Calling the fact that high-damage, high-stagger weapons can abuse stagger isn’t a “bug”. It’s precisely what is programmed, it’s just that the basic premise of stagger mechanic is flawed, and the most effective way to use this mechanic is not strong team play, but picking some of the very few weapons that are good at all things. That’s definitely not balanced - and to be clear, I agree that what we had before in Live wasn’t balanced either, though far more weapons were on par, or close to each other in approximate value than what we have now.
Also, cooperation and teamplay is not limited alone to “I soften up this guy while you finish him”. “I control this group while you deal with that one” is also team-play, and I would say works better with the fast-paced nature of Vermintide.
XSword and Glaive were always good, especially the former. It’s just gotten better. The difference in value between weapons has grown significantly.
In the end - we don’t have gameplay that rewards better team work, we have gameplay with worse balance, a more complex mechanic that is just a messy side-grade from before. “Keep it simple stupid” and utilizing the existing resources of the game would have served players and gameplay much better than “let’s create a whole new mechanic and rebuild the game around it!”
That is fair, we can’t actually say with certainty that the developers didn’t intend those weapons to exist in that hybrid form unless they change it or say otherwise.
You are correct that these can both be team play, though there is a difference in focus. One is focused on cooperation between two or more people and the other has two or more people working in isolated parallel.
You could say it’s the difference between multiplayer vs. cooperative.
Multiplayer meaning there are many people playing.
Cooperative meaning many people play together.
But that’s a little reductionist to be honest. XD
Obviously, vermintide can be played cooperatively under the old system, on a macro level at least. You are all trying to get to the end of the level and work toward that goal. There was no real need to work together on a micro level though, each person can just do their own thing working in isolated parallel toward the final goal.
The newer system pushed micro-level coordination hard. You could no longer work in isolation and expect success but instead had to settle in close concert, weaving each person’s contribution into the greater whole. I agree that it’s a lot more challenging in the fast-paced nature of Vermintide but some people really like a high skill game.
Now that I think about it: this is the group work problem.
Some folks hate group work. So they do their part alone and bring it to the group finished. “I killed these rats. I built this entire quarter of the car, frame, wheels, safety etc.” So long as everyone in the group completes all shares of the project the group succeeds, “We got to the end of the level! The project was finished!”
Other folks like group work. So they bring ideas and weave them together with others to make a finished product. “You stagger the rat, I kill the rat thanks to the bonus damage. You built the entire frame, I’ll install the drive train and engine, Bob over there will assemble safety gear.” Since the finished project needs each person’s contribution every step of the way to find success it’s harder to do…
…though I’m not sure if it’s the best analogy. Realistically each person has their specific job in the project, it’s just a lot smaller scale. Less “I kill 1/4 of the rats” more “I will stagger rats”
Ha! The assembly line of murder with each one of us specializing in one part of the job!
Oh! And that would make the isolated players artisanal murderers!
You want factory finished or hand crafted dead rats?
Anyway it doesn’t really matter but it sounds like you’ve found some success using parallel play as a team. That’s great, but this mechanic is so easily worked around by just using very specific weapons that abuse it.
As a community, we’ve seen months of folks being able to run off by themselves and two days of tightknit coordination. Though I should really stress that either situation is not strictly bad, just different. As we discussed earlier in the thread there are two broad groups of people playing this game:
Those who play with a team and want more challenge to encourage coordination
Those who play alone and don’t want to rely on an uncoordinated team to find success
I guess the real question, that we players can’t really answer, which of those two groups is Fatshark building a game for?
A multiplayer game, or a cooperative game.
A game you can play with friends or a game you must play with friends?
Vermintide has always been the former category - with a high enough skill level, you can solo it. This has always been a very fine line it has walked, but now there’s not just disablers and numbers against you, you functionally have a debuff if solo (unless you use a top-tier weapon, which again kinda shows how poorly thought-out this mechanic is).
Me, I love playing with friends, but my internet is also garbage (I live kinda far from a big hub) and so I often have to play alone (aka with bots; I’ve done True Solos, but I don’t enjoy them that much).
I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that nearly every game I have lost since 2.0 dropped was due to the failure of the bots to act in even a marginally competent way. Having a standard of “if you go down even once you fail the mission” is a seriously big difficulty spike, but that’s kinda what you face with bots, because they are so bad at this most basic feature - and have been since the first game. I could post dozens of screenshots of the times they have simply stood on top of my body - when a revive was entirely possible to pull off - and let me die. Or how often they will simply abandon you to try and go melee a gas rat across the map while you are facing the entire horde.
The fact that basic issues like this have just never been addressed - and they refuse to sanction more mods that alleviate them - just makes me skeptical that they will ever address many of the other major problems plaguing the game. Look how long it took them to even just address the green dust issue!
It all makes me wonder; why did they feel the need to develop this whole new mechanic, when there were simpler and neater options that would have left more time and resources for fixing long-standing issues? It’s immensely frustrating, and I wonder if they will ever bother to address things players have pointed out for over a year and a half now.
It’s true, humans are great at memorizing things, we’re such great learning engines! (When we try that is, being lazy is more fun most of the time.)
Though we could propose that, with the recent changes, Fatshark would rather the game be in the second category. Still that’s attributing intent without much info, a dangerous game on the internet.
This is backed up somewhat by the new cataclysm difficulty. It remains unchanged by revisions and is listed as needing a coordinated team. It’s your, ‘must with friends’ experience, as I understand it. So we may have sort of gotten a solo queue/team queue dynamic.
Logically they thought it was a good idea. It did certainly have the intended effect in the games I saw. But I can appreciate that it was detrimental to the bot play . A computer is never going to be able to follow the constantly evolving battle space like a human can.
The problem, as I’ve kinda shown repeatedly, is that their logic was flawed, it was pointed out to them many times and ways in which it was, and they kept to it.
And bots can’t even handle Legend - I get Cata makes sense to be beyond them, but they will neither approve of mods that help these issues, nor fix them themselves. When there are real issues remaining after a year and a half, spending time and effort on a new in-depth mechanic is not really logical or wise. Especially when - as I stated and backed up repeatedly - there were other, simpler ways to go about it.
On top of all that; when they do these big patches, they invariably bring back age-old bugs, like “enemies spawning around you bug”, which was present in the original pre-release beta for the game.
I just went and tried good ol shield and axe, trying to stagger enemies for my team. Anecdotal…
Nope, no fun. None. It was boring. I died last… I watched my team fail to capitalise on my maneuvers over and over and I watched them go down over and over and I slowly walked waving my … butter knife/pool noodle of an Axe through enemies until I could get them up again over and over and over and over…
There is a problem here that isn’t about mechanics, its about intent. This DLC intends to make the game more interesting for the long term elite players still playing the game at this point (At least that is what appears to be the intent). Those in discord servers and on reddit and streaming regularly are going to get as lot out of the forced team effort, might bring them back from mods that already create this kind of game mode (did Fatshark need to remake the wheel). For the rest of the player base… too bad not only is this new content not for you the game you came back to play is gone.
I can understand why the sudden and realistically unfair negative backlash.
I think I could learn to like it once they deal with the major issues. I would hate to be someone who enjoys theory crafting though since that kinda feels like its gone with the new stagger system.
You have been strongly championing the artisanal murder approach to the game where people play in parallel, which is totally fine. That’s your preferred style of play and is no doubt fun. But it’s not a great argument to say that their changes, which enhances assembly-line murder, are bad at improving artisanal murder. “They changed things to make A better but it didn’t make B better.” as it were.
FatShark set out a goal and made adjustments to the game toward that goal. What they changed was successful on that metric. By logic, their changes were also a complete failure at the opposite.
So if they were trying to improve artisanal murder, they have failed. The changes to stagger objectively made it harder to solo the mob without using niche, unbalanced weapons.
But if they were trying to improve coordinated teamwork via assembly-line murder then they had a stunning success. People were coordinating far more and with greater effect. But this enhancement to team play came with a very real cost to parallel play.
So to narrow the discussion down a bit I’ll adjust one of my questions above:
Is there another way, besides the stagger system, to encourage tight cooperative play?
If we want to take things even further:
Is there another way, besides the stagger system, to encourage tight cooperative play without harming parallel play?
Not going to lie, that’s a really hard question. I don’t think there’s a good answer, but it is a fun problem to tinker with.
Sounds like the team hadn’t come together yet, you were making the openings but they didn’t know how to exploit it. I know my friends and I spent a bunch of time in the keep practicing as a group before we felt ready to tackle the level after our first big flop. It was super fun though, everyone offering suggestions and devising cool weapon combos. That’s why we settled on shields and spears, phalanx formation for the win!
It does seem to be the extrapolation of what information we have. I mean weaves are all about eliete players.
I see where it’s comnig from but I don’t really find it productive but it is the internet.
Oh? What do you mean by ‘theory crafting’ geekhaven?
Ya it’s going to be harder to count in the future. You need to work out:
How many times do I hit them when it’s just me
How many times do I hit them when it’s me and a friend
It’s interesting that you break cooperative and fun as two different groups. I assume you also prefer parallel play? Or at least you’ve had only terrible experiences with team play for it to not be fun!
Not really. I did game design at uni. Those are two separate metrics and they are neither mutually exclusive or inclusive. Optimally you want both. Currently I think we are losing fun to enforce co-operative game play which for a select group of tactical players is fun but currently I am on the fence and that may be because I play with a lot of lesser skilled players. This is going to make those games far less enjoyable.
That’s a fair assessment. I guess that’s why they’re doing the survey to see if the majority of players fit in the coop or parallel camp. As in, is it a net gain or loss of fun for the majority.
This has been fun but I should get some other things done. Enjoy yourself and I’ll take a look at any replies later.
I don’t think this will change anything about new stagger I think its here to stay. Good or bad, negative review or not. So information they’re looking for imho is what does stagger make un-fun and how do we fix that. Like hyper density filling the area in which a knocked back enemy was in… well cant fix hyper density so… less mobs. Boom problem solved.
It’s not great design process imho but I’d bet on this exact thing happening right now. If it were me I’d sit down and see what problem I was trying to solve with new stagger and solve it different because I don’t see how stagger is solving anything that couldn’t be solved less disruptively another way.
i.e. Reward co-operative play don’t punish solo play… carrot not stick especially when people are paying for the privilege.
Ya Osrail was talking about just that. It makes solid sense. I was just actually just playing vermintide 1 yesterday and was surprised and how few enemies it took to make a dangerous horde. Things have really changed.
This does seem to be the tricky question. Did you have any ideas for this given your training?
I think we are talking about a delicate balance with Vermintide. Its a high skill high reward game and I don’t have the experience with the development of this game specifically to make professional judgment calls. I also think knee jerk reactions to community outrage is bad… so…
Yes, I think the simplicity of the mechanics is key, people need to understand the mechanic and it needs to be easily conveyed through tooltips. Lets start there, with simple to understand but hard to master tools.
I don’t think new stagger is really that. Old dodge was, but perhaps to easy to master. I don’t have an issue with new dodge. I saw elsewhere a talk about how the complexity of stagger still achieves a relatively simple outcome. More stagger more damage… its the confusion of how to get that stagger to happen and how damage procs within the stagger that is upsetting imho ‘builds’ ‘breakpoints’ and ‘optimisers’. I don’t play that way but it is clearly a strong methodology of the game, in fact a core experience for many I’d say.
If you can’t explain the process in the tool tip then the mechanic is unsound.
But thats just one pet peave, there are so many elements here. Its why I think simple is better, many simple emchanical elements combined to make one larger tactical experience…
If it was my call… I’d focus on seeing what made the hard core mods work and start formulating that into CATA. I’d see what made Team Fortress 2 so popular and start using those methods to appeal to the general mass.
The importance is the consistency of experience throughout. If I’m good at veteren I want to be ok at champion. If I can cake walk champion I want to be good at legend and if I can cakewalk legend I want to be able to succeed at cata.
I don’t want to learn different mechanics or not be able to understand my failings of a difficulty level only one above what I can do consistently while listening to lofi beats and chatting with my 8 year old son. I want to be able to play with my 8 year old son on easier levels and chill helping him grow his skills but also enjoy CATA with my other CATA freinds without crippling my ability to play either enjoyably.
well, the reason for the density of enemies was precisely to challenge the players. correct?
so, the solution isnt to try to “fix” the hyperdensity of enemies because they cant uncode or reliably fix that. nor is the solution to open up dodge or block windows.
the easiest response is to lower the number of enemies to challenge the players.
the easiest way to challenge players with less enemies is to nerf the players.
the easiest way to nerf the players is to remove talents and many of the weapon traits and power levels themselves.
now it becomes clear what the problem is… its not overdense enemies but op players.
The reason for the density of enemies is because a sequel ‘needs’ to be bigger and better than the first, so the game’s direction pulled it in such a way that players could crush huge waves with far less effort than the first. This wasn’t some accident - the difference in fighting a stormvermin between the two games is night and day. An individual chaos warrior is a complete joke, made threatening only in bulk.
Almost everything regarding the shift in combat with this update has been ostensibly to push the game back into a position that makes it play like the first. The only thing that hasn’t changed is that the number of enemies hasn’t also been reduced to compensate so you’re playing as a bit more powerful VT1 characters fighting post-WoM VT2 hordes(now with enhanced aggression and common durable elites mixed into the fold).
The point of reducing enemies in my mind is not to make the game easier but to solve problems they can’t fix, which comes up fairly often when looking back over the game’s life cycle. It’s less about difficulty and more about consistency and visual clarity. Even if ‘op players’ were an issue(and maybe they are, it’s certainly been a pain for them to balance), you’d have a much harder time convincing people to give up how ‘cool’ their characters are in comparison to just reducing enemy groups and making them tougher/more complex.
That’s just me, though. If people are digging the change in direction then more power to em, i’m not interested in complaining that the game isn’t progressing the way I would want it to. It sure seems like folks like it - steamcharts suggests they peaked at 14k players over the weekend, which is pretty impressive considering where it was pre-WoM. Means a lot of support, hopefully.
This is easily the most mature discussion I’ve found on the subject online. From another lurker let me add 2 more cents. I play Quickplay solo 90% of the time, I have limited time after work, and while I have made several friends playing this game we don’t always get to sync up. My perspective is from a legend player.
I think the problem is less about stagger than about the bugs they created/reactivated in order to overhaul combat. I could deal with these changes better if the game wasn’t cheating me out of being able to capitalize on my skills.
Currently if I push an enemy wave, which is Mandatory under New Combat, I will knock some to the ground, where they become untargetable, but are able to still attack me and impede my movement. Under Old Combat if I saw density building up I would push them back and attack in order to take advantage of bonus cleave. It was a decision I made based on an understanding of game mechanics and experience in applying them. It was rewarding, now it’s not a decision I make based on a situation but a requirement to function, and on top of that it’s bugged.
Previously I was able to dodge attacks reliably under Old Combat, and it felt good to be more mobile than the rat men and able to hold down my side of a horde. Under New Combat dodge is unreliable, and dodging backwards is utterly useless, I can’t tell what my connection to any given host is, but if they cannot make their netcode function properly, which MANY companies struggle with, then they had a solid workaround in place that led to a fun gameplay experience. With New Combat I have a lot more moments of “BS!! That attack landed 6 feet from me!” and it’s unreliable whether my dodges will work or not depending on a connection I don’t know about.
Furthermore there are phantom swings I have noticed on several weapons and enemies will occasionally clip right through me, they can still hit me but I can only hit them half the time, it seems to be present when an enemy is within 2 feet of me, if there is 1 unit of separation blows land reliable, if they are in my face I might not be able to do anything to them. This removes my agency as a player and voids any skills I may have if my inputs into the game result in nothing happening.
The Talents and Temp Hp are a separate issue, I don’t think they bugged the game out, but the Stagger System appears to have fundamentaly broken combat. I don’t know which bugs are new or old, I haven’t been here since launch, but I know what I’ve seen lately and I don’t understand how anyone who isn’t playing with a premade can be anything but distraught at this patch. Runs seem to only work when someone brings Fire to the table… thats a terrible spot for game balance to be in.
