I've finally tried Havoc: even before saying "It's good or it's bad", I've to say: DERANK mechanics KILLS it

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Now, I don’t want to be rude, but it’s like there was a good Fatshark and a bad Fatshark. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

We have the good Fatshark, capable of offering us of a unique and fun game… and then we have the bad Fatshark, which doesn’t believe in the goodness of its product, which still wants to trap players in frustrating, unfriendly and grinding mechanics. See the old crafting system (which literally took a crusade to change, when feedback from Vermintide would have sufficed). See Aquilas Shop’s FOMO pressure… see DERANK mechanics in Havoc

In my opinion, would enough to say this: if I’ve shown I’m skilled enough to defeat round X… why do I need to repeat it? What is the purpose of Havoc: test my skill or test my patience and my free time? Let me simply repeat the round I failed… so I can train, gid gud and move on

But it’s not just that: derank is a toxic mechanics that spreads its toxicity to the community, undermines relationships between players

Just look at the party finder and how picky people are. Just look how painful matchmaking is… and there is more:

Think about this situation: I invest my time, search on Discord and find a group. We speak a little and we’re ready to start Havoc… but we fail our first try. DERANK fuels cowardice, many are afraid to go back, they see that the team is not working, they insta-abandon it

Without derank, players would be stimulated to try again. They would refine their technique, collaborate, get in tune, gid gud togher… and finally win… and why not, maybe even become friends

To this, without going into too much detail, a more technical aspect must be added. Havoc is deeply RNG, you can find yourself in situations that amount to certain death. It’s a mode designed to be infamous, I can accept that, but deranking because of bad luck… well, it makes it all the more miserable

Really, Fatshark, what’s the point of all this? Why play with people’s time… why base the challenge on frustration and boredom instead of skill?

Once again feedback has been ignored in the most absolute way (as happened with the crafting system)… In Vermintide the weaves were criticised for very specific reasons… and here, instead of solving those problems, you make them worse by adding derank?

Just to give some personal context, you can also skip this part, I’m not a player who just won a couple of Auric and already feels the world champion. I’m an experienced player who has been playing since d1 of Vermintide 2. Who has completed the all the weaves and the hardest challenges/modalities

Thanks for reading

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Adding you to The Book.

I’m tired of the MBA RNG-addicted suits running the show for this company.

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Havoc has definitely made the game a more toxic and miserable experience for me (including outside of Havoc), and I also think it is mostly because of de-ranking.

Not going to attack anyone’s intellect but that decision was unbelievably stupid.

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I can’t speak to PUG Havoc toxicity, but my group just started playing havoc together and deranking is just annoying.

It doesn’t add anything (good) to the game.

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My enjoyment of havoc went up immensely once I hit 40 and could no longer derank.

But so many of my small gripes would be gone if they changed/removed de-ranking.

People instantly quitting when you lose once (no matter if it’s bad team composition, actual bad team mates or the director throwing 5 bosses, 1 twin 1 captain and an off-screen ritual at you.)

People being extremely picky and not wanting to yolo it (some of my most fun runs have been 2-3 people running off-meta or 4 of the same class)

I would understand de-ranking if you could quickplay into your rank or hell even see their rank at a glance in the party finder but instead we gotta rely on true level showing us their highest cleared havoc.

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Get rid off the Derank System (or change it at least) and most of the people will stop to be picky as f.ck (and I can’t blame anyone for being picky, because current derank mechanic forces u to be picky when playing with random people)… FS won’t remove their derank system at all… But I hope they maybe change it to something like you have the whole week to play and win at least one match on ur current Rank… No restrictions in that week, u can’t derank even if u lose 100 times… Only if u can’t win at least one match on ur current Rank, then u get a derank at the end of the week… Maybe this is a better approach (I know derank s.ck, no question… But with this approach people can trial and error without having to worry about losing their hard-earned rank after 3 failed attempts)

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it’s part of the same suite of nonsensical out of touch decisions as the RNG mission selection for both the regular board and Havoc

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My idea is that you should recover your assignment’s retries if you help someone of lower rank to win. It would be a decent middle ground, you have the chance to help players in lower ranks and recover yours. But, removing derank in general would still probably be better.

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Like I’ve said before, get rid of the derank system obviously, or stop artificially lowering our ranks. There’s literally no reason for it. I’m sure a good number of us have proven we can do 40’s. We’re forced by default to be picky & pretty elitist using only meta load-outs because of this nonsense. But somebody did make a great point about it. Once everything is balanced, or if they do eventually get around to it (doubt it)… Reset it one final time, then permanently keep the 40 ranking, so that it at least gate keeps a decent number of noobs out of higher difficulties. But honestly, the system is really the most anti-fun aspect about Darktide in my eyes. I don’t want to grind my @ss off for something we’ve done a bunch of times & struggling with randoms to get back to 40 status. This is a big fat L Fatshark.:fu:

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De-ranking is such an absurd mood-killer. When you get to your last try, you’re doing good, and then the game just decides you’re gonna lose no matter what and just throws Reapers, bosses, rituals, and other random nonsense at you - it just kills your desire to play. Happened to my party tonight.

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Very appreciated, thanks

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Its obnoxiousness is compounded when attempting to play in a relatively low-pop region, so it’s either play with triple to quadruple the latency or not find any games at all.

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FS believes scoreboards are toxic. everything else is a joke.

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I started playing Havoc more often because a regular auric game became a cakewalk. My comfortable level is 20-30, which is like an old melstrom with the danger of losing. But you always want to climb higher to “complete the challenge”. My win rate at 30+ is about 50/50, and if I lose 2 attempts towards the end of the week, I just stop playing DT, waiting for the next week. People leaving the team after the first loss is the same story. Forcing you to use the meta to reduce the chance of failing and avoid dernak is also the same story. Although I see the point of this threat, it is not comfortable and often annoying. I would suggest paying regular or melk money /crafted materials, even books and grimoires - to buy a new attempt. I am sure that high level players have all this and nowhere to spend it.

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Okay, as we are discussing what “kills Havoc”, I’ll throw in my 5 cents then lol. And I know I’ll be hated for that, so shoot.

I’ve played Havoc a few times, do it occasionally, like once per two weeks, when I feel like it. I don’t care about de-ranking, and even the looking for squad part isn’t a big obstacle for me, some people reject my pleas, but eventually somebody accepts (even though I don’t play metabuilds).

So why I don’t play it more often (and I believe it’s the reason why most of others don’t)? The reward part. I don’t see any reason to do so, that’s it. It’s more challenging for… nothing in return? And you can’t even quickplay or join in progress there, what unnecessarily complicates things. It may not be that bad on its own, each of those factors, but they stack, too much hassle for effectively nothing in return (more resources you probably don’t need already, because you’ve maxed out most of your gear)

Here is what I think will drag more people into Havoc (assuming that’s the goal):

  1. Quickplay button, first of all. Fine, put some warning that people should use Squad Finder instead, talk about what build to use etc - that’s all fine, but it must be optional, let people decide themselves how to play the game. Let them disable Join in progress and via Quickplay when they create their squad if they want (should be separate checkboxes btw, you may not want random people in your squad at the start, but if somebody DCed and didn’t return - you would want somebody to join instead of them) - but that’s it. Stop being gaming police.

  2. Full revamp of gear system and game’s economy. It makes no sense now, when you’ve got almost anything you need at about 150hrs in game, and have nothing to work towards past that point, with resources endlessly stockpiling in your bank. There always must be incentive in a form of better gear you could grind for, resources you need to upgrade or change/mod your rare gear, new rare expendable items you can take on missions with you (like flame extinguishers, some unique stims, a single-use instant revival implant etc - just some ideas I saw in other threads here). Then you make all those rewards available only in Havoc, and/or make key resources more abundant there. That will make it clear to people why they should play it

  3. More rare, cool customizations only farmable in Havoc, added regularly (once per few months). Will help too. Note the emphasis on “cool” though, some frame or title won’t do, it needs to be something brag-worthy and standing out.

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Like in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. Honestly surprised they didn’t implement anything like that.

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I didn’t play ME series lol, but for example I know that insta-revival perks are implemented in Deeprock Galactic. There are two of them - one allows to revive your teammate instantly once per mission. The other one allows you to stand up and fight for 10s before dropping again, also once per mission - allowing you to save the day by reviving couple other teammates. Both of them could be turn into some expendable (single-use) items for DT, which only would drop in Havoc, and at much lower chance in Auric.

Honestly, there are other things I like very much how DRG does. Like take their approach to revival - several players can revive a fallen one, speeding up the process. I don’t know why you can’t assist like that in DT, like if two people helping a dude to climb up back to some platform, it goes 1.5-2x faster, same as when you revive somebody. I constantly see several people trying to revive the same person, and it’s very confusing (was there myself), as sometimes you can just miss them, or hit the button while being slightly out of reach - and you can’t understand at first if revive didn’t start because of those reasons, or because somebody else is already reviving them. The fact DT doesn’t really provide a clear visual hint that revival is already going on doesn’t help either.

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Oh, yeah, I know the abilities in Deep Rock.

It is really odd you can’t have multiple people reviving to make it go quicker. That would be so nice at times in DT at high levels.

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Yup!

Been saying it all along.

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Honestly this basicly sums up my havoc experience for the last week of playing it for the first time.

For the record i completed 35 and had good 40 attempts all of it with randoms too. So i have pretty much seen what havoc is throughout the entire thing.

First problem is, if you seriously want to rank up in havoc to 40, inspect mod is basicly must use. And if a team is bad you simply cannot afford to keep playing with them because of the horrible derank mechanic. The derank mechanic literally forces you to sit there for 1 hour before every game and try to inspect and fish out most sweaty players like yourself. This is horrible. And i do this too because you simply HAVE TO do it. I would gladly play with the average player but deranking is a MASSIVE waste of time so i just cannot afford it.

Second problem is tied to the first problem, between 30-40, the difficulty curve makes no sense. You can unironically get a 30 or 35 mission that is harder than a 40 mission because they roll 4 modifiers and some map+modifier combinations are outright extremely difficult and punishing. This makes deranking even more stupid because the difficulty curve is not just increasing steadily, RNG is heavily involved.

And third problem is it is jsut super toxic. I mainly played with randoms, and the amount of toxic interactions is just… insane. I have never seen this much toxicity in aurics. Like inspect mod kinda reduces the toxic interactions but still there is no need for this. Literally remove deranking and nobody is gonna care.

Something fatshark needs to understand is, LOSING IS FUN. Why do you think we played 200% bomber twins in V2? The winrate of that is like less than 10% for a skilled group but we still play it because thats the fun of it. You bash your head against the difficulty until you beat it. Tell me what does being demoted do other than waste your time? You already beat that level, you will beat it again, so whats the point of forcing the player to repeat that? This is not gonna be a huge problem for premade groups but if you are using the party finder and playing alone this is just extremely bad and makes everyone hate each other.

Like normally i never cared what build anyone played in aurics, or in V2. I literally always say play waht you want. But now i am forced to inspect every single person to make sure they at least know the curio meta (which usually reflects their gameplay). You just have to do this and it sucks.

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