There has been much controversy in the community regarding the inherent RNG in the progression systems but so far I haven’t been able to find any statement from FS addressing their reasoning behind it. Plenty of people have speculated, myself included, that it has to do with player retention but looking at the steam charts it doesn’t seem to work all that well.
FS has stated in a community post that they’re willing to be more transparent with the community so I wonder if they’ll be willing to make a comment on this?
IIRC they’ve once stated that getting a really good weapon should feel like a rare treat. To me that sounds like they want the best weapons to be really scarce so maybe that’s the reason for the RNG.
This next part is anecdotal and a tangent: I’ve gotten a few really really good weapons but I didn’t feel like I had earned them. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to obtain these really powerful weapons and I didn’t really have any attachment to to the achievement. Don’t get me wrong it’s nice to get great weapons but because I didn’t do anything in particular to obtain it, it didn’t really feel all that special. I’ve also chased the perfect gun a few times and finally getting the perfect rolls doesn’t feel all that great either. Again I don’t feel like there much of an achievement in buying 100 of the same gun in the armoury and rolling them to get the gun I want. I think it’s because it isn’t really tied to the game, it all happens in a menu. In Vermintide had a similar issue but it somehow still felt like it was connected to the game because you got your loot box at the end screen. I know that resources are gathered in missions and that is what is meant to connect the crafting menu to the game but it doesn’t really feel like it. Maybe it’s just me being weird but I wonder if anyone else feels the same way?
Tell the truth even from a player retention standpoint a lot of the decisions make no sense in particular resource siloing.
Generally for a loop like this to work you need to have some form of resource sharing or skip system because any system that requires this much rolling / rerolling of items needs a huge resource pool to not irritate your playerbase. It’s usually play and work your way to the top with a primary character. This one is generally the hardest grind because you are just learning the game and have no outside assistance.
Then you branch out from that primary build / character with a healthy injection of resources to make the other grinds easier with your new found knowledge while also learning the ins and out of the new class.
After you get the other classes / builds up you can funnel time and new resources back into your primary character or keep going with a new one if you so please. At this point the end game is going after account wide resources / dailies to funnel toward your preferred class.
DRG, payday 2, and Warframe just have shared resourcing account wide and generally any grind is doing associated achievements/ missions required to unlock the new thing plus getting any new resources / currency added. For payday 2’s example to unlock some special ammo types / attachments for purchase you need to complete certain achievements such as killing X number of enemies with a poison weapon.
Diablo 3 has shared stash tabs and shared gold so you aren’t stuck with say a god roll Witch Doctor weapon on a Wizard (though even then they have weighted loot rolls to make sure you get 90% class relevant weapons). You have access to account wide gold as well so don’t need to entirely go though the gold grind again on a new character and so playing different characters is more smooth progress wise because you aren’t always guessing at how much of each resource you have.
Infact most MMOs have at least a shared bank for critical resources and items that are account wide.
The most we have here are account wide blessings because with how heavy the rng is on the system and blessings being locked to a particular weapon type / mark I’m pretty sure there would be a riot if someone got all their T4/T3s on the wrong character.
The thing is they didn’t do this in VT2 so the 180 to something universally hated is a head scratcher.
The intention is simple/obvious - they know they lack content(the number of unique maps and classes/weapons…etc.; for some reason they don’t even have chaos spawn ready on release on top of removing a few things from beta, like heresy-related penance cosmetic recolors - which is probably just to make people want to keep grinding penances and waste more time/compete less with real money cosmetics) and they “designed” the “progression” system to pad play hours to make it look better on whatever performance metric they might have internally.
You can find the shills telling you something along the lines of “if you make it this easy(here referring to just the ability to change both perks and blessings, no locking; plenty of rng still in base stats and acquiring lv4 blessings) to get perfect weapons players will just stop playing” garbage, which is essentially admitting the game doesn’t have much going for it outside “progression.” (and it often doesn’t; there are very few reasons to use more than one mark within one weapon type, there usually is an obvious best mark - even though the way to balance those marks is pretty simple - give the lighter alpha/dps ones more mobility/other stats)
So they won’t be transparent with you here because it will just make them look worse.
Worst of all, if they just wanted to pad some hours they could have added up some material cost(for changing the 2nd perk/blessing and for upgrading to lv4 blessing for rebless), but no - they want gamble addicts.
I also think it’s just a desperate way to hide the lack of content.
Personally I pretty much stopped playing as there still is no real way to try out different builds with the way the crafting functions and due to RNG. The small amount of available builds is, atleast for me, the last bit of content that would be interesting to play around with (because the missions and maps get super repetitive very fast) but I don’t care spending hours, days or even weeks on hoping to find a weapon with the perks and blessings I like/need for the builds, or one I can extract the blessing from.
Assuming they’ve introduced a lot of grind to hide a lack of content and assuming there’s more content coming down the line, do you think FS will eventually roll back some of the RNG and grind?
I’m assuming things here because even though your argument is convincing I guess we still don’t know 100% (even though you might be right). I’m not shilling or anything of the sort, I’m genuinely interested in people’s (and FS’s) views on this topic
As a creative person I would not trust this community or the gaming community at large with any deep look into my process. Things are far too easily misconstrued and frankly unfairly interpreted.
That being said I think we as players can rely an absolute, which I know will bring everyone around to “ERM, actually” me but here ya go. Give players level 30, with 80% across all modifiers on every weapon with infinite max rolled blessings and perks that can be swapped at will is far more likely to cause player loss than if the system is not that in 2023. Flat arcade gameplay was the market 20/10 or so years ago but not anymore. To this point, even as it is currently people complain about the ‘end game’.
RNG then is a solution to the problem of skill gating. I’d personally rather just skill gate most rng problems but as a design that’s not inclusive of low skill/casual players, which of course you need because it’s very risky to bet on a small mercurial but possibly dedicated fanbase to support your biggest title with what is likely a difficult partner in GW.
Their design choise was: More time consumption in everything, so they can do less actual work.
No fun allowed, only mindless grind.
Good, different levels, with their mibi-stories!? Too hard, lets make 5 levles, and make people play those levels backwards on different objectives. And god damn we SAW coming! We saw when devs first tried to make Winds of magic and then Chaos wastes, it was huge alarm that they don’t want to spend resourcers on handcrafted designed and different levels.
Weapon customisation!? NNNOOOOOO this not a Cod! Here’s ya tons of samy lookin guns with different stats called MARK’s
Skins? You want to earn cool skins!? ahahahah BUY THEM!
Make different heroes with their behaviors and fun chemistry between them? Nah, here make your faceless character, that gonna say some random stuff to each other.
Oh classes? Naah, 4 is enough enjoy, actually did you saw our beatifull skin shop?
Story? Really, this a grind pron not a story driven co-op game. And story in a pron not needed.
Noone liked fightting against Packsworn in V2, murdering their officers, destroying artefacts, and finally getting revenge on Rasknitt… That wasn’t satisfying, Getting inside vampire castle wan’t fun, intrigue with Sienna sister, who cares, don’t make part 2, LETS PLAY MINDLESS CHAOS WASTES!
Okay, im gonna stor here, im on my edge…just played DT and every time emotions getin worse…
I think they’ll eventually make it worse by removing 380/80 stat gate.
As for near future, they already “reworked” crafting so it’s unlikely to see significant changes until maybe xbox release(which I expect they’re having most people working on, like they did with VT2).
At best, that last 20 points will be a diamantine dump since they still wouldn’t fix diamantine issue.
You’re not as creative as you think you are if you think excessive rng is the solution to keep people playing while others are likely to lose players.
For one, nobody asked for rng to be removed; just toned down to an acceptable level.
You and rest of your kind kept ignoring the fact that people can be “encouraged” to play more if the rerolls(without bs locking) were priced accordingly, plus the fact that one can own multiple copies for multiple loadouts, in addition to different weapons(shocking, right? that people would play with different weapons even if they got a godroll on one of the many).
The players are losing interest because their time/effort wasn’t respected(put effort/time in to complete damnation? more worthless diamantine for you, and here’s some more borked craprolls until you start begging us for real money purchase weapons - fatshark, probably). And no, the patch hasn’t fixed it.
f2p games have done a better job. Like warframe riven system. It’s pure rng but at least you get to reroll every part of it(and the weapon slots, changing one of which requires a relatively rare resource + re-leveling the weapon; no weapon basestat rng bs there) as much as you want as long as you keep farming.
And you can’t realistically say that’s going to lose players.
In Warframe I pay because I had fun and paying lets me have more fun(and I can earn real money currency if someone else wants to buy something I farmed up).
In Darktide I paid just to begin to suffer(they never really fixed crashes/serverinstability/ghoisthits; and I had to edit setting file to make performance acceptable), with a slim chance for fun, and I don’t actually have a way to pay to make it fun.
I think its more a problem of the industry in general rather than “mean gamers.” There’s been so much corporate bs over the past decade and even in Darktide (cosmetics, premium currency and not being able to buy 2400 bundle at launch, unfinished game on “release”) that make it very easy to be cynical about every decision being some sort of predatory business tactic. Also it is funny because while other games in coop horde shooter have rng elements, non are as integral to the game as DT and in general I’m fairly certain have larger playerbases amd better rention. I for one would be fine getting a set weapon with blessings I want and then taking those and doing more challenging content with them, with maybe only cosmetics as a reward.
Basically, using RNG to cover for the lack of campaign, lack of and repetitiveness of missions, lack of characters, lack of narrative and more than a few other issues. Well, I see that their design was a success because we are mostly talking about this cesspool as opposed to other problems.
That’s really the rub, even if anthem had an amazing gameplay loop that was really fun people likely would have still peaced out because of having to work though an unreasonable amount of grind to get there.
Even if you do something as basic as an endless mode that keeps ramping up and giving rewards or something like a roguelike mode that keeps adding modifiers to make it harder the further you go with more rewards to keep people to coming back and playing it’s still better than just locking your weapon progress behind 200-500 hours of gear grind.
I mean heck, people are still playing Killing Floor and Killing Floor 2 over 10 years later and that game only has 10 classes total to level but it actually had content to play.
It’s really confusing how Fatshark had the winning formula with Chaos Wastes(micro progression each run, as you become more powerful during the run, like how you make dosh to buy/upgrade weapon…etc. in killing floor games) in VT2 but somehow had none of that for Darktide.
Also, bold of you to assume 2-500hours will be enough.
If Vermintide 1 and Vermintide 2 are anything to go by, they won’t change the systems but they will likely mellow out on them. Increased drop rates for better stuff, reintroducing Tier 3 Blessings to Brunts ordinary shop and such.
I Vermintide 2, they introduced ways to acquire red gear easier later into the game’s cycle and that’s how you max out gear there. So it’s eventually coming I think.
Yes, but provided you were playing legend 80% of the time, 500-600 hours was more than enough for all the reds for all the characters even before they introduced any change. Well, if you were unlucky, you might have missed one or two weapons, but the red dust made that a non-issue.
At ~1500hours I was still missing one of kruber’s executioner’s sword(got lots of same copies of the other one) and quite a few dwarf/elf/especially witch weapons.
You might get one of each type of weapon in under 500hours if you’re lucky in VT2, but usually it’s a lot of bs rng that gives duplicates.
