People forget that a large majority of any game’s population is going to be the more casual players who can’t handle the highest level of play. Grinding Gear Games has stated that a lot of the player population for Path of Exile stays in the campaign, which may as well be an annoyingly long unskippable tutorial for those who want to get into the more varied and interesting endgame content.
The most vocal players tend to be the top level players, because they’re going to have the most experience, and are also likely dedicated enough to the game that they WANT to see it improve further.
The same holds true for Darktide. Many opinions I see here, including my own, come from hundreds of hours of experience in the game, mastering the ins and outs. The reason leveling a new character is so damn annoying is because there are, in fact, noobs playing those lower difficulties. Some DRG friends of mine have openly admitted that, even after those hundreds of hours, they prefer the lower difficluties, because they are casuals.
Developing a game is not just about making it always competitively viable, or only listening to the top players, but also making sure that it’s fun to play casually as well. If there’s one dominant degenerate strategy that always wins, people are always going to pick that, and though it might be balanced and fun at high levels of play, it’s going to get boring real fast for people who don’t want to master it.
This is part of the reason why arena shooters like Quake 3 died, is because mastery of the game rewards memorizing levels on top of mechanical skill and performing bugs-turned-features, and many players new to the genre are gonna get ROFLstomped by grognards who’ve been playing since 2003.
