Title.
I ground out the 250 of each map type save for repair, which I was working on when the new patch dropped.
This is the second round of penance requirements being lowered and I don’t like it. I hope fat shark doesn’t bend the knee on the consecutive wins requirement.
Opinion: people need to not get upset when bs grindy challenges that ultimately mean nothing are made less grindy when they did them when they were grindy
I agree with Enclave: I think difficult Penances are great. I think grindy Penances are horrible.
I assume you’re referring to the Auric Maelstrom one? If so, I’m kind of 50/50. I think the challenge itself is great, no problems with it, even if “Darktide happens” and you get killed for some BS that would’ve been very, very hard to stop. I hate that it makes all the randoms in pubs disappear the second they hit the floor.
This. Hell, I’m even of the opinion that legit difficult penances being changed to be more reasonable is also fine.
The first renditions of On Overwatch and Make Every Shot Count were hard. They were also incredibly poorly designed and I’m very glad that they got adjusted to be more reasonable, even if I wound up being lucky enough to get them pre-adjustment.
Opinion: people need to not get upset, when bs grindy challenges that ultimately mean nothing, do not cater to people who do not like that type of content.
If it is your opinion, that it is meaningless anyway, why do you care if the requirement is so high that it is not accessible to you?
If it does not matter anyway, why does it need to be changed?
Why do people feel entitled to have everything tailored to them, and to get everything they want, independent of how little effort they wan to put in?
It is always easy to say “why do you want it changed? it is meaningless anyway” just after having that thing changed to fit what you like (and others dislike). Apparently, you cared enough previously, when it was not the way you like.
Not a single one of the grindy penances that were changed, had to be changed in order to make the 4500 penance points (the end of the penance point reward track) accessible.
It is a time investment, so it means something.
However flimsy the original reasoning behind the grindier penances, fact remains that those who got them at the time put in a certain amount of effort in that others now wont have to. Whatever your feelings on it are, that does diminish the original value of the achievement. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that making those types of changes after the fact like this is not the smoothest way to do things. The smarter thing would be to either add another tier of penance that’s easier than the grindiest one or add yet another level above the previous high. But to just just devalue the hardest achievements with no other motivation than “one group thought it was too hard/boring/grindy/whatever” without considering how you’re devaluing the efforts of another group seems like an even flimsier reason than whatever the original idea was.
Has anyone made much progress on the “Unseen Predator” penance for vet? I never use the Infiltrator skill so I can’t tell if that penance is just especially grindy or if I’m doing something wrong because I have no frame of reference.
Yeah why don’t they just revert to the previous requirements and simply add more penances for the newer reduced requirements? Totally bizarre this wasn’t the way they did it. Probably an afternoon of work to add a few frames and penances to the existing list.
Everything ultimately means nothing. But the time investment feels like a slap in the face. Putting in the work on a penance just to watch it get reduced to 40% of its original value feels bad.
I like that penances ask me to do crazy stuff. That’s the entire theme of the game. Is to do insane stuff. We’re rejects doing missions taking on the impossible. Being asked to do the impossible 5 times in a row fits.
Yes!
The grindy penances are basically nothing except just that.
They are not difficult, but take a lot of time. Time investment is pretty much the only thing that goes towards those penances.
The only reward for them is an exclusive but ultimately meaningless cosmetic, that allows players to show to themselves and to others “i invested a lot of time to do this”.
The entire point of grindy penances is, that players who want to, can spend a lot of time on them.
These penances are not required for anything.
There is no need to make them more accessible to anyone.
Anyone who does not like them, can simply ignore them.
Anyone who does not have the time to grind for them, does not lose out on anything.
Nothing is lost for those people. Except the badge that says “this is the badge i got by spending a lot of time doing that”.
It is one thing to rebalance some of penances that are very annoying to do, like some of the class penances, which can be done within a few missions. No biggie.
Finishing those penances is not a matter of great skill, or great time investment.
On the other hand, there are penances where the entire point is, that they are very difficult and require great skill, or that they simply take a lot of time.
Making an incredibly difficult penance easy, removes the entire point of that penance and devalues the effort that players put into improving their skills to beat that penance.
Removing much of the grind from a very grindy penance (over a year after releasing it), devalues the potentially hundreds of hours that players have put into those.
It’s not as hard as you might think. Just make sure you have the upgrade for the skill that actually staggers enemies when it deactivates and then just run into a horde and trigger it. Took me no more than a couple of auric rounds.
It took me a bunch of Malice rounds because I was acclimating + trying to cheese Flawless Execution at the same time. It’s much faster at higher enemy density, just make sure you can survive the results.
Agreed. Especially when there’s cosmetics and other stuff people actually want behind those penances.
I had almost all of the old penances. Many of them stuff they addressed over the last overhaul about a year ago, and put into private matches, too. To me this is like the American student loan forgiveness issue. Many of the original penances were horribly grindy and some of them downright trollish in nature. They should’ve just recognized their mistakes and fixed them into something reasonable, maybe as a compromise even added some small rewards like credits or plasteel to the people who already completed them. But instead they went with the private match thing precisely because they did bend the knee, only they bent that knee towards the old players out of fear for backlash.
But the main problem here imo is that penances aren’t just any random achievements like in most other games, something just for those who collect them for their own sake. They come with actual rewards many of us are looking forward to, part of the reason we play the game at all. This means they should be reasonable to get, both in terms of grind and not relying on private friends-only matches either.
My biggest gripe with the penance update is how little it has to do with the player agency they professed to be focused on in their previous updates. I thought we could buy some rewards or bypass some penances with the penance points, letting us focus on the challenges we actually want to do, on the characters we actually like to play. Instead it’s a simple progression system with no choice or agency at all. And the whole rarity thing doesn’t help either.
For example as a main psyker, I was looking forward to some way to express that fact. A title, frame or something you only get with x hours / missions / whatever in as a psyker for example. Instead we just got the same basic general stuff no matter what we play as, and progression itself demands you to play all classes. Titles have no personalization, just the rarity. So everyone who has Auric Storm Survivor obviously uses that title. And ofc. the progression system itself means those of us who main something in particular, now need to spend most of our time playing anything else but that just to get the penances for those rewards.
I’m happy for the update and new “content”, absolutely. But I do feel it could’ve done better, especially when it comes to that agency. 
In your opinion, is there ANYTHING that would be ok to be locked behind a very grindy or very difficult penance?
How would you solve the “issue” of having penances that not everyone might get?
Reduce the requirements to zero? Should everything just be a participation trophy?
Do you think that if you want something, you are automatically entitled to get it for what ever small amount of effort you are willing to put in?
Sometimes, the most difficult content rewards the best gear. Completely fair. You are better at the game, so you get better loot. You earned it.
Some people complain about that. Because they feel entitled to have the best gear.
In some games like darktide, the most difficult and grindy challenges give you purely cosmetics reward that have no impact on gameplay. You are better at the game, or did something time consuming, so you get something exclusive to show for it. You earned it.
Now people complain about that as well. Because they feel entitled to that, too.
Even if there is no reward at all, some people might want to have all of the penances completed, but without wanting to put in the effort.
People will still complain. Because they feel entitled to everything.
It does not matter what the reward for a penance is. If the penance is somewhat difficult or has some prestige attached to it, those entitled people will want that reward given to them.
They are lazy and jealous. They want the reward, because they want to be “cool”, but they do not have any intention to earn it.
Those people want everything given to them. They act like badly parented children and will not accept if anything is not available to them.
They are a disease to any community they become a part of, and they should never be catered to.
I saw your first draft, and though you toned it down the message remains much the same.
What about you? Do you think if you want something, it should always be locked behind a minimum of 30 years of hard work and labour, require a full organized team with 5x 3h training sessions every week, and anyone who couldn’t handle that should just be banned from the game?
Ridiculous extremes like this don’t really add to a conversation, save for making sure the other person knows you’re not in it for dialogue. Let’s just save us both the time and stop it here. 
Edit: Didn’t wanna leave it at that though.
My point isn’t to make things easy but to make things reasonable. Grind in general is a very bard argument for “hard work” or earning anything, it should be about more than that. But mostly I’m a fan of agency and reason, so I want for example psyker cosmetics, titles, etc. to be obtainable by playing a psyker instead of grinding an oggie. Same for every other class. And I believe meaningful rewards of a general nature that everyone should like and enjoy, should be obtainable through many different means for many different people. So for example locking content behind friends only teams, guilds, or specific timegated content which instantly makes it unfair to a lot of people is a huge no for me.
Obviously doing this, or even deciding on where to draw that line isn’t easy. But few things worth doing in life are, easy that is. 
Also if there is a badly done penance with too much grind or unreasonable / unfair requirements, I’m all for fixing it for everyone instead of placating those who would feel offended because they got it when it was hard. Just like that student loan thing. I had almost all of the old penances and I certainly don’t feel neglected because they made them easier. It’s the opposite really, I’m happy for them.
There’s a fine line between making unlocks/rewards easy to attain and almost completely diminishing their value. There’s sense to the argument of “just because you want it doesn’t mean you can just have it” but obviously, the discussion is around where to place the line. To me, it boils down to the specific rewards. The coolest stuff should definitely be locked behind the toughest challenges. That just makes sense to me and I’m sure many others and I don’t think that’s an issue. What was always the problem with the penances since release is that far too often they revolve around playing the game in a completely inorganic, nonsensical way to achieve some arbitrary goal that in itself makes no sense. There’s certainly a lot less of that in this batch of penances so overall I don’t find their requirements too unattainable or obtuse. If it’s just “grindy” that to me translates into “it takes time”, which maybe it should. I don’t think anyone can make a blanket declaration as to the validity of every penances requirements, so really the devil is in the details of each one.
Except i actually am interested in a conversation and asked you this, because i would actually like to know.
That is why i asked you multiple questions.
Let’s say there are penances for playtime and each stage comes with a portrait frame.
play for 50 hours
play for 100 hours
play for 150 hours
play for 200 hours
play for 250 hours
Those penances would simply track your overall playtime and allow you to show off your “progress” via cosmetics.
Their rewards are purely cosmetic and they do not grant penance points (or maybe they do, but you can very easily get all penance point rewards without those additional points).
Three questions for you:
I want a penance where you have to be the only player in the team that doesnt die. They could call it “imposter” or “Keyser Söze”
Also “fly me to the moon” kill team mates X times with explosive barrels.
“Pinball Wizard” get thrown by a mutant into a trapper net or pox burster.
I only wish there was a way to ledge a nugle slug that has eaten an team mate “Express train to hell”?
They shouldn’t have changed all the pre existing penances again. But they also shouldn’t have added a bunch more of grindy meaningless penances that take no more effort than occasionally throwing a different aura on.