There are, as of right now, six different player pools for ‘quickplay’.
Regular missions
Auric missions
Regular maelstrom
Auric Maelstrom
The Orthus Offensive
Havoc
What is the purpose of these?
Orthus? Well we thought it would be the start of a fixed mission campaign map in order to develop content, instead it’s completely neglected, and every subsequent ‘campaign’ mission has been released on the regular board.
Auric and maelstroms were supposed to be the sweatswamp and instead have been subject to player power-creep until they’re just regular missions with shiny penances.
Havoc served only to divide the player-base and add harder stuff with cycled-in modifiers, gatekeeping content.
This shouldn’t be hard. You want regular quickplay, you want a campaign, and you want your sweatlord experience. Three pools for QP loading.
Seriously, just simplify it down.
Regular quickplay works well enough. It’s random, sure, but whatever. Merge Maelstrom’s QP pool into it. Do the same with Auric stuff.
Take all the missions developed with continuity in mind (so all the Blighted Stimm bits, plus Karnak Twins, the Moebian Steel one, and the variant of HL-17-36 Smelter Complex that has everyone fixing the smelter for production of said steel) and add them to a revamped version of ‘Zola’s Special Mission’ that has them all in order. Leave them on QP if you want but let everyone play a campaign. I’d prefer if every mission was in the campaign but I’ll take just the ones that require an actual order.
Havoc should never have been created to begin with and I have no suggestions for salvaging it. It is an unmitigated failure of a gamemode and should never have been allowed to be made when Auric existed. As it stands it’s there solely to encourage weekly logins and to be annoying about meta abuse. I would like y’all to completely tear it down and start over but we both know that’s not happening.
All anyone ever wanted was to be able to pick the map and stack the modifiers you want. If you want to be fancy give it the option to be quickplayable.
This was often met with critque that it’d split the playerbase. Funny enough in their infinte wisdom FS managed to fracture the playerbase even harder.
I like the density, I like the stronger enemies, and I enjoy the weird bullsht that happens. But being forced to endure map RNG or hunt for people that have the map I want to play makes me want to kill myself. Not to mention the party finder.
Every single aspect of FS current day design philosophy makes me want to stop playing. The only reason I come back is the gameplay, in spite of their terrible choices.
I brought this up forever ago, honestly there needs to be a “throw my fates to the winds” quick play button to ensure players are even getting into games with other players.
Please add this as a grudge. It is a multiplicative issue that will get worse the more game modes they add.
A so-called “sweatlord experience” was not even something I desired.
My hope was that Fatshark would continue to work at Auric Maelstrom by introducing fun modifiers like Moebian-21 and Cranial to that game mode.
After that, I hoped that Fatshark would concentrate on Chaos Wastes rather than Weaves 2.0 or whatever garbage Havoc is meant to be.
I do not know if I fit into the sweatlord camp, but I certainly did not want anything like Havoc, and I only played Havoc to finish all the penances and cosmetics (I still have to open eight more weekly chests for the final penance, blergh…).
The other thing about this is that the Havoc Party Finder is clearly the lobby broswer from VT2, but, they took out the ability to see all active parties.
So what they did was give us the ability to browse only the parties they chose. The ones on the Mourningstar.
I’ve wanted for ages the ability to jump in and help groups that are clearly partway through a map and a man down. As it stands, since there are TWO quickplay queues (divided into 8 difficulties), and Orthus and Havoc aren’t included in EITHER queue, I have no way of finding those groups in trouble.
I think Auric shouldn’t really be considered a different mode (unless we don’t count difficulties as well). They are basically just meant to be Diff 4+ and Diff5+.
Which is a way to increase the mission pool for where the players is ‘meant’ to be when at level 30, without drowning the board for players that aren’t there yet.
Maelstorm, did start a trend compared to the 2 previous ones. Basically it’s allowing them to do more ‘unbalanced’ modifiers without having to really nerf it to the level of what it would have to be to be part of the normal missions.
RN we only have the 1, but Assignment to me sound more as ways for FS to do tech demo of mechanics they’ve created (Death Head Grenades; Double Lords; map specific Tox Gaz).
In this consideration, they’ve had to try to balance it (but still keeping it 'harder), but also made the secrete mode to do a less balanced mode
Same realistion as with Weaves and Cata back in 2019 (iirc), they see that a dedicated part of the community play only in Auric maelstorm, and that they’re hungry, so having Havoc as a less balanced mode is a way to sate those peoples.
And now we will have Mortis, I think the only possible thing to look at rn is to compare how they talked about Havoc at its reveal and how they are doing Mortis:
Here we can see 3 differences from the get go:
Havoc mention it being tests for the most seasoned part of the community, while Mortis doesn’t (Positive, content that is made for everyone)
Mention of cosmetic rewards for Havoc, nothing of the sort for Mortis, only the secret info (Honestly would consider it a negative, earnable cosmetic are king)
Mention of repeatability instead of one and done (Positive)
Going forward there are multiple ways to treat the different modes, and there are some preferences by the community that sadly will most likely never be answered (Being able to select/customise your mission)
Normal mission coherence and separation: Cataclysm
Introduce 1 or 2 difficulty higher than Damnation, and have the top 3 difficulties become closer to what Auric currently is (So losing Auric Heresy, and Normal Damnation)
Have Maelstorm for Heresy (normal), Damnation (‘Auric’), and each higher difficulty
→ This is to the process on making those a single ‘mode’, by treating them simply as higher difficulties instead
Assignment: The continuance
Not treating them as story, as all the new updates try to advance the story, or at least open new hook lines (Moebian True Steel, the failed ritual…)
Using them Tech Demo, or raid (bad idea: maybe having speedrunning rankings, with optional additional difficulties adding to those rankings)
→ There are quite a few plot hooks where we have either specific enemies (The Mysterious voice, Rinda, Biron…) or even have strangers that wouldn’t make sense as being killed and illico presto replaced by their brother/sisters (The possible Eldar Ranger, Magos Biologis)
I do see that Assignment were meant to work with the view that FS had, which sadly did not quite go as well as hoped. Where normal missions are supposed to happen multiple times (Which does not work, as many don’t make sense if they happen multiple times, Dark Communion, Mercantile, Warren, Archivum, Gloriana…).
Operation: Deleted
Rolling steel, part of normal missions, but reworked into a 2 stage mission, to approach the time length of the other mission, here with us first having a short mission disabling the Skyfire, then boarding the Valk to drop on the train
Havoc:
Willing to wait to see how they’re doing stuff.
But, use it to introduce new modifier that then get used after their reception to the normal missions
Chaos Waste Darktide:
Do not make us use the party finder for that one. I swear to the Dark god I see that happening already.
Honestly would be a stellar idea toward the “unlock secret information on some characters present on the Mourningstar” idea
I honestly also think a difficulty level should be scrapped for the good of the game too. There are too many.
Vermintide 2 had a game browser, where you could filter what game you wanted to join in lieu of quick play, maybe darktide needs the same if they are going to continue down this route.