That’s how they keep you playing. If you’re missing that last 1% health to finish your build, you might leave satisfied and not come back.
It sounds silly, but people will really crack open a laptop at midnight to grab some reward, or log into a farming app every fifteen minutes.
The truth is, that 1% toughness or 1% health on your trinkets means practically nothing. They know that, but they also know plenty of players will sink another thousand hours chasing it.
I say, just don’t think about it. Penances asking for ridiculous grindy feats? Forget it. If it happens, it happens, if not whatever.
The bigger problem is that it’s not just Fatshark. So many games are built to waste your time on meaningless crap. You don’t actually have as much time as you think, and you’ll only finish so many things in your life. When I’m on my deathbed, my gaming achievements won’t mean diddly squat. The FOMO cash shop, fake scarcity fake currency; it’s a dead giveaway these people don’t care about you or your experience, they use you. Someone at Fatshark is absolutely leaning on dark patterns to keep players chasing something they’ll never quite finish without thousands of hours.
Your time, data, and attention are a currency. I don’t want to spend mine chasing a carrot dangling on a stick.
be thankful curios are the only big RNG thing in this game at this point
idk if you were playing a few years back but, weapon level, stat distribution, then 2 of your weapon perks/blessings were essentially locked in place.
so you had to A get a weapon with a decently high level B get that weapon with a decent stat distribution C level that weapon up to unlock perks/ blessings and HOPE to god that you got 2 perks and or blessings that you liked/ were high level
curious were similar, you could get a 17% toughness curio and then get stuck with some bad perks (but you could at least re role 2 of them)
these days, making a god tier weapon is easy
buy white weapons, get the stat distribution you want (which is QUITE easy) level it up, put whatever perks and blessings you want on it, and there you go, god tier weapon, same for curios everything can be swapped now
to there credit fat shark removed ALL of that BS RNG stuff about a year ago i think it was.
personally i have every single character in the game max ranked, full god tier builds, i still come back and play this game not because i want the 17% toughness or 21% health, but because this is a damn fun game, especially with friends
I’ve played on and off since launch and watched the crafting system change over time. Even with improvements, when a game keeps unnecessary grind in place, I tend to lose interest in any part of the game that has that grind.
Lecturing players they should be grateful it isn’t worse misses the real issue: many games are intentionally built around psychology that keeps people playing rather than making the experience enjoyable.
To the extent that games are made to use FOMO, Variable-ratio rewards (slot-machine logic). Artificial scarcity + sunk-cost pressure. RNG taps into the same reinforcement schedule casinos use. When the reward might drop on the next run, your brain releases dopamine in anticipation. That “maybe this time” keeps people repeating the action far longer than a guaranteed reward would. Slow grinds make progress feel rare. When progress feels rare, it feels valuable, even if the reward itself is trivial. Once players have sunk time into the chase, they feel pressure to finish it; even if they’re no longer enjoying it.
Together they create a loop where you keep chasing the last bit of completion because your brain overweights the anticipation and the investment, not the actual payoff.
I plan on going full peter ustinov with a flashy slogan and a list of my best k/ds
on top of it a nice video wall with endless replays and moderate volume spanning the whole graveyard with “excellent” “humiliation” “mo-mo-monster kill”
My gaming achievements will be engraved into my headstone, and my children will tell their children about their grandfather’s achievements/Darktide played hours!
If that’s what you find fun and that’s what you want to focus on, fair enough. For me, I want my time and whatever legacy I leave to be friends and family. I’ve found no real satisfaction or meaning in games, only in relationships with people. To me games are just a way to enjoy my free time while I have such time.
The part I’m pushing back on is how easily systems like these target players who tie their satisfaction to a grind; RNG, FOMO, and other psychologically manipulative ploys to retain players.
The problem is that it’s often at the expense of actual enjoyment. The chase becomes the point, not the experience. And that’s what I think is a problem, not just with this game, but with game design in general.
I’m brown-skinned (obviously), and people have called me all kinds of slurs online because of it.
I was never insulted because it was all part of the game, and I simply gained more ammunition against them when I completely obliterated them in Halo (1).
Screaming at people and being shouted at by people online (especially Dota 1) used to be really fun because it was never done maliciously; it was all about mental warfare, and the bulk of the people I verbally fought with became great friends that I played games with for years.
My IRL friends and I would hit each other’s shoulders as hard as we could to make the other miss combos in KoF: 2001, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, and Double Dragon (Neo Geo - the fighting game).
I think I got curios quickly on my end (already have x3 17% toughness, x1 21% HP and x2 3 stam on Scum) and I’m pretty sure I still wanna play the class
I just check through the Armoury Google extension (currently broken cuz Scum release) once I’m free
It’s a little silly to believe people would stop playing because they maxxed their curios IMO
Even if I don’t get them, it doesn’t matter much to me. I’m telling you, the point of grindy gameplay is player retention. Silly or not, it works on certain people. I never thought there were actually people who unironically would want their gaming achievements on their headstone, yet two of them responded here.
There’s definitely people who stick around because of those retention mechanics. There’s also people who dump all their time and life savings into gambling machines, too. There’s people who like poker for the game itself but would never do that, of course, but both exist.
The Dark Pattern summary Chris Wilson put out is excellent and sums up my feelings on the matter too, even though ironically I think his own game has some of that in it. Chase uniques come to mind.
Unfortunately, if you’re not a legislator making laws, you will never be able to convince a company like Fatshark to make less money for moral reasons. I’m not saying that to clown on you or something, I fully agree this kind of stuff is kind of vile and is keeping a significant part of society in a bad spot. Fatshark may not be the only or worst example of it, but it’s a trend in gaming that as a whole is actually causing an extreme loss and keeps people from functioning in society just like easily accessible drugs would. Sounds dramatic until you see the numbers on gacha games, but you’ll agree with me once you do.
I don’t know the extent Fatshark retains players or makes money this way. I think it’s probably almost none. I’m sure the cash shop makes money by using premium currency to vaguely hid prices and uses FOMO with infrequent updates to the available cosmetics, besides that, I don’t know why they didn’t overhaul curios with the crafting system. It is silly to me.
That, and a couple of penances that are so silly and anti-gameplay that you can’t be annoying other players in quick play with them; or they’ll just almost never happen during normal gameplay unless you go out of your way to get them. I have so many uncompleted achievements in VT2 having put in over 3500 hours into that game, and when I see stupid achievements that don’t reward the normal gameplay loop, it’s disappointing, because it means that part of the game isn’t for me.
It’s just annoying, but that doesn’t bother me as much as penances requiring that I bum around on Discord looking for a private match. I don’t know why I can’t go solo. I think I’ll ignore penances until I find a discord group for Darktide like the ones I have for VT2, because many of those are pointless and don’t reward actual gameplay.
likewise, what “modern gamers” like to forget is that it’s about ingame proficiency, not the “character”
the time alone I spent in quake E1M1 and not getting anywhere remotely close where the current speed run record is, is testament that even doing a thing a million times over can still be “fun” if done right.
every corner, every texture, every sound and background noise “feels just right”, like my second living room.
that’s a fondness shared with darktide right now and its wonderful design and environment.
a “character” shouldn’t need no “progress” or tweaking but be a finished tool from the getgo to purely concentrate on the skills within yourself and how to grow it.
sure, that 1% ain’t doing in the grand scheme of things but it’s like picking up an armor in quake and getting 99%armor value instead of 100.
Ideally yes, but the progression where you unlock talents and rewards is a great way to introduce players to the game with a fully fleshed out story that introduces you to enemy types a bit at a time. I personally enjoy the process of getting Arbites to level 30 and doing his masteries; it’s also a great way to get back into the game if you take a long break. Make a new character and enjoy the story and atmosphere a bit before jumping right into the highest difficulty.
The real game is when the build is completed. After you’ve completed your weapon masteries, and have all your talents, I think that the idea is you get better at playing the game, rather than upgrading a character. That’s when players really learn how to play the game.
I think that Darktide and Vermintide 2 now have gotten rid of most of the grind to get there, but it is just kinda annoying that there’s 1% toughness or 1% health missing, and I just kinda got to ignore it. Eventually, I’ll probably get one from Melk’s random curios. That’s how I got them for Veteran.
This would be so much “easier” to get if Armoury Exchange would work but sadly Hive Scum update broke it and the dev who kept it updated is busy with game mods(?)
No need to login to the game and check every hour. Just have a look at a webpage taking 5seconds, instead of about 5min with logging into the game itself
i said this a few times: old players hate being sent back to school for leveling. but it can be done in 1-2 days now, it’s literally nothing compared to the dark ages when we were at the mercy of RNG, couldn’t craft anything as we wanted, even had separate wallets for each characters, so buying a new grey for 4000 dockets for my vet was impossible, because my ogryn had the money, ffs!
anyway, i like ranting about curios because they’re the last leftover from that awful system (for whatever reason, because fatshark doesn’t explain anything) :
so while one won’t see a difference between a 17% and a 16% toughness curio in a blind test in-game, it’s simply annoying to have some imperfection when you have the resources. and top it off, melk offers my arby 4 curios every day (the only thing where he’s remotely useful) while my ganger gets none!
in the grand scheme of things but it’s like picking up an armor in quake and getting 99%armor value instead of 100.
