Player Agency - Darktide Has Almost None

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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The design of this game demonstrates that it has been built around metrics unrelated to player fun and satisfaction.

Aforementioned contacts to get that specific weapon you wanted - nowhere to be found.

Ability to try out all the weapons available to your class from the start - nowhere to be found.

Lively social hub to interact with other players? - Mourning Star silent ghostships with pointless running around (mostly to check the item shop for updates…).

Ability to acquire/modify your weapons to fit your playstyle? - Get f**cked Rejects. All weapons and perks/blessings are locked behind several layers of RNG.

 *sigh*

The engaging and visceral experience of the actual gameplay is scuppered by almost every system that surrounds it.

Tomes and grims? - Why bother when the risk/reward is so out of whack? In V2 there are tangible benefits to adding books to your run, not so much in DT.

Why bother with weekly quests other than an opportunity for another (very random) role of the dice? Pick up 25 scriptures (individually?!?) No thank you.

The only strategy necessary for the weeklies is to acquire 3000 of the currency and then just twiddle your thumbs until a better than mediocre weapon that you want pops up. Will it have the configuration you want? - probably not. Can you craft your mediocre weapon into something you want? - probably not.

The current solution - make due with what you have and ignore all of the anti-player systems Fatshark has intentionally put in place to increase ‘player retention’.

Still having fun with the game, but jeepers, can we please condense the 2 year+ fixing cycle that was necessary in V2 to make it a cohesive player friendly product?

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They want my money but won’t respect my time.

I have other things to do that play your godforsaken roulette, FartShart.

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What makes this even worse and what makes me understand this system even less is, as soon as you have a reasonably ok item, there is basically no more point in farming resources or checking the store because the chance to get an actual upgrade is so miniscule that chasing it is simply a waste of time.

If FatShark think that this rng heavy system helps with player retention, they might be right in regard to SOME types of player.
However, other types of player hate this rng system and already have, or will quit because of it.

I spent over 2000 hrs playing Vermintide 2 and spent a bunch of money on it, because the gameplay itself is fun and because the game gives us agency about almost everything.
We are free to play any map we want, at any difficulty we want, when we want.
While item acquisition is initially pure rng and while rerolling traits and properties is rng, this randomness is not a problem.
On lower difficulties, traits and properties simply do not really matter, but by the time they actually do matter (max lvl, playing Legend and Cataclysm+ difficulties), the amount of resources we have farmed, allows to reroll our items a few times and make them better.
Playing on higher difficulty grants red items with guaranteed max rolls and while opening boxes might not give is the red item we want, right away, at least we can salvage the items we do get, and then craft the item we want.
We can play the game and by the time it matters, we can get items with the stats that we want in order to complete our builds and play in the way we want.
We get a good necklace, charm or trinket? Great. We can use it on ALL of our characters.

While the vermintide 2 crafting system is not perfect by any measure, at least it gives some agency to the player and pretty much guarantees to get the item we want, by farming for it.

Darktide does not allow any of this and therefore will (outside of the gameplay itself) not offer anything to long term players who like their playtime being rewarded in any way.
Have fun getting items with randomized basestats by not playing the game, upgrading them with resources you farmed on low difficulty missions for efficiency, and then throwing them straight in the trash because just an other layer of rng bricked the items by giving them a few bad stats that you can not reroll because FatShark purposely made the system that way.

If Darktide had a system in place, where playing on Damnation difficulty would allow to increase the stats of an item to eventually max them all, reroll ALL perks and ALL blessings (or better, just let us pick which exact one we want), there would be a long term goal that people can play for. We would have agency and our time would be rewarded.
Maybe even add a special shiny skin for each weapon type that is unlocked once a player completely maximizes an item of that weapon type through skill, time and effort (5+2+2 damnation missions to max one item).
Such a system would provide countless hours of content, grant player agency and allow to actually play with the items and build we want to.

The way it stands now, i and many others will likely go back to vermintide 2 or play a different game alltogether, pretty soon.

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yep consecrated a bunch of items and rarely ever found satisfaction doing so. felt more like my time was wasted, but the mission game play kept me going. i really enjoy the missions feel different enough due to how mobs spawn differently, that was what kept me going and the gameplay of the weapons.

everything next to that sucks tho. the consecration is a slap in your face, the limited offerings for weekly currency are laughable, the armoury exchange is a joke. it all mostly gives items i do not want.

its mind blowing to me why its like that. its not rocket science to make it functional and fun, what in the name of the emperor happened here? who in their right mind wants it like that for their enjoyment? while i was leveling it was not so noticable as i was busy with missions and just generally gearing up i took what i got and did not think much about it, but now i want certain blessings on certain weapons with certain perks. i have expectations of the weapon handling and capability that i prefer, but there is no way to get it.

i thought like ok the gameplay is cool the shops suck but the crafting will make up for it, but honestly i lost faith after the release of this idiotic example of game design called crafting.
the only way for me to enjoy this is without rng but a clear linear path of grind for the stuff i want.
cut the rng crap @Fatshark

i like to imagine how the development process goes and how developers would converse with each other about which features should be in which way. imagine they found this to be good, imagine what this implies for the future quality of the game?

it feels like the crafting and item upgrade process was designed by an entirely different studio.
its so rng it is nonsensical.

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