Counterpoint: with no reason to play but the challenge (with 40 negative modifiers…which, I’m still very curious about), it very well could become a dead mode.
But, without quickplay and with ranks, I really don’t see any danger to having a solid reward incentive. If you don’t think someone can hack it, you just don’t accept their party invite.
this havoc is such a disappointment, it seems like Fat Shark didn’t recognize anything in VT2, this havoc mode is a disaster of a contraption
That was the exact reason Weaves died very quickly:
Given the 160 weaves it was downright impossible to get a full party going due to how fractured the playerbase was.
And that was with a peak playercount of 73k people at release. Due to these issues and many others it quicky died down to 5k average little over a month later and at that point you could only complete weaves with a dedicated group of friends. It was basically a dead mode.
Now consider Darktides current player count in comparison.
Forcing people to use the party finder will massively hinder havoc. Quickplay would have been the one saving grace of the concept.
I can’t imagine how the addition of decaying ranks and weekly lockouts will affect it. As usual FS took the worst ideas of a previously tested concept and instead of improving upon them made them worse.
As for aquilla rewards. The toxicity they’d foster would be endless. Just look at mythic+ and raid.io as others have mentinoed.
My only hope is that the content is actually challenging enough to require a full 4 stack, otherwise the only thing to look forward to is the new map and weapon variants tbh.
Only really interested in nabbing the armor. What will it take to acquire it? A particularly high rank or grind?
I don’t know what you mean by “weekly lockouts” but as long as you play a Havoc mission you won’t decay:
I just don’t see this. You get infinite chances to gain rank each week. 3 on your own assignment, yes, but you can just join another mission of the same rank. Even with Aquilas on the line at the end of the week, the stakes are super low for each mission.
EDIT: and if Aquilas were on the line, that’d be a pretty big difference from Weaves and, I imagine, a huge motivator to keep people engaged.
Reward lockouts. As there’s one per week. The more pressing issue with decaying rank is removal of player agency. Games demanding your attention is a terrible mechanic imo.
You could say the same about weekly mythic+ dungeon keys in WoW. You’re correct in theory. But reality proves different. WoW is a prime example. And that’s without premium real money currency on the line.
I agree with you here. It’d definitely keep the mode alive. Can’t say what it do to people’s behaviour in regards to non-meta loadouts and the like when looking for members. I’m sure everyone would be nice and forthcoming /s
A player can skip to any difficulty.
So a player’s rank would not be a trustworthy indicator at any point.
Unless you expect the highest difficulty to be hard enough to require a premade team of 4 cooperating players from the top 1% or so, you can not really prevent a team of 3 from carrying a bag of trash.
And regarding them choosing to bring an ankle weight…
Most people probably do not want to do that. So there is an other issue that i mentioned. When everyone has to use the party finder and people can actually choose their teammates, you can expect aggressive elitism as well.
If the top difficulties actually require very good players, who cooperate well… have fun with the party finder, unless you have friends to play with.
I REALLY hope I get to see the live reaction of an alt f4er when they rejoin hog tied for the first time. Glorious change.
As I said before, I don’t see any other way they could make the weekly rewards enticing. Throwing out dockets, crafting materials, melk bucks, or weapons (probably) won’t matter to the people who can get to level 40, and even if it does it probably won’t for long.
Again maybe having actually enticing rewards is bad because it makes people who aren’t good enough to play certain difficulties try and get the reward. But at that point why have any weekly rewards at all? Just have it be a bragging rights mode and get normal or slightly boosted docket rewards at the end of the mission.
As for Quickplay and stuff, honestly I would like a quickplay option. If someone rage quits your game, or you just wanted to get the game started but haven’t found 4 people it could be useful. Just have an option to select public or private like in normal lobbies. I actually have started to enjoy joining in progress games, specifically when everything is falling apart, so it would be fun to try and save people’s runs if someone quits or something.
If FS really wants people to group up with the group finder, make it so you can only QP into pre existing matches. Or, maybe have a “Quickplay” option that makes you show up as a potential member in all LFG Havoc lobbies.
All in all I will wait and see with Havoc but tbh I don’t have much confidence in the mode and feel like people have lot’s of problems with it. Hopefully the armor and new penance rewards are cool at least.
This could also salvage ‘ruined’ runs where someone ragequit mid run. Imagine a group of average players barely making it through a higher rank havoc only to have one guy alt+f4. They’d be glad about someone backfilling the empty slot.
The more you think about it the more quickplay makes sense.
I just imagine tourists only, and repeatedly, trying to QP into games to get carried across the finish line.
Make QPing not progress rank to disencourage tourists. Maybe even add a selectable havoc level range to QP into like 31-40 for example. That way people can replay certain tiers and enjoy the challenge. Without being forced to hunt down people with that specific grade.
I personally enjoy QPing into running auric matches. You never know what to expect and trying to salvage the utter chaos of a run gone sideways is fun. There’s nothing you would lose.
You could keep the gamemode alive by merit of the ‘harder daddy’ crowd QPing and also solve the issue of rage quitters.
One question I have is this:
Are we going to get mutators that HELP us, or just ones that make it harder?
I get the point of the difficulty is to make it more difficult, but this is kind of bonkers that the only thing that gets modified is the enemies. I miss games like Unreal Tournament that let the mutators affect players too.
Why not give us a reward that while the game is scalingly much more difficult, you get a power up to help your team complete the assignment? It makes no sense to me that we don’t get a benefit too, our faith in the Emperor should get us something, shouldn’t it?
What about Error Code 2014? People on wifi who get disconnected? So long as we keep connecting, it still counts us as in, yes?
Well it says you can’t quick play it.
Right, yes, that was part of a larger discussion on how this game mode might stay healthy/populated.
I think they meant that there are rewards for ranks 1-40.
At the end of the week you are rewarded.
You are rewarded based on your highest rank.
If you hit rank 40 in week 1, you get rank 40 stuff.
I created this account to clarify this for you.
The only modes I care about at this point are challenge modes where I don’t get any mats as it is. I want players who are here for the fun of it. Materials are meaningless to me because I have millions, but if it becomes some kinda mat farm people are going to be thirsting like crazy to get carried. I think extrinsic reward is exactly the opposite kind of crowd havoc should be catering too.
if it isn’t at least that hard to beat a 40 then its a mode that doesn’t matter to me to be honest. I’m just going to go back to Duos after I hit the badge, at which point havoc will literally be a failed mode. Duos Monstrous Specialists…and true solo monstrous specialists (I mean, i’m trying for it and made it half way through Archivum Sycorax a few times now) is about the only attention grabbing difficulty for me right now. Aurics are just a game mode I play casually and sloppily at this point. I’d hope that the “new harder mode” with 40 difficulty levels is as hard for 4 players as true duos monstrous specialists runs are for 2 players. Otherwise, at which point a single player would be a significant burden to carry and if they did manage to beat it then they can’t have been that bad.
Knowing that there will be weekly rewards, I’m curious how this will play out.
All the normal mats are meaningless, as you’ve said. I hope H40 will be fun, but honestly 40 debuffs sounds like pain any way you cut it. Very curious how they’ll keep people playing/pushing towards that.
I think this is if the coding picks up the key/button sequences of what is Alt+F4 and on Consoles the “Leave Game” or for either one if it can pick up that a player force closed the game. If so, the game may discern it.
In some recent games, I had also tested on Auric Maelstrom where if you Alt+F4 or leave game on the console, there is a 50/50 chance that when you are downed that you reappear hogtied. More likely to happen if done repeatedly. Sometimes even the Auric Storm Survivor quota drops back to Zero as well. With the Havoc mode it seems like the player base complaints have received some recognition to where they have coded into the game what they will soon enforce across the whole game. We shall see!