this post was written by beast of nurgle
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Im with you on this 100%. Fatshark, plz make solo rushing impossible
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This is unfortunately how stealth works in game. That or the guy you expected to have your back stealths away and runs to some random corner and gets you backatabbed.
Maybe he even comes back rezzes you while stealthed and gets you one shot by the crusher wailing on you.
It’s not rocket science, honestly. Director already responds to split teammates by explicitly spawning Pox Hounds, but Fatshark could potentially make this more aggressive for players who run ahead, ie. spawning Pox Hounds or Trappers directly on top of these players at a constant rate to discourage them from remaining separated.
Unfortunately I’m not sure there’s a way to differentiate the distance of teammates being forward or behind in a map, so this would be exponentially worse for slow players as well.
On a sidenote, Pox Hounds also don’t focus on the teammate that’s force-spawning them, which is kind of a flaw in that triggered response.
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i once kited a plague ogryn, and the remaining 2 alive allies decided, they would be better off running ahead, to rez their (i suspect) friend, who was quite a long way ahead, i couldn’t follow because they didn’t kill everything and some crushers and maulers blocked off key stairs so i had to loop, this happend multiple times on different choke points, after like 10m i died, after killing a couple disablers, a flamer mutant combo got me.
the ogryn and the specials who came for my head came for the two rushers, (their friend already dead again) and finished them too.
we easily could have killed the ogryn, and moved forward normally.
the director doesn’t take anything into account in that example only that im far behind.
and perhaps you could argue → a death like that causes the sucess rate to lower, therefore this behaivior gets punished with less sucess, but i highly doubt that they would learn anything.
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There’s no good answer for this. All I’m really saying is that there’s already parameters set for the director to respond to split teammates. And I definitely did acknowledge that this sort of tactic already can’t discriminate between teammates lagging behind or being super far ahead and the force-spawned Pox Hound doesn’t actually target the split teammate, and often just goes after the team instead.
Also that scenario just sounds like a crapshoot. It also sounds like you were playing with 3 friends that didn’t care about you.
I can happily say that after 1300 hours in Darktide I rarely run into bad teams like that. I usually just get the occasional player who instantly leaves on getting downed. I don’t really consider skill differences to be bad teams in this case. Sometimes things just don’t mesh up in that regard and players can’t compensate for teammates and their kits.
I only play in Auric Damnation if that helps at all.
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Every game has at least one lift, air lock, or hold and capture location afaik where the entire team need to regroup, many with multiple ones. That is clearly deliberate level design. Speedrunning is a fruitless exercise unless the team have pre-agreed to do it (e.g. the Zealot penance).
To that point, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a solo speed runner in my 800 hours. Sure there are those that spend a lot of time ahead. But they are also the same people who get trapped, die, then quit the game. No speed running that I can detect ;).
I really haven’t wasted any time or thought on them… well, until this post.
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It is. I’m pretty sure the devs even call them speedlocks in one of the blogs/update posts.
The most they can do in that regard is introduce more map design that’s hostile toward solo players. But that interferes with true solo players on the side, and can end up making maps feel way too “compartmentalized” instead of big and open. Having to constantly stop at speedlocks would just become a nuisance for the playerbase as a whole.
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My only beef with speedrunners - way less crafting materials from mission, like 200-250 short on Plasteel from Damnation run.
Speedrunning should be somewhat consensual thing with a team. Run ahead without asking “Let’s do a speedrun” = valid reason for vote kick, 3 other players might be here just to grind for mats. But it’s a bit brutal.
Here is the funny option.
“Yoink back!” vote along-side with vote kick. Requires only 2 votes to work. It teleports back (with a yoink! sound) a player who too far away from the team. Also can be used to rescue players who were pushed/thrown out of bounds.
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This is a genius idea and I support it 100%, please implement this immediately Fatshark
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I do find myself wondering if people are really running into all that many speedrunners. There are some, yes. But do people just quit the mission as soon as they see a knife/stealth Zealot? Because a very small percentage of them are actually speedrunners. Most of them play properly, which means rubber-banding back and forth (even behind the team to take care of threats), and never really being particularly far from the team.
Not saying there aren’t speedrunners… but if you’re quitting the game because you see a stealth Zealot in the lineup… you might be thinking the problem is bigger than it is.
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its also alot about perspective, maybe someone who struggles with a mixxed enemies and see’s another player running off, might consider him to to rushing while the other guy might thought he can handle that im in a position to do X for the team rightnow.
so i usually withold my judgement, until it gets blatantly obvious whats going on.
if i give most people the benefit of the doubt i rarely encounter toxic players, rushers and otherwise.
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Hey, how about a new mission on the board that rewards bonues on completion times?
It would be as special one, like the Karnak twins, so you can’t accidentally get it from Quickplay.
Call it a “flash” mission.
Then everyone’s happy.
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I always give it a chance to see what they do, but if they run past that ‘point of no return’
that’s at the start of every mission and start fighting, well before anyone else even gets close to it, I’m out.
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1300 hours? freaking hell…i hope you just typed one zero too much here friend…
Almost 1200 hours here, I got what I payed for.
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?
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In East NA (Auric) it’s only the rare jackass ruining it for everyone, i can go days without seeing one
But in the morning now that the playerbase is going down again, i queue in EU, and over there it’s pure hell
It seems that half the EU playerbase is a Stealth/Knife Zealot who makes a point to try and prove he’s the main character, and please undertsand that i’m barely exaggerating
It’s insane the difference in mentality between the two regions
For instance in East NA i barely saw a handful aholes who purposefully picked all the ammo knowing full well what they were doing, in 1000+ hours
But in EU, they’re everywhere
Side note, i think most maps could use a “step” intro like the Hourglass evelavtor, as opposed to a pit leading directly to the first pod of enemies, which conveniently sometimes is filled with Crushers and makes the Zealot Main Character insta quit 3 seconds after he jumped in alone with his team far behind because he’s so much better than everyone
Also a point people rarely mention, smooth brain speedrunners are annoying for sure, but Stealth suddenly dumping aggro on your unsuspecting teammates is absolutey GARBAGE DESIGN
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Funny you mention that. Seen this behaviour like once on EU and that’s my main server.
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I’m not sure what could be done about the Stealth Aggro Dump problem. I agree it’s kind of a problem, but I dunno what to do with that one. Like, the whole point of stealth is to make all the enemies stop attacking you, and the Veteran can certainly use it ever since they took away my damn Camo Expert skill yes I still want it back.
The problem arises when the enemies must all then attack someone else, which can cause allies to be overwhelmed. So I suppose a solution would have to somehow cause the stealthing player to stop being targeted while not increasing the number of enemies targeting other players? I guess activating stealth could confuse all enemies that had been targeting that player? Maybe they could keep attacking the place the stealthing player had been for like five seconds? Like a holo-decoy sorta skill or something. Or maybe all enemies that had been targeting a player get a big damage and speed debuff. But then that kind of thing might make the stealth ability too powerful and you’d need to, like, increase the cooldown a bunch or something to compensate.
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