Yes, because retention certainly is an “issue” no matter which reason you want to attribute to be the cause of that issue.
No, because the crafting and progression is full of typical psychological tricks to dive up the engagement and it’s evidently not working. Fixing those elements would either increase engagement or not change a damn thing… Which is precisely why it needs to change! If the worst outcome is “it changes nothing” then the players that stay have a substantially better experience playing the game!
There is no reason to not improve the crafting even if you disagree that it will help with retention.
The reason why I say that it will help with retention is that every single update hasn’t managed to retain players and the updates were either bug fixes or content additions, neither of which have shown to be effective at retaining players. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: no content addition fixes what’s wrong with the game and will not retain players for a prolonged period of time. We have seen this point proven 12 separate times already and will see it proven a 13th time again.
The crafting is the only thing that hasn’t changed since launch and DT has had retention issues since it came out. I’m not saying that causality = causation but evidently the bugs are not the issue and the content isn’t either. It’s likely a combination of all three aspects and all of them need to be fixed to increase retention. You can fix the other two for as long and as hard as you want, if you ignore the 3rd aspect, nothing will ever change.
Before someone else dismisses your entire comment because “technically the crafting system has changed since release”…
It has changed a bit. This is true.
But the underlying mechanisms and the overall system have not.
There is still no way to deterministically get to a goal. No rng mitigation. No progression. It is still a time wasting system that does not allow for experimentation, while not offering any guarantee to get anything.
The system has changed in the sense that stuff was altered, numbers were changed and features were added. These changes are irrelevant to my point and to the discussion at large.
The system hasn’t changed in how much of it is entirely reliant on RNG with 0 mitigation or player agency and that number is 100%. This second bit is what actually matters.
I could’ve put that clarification in the previous message but I don’t think anyone was seriously going to dismiss my points because “technically the system was changed”
You need a weapon with decent base stats (for Auric, let’s say 360+)
Those stats have to be distributed in a decent way. The dump-stat cannot be on damage or a couple others depending on the weapon
You need at least 1 perk to be a desirable perk
You need that perk to be at a desirable level (let’s say 3 or 4/4, which leaves 1/2 of that to be bad)
You need at least one blessing to be a desirable blessing based on your build & playstyle
You need that blessing to be at a desirable level, Most are fine at tier 3 but some you do need to be tier 4
That’s 6 layers of RNG. The tweak to adjust any 2 things instead of 1 of each did help in that for some weapons, 2 chosen blessings is preferable, others rely more on perks for breakpoints, etc. But this did not really change the fact that there are still 6 layers of RNG.
This system is not meaningful to engage in because you pay and hope that you get all 6 layers in your favour. There is no progression. There is no validation to investment. It is not respectful of your time. I would be fine with there being these 6 layers of RNG, if we could at least mitigate the vast majority of them via progression.
If you could pay diamantine to upgrade stats, perk & blessing levels, and pay a combination of the two resources to break locks, then that removes most layers of the RNG and would make the system actually feel like your time & resource investment is giving you returns. That’s progression, numbers go up, feels good.
I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Necromancer DLC for vermintide since I’ll be able to sit down with the game, look over the details of the career and its talents, think of a build idea that I want to test, AND JUST CRAFT WHAT I WANT. What a concept. If only Vermintide’s developers could sit down and teach Darktide’s developers a few lessons. OH WAIT
The missions are resolved? They are still woefully sub-par compared to V2 where we could just pick and choose what we wanted.
Yup, in particular get rid of the ones that invite bad play. Kill scabs fine, but kill scabs melee vs ranged not so much. I know you get them eventually, but everyone I play with changes their play style depending on what they have here rather than what is strictly optimal. With that said, those I play with don’t push this to the extreme. We rarely wipe because of it.
Yup, I’m already out and back to other coop games, but I’ll check back every major patch.
Not sure about this one. FOMO skins have nothing to do with crafting. It is, however, yet another example of what V2 did so much better. V2 had a great cash shop. Buy what you want from all that is available. What a novel concept.
I am only speaking for myself here of course. The lack of a real end game is because of the crafting to me. If the crafting system was fixed and giving me interesting challenges to grind for better gear against I’d be back and recommend this game.
You may be right here. It’ll keep me playing though, and at the moment I’m not. This is a niche type of game, and that’s fine, but I think they are not only losing casuals, they’re losing their core audience and that’s dangerous. Only they have the metrics though to know how bad this really is. I’d be interested to know what type of major rework would make this fun and interesting for casuals in the long run… or just for more people.
No to even mention, you can grind your ass out to get your BIS weapons stat+blesses+properties combo only for it to be nerfed to the ground in next update becasue it’s “life service” game. I am not talking about OP weapon being balanced but going to trash tier becasue we all know how balance patches looks for games like this - it’s hit or miss. And suddenly everything you grinded for is obsolete and you have to grind for something else without any guarantee it won’t later be nerfed/reworked/changed.
If we had just normal crafting system where we can change everything, spend resources to slowly upgrade every stat on our weapon, craft our own blessings etc. We would avoid all frustration. People would simply swap stuff out for different and hop into games and enjoy.
Fatshark - games should be games, not second jobs. This ain’t mobile market and this ain’t 2000s and early korean MMOs times anymore. Gaming market is so huge, it’s just waste of time we could spend simply playing different game. You have all solid fundations for your game to be played just becasue your gameplay loop is great. You dont need that RNG, it holds you back.
That’s kind of a point worth mentioning. Fatshark is treating the game like a mobile gacha game with its layers upon layers of RNG. But one of the common trends in gacha games is that nerfs are often extraordinarily rare and only leveraged as a last resort. Units are often power-creeped but rarely nerfed. Fatshark is just combining the worst of both worlds. Horrible gacha RNG making it a tremendous pain to get anything, and then nerfs that invalidate that effort in an eyeblink.
Honestly, this shouldn’t be a gacha game, and I think that nerfs are a good thing for the type of gameplay that is present within darktide. But it should be trivial to reconfigure our gear in response to new updates just like it is trivial to reconfigure our talent builds.
