There’s a particular kind of toxic player in this game who I will refer to as The Speedrunner. These players charge ahead as fast as possible with no thought to the rest of their team, though they will come back for people who are incapacitated, sometimes. They don’t bother to clear rooms of enemies, even if the enemies are currently attacking their teammates. They don’t bother to pick up loot or equipment. They don’t bother to tag anything, not that it would do any good anyway, because they’re always multiple rooms ahead of everyone else. Speedrunners have gotten very good at dealing with incapacitation specialists like hounds and trappers, so they think they’re all set, and don’t need to be part of a cohesive unit.
I hate Speedrunners terribly and I want to hurt them. This behavior is detrimental to the team and community as a whole. I assume that it goes against the spirit of the game and intended playstyle, and so it should be severely punished. I saw something in a patch notes once about a system to punish people who run too far ahead, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.
Here are some dreadfully spiteful but hopefully still fair suggestions. These are predicated on the idea that the Loner skill is either changed or doesn’t stop any of the following suggested consequences.
Idea 1: Squad Broken
If your coherency stays at 1 for too long (say, over three or four uninterrupted minutes, and with an exception for when everyone else is dead) you become Broken and suffer penalties like:
- Greatly increased susceptibility to being stunned by enemy melee hits and being suppressed
- Even worse accuracy penalty from being suppressed
- Muted audio cues from being targeted by enemy shooters or about to be struck from behind
- Muted audio cues from specialists, elites, and daemonhosts
- 75% reduced stamina regeneration
- 75% reduced toughness regeneration from all sources
Broken is temporarily removed by returning to coherency, but will return if coherency is broken again. It can only be removed more permanently and the counter reset if you stay in coherency for an extended period of time, say over twenty or thirty seconds.
Idea 2: The Dark Ritualist
New kind of specialist, a rogue psyker/minor sorcerer witch cultist type fellow who spawns if a player has a coherency of 1 for more than a minute or two. The Ritualist teleports into the area and psychically grabs a player who is alone, lifting them off the ground and encasing them in a warp field. The Ritualist is invulnerable and invisible until it grabs a player, whereupon the grabbed player becomes immobilized and invulnerable so other enemies can’t hurt them, and the Ritualist then begins chanting loudly and glowing brightly for something like ten to twenty seconds. If the Ritualist completes his chant, the grabbed player is essentially Brain Burst and dies instantly, and the Ritualist laughs and disappears. The Ritualist is also immune to explosions and fire from the environment, and cannot be damaged by the player he is targeting even if his shield is down, so he can’t be deterred by the Speedrunner throwing a grenade just before they get grabbed. The Ritualist has one hitpoint and no stagger resistance, and will immediately drop the grabbed player if suppressed or pushed, whereupon he will teleport away and despawn.
The Ritualist’s psychic grab cannot be dodged or avoided in any way. Pox hounds, trappers, and mutants are no deterrent to Speedrunners because it’s possible to avoid them. It’s even pretty fun to be good at soloing specials or elites. The Ritualist is not supposed to be fun; his only function is to hard counter people who are way too far ahead of everyone else. If the team is ANYWHERE nearby, rescuing someone from the Ritualist is extremely easy.
Idea 3: Inquisitorial Death Sentence
This one is my favorite. I remember having this idea like all the way back when Darktide was announced.
If a player goes too far from team they are flagged as Out Of Formation, and they’ll say the usual “where’s the team” line and someone else will say the usual “get back here” line. Players then begin to accumulate stacks of Out Of Formation the longer they stay away from the team, and even more stacks if they move in a direction away from the averaged locations of the other players, and lose stacks if they move towards them.
If a player reaches a certain higher number of stacks of Out Of Formation, they get another warning where the mission handler will call them up and tell them to return to the squad while explicitly threatening them. Something like
Zola: You are too far from your team. If you stray any further, I’ll have to consider this an act of insubordination, and there will be consequences. Do I make myself clear?
Morrow: 'Ere! Are you looking to defect, Reject!? You got one chance cuz I’m such a nice guy, get the hell back to the squad or I’ll have you executed on the spot!
Masozi: Hey, I see you down there! Are you trying to make a run for it? Trust me, you won’t get very far. Get back with the others before they kill you for treason.
Hadron: Varlet. Your repeated failure to maintain unit cohesion has been noted. Return to your fellow varlets immediately, or you shall be punished for dereliction of duty.
If the player reaches maximum stacks, Sefoni calls them up and then makes them Peril Overheat and they die instantly.
Idea 4: Give Me My Vengeance
This is a terrible idea, don’t do it, but my vindictive anger would love it if being out of coherency for over a minute made you stop being immune to friendly fire damage.
EDIT: a future post with some clarifications
Seems a lot of people have missed an important detail in my original post: time measurement.
It’s actually really easy to differentiate between a teammate who is consistently going ahead and a parasite who is trying to go solo and completely ignoring the team, and I already accounted for that. My proposed punishments all have a several minute long time requirement; if a player is ahead of the team for multiple uninterrupted minutes, with bonus points added for continuing to get further away, that’s when the punishment kicks in.
I’ve had some rudimentary amateur experience designing custom maps in old strategy games, and determining if a player is ahead rather than behind is trivial, at least if it’s a linear map. You just divide the map up into a bunch of segments that each have a progress number assigned to them that starts at 1 at the beginning and then increases as they go. Then you can tell if a player is far ahead or far behind by just checking if the progress value of the region the lone player is in is higher or lower than that of the other three.
The idea isn’t to punish a player for running too far ahead right away, it’s to make it literally impossible to play the game in a manner that involves abandoning your team, so that no one even bothers to try, at least not more than once. I think there’s a fundamental flaw in the idea of just spawning more hounds and trappers if someone is alone: players who completely don’t care about their team are not going to be dissuaded by more challenging gameplay. A bigger challenge is what they want, otherwise they would stay with the team because that’s safer. Like I said right in the first paragraph of the OP, more hounds and more trappers is an incentive for this type of parasitic solo player, because it’s still possible to Skill your way through any number of hounds and trappers, and that’s what they’re interested in trying to do. If you want to stop them from doing this, you need to make it just flatly impossible. That’s the reason I call them “Speedrunners” because people who actually do try to speedrun other games aren’t deterred by higher difficulty. They’re the type of people who wear the ring that increases your damage but lowers your health. They look at more incapacitation specialists and go “oh boy! can’t wait to get so good at dodging that I can get through that!” (no shade on actual speedrunners of non-team games by the way, speedrunning in other stuff is awesome)
That’s why I advocate for the Inquisitorial Death Sentence. It’s not a really hard challenge, it’s just complete impossibility, so that players get nothing out of abandoning their team except an exploded Battle Royale collar.
Oh yeah and to the mouth breathers who were saying ‘dur sounds like it’s your own fault if one guy running ahead makes you lose’ I never said anything about me losing because of these dirtbags, I said detrimental to the team. That is a different thing that I guess I have to explain to you in small words. It is a team game. I am having Fun when I am with a team, doing Teamwork Things. If someone on my team is being Bad For The Team, then I am having Less Fun. Since the devs have already tried to stop people doing Bad For The Team Things, I think they probably would agree that it is Less Fun when someone does Bad For The Team Things, and so such things should be discouraged, not just ignored. I am not terribly satisfied with the suggested “solution” of me having to inconvenience myself by leaving the game and finding a new one when someone else behaves badly, and while I’ll do that for the time being since there is no better option, I would like to make it known that I want a better option, hence this thread. Does that make sense? Do you understand, Varlet?
Kick them, plain and simple, accept vote kick, pay attention to what is going on on your whole screen not just your cursour and problem will solve itself - they will have to start doing premade groups. Or use barrels and explode them out of the map, dont free them from nets, let them die - if the are no consequemces in game there is nothing to stop them, complaints on forum definitly will not stop this. Suggestions like OP ones might at some points, but first FS need to acknowledge that this is still a problem.
