A few months ago, reddit user JMartell77 made a comment on the Vermintide subreddit saying;
“So at this point it’s a safe bet they are just going to be absolutely f*cking lazy and never give us actual new armors.”
To which Hedge replied;
“Your bet is not safe. You might find stuff in game files, but there’s also stuff you wont find in there.”
Basically saying, that the game would get armors that weren’t in the game files, i.e. completely new armor and cosmetics (atleast that is how I would interpret it). Well, as we all know by now, the DLC launched and it contained nothing but lazy re-skins and re-colourings of already existing cosmetics and illusions, along with two new maps.
A few hours ago, reddit user calls_you_nouns made this post on the subreddit, basically calling out Hedge on his comment, that explicitly said that the game would get totally new skins and cosmetics, which it obviously didn’t.
Out comes Hedge, in the comment thread, and states (two separate comments;
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I still stand by my original comment anyhow. reddit gonna reddit though. We’re the bad guys.
The comment I answered was:
“So at this point it’s a safe bet they are just going to be absolutely f*cking lazy and never give us actual new armors.”
It was noted there that we would never give you actual new armors.
I replied as such:
"Your bet is not safe. You might find stuff in game files, but there’s also stuff you wont find in there.
and I stand by that. People wonder why a lot of devs aren’t transparent? Well, you can see in this thread why they’re not. Did I give a time line? No."
People ask for time lines, we give them and miss them for any reason? We’re the worst.
People ask for information without time lines, well they’re going to invent one that meets a narrative and throw up when their narrative isn’t met. It’s ridiculous.
edit: fixed typo
edit 2: I’ll be taking a self imposed hiatus from the sub. Will be hanging out on the Steam and the Fatshark forums and various discord channels and happy to answer questions there. Thanks.
Sigh. There is so much in there that one can criticize to the end of earth and back. Let’s try and break it down from top to bottom.
“reddit gonna reddit though. We’re the bad guys”
Yes, reddit is gonna reddit, and calling you out on your bs when you objectively stated that we would get new armors and cosmetics, and the DLC that was 4 months delayed didn’t have any of it, isn’t a “bad” thing to do. It’s what fans, and costumers and consumers are supposed to do when a company doesn’t do what they promised. And yes, further down you said that your comment never specified cosmetics for 1.2, and the release of the Bögenhafen DLC. But I think it’s fair to say that 95% of people that read your comment saying that entirely new armor and cosmetics were coming, would assume that atleast some of that would be in the next DLC, you know, the DLC you delayed for 4 moths. So either A, you deliberately made a DLC with absolutely nothing new, hoping people wouldn’t notice it was all a palette-swap. Or B, you didn’t have time to implement new cosmetics in a DLC you delayed by 4 months, which might actually be worse than option A, as it just reeks of the mismanagement going on over at Fatshark right now.
And also, yes, you are the bad guys in this. It’s not just reddit that says that, almost everyone I’ve actually spoken to about this (I have over 40 Steam friends playing this game), people on the forums, and yes, people on the Steam forums, are saying how awful Bögenhafen was, and they are saying that you have no idea what you are doing, and they are pointing out the bible of bugs, and other issues. That’s not just reddit. Reddit is actually the one place where alot of people have discussions, objective arguments and facts in their posts. And you have the audacity to label them all as people who “mindlessly” call you bad guys? Grow up, if you have to actually quit on reddit because you think people are to negative towards your game there, then maybe the game have a fair few problems you need to fix? Just maybe?
The comment I answered was:
" So at this point it’s a safe bet they are just going to be absolutely fcking lazy and never give us actual new armors.*"
It was noted there that we would never give you actual new armors."
I replied as such:
"Your bet is not safe. You might find stuff in game files, but there’s also stuff you wont find in there.
and I stand by that. People wonder why a lot of devs aren’t transparent? Well, you can see in this thread why they’re not. Did I give a time line? No."
Well, here’s the thing, and you might not have realized it, but it is because you didn’t give a timeline this will come back and bite you. Had you said that the next DLC wouldn’t have new cosmetics, but instead said that the DLC after that would, you would still have people pretty pissed (because a DLC that is 4 months too late didn’t offer anything new), but atleast we would know what we would get. However, since you very sneakily left out a timeline, you thought you could use that as a defence. If a developer, or their PR-rep, says that there will be new cosmetics, but not specifying when, 95% of your customers will assume that it’s the next thing coming, maybe in that overly delayed DLC you have right around the corner? Well apparently not. The fact that you didn’t realize this, is a fundamental flaw for a PR-rep. I’m not saying you are bad at your jobb, I am, however, saying you should realize how the industry works by now. If you don’t give a timeframe, people will take it to mean “as soon as possible”.
Besides, your statement you made after the fact isn’t even objectively true, is it? It’s all well and nice that you can go back on what you meant, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that you, and some other dude, during the launch stream of the DLC, claimed, on Twitch, that there were new cosmetics in this DLC. Which is false, re-skins and re-colorings aren’t new cosmetics. Imagine making Krubers skincolor green in the game, would that be adding a new character? No, it would be changing an already existing character. You are not adding anything, at best you are changing what’s already there (I Mean, there were just a goddamned mod released that let you do it for free, to any color you wanted, aswell. And you tried to sell it as “new”)
I think, what happened was, you, and the rest of Fatshark, didn’t even imagine in your wildest dreams the pushback against you for releasing a DLC that’s been delayed by 4 months, and only having re-colorings in it. And because you didn’t have any idea, you probably thought people wouldn’t really notice, you went around making statements that the game would get new armors and whatnot.
I would love for this not being true, I have gone around, even in the days where I’ve been the most angry and critical to how you treat Vermintide 2, saying that I don’t think it’s down to maliciousness from your part, but rather the fact that you bit of more than you could chew. But if it’s true, that you deliberately called re-coloring for “new” cosmetics, and then after the fact went back on that. Then I have no choice but to suspect serious maliciousness from you unto your costumers, in the same way EA, or Activision, does.
“People ask for time lines, we give them and miss them for any reason? We’re the worst.
People ask for information without time lines, well they’re going to invent one that meets a narrative and throw up when their narrative isn’t met. It’s ridiculous.”
Was it people that asked for you to put out a roadmap of the first DLC, and dedicated servers, when you released the game? I don’t think so, I think you did that, so why on holy mother earth do you get angry on us for your own company screwing up? Because that is exactly what Fatshark is doing now, on every, possible, front; screwing up. It’s sad, but true. latest DLC, while having two pretty good maps (I once made a statement that they weren’t very good, I take it back, my statement was mostly due to Blightreaper not even working in the beta), is a disaster on every other front. 66+ weeks to get all the re-coloring you made, and on top of that having to pay 8€ for the privilege of grinding over 2 hours everyday of the week, for over a goddamn year, to get for what we payed for, in the form of one cosmetic per week.
And we also have the fact that this game is so broken, down to it’s very core, that for every issue you “fix”, you break the other half of the game. And it’s been like that since the BETA. The BETA of the main game, that started at the beginning of this year, and it still isn’t fixed. And you went like 3 months without a bug fix, because you were working on this “super patch” that would rework everything, so that these issues would be solved, and you failed. It didn’t work. We went 3 months without patching only to get the 1.2 update that made the game break again. You literally, can’t use the rapier right now because of phantom swings. The game crashes on switching careers, the game looses connection to the backend when opening up goddamn boxes. The director AI still only spawn duplicate specials, an issue I myself reported in the closed beta on these very forums, and it supposedly were fixed, until it broke again. If you can’t make the engine work, then ask a modder to do it. Swallow your non-existent pride and ask someone else to atleast have a look, to help you, like some other game companies have had to do, in the past. Because you evidently can’t fix the issues yourself.
Also, I believe saying that “missing” a DLCs release by 4 months because of any reason is simply not possible. There has to be a fair few, pretty big, reasons as to why you’d miss a date by 4 months. This is an industry where develoeprs get death threats (extremely unfortunate) for missing something by a few weeks, at most, and you think people wouldn’t get a tiny bit upset when you missed a date by 4 months? I can have sympathy with you, because you clearly have issues on every front in developing this game. But if I were in your shoes, I would atleast have given a partial explanation as to why a DLC were delayed. You know, a PR-reps job, to uphold public relations. Going silent for 4 months then coming out guns blazing towards your own fans because they ask how on earth you managed to delay something 4 months, is not what a PR-rep is supposed to do. Your supposed to explain, and if the reason, somehow, is highly secret and confidential, atleast say something vague. Don’t be completely quiet about it. That’s not going to help at all.
edit 2: I’ll be taking a self imposed hiatus from the sub. Will be hanging out on the Steam and the Fatshark forums and various discord channels and happy to answer questions there. Thanks.
And there is the biggest sin of them all, the PR-rep steps away from his duty becuase people aren’t being saints when Fatshark screws up. I wonder why people get pissed, I wonder why your game have gone from “very positive” on Steam to “mixed” in the recent reviews, I wonder why your DLC launched with “mixed” reviws on Steam. Could it be becasue you aren’t as great as you seem to think you are, Hedge? Could it be because costumers want to be treated with respect, at the very least? And you, haven’t acknowledged almost any of the issues brought up, on reddit, or even here on the forums? Yes, it’s very nice that you say you will make the acquisition of Bögenhafen items easier, but that isn’t anyway near enough, in my humble opinion. I want to know how you were thinking to implement a system like that in the first place, I want to know what you will do instead. I also want to have your view on the entire “weekly-challenge” disaster, that is still in the game, answers on the “inventory space”-issue, the already mentioned phantom swings, performance issues, all the issues. But you have given no answers. I wonder why people get upset? Such a mystery.
And walking out on the most active community you have won’t solve anything. It will only make things a lot worse. Just because people aren’t praising your very existance, doesn’t mean they are just trolling you, or hating on you because it’s fun. Almost all of the top voted criticisms on the subreddit are all very valid, many of them are well reasoned, and well written. And I, frankly, find it insane that you would walk away from that because you can’t handle your own companies mismanagement of the game. People on reddit aren’t, like you make it sound, making up problems, conjuring out statements, from you, out of the blue, or just trolling you. They are trying to help this game, the reason people submit long posts on the subreddit, isn’t to hurt your game, it’s to try and help you. Do you really not understand that? Anyone that actually read those posts would understand it. And it’s always reinforced in the comments, people saying they are only trying to help you. Do you have the audacity to say that Fatshark doesn’t need help with this game? You have no clue in heaven what you are doing with it. You need all the help you can get. You need all the opinions you can get. So walking out from the subreddit is just pettiness. Grow up, jesus christ. Just because everyone doesn’t treat you like gods in their criticism, doesn’t mean they are malicious towards you. I’ve said it before, I can say it again; If people take the time out of their, probably, busy life, to write about your game, and say what they want improved, and discussing the bugs they find, then they probably care. And now you will simply ignore the 50k people on the subreddit, because you think they aren’t “fair” towards you. Well, holy cow, it reminds me of a child ignoring their parent because they can’t have candy on a wednesday.
It’s best you don’t forget, you wouldn’t even have a job if it wasn’t for all those of us who bought the first game, and continued to support it by buying DLC.s even though it was a buggy mess. You wouldn’t have a job if we didn’t continue to support you when you released VT2, and despite the sheer ignorance from you on half the games issues, despite the lies and bs you told pre-release, saying you would have dedicated servers a month after launch, promising the PC version wouldn’t get put aside in favor of the console ports, and you delaying a two map DLC by 4 goddamn months without any reasoning to it, idiots like myself are still spending hours on these forums, hours on the subreddit and by now nearly a goddamn hour writing this damn post, because we care about the game. And you just ignoring us every single day, and now just signing off from the subreddit because you got a bit tired of us, is pathetic. The amount of times I must’ve said this in the last few months, but holy cow, Fatshark, start to act responsible for you releasing a game that were broken. Act responsible for your own silence in a time where you should have been as open as possible, and act responsible for your game, when it finally seems it would get somewhat of a revival, with a mega-patch and a new DLC, not even bringing in 10% of the population. It’s noones but your own fault that this game right now is on the thread of simply dying off. Stop trying to blame the forums. A community manager that doesn’t manage the community is completely worthless, and even if you like reddit or not, it seems as if you have some pre-existing malice towards reddit (which in itself is weird), your goddamn job title basically requires you to take into concideration your own community. Just 24 hours ago you wrote this on reddit;
We’re happy to receive criticisms. This post is a much clearer / fairer post and I thank you for the clarification. Expanded commentary is much more useful to me and my job and the studio as a result than calling me a liar directly.
Proving that A, reddit is helpful, and B, you take in alot of the criticism leveld at you, on reddit. Good, then you wrote this;
edit: This sub used to be constructive in their critiques and as such resulted in a much healther working environment for those who frequented it and fostered an environment where we could parse criticisms and put them in a list of things to look at. Maybe we’re to blame in part, and in part it comes from now being a much larger audience in the sub and with it came people who just don’t know how to communicate their frustrations healthily and usefully.
Which is an objective lie. The subreddit didn’t “use to be constructive”, it is constructive, for the most part. Everyone on there isn’t, some people just think it’s fun to hate, but most don’t. Most write constructive things on there. You cannot come and say that isn’t the case any longer. Since the release of the DLC’ I’ve been on that subreddit every single day, and every day I find constructive posts. This either proves that you jsut want an “excuse” to get away from there, or it proves you don’t even visit the subreddit. Just because a few people doesn’t dance in line with your every move doesn’t mean what they are saying isn’t constructive. The DLC didn’t bring in “a much larger audience” to the subreddit. If anythink it increased the number of constructive posts. And those posts are “well communicated”. A Damn lot better communicated then any communication coming from your own goddamn company. 3 months of absolutely nothing and you have the audacity to say that we can’t communicate. That makes me more angry than any DLC you could’ve ever put out. That subreddit is one of the better mannered in the gaming space, don’t come and pretend otherwise.
I think the basis of it is that you, a late evening, got tired of reading just another critical post, and you just snapped. Understandable, perhaps, but still un-professional. Take the critcism to hearth instead. I don’t think you’ve done that for a long, long time. It has taken you until, what, yesterday, to realize that you maybe should fix the red duplicate-issue. Not until yesterday did you say that having red dust may not be such a bad idea. The trophy system is nowhere to be seen, dedicated servers don’t seem to ever happen (which honestly might just warrant everyone a refund), game breaking bugs, glitches and connection errors. Maybe it’s time to open up to why this game has all these issues, instead of remaining silent about everything, and hoping that people will magically forget. Grow up and act like adults, Fatshark. Stop pretending everything is happy times, it’s more like the end times for you, whether you realize it or not.
Thank you.
