess ammo from the bag goes to your team mates
lets say you only need 50% of what is in the ammo bag to fill up
well the other 50% can be shared with anyone who needs it
that way is some dimwit shoots a single bullet, then picks up an ammo bag, they get 1 ballet back, and the rest of the team get 99% of the ammo in that pickup
this would be especially useful as a veteran player, to have your team mates give you their excess ammo
i can’t tell you how many times as a zealot i have accidently picked up ammo when i didn’t need it
hell half the time the only ammo i need is the ammo i take into the mission since i kill 90% of the enemy types with my knife
guns only get used against crushers and certain specialists, trappers, snipers, etc
i always make sure to look for an point out as much ammo as i can afterwards when i accidently grab a large bag out of a chest even tho i don’t need it.
and as a psyker, that is using a staff, i quite literally don’t need ammo, but how handy would it be, to have the psykers on your team, be able to pick up ammo and give it to, any other players that need it
the person with the lowest amount of ammo
or a % based on how much ammo you are missing compared to the rest of the team
example
player1
missing 50% ammo
player 2
missing 25% ammo
player 3
missing 75% ammo
player 4
missing 1% ammo
lets say player 4 picks up the ammo bag
the ammo bag contains 100% of it’s own ammo, and gets distributed based on who needs it the most
player 3 would receive 50% of the ammo
player 1 would receive 33% of the ammo ish
and player 2 would receive 16% of the ammo ish
and player 4 would receive 1% of the ammo (OR) player 4 could fill ammo and then the rest can be distributed based on who needs it, either way
I’m just doing napkin math’s here, but it would be really really easy to code in the formulas to distribute ammo based on who needs it the most, like really easy. they are doing MUCH more complicated stuff with numbers to calculate damage and all that. something as simple as distributing ammo should be Childs play for FS
I don’t think there is a need to make all sorts of hoops and loops of % ammo automatically being transferred to the lowest ammo player or other safeguard mechanics.
I play Dakka Ogryn and I do try to be mindful of taking ammo tho I’ve faced the following problems:
While it is good to have a color indicator for my team’s ammo count, I still think an additional percentage number would be nice for me to gauge how quickly they are burning through ammo.
I would love to be able to see my own ammo count color/percentage coded too on my own sidebar, stubber guns have A LOT of bullets, so sometimes it is hard to gauge how much more or less I need ammo over a team-mate with “yellow” ammo left. Especially if things are hectic.
Also, a smooth solution to some of the issues is to look at how L4D does it; having unlimited ammo piles.
Ofc it shouldn’t be littered all over the place, but it would solve the issue if they were next to medicae stations every now and then.
There can even be a cap of 1 loot per player pr. pile.
What gets me is how a whole team will rush behind me to get to a crate I’m already opening, only to try and ‘steal’ the plasteel/diamantine we’re all going to benefit from anyway.
Never mind watching for enemies, covering angles etc. Must take before anyone else!
All guns in all video games should be balanced around having infinite ammo with reload, mag size, and damage limitations. Look at the revolver: Limiting its ammo is hardly the problem. Could just as easily have it recharge like assail. If you are running a vet, it basically does.
I mean, so you like looting crap off of the ground? Have a few kids in real life. All grenades recharge over time, all ammo, all resources for mission success or failure are calculated. Focus on the fight and comraderie, not padding match length by having to run around and loot.
There’s pro and cons to this idea.
Playing mainly a psyker I don’t use ammo, but being able to pick them up anyway and have them redistributed to my party would make life so much easier.
The con is that those who throw away the most ammo are the ones being rewarded the most.
You know what is even easier thought? Making ammo tins a pickup like ravaged art. To explain what that would mean: every tin or bag of ammo can now be picked up once by every team member. Or in oder terms, every ammo pickup would have 4 charged but only one per person.
You can solve the problem with math, sure. It’s just unintuitive for most people.
Nobody will have a problem with understanding that ammo tins can be picked up by everyone but only once by themselves.
