Community Comm-link 25th May 2023

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Announcements
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Honestly, it would be nice, but that’s really not a priority for me.
However I can understand that players from VT2 can see that as a must and the current tunneled resources as a step back

I just want more plasteels to allow casual players to craft more weapons in a given time…
I want also that they raise the odds for Brunt’s Armoury to get a good roll
i want that they raise the base modifier of weapons from Brunt’s
etc.

In short, I want that they reduce a lot the annoyance of the RNG system… cause this game need more players.

I can agree that they need to invest time on a system that would permit players to create their missions and a system that would permit the ones that just want to jump in one to preselect the parameters that are importants for them.
Example, I like normal / high intensity damnation missions. But I do not like low intensity, power failure, shock troop missions… I should be able to configure what I prefer (no modifier, high intensity, venting), what I absolutely want (a damnation mission) and what I do not want at all (low intensity, shock troop).

if you mean the possibility to get any weapon you want… we have the Brunt’s armoury.
So, please, don’t ask that. Brunt’s Armoury is the worst thing they made cause you spend all your ordos and get 1 weapon acceptable if you’re lucky, 0 most of the time.
I don’t use the Brunt’s armoury but try to grab good rolled weapons from the normal shop. This means I have to check the shop regularly… something that annoys me so much that… well I have played few times for the last 2 weeks.

totally agree. I want to be able to change the size of my char, its gender, its name…
And I want more faces and more hair cuts. Women in game are all the same 3 faces.

That’s the main reason I play less… I perfectly know every missions of the game… and that’s boring
That and the fact that this game is not for casual players… 30 minutes for a mission, this is bad when you have a family…
1h30 - 2h to craft one weapon… bad
several days to get 1 weapon enough good from the shop to try to craft it to orange… not good

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Here’s another youtuber, this one is a content partner. Not yet my favorite one (:smiley:), yet the message is oddly similar: Darktide - The Real Reason Players Hate Nerfs is RNG & Locked Builds - Viewer COMMENTS NEEDED! - YouTube

#breakthelocks

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265

Another common misconception: players dictate the development path of the game. By the way, aren’t you picking and choosing your arguments to a fault? Like who T.F. said anything about the game being “so great”?

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The feedback has been universal ever since they started to outline their pathetic attempt at a crafting system. From major gaming news outlets, from youtubers and twitchers, from the community. Practically everyone hates it. What is FatSharks response? To be completely silent about it, and then as the biggest middle finger possible, they start to lock and timegate new maps.

There is not only no hope for this game, there is no hope for this company. I’m sure in their twisted minds the ‘community event’ qualifies as great and exciting content to have running over the summer holidays. No need to worry about putting in any actual content, or say fixing crafting and progression. Having people replay the content they have already replayed millions of times in order to ‘unlock’ one new map is their idea of a good time.

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267

No, but free market capitalism does.
Game development isn’t art - it doesn’t need to send a message, it needs to earn money to survive, money the consumers spend on a product they want to have.
If the product does not appeal to the market, it will fail.
The most successful games are the ones where the development is guided by player feedback, made by players, for players. If a feature is loved/wanted by the community, it gets added in. If something drags the game down and makes it less fun, it is removed.
This is why DRG (a complete no-name original title with no franchise to build upon) has been sitting close to a perfect score on steam since it first released in early access, and why Darktide struggles to stay above 50% even half a year after it came out.

There are plenty of names here that claim the game is fine the way it is, people are just entitled whiners.

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268

That makes sense to a certain level, but for every successful game that involves the players in development and uses this as a marketing appeal, I could come up with games that don’t and are still considered blockbusters.

Beware, long story coming up! Darkest Dungeon comes to my mind in early access. There was one single player, a modder even who was fanboi#1 until there was an update he didn’t like, and when the developer team didn’t respond to his gradually more aggressive and delusional demands and accusations, he went into an absolutely mad (like literally crazy) rage campaign against Red Hook. There was a freelance game critic and the guy put tremendous stock into his scathing review of the game based upon his delusions, when he kept that critic harrassing until he finally told him to f-off, he too became a “shill” in his microcosm. When the game launched, DD’s reviews on Steam were mixed, or mostly negative for a short period, and (not so) coincidentally that lunatic was promoting the reviews as a proof for his argument and that Red Hook is doomed, because he said so. Don’t know how he managed to rig the reviews, but his hamster got obviously launched out of its wheel.

This is obviously an extreme example, but perfectly displays the entitlement, selfishness and short-sightedness that can go wrong with player input for game development. Simply, they are not professionals. They often act like children in a toy store. I saw steam reviews, reddit posts and whatnot literally raging about the “transcendent” level achievements that were detrimental to the mission. Fair point, and those penances got shelved a month ago, and we all got a new set with new costumes. I may have missed it, but didn’t come across any mention of that, opposite to the argument that FS doesn’t care about the player base’s wishes. I think they do, they just can’t comply with the million-headed monster’s wishlist at once.

I work in the restaurant business, semi-fast food type. It is a typical reaction for any complaint to exaggerate, overreact, threaten with not ordering anymore, 1-star review and any combination of the above. They might not be right at all, can be spiteful or their needs are simply not in sync with what the restaurant provides. We won’t ever be perfect, but still doing better than okay. I see the same tropes coming up with Darktide and Fatshark in general and by proxy, I tend to sympathise with them. I’m not a literal fan of theirs, but appreciate their work and played their games since War of The Roses. Sure, Darktide has many flaws, I for one miss the many subclasses that are present in VT2 and gave any good build a satisfying flavour to play with, but the most important thing for me is that its core, DT is a damn good game, one good round on damnation high intensity shock troop gauntlet with double grims has the potential to make my day at the end of it. Just did it in fact, 2 days ago.

I love 40k, I like Darktide for what it gets right and I happily take what I get, when I get it. That’s the sum of it all. I wish people would be more patient.

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269

That’s a whole lot of talking about something that has nothing to do with this, and bringing up a completely irrelevant example of some single lone guy going nuts.

Whatever you try to argue when it comes to how much player feedback you should take onboard, there is no getting away from the fact that this isn’t a million-headed beast. The feedback has been nearly universal, brought up by countless members of the community, by major gaming news sites, partnered and unpartnered content creators alike.

You also can’t get away from the fact that the game has had a catastrophic launch, and is net losing players every single week. They are driving away more players every single week than they could ever hope to gain in new sales. It’s not like they’re holding steady at 50K. Or 10K. Or even 5K.
They keep dropping, and dropping, and dropping.

Even if a developer was so hopelessly deluded that they thought there was never, ever any useful feedback to be gained from their customers, they should at least realize that whatever they’ve got going on right now, isn’t working.

Perhaps they should have the insight to realize that after months of players universally hating and leaving the game because of locks, it would be beyond stupid to release a locked map?

No? Just have patience?

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270

I wholly agree with this, it is a fantastic game, and I love the gameplay, which is the only reason why it’s so disappointing to me that it’s delivered in such an artificially difficult way, and I’m not the only player with precisely that sentiment, as CommanderJ brought up.
The game is suffering, and it’s not some mysterious thing, or bad luck - it’s a very specific way the game is being handled by the management department that is trying to use old school monetization techniques to get people addicted for longer times, and it’s suffocating the beautiful game that is there underneath, so much so to the point that it’s actively driving people away and leaving a sour taste in their mouth.
It’s not just monetization, it’s monetization done badly.
It’s good to give players something to do and work for, keep them occupied, keep them working towards rewards. What’s bad is when you go too far with that and make everything so tedious and random that players feel like nothing they do matters since they feel they are making no progress regardless of how many hours of effort they invest.
The key factors doing this in DT is the siloing (which arbitrarily inflates the time needed to achieve goals and leads to wasted resources on some characters, while others have none), complete reliance on RNG progression, coupled with crafting locks that stop you from being able to work with the RNG hand you’re dealt.
It just leads to the feeling that you’re not really allowed to play the game, like the game hates you for even trying, and that’s just not fun, plain and simple.
I love the developers, I love their past games (I drooled over the realism of the armor system in war of the roses), I love their ingenuity and the depth and quality of what they produce.
This problem is Darktide specific, and more specifically, it’s the way it’s being marketed, the game itself is as good as anything from FS, it’s just been blighted by Nurgle.

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With Diablo 4 going live on June 6, 2023, has Fat Shark thought about what new content to use to ward off the coming downward spiral?

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To be fair, the guy said the math was “quick”, not that it was gonna be right. :smiley:
But yeah… dude is off by a factor of 100x, which is more than the current 24h peak is off from the all time peak.

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My bad. Corrected the mistake.

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Rhetoric question: how are you going to tell Karen that she’s being Karen?

What I wrote is my personal perspective of the situation in general, you missed the whole point apparently. You are the child in the toystore that I mentioned in my wall of text. Your behaviour inches towards that looney I wrote about. You come off like an average consumer who thinks his buck entitles him to anything beyond legally playing the game, insinuationg that you’ve been scammed. You keep demanding answers for questions I don’t care about at all since I have a lot more going on in my life. You don’t realize that no feedback is feedback as well, that constitutes of thousands of players who are just having a good time with the game and no drama. You keep banging your drum, working yourself up on your arguments solely, not able to see the forest from those damn trees. You are the type of player who starts his steam review with “I really wanted to like this game…” You are so deep down that rabbithole of yours that you would probably feel satisfied to see the game pulled off the market to feel justified.

Frankly: if you don’t like what you’re getting and don’t have the patience to wait for it getting in great shape, why don’t you make the logical move and leave it?

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Oh it’s on now :popcorn:

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#breakthelocks

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If your favorite restaurant can’t hold its business together because the people running it are idiots and it closes. Its not my fault, its the businesses problem. But i am still losing out on access to my favorite restaurant.

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Just like in your last post, your are unable to put together something even approaching an actual coherent argument. In your world it is always the paying customers fault when a product is subpar or fails to deliver. It’s even the customers fault if a company is very obviously being run into the ground.

Not only that, but in your world, class action lawsuits about fatally unsafe cars would be dismissed because “a majority of owners are quiet and have not complained.”

You have no argument beyond insults and inane comparisons that a five year old could see through. Better luck next time.

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279

My. argument. is. that. there. is. no. need. for. an. argument. You. are. overreacting. Karen. :slight_smile:

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how about an update on when you plan to enable pc to pc or pc to xbox crossplay for darktide? this really is damaging what the game could be from a community standpoint and i would love to get some play time with the people from other platforms.

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Bad example. A class action lawsuit for malfunction can be totally valid even for a minority, since there are no two totally identical cars. Darktide runs the same for everyone content-wise. Funny you brought up the lawsuit, that was on the lunatic guy’s agenda against Red Hook as well.

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It’s a big deal for me because it means I can’t do things like gear up my Zealot while playing my Psyker. I have to do each class individually.

It means that I was effectively limited to 2 classes because I just don’t have the time to grind out gear and resources for any more than that.

It means that I get put in situations like “I’m tired of playing this character but if I switch I won’t finish my weeklies” and that sucks.

No, I’m talking about “The Commodore’s Vestures”, the real money cash shop for premium cosmetics.

And specifically the rotating content model where they plan to only have three pages of cosmetics available at any given time and the rest will “probably come back in the future”.

This is what’s called a “Fear of Missing Out” mechanic that pressures you with limited time exclusivity and future uncertainty.

“This item isn’t super cool, but what if next week is worse? Maybe I should get it while I still can.”

“If I don’t buy it now, how long will I have to wait for it to come back? Maybe I should get it while I still can.”

“Oh. This week’s item is way cooler than the one I bought last week. Well, I still have leftover points I’ll get this one too.”

I hate this. I hate it a lot. I hate that they are still planning to go ahead with it despite the community’s pushback at launch.

And no matter what they tell you, it is not consumer friendly. Nobody will be confused by having too many pages in the store, and it is not “immeasurably complex” to build a store UI for lots and lots of items. Those were the excuses they gave last time, I’m curious what they’ll say this time.

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