Fatshark, you might want to take a look at your Game Designers

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Everyday there are complaints about the same three topics: The Map Selection, The Crafting System and the Armoury Shop.

Who is responsible for this system? Your Game Designers - Lead by Victor Magnuson.
Everything your Designers have worked on has received terrible feedback from the community. Now resulting in Darktide having 10k players average on Steam. The community DOES NOT enjoy the work of your Game Designers. They failed PHENOMENALLY at their job.

Do with that information what you want. I’m sure your Designers are nice people and need to pay bills as well - but when the community is complaining about the work of your employees so much, you might want to take action?

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Send those rejects to make Facebook games.

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Funny enough everything but the gameplay itself is a 1:1 Facebook game lol

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Counter point : every single of these three topics has a greed related explanation somewhere.

When I dont find a good option in the mission selection, I go to the Armory Shop, then crafting or Sir Melk, then come back. Can you guess which other shop it on the way ?
Armory Shop rotations and incomplete crafting is an incentive to go back and forth between these shops and the psykhanium, in a hub with other people who have a range of cosmetics equiped. The whole system is on timers and without shortcuts to have you spend time in this hub. This is even easier on the servers while being profitable on paper.

Do not look at the Game Designers only, but at the people internally who push even now for profit generation mechanisms that go against the fundamental core of the game.

Corporate politics and user reviews being what they are, it is very possible that the game designers who worked on solid core mechanics are being held more accountable than those who pushed for these designs in the first place, and that would make me sad.

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I get your point and i agree with it.

My counter point: Get rid of profit generation mechanisms and give the player more freedom - resulting in happy players resp. happy customers. Make good changes, receive returning players, receive good steam reviews, make more money.
That should be their priority. Of course they can continue not listening to their dedicated community. They may do so for another few months. But once the game has reached 2k average players at most they will see they have f’d up.

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Legend has it that if you say his name in front of a mirror three times on the day of a winter solstice, Victor Magnuson appears and steals your wallet.

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Okay this is like the fifth thread of the same stuff. Can you guys at least condense yourselves into like one or two threads so the rest of us can get to reviewing and making constructive suggestions that isn’t repetition of muh its worse than VT2 and corporate is bad muh.

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Quantity has a quality all on its own.

People are dissatisfied, some give long winded and exhaustive feedback, others simply state their discontent. Both is valuable and not everyone has the time or energy to devote hours of their life to doing Fatsharks job for them, especially when they never ask for it.

When was the last time a dev/des came down from mount Olympus and asked us mortals for feedback on his divine creation?

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Fundamentally, Fatshark (and any dev) want to have as many players playing their game at a time as they can - it’s the engagement metric. And this is linked to engagement = revenue through MTX sales and/or base game / DLC sales.

And fundamentally, there are two ways to go about engagement: making games that engage players through addictive gameplay (i.e. I just want to play one more mission/turn/run!!!) or that engage players through manipulative (e.g. dark pattern) practices.

Fatshark has leaned heavily on the latter (dark patterns), I guess under the theory that if they can get big launch numbers they will attract enough whales or other users willing to spend in the MTX shop that it will provide the revenue they want.

This may indeed work as they planned financially, but they’ve also damaged the game’s public reception/reputation and its ability to grow the user base over time.

Deep Rock Galactic provides a great counter-point, where the incentives are always geared towards getting people to just play the game. Nearly everything in DRG related to progression is oriented around consistent and predictable rewards. If you start an assignment, you get a guaranteed set of missions to play (no RNG for the chance to get the right mission) with a tangible reward at the end (resources, unlocks, etc.). When you’re done with the assignment, you can take on another one right away. The season system rewards doing in-mission challenges to help you progress through the season reward tree faster.

All of these systems in DRG respect player time and encourage you to actually play the game (and take on fun additional challenges during mission for greater rewards). DRG isn’t stingy about handing out rewards. They know that the constant trickle of rewards for playing compounds with solid core gameplay to keep players coming back.

And it shows in the numbers. The trend line for player counts in DRG has simply gone up over time and continues to climb (with the occasional spikes helping to boost the baseline).

DEEP ROCK GALACTIC:

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Darktide is probably following the Vermintide 2 trend (below) where the baseline average numbers are slowly declining overtime. There are bumps backup when big content drops happen, but then it just dips lower again afterwards.

VERMINTIDE 2

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The irony of all of this is that many people will gladly support developers with DLC and MTX when they feel valued and respected as players. I’ve bought a bunch of the cosmetic DLC for DRG just to support the game because I enjoy it and respect the developers.

Granted, I’ve also bought a lot of the DLC and MTXs for Vermintide 2, so I’m part of the problem. But I have to imagine the potential earnings from gradually growing your player base and having a continuously expanding pool of regular players is going to be better for long term financial success, company reputation, and player engagement than designing systems to prey off whales.

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So you see, the issue is that we’ve given somewhere around 1-2 months’ worth of suggestions already, but because nothing of substance has changed since the beta, there’s nothing to iterate upon.
The only thing that changed is the addition of the cash shop which just became another problem, and then the addition of parts of crafting that was not what was requested/suggested/expected, and it became another source of problems.
And then the leaks about the hundred new cosmetics and the booster packs.

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I’ve bought all the DLCs available for DRG because I like the game. I’ve made sure to complete the season pass every time they drop. I am taking care of the weekly Deep Dive thread on the DRG subreddit out of passion and I often chat with their CM Jakob, who is a chill dude.

I’d never do the same for Darktide. The spite for Darktide is making me unwilling to buy anything for V2. I don’t want to support Fatshark when they’re treating the community (and therefore me) as crap.

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