It’s not really possible to balance all weapons if those weapons are supposed to function differently. There’s always going to be one that performs worse due to things like playstyle, talents, class, team setup, etc.
But more importantly (in my opinion), all weapons simply shouldn’t perform equally.
In 40K lore some weapons are simply objectively superior in basically every possible way and situation. Power weapons are prized relics from the Dark Age of Technology that the imperium has all but forgotten how to mass produce. A mundane sword should always, ever, and without any possible exception, perform worse than a chain sword, or a power sword. But here we are running mundane axes, swords (Dueling Sword ROFL), and knives, which frequently perform as well or better than power and chain weapons.
Lol, but even then, in VT2 every Handgun is nearly indistinguishable when at the same power barring properties and traits, in DT every Lasgun is wildly different due to stat rolls being RNG, unless we’re only interested in balancing a God-Roll weapon that 99% of players will never see
God roll weapons should be the norm post-U&L. The RNG to get the optimal dump stat on a weapon is quite minimal, like 1/10, and then you just need to consecrate the thing.
Word! Yea, it’s trivial and cheap now. And you can nab what will be a god tier weapon early on and hang onto it, slowly improving it as you earn mats. It’s worlds better than it ever was.
It means nothing.
I’ve just played a game where I saw 8 different players that logged out before I get “a team”… same story: they appear, rush ahead, fall far ahead, and die. No stealth Zealot at all… but Ogryns, Veterans, and even Psykers…
Fact is, we won because I took my time and never got caught by a Trapper or a Dog (and I was alone for 80% of the game). Fact is, I remained the only one alive twice…
So, those who joined later benefited from the fact that I ensured the game never ended.
Also, as I said, I saw 8 players (+3 teammates), so 11 + 1 (me) for just one mission (thanks to bots not being fixed…). Guess what happened? Every time someone died like a 5hit, they logged out.
Sidenote: I was playing as an Ogryn and dodged lots of Trappers and Mutants… Because when you progress alone, the game loves to throw Trappers and Dogs at you.
To tell the truth, such games are uninteresting, and one is enough per day. So I didn’t launch another game, quit, and played something else…
I won’t talk about the other steps of your post
Anyways, DPS, kills per mission, weapons picked, talents etc… they have all the metrics, or can have them. I remember that at the beginning they made an announcement about the number of enemies killed. So they have the numbers… but no will to use them.
A lot of responses don’t seem to understand what a control is. The comparison is not between different players, it’s between different weapons used by each individual player. Since the skill of that player is always about the same, the test is if they succeed more with weapon A, weapon B, C and so on. Same player, different weapons, different rates of success.
Roles/synergy used for each weapon are part of the same consideration. If the role that players are using that weapon is leading to lower success, that is the same consideration on whether the weapon needs to be buffed/nerfed. Of course we could also look at the skill builds but this is Fatshark so limiting the consideration to weapons keeps it simple.
If you’ve used different uncommon weapons in this game, it should be very clear to you that a lot of the weapons themselves need buffs. No matter what role they are used in.
Good point about skill cap. What weapons have a high skill cap? Just knife? Maybe devil’s claw with low ping? I’m in favor of high-skill cap weapons as long as they’re not being overly abused with macros and mods, so balance them in the upper-middle skill range. Or whatever, that’s a special balance choice for a small number of weapons.
I agree victory or defeat happens from a large number of factors which is why they would want a large amount of games to average out or filter out the random factors. For anyone who works with large excel sheets or databases, I assure you this amount of data is not more than we can imagine. As long as it’s in the data, it would take a matter of seconds or less to sort (and average) any column in a million (any number) games for any given mission modifier for instance, so they’re only looking at games with identical modifiers, or even identical missions, identical class comps, blitzs, etc… But for sure they would want to check that there aren’t niche uses where the weapon overperforms before considering changes.
I don’t think most of this is really a consideration though. Having tried almost all the weapons in the game, most of them are strictly worse than others in every way, for every purpose.
6,342.3 average concurrent players in the last month. So that’s like 200,000+ games per day? They can discard every game where a player left mid-game or where the game even started with a bot, or any other reason that would distort the data. only look at damnnation+ games, only certain havoc tiers, only certain builds or blitzes, use other stats whatever criteria they want and still have a huge sample size.
Touche. That’s really the problem here… The years I played Vermintide 2 it was the same.
It may be easier to nerf the weapons correlating with wins and buff the weapons corelating with losses in say max havoc… if something succeeds in that crazy difficulty something is overpowered, just a matter of identifying what then.
Use Havoc for what it was intended for… exploiting try hards into identifying the bad areas and nerfing and buffing them.
I’m not sure weapons can be balanced simply by looking at win rate without choosing a specific difficulty level as a basis. Different weapons perform differently at different difficulty levels. Assail after Patch 13 wasn’t a big issue for Auric players, but allowed a basic level 7 Psyker to run around using Assail as their primary weapon to LMB spam their way through Malice games without leaving any non-ogryn targets for teammates to fight. Plasma Guns are insane in things like Havoc where they’re presented with dozens of cramped enemies literally often occupying the same spot, but don’t feel the same way at Heresy or basic Damnation where you just aren’t seeing 12 shotgunners spawn on top of each other.
I don’t understand how this doesn’t have more upvotes, it’s a very valid point.
In no way does Win rate alone reflect the barely level 30 Vet running a sub-par weapon getting hard carried by the Heavy Hitter-Taunt-Krourk Knife Ogryn.
Nor does it account for the DS4 in games that are a loss because too many players lack the experience necessary to not get blown out by the first Trapper that comes along. Then that brings down the total win/rate of the DS4.
Maybe if there was a way to use the specific weapon kills data and average that across all players. It would have to somehow seperate actual kills from bleed/blaze kills while the weapon is equipped though.
This is more than just valid… That’s also what I think.
A simple stat says even more: the proportion of players who picked this or that weapon. I must say, for example, that since they buffed the Boltgun, I don’t see a reason to play with the revolver. I guess, considering how many Boltguns I see, that I’m not alone. And so, you can easily identify the weapons that are too strong, because those are the ones players pick the most.
An other example… I guess that if you look to these stats, you won’t find that Devil’s claw is the most picked weapon since the last patch that buffed it. It stays as by the past… rarely used. Guess why? because this is the worst melee weapon… that’s also the weapon they have chosen for the bots, main reason why bots are bad. Because their weapons are the worst of the game.
That would also be a good stat to use alongside the average match kills across all players using that specific weapon, but by itself the “picked this weapon stat” could also be inaccurate because sometimes youtubers create builds with weapons that are subpar/outright bad but newer players will use those weapons anyway because they don’t know any better.
Also, older youtube vids recomending certain weapons can become outdated after patches hit, but the YouTube algorithm may still recommend that video a year later to newer players.
ideally fatshark would offer a tiny version of each map, like the most “important” 3 rooms cobbled together (so we wouldnt die of old age testing)
putting each usual enemy type in and let us run solo against the clock.
you finish with 5 minutes remaining vs time runs out in room 2 in itself would indicate the later kit not being up to snuff.
even this method has its flaws since usually you get buffs from your mates that boost a weapons performance.
but even without em, lets say 5x hab dreyko “light” with rumbler/knife and 5x roughly the same damage/dps should get a weapon performance indicator in itself.
I do think FS has the capability to do this, they mentioned monitoring Ogryn win rate in Havoc as high even prior to buff patch. So theoretically they can track builds and weapons and with enough statistical data can figure out the outliers good and bad… whether they have a mathematician on their payroll is another question though.
