I edited this post since it addressed a broader issue than just Rotten Armour…
Just a note to FS regarding how the entire community wants this terrible thing removed, but a bigger, demotion making annoyance is…
You haven’t fixed your bugs! So rotten armour isn’t just rotten armour… it’s:
Ice skating crusher armies spawning out of thin air.
Crusher armies stuck in walls beyond shots but capable of god tier reach across the map.
Crusher homing missiles skirting round walls.
All crushers have slippers on- game cannot load the audio of stupidly broken spawned crusher army.
Ass spawn crushers mid swing animation.
Pox bursters stuck mid air with no ticking, just THERE… for a bit… then exploding in random directions, even through walls.
Trapper latency issues still.
Mauler armies and crushers can seemingly skate up and down walls as long as they’re in their overhead animation- up or down sections they’d normally have to engage a “climbing” animation, but just spidermanning up and down to homing beacon their target.
Gunners shooting through the WALLS! And obstacles! Again- if our bullets can’t penetrate it, nor should the enemies’.
Please remove demotion system AND fix the broken things.
The bugs are the biggest reason the demotion system is just entirely anti-fun. It’d be one thing if you had three legit chances to clear a level before you get demoted, but in those three runs, any of a number of things can happen to just rob you of a chance. In every run I play, it usually goes like this:
First run; someone or someone’s are still warming up/getting used to this current set of conditions, we wipe.
Okay, not a big deal, we can try again. This time, we’re on point, going fine, and then some kind of buggy nonsense kills someone. The rest try valiantly, perhaps even clutch and rez the whole team, but if the game spawns twins or something, then that just isn’t possible because you can’t get space on the melee twin and the plasma twin can always interrupt your rezzes if he has LoS. Perhaps we even recover and THEN another bug happens. Perhaps some people crash at a critical moment, and in the time they’re gone things spiral out of control.
And now we’re all annoyed, feeling robbed, and try one more time - and the server crashes, kicking all of us and taking that last chance.
Demotion is terrible and toxic regardless of bugs. How it should work is: demotion only happens once per week on demotion weekly rewards reset.
If you have not completed a mission higher or equal to existing rank within the week then you get demoted by a single rank at that weekly reward reset. You have infinite goes within the week.
This would allow the mode to open up a bit to experimenting (and fun?!) but still gives that nugget of retention that FS insist on.
Well, we called it as soon as the patch dropped. I have no idea how some of those decisions get signed off by the senior players in the game design team at Fatshark.
Rotten Armour was an exercise in tedium before the “fix”, and a symptom of Fatshark’s lack of courage to nerf the broken weapon and class build outliers. Now it’s a monument to that.
This post is absolutely spot on to the current situation and user experience with Havoc - it’s not the Rotten armour mod on its own it’s the system stability plus the demotion system that combine to make it sometimes miserable. Most people PUG Havoc and all teams take a bit of time to gel and find a playstyle that works particularly with a set of mods that punish mistakes very quickly. I’m someone that PUG’d my way to Havoc 40 in the first couple of seasons - the good/rewarding experience on a run vs bad is now worse and it’s the demotion system that’s largely driving that. Give teams a chance to try and improve and learn how to tackle the mods and don’t punish those who try so much .
Honestly I’d take out ‘rotten armor’, swap in ‘havoc’ and then get mald af again we get this quarantine of garbage, demotion and constant crashing over a legit 6th difficulty you could just power up Darktide and play without any hurdles or waiting 20+ minutes for one game.
Yeah, that effect is annoying as heck, i do not understand why they would even add it, tanks performance, adds more visual clutter, and i feel like im being flashbanged constantly.
A massive disconnect between their “art style” design team and expectations of those parts of the player base which cares about performance, clarity of picture and / or competitive gameplay.
That’s the reason why so many “I want to see, Fatshark” mods exist.
