Having fun over min maxing - the problem with different palystyles and goals playing a mission

I know a lot of you will disagree with me, but i think the main problem with a sour community is playstyles the game isnt really made for, but then tried to give these players something shallow.
People who wanted progression and min maxing got skinner boxes aka RNG shops, maps, conditions and crafting.
And i think FS knew exactly what they were doing and maybe even expected that kind of backlash, but didnt care that much and got their copies sold in pre-Order, because of impatience of players wanting to play as soon as possible with “progression” hopefully carrying over.
They got their numbers solely selling the game via pre-Order and the “bait” most couldnt resist was to play 2 weeks earlier.
Everyone was ok while leveling and slowely one after another realized, there is no “progression” or “endgame”.
They implemented a RNG hourly Shop, a RNG weeklies shop but nothing that you can call progression or endgame in sense of min-maxing and “working” torwards something following the effort=reward formula.
The more and more i think about it, i see what they really did.
I cant say what they promised, i only knew there is another WH40k Game coming end of the year and i thought it would be a coop Shooter, i didnt even know it would be like Vermintide and got it only after i pre-ordered and played it is a “tides” game.
Like ah Dark"tide", Vermin"tide" that makes sense.
I didnt like Vermintide, it’s players when i tried it were all too much into rushing a level i couldnt keep up with.
I dont have the problem that much in DT, but the playstyle of many players is not for me. I take my time, i can deal with it also in a slower way searching levels, going back and forth even to not miss a box or some resources.
But players are like hush hush, higher, faster, further, i want my perfect 380 weapon with perfect T2 perks and blessings.
I have to say i felt for it too in the first time until i realised how frustrating it is.
Same for Heresy Penances what you can only do with people helping you, with using a premade DC group and voip. But you know what all this spoiled the game for me.
I read players were chacking the shop hourly almost 24/7 via a browser app ujst to find out even this doesnt help much, you will get frustrated and you will burn out on it.
Some were maybe lucky and then realized there is “nothing to do anymore” its the same missions/ levels when done on Damnation.
These are all artificial constructed things for players who want progression and min max and this is their game they have fun with and DT lacks to deliver. They would never had play L4D afaik because this game doesnt even have any form of progression nor tries it to say so.
The only thing is playing missions at highest difficulty and if that is fun, then thats it.
All the stuff besides missions in DT are baits for progression and min max players and to trick them to stay by these skinner box like RNG stuff.

People who just play for the fun in missions may fall for it, but some can get over it and dont care anymore, but play missions for fun with the weapons the have and not even trying hard to get BiS gear.

I’m curious how the community will evolve and if said progression and min max players went further or get some compensation or if the community will only consist of for fun players who second BiS Gear and progression, but play for the fun only.

There is nothing good to be said about promising something (like a fully functional crafting system), then not delivering.

That said, a lot of the sourness stems from other fundamental issues in this game. Not having BiS gear is just the straw that broke the camel’s back in many player’s cases, I suspect. If there wasn’t a slew of issues with the game, not having a fully functional crafting system wouldn’t be as egregious. Or maybe if there was more content, or something to strive for beyond simply accumulating materials in hopes of a fully functional crafting system, people would be less angry.

Most people have realized not having 380 weapons isn’t necessary to success, but a big problem with having a missing crafting system and forcing people to camp the shop (beyond the obvious of it being tedious and anti-fun), is having blessings that fundamentally change the playstyle of the weapon - i.e. brutal momentum, deflection, laceration, power cycler.

You mention having a community that plays for the fun of it, and a community that plays for progression. There’s nothing wrong with either community. Simply having the community that doesn’t care and plays for fun isn’t a good excuse for releasing the game in an unfinished state or completely cutting off communications for a month (now the biggest reason for how sour people are).

I’m glad you like the game enough to defend it. I enjoy it a lot too still, and I will continue to play it regardless it’s many… MANY faults, but I can’t fault people for wanting progression not in the form of an hourly shop.

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I think they legitimately believed the gear system would be a good idea. They’ve stated they were surprised at how many hours people put into Vermintide 2 despite the gear system ultimately capping out fairly early on compared to the number of hours played. Now with Darktide, they created a system where you could continue to get upgrades and sidegrades for a lot longer period of time. I like always having the potential for finding a new weapon I want instead of hurrying up to sit on a few items forever, but it’s obviously rubbed some players the wrong way.

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dont get me wrong i dont defend it, i think that this is the problem for most/ many players that they expected something with progression and to be able to min max with effort= reward and that is ujst not the case.
I feel FS didnt ever want to deliver to that but knew a lot of gamers are like this and wont accept a L4D play for fun only although they have that very good core gameplay that most of the players who still play play for the fun of it and second said progression and min-maxing.

fully agree!
You can check the shop and hope for a better version of what you already have and you can craft/ improve it, but not even fully but even when it is fully implemented, it will still be 50/50 luck/ effort and to have that BiS Wepaon you need both, some luck and put some effort in.
But it will never be like work torwards your BiS gear solely.
And that is what most people dont like.

The core game is awesome, but this is not enough for most people. They need and want progression and working torwards something and they hate if it relys on RNG to some degree, but i dont think FS will or even can come up with something that would really please them other than releasing new story and 2 maps every 2-3 month and increase the levelcap once in a while and have some form of treadmill.
I played Sea of Thieves for 3 years from Alpa to season 2 of their BP and then i quit because i didnt want to work off weeklies, the sandbox was still there, but the players didnt play it like a sandbox anymore but worked off the seasonal BP.
That wasnt much different before, because we got a 3 monthly updates and sometimes events, but they were done in like 2 or 3 playsessions, then anniversary brought stories and more and more they implented these monthly and thenn weeklies to work of stuff that made most players not having a sandbox adventure anymore but worked things off.

The thing with playing “for fun only” is precisely that. There is a finite amount of time that I can dedicate to the game and I would like to have fun if I decide to spend said free time with it. That is, if for example I would want to try out a specific build requiring a particular setup of weapons and their properties, I would like to be able to do that. Both in Vermintide 1 & 2 it is quite easy to do that in a very finite and reasonable amount of time. Assuming you’ve played enough to unlock the weapons that interest you and have a few crafting materials in store, you can just forge the weapon you want, throw the properties that are required for your idea and be on your merry way to smash rats and heretics.

Yet, in Darktide I’m supposed to camp stores with randomly generated content that refreshes once an hour or once a day and hope that the weapons I want are on offer WHEN I am online AND have some reasonable stats. On top of that, we’re almost two months after the game’s release and I still can’t modify an acquired weapon to my requirements because… the crafting system isn’t fully implemented yet. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they went ahead with these ideas, but I do hope they will reconsider and rework them in a way that is a bit more respectful towards their customers. There used to be a time when the customer was always right. These days it feels that the customer’s status has receded to such a degree that they’re not even wrong anymore.

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When instant gratification meets classic videogame grind. Hopefully they figure out a new endgame.

The frustration, for me (playing V2), is they released 2 different “endgame” experiences. Winds of Magic and Chaos Wastes. Both of these introduced different systems, different ways to play the game. I always went back to the “classic” mode after 1-2 runs and only tried it if a new friend was like… Oh what’s this?

Its clear to me now that they haven’t figured out how to implement endgame into this style of fps. That brings us to a question, does this coop horde shooter have a “traditional” endgame? What does Endgame even mean to each individual player? Diabo 2 Loot? Beating it on Cata? Prestige? Cool Cosmetics?

V2 endgame, for me, was completing 100 missions with each of the 12 classes to get the cool skin, border from cata. It was all cosmetic achievements. They threw away V2 endgame, for paid content which a lot of people agree was an ok way to make money.

If you take away the V2 cosmetic endgame you have to insert something into that void. Currently Darktide has a void.

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This would suggest that gear progression isn’t what those people are here for.

I want to be able to make the decision that I want to try a different weapon and have a version of that weapon that’s appropriate for my difficulty in my hands within a few runs, at most. People whine about V2’s system, but V2’s system enabled me to do that. I don’t want to make that decision and then have to play for another 3 weeks before I can act on it.

If I’ve done the hard yards and have mountains of resources to throw at things, I expect to be able to use them to get what I want.

The one saving grace here is that any weapon is usable as long as its base stats aren’t terrible (and sometimes when they are)

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I would say you’re missing a big portion which is theory crafting. Some builds/weapons aren’t viable without certain combinations of blessings. In Vermintide it was easy to get a “blessing” you wanted and max “modifiers” for the weapon. The “perks” you could get but their numerical values wouldn’t be max without a red weapon (likely). But unless you were hitting an important breakthrough didn’t really matter. However, in darktide things like getting deflector on a force sword or ignoring mass on an axe are pretty integral for certain ways of playing. And with some weeklies needing specific maps and secondaries they may not be in rotation on the difficulties I want. Even DRG with random missions has at least a difficulty scale to pick from.

TLDNR: I played 1000 hours on Vermintide 2 when I could pick the maps, difficulty, and weapons I wanted to play with. I won’t play Darktide until it’s roughly the same.

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You’ve mis-identified the problem.

I don’t care about having the absolute best-of-the-best weapon or constantly “progressing”.

I just want to try out different builds/load-outs with different combinations. But I can’t unless RNG decides to let me.

You could completely remove the whole “stats” aspect and have every weapon of the same type in the game have the exact same “numbers” so that “progression” is completely non-existent, and I wouldn’t care. Infact I’d probably like it more. Just let me try out a fun new build without having to check the shop 10+ times a day, 7 days a week.

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I think the devs might’ve misidentified the problem, given that the game’s premier progression system is built around gear, despite they themselves recognising that gear progression isn’t what kept people around.

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I think you just skimmed through the forum, picked a few sentences from each 100+ thread and generalized stuff in the simplest way possible.

While we all have different expectations and factors and there is probably no single reason for the sourness that we feel, there is only one consistent element and that is that the DT as is is consistently trying to send you contradictory messages. It wants you to experiment with everything, it makes you grind for it. It wants you to have a bunch of weapons, it makes you wait for the lottery. It wants you to play in a certain way for special rewards, those rewards are either crap (Melk) or presume insane combinations to achieve (a lot of penances). It wants you to do the special rewards, but it also does not allow you to do it because there are no missions to perform what it asks you to. Approaching it from any playstyle that I can think of - including something as basic as L4D, which many of us played a lot before - and I did that, just so to see whether it was something I was missing, maybe this wasn’t to my taste after all - there is always something that doesn’t fit, that breaks the concept.

Allegedly, FS was surprised that people played more than 100 hours in VT2 (I know people with 5-20 as much in VT and on my Steam friend list there are at least 20 players with more than 2.5k in VT2, the most persistent one is almost at 6.5k) - so I keep wondering why they designed it with all the techniques to protract the engagement and failed at it.

Anyway, you get the prise for the fruitless rehashing of the day, chance to be the initiator of 100+ thread etc. But, again, it’s obvious that a lot of us like something in this game since we stick here in hope that there is a rebound.

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i see this, that is why i didnt want to play VT2, because everyone was only doing what he want to do and missions and difficulties i wanted to do were orphaned.
I think FS did that, because it leads to a small community tweaking their experience and everyone else is left out.
You dont want to speedrun Mission X on high difficulty, sad for you, but the whole community is only doing that.

Just play the mission you want and the difficulty you want and people will still quickplay into your games. That functionality is also present in DT but neutered because of the limited number of maps available at a time. “Not wanting speedrunners” is such a lousy, selfish and myopic excuse to remove the basic agency of anyone else wanting to play a particular map on a particular difficulty.

Everyone has a preferred playstyle. “Not wanting speedrunners” isn’t really about the speedrunner style specifically, it’s about being able to play the game the way you like. Speedrunner types don’t tend to like it when the rest of their team plays at a different pace either.

Coop games are more fun when everyone is on the same page, whatever the strategy.

I’m not sure there’s a good answer for this issue other than to give players more options when setting up matches, though with the dwindling playerbase even that’s probably not a smart move right now.

And removing map/difficulty choice is a wonderful representation of how one can play as they like?

I’m just against completely neutering player choice in general and especially thinking it’s a good idea because it punishes a tiny subset of players, especially for something as fundament as map selection.

As I said here and other places regarding mission selection, quickplay is already a thing (even if the matchmaking is broken and the functionality is neutered by the limited pool available at a time). If you want to play a particular stage at a particular difficulty, you should be able to. With a healthy player-base people will quickplay into your game.

If you don’t want to choose a map, you quickplay; yes, there’s probably more chance you will get a popular map where the players are trying to speedrun, but that’s no reason to effectively punish the entire rest of the playerbase by forcing everyone else into only being able to play a limited number of combinations of maps and difficulties.

DT’s current map selection feels like they cribbed Deep Rock Galactic’s system without understanding why it was implemented the way it was in that game. Or I could be slightly more charitable in that they copied Payday’s crimenet, but then ignored 11 years of iteration and improvement to their system.

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I said more options. Not less. For example, I personally would like to be able to select a ‘grimoire’ option when queueing for runs, quickplay or otherwise, so that I end up with people who do (or don’t) want to collect grims.

Something similar could work for faster or slower playstyles.

The sad reality is that people often don’t want to cooperate, despite playing a coop game. Cooperating sometimes means playing a way other than what you wanted and a lot of people just refuse to do that.

Sometimes things line up and you get a run where everyone wants to play the same way, other times it doesn’t and you don’t. The former is better, in my opinion, and improving peoples’ chances of getting that would be best for everyone, whatever they’re after.

That said, the playerbase is cratering at the moment so more queue options would probably just make sure that teams never fill up.

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It is a bitter combination of lack of content and lack of builds agency.
You can have one or the other, but what kills the game is both twice at the same time.

If there were more content, I wouldn’t immediately need to vary my playstyle to not get bored.

If there were a completely exhaustive crafting system, I could play the same content over and over and have the possibility of having it be different every time, like VT2 does.

In DT, I get bored from lack of content and I can’t do anything about it because everything is garbo rng = I stopped playing.
Even had I been playing all this time I wouldn’t have had an exhaustive arsenal. Getting a specific weapon is more of a chore than hunting for any red in VT2.

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Among other things. Just like the VT2 is missing stuff like “deed” or “challenge” option or flag. (Unless you are playing cata, the presumption is that you are always going for the books - but “no books”, “some books” and “all books” flags would also be OK.)

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I would have been finer with all weapons being available, you can custom them to your heart’s content, you unlock traits and perks by playing the game so that everyone pretty much has the same kind of weapons all of the time, and you being allowed to customize your guns and cutlery freely. Having an end game that gives you cosmetics or other none game affecting items. Having stats on items is just annoying, letting the weapons have a small talent tree on their own would be much better. Or not a talent tree but having different sights, stocks, barrels, and so on.

The focus should be the coop experience, not the upgrading items with an RNG system experience. Having the items already ready for upgrades and letting you pick how YOU want your loadout to be is just a better experience, like Payday 2 where the base item has a fixed stat and the add-ons determine how the items work and feel.