I am once again calling for further gatekeeping of the highest difficulty missions

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

I want to break down my perspective on what is starting to become my biggest gripe with this game.

And look, before anyone starts talking about this being toxic or elitist, let me affirm some facts. The following is true, regardless of how you feel about the contents or the tone:

  • The Auric Damnation missions, let alone Auric Maelstrom missions, are as difficult as the game gets. They demand you have a firm, all-round grasp on the game for you to perform to a decent standard (not being a liability and cumbersome weight to your team). If you are not able to do that, you are objectively out of your depth and unable to carry your own weight, inevitably leading to someone else having to carry it for you.
  • Everyone playing the game is another person living in the third dimension. Our time here is finite. That’s a fact. Wasting the time that can never be returned of other people by means of poor self assessment and lack of consideration is ruder than any words can be. That last part is my opinion and one that I’m sure others share to varying extents.
  • A person with 1000+ hours and a person with a few dozen hour played can both be level 30, but the gap in skill level is immense but neglected in the games structure currently.
  • As a game developer, you can not rely solely on masses of people to even halfway consistently exercise enough self awareness to know where to place themselves.

Those things being said, my suggestion as I stated in a previous, broader, thread I made, is to raise the level required to access the Auric page. Call it prestige ranks or whatever you want, but they need to be in there to clearly visualize to people at a glance the difference between players actual skill level and by extension, how compatible your playing will be with theirs. It’s the only way to be fair to both parties. If you’re a seasoned player that doesn’t struggle through anything but the craziest maelstrom missions, it is not fair to repeatedly be paired with people who can not reliably play through an auric mission without dying repeatedly. If you’re a newer or less experienced player, you will either be made redundant by better players and have little to do, or you will spend most of your time dead or dying, either option being less than ideal.

And I’m sure it will be mentioned by people so I’ll mention it myself; people play for different reasons. I don’t play any mission with any intention or expectation of losing or even dying on account of myself. To repeatedly be paired with people of vastly different mindsets (but still on the hardest missions) is not an enjoyable experience and I know for a fact I’m not the only one who feels this way as it’s something I hear all the time from players of similar mind. In general, this crowd gets their satisfaction by feeling like they and their teams is performing well and doing things that are difficult, successfully. It can’t be done with people who are after something else.

Others play in a much more casual manner. Seems to me they’re less concerned with the result and more of the experience along the way, whatever it may be. That’s my best guess but I don’t claim to understand this perspective as it’s not one I share, but I can respect it. I’m sure those who feel this way and read this will find my point of view unpalatable. Which is fine, but also the reason I think there needs to be greater distinction in the game itself.

So here’s my actual concrete suggestion for addressing this problem:

  • Add prestige ranks. Structure it however, but make it visual and easily identifiable on your characters card.
  • Double the amount of mission options on the regular page and lock the Auric missions to something akin to level 50 right now (at least, maybe more).
  • Remove Maelstrom missions from the basic mission board and make all Auric missions Maelstrom missions. Add more, milder varieties (2x parameters) if necessary to widen the spectrum of options so it’s not all madness.
  • Maybe even add some in-lore disclaimer to the Auric page so people who don’t realize what those missions require can get at least a theoretical sense of it before they’re in there falling apart.¨
  • Up the rewards for normal damnation missions so we don’t funnel people into the hardest missions on account of resource deprivation everywhere else.

Now obviously this won’t fix the problem completely, but I’ll go some way in addressing it.

I know we’re all playing the game to have fun. The problem right now is that there’s essentially two major groups that have different perspectives on what that means and the game fails to clearly address that. For example, why is there the possibility of having the same exact mission with the same exact parameters show up on both boards? What’s the point of it then? The difference needs to be more distinct and less blurry. I want the game to make it clear who’s in there to be performing on the highest level so people who don’t want that can reasonably go “ugh, not for me” and play with someone else. I genuinely don’t find this toxic, it’s just promoting healthier boundaries between people who would experience noteworthy friction of forced to play together. It’s nothing but a win-win in my eyes.

So, with all that said, that’s a wrap. I’m sleepy as hell as I’m writing this, so apologies if it is incoherent somewhere. In any case, do you think the sentiment behind this thread is fair? Am I making sense or am I an elitist prick? Cast your votes below, Varlets.

  • I agree with this sentiment
  • I do not agree with this sentiment
  • I sort of agree with this sentiment
  • Other (Reply)
0 voters

Till the next rant :saluting_face:

2

there is no level of play where you don’t have people who ruin things for everyone else because they don’t play with others well. you don’t need special treatment for the tiny handful at the most obcessive level of play.

3

I agree with you but just want to clarify something.

How do you guarantee people with a high rank are good?in other words, couldn’t people just play heresy to rank up to whatever arbitrary level you pick? You could make it damnation only experience, but people can just play that, never do good or suck, get carried, etc and still level up their ranks

What do you think of some kind of ranking system (like MMR?) not sure what stats it should be based on , it it might be more accurate than a rank that just goes up by playing

4

I think a player rating system in the vein of MMR would be the way to do this, but I also think the playerbase is so small (particularly in my region) that it’d have to be so loose that it’d be ineffective in order to keep queue times reasonable.

I don’t think hard-set gates like player or gear level are a reliable way to do it, in any case.

TBH I think it’s mostly a non-issue. It’s as impactful and frequent as having a speedrunner on your team and the general reaction to that is “suck it up, princess”.

5

I do think matchmaking could be more ‘true level based’ tbh but otherwise I honestly don’t care. I’ve given up on the GRIND and now I’m just playing to chill with friends.

6

i’ll keep it short, true level mod is the acute solution and should be an ingame feature by default.

9/10 i see a 30-50 player in auric maelstrom, its either a hard carry, waste of ressources or run go south.

usually one is manageable, 2 and i leave the lobby.

then again it should be an account lvl displayed rather than character for the 1/10 is the twink of a valuable team member trying a different class.

oddly enough recorded a failed I II V E G the other day were no matter the carry, the drain on ressources and forced mis-positioning to pick up our dead weight, ultimately proved to be our doom.

educational material nontheless, next time act accordingly.

these clientel though lack even the most basic instincts for self awareness and are neither capable of learning even if they hit lvl 1000 or are simply used to getting carried without feeling ashamed.

hard to put a lock on that other than reliable premades.
sadly part of the fun is having fresh AND competent faces spicing things up.
a fixed 4 man team can get stale blazing through the content just as well.

thinking of conan : wealth can be wonderful, but it can test ones mettle as surely as the greatest adversary.

7

Just make Heresy give the same (material) rewards as Damnation.

8

i play on auric damnation, and, tbh, i haven’t noticed any under-levelled players in a very long time. i actually can’t even remember any times where a -30 player was in the lobby. there are bad players, sure, but having prestige levels and whatever isn’t going to prevent you from having a bad game. getting good teams is rng.

you’ve got potentially thousands of players queuing up for auric stuff, and not all of them are going to be playing at their best every single game. we all have bad games/days, and a player having 1000+ hours and another one only having maybe 40-50 can be indistinguishable at times. just because someone’s played longer doesn’t mean they’re better. some people just suck, and will always suck.

i really don’t think this ’s a problem on auric. maybe from malice to damnation, but auric stuff has always been pretty consistent with decent level 30+ players from my experience. i also think the difficulty is pretty good where it is now, too, where there’s enough challenge where it feels satisfying when/if you make it out of a tight spot. sometimes it feels like maybe you were cheated out of it for whatever reason, but that’s how it goes in all games. i’m sure if you could go back and change the way you played just a few second leading up to your death, you could probably choose to do something differently that would have saved the mission. that’s where skill comes in, though. everyone makes mistakes. the threat of failure is why videogames are fun to begin with.

9

There’s more than a “tiny handful” of people that fit into the category of what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about obsessively playing the game for hours and hours every day. That’s not even what I’m doing. I’m just talking about the people who are trying to and generally can achieve peak performance. Call them tryhards or what have you, but that’s not a small proportion of the playerbase.

I feel like you’d need such an elaborate system to accurately and fairly calculate an MMR in this, seeing as it’s not PvP and you can suffer at the hands of others more so than yourself sometimes. So, I don’t know about that. And of course, higher levels does not automatically guarantee better playing, but I think it’s fair to say it would help increase the likelihood a decent amount. There’s no panacea, but there are some simple things that could be done to mitigate the issue until someone creates a self awareness pill.

I’m not talking about people who are under level 30. Level 30 is a really quickly attainable level that, once you reach it, removes any limits to what you have access to in terms of missions. It gives you access to missions that, if all your playtime is the time needed to get to level 30, you can almost certainly not be ready for. I’m just saying we push that access a little further back.

I’m also not talking about people who have off days or whatever. It happens to me too just like anyone else. I’m talking about the level 30-40 veteran running a knife and Ia lasgun with voice of command who dies repeatedly to poxwalkers because he is trying to shoot them when they’re swinging at him instead of meleeing them. That’s not someone who’s having an off day, that’s someone with no clue what they’re doing. I’m just saying the game should be structured in a way that discourages this level of mismatching between skill and difficulty, as opposed to what it is doing now which is, at best, ignoring the matter or encouraging it at worst.

10

On God, I’ve seen Level 1000+ players in Insurgency: Sandstorm who perform worse than noobs.

11

Respect, honestly.

12

High rank in a PvE game is a much better metric for competence than one in a PvP game.

PvP games by the very nature of dealing with people as your enemies makes for a much more chaotic mess while in PvE even as weird as the spawn director can be the game is ultimately quite predictable meaning you can have full experience with the limited number of scenarios that are available.

That being said I’ve run into lvl 600+ veterans who I thought were going to be a lot less…not good.

They still weren’t a hard carry though, but I can only imagine them when they were around lvl 300, or lower.

13

The Level 1000+ Insurgency: Sandstorm players that I took particular notice of were mostly Checkpoint (PvE) players, although there IS a joke in the Insurgency: Sandstorm community that Checkpoint players are drunkards.

14

Didn’t even know there was a PvE mode in that game. Guess they need something to bolster their player numbers.

It’s rough to be a tactical shooter that isn’t CS tbh.

15

Yeah, Insurgency: Sandstorm is criminally underrated but what can we do?

I remember playing with a guy on there who also happened to play Darktide, and we used to have fat chats about the potential of a “40K Tactical FPS” game based off of Insurgency: Sandstorm and Ready or Not with customisable Imperial Guardsmen on one faction and customisable Chaos Cultists on the other.

Yes, Beloved, mama’s geeking out :roll_eyes:

16

I think it’d be much simpler than you might imagine, but I think it’s moot anyway because the game doesn’t have enough players to support it.

17

An MMR system would suck anyways.

You get all the good players getting boring matches because you just get an auto win, and the bad players are less likely to get a walking learn-by-example players to improve themselves (that or get frustrated and quit).

18

There’s a pretty good-looking Star Wars total conversion for Squad.

19

I dont agree with upping the gatekeeping itself, but incentivising people people to farm stuff in regular difficulties by reducing the difference in rewards for regulars and aurics by either increasing the rewardd for normals or reducing auric rewards or both.
Like in vt2, legend is unofficial farming difficulty and cata is the “fun” difficulty.

20

Well yeah, but isn’t that what people like OP are after?