Do we need more restricted high level difficulty (poll)?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
21

I sometimes like less skilled players in my lobby, they create a challenge.
But if I see them dying to the hoard a couple of times (just dudes, not elites inbetween, not specials, not shooters, just rotting guys with sticks), then I am kicking them for their own good.

It is rare when things are this bad, and if votekick doesn’t go through, I do not try it again, because I am basicly asking my team if this fella is Ready or Not.

Well, I’ll get back to the topic - the current system is fine, there’s really no need to change it

22

what was the question?, i didn’t understand

23

It’s not reductive at all, not everyone needs to have the game hand you a “good job” sticker to enjoy the game.
The only reason why winning matters and why you consider a lost game as time wasted is because of the godawful progression system that plauges modern games.

24

You can put as many restrictions as you want, we will always complain that they are not enough!

25

Which boils down to the deliberately pathetic amount of plasteel we get awarded with the good job sticker.

If blessings were unlocked I bet many people could just get on with enjoying the game instead of running with anxiety over losing plasteel if the mission fails.

26

You just gave a very real reason. If you lose you get no return on your invested time. If that’s on account of someone else’s actions, then that’s egregious. If you have 1-2 hours to play this game every day, do you want to spend any of that time losing on account of people who don’t know what they’re doing? I’d venture a guess at no. Besides, this argument of “I don’t need to win to enjoy the game” is pointless. It’s subjective and doesn’t mean anything ultimately. Losing is time wasted by objective metrics. You get nothing out of it.

27

I get the sentiment, and it’s frustrating when someone comes in and just keels over repeatedly. In fairness - maybe they feel the same way and aren’t just there for free loot, but as pointed out, you can’t learn unless you try.

The problem likely though is that the better players play on higher levels, and so we have a bit of a prisoners dilemma situation. Regardless of how good you are(n’t) - it’s always a better choice to go for a higher level as the chances are 75% of your team will be better than you’d get at a lower level, and that more often than not offsets the difficulty change.

I’d be curious to know how many new players are currently making their way up through the levels. Is it a lot? A few? Enough to get games at tiers 1 and 2? Are threes well populated ? I dunno. But if there aren’t many players in the pool of Darktide actives, then lower ranked games are going to be bot fests.

Is it worth changing up that levelling process now the player based has matured? My memory is that enemies hit limply and there aren’t many of them early on. Why not have more enemies at lower levels than at present so players get used to the volumes, but maybe your weapon power is better (than the current ‘base’ is) to keep you in it?

I also think level recommendations would help significantly for new players. e.g. rule of thumb tier 1 for levels 1-5, t2 6-10, t3 10-20, t4 20-30, etc. It is just a guide. I ground through level 1 and 2 learning the ropes, raced through 3, found 4 a big leap, then 5 a relatively more easy step up. At no point though could I work out in those early days when I was ready for the next challenge other than just going in to a mission and getting my backside handed to me. I learned a lot about builds that didn’t work that way! Bye bye TH for example.

28

I think it’s more a matter of difficulty gaps, communication tools, and differences in player skill.

Difficulty Gaps

It’s been 1.5 years since I leveled my last character and a lot has changed, but at least back then Malice was just boringly easy. Yet going from T3 (Malice) → T4 (Heresy) the enemy hp & dmg increases by 50%, the spawns are way more aggressive and ofc. now there’s Auric modifiers like HISTG on top.

So the gap in difficulty between T3-T4 is way bigger than anything before or since. From T4 → T5 (Damnation) it’s just +33% iirc while the modifiers etc. stay the same. Back around release there was also the issue of penances requiring a minimum of T4, so a lot of people who were in no way ready for it were still there to grind those (idk how common those penances are now).

Communication Tools

While nice, they’re are far from ideal. Resource pings have a short range. Tagging resources is arduous & requires pixel perfect accuracy, so you’re likely to spam them in frustration while focusing on everything else … only to doubletap and cancel the whole thing. Enough of that and you just won’t even bother anymore.

On top of all that both chat & pings are super easy to miss during a fight, especially for new players already overwhelmed with everything else. Yet the game doesn’t communicate resources effectively like team ammo states (maybe it does now, not sure). Nvm even explaining how ammo boxes work, so ofc. newbies burn the whole thing in an instant and screw everyone over just triple clicking it every few shots. In their defense, it’s illogical for the thing to have a # of uses instead of # of ammo.

In short, the game doesn’t offer the experienced the tools to help the newbies stay informed, stocked on ammo, health etc. and it’s easy to miss refills when available.

Player Skill

Finally, Darktide is absolutely a skill-based game first. A great player can do with grays far more than a newbie / mid player can do with a full set of gear, and great players tend to learn fast. A fresh lvl 30 great player is easily ready for T4, likely even T5, where a level 300 fully geared middling gamer can barely handle T4. To restrict the former on T3 while sending the latter on to T5 Aurics is just going to make things worse for everyone involved.

tldr;
If the game needs anything, imo it’s to either give us a new difficulty somewhere between T3-4, or to reverse the relationship of T4-5 difficulties so that T4 is a smaller step up from T3, while T5 then would be an extreme step up from T4.

I’m not opposed to setting some kind of a filter for newer players but it would have to be based on something other than gear. Especially in the current RNG where not only is earning that gear up to RNG in the first place, but your gear score has precious little correlation between the real power of the build & blessings nvm. the player’s skill. So something like “must complete N tier X missions” before getting access to the next one would imo be the best bet.

But considering how many fully geared level 300+ players I see every day on T5+ who miss every single resource, don’t heal, walk straight into pox bursters, can’t handle hordes or dodge muties etc? Honestly, I think the best thing we could do is just get a proper set of tutorials and better communication tools to teach the basics even to those unwilling to learn. :sweat_smile:

29

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.

Instead of getting angry with players not carrying their own weight, that anger would be better used in trying to change the systems that brings forth such anger/annoyance or whatever you wanna call it.

30

even if they did pay attention, which i doubt, the causality of things happening on screen at the blink of an eye and the decisions that lead to this encounter, are so far out of their grasp that the learning factor is zero.

havent counted the times i rewatched my own matches

•where was my positioning
•from where did x spawn
•why was i prioritizing y instead

etc etc.

same reason i dont learn from hitting someone in training once by sheer luck i got to repeat that motion a 1000 times under controlled environment, not in a street brawl where i might get stabbed instead.

so fundamentals:
• shove or shoot a burster
• shove a dog
• dodge a net
• who comes first ? flamer (straight line of area denial) or bomber (large circle of no-go area)

need to be sleep walked in lower diffs to perfection before failing under pressure in I II V E G with no means of even understanding why the match just went south

31

I mean in general I agree with that, but at the same that does not invalidate what I’m saying. The world would be a better place if people held themselves accountable and there’s no denying that. That being said, do I spend inordinate amounts of energy fuming about this particular issue? No. But in response to this general question, I presented my position on it.

32

Powerful; but do put into consideration that the Darktide base has far different sensibilities compared to us Vermintide players. All we can do is preach patience and hope for the best. The essence of these games has always been the thrill of surviving the crap the game throws at you rather than winning.

33

It also depends on what you perceive the activity to be before you get into it. Clutching and carrying for players that don’t have enough sense to know when they’re out of their depth was never in the proposition of this game from my recollection. I still don’t find that aspect entertaining in the least, but more power to you if you do. For me the enjoyment was always found in a group of people weathering the storm successfully, together and it still is.

34

And you’re not wrong in any way for feeling the way that you do, I was simply offering a different opinion and hoping it would give a perspective/a way of enjoying the game even when it isn’t going optimally.

35

That’s fair. I mean there are definitely rounds where I can smell the damnation (some pun intended) coming and just check out from the whole “we should be winning” thing and just go down with the ship, it’s just not my preferred outcome.

36

I am completely in favor of having a few training missions or penances that are mandatory to complete, before players are allowd to join the auric playlist.
Players should have at least some very basic skills.

You don’t know how to push bursters without taking damage? Stay off the auric playlist.
You don’t know how to dodge a trapper, a dog or a sniper? Stay out.
You can’t 1v1 a bulwark or a crusher? You guessed it. No auric playlist for you.

If you can do those things, the training missions would maybe take you 10 minutes to complete. Once.
If you struggle to do those things, you are guaranteed to be dead weight in the auric playlist.

Something like this would not be “unfair gatekeeping” or anything like that.
It would simply keep the absolute bottom of the barrel players out of the highest difficulty in the game.

37

You’re not wrong. We just have different perspectives is all. I like getting beaten over the head while attempting to survive with the crap the game throws at me. Nothing gets my adrenaline running then seeing my fellow players get downed during a horde rush then Twitch Cata spawning 3 bosses as I clutch my balls off by circling around then rushing to revive my teammates in the amidst of an assassin wave vote.

A lot of people that join my Twitch Cata games are not good enough for it; myself included, but it brings so much excitement when sh!t hits the fan and I pull off memorable plays that stay with me for the day.

38

Yeah with amount of technical minutiae in this game, the tutorials are so completely lacking. There are so many things that are essential that they do not cover but should. They should have been considerable more thorough and unskippable.

40

Anyone thinking any amount of tutorials, played or read, will make good player, must be a bit delusional.
Darktide mostly bases on snap decision making, that are almost non-conscious. You can learn that practise and practise alone.

There are also tactical and strategical parts, but those require some sort of cooperation from other players, hence no tutorial possible, or knowledge about maps, also not tutorialish.

41

No one’s saying that. But it would mitigate the growing pains for players if they actually knew how the game worked before they were made to play it.