Karking damn it. I looked over my data and I’ve completed 70 heresy missions in the past 2 weeks alone (data collection was over a month long). Even giving Plasteel collection a generous reduction to an average of 100 per run I should’ve had 7K Plasteel split amongst my 3 characters. Why TF are 2 of them in the low hundreds after un-noteworthy Hadron rolls?
Now I’m a little more frustrated. I never actually kept track of the rewards. This blows.
Edit: 70 was just the Heresy runs, and just the past 2 weeks. I’ve been saving most mats for the possibility of having the completed upgrade system. I have so many more runs completed. And not to account for the fact that incomplete runs also partially collected Plasteel/Diamantine. Ouch… Just… Ouch…
But it does also have progression, and it’s not “shill speak” to point out that giving everyone perfect weapons instantly completely invalidates the progression part of the game.
Because that chart is misleading. Not every single match is going to have the max in it, it’s completely possible to have horrendous spawn rates of plasteel (or bonus points, having plasteel in spots that can’t be picked up) even if you do check everywhere. Enclavum Baross is notoriously stingy with its resource spawn rates.
As I said above, you do realize that not every single match is going to spawn that max, right? Even if you pick up literally every single plasteel piece and get lucky enough that you got the absolute max possible, that’s still not even enough to upgrade a single blue. More realistically you’re going to be getting between 100-200/match. That’s assuming 0 run failures as well. When I’ve had damnation matches run up to an hour before because of having to drag people’s carcasses slowly across the finish line that’s not really an acceptable rate. (I think my longest was ~an hour and seven minutes or something? Thank you bugged Excise Vault, very cool.)
Oh wow, thanks dude.
So, that’s why I have a load of Diamantine and no Plasteel. And it’s really wierd that ratio of Diamantine and Plasteel come closer to 1 as we get to Damnation
Well I’m all for FS using their internal data on Mission (A) success rates and (B) completion times to tweak the amount of resources in a mission. People should be rewarded for challenging themselves even accounting for the success rate generally dropping (although to some degree success rate is self-selected, as players will generally opt into whatever difficulty where they feel the win rate is acceptable, so I think more attention should be paid to time than success rate).
Wasn’t aware of the randomization to resources. Where have people tested that? Seems like it’d be very easy to make mistakes while testing (given it requires someone has 100% map knowledge of every potential spawn location, which I’m sure the majority of players don’t have). But I could totally believe that there’s variation, so I’m not saying I think it’s not true, just curious where the data is from.
The actual scripts of the game and… playing the game. Those items are all part of a distribution pool across the map, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get all of them every run. Otherwise you’d have runs with 5 medpacks and 5 ammo crates while drowning in ammo in general, etc.
Everything has a value that detracts from the overall loot pool, including resources. It’s possible I’m missing something but as far as I can tell that’s how it works, based on both the actual script and just from experience in the game. (Even prior to digging into the script this was always how I figured it worked, it just seemed to verify it)
Again: The numbers you listed are the absolute max possible. Between conflicting spawns, different loot values, maps with lower potential spawns in general (The aforementioned Enclavum Baross) getting 285 is nowhere near the norm.
I’m saying that it wasn’t the itemisation that people kept playing. There was a reachable end to V2’s itemisation, but the people who kept on playing kept on playing despite there being an end.
In DT’s case, its itemisation/progression is frustrating enough to drive people away despite the solid core gameplay.
DT’s itemisation is horrible partially because it was designed to be engaged for the entirety of however many hundreds of hours they were hoping people would play and they try to achieve that by:
Hard timegating item acquisition and removing the RNG mitigation associated with it (item crafting)
Decoupling itemisation from gameplay by having core gameplay not affect the quality or quantity of items
Having arbitary restrictions that force you to choose between bad choices (refine perk lock)
An incomplete crafting system (blessings)
A frustratingly low resource acquisition rate (or high crafting cost)
Siloing character currencies, material and gear.
V2’s system wasn’t great, as it still had a good chunk of RNG and some bad UX design, but you could get at least one character kitted out in about 100 hours and be able to share your crafting materials/currency and even drops with your other characters.
With DT’s system having no reachable end in sight, nothing to actually progress or build or aim for because of the RNG, a remarkable lack of player agency with itemisation and arbitrary restrictions that seem to have no purpose other than to extend engagement time with systems that feel bad to interact with, is it a wonder that DT is criticised for having bad itemisation/item progression systems? Pure RNG is not progression, it’s waiting until the right numbers come up.
Progression Systems are addiction mechanisms of videogames. The worst of them are rng based and not even performance related.
Good, fun games dont really need them, they get played because they are foremost fun.
That is the only “reward” a game needs to have.
That is the main cause we should “play” a game.
But the reality is many gamers compensate something or confuse playing games with serious sports, performing and working things off, having a meritocracy approach.
Sure this can be fun too, but it often leads to bad habits regarding playing a game or gaming a system.
Right, but Darktide has somewhat better gameplay than Vermintide 2 (only somewhat because while it added new interesting layers, it’s also still a little buggy).
So then if someone seriously believed items weren’t why V2 was worth playing, they’d believe DT was worth playing.
So clearly you don’t actually believe the argument you’re making, because you’re very fixated on “DT’s itemisation is horrible”, and that’s a reason (perhaps the biggest reason) you think DT isn’t doing well.
What do you mean by this? Do you have maxed out items across every character? If not, there’s certainly progression to be had. You can criticize the “inputs” to the system being RNG based and several of the steps being very RNG based too, but you can’t criticize that there’s “nothing to actually progress”.
Just be more precise in your criticism and actually say what you mean.
It doesn’t have much outside progression. Gameplay actually is more janky than vermintide thanks to bad netcode(in vermintide you could hit something and its reaction and damage was delayed but generally never absent; in darktide server decides you didn’t actually hit anything and thus that damage is never applied - which leads to all the complaints about “ghost hits”)
Progression and crafting is clearly undercooked and thus wasn’t the priority in first place.
Therefore they’re relatively minor parts of the game in developers’ eyes(no matter what pr piece they spew out) and not an issue if players are given godrolls easily.
When you have the appearance of a lootershooter but don’t give players enough loot(because it’s all timegated) then you got a bad game design.
I believe V2 truly shines in its core gameplay when you had all the weapons and accessories built up, you could do whatever build you wanted, you could experiment with weapons, all from a foundational base of maxed out items where you knew they were performing at their full potential (attack speed, hitting breakpoints, etc.).
This is one of the factors that I believe led to a fair amount of people continuing to play V2 despite at that point not having any more progression on top of the solid core gameplay that V2 has. In Fatshark’s own words they had designed V2 so that people could get 100 or so hours out of V2, and they were surprised that people would play for hundreds or even thousands of hours more. It was similar to V1, where it was still fun to play after reaching what I call post-itemisation. For a lot of people that continued to play, dealing with itemisation was a short amount of time of their total play time.
DT’s system with all of its myriad layers of RNG prevents you reaching that stage of the game.
When I say there is nothing to actually progress, I am referring to there are no actions you can really do to progress your gear, short of waiting for the stars to line up and the armory and/or crafting allowing you progress. You can’t do better in a harder difficulty to have better quality weapons appear. You can’t choose to target for a specific item type. You can’t craft even a base version of an item type. You are literally at the mercy of the random number generator and time for the ability to play with certain items, blessings, builds, etc.
Because of the unmitigated RNG, there is a layer of frustration where you don’t know when and even if you are going to get a subjectively meaningful upgrade. We have to make do. That’s all we can really do, and I don’t like that feeling. At that point, it’s not progression because you lack agency to progress.
About the topic… Please, for the sake of my mind, fix plasteel/diamantine ratio.
I suspect that diamantine will be needed for the other crafting options. If it is that, they won’t balance that.
Why doesn’t it bother you that you’re trying to pretend the core gameplay (the thing you spend 90% of your time doing each session) ‘isn’t much’?
Clearly it’s an extension of V2’s core gameplay.
Clearly there’s a lot of depth to it.
Clearly ghost hits are super rare (maybe I’ve seen 8 out of tens of thousands of melee attacks), and don’t significantly influence things.
If people were precisely criticizing the things the game actually does badly and saying the game has done badly as a result of doing those things badly, that’d be reasonable.
All I’m doing is asking for people to be aware of the actual criticisms they should be making. Put some thought into your critiques so you aren’t just outright lying, ignoring depth, and overinflating minor issues.
For example if you think it was a significant problem that loot was RNG and not tied to running missions, I would totally agree! But people weirdly aren’t making criticisms like that (and ironically it prevents the devs from being able to trust the playerbase, because they’re never actually saying what truly bothers them and they seem to be willing to frequently lie about things; like unless your region or internet quality causes you to have way more “ghost hits” than me, the fact that it’s your major reason for thinking DT’s core gameplay is worse than V2’s just feels like a lie.)
