Melk's Weekly Jobs could be a lot better

[ElevatorEleven]

I feel that Melk’s jobs don’t enhance the game. As it is, I always reroll the books one because the team can’t be relied upon to pick the damn things up; most people run right by them even if you tag them, waypoint them, and beg in chat. I also always reroll the Kill Enemy Type With Melee/Ranged because they make me self conscious about what weapon I’m using and what enemy I’m fighting which leads to sub-optimal decision making; I’m more inclined to try taking on ragers in melee instead of just safely shooting them, for instance. But worse than that, being required to get a certain number of kills makes me acutely aware of my allies kill stealing, which is the wrong mentality to play a cooperative game with, and leads to competitive thinking and resenting other players (side note, this is also why I would much rather some of those On Kill skills and blessings be On Hit instead).

There’s a paradox here: part of me feels like Melk’s jobs should be some sort of extra challenge to warrant an extra reward, something the player has to go out of their way to achieve, but another part of me points out that if it’s something the player has to go out of their way to do then it’s making the player deliberately sabotage themselves, and therefore sabotage the whole team.

To illustrate:
Good teamwork isn’t just helping teammates who are incapacitated, though that is of course extremely important. A big part of it is understanding team strengths and allocating your attention and ammunition to where they’ll be most effective. If I see a mauler coming towards us from the left and a groaner horde closing in from the right, the mauler is normally the priority target, but that changes if I also see our zealot sprinting towards him with a raised thunderhammer. That mauler, is f***ed. He is Handled. I do not have to care about him. I need not waste my ammo shooting at him. I should turn my attention to the horde.

But I do need Scab kills with a ranged weapon…

Yeah not good. It’s not a terribly big problem, but it can be a lot of small problems that add up over multiple games.

So Melk. While I understand the idea of making them Additional Challenges, I think it would be better to err on the side of not incentivizing competitive thinking, anti-team behavior, or resentment. So let’s see, that means no kill counting, no books, and no player deaths. They should instead be things the player was already doing, but more so, to reward playing the game more and playing the game well.

Alternatives: For a start, looking back at Vermintide 2’s jobs, the 2 Missions As Character wouldn’t work, but there’s Kill X Elites As A Team, get X Headshots, and 3 Quickplay Missions.
So, suggestions:

• Kill X Elites As A Team
• Get X Weakspot Hits
• 3 Quickplay Missions
• Kill X Specialists As A Team
• Finish X Missions Without Taking More Than Y Health Damage (should be measuring damage taken, not checking how much health the player has, since that would potentially incentivize selfish use of healing items to keep health above the threshold)
• Dodge X Attacks
• Complete X Missions of Specific Type (would probably necessitate a bit of reclassifying mission types so there isn’t only one Repair and one Investigation)
• Complete X Missions on Specific Difficulty Or Higher

before complaining about any of these suggestions remember that you’d still be able to reroll them if you don’t like them

[umikaloo]

They seem like they were intended to have some sort of lore justification, but a lot of them are really weak, and the effort-to-reward ratio is really off.

Plasteel and Diamantine are undisputably the easiest and most rewarding, while enemy kills are largely dependent on the loadout and playstyle of you and your teammates.

Then there’s the “complete X number of missions with no deaths” and scriptures, which are entirely dependent on the cooperation and performance of your teammates, and which require significantly more effort for less reward than the materials contracts.

Newer players may not realise it, but it was EVEN WORSE at launch. It seems Fatshark vastly overestimated how much free time their core audience has.

Overall they range from “I was going to do that anyway” to “Goddamnit you dumbass, YOU went and screwed up MY contract!” which is not something you want to have in a coop game.

[misto]

i would like melks tasks better if they related more to the investigation and operation in tertium. the scriptures and grimoires at least are grabbing papers and artifacts that the team on the ship could examine.

i was expecting to place data interrogator skulls on hidden terminals and leaving them to do their sabotage or breaking enemy servo skulls or something, starting the mission with a package to drop off at a dead drop halfway through the mission for one of our spies to pick up and use.

[UnLimiTeD]

I find some of the kill quests basically solve themselves.
Getting 750 team melee kills against dreg enemies is faster than succeeding at 8 missions even if you succeed at every mission.
1000 scabs at range? Naah. Scabs are usually a bit less common, anyways. Depends on the mission.
The book quests might actually not be so bad if picking up books meaningfully rewarded players for it.
As it is, it’s a bit of effort for a tiny reward, or in the case of grimmoires, a lot of risk of failing the mission for an equally inconsequential reward.
I’d certainly be open for more melk quest types. So everyone can get what they want. Oh, and more side missions.
And why they don’t have “kill specials” quests when they already include standard enemies and bosses I can’t quite understand. Would 1 or 2 extra quests really skew the balance?

[kagekiri]

Worth noting that the Scab/Dreg/Monstrosity kills are already team based, which is why I take them along with missions completed, diamantine, and plasteel (if I can help it).

I run 2 Psykers (and the rest of the classes), and get plenty of Melee kills with Psykers on those Melk quests, because my team’s kills count; if they didn’t, I would notice very easily, because the majority of my kills are ranged.

But yeah…definitely thought of nuking targets for ranged kills when Zealots were charging into scab groups, that issue still could come up. And some of your ideas definitely work, certainly better than what’s on offer now.

[zaygr]

Yeah, some contracts combined RNG and relying on teammates, like the complete secondary mission on a specific map contract… on a mission selection systems where it is entirely possible to go weeks without seeing a mission unless you’re camping the mission board 12 hours a day.

[se05239]

Doing Melk stuff should reward Aquillas but Fatshark will never do that.

[Macharia]

Melk’s Requisitorium is the epitome of wasted opportunity (a mantra that applies to the vast majority of Warhammer 40K video games, but especially Darktide).

If the tasks are already unimaginative and not at all engaging (did it really take that long to develop and apply ideas like those suggested by Misto?), the most serious problem, in my opinion, are the rewards redeemable by Melk, which are not only generated casually, but also of questionable quality, and what’s more, they only concern weapons and curios. It would be nice if the Requisitorium also allowed you to obtain cosmetics (like in the first Vermintide), Aquilas, consumable bonuses for missions.

Honestly, I stopped caring. If I manage to complete some tasks it is by pure chance and if I’m not mistaken the last time I redeemed a weapon from Melk was two months ago.

If crafting is the first problem to solve, I dare say Melk is the second.

[Molonious]

Melkmissions are junk, they’re really poorly constructed in terms of engaging me to play consistently. Having contracts share between all characters in the same way as the Wallet would go a long way even if they take longer to complete individually.

That said, just kinda stopped caring about them. I’ve got tens of thousands of Melkbuks, and I can’t recall the last time I bought anything from Melk, it’s all junk.