This is a cross-post from my initial reddit post, I’m hoping to cast a wider net to get other input on whether my understanding of the shop is correct
As an initial caveat everything in this post about the functionality of the shop should be prefaced with either ‘appears to’ or ‘seems to’. Trying to figure this out is akin to pulling levers in the dark where you must wait an hour to see if they changed anything while also being unclear how many levers there are. I am likely wrong about at least some of this, possibly all of it. My data pool is small and the trends I’ve observed are minor, but I am posting this now because I don’t have the time to continue logging in every hour to write down numbers from the shop, hopefully in aggregate with the community a better picture of its function can be made.
Initial theories about the shop were that it was dictated by player level and while level appears to play a role in the maximum wieldable power (at low level you will see high power level items in the shop that require a higher trust level) and therefore dictates the maximum rate of shop progression, instead item power seems to be the factor considered in the quality of items at the shop.
Offhand one poster mentioned they saw greater increases in item quality on their character who was constantly buying at the shop relative to their friend who held out for specific item types and wound up with items of a far lower quality at the same level.
This motivated me to start logging the Base Power (BP) of items in the shop to see if the BP of my equipment was linked to the BP of shop items. The two do appear to be linked, with the highest BP items in your inventory (they do not have to be equipped) informing the range of values assigned to the shop, I’m not clear whether it averages primary and secondary or if it just takes the highest of the two, I’m loath to delete my best equipment which would be required to confirm this so that will remain unanswered for now.
As I proceeded, I bought items with noticeably higher scores than what I started with, upon doing this I noticed a small but consistent increase in the average value of items in the shop, increasing from 325 BP to 330 BP. However, both of these were well below the average BP of my Equipment (370), this then led to calculating the average of the Overall Power (OP) for items in the shop and doing so on multiple characters. What I found was that mean Shop OP leads Player BP by roughly 20 points at lower levels (18 points on my level 5, 34 points on my level 12) while it roughly corresponds with the Player BP of my level 30 (ranged from -14 to +21). I tested by upgrading my best equipment, increasing overall item value and this had no discernable impact on the value of items at the store despite being a substantial change in OP, indicating that Player OP has no bearing on the store.
The issue here is that there is a disconnect, where the store is using Player BP (maximum 380) to calculate the Shop OP (maximum 450) since OP considers blessings and perks which can have bonus values of up to 45 and 25 respectively. As you increase in level the number of blues increases - which makes sense to give you control over blessings, but it means much of that BP score being factored into the shop is being used on Blessings and Perks rather than BP. This is what traps the shop at a mean BP of 330 even with a player BP of 370, consistently resulting in items with a BP well below the player’s and therefore limiting their utility.
But what about the whites? My understanding, and this is entirely conjecture, is that the store is trying to maintain a mean OP equal to the Players BP. It’s distributing a set number of points throughout the 12 items available to the player this means that whites more often than not serve to equalize out blues that are above the desired average – there is always the chance that one will roll with a high value, but the calculation for how the points are divided takes place all at once, with some minimal threshold to be used for BP.
A sample of this may be
(Player BP + 10) * 12 = Shop Total
Where Shop Total is then divided into 12-point values which are then spent on BP and Blessings/Perks. You could in theory roll a very high value which would result in a Blue 380, or a 380 that happens to not get any perks or blessings, but the values are determined in total rather than individually meaning a white does not have substantially greater odds of being a high point value than a blue or green.
Opinions and Conjecture
It appears as though this system is meant to work somewhat similarly to VT2’s, where on opening each chest/crafting item power could be between -5 and +10 of your average item power. There are two serious problems with this as it functions in Darktide. Firstly, BP isn’t the only stat being rolled for, each weapon has a distribution of stats, something not present in VT2. A Bolter with BP 380 and DAM 60% is worse than a Bolter with BP 370 & Mobility 50% (other stats being equal), even though the latter has worse stats. In looking for items at the shop you’re not just rolling to get items of similar or identical BP, it needs to be distributed well. Secondly, the game appears to be using your BP to calculate the OP point values of items in the shop which leads to a further disconnect as the shop becomes more heavily weighted to higher rarity tiers as you increase in level, and points get eaten up by perks and blessings leaving BP stuck around 330 with exceptions up to 350 relatively common and above that exceedingly rare.
To summarize, an item at the shop has the following rolls to be considered by the player
Item Type
Base Power
Power Distribution
Perk
Blessing
Of these some can be changed, either now, or potentially in the future. Blessings will be able to be changed and one perk can be re-rerolled but BP and Power Distribution can’t be changed and add a massive additional layer of headache to item acquisition as they both determine the foundational utility of a weapon, and the player has no agency over them.
Solutions to the shop have generally centered on Item Type as the area that needs improvement, the desire being guaranteed items of every type available to the player, allowing them to stick with a chosen playstyle and continually having the chance to improve the type of weapon they were already using. However, unless the power allocation of these was computed separately from the rest of the shop this wouldn’t solve the issue of stagnant stat growth occurring at high levels as it would merely expand the multipliers and point drains in the formula (e.g., instead of * 12 it would be *20 with 8 whites locked in). I can also understand why this would conflict with the design philosophy of the shop and the game as a whole where the desire appears to be incentivizing the player to try out the different weapons in their class and hopefully enjoying one they otherwise wouldn’t have tried by virtue of settling on one they liked early on and simply crafting it as the BP started to lag. Whether this philosophy is correct or well-founded is not the subject of this post, but assuming this is the philosophy the solution to at least some of the issues surrounding the store is simple, either link Player OP to the store, or link Store BP to Player BP. In either circumstance the store will then continue to give players items of equal or slightly greater value at max level rather than breaking down and continually giving sub-par items with low average utility resulting in the overwhelming majority (93%) not breaking 350 BP making them over 20 points worse than my best gear.
Functionally, this means items in the store are rolling for Item Type, Perk, and Power Distribution – removing one of the factors being considered that renders most items at the store useless at high levels (if most items available to buy are 50 points lower in quality, most items will be useless relative to equipped gear, regardless of perk or distribution, there is some amount of wiggle room but not 50 points worth). In doing this you incentivize players to interact at the shop more rather than open it, initially filter for item type, and then close it if they don’t see the specific types they want. If there is an incentive to always buy an item with a higher score than what you have then there will naturally follow attempts to test out the item which promotes the weapon diversity being sought after. Additionally, once reaching max item score (either in OP or BP) The items in the shop will generally be rolling with comparable stats making a change of weapons down the line less complicated than waiting for not only the weapon type to roll but to roll with good BP & distribution.
In my opinion, more than any changes to the store in function the change that HAS to be made is making this system clear. It shouldn’t require community crunching of numbers to make sense of how the store works, there should be an explanatory pop-up upon first opening and an info button either in the menu or upper corner of the store. The opacity of the system is more frustrating than the system itself because understanding how it works (in its flawed current form) makes it easier to get desired gear. This is not a complex addition; it is a pop-up and some copy. Community anger about the RNG in the shop could be mitigated if it was made clear to the community that they actually did posses some agency in the shops items even if substantial issues remain with regard to the relative quality of items that spawn in the shop.
One of the card developers for MTG (A game I have admittedly never played) remarked on a podcast about how players are amazing at finding problems but terrible at fixing them. I understand if my proposed fixes are flawed, either in philosophy or details, but please explain how core systems of the game work. I am likely incorrect in at least some of my understandings, quite possibly all of them, but I don’t feel that I should have to be logging in every hour to catalogue numbers to try and find out if there’s something I can do to actually get better gear or if it really is just a numbers game with atrocious odds.