Yes, it is. Because in VT2 you would have to be very unlucky not to roll the property combination in that many attempts, including the too low stats, while here you have to be very lucky to get it. VT2 improved an already solid system over the time - and here we have the system that is immensely worse than the VT2 one was at the very beginning.
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Exept you can’t because you have half customizaton locked!!! 
It is worse, because in Vermintide you have red weapons that are guaranteed max rolls and you would get the combination you wish at some point.
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Exactly this. This should be by far the easiest place to improve upon and the one that is almost universally criticized.
And I agree on everything you said about the items.
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congrats on being the only one
After roughly 250 hours just on bardin I still dont have red 2H axe
yes reds exist, and after adding red dust after 2 years you can craft them.
But lets not sugarcoat V2 system
This really invites the question “What kind of medication are you on? I would like to try some. Or maybe FS should provide it with the DT.”
Sure but with 1,000 hours in vermintide 2 I got reds for every weapon a while ago. Plus 50 red dust to spare.
250 hours into Darktide I am not even close. It would take over 10,000 hours easily (with the proposed changes).
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You and I and the others may not subscribe to the FS’s definition of the fun, but obviously there are a few people who do belive this is a way to go. Good for them. Maybe they are a silent majority? Who knows? Not me.
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I know it sucks, it took me i think around 800 hours to get all the reds on all the characters if i remember correctly, but if you play legend with grims and books in around 50 runs you should have 5 red dusts. it’s a grind for sure but at least one where you can see the end goal.
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Remind me which games do progression like this (with no randomness) and hold onto players long-term. Because I appreciate the passion, but several posters don’t really seem to be calling attention to success stories of earlier games that don’t do any randomness in crafting/progression.
The Steam reviews aren’t backing you here. They’re mostly about crafting being unfinished at launch (and other legitimately bad things like crashing and bugs), not about which flavor of crafting might exist in a finished game.
Sure I imagine they might. And the expectation would be that just like V2 and DT before it, it’ll launch in pretty bad shape but eventually be the best coop PVE game on the market.
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DRG has very low RNG. Just on over clocks.
But there’s lots of PvP games that don’t have high RNG and maintain players. Depends on what genre. Does Halo 3 or COD count? What about Left for dead? They released more content. Pretty comparable.
Gun fire reborn has a high player retention. It’s a rogue lite. Remnant from the ashes. Pretty much no RNG.
Hell divers is a co-op top down game. No RNG and has an active community.
Elite dangerous no RNG really.
Killing Floor 2. No RNG.
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Yeah but nobody’s arguing for the current system.
I’m pointing to the new system, where you can certainly control the vast majority of things, and the people you think hit the jackpot and get everything perfect are so few in number that it’s bizarre you let them destroy your happiness because they’re basically irrelevant. Certainly they’re unlikely to be able to use the weapon as well as you use your 80% optimal ones.
So it feels like a weird thing to get angry about, and even weirder to pretend that game knowledge (knowing which combos are good) doesn’t factor into it (that’s the part that strongly implies you’re only talking about the current system, and not the proposed one.
Modifiers- no control
Perk 1- no control
Perk 2- Control
Perk 3- No control
Perk 4- No control
Blessing 1- Control
Blessing 2- No control
We don’t have a vast majority of control.
Dude… how do you still not understand any of the points made?
The problem is not, that someone else has something i do not have.
The problem is, that basically nobody will ever get what they want and nobody can expect to ever get what they want.
And everyone who does get it, did not earn it, but just get it at some point through random luck.
Even with the “improved” system, it is still an insane RNG fest (with every single bad aspect of it being there by design and on purpose).
It is like going to work and being paid in lottery tickets.
Imagine you pay someone to make a chair for you.
You want a comfy chair to sit on. You want to be able to sit on it and enjoy it.
They make it completely from scrap, are entirely unlimited in their possiblities and they know what you want (because you told them). They tell you, that they are listening to what you want and that they will be respectful to what you wish.
Now they make your chair that you ordered with specifications and that you paid for.
You want to sit down on it, but you notice that it has a bunch of nails sticking out the top of the seat.
You see that the nails have absolutely no structural function, you stand there and wonder “wtf is that?”.
Everything about the chair is 100% put there with intent and on purpose.
They give you this abomination and say “here is this exciting thing that we made after listening carefully to your detailed specifications of what you wanted”.
At some point, the chair was fine, but they went out of their way to put these nails there, knowing that they would make the chair worse and that it would inconvenience you.
That is what this crafting system is.
Something potentially good, that is absolutely ruined by limitations that were put in place on purpose, which work completely against the original purpose of the thing.
(To make sure you understand: the nails represent the modifier/perk/blessing locks.)
Last time i reply to you. It is fruitless, trying to reason with you.
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Left4Dead 2 still has a sustained player base without any progression. Versus and modding does contribute to that, but there is still a large subset of players playing PvE.
Dark Souls has a mostly deterministic loot system, there are some weapons that are RNG to get (like black knight weapons in DS1) but there are always alternatives that are in set locations and the upgrade system is fully deterministic.
Remnant of the Ashes has set weapons, where getting some of them is RNG due to the branching bosses and random map tiles, but again upgrading is fully deterministic.
For all of those the gameplay is definitely still the key focus, but their itemisation isn’t randomly frustrating.
The new changes help, but they don’t address the fundamental issue that there are still way too many RNG layers that you still have little control over and the control you do have is subject to RNG anyway. (good luck getting a T4 blessing on the weapon type you want when your options are burn resources on junk to consecrate to orange or get it from Melk’s on that daily timer) and that’s just for one build of one weapon.
Fatshark are trying to keep player retention with an RNG wall with their attempt at itemisation rather than content, every change they’ve announced is at best a small bandaid over the gaping hole that is their fundamental itemisation design.
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Well I’m mostly talking about comparable games, and for me L4D isn’t a good example since part of the reason that entire series only kept me playing 60 hours (less than any individual 'tide game) was the lack of content:
- DT has 14 maps, 65 weapons, but really far more than 65 due to the meaningful variance we’ve been talking about.
- L4D had 7 maps, 8 weapons
- L4D2 had 9 maps, and about 35 weapons (though really more like 24, since 12 of the weapons are near-identical melee weapons)
I made this when someone was telling me to have a look at the game from a glass half full perspective.
I think it illustrates my feelings as well as I can really articulate it.
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And the other examples? Hell divers? Remnant from the ashes? Killing Floor 2? The point isn’t whether you personally stayed or not, but whether the game was a success in market and player retention right? Meaning it’s incorrect to assume that darktide not having RNG means low player retention.
It should also be said the RNG in darktide for similar genres is the highest, most absurd RNG I have ever seen bordering impossibility. I don’t play free to play games and mmo’s but that’s the only thing I can see being even close to similar. Never in a PvE or CO-OP game have I seen your odds this bad.
If my odds of getting one max curio are 1/681472, and I have to do that 12 times that’s, for the unluckiest person (but still possible) that’s potentially 8,177,664 curios (gold rarity) you would have to upgrade to (potentially stopping at earlier rarities but the number is the same, blue quality at least). How is that any sort of twisted logic fair or fun? How should it be humane to be even considered a possibility? People thought loot crates were bad? Loot crates ain’t got nothing on these odds.
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The RNG is doing so well for retention that Darktide is significantly dipping below Vermintide 2 (a 5 year old game) in active players on Steam 3 months after release.
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In my experience i started to actually have more fun in V2 from the moment i unlocked all the red weapons, because i could easily tailor my build and keep the game more diverse for me.
Endless grind is not a good player redemption tactic, if more it discourage people from putting hours in the game.
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