I will, I see and hear you and will continue to pass on your feedback as always!
Thank you kindly!
The fact that resources are no longer shared between characters is exactly the reason why I personally never made another character but my 1st one. Together with the weeklies being split per character as well, the fact that they can take much longer to complete than what was required in VT2, the fact that some weeklies are not up to me to be completed (f.e. “Finish X amount of Missions without anyone dying”) and finally that there is a substantial (30 - 40%-ish) currency reward for finishing all of them, all come together to not make me (and likely a ton of other players) not want to even try out the other classes.
Not only is the bricking of items a massive issue, it gets compounded by the fact that whatever item just turned into a brick cannot even be used to get any resources back! If I get a bricked blue, it’s worth less than 4k dockets and only dockets. That is so insignificant and worthless I might as well have gotten nothing but it cost me around half a damnation missions worth of plasteel to make the damn thing.
Silo’ing is one thing but being stuck on 30K of a crafting resource that I cannot possibly spend faster than I earn it combined with a ton of things that I’d like to be able to spend it on, make for a really depressing and disappointing experience. And then I’d get to re-experience that every single time I make and level a new character… “yeah no f. that!” Is what I think every single time I ask myself if it’s not finally time to try out the other classes. If I, someone who decided to stick with the game, thinks that, it had to have been a reason for others to quit!
This needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
There is no scenario that combines locks remaining and us being able to make what we want.
What good does it if I can max out the properties I never wanted to begin with? You will never max those unwanted perks and blessing because it’s what you want to do but because it would be the only thing you could do.
Locks need to go, no middle ground can be made acceptable.
Where do people get the idea that the game is failing? Is there a site I can look at to see sales and active players? Just curious if people think places like this forum, reddit, steam reviews are a reflection of the majority. Some of these guys quit the game everytime there is a dev post… Which tells me they did not actually quit. Some do not even play Darktide, they just love to complain about it.
So I would love to see where the time is running out so I can keep an eye on that.
Are the penances replacing the current ones, or just being added into the mix?
If they are additions, is anything being done to address the current ones that are near impossible to complete?
They are additions I think…
I suppose you can look at steam charts, its a very loose indicator of the trajectory of the player base.
Take it with a grain of salt.
Oh dear god. I fear you might be onto something.
It’s funny, just yesterday I was talking to a friend (that quit DT due to its crafting system ;D ) about how red items would work but more relevant here: how they would be earned.
We couldn’t see them being obtainable in the armory so that’s no good. Melk having a chance of getting them sounds like an “ok” idea but you already know the odds of seeing the red that you’d want is so low that it might as well not exist. Melk would have to have at least 1 Red 100% of the time and even then… Getting reds as emperors gifts also seemed a bit underwhelming.
…but I swear to god if there will be a way to pay for them, they have burned, nay, nuked all bridges. No fix / rollback of the changes after that could ever win the “goodwill” of the community back. It sounds like an idea so unfathomably stupid or greedy, nobody could be seriously consider doing it. Then again I thought the same thing about “reworking” VT2s crafting system into something so disrespectful to our collective time but here we are.
This is great. But I also really think you need to implement a breakdown system where a player can turn unwanted weapons (with unwanted blessings) into plasteel (and diamantine) maybe at a 1/4-1/2 of the value it takes to upgrade the weapon because the game still feels like a slug for upgrading the character - far worse than V-tide. Especially worse because resources are not shared between classes and the fact that maps take 50-100% longer than V-tide maps
Look at the directions of the steam ratings and what the reviews are saying, there are almost no buyers who are satisfied with the state of the game as it currently stands or the direction it is supposedly taking.
A great many of the negative reviews say that the crafting locks, RNG progression, and resource siloing are the sole reasons why they can’t bring themselves to recommend the game, and were the devs to come out and definitively say that they are not going to change it, most of them would give up on the game altogether.
The hope that it will get better in the future is the main reason why a big chunk of the dwindling couple thousand active players are even still here, and I’m pretty sure FS knows that, that’s why they avoid the topic at all costs.
I have 8 friends who own the game, 3 who have it on their wishlist. Only 2, myself included, actually still play, a third joins in sometimes when we ask just because he likes to hang out with us, but never plays on his own time. The rest just don’t find it enjoyable enough to even try.
A few hundred players aren’t going to cover the costs of dedicated servers, something has to change before it reaches that point, because if FS decides to stubbornly stick with this time wasting system, I just don’t see how else it can end, there are just too many other games out there they have to compete with that are better at keeping their players entertained and wanting more.
We cannot make deals with heretics.
Just compare the active players chart to that of an actually successful game like Monster Hunter World f.e.
DT at it’s peak had 1/3rd the player base compared to MHW:IB but now it has 1/13th the players in a split of 4% compared to MHWs 9%. What makes the whole situation even more dire: MHW is 5 Years old! It’s not received new content since 1st of October 2020! It’s been out for 10X the amount of time and still has more than double the player retention than DT has.
Edit: Or you could compare it to a game whos support has been discontinued like f.e. “Back for Blood”
Looks a lot like DTs doesn’t it?
You can also check the charts for Deep Rock Galactic. They have steadily been gaining more concurrent players since launch a few years ago.
You can also look at Left 4 Dead 2. Heavy fluctuations due to free weekends and special events but a super steady population.
You can also compare it to Vermintide 2’s charts. It had a somewhat steady decline from the beginning, much like Darktide, but hit a real low in august 2018 (approx. 4k concurrent). Vermintide 2 also happen to share the same publisher and development company. Vermintide 2 was also released in a real sh*t state. insert pepperidge farm meme
This is an important point.
It’s pretty easy to come out and say “we’re working on it” or “we’re considering our options” or “we’re having internal discussions about it” … when point of fact there is zero intention to actually make a change. It might not be technically “lying” (we do have discussions about it!!!) but it’s 100% deceptive.
The same thing was said about crafting in VT2 years ago. There were comments from Fatshark, especially after Winds of Magic came out and we saw the cool deterministic crafting system it used and asked when that was going to be ported to the main game mode. “We’re working on a crafting overhaul” is all we heard. It’s been years. It’s never going to happen.
All of this is to say that it’s in the dev’s interest to make some half-statement and keep people hope’s going that something might improve, when in fact they have no intention of changing it. If they actually came out and said “locks are staying” it would be another PR nightmare. Better for them, unfortunate for us, if they just say nothing 
I’ve also been hammering this point. Deep Rock has steadily gained “base player” numbers over the years. Base Player numbers are what I consider to be a typical low/baseline player count between the spikes of when new content / seasons / free-weekends / super sales / etc. cause a spike.
I like looking the Peak Players data since it’s the most finely tracked information for a given month and it’s what is used in the Steam Charts “charts” and graphics.
You can see below for DRG. I’ve called out the plateaus in between the spikes and you can see how they keep getting higher and higher. The “Baseline” of players keeps going up.
You could look at Payday 2 as well, another swedish made co-op horde shooter, game came out almost 10 years ago and still maintains a pretty big player base.
Well, at least one of my predictions came true. Yesterday peak counts were 4,761.
This is the first time the game dipped below 5,000 in a while.
Usually the big drops in player counts occur on Monday at the start of the week. This week Sunday was 6,835, and it dropped 80% to 5,532 on Monday. Thursdays usually have MORE people than Monday-Wednesday and it’s the start of the weekend upswing. But this Thursday it kept dropping still. It’s possible next Monday or Tuesday could see the counts below a 4k peak if the weekend playtime remains unexpectedly lower than usual. If we end up 4k it would be the lowest daily peak ever.
Crafting update in late February bought FS about 1.5 months of modest player count gains, but now that the malaise of RNG and silo’ing has set in again, those gains have been lost. The balance patches have caused some small upticks here and there, but the last powersword and flamer changes, right or wrong, pissed a lot of people off and generated bad PR, and I think that’s somewhat a factor in lower counts as well.
EDIT: Also each weekly comm-link that ticks by with no word on RNG/locks/silo’ing changes I honestly believe just disenfranchises people more. The biggest line of discussion in every comm-link post is “when are locks going away?!”. When there is further silence, people get more disinvested in the future of the game and counts go down.
All of this is to say that the player counts appear to be back to a similar place to where they were mid-February before by the crafting update came out. Sigh.
RNG “problem” must be addressed… even if the perception is biased, the complains that keep coming back maintain a bad feeling about the game.
I agree Brunt’s armoury is bad, I wish they add more materials in mission (and fix relay station mission) and that there are several things that could be added that I summarized here.
But, locks are not really the point where I would focus… I would prefer that we can craft more easily…
To be honest with the growing silence about the crafting is big, but dropping a heavy nerf pack to some of the most used weapons (although I still stand by seeing less flamer before the nerf) without buffs to the same classes’ underperforming weapons is just asking for trouble.
They should have bundled the PS nerf with the Plasma buff and Flamer nerf with a Evis buff or something…