I mean looking at how they downgraded Darktide:
Safe to say gacha mechanics are the least of my worries. Probably going to need to sign in to a third party account in order to select mission with a real life timer too.
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Of course. I was just refering to the fact that is not black and white - FS is either not listening or it iz predatory, as presented in the post I replied to.
What keeps me scratching my head is that all the gameplay system stuff is presumably programmed by people other than the level designers, modelers, artists, etc.
Which begs the question about what amount of content was actually planned to be released by this time had the launch gone smoother. There hasn’t really been a “content drop” since shorty after launch (new map and missing weapons), and I’ve assumed that was content scheduled for launch that was just a couple of weeks delayed.
Which means, for a live service game, there has been nothing released or announced on the content front. The only thing we know about is a pile of premium cosmetics waiting to be released. No mention of new maps or mission types. No mention of any seasonal content or fun events to get people engaged and looking forward to something. Nothing.
Live service FTW! Right?
5 Likes
Get rid of Locks. all it does it cause frustration and an artificial grind feel.
Have the 2nd perk and blessing re-roll just cost more. This is also true since the game has a lot of balance patches. Spend hours getting a perfect weapon then the next week a patch nerfs it to the ground. makes me want to quit just by reading the patch notes.
No locks. the artifact tier weapons will have a 3rd perk or blessing my guess so how bad will the RNG be when artifacts come out. not only getting a 400+ Ilevel but having it with 2 perfect blessings to re-roll.
Progression is key. on top of reaching level 30 why does exp matter? it doesn’t.
higher quality is a reward for harder difficulty which is much needed. but there needs to be a paragon level system. This could directly help boost chance at higher weapon base levels. like paragon +15 would give you a much higher chance to get a 380 i level. And paragon +30 lets you get above 380 etc. This would be great progression since doing the harder difficulties would get us to that goal faster.
TL:DR
NO crafting Locks.
add Paragon/prestige levels above 30
Shared resources between characters
7 Likes
A nice simple solution would be that every time you level up after level 30 your EQUIPPED weapons each gain 3-5 points that are randomly added to their stats to boost them slowly up towards the max.
Ideally, it would be cool that when every stat hits the max, you would unlock a special skin for that item.
Having this boost go to your equipped weapon would give an incentive to keep experimenting and trying out different weapons.
1 Like
Refine Perk
Refine a single perk on an item to roll for a new perk selected at random by Hadron. The perk that was not chosen to be refined will become locked for this weapon.
Re-Bless
Players can choose to replace a single blessing on the weapon with a blessing of choice they have earned the right to use. The other blessing that was not chosen will become locked.
Two quotes, two vivid red flags for me.
Dear Fatharks. Why? What is the purpose of this randomness? The answer we got so far for it are just plainly wrong, just take a look at the fanbase reaction.
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Well, they did say:
For Darktide, we wanted to set a different direction for the items characters will choose to equip.
So, @FatsharkCatfish, I do hope you will let us know how going in this direction has been for Fatshark in a few months.
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Double-Double down on the RNG. Amazing. This game is totalling going to ask you to pay cash to undo the randomness. Maybe in like 3 months when they think they have enough good will again. Dreadful stuff.
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While you may very well be right I’d be careful to credit forum posts or the steam reviews to what the fanbase actually want. We who engage in forums are very few.
… with that said… I don’t know who would think the locks are a good idea…
2 Likes
Since this communication dropped I keep thinking “maybe tonight I’ll do a few missions to just hang and chill.” And then I think about this situation “Why even bother investing the effort into playing. Time to move on.” Haven’t played since the news dropped and I guess I don’t see that changing. So tragic.
6 Likes
Two things.
The actual player base is equally few now and if there is any doubt in their mind what players want send out a simple question to every active player saying
Do you want locks on perks and blessings in crafting or not.
Then there can be no doubt at all.
Problem is what we think is not the priority here lol
1 Like
Meh, i’ve still been playing with my brother and friends, its still a great co op experience and my gear even with the current system is good enough for damnation. I’m not syaing I didnt wish they’d make it more progressive and allow you to work towards the blessings/perks/stats you want but hey, its still a fun game, just has garbage supporting systems.
OH, I also got pick’n’mix penance randomly in a tier 4 high intensity throneside. That felt awesome.
Details were rather vague, but doesn’t this mean we still have the same exact problem of waiting to find a “perfect” roll before we even begin the crafting/editing process?
If it always locks one perk and one blessing, you would always need to wait around hoping to find a perfectly rolled item that has max stat lines, a perfect, max tier perk for that weapon and a perfect, max tier blessing.
If that’s the case, it’s the same exact system and problem you already have. Is there a way to improve stats on a weapon? Is there a way to improve blessing and perk tiers? You make no mention of tiers whatsoever in the original post, which tells me this method of RNG acquisition will continue to be an immense issue. I don’t see how profane weapons could have the greatest potential when the pool for randomizing bad rolls is so massive, and there’s no control over it.
2 Likes
the blessing rolls you get are determined by item level, so the highest tier items tend to produce blessings that are T(1 or 2), gain item level from it and then produce a blessing of T(3 or VERY RARELY 4). the new system will let you generate a lot of profane items at what looks like low cost, so you have this opportunity much more frequently. the crafting is scaled to be cheaper for earlier rolls partially for this reason - you can reveal the first perk/blessing inexpensively and decide if you want to progress.
at launch you were completely reliant on RNG - your two blessings and two perks were totally RNG so the only control you had was what you chose to level up, and your pool of high stat profane items was and still is super limited. the new system will drastically improve the odds - post launch you can roll many profane items you are chasing, allowing more access to higher statted items. you can choose 50% of the perks, meaning you’ll always get at least one you want at high tier and can always reroll your worst one. and you will be able to do the same to blessings - roll twice but pick your favourite and revealing the first is cheaper but will likely be a worse roll so there’s a tradeoff.
it will all come down to the actual odds which we don’t and can’t yet know, but these systems should be significant RNG mitigations.
Even the RNG mitigations have RNG…
2 Likes
well i mean, the alternative (and what some people are asking for) is deterministic completely - the player grinds something or jumps through whatever hoop and gets to choose all of the non-stat slots on any given weapon. individual drops would only have value as blessings sources since you’d get a good stat item and presumably keep it? you’d never ever want to replace your 380 and ideal distribution with a 370, or anything else.
i predict some mechanism for leveling up blessings eventually but i don’t think all the slots will be unlocked, or frankly that it is possible to evaluate how good/not good the proposed systems are until we have any idea at all about the odds. if they’re 99.999999% likely to get whatever you want on the first roll then despite being RNG i imagine no one would mind, i just don’t expect it.
I don’t mind RNG when it’s in moderation, but when you have 7+ layers and whatever mitigation is present also has its own layers of RNG, it’s a bit too far.
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well it’s rng mitigation, not rng negation. think a hand of five card draw poker - each draw is a “level of rng”, and each hand will go through at least five of these. it costs a resource to play and to stay in the game - the player can stop and stop spending the resource and wait for their next hand, or spend more to keep playing. then the players apply their RNG mitigation - they discard their worst options and are allocated more. despite all of these random events skilled players can achieve extremely rare outcomes at low relative cost by careful application of available systems and the odds of these things can be predicted to a surprising level of accuracy. to the point it becomes an evaluative judgement on how far other players have built their ideal hands and pretending to signal you have had better RNG than you have. imo it’s kinda neat.
when you say in moderation what i think you mean, and what i think most players generally mean and is a super common game design truism - it’s not the random that bothers players it’s the odds. when people say things like “i hate the RNG, i had to play for 100 hours (i needed to spend this much time resource) to get this shitty reward! (to get this moderately rare outcome)”. that’s frustration at odds, not necessarily the fact there is chance. fix the odds and the RNG suddenly feels less oppressive.
It’s definitely much less oppressive when you can get what you want after 100 hours. But I’ve been burnt before by really bad unmitigated RNG (FF14 Atma Relic hunt) so I’m a bit more sensitive to it.
Again, anecdotally, I was pretty much geared for all 15 careers in Vermintide 2 (reds or red-equivalent oranges) after 150-200 hours.
After 400+ hours of Darktide, there are still blessings that have never appeared for me, items that I’ve never seen higher than a 300 base rating, and 3/4 380s I do have (over all 4 of my characters) are weapons I don’t like using. No double T4 blessings or perks on any weapon. No more than a single T4 perk on a curio. The odds need fixing, but so does the fundamental design where there are so many layers, having good odds on a single layer or two doesn’t help.
They need to fix this:
And these changes are a good first step, we’ll have to see how the item “acquisition” improvements pan out, but if it’s still something along the lines of 100 hours for a T4 blessing on the right weapon type or something, they can shove that system into the warp. It’s not rewarding, it’s not progression, it feels like I’m wasting my time.
Edit: I also hate poker and casinos.
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some of that you would expect tbf - i have less than 10 T4 blessings total over almost 400 games. i bet if two t4 blessings items even exist there would be a handful over the entire player base. the odds there are broken, not that there’s random - there’s a bottleneck there. likewise - okay imagine if T4 perks was the common outcome, and T3 is rarer - you would achieve your objective (of getting all T4 perks) much much quicker. there would be exactly the same layers of rng, the design would be identical, but you wouldn’t have this issue. that’s really really foundational to understanding the problem imo.
it is a lottery - imagine if you were playing the lottery, the numbers got called, and you were allowed to change a few of them. even if you could only change any two, imagine how much more frequently you would win the lottery. that’s rng mitigation, that has a huge impact on the statistical likelihood if you do it right.