Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. Until they actually take action, I’m not convinced that they’ve actually heard us and that they’re not simply giving pre-packaged form-letter responses to simply bury the complaints.
Until they’ve DEMONSTRATED that they’ve heard us with ACTION, then complaints need to be loud and numerous.
Yeah, we get it, OP thinks that screaming and wailing and stamping your feet at insufficient volume is the reason that crafting hasn’t been changed yet.
I’ll be brutally frank with you, more wailing isn’t going to change jack.
Fatshark have either heard and decided to do nothing about it.
Or the more likely scenario, they are acting on the feedback as they have acted on the feedback for the mission board, the resource soloing, the weapon balancing, and the classes and they will get around to doing something about it at their usual painfully glacial pace.
In the meantime, take a chill pill.
Maybe you should be the one to calm down if everything you don’t want to hear sounds like wailing and screaming to you.
How long before we’re upgraded from criminally under-discussed to criminally discussed?
Probably after Fatshark actually does something about it.
My take is that they are convinced that by more flexible locks they have adressed the issue sufficiently. Thus staying vocal about the fact that the whole itemization sucks hard makes sense.
I get you though - FS has by now recieved enough constructive feedback on itemization and monetization that they could turn both into engaging and enjoyable experiences and they decided against it.
Since they are increasing the pricesof their MTX they seem to happy with the profit they are making from them. Nobody - not even them - will ever know if the profit could have been higher (or actually lower) if the system was fairer and wouldn’t push so many people away.
And they seem still to think a silent majority likes the crafting system - and here also nobody will ever know if player cound would actually be significant higher (or maybe lower?) if the had a crafting in place that allowed the level of player agency that is fun to engage with.
They seem to believe that only toxic monetization secures income and only toxic itemization secures player number. I believe both are holding back the games potential. We’ll never know as FS seems to be adamant about their course.
I doubt anyone is a fan of the gearing in Darktide, but since understanding why it is the way it is, I’ve come to at least appreciate it for what it is: a necessary evil.
The game has precious little content as it is. There is no story to speak of, we only have a handful of maps, a handful of enemies with no new ones added over the past year etc. The entire gameplay loop is based on doing the same few things over and over.
Once you consider things from that PoV, a lot of things suddenly make sense. We can’t have a mission / mod selector, because if we did the barely dozen maps - almost half of which are alternate route versions of the same maps, and only 3 barely different biomes between all of them - would become boring in an instant. We can’t have great agency over gearing, because if we did the only meaningful progression in the game would become obsolete. And if gearing became obsolete, every engagement mechanic from weeklies to stores would fail. Worse, player retention and the new player experience would plummet, as teams would be divided between those who don’t need materials just rushing through missions, and those who do being forced to stay back on their own and spend 99% of their time looting and dying. Not long after, with so little content and no progression left, the few people remaining would leave and the game and community would just die off.
Whether Darktide was even originally designed to be like this, or whether it was something they were forced to do because they simply didn’t have the time to add the content they wanted before release and had to make the best of what was there doesn’t matter. We’re here, because this is the only way it can work. And this, I believe, is why Fatshark has in previous patch notes openly admitted to struggling with ways to both give us more agency over gearing, without breaking the RNG the game must rely on to survive.
Those locks will NOT be removed. They can’t be. At least not until there’s so much more content and other engagement mechanics that the locks are no longer necessary.
This is straight up false. There are tons of players playing vermintide for years with mountains of unopened boxes because they have already fully optimized their builds and have no reason to do so. Yet they still play despite the lack of a grind treadmill because the game is fun. Stop spreading the LIE that grind is necessary or even beneficial.
Lef4Dead, one of the most wildly successful co-op games of all time, doesn’t have any gear grinding whatsoever.
Ah, and again people who are against current crafting system are trying to cry as loudly as it is at all possible.
There are already tons of topics discussing the issue. You literally don’t need more.
Nah, we need more since all the threads are met with silence.
What’s it to you anyway? If you’re ignoring the crafting system, it won’t affect you. If you’ve already got the stuff you want, it won’t affect you, unless you feel people should work (gamble) as hard as you did to get your items. If you like the crafting, then defend it with why you like it, just attacking the people with criticising crafting doesn’t make any point at all.
If it’s purely a forum thing you can ignore the threads. Why are you going into a thread, attacking people dicussing the topic? Is there a thread quota? Are we going to run out of threads?
I’m pretty sure he nailed FS reasoning - I just think it’s a falacy.
There are players that don’t care much about itemization - and I think they are the majority - once they have a weapon that works for them they are happy and play as long as gameplay is fun for them. They don’t strive for much better weapons but if they randomly stumble over them they gladly take it. These players aren’t driven away by the bad crafting but by the lack of content. They aren’t kept however by the crafting as well, as they don’t care enough about min-maxing.
There are players who like to optimize and to tinker around. These are the people complaining loudest about the bad crafting - although they might be initially held hostage by the urge to create weapons they want at some point they’ll throw the towel. These players are actively driven away by the crafting - but could be held longer by a fully deterministic crafting that allowed them to finetune their gear to their wishes. (Ah this combination works quite well - cool. But if I change this - is the tradeoff worth it? Let’s find out!)
Then there are players that actually like to gamble a little. They might be held initially by the crafting and feel great joy when they are lucky - but sooner then later they’ll run against a wall of absurd odds. Then they’ll turn away to another game with friendlier odds.
And there is an propably extremely small group of players who enjoy gambling against the worst odds and they might actually stay by the wish to get 550 weapons with the right blessings and perks in eternity. FS obviously believes this group to be far larger then I do.
I explicitly pointed out the lack of story, maps and more. Vermintide 2 has orders of magnitude more maps, more diverse biomes, several story archs built upon those maps, far more diverse enemies, specials, bosses, classes, everything. It literally has that content that Darktide needs to break out of the RNG. Which is exactly what I already addressed in my post above.
But to do this? To blatantly attack me and accuse me of lying the first thing you do, all while ignoring what I said on purpose just to justify this toxic assault on me for no other reason than a disagreement?
Sadly this place has no option to block people, so all I can do is report you. Never talk to me again. I want nothing to do with your brand of illiterate abusers. Ever.
Edit: Oh there is a way to ignore someone! FYI anyone else, you can do it by going into someone’s profile and clicking the dropdown thingie below the “message” button on right hand side. Also to everyone else, I apologize for the outburst. 
Now that I know I can do this I can handle it better in the future…
I mean, @Armchair ain’t wrong.
For how bad the locks are and how they influence alot of people into quitting the game or taking a break, it is under-discussed.
But I guess the people that dislike the system either already posted about it, stopped playing, still suffer through it because the gameplay is still enough to keep them playing or are still here posting about it every now and then. I’m one of the last group but I gotta say, after nearly a year without any feedback from FartShark themselves I’m getting kinda exhausted and hopeless for a change in the “crafting” system (which isn’t crafting really).
They are aware, its been discussed since day 1, and in all likelihood, they just don’t care. I understand you don’t want to accept that (because indeed it sucks), but if there was a will to fix this issue, it would have happened by now. Sorry bro.
but you understand that is not at all the same as saying “I don’t believe that they are aware of the issue”?
I was arguing against the prior and not the latter.
They also have given responses that confirm that they have heard our complaints so “believing” that they haven’t is just silly.
There is someone in power at FS that believe that their current crafting holds some form of benefit for DT and that changing the RNG slotmachine to our benefit would be to their business’ detriment.
There is no other logical explenation left for why they haven’t already changed crafting.
Tinfoil hat time (it’s been a while):
Crafting sucks because FS was planning to monetize items in some way. Maybe selling red weapons with nearly maxed stats and no locks or something. Not technically better than what you could get from RNG, but letting you pay to skip the grind for that item.
I think the above is why we haven’t seen red items. It may be why weapon skins are getting pulled from the cosmetic packs. Who knows if they’re going to go through with this or not, but I think it was the plan at some point.
That sounds unfortunately very plausible. I hope you’re wrong. I fear you’re right.
I kinda doubt it. It’d be a clear case of Pay to Win, and it has such a tarnished reputation already that it’s hard to believe anyone, even the execs, can expect it to work out well for them.
Or at least that’s what one would hope…
I think if that happens that would be the point I walk away from the game.
Payday 2 did this with disastrous results and it took basically years to fix it.
I’m not paying to play a slot machine in a game I already paid for just to get items that are better. If I wanted to do that I would just play one of the many free to play games that somehow have less restrictive systems.
I don’t think it’s a tinfoil hat. It fits disconcertingly well.
Fatshark got bought out by Tencent and instantly started rendering their game unrecognizable. Clearly a better studio needs to take the art, music, and sound people because those guys are doing 99% of the heavy lifting that makes their games great and they deserve better than an awful monetization-filled trainwreck.