That’s because the modern “skill based” matchmaking is heavily rigged and has nothing to do with the actual skill. It will try to maintain a 50% winrate on the distance, which in practice turns to just a massive roller-coster of win and lose streaks.
I think the issue people have with Havoc is that it’s a “seen it once seen it all” kind of deal - the modifiers are relatively uninteresting and don’t mesh that well with each other unlike Maelstroms (mostly melee enemies and monstrous specialists comes to mind), and the modifiers encourage cheesy turtle strategies that are less fun and encourage less build variety.
Maelstroms, while rough, still allow a lot of build variety. I’ve seen people with meme builds perform the best out of the whole team in the mission just as much as I’ve seen people with the meta get absolutely rekt. They’re also just inherently chaotic and intense, which a lot of folk find fun.
What people wanted from Havoc was a Maelstrom with additional, brutal modifiers, but instead all we got was campy regular Damnations dominated by Psykers and Zealots. Folk would be more than happy to have a higher challenge without many rewards, but the challenge that IS presented is just boring.
Havoc mode really needs to be reformulated as a way to expand maelstroms. Normal Maelstrom and Havoc 1-20 can be combine, and Auric Mal + Havoc 21-40 could be combined.
Let people quick play into Havocs (could allow for some QP filters around Havoc level, etc.), do away with the “three strikes and you’re out” thing. Let hosts and joiners both rank up together. Combine the pools of modifiers and keep the combinations more varied and volatile.
2 Likes
or because having same skill players around you bottlenecks you into meta gear, and having anything less than optimal is “gimping” yourself potentially.
it also removes any interaction between veteran and new players teaching and learning from each other.
never seen it improve my experience, but i’ve never been competetive
Havoc isn’t competitive, and that’s why there’s no leaderboard.
And the rewards indeed aren’t the point of Havoc. Most top-tier, long-time players are swimming in materials. Many don’t care about frames. All of them love the gameplay, and lots of folks were asking for something more challenging. The challenge is, ultimately, the reward for those folks. And for the rest of the player base, some badass cosmetics can be had without being a top-tier player.
Events are marketing opportunities, a chance for new/broke players to fast-track some materials, an opportunity to try out new modifiers (at least one of which has proven to be massively popular), a mechanism to cheaply add some story progression/flavor, a carrot for people (like me) who are motivated in part by unlocks/rewards. They’re great, and I wish we had more of them, especially now that item rewards are in the mix.
As for the issue of reward materials being pretty much useless after a point: it’s a dead simple fix. Add just a few sets of super-high-priced cosmetics to the commissary as an ordo sink. Introduce high-cost (but deterministic) red weapon upgrading that consumes tons of tubes and cubes. Melk needs a new feature/function too, but I’m not sure what that should be.
You pretty much answered your own question. Havoc’s primary audience is the percentage of players that are playing the game for the game. These people would still be playing if the game had entirely no loot at all.
Havoc should have come in a more complete update with actual stuff. But the incentive to play stuff should always be ‘its fun’. So yeah the devs should stop cashing in on the same content or tinkering without touching animations (go f yourself whoever did that). And make more Darktide, that I would be happy with.
1 Like
Everyone has different motivations but, yes this is certainly mine. Also why would you want to play with players of at least your level or higher? I know Havoc can be quite hectic, but very good players or at least good players with certain builds make a lot of Darktide games a cake walk.
I don’t think it actually did drive much engagement in practice (as it mostly pissed people off), but it was essentially a classic Gacha-gambling system pulled straight from Pachinko parlors and mobile games, on a hourly timer loop no less to get people to log in routinely to check inventory. You basically get resources that enabled you to pull a slot machine lever and hope you got what you wanted, with an exceedingly small chance to get the actual thing you’re looking for, that you have to check for all the time. The only thing Fatshark didn’t do was properly close the loop, generating lots of frustration but providing no release valve where you spend actual money or tons of in-game resources to get the specific thing you really want. ’
Now with the new Mastery system you can just dump tons of in-game resources into it, but it took them almost two years to complete.
Unfortunately they don’t cycle back in shortly. Some have, but IIRC not within a year of their initial offering, at least in the original color pattern. Yes there’s a several week window now (but not originally), but its still very much built around “buy now or miss out because it’ll be a year or more or never before they show back up”. This drives people to buy stuff they often ordinarily would not have, or to buy it when they shouldn’t (e.g. “cash is short this month, but I don’t know when this will pop up again”) while also incentivizing casual players to check at least a couple times a month to look at new offerings.
The way FS also splits cosmetic items up feeds into this as well, doing things like offering a re-color of something offered a few months prior or bundling a lame looking headpiece with the full set and then offering a cooler or better fitting headpiece for sale separately at a higher price.
2 Likes
i am frankly stunned people felt the need to log in hourly to check for blue items , sure id go blessing fishing myself but only if i was already in and playing, i never once felt compelled to log in and see if the hourly blue refresh had a good item , damn that must of been a lousy return on time spent. and for some in game currency we all have more than we can spend .
the shop worse than i thought , i just figured it was the same trash cycling in and out.
i always put these down to rushed place holders being left in to meet launch rather than actual planned mobile /console level engagement ploys
Fatshark can do 4 things here
1 a total balance overhaul. Rework weapons and perks that feel awful to use and tone down the ones that are obvious outliers. Make it so that it’s possible to design challenge that simply isn’t just statistical changes and spam.
2 nerf the meta weapons and perks that feel good to use and make them feel awful like the others.
3 buff the underperforming weapons and perks continuing the power creep and the only ‘difficulty’ being doing more of the things expert players have already mastered
4 nerf ogyrn with more tax nodes and nothing else
1 Like
Nerf Ogryn? That’s more like it!
Swagger would be the perfect culprit for this.
Another resource sink could be a “shop” for mission modifiers like the Town Fountain in the game Heroes of Hammerwatch (picture).
Yeah, I’m personally more fond of the “Three Tier” approach.
1 tier for new players/people who are really bad. These folks usually play with each other or bots until they graduate to the next tier.
2nd tier is where the bulk of players randomly intermingle. The radically different skill levels lead to a lot more chaos and in my opinion, more fun.
3rd tier is where the pros and meta-heads go, we’re talking like 90%+ winrate here. Usually this tier is isolated into a secondary mode (Like competitive) but in the regular mode the tier 3 players are split evenly amongst teams of tier 2 players, so everyone gets a few.
In the event of a stomp, the teams are scrambled, with the highest performing players on the stomping team being seperated specifically.
But I find as long as you’ve got a “Training Period” and a “Competitive Mode” to handle the edge cases, you can let folks of all stripes play together (Man, do I miss server browsers).
Best case, you were checking it between matches.
Worst case, you had a browser tab open that would show you the new items on rotation so you could do something else while waiting for the item(s) you want.
For me, I was always on the hunt for greens and blues to complete my blessing collection (At the time you had to collect them and sacrifice weapons to get a permanent copy of that blessing at that tier, so armory was great for collecting tier 1-2 blessings, and leveling greens/Melks helped get tier 3 and 4.) so I was checking between matches, which in hindsight was a great use of my time for which I was ridiculed by my mates(But guess who got 100% mastery when the Unlocked and Loaded update dropped!).
But now, I don’t look at the regular armory or Melks at all, and I only use Brunts to roll for stat-distribution, and it only takes like 5-10 rolls since every weapon has top-tier potential. We gained so much freedom, but I’d be lying if I said my Mind Goblin wasn’t upset about no longer being able to perpetually acquire weapons with slightly better stat distributions.
And it would open up possible convos between him and Alice (Who would totally want a cut of this enterprise, Melk too probably) and Morrow, who’s not fond of contraband.
After playing so much with little reward I just kind of got used to it. I spent at least 700 hours playing without even touching a weapon upgrade or using any of my materials. That is a good and bad thing. Good in the aspect a game can be so good it keeps me interested for 700 hours with little reward - bad in the aspect that not everyone is like me and will want a reward to keep them interested.
I still think that all FS really had to do was just remove the locks and crafting would be totally serviceable and your mind goblins would still be hard at work.
You’d still need to grind/hunt for good blessings at the Armory AND Melk shop, unlike now where these shops are largely pointless later on. And you’d still be constantly on the hunt for better stat distribution. There would’ve been more opportunity for having secondary mission challenges reward more higher rated items for example, unlike now where rewards are mostly pointless.
Granted, Im not complaining about the new system, but I think they took it too far. The used a sledgehammer instead of a scalpal and and so now there are broken pieces (armory, Melk, mission rewards) lying in rubble. All they needed to do was remove the locks. The rest of the itemization system would’ve still served a longer term purpose.
1 Like
Absolutely no way…there’d be people still throwing millions of materials away trying to get Power Cycler IV or whatever the new BiS T4 blessing would be on any and all new weapons that came out.
I’m leveling up an alt-account right now for mod testing, and the journey to 30 and weapon systems both feel great, especially with all the new penances. I am constantly getting unlocks, and I can see exactly where I’m going with progression. And all the shops make sense along the journey. There’s dozens or hundreds (depending on skill level) of hours of progression there for a completionist, or shortcuts for anyone with mats.
Long-time players just need a new end-game grind. I’m hopeful the red equivalent will be dropping soon and will be a long-term deterministic grind.
2 Likes
It feels weird agreeing with you but yeah.
‘Just removing the locks’ would NOT have been enough.
Now there’s direct progression. It works. Sure you lose out on the finest of stat-balancing but let’s be real - most people were not playing with that in mind.
1 Like