Hi,
I just like many fellow darktide players use mods to add certain quality of life improvements or to try and find a new way of enjoying the game again. Some mods however, shimmy around the grey line of cheating such as, imo the mod which mines all the correct answers for the mini game. People will argue it is not a cheat but whatever it’s a minor issue.
The big issue and the main concern of mine is the reconnect mod (Reconnect at Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Nexus - Mods and community). As far as I’m concerned this mod has been created to allow people to quickly reconnect to the game when the connection is funky without losing access to the game you are playing in. Unfortunately however, some players have found a way to abuse this mod. I believe that if your character got trapped in a net, pounced by a dog or went down you can quickly hit /retry in your chat to reconnect to the game. This, for some reason allows your character to get out of nets, pounces and… death apparently because you can resurrect yourself. This obviously opens up possiblites such as speedrunning.
To be clear I main zealot and I have nothing against people who play combat blade and sometimes run off from the party to kill targets around the event or gunners. That is their job and all the power to them. I can also speedrun or finish maps on my own without bots hi intensity t5 no problem.
The thing that drives me crazy are individuals who purposefully pick combat blade to run at max speed with the lunge cancel past all the enemies reaching the elevator and just wait there for the party whilst ‘delaying’ the enemies in public games! Obviously it’s not like they will ask whether or not the party wants to speedrun, no they naturally just assume its totally fine to grief a game. It really is quite cringe to see that now our party more or less shrinks to 3 players and 1 dumbwit who just plays his own game. It didnt even use to be so much of an issue until people found out about the exploit which more or less allows them to be nearly invincible by simply reconnecting to the game and getting out of most trouble, so they don’t ever have to be near the party. If you want to play on your own why do it in public games?
This post does not aim to spark a conversation on which mods in particular are fair/cheating or should the combat blade be nerfed, no. I would like for fatshark to perhaps address this issue of reconnecting-out-of-troubles and look for a possible soultion since most of the ‘sweat lords’ will use this exploit to basically forgo the need of teamplay and when their luck runs out just leave the game after triggering 3 hordes and 2 bosses. Mods are amazing but this is just a clear exploit abuse.
Speedruns are amazing and fun to pull off but keep them for solo play or bring a party who is willing to have their fun and challenge of the missions sucked out of themselves with an exploit.
agree. Mods that tell you if grim is nearby. Or that show enemy healthbards in fights. Or telling what buttons to press on auspex. Are cheats.
I would’ve added the new mod “Spidey Sense” that shows where certain specials are. But this mod is a necessety, due to the bugs when game not playing audo cues for those specials.
Reconnect is a big issue. My friend abused this all the time. If we about to lose and he died - he alt+f4, gives as a bot, and reconnects back after we won a fight. Havent seen people reconnecting to escape the net or smth. But it’s a problem i wish was fixed
All FS has to do to address the ability to reconnect as a “get out of jail” option is just down or kill the player if they disconnect while incapacitated. It’s pretty simple and this already happens in VT2.
Well this is a flawed design of darktide but eh you could just pluck ur Ethernet out and have the same result.
I reconnect when A i glitched out cause chaos spawn or we are a full premate team and need that 1 bot for the clutch. So we disconnect and reconnect happens rarely but we all don’t care.
The issue tho is in pubs when they run ahead or do tourism on tertium. Get trapped/ dogged to use it and continue with their meh playstyle.
But for that you got the vote kick.
Small edit I disconnect if MY INTERNET spikes for 2 seconds up to 200ms + bad connection on my end but fatshark IS LIKE HOW DARE YOU have a high ling and throw you out unlike other games like league giving you time to stay in the lobby till your connection is stable again it’s just a darktide issue at hand.
Rarely ever have issues with reconnecting players. Most just quit the game when they get netted in a bad spot or go down. This is after 1200 hours.
It’s always better to assume people have good intentions when using mods. Audio visuals for Specialists can greatly help people with disabilities, and the Reconnect mod is useful when you fall out of the world or get stuck in geometry.
I do realize that the abuse of this mod may not be as common to run into. However this is a case where I assume the game does not work as intended and it creates an exploit which over time could be abused by more players. At this pointm, do we need a larger amount of players running rampant and completely ignoring the game’s mechanics taking away from the fun of the players for it to be worth of a fix? I’m simply hoping for a fix on an exploit and since apparently this has been a thing back in vt2 Fatshark should just simply issue a patch for it, or so I hope they will.
Again I use mods myself to fix some of this game’s issues and I do not blame anyone for wanting to do so. However wouldn’t we want them to simply address an exploit and leave the general functionality of a mod unscaped?
Mods are there until they’re not needed. That’s the short and sweet of it. Fatshark is OK with a lot of these mods because they don’t affect the gameplay of other players at all. Many of the devs sit in the official modding discord for Darktide so they’re very well aware of what goes through the scene.
I think the issue here is that people often conflate the potential of something being abused with what’s actually happening, and might pull out an edge case from the subreddit or the one time it did happen to them over 300+ hours of playing the game.
The reality is that most of these mods are virtually nonexistent for other players. They don’t alter how anyone else plays the game and a huge chunk of players don’t even mod anymore. If they do, it’s usually just QOL like Numeric UI so they can see how much ammo everyone has. I personally love the little cooldown bars for everyone’s class abilities. That’s a great feature.
Scoreboards and True Level don’t make people leave a game. It’s seeing someone with a knife or other ‘troll meta’ weapon or operative overlap that they don’t like, and assuming the absolute worst immediately and blaming other players for their perceived biases.
I’ve had more people leave lobbies because I was playing Executioner’s Stance Vet and ended up with generally the highest amount of kills across all categories anyway, and Scoreboard lets me gauge how useful a build is with my personal performance. I really don’t look at other players’ stats unless something went horribly wrong and people are being rude and passing blame.
Is it a little sketchy that these mods exist? Yeah. There’s even a few mods that I wouldn’t touch unless Fatshark personally OK’d it, like visual cues on Specialists, but probably the most ‘cheaty’ mod that I use is a mod that prevents accidental jumping between dodging. I use it because I lose dodge tempo easily and it really helps me out.
I don’t really consider something like Book Finder or Healthbars to be cheaty at all. Healthbars don’t change how you play the game and Book Finder only works if you’re already within the audio cue range of books, which is a vanilla feature. Most people just can’t hear them and the audio effects are pretty bad, anyway.
I consider mods that turn weapons into automatics (glorified macros, really) to be within the scope of ‘cheating’ if I had to pick things out, but it ultimately doesn’t matter.
the number of mods that sail close to and over the line of cheating is clearly growing and there are also mods that i simply dont want to be grouped with people using, like scoreboard mod. dont want to stop people playing the way they want but we shouldnt have to join in.
How many more times does this puddle, which was once a dead horse, need to be beaten?
Before the reconnect problem (and mods surrounding it) can be removed or banned etc. the f*cked interactions with sounds and other ways the game cheats you out of success, need to be fixed first before any of this bears any real weight.
i thought people just rebinding “jump” button to something else. Mine is on alt key, so i can both vault/jump when needed. And wont be accidentally jumping instead of dodging
Wish people would learn to karkin’ votekick obvious trolls like this.
It amazes me in 30 years of online gaming how little the votekick is used to banish even the worst offenders.
Thats so simple and true and yet the amount of failed votekicks i saw amazes me. Lack of consequences in game community is the reason for toxicity, nothing else. Add consequences and toxic players will be dealt with, no matter if its spamming, trash talking or cheating.
i just dont get this logic , how does piling on more wrong ever help? people are just going to get used to them then you have a another shitstorm when they take it away. all you have done is double the work required to get to a good point and placed a really uneven “fix”
i dont think that was the problem OP raised. Like ok if you using mod like Spidey Sense that shows if trapper/poxburster/dog nearby. Game does have sound problems.
If you using reconnect to escape from being trapped/pounced - ok, fine. Game sometimes being unfair by letting trappers shoot net through obstacles or dogs instapouncing you.
The problem OP raised is - that kind of cheats allow some players to not be punished in scenarios they must be punished. The more specific - knife zealots, that run away, trigger all hordes/ambushes/bosses. Hence griefing the game.
Yeah, fair that’s a connected but still different topic.
I actually already said my piece to the original topic but I guess I’ll state it more directly:
There are two aspects you can have a problem with: either the principle alone or that the mod makes it faster / more effective.
The solution proposed is to ban the mod or make it impossible by game mechanics.
In both cases, everyone gets punished for the actions of a select few bad actors.
I am against this on principle but in addition to this topic specifically; I hate that this “problem” doubles as an “anti BS fix” and there is no way to remove the problem while keeping the “BS fix” in.
The only logical conclusion is to remove all things that the fix is there for and then nobody no longer cares if that functionally is gone.
Asking for it to be removed before the BS is, will only anger more people that use said functionality in more acceptable ways than the most self centred, egotistical way possible.
This is also a problem because people that use the reconnect functionality in this degenerate, selfish way are far fewer than people using it in the acceptable way.
And the only reason why people even use it in such degenerate ways is because there is no solo mode for them to play the way that they want to.
Enabling a private solo mission is the actual solution to OPs problem. That’s also easier than fixing all the sound and collision issues etc.
If you ever see someone like that in your game, kick them. If the others won’t comply, tell them that you leave them with the griefer and then you leave. Now that it’s just them, the griefing is even more strongly felt and that will surely annoy the remaining players and hopefully they blame the griefer too.
Not ideal but there’s nothing else you can do in the moment.
happens rarely but we all don’t care.