#1 We need to stop calling it “crafting” in this game because from what has been released and what the dev blogs say, your not crafting anything your just upgrading/rerolling. The FOMO shop is your “crafting.”
#2 I can’t believe I didn’t notice it day one, but a friend was explaining how “power level” and the sliders work to me yesterday… And it hit me like a truck… these games item system is more akin to raid shadow legends/epic 7 then it is to Vermintide 2. Unlike most “pc gamers” I’m not a shame to admit I’ve played mobile games since 2017 (release of fire emblem heroes) and still to this day try out new ones to see if their any good. So I feel like I have some room to talk on the topic. The sliders and “upgrading blessings tiers” is 100% a mobile thing, the point of the sliders is to make it were you have to spend weeks if not months trying to get the “perfect mid/maxed” gear.
“Sweet, I finally got a max item level chainsword… oh… but the damage slide is only 64%… it can go to 88%… back to grinding”
or
“Sweet, I finally got a max item level chainsword… oh and… it’s got the max damage bonus of 88%… but only 3% penetration and 5% mobility… back to grinding.”
Now imagine you get a “god roll”(max item level and perfect sliders in everything you want) purple and you go upgrade it to orange… and it puts a property or trait that’s counterintuitive to your build… so back to grinding, and when you finally get your truly perfect item you can feed this item to it because for a mid/maxing end game build it’s worthless now. Side note “feeding” multiple of the same items to up the properties/traits % is a big part of the trash fire that is the below 2% or lower pull rate mobile games.
How do you fix the problem? Remove sliders altogether and have all items of the same name have fix stats like damage, mobility, pen, etc. Properties and traits can still be rng but should be able to reroll in the upgrade “crafting” station. This is likely not to happen for the first year or 2 of these games life though because the whole reason it’s in the game is to get you to accumulate “more time played” so they can show investors. It’s the same reason when you start the game up you have one screen that’s skipped by “any key” the next is skipped only by “esc” and the third is only progressed only by pressing “space”, they could all be “any key” but the people who play daily will bumble it up every now and then which thousands of people spending extra seconds on the intro screen during the year adds up to a couple extra days in “time played.”… Same reason you can’t scrap trash items for upgrade material and instead have to search maps for it. It’s to keep you from b-lining straight to objectives and completing missions as quick as you can, and instead incentivizing you to search everywhere in each map. Making each mission accumulate “more time played.” Same reason they got rid of all the keyboard shortcuts from Vermintide 2. You used to be able to pick your character, load into the castle, hit M, click play, and your in a match within a couple of seconds of loading into the game. In Darktide though, you have to walk to the map not only when you load in for the first time but after each match too, and there’s no “jump off the cliff directly behind spawn, to respawn immediately in the “ready to start match” area” like in Vermintide… Which the walk to the map is also a thing so you can see someone’s skin and be like “wow that looks cool… oh… it’s $12.50 in in-game currency… and you have to buy two $10 in-game currency bundles to get that much… but it looks real cool… I think I might buy it…” but that’s a discussion for another time…
P.S. Fatshark, in Vermintide 2 only 3% of the player base ever got all characters to max level… and I have no doubt I’m in a 0.5-0.7% of the player base that has all red items specifically rolled for every subclass, but this level of grinding is not good for your game as a whole. Out of the 9 people I got to try Vermintide 2 only one of them got a single character to max, and then he started trying to level a second and basically say “forget it” and quit… Please reconsider what your doing to Darktide, you copy and pasted so much from Vermintide… but left out basically all the quality of life stuff that Vermintide accumulated over the years.