Non-"toxic" scoreboard solution

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
22

scoreboards are not toxic in any way.

people who think the scoreboard is toxic lack the ability to be humble. they also lack the ability to appreciate other people.

they take it as a personal attack to their ego, if someone out performs them, so they lash out and start calling people names.

Under this logic anyone who’s is successful in anything in life is automatically toxic to these people.

Going around calling people who are good at video games toxic is inherently rooted in insecurity, ego issues, and very ironically toxic.

23

I hardly ever saw this, and the good far outweighs the bad. The more information people get to improve their game the better.

24

I think it does, and as I understand it, that was also Fatshark’s reasoning. Yes, people chase kills etc regardless, but my impression was that the scoreboard made it worse – and this was also Fatshark’s conclusion, and they presumably have actual data on this.

I’ve experienced a remarkable amount of toxicity on these forums, Reddit, etc., although just about all my in-game interactions have been great. Same with VT2; I never observed anyone being actively toxic in chat etc.

25

How exactly though? You can’t really get data on people’s motivations. Am I mauling every special instantly as bounty hunter because gimme dem green circles or because I have to do so to ensure we survive? It’s attributing motivation to something you can’t quantify. What dictates a match that was made worse by ‘circle chasing’ and how do you even determine that’s what they were doing, barring somebody straight up saying “I WANTED THE GREEN CIRCLE!”

Ha, I heavily jinxed myself, was trying to just do a run of Chaos Wastes tonight and had my first truly awful humans join. Warning: Racism and loudness. My friend and I were more baffled than anything by them. (He had voice chat muted and didn’t realize they were being that awful in it until after) Like, all right I guess. You… have fun with that. We’ll just move on to another run.

26

I agree with this, but it does not further encourage more.

I actually dont play because of the playstyle of many players.
But its also a me Problem, because i dont want to play premade on discord.
But the most pugs end up beeing not very much fun in regards of cooperation or having people with equal goals, playstyle or mindset.
Rushing Levels, not sticking together, not picking up ressources, books or just not waiting to engage into combat or just beeing unable to handle some situations like 3 vets unable to kill a sniper for a minute, recently i saw people not rescuing others from hanging a railing as if they wanted to punish their mistake and tell them if you fall down you deserve it to hang there.
It’s not common, but all these little things sum up to a more and more unfun pugs experience.

And individual stats wont change that maybe, but they would encourage stuff like this even more.

27

I thinking some stat tracking wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would help you get better. But I can also see why they haven’t added it to the game.

I think for most reasonable people a scoreboard is just to see how they did. Problem is not the reasonable people though :slight_smile:

If you did well you know you where mvp that round with or without a scoreboard maybe they could add private stack tracking that only you see after the team has split but before you come back to the mourning star?

2 Likes
28

Until your post and Statement there is No one arguing like that and some even point out its is not what you think it is, yet you start Rating and belittling others opinions, ignore their arguments, oppose it with your imo false claims and dont apreciate what they Said, but only pour oil into the fire or even only start a heated discussion with bringing this up.

Do you have ny arguments against: it encourages more to Play for individual stats than cooperate stats?

I said i want more team based stats, only individual stat i can think of fits is rescues.

Stop the "i’m not toxic, but you are " way to argue its not a helpfull or constructive way to debate.

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30

Eh, I’m genuinely curious to see what they have to say, Tinybike seems like a generally reasonable person from prior discussions although who knows, maybe they turn into a raging frothing abomination over the scoreboard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Or at the least they seem the time type (Damn thee insomnia) that might get the point that I’m getting at, even if they disagree.

31

Well, I think there are a bunch of ways you could do it. Off the top of my head, it seems like the easiest way would be to just look at if there is a correlation between probability of mission failure and the max % green circles earned by a single player. There probably is, and it’s probably due to a combination of carries (intentional or not) being more likely to fail, and green circle chasing. You could dig into this a little more by establishing a control group (perhaps of Fatshark employees who are known to be good team-players), having them do a bunch of carry missions with pickup groups, and then using this as a baseline. You could further parse the data by character and class played, and so on.

There are plenty of other ways you could tease out the information of whether someone was green circle chasing. Like for example generally the person with the most green circles will be a relatively skilled player, so if the mission fails, on average that person shouldn’t be the one who dies first. But green circle chasers in my experience do actually tend to die first, precisely because they’re chasing circles instead of working with the team. So you could examine the subset of missions that failed, in which a player with (for example) 75%+ of green circles died first, then look at whether they tended to collect the most green circles and die first in their other missions as well. Go through your entire database of players in this way until you have a reasonable study group of green-circle-getters-who-tend-to-die-first, and then compare this group’s max % green circles vs mission failure rate, to that of the disjoint group. You could further compare this data to data gathered from a game (like DT) that doesn’t present green circle/scoreboard information to players.

I have no idea how Fatshark actually came to their conclusion of course, or even what kind of data they actually have access to and retain. But I think this kind of thing is certainly possible to investigate in principle.

Yikes, that’s a whole nother level of toxicity!

32

You see all those people chasing badly designed penances that they have to cheese or otherwise harm their team to achieve? Those people will absolutely chase after big numbers for the sake of big numbers.

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33

Players who are strongly motivated by competition enjoy duels, matches, and battling it out on leaderboards. Games such as Call of Duty and League of Legends are particularly popular among this cohort. Conversely, gamers who find minimal appeal in competition gravitate towards non-adversarial games where there is no human conflict or rankings

The players who are motivated by community are driven by sharing experiences with others, and tend to be more collaborative and dependent on others within gameplay. Games in which the majority of players are motivated by community emphasize teamwork and collaboration

Gamers who score high on challenge are driven by the ability to practice and master a skill. Popular games among this cohort feature complex moves and difficult missions, rewarding mastery over time

Gamer’s who score high for the fantasy motivation want to be part of the game world. A type of psychological teleportation, it hinges on the gamer’s willingness to be transported to an alternate reality and the richness of that alternate world: its lore, its scope and its visual design.

FS had for sure made some Market research and created a game on that data plus having a philosophy and knowing their own playerbase and community or wanted to build up something new and different and were looking for some compromise.
Seems they failed hard at that or now have a hard time to get this on track again.

I’m not a VT or Horde Slasher Player, and i’m more of a PvP rather than a PvE player if we talk about online and action games, but i also enjoy various WH40k themed TBS games and will maybe also love Owlcats Rogue Trader RPG, although i did not like their first Pathfinder game Kingmaker and havent buyed the 2nd game WotR.
And that is mostly because of the settings, but also some design decisions.

I came here and to DT for WH40k and having an immersive CooP Action game to find out, immersion is well done, RNG game mechanics are very frustrating, but i could ignore to some point to then find out the Community is playing more competetive wants a scoreboard more urgently than a good story and doesnt like cooperative mechanics like coherency very much, but rather going for scoreboards and builds for mastery etc.
That was not what i came for and therefore the game and community is not that much for me sadly.

I’m still curious what FS will change and to what part of the community they are heading to or if they still try to please everyone, what we all know will mostly fail and in the end nobody will be happy with.
But maybe this way they can encourage more people to buy their product and don’t care for player retention that much than some think or want them to.

A good marketing strategy could be to try to please everyone first and sell as much copies as possible and stay vague of the games course first and at some point start change the course to please the biggest part of the commnity that is still playing.

I’d hope for a more community, cooperatively and grimdark fantasy/ immersive/ story related game, but i think they will not do this and first try to please everyone and in the end go for competition and mastery in a Coop PvE game.
Although that is weird and odd imho, because competition and mastery in a PvE Coop game is very limited compared to a PvP game where competition and mastery is much deeper and takes longer to accomplish.

But only FS knows.

1 Like
34

Without the scoreboard things are much more toxic.

no one knows how other teammate did , no one adds other as friend, you either need to do a hard clutch to show that you are a good player or no one is going to know you and add you as a friend.

all this time i havent even received or sent a single friend request, unlike VT2 atleast made 6 friends.

35

Personal stats or what games like Warframe or Overwatch do: give every player a single thing they excelled at.

36

I didn’t mind the scoreboard in VT2, but the stats on that do have the capacity to skew how people play. For example, if you’re the kind of person that usually plays rear guard you will never be the highest scoring, even though you contribute substantially to the team’s success. If you measure your contribution by the scoreboard you are straight up disincentivized to play that way, even if it can lead to overall worse team performance if nobody takes special care to always keep an eye on the rear.

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37

You and others miss the mindgame behind it.

It´s NOT “Yeah i´m going to flame you within the 3 seconds of scoreboard because i´ve more green circles!”.
It´s what it creates in the players head.

Such scoreboards are similar to the KD in PvP games.

  1. Poeple will start to play for it instead of playing it in a cooperative way as it is normally intended. They´ll chase for green circles or even prefer to let the team die to show their skills to them.

  2. Poeple will get more self-susteem in the game even if it relies on nothing but luck or broken classes / weapons. It doesn´t mean that they start to flame others with less green circles, but they´ll faster start to moan if someone does something wrong, dies, or “don´t follow their rules” within their playtime.

Such behaviors are part of Vermintide. Of course you can say it´s just individuals being so at any time, thinking they´re the best etc… But even if that´s the case, scoreboards do nothing else but pushing that feeling and confirm that they´re in the right to act as they do.
Again, it´s nothing else like KD in PvP games and pretty much any discussions about skill, mistakes or whatever are boiled down to “But i´ve a higher KD, but i´ve more kills this run, you suck!” etc…

Just think about it and you´ll find dozens of examples to prove it. It´s also one of the reasons why so many poeple will always play meta. They want to get rewarded with a feeling of doing great. And while this feeling would be higher if they achieve it with “harder work”, they don´t want to take the higher risk to lose.
In that way also “not so good players” get a wrong feeling of being great and start to flame others for their own mistakes.

Yes, data can´t be toxic. But what it causes to the players minds can be.

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38

Indeed! We already have a bunch of this with penances like “revive four trillion players” and everyone running to revive a dude surrounded by 10 shotgunners, 2 Daemonhosts and 16 crushers.

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39

This. Not once. Not one time have I heard anyone verbally abusing anyone else over the scoreboard. I don’t know why people are terrified of some competition, but to say it’s “Toxic” is ludicrous with no evidence.

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40

The social tools are totally broken in DT though. I’ve wanted to add people as friends after good matches before and it’s amazing how hard this is to do if they don’t spawn into the same Mourningstar instance as you. The recently played with tab simply doesn’t work. You have to exactly remember their Steam handle, and then you can possibly find them via Steam search if they a) have a relatively unusual handle so there aren’t 10,000 search results and b) have a public Steam profile.

Unsurprisingly, I haven’t made any lasting friendships in DT. FS really should prioritize fixing the social tools, especially bringing back the “keep the current strike team together” button.

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41

I’ve never observed it in the actual VT2 game either, but this forum sure does have some egregious examples of it.

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42

That might lead to some conclusions but on the flip side it’s generally accepted that in my group if I go down first there’s a much higher chance of our group wiping. I also generally have the big ole green circles. Correlation /=/ causation and all that jazz. That still doesn’t quantify motivation behind things, nor does it ultimately establish the importance of said green circles to players. EG: A match for me might look like this:

I don’t go hunting for green circles, I simply have to be the one popping specials or the run will go a lot worse on the whole.

You could attempt to establish rough correlations but ultimately actually establishing A) If they’re actually being toxic towards the team and B) Chicken or the egg? Did the team wipe because they went down first and were carrying the team or did the team wipe because they were chasing kills?

Without actively watching every match you can’t really establish anything, and even then without knowing someone’s motivation there’s no way to know why they’re acting the way they are.

Particularly bizarre since they just joined and immediately did that, there was zero interaction with them. Haven’t really run across anybody being that idiotic in years.

@RasMoti : That depends heavily on how you even view the scoreboard. While I like seeing how things shook out in practice after the match, during said match the amount I care about MUH CIRCLES is slim to none. You can literally remove the negative connotations from the scoreboard by a simple rename: “Scoreboard” to “Run summary”, and simply removing green circles/highlighting who ‘won’ at a category. Do I think it’s silly to potentially need to do that? Yep. But people are irrational.