That’s the problem. I don’t think they’re doing it right, especially with the perk/blessing lockouts and the reliance on the store/consecrating being the source of the blessing mitigation. It’s still a slot machine with dials within dials.
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it still is all rng influenced, sure. again, mitigation not negation - but that’s like saying a hand of poker is a series of slot machines, because each card drawn is a fresh random event. despite these cascading random events meaning overall prediction is nearly impossible the odds are what matter - if you think that means that poker is too random or not skill based i strongly suggest avoiding playing it with professionals, haha
I think poker is a bad analogy for this itemisation system. It’s closer to Sabacc from Star Wars where your cards can randomly change at any time.
I don’t hate poker for the randomisation, I just hate gambling. Poker doesn’t pretend to be a progression system.
I don’t want 7 layers of RNG just for a single item.
Another thing that is grinding my gears is there’s no mitigation within the rolls (at each layer) themselves. You can roll grey items 100 times and you’re never going to be closer to getting a 380 item with good stats. You can literally roll perks for an hour and still not hit perk and tier you want. You might never see the T4 blessing for the weapon you want. Rolling more often doesn’t equate to mitigation in my eyes. The lockouts make it worse because of you’re unlucky you start again. That is literally disrespecting your time.
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i don’t know that game sorry. five card poker is not a perfect analogy but not that way? it’s waaaaaay more permissive, the system as outlined is closet to poker that is like “a card is drawn for the river, and each player draw four cards, replace any two with any two cards you want”, which is muuuuuch better odds than most implementations of poker.
what you are asking for is “a card is drawn for the river. each player can select four cards”. which would not lead to very varied outcomes.
I don’t want varied outcomes. There’s no benefit for me for varied outcomes. The only varied outcomes I’m getting because of this itemisation system is not getting what I want out of it after 400 hours, and the changes won’t make that big a difference unless the fundamental design of the itemisation system changes. I’m not expecting a looter game like Diablo or Borderlands. I’m expecting a co-op horde shooter where I can reach itemisation/progression end in a reasonable amount of time (100-200 hours) and then continue to play the game without my enjoyment being damped and chipped away by this half baked, gaping warp portal of an itemisation system.
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well - hrm. i can understand your frustration and couldn’t agree more that the current itemization is awful. but like, to stay in the poker analogy, we’re playing poker. it is the thing it is, and even if your tastes are something else- you can expect chess if you like, but you are going to be consistently disappointed at all the cards, lack of a board, etc.
Then why does it sound like to me you’re defending the system? At least until you stated the system is pretty horrible too.
We both know what the system is like, we both have our own analogies for it.
Is it just that our view of the upcoming changes are different? Mine are “good start but it doesn’t address the fundamental issues”, and I hear from your statements that “it’s good enough”.
I know part of it is managing expectations, but even if they intended this to be a looter game they failing hard at it too.
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nah i have no idea if it’s good enough. no one does it is impossible at this point, that’s what i am saying - taking issue with the upcoming system or even thinking the upcoming system is great are both currently totally irrational since the system will make or break depending on the odds. people reflexively rejecting it on the basis it has RNG doesn’t make any sense.
but i would say - it’s definitely, definitely a looter game. i feel like when people make statements like that what they actually mean is “i do not want it to be (the thing)”, which is totally fair. but it’s for sure intended as that. imo you are going to keep being disappointed if you expect it to turn into, say, a left4dead model. even if there was nothing wrong with L4D, even if it was more popular, even if you think that would be the better choice, even if you hope they totally 180 and rip it out and start again - it’s still a loot game and will be until that time, and if that’s not your jam fair enough.
Oh right, sabbacc is a space version of blackjack where the target number is 23. 4 suits of 15 numbered cards and 13 face cards from 0 to - 12. The main unique thing about it is that cards can randomise at any time, but you can place cards in a field to lock the value, and in most some variations you have to reveal locked cards.
Vermintide 1 and 2 has loot and RNG, I’m not against some RNG but Darktide is orders of magnitude worse, with significantly more RNG and deliberately removing player agency from it and surrounding systems. And their (proposed) systems for mitigating said RNG is bad and doesn’t address the core issues with the system. Design intent for designing a 1000 hour item system is such that you’re literally denying people perfect rolls. And if you’re statistically only able to get a perfect item once every 1000 hours then it’s an issue with the design. Especially if it relies on RNG since that can be anywhere from immediately to the heat death of the universe.
Just to reiterate. V1 and V2 may have had issues with the way they implemented their systems, but Darktide is somehow significantly worse than either of them.
My bet is they don’t have a statistician on the dev team or they didn’t listen to them. Or there were different people working on different parts of the itemisation and no one spoke to each other.
“5% chance to get an item type you want is pretty good.”
“2% to get a perfect stat roll is pretty good.”
“2% to get a perfect perk is pretty good.”
“1% to get a good T4 blessing is pretty good.”
And then mashed it all together because of the crunch.
The system is poorly designed for any expectation and pointing that out isn’t irrational.
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Ok but this still isn’t really equivalent.
You are still playing the lottery and I feel like the problems with this analogy is that it massively downplays how much the game expects you to play the lottery.
It’s random if you get the weapon you want.
It’s random for how high your modifier score is.
It’s random how your modifier score is distributed.
Perk 1 and perk 2 is not only randomized by what type of perk you get but by what level of perk it is. Then you have 2 blessings which are both randomized by type and level.
You can control 1 of these currently but even that is a random roll. It also costs resources to do all this up to a point and there is no option to retain a perk, just to re-roll it.
This gets just as bad with curios.
You need to play the lottery effectively 11 times currently to get a finalized weapon roll and you need to do this twice. You also need to do this for 3 separate curios.
Now multiply that by 4 characters which get no help from each other.
Saying “it’s just playing the lottery” is one thing but even playing the worst lottery in an mmo you atleast often have set stats on your final weapon or item and know where you need to go to get it and can choose that.
Even the missions are randomized and it is not a guarantee when it comes to how much you will get in crafting materials or where they will even be so if you want to play a preferred mission it might not even be up when you log in.
Playing one slot machine from time to time is fun but being forced to play the slot machine every step of the way is garbage.
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Worse than a lottery:
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Is “this next patch” this week? Soon? Whenever?
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oh, literally yes. that was the point of the quote you used later - no one ran the odds on extremely rare outcomes until post-launch. t4 blessings in particular are much too rare and as i’ve said they’re nowhere near 1%.
but what they are doing when they do so, and what you are doing, is essentially looking at a probability curve with an extremely long tail, pointing at the absolute farthest point - a combination of rarest outcomes - and then getting a figure. that’s perfect but that’s not what is intended as a routine outcome, it’s supposed to be very unlikely. it’s relatively easy to get a good item, and then extremely difficult to get a perfect item and there’s a diminishing return the further you go.
you can see some genuinely good work on the rough breakdown of the statistical likelihood eventually in this thread (0.048% to roll specific max 1 perk and 1 blessing - #68 by coolcab), particularly on the actual odds of curios. you can also see many people making extremely large exaggerations of the odds including the OP because they don’t fully understand this paradigm, and also people spouting complete and incredibly easily falsified nonsense on the level of “the odds of drawing any card from a deck is 1%, and any queen is .1%” ie confidently quoting odds that are totally, comically incorrect, even if you didn’t have the absolute figures you could verify with a deck or having played with a deck of cards ever in no time at all and getting likes out the wazoo.
okay to be clear a lottery is a collection of rare outcomes that you match somehow. multiplying lottery by lottery is going to leave you with an extremely poor understanding of the odds involved.
the odds of winning a perfect curio, i would estimate, are in this ballpark? ie you need one rare outcome (1/4 to get the curio you want), one very rare outcome (the store odds of getting over the blessing breakpoint), then two rare outcomes (picking at least two of your preferred perks out of three) then two rare outcomes (and they both need to roll T4, heavily influenced by item level).
but that’s not the intended design of the system -the odds of getting a curio with 2/4 perfect outcomes and 2/4 near perfect outcomes is MUCH better, since the system gives the player control over several of these rolls. ie, the player can choose only to pursue good blessings, meaning the first several rolls are mitigated - the store shows you the rarest roll (the blessing) and even shows you the first perk roll. the store odds haven’t changed but the only resource spent is time - it is much cheaper to see these rolls than other ones. as crafting gets more expensive as you go seeing your first rolls are always cheaper than the last one. as such you would predict, and i can demonstrate personally, that players will trend strongly towards and achieve in a reasonable amount of play:
a T5 curio blessing they want, probably but not for sure over the breakpoint depending on their store tolerance
a T4 perk they really want via the reroll
1 or 2 T3 perks that they want or don’t hate, probably 2
1 or 2 T4 perks they either want or don’t hate, probably 0, maybe 1, very rarely 2
i would predict this describes a majority of level 30 curios currently in use. if you polled players with say 50 hours, i would predict (if their item prioritization was curios, if they are engaging with the available systems, if they understand the odds) they will easily meet most if not all of these objectives.
or, the odds of getting a perfect curio are bad, but the odds of getting a nearly perfect curio are nowhere near as bad, and the mechanical difference is minuscule. that’s your diminishing return and that’s the intended design of the system, and was also an intended design of VT2 and most (but assuredly not all) games of this nature.
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I know this situation is by design.
Vermintide 2 was tuned for about 100 hours of attempts, by the developers own admission. They didn’t even realise why people kept on playing for hundreds to thousands of hours more.
This current design is a extension of that statement, where they are trying to extend the itemisation for hundreds and even thousands of hours.
Being tuned for 1000 hours means you’re never going to realistically ever get that top roll. There’s no RNG mitigation in the rolls themselves, so you can literally roll forever and never get close.
I still say it’s bad design that goes against what they did, even possibly accidently, with Vermintide 1 and 2, and they miss the point of why people kept playing V1 and V2 beyond whatever itemisation was designed.
If they keep dangling a carrot that is statistically unreachable, eventually even really hardcore players will get sick of the carrot and the machine that’s attached to it.
They drove off people that they are trying to attract with an endless grind with all the technical issues, bugs and content drought, and they’re driving off their long-time fans with this hostile itemisation system.
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It feels like they have a Diablo mindset, where they’re fantasizing about players continuously throwing their old gear in the trash as they find very tiny increments in better gear. Other people have already expressed why this is not only statistically asinine but also obliterates engagement. Diablo not only has no ceiling, but seasons and gigantic throngs of loot to sort through. Darktide has the equivalent feeling of Destiny 2’s infamous “a blue and two tokens” issue - the developers are not only stingy but also place no value on player experience - only denying goals to increase whale retention.
Telling players that the weapon they’re using will always be future trash is what is making players abandon the system. Players can’t find the guns they want with a specific tier 4 perk and blessing and the best stat line. They know this and so do you. You like the idea because you think they’ll keep trying to find a drop that will never happen. Players aren’t that stupid and have better things to do.
If you want such an absurd amount of variation on weapons, you must give players a starting point they consider to be “perfect.” This will keep them engaged with the rest of the system because they are mentally rooted in the idea that they can make progress. The mistake you’re making is the assumption that players are happy to use and dump resources into something they know they’ll treat as junk, until they find new junk that is technically better but still not at all what they wanted.
If players get invested in having a good starting point they know is exactly what they want and consider to be perfect and a weapon they’ll improve forever, then they’ll get more invested in their character. More investment in the character, more money.
With the old failed system and this new (soon to be) failed system, stop making step 1 the hardest part. I know you’re afraid players will instantly fashion god weapons unless you remove agency from the drop itself, but there are other ways around that issue that don’t kneecap your entire game. You cannot design like that. You’re killing yourselves.
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Yeah. You know, like, balancing blessings. Which they have barely touched since release.
They’d rather tantalize us with a lottery for a god weapon with the one high-tier blessing everyone wants, than make an actually diverse, fun system.
Needless to say, unless they get rid of perk and blessing locks, my review’s staying negative forever.
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Oh Diablo… In each run I would find a weapon I liked well enough within the first third and stopped even checking afterwards.
I still wonder if anyone who actually bothered to understand the system uses certain properties in VT2 like “Damage reduction vs. X”, which requires a unique slot against Stamina, BCR or Health. And yes, even Push/block can have its rare place there… With 10%, it’s simply always the worst choice. But DT has brought junk to a new level.
The dev blog is definitively discouraging me to change my negative recommendation.
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Tbh I feel like they’d do much better with a Disgaea type system where you level up the weapons themselves. It doesn’t have to be literal battles inside the weapon, of course – but a system where you get incrementally better stats on a weapon based on how often you use it would feel very good. Could even use the useless level 30 experience points for this – you’ve stopped leveling, but now those points get transmuted into weapon experience. Each weapon slider asymptotically approaches 100% with infinite experience, and perks and blessings all start at T1 and slowly progress to T4 as you run hundreds of missions at level 30 with them.
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