Havoc

Huge unmitigated fail . i cant even fathom thinking this is a good idea.

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Go on…

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Issues:

  • Having different modifiers per player, seems completely pointless. It serves no purpose, but causes unnecessary problems: it makes regular matchmaking impossible and creates an arbitrary need for premades/party finder.
  • Dependency on premades/party finder will very likely make the gamemode less popular than it would be otherwise.
  • System might not encourage players to keep playing it for anything outside of difficulty. People might not even bother to play the 1 mission per week that they need in order to prevent rank decay. (this could also be a good thing, because it might increase the ratio of decently skilled players who are there for the difficulty, not for the ressource rewards)
  • “Rank hopping” is encouraged and removes the entire progression as soon as people start hosting diff ~40 lobbies (Immediately join hosted diff 40 missions until you get carried through one. You will have the same progress as someone who progressed through all 40 missions one by one.).
  • Due to the ability to join lobbies of any mission difficulty, there is no built in learning curve and gatekeeping. This will result in low skilled players infesting high diff lobbies, unless players gatekeep their lobbies with “proof of skill” via penance cosmetics. Low rank players have nothing to lose anyway and they will drag down everyone else.
  • If failing 3 times in a row reduces the player’s rank by 1, people would be encouraged to quit out of missions, unless quitting in any way is also counted as failing.
  • If quitting out is counted as failing, those who are trying to progress properly without taking shortcuts, would be punished every time they match with bad players who are trying to jump up to high ranks immediately. It would be reasonable to expect players to be very picky, when it comes to choosing teammates to start the mission with.

Possible solution:

  • 5 mission difficulties (all damnation+) with a few options each
  • 50 ranks (3 “stars” each)
  • no individual modifiers per player
  • regular mm playlist with 2-3 fast rotating options per difficulty
  • party finder is also available
  • players must climb ranks in oder to access higher difficulties
  • successful missions grant stars, while fails lose you stars
  • playing above rank is only possible in private lobbies (+3/-1 stars for win/loss)

Ranks 0-9:

  • access is limited to damnation+1: +3 stars on win, -1 star on loss

Ranks 10-19:

  • gain access to damn+2: +3 stars on win, -1 star on loss
  • when playing damn+1: +1 star on win, -1 star on loss

Ranks 20-29:

  • gain access to damn+3: +3 stars on win, -1 star on loss
  • when playing damn+2: +1 star on win, -1 star on loss
  • when playing any diff below: no stars on win, -2 stars on loss

Ranks 30-39

  • gain access to damn+4: +3 stars on win, -1 star on loss
  • when playing damn+3: +1 star on win, -1 star on loss
  • when playing any diff below: no stars on win, -2 stars on loss

Rank 40-50

  • gain access to damn+5: +3 stars on win, -1 star on loss
  • when playing damn+4: +1 star on win, -1 star on loss
  • when playing any diff below: no stars on win, -2 stars on loss

(alternatively: 10 difficulties instead of 5, in which case the difficulties would be unlocked every 5 ranks, not every 10)

9 Likes

Astute observations. You should be on the Design Team.

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I think we should probably wait at least until the Devblog, if not until the mode itself is available, before we start creating solutions for such specific problems we don’t even know are real.

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the game is finally done with reworking systems (i hope) our first majour content in forever and what do we get?

Do they go for something evergreen and gameplay transformative, like the chaos wastes? no we limit it to only those that are currently playing Auric damnation, so we are catering for what? 8%? to the best of my knowledge they havent released darktide figures but we know in V2 8% played cata.

but its for people that want to go past that and you have to use a pre made group.

if you “host” you risk your key and your rank , how keen will you be to bring people on low ranks?
if you join a low host theres no gain so whose going to join a lower host?

lost opportunity of exploring other ways of bringing in higher difficulties. this enshrines modifiers and conditions and imo they havent been that popular outside HISG and…the other one people like.

oo f it i cba with this i am beyond disappoint.
weaves 2.0

3 Likes

that’s right, only a rough outline has been explained so far, so I’m eager to know more details about this game mode ASAP. The update is likely coming in December, so we need to provide feedback before it’s too late (before the shark escapes from the tank), allowing time for improvements

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I don’t want to lay into Havoc before it’s even finished being cooked up but honestly the more I think about it the less I like it.

Probably letting us select modifiers, even mixing more or extra potent ones than Maelstrom does would satisfy more people more and split the player base less.

Then just keeping slowly churning out more maps and modifiers for us to mix and match with and I think everyone would be pretty happy. It could be like what Deeds from VT2 should have been.

I’m struggling to see what advantage Havoc would have over this. Technically a sort of “progression” mostly by way of bragging rights but I don’t imagine that’ll be super appealing to most.

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Havoc?

1 Like

This has described my thoughts on it over the day.

When I finally got lunch break and throughly re read it the hype kind of died to be replaced by,

“That’s ok. I guess. I just want to play Monstrous Moebian on a map I want if that’s ok.”

5 Likes

Honestly I just wanted more actual content and them to remember the existence of the commissary

To offer my own thoughts related to loss of progress, I found 2 solutions I found reasonable.

  1. Checkpoints to lock decay.
  2. GW2 Fractals.
  3. WoW Mythic keys.

So, let’s expound on this.

Checkpoints

Explationation: A Checkpoint system would allow you to save progress at certain breakpoints. These can be every 5 levels, every 10 levels, even every 4 levels. Potentially not locking at 40 specifically. This would simply prevent decaying below a specific checkpoint. It’s very basic, very boring.

Pros: A checkpoint system means we can never truly decay past a certain point, even on season reset.

Cons: Checkpoint systems are stale and encourage just sticking in the highest difficulty anyways, no real flavor, barely a reward to push. You still have the decay on repeat failures.

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Guild Wars 2 Fractals

Explanation: You have to unlock everything, but it’s only required once. The levels can be 1-100, broken up into 4 tiers (simply tiers 1-4,) which happen at even levels. While it’s a longer initial setup time depending on how voluminous the missions are, once set up, it’s permanent. If a tier is 25 missions long, all 4 tiers have identical mission sets, but not identical difficulty. Weekly missions can target specific missions, but not specific tiers.

Because each tier has identical missions, if you clear a mission of a higher tier, it auto-completes all identical daily/weekly missions in lower tiers. That is, if you clear the tier 4 mission number 80, it also clears 55, 30, and 5 simultaneously for the purposes of daily/weekly objectives.

Finally, every player has the exact same mission roster. No bespoke missions, no independent grinding. This intentionally draws people together instead of isolating them. Likewise, because daily/weekly bonuses target specific missions, you can still shake things up on a weekly or seasonal basis.

Pros: The upsides are many and numerous. You only grind once. Difficulty is broken into specific tiers, not the number of the mission itself. The system inherently has people want to do the same missions, so quickmatch is just fine in such a system. And, because failure is only punished by failing, there is no inherent toxicity beyond the act of failing and bad player builds besides.

Likewise, with daily and weekly mission targets, the devs can intentionally target certain missions, while still being respectful to players’ time.

Cons: The downside of such a system is that players have to grind a ton of missions to set it up. This could be 40, this could be 100. If Fatshark is sadistic enough, it could be 1000. The granularity doesn’t matter, but it is a grind.

Furthermore, if progression is character based, and not account based, the grind gets exponentially multiplied, which is not good for the health of the game.

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World of Warcraft Mythic+:

Explanation: This one’s harder to explain since I’m not 100% familiar with it, but the basic gist is you get a keystone, the keystone has a level and assigned dungeon (for DT purposes, a specific mission, even if that’s a bit stale.) When you use your key, you go into said dungeon at a specific level. Successful completion of that dungeon nets you a keystone of a higher level, essentially difficulty. You keep pushing up that dungeon as much as you can within certain limits. Likewise, this resets every week, at 1 level lower than the last level you successfully completed (might be wrong on this.)

Furthermore, anyone can join anyone elses ‘mythic’ and, at the end of a mission, gain that exact keystone reward, helping to drive people together instead of apart.

For Darktide purposes, it can be the random mission/modifier system the devs want with increasing difficulty.

Pros: As with GW2 fractals, the advantage is that keys don’t quite reset the same way as a decay from not playing. Or maybe it does, I’m not an expert. Regardless, the punishment for failure is you have to wait a week before resetting but you get rewards based on the highest level attained.

Cons: Unlike Fractals or even a weekly reset, this is a once a day/week/whatever reset system before getting to do it again, essentially making it a limited grind system, which is less beneficial overall if the goal is maximum playtime and retention. But it obviously works on the scale of an MMO, so with some tweaking it should work for DT anyways.

–

Rewards:

Unrelated to which or how it’s handled, 1-time cosmetics and random missions is not especially fun. This would be the perfect way to introduce red weapons. Perfect weapons. Weapons with 100% in all 5 stats. The reward for doing this system should be a big increase over standard missions, and a new crafting material to make red weapons.

Basically, Fatshark needs to push players into this game mode, and the seasonal thing they have right now will be a boring snoozefest that drives players apart. Please reconsider this and make a system that encourages players playing together.

This phrasing immediately made me think of this meme format lmao:

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Peak

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To quote a small man

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I also think it’s going to suck. It’s a bit tone deaf after the community has repeatedly been asking for balance changes and being able to select maps+modifiers for a challenge.
This is just more of the RNG bollshit everyone has been screaming about since launch. Fatshark is repeatedly headbutting that brick wall expecting a different result.

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It’s more like weaves than deeds. On that note, why they decided to lean into vt2’s most disliked game mode for darktide’s first different mode and not something like their most liked mode, chaos wastes, is beyond me.

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How so?
How does me having -20% toughness generation and someone else having +5% health damage taken make matchmaking harder?

I really don’t get people complaining before we even see what’s going on (Fatshark has never been that good at communicating their intent), and I assume that this system is a lot easier to implement than a chaos wastes game mode.

Does it adress any of my pet peeves? Naw. But it doesn’t harm me, either.

I can’t speak to this because it hasn’t been implemented yet, but I don’t want to see a game mode that only adds to the stress.
But I’m glad there are more difficult missions.

it says in the dev blog the reason they got party finder out was because you will not be able to quickplay Havoc

and ill be honest that right there is enough for me to know i will not go near this

2 Likes