Bad design on top of more bad design.
Just know that you’re in for a lot of criticism, and that it will be well deserved. You had the chance to turn a new leaf here. This is not what a good crafting system should look like.
They could have allowed us to unlock perks and blessings with crafting materials, but they didn’t.
This entire thing reeks of C-level corpo bs and I seriously doubt the devs haven’t heard us but are being forced to do this for “player retention”. There’s no way they’re this stupid, it’s incomprehensible. The only thing we can do is keep making a stink.
How about the repetitiveness of quality upgrading about 100 items with good base stats in hope that one of them turns out the way you want?
How about acquiring 10000 of the same weapon to get the 100 items with good base stats to begin with?
How about letting us change perks and blessings fast and easy to be the way we want, and then slowly grinding towards upgrading all of the base stats of the (now useful) item to 100?
A clear goal to grind towards.
Player agency.
No pointless rng, no pointless waste of resources.
Yeah no, that’s why I stopped at 60 hours.
But having a couple variations of each weapon that do slightly different things because the upgrade didn’t immediately go as planned on the first try sounds like interesting variation to me.
Great, I wasted all my money in preparation for the fusing system on useless gear.
They already know what a good crafting system looks like, they made one with the Athanor in VT2’s weaves mode. They just chose to not use that system because player retention is their new god, I guess.
You need to have players to retain them. That ship has already sailed a month ago
Really like to hear what’s coming, and I like a lot of these changes, but please abandon all the RNG and upgrade locking in the loot/crafting system. This isn’t a looter shooter, I don’t care about the “hidden potential” of my mass produced lasgun. I want to reliably upgrade a weapon I like to do the stuff I need it to do so I can play the game on the difficulty I want to play.
If you’re gonna insist on applying RNG to anything it should be the map variety and AI director to make missions more unpredictable and fun. God, it’s like someone is holding a gun to each of the dev’s heads forcing them to adhere to these systems that nobody has liked for three games.
Everyone is dogpiling and you because they’ve spent 300+ hours and barely progressed their equipment. The grind NEVER gets better.
No, there are dozen of you. However, the rest of us really don’t want to spend time on the equipment management as designed.
Perks, sure. Blessings, no. Especially when the patches change how they work and if you want to experiment. And you want it on multiple classes, characters (for supposed dlc) and weapon types. Chase cosmetics like in VT2 with red skins and hats. If the game is about skill all players should have the same mechanics and load outs to choose from relatively easily instead of someone did good because they got a lucky good weapon.
So it still sucks? Honestly sounds worse than Hedge’s pitch back in the beta. I really hope those contracts for mats helps somewhat with the main issue (turning a white to orange is like 6 hours of grinding).
Any VT system would be good.
Fatshark is just messing with the players at this point right?
You cant convince me otherwise
That is a complete misrepresentation of people’s complaint.
If my chance to get a perfect item is 1 in 1000 and I can square away three or four items per play session I might have it by the end of the year if I play every day, and I’ll probably see incremental upgrades every few play sessions.
But the chance to get a perfect item with the system that Fatshark has built is more like 1 in 1,000,000. I will never get that item and I know it. And they know it. They are trying to trick me into chasing somethin unattainable.
I have 200 hours in this game and I have one 380 item with good stat bars. I just found out that item is ruined by having rolled with two bad blessings, and it was never going to be perfect anyways because one of its perks is level 3. So no, wanting to be able to swap out all the perks and blessings is not wanting perfect items across the board right now. I have four other item slots where I’ve never even received something with the base rating to make a top end item, let alone the perfect perks or blessings.
If the only random component on an item was the bar stats you would still go for hundreds of hours trying to find the perfect one. That’s years and years of play.
Honestly guys, it’s like you don’t actually understand the core problem here. Even if all of the “issues” with the crafting system are fixed? It’s still going to be an awful system. The base crafting in and of itself is simply NOT GOOD. The RNG is NOT GOOD. It’s not fun, it’s not interactive, it’s not even as good as VT 1 or VT 2 and both had meh crafting as well. The crafting and RNG is not fun to do. And that counts for a lot when it comes to how much people are willing to do it. No one wants to stand at the store and buy the same weapon over and over in hopes of getting the perfect stat roles, that sucks! It’s boring! It’s NOT FUN. Please, please, understand this. There is not a SINGLE piece of the current item progression system that should be kept in its current form.
The reality is you need to find a way to make it fun, interactive, and interesting. That’s part through animations and sound design, part through the results/what we get out of it, and part how the system actually works. Right now you’re failing in all three categories. Boring windows and a ton of clicking wherein we just go ‘retry, retry, retry’ is absolutely god awful. Blessings and Perks are, largely, boring. And the system itself is painful, not fun.
What we really need to see are options based around player agency, no RNG, and actual change/things that vary such as weapon attachments that change both how the weapons look and feel. Scopes, ammo types, magazine size, etc. I know Hedge was all hurr hurr this isn’t CoD, but honestly? Make it CoD in this aspect. It’d be way more interesting than what you have currently. Let us unlock attachments through use or research them with materials and then custom fit our own weapons to create what we want. The gacha style is NOT working and NOT good for player retention.
I have hundreds of hours in VT 1 and VT 2, and I want to love DT. I want to be able to support you in what you do and put money into the game. But you’re making it SO hard. The gameplay itself is fun, but the crafting and basically every system around that is just… I’m sorry, but it’s kinda dogshit. There’s not a polite way to say that. It’s insane that it launched like this or that it got past any kind of review board, it’s like it didn’t pass through any actual gamer hands and was instead just c-suite nonsense based on some psychological profile of player retention and buzz words. That’s not going to fly.
People are leaving in droves. And I know this sort of thing takes time, but honestly, I’m not sure you have it. It can’t be delayed. People are unhappy, even your diehard supporters are unhappy. Item progression and crafting go hand in hand, and ultimately I think everyone needs to take a step back and focus on what’s actually FUN to interface with. Right now? It simply isn’t. And if the game isn’t fun, why am I playing?
Same.
Hey Fatshark.
Lets have a little… heart to heart shall we?
What is your problem with the playerbase and letting us choose how many times we re-roll a weapon? Is it because you are scared of players finding a “perfect meta” to easily blitz through the game? Are you being pulled by your paymasters at TC to gacha the game so that people spend more time and effort in this thing? You’ve made a wonderful game that does an amazing job of showing how grim and despressing the galaxy of the 42nd Millenium actually is. Yet you have shot yourselves in the foot.
You released the game with few maps, few classes and then released a fully functional GIEF MONEY store. You didn’t even have a fully functional shrine system, which promised us the world and when asked what it would cost to get what we wanted, told us to take a long walk off a short pier, congratulations, gg, you’ve ruined your weapon. Pennances that are anti-team or horrifical grindfests. This is tiring. We don’t need this in this day and age.
The following needs to be addressed urgently by yourselves:
- Allow the playerbase to reroll perks and blessings indefinitely.
- Allow the playerbase to pool resources from each of their characters.
- Allow for upgrade paths of weapons stats.
You have a limited window here Fatshark. Your active player count for this game has tanked since it was launched. Its now less than 7000. The steam reviews have this at (as of writing) 28% and falling. The overall rating is 54%. Any lower and you will find it impossible to bring it back.
Take your development teams to look Payday 2, a game that has been out since 2013 has around 5 times that many players. They let you customise everything in the way that you want. Nothing is beyond the players in that game. Overkill jiggle the meta from time to time but please… please do one thing: Learn from them. Learn from them and the game that you’ve patently rushed out will become awesome.
I’ve played your games since Vermintide 1 - Vermintide 2 is a game I also adore, be it playing the long game or speedrunning the hell out of the maps (non-glitch obvs.). Darktide is looking like the difficult and fatal 3rd album in the Tide series.
Have a wonderful evening.
#Breakthelocks +1