Just curious, but is there a tester(s) at Darktide that plays the game as if a normal player would?

I know in ideal QC/QA you have fairly segregated unit testing: testing specific systems, combinations of systems and segments, but I was wondering if there is anyone in Fatshark playing through the game as if they were a normal (or a bit more dedicated) player?

Unit testing tend to gloss over a lot of emerging pain points because they can do things like this:

Or choose exactly the map/difficulty/modifiers and secondaries for a mission, etc. etc.

Or generate the exact weapon with the exact stat spread for testing.

It just seems like most systems in the game were designed and implemented in isolation with little or no feedback between teams and as soon as you take entire systems as a whole in Darktide there seems to be some severe design clashes, issues compounding themselves between related systems and some fairly serious UX issues that only really come to light after a certain amount of time played.

Understandably there’s only so much in-house testing can catch, but we’re talking about some really blatant and visible bugs and glitches as well.

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a few devs play at a decent level, they try to hang with the v2 modded community, and various chosen people, but they usually end up getting carried. Its a small club and you aren’t in it, its not based in equity at all.

Players had to balance V2 for the devs, that should tell you something.

The main reason there are no scoreboards is leaving them out is a cope, which has been rationalized in various ways.

  1. scoreboards are evil, you are toxic if you like them.
  2. scoreboards tell you nothing useful, you are dumb if you don’t agree.
  3. “there are a non-zero number of complaints about scoreboards.”
  4. positive scoreboard interactions, even if they dwarf negative ones, do not matter.
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Can you please not derail the thread into your scoreboard campaigning? There are other threads for that.

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it’s not really a derail, devs do play and they don’t play that well, and scoreboards show they don’t.

they don’t play well they don’t QC/QA the game well. you are correct.

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Ah, I was more thinking devs or testers experiencing the progression, itemisation, crafting, mission selection, etc. etc. as a normal player rather than in-mission performance.

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a lot of people who know what I know won’t say it, but yup. I mean they aren’t terrible at the game, I don’t want to give that impression, but the problems in the game are in my opinion related to bad testing and a mission statements not congruent with “make the best most fun game possible”

That screenshot tells you all you need really. It would take 64 T5 wins never missing a pick up to get 51013 plasteel (I’m assuming they started from a million). In that crafting bonanza they only used 18200 diamantine. It is literally useless and inexhaustible, but earned at almost half the rate of plasteel despite being used at like 1/3 the rate.

Regardless someone literally thought mashing through 50k resources was acceptable, and for that mashing to have literally zero guarantees or bad luck protection.

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Correct! Weeeee have a winner!
jim-carrey-liar

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What do you mean? What have WE been doing since launch?
I personally enjoy spending money to do QA work… I mean, I must, since I’m still at it - a burnout or two and 500+ hours later…

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This definitely comes into play with weapon breakpoints. The math for lots of different weapons and stuff adds up percectly for certain damage thresholds, even up to Damnation. There was a thread going into more detail on it awhile ago.

However that all gets thrown out the window if you don’t have 80% damage. All this meticulous work and balancing to make weapons feel good and have certain uses because you got a 79% instead of an 80% on damage or penetration. Example is for the Grenadier Gauntlet, where I believe you need an 80 in both those stats to 1 shot a Scab Shotgunner on Damnation.

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that’s putting in mildly. I question whether they have a dedicated UX team, and if they do, whether or not they listen to them

Frankly I doubt a QA department exists at all. So many blatantly obvious bugs and issues get pushed into live builds, or problems that would be revealed by a few minutes of testing. The shirtless bug for instance. The agripinaa headhunter is another example, it stutters at high rates of fire which was supposed to have been fixed, but the fix did nothing.

This state of affairs is hardly unique to darktide, vermintide 2 was the exact same way.

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Ideally when a studio wants to make a functioning and well oiled service game you will have the leads regularly make a new account and see what the game feels like for new players in order to lessen the quit moments. I highly doubt this happens at FS.

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when patch #8 tools of nerfs came out, FS did a livestream, I’m sure you can find it on their youtube channel, anyways, if you watch it, they were playing their own game as a competition, took about 3 minutes to understand why this game is in the position it is…maxiumum cringe

Where did you get this image from?

It is not on their youtube channel, but it is saved on their Twitch channel. I’ll definitely be giving it a quick look to see what you mean. I believe this is the one you are talking about? There are 2 Darktide dev gauntlets, this being the first one: Twitch

Edit: That first livestream I linked has the sound team and the cinematics team playing against each other. Neither of those has anything to do with gameplay balance or whatever, so I don’t think it matters how well or not they play. The second dev gauntlet stream has the QA team going against the COMBAT team so I’m going to take a look at that stream instead. Twitch

This particular image was from the skulls showcase when they were talking about the patches they dropped.

User Experience designers are supposed to kill this role now… except they’re mostly cloistered anime artists with delusions of psychological insight these days (UX research? Nak, i know this one…).

TBH, for all we know these teams all exist and are doing their jobs well, but without follow through from leadership they really can’t make headway. It’s been my experience that this is often times the way it goes

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