It serves ZERO purpose and worst it doesn’t encourage players to communicate with each other. Also it reduces that ability of players to make changes to their loadouts before the start of a game. Why this part of the game was made different from how VT:2 handled grouping and starts of maps is beyond me. Also if I want to wait around until more people show up rather then starting with bots then that should be my choice. I shouldn’t be forced to load up a map with absolutely useless bots.
2 Likes
It doesn’t fit the design intent.
What exactly is the design intent that overrides player convience? Sometimes asthetics should take a back seat to not inconviencing players with a artificial timer at a pre-loading screen.
Honestly, I don’t get it either. I want to blame GaaS, but I suspect the reality is that it’s due to the underlying design of how mission instances and/or character siloing work. The latter would be a GaaS thing, I guess.
If we could see eachother’s kits and change characters in the lobby, there’d be an opportunity to build around eachother and figure out how we want to approach the run, but we can’t, so we don’t. There’s literally no gameplay advantage to having a separate lobby at all with things being the way they are.
All it does is add more loading times.
Shockingly Fatshark doesn’t seem to learn from their mistakes and success at the design stage. Everything sacrificed to advertise and sell in-game cosmetics.
I honestly don’t think they made these changes for those reasons. The time-limit is there so people don’t stall forever and I think the idea of a time-limit is fine. But I will agree it’s too short.
Edit: Went a bit on a tangent earlier, irrelevant snippets removed.
The framework for it being one big mall for cosmetics that tried to get you to spend as much time as possible on the Mourningstar is still there, and I agree that they ran out of time to polish even that. They are making small steps in backtracking that design, like moving the Armoury closer to Hadron, but to me, the crux of their design intent still shows in why they still haven’t officially put in hotkeys for the Mourningstar in.
Snipped because the post it was addressing got changed significantly.
Similar system, similar item structure, but they made the RNG significantly worse and initially deigned it good enough to lock items behind an immutable timer and capped random loot drops.
Once you hit 300 item power level in Vermintide 2, the range that you got from drops and crafting was only 295-300. In Darktide it was 280-380, now 300-380 which is a negligable difference. That’s an 18-20x difference in variability.
Stat distribution just throws the entire RNG out the window, especially with absolutely no way to influence or adjust it.
Perk/Property distribution is on paper better in Darktide, limiting it to 4 tiers rather than rolling numbers (to 0.1%), but there is still a massive list to roll against and the UI is somehow worse than both of VT2’s UIs. And there is no red equivalent which you can’t just take out of the equation, since it was a massive QoL upgrade for item rolling.
Blessings/Traits took a massive hit here. Most traits having 4 tiers bloats the blessing pool, then add blessings that are rarer due to them only being found in T3 or T4. While consecrating to orange at level 30 does seem to take T1s out of the pool, you can still roll T2 blessings which is a kick to the face for the resources spent to get it to that consecration level.
The structure is similar but it’s so much more user hostile with how all the numbers are stacked against you. And the locks. They are the most obnoxious change.
Fatshark marketing claimed, pre-release, that Darktide is going to address players feedback regarding the grind and RNG in VT2 itemisation / “crafting” systems. If Darktide is an improvement over VT2 systems, I’m the king of England.
3 Likes
It is an improvement and no, you’re not. But I got a bridge to sell you.
1 Like
And nobody else should be forced to needlessly wait because you want to waste everyone‘s time.
Btw if the lobby does not fill up before the timer ends, you can still just quit the lobby if you do not want to play with a bot for a minute.
Recently I’ve gone into that lobby (which I can’t switch my operative out either, but that’s a separate rant) and when looking at my feats / gear, it get stuck and can’t hit “ready” – to me, that timer is a failsafe for when the game itself shits the bed and you can’t click the go button.
It isn’t what? OP’s complaint is a result of a design choice. Specifically, the separation of the hub and the pre-mission lobby.
As for the gear system, nobody cares that it’s RNG, really. RNG has been a staple of RPG gear systems since forever. I remember first seeing it in NetHack. What people moan about is how tiny the chances are on that RNG and the amount of grinding it takes to purchase those chances. It’s WAY worse than V2. Absurd grinds are a pretty common GaaS MTX feature.
Read who and what I quoted.
Everything sacrificed to advertise and sell in-game cosmetics.
To which I replied that it honestly isn’t. My entire response is in that context.
You quoted Jan, who quoted me. It wasn’t clear what statement you were responding to.
In any case, I do agree with their statement that a whole lot of the bad is because of GaaS, including the gear system.
1 Like
The timer is far too short given the waiting period and players can get dumped in literal seconds before it goes off, leaving them stuck in a conflicting loadout. Not to mention the whole bot thing because the lobby didn’t fill up. With how borked the matchmaking is despite an active playerbase this problem gets pretty bad.
The timer should only start ticking down once the lobby is full. This prevents players from taking too long to ready up but gives ample time to discuss brief strategy and note your other players’ loadouts and adjust accordingly. A minute is fine in THAT case. It feels like the way it currently works was designed with instant full party matchmaking in mind rather than any sort of realistic situation.
1 Like
My response is to the person I quoted and their statement of “Everything was sacrificed to advertise and sell in-game cosmetics” and I left them quoting you in there so the full context can be seen.
Why I went on this item comparison tangent I don’t know. Probably because it’s often brought up in combination so I made a logical leap. Awkward but eh.
But yes, it was a deliberate design choice. Not saying it isn’t.
Edit: Fixed my earlier post. Sorry for the confusion.
1 Like
I’ve literally never seen that happen, here or in V2.
1 Like
By the by, I agree that the timer is way too short. I mean, I managed to change my full loadout before and I’ve seen other people do it. But it’s rare because you have to change so much and go to menu from menu unless you have the loadouts finished already.
Doesn’t help of course that it doesn’t show you when somebody else changes their loadout currently. A notification for that would be great, too.
Don’t know if it’s a regional thing or just you not hanging around in high difficulty often, even with the short timer I see Damnation players ask for or note what others are using and change accordingly at least once every other play session. People will agree on who gets to have flamer/purgatus duty or swap off of Plasma if there isn’t a proper gunner counter for example. It only occurs when the team actually has the opportunity to do so though, so only when the team populates in immediately rather than at the sub-20 second mark.