Player survey state of the game

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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This could go into one of the wow I hate the survey threads or the ones bashing it’s spelling, its choices, or the cluelessness apparent of it. Posting as it’s own thread is needless.

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Fatshark deserves the ridicule.

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Whatever, go fish with trolling on Reddit.

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The video is more about the state of the game then it is about the survey.
The sad part is that this dude made a lot of DT content and was almost never critical of the game until now.
Guess we all have a breaking point.

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It´s a survey to do better and to find priorities to initiate changes if needed. Really what´s wrong with ppl?!

“FS doesn´t listen, meeeeeh”.
“FS wants to listen, meeeeeh”.

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More and more paid DT partners are putting out critical videos. Even being paid by FS can’t make people ignore all the shortcomings for too long.

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Nice rhetorical switcharoo you did there.

The opposite of “doesn’t listen” is “listens” not “wants to listen”.
I don’t want FS to start WANTING to listen. I want them to actually do something about it so that we can say “FS listened”.

If FS, indeed, wants to listen, they could use all the feedback they got so far.
Instead, we get a survey with questions that don’t seem to indicate that FS is even remotely aware of the major issues with the game.

Personally, I think FS got more than enough feedback on major issues people are having with the game, but hey, I am not against them getting more since they obviously think they do need more feedback. Sure, let’s see what it leads to except more delays, of course.

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As said in the other thread, the handful of poeple here are not even near the full playerbase nor representing a majority.

There are a bunch of players fine with the game and playing and most of the times those players will never find the way into a forum. Then we´ve players just being mad about performance issues and crashes, meanwhile enjoying the game. There are players without much issues but dislike the side-systems. Others miss content, a real endgame and variety between the missions.

Performance and crashes should be top priority and that´s nothing they need to listen for. The rest is highly opinion-based and a lot of “feedback” here or on steam is nothing but a big shitstorm where poeple can´t even concentrate on the topic, it´s just about bashing and new assumptions to make the game looking more bad than it´s actually.

The survey is a good thing to reach ALL players and to get better data to cater the most as fast as possible. One week more or less doesn´t matter if they focus on it.

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I doubt that the number of people who are both:

  • still playing the game
  • not on this forum
  • noticed the survey in the launcher
  • willing to go through the whole survey

is as large as you think, but neither of us has the real numbers.

You put shitty things in your unfinished game - you get a shitstorm in both forums and the community in general. That’s how it is suppose to work.
That said, I don’t know what you mean by “a lot”, but I think a lot of feedback here on the forum has been not just constructive, but also went so far as to lay out exactly how certain mechanics can be fixed and how character reworks can be done etc.
You don’t even have to play the game to get a pretty good idea about what’s wrong (missing or not working) with the game just by reading through this forum for like an hour. Hell, you can just go to steam reviews and read the “most helpful reviews” section (both positive and negative reviews), and you would get a pretty clear picture.
Not sure why you are pushing this narrative that FS is somehow confused by all the “shitstorm” feedback and cannot deduce what the major issues are from it so that they need a survey.

Speaking of the survey, let’s analyze it for a moment and see how it “communicates” the most important issues with the game to FS:

The first couple of questions are just general, and FS knows answers to all of these questions in general:

  • How long have you played DT so far?
  • What attracted you to play this game?
  • What is your overall satisfaction with DT so far?
  • What is you main interest/motivation for you to playing DT?

Then, we get to a more meaty part that can actually provide some feedback:

  • How likely would you continue to play DT?
  • What would be the reasons for your unwillingness?

That last one is a multiple-choice question that has some OK choices, but, out of 17 choices in that question, not a SINGLE one was about crafting, end-game content or server and client performance issues. Only watered down versions such as:

“My computer is not configured for the required frame rate or image quality”

Yeah, the problem with the performance must be because my computer is not configured properly /s
It happens to be very “configured” for other modern games. My bad, I guess…
I’m not even going to go deep into why they give us condescending choices that makes us look like whiny kids, such as:

“The weekly contracts is boring”
“The network connection is unstable and disconnects frequently”
“My mained career is too weak compared to others”
“The combat is too difficult”
“I don’t have any friend to play with me”
“I don’t know what to do after I reach level 30”

Just feels like they are intentionally avoiding to even ask about the real issues:

  • weekly contracts are not shared, depend on RNG (and additionally RNG of the maps), too tedious, and unrewarding. FS’s take is that people’s main issue with weeklies is that they are “boring” ??? How disconnected are you, really?
  • Why are you asking about the “network connection” - a term that usually means fault of clients computers or their ISP. Why not ask whether people have issues with lags and S E R V E R stability. My “network connection” seems fine when I am not playing DT
  • etc. etc. etc.

FS is unwilling to entertain the idea that something might be wrong with the game even when seemingly gathering feedback. They think they just need to find out what exactly are people unreasonably whiny about.

Then, we get to interesting question number 7:

  • What do you think of the following modules of DT?

You are given the option to rate your satisfaction on following “modules”:

  • Character creation system (face customization etc.)
  • Beginner’s guide (training ground)
  • Combat experience
  • Progression system
  • Level design and in-game missions
  • Tagging system

If you pick neural satisfaction or lower, you get additional questions about why you are dissatisfied with that part of the game.
We can immediately ignore the padding with unimportant questions about character creation, beginner’s guide and tagging, which leaves us with 3 important aspects of the game.
Although important, we can also IMO ignore the “modules” that most people (almost universally) say are done pretty well in the game: combat and level design.
This leaves us with progression, and if we ignore some condescending answers like “I don’t know how to match skills/weapons”, this is the only part of this entire survey that seem to have any value in communicating what needs to improve in the game. This could literally be the only question in the survey, and the usefulness of it would remain the same.

After that, we have more useless questions til the end of the survey:

  • What is your most frequently played class in DT?
  • What is the difficulty you play most often in DT at NOW?
  • What do you know about WH and WH 40K?
  • What do you know about Vermintide 1 and 2?
  • Which game genres have you played most often in the last 6 months?
  • Which types of shooter games have you mainly played in the last 6 months?
  • Which games have you played and enjoyed? (is it “Red Dead Redempt2” by any chance?)
  • Which region do you currently live in?

I am not mad that there is a survey, but the way it is done doesn’t give me confidence that FS is sincerely looking for actionable feedback at all.
Perhaps this survey is just something to justify more delays in fixing the biggest issues. I can already hear the apologists saying in couple of weeks to whoever is left on these forums at that point: “they just finished with the survey, man, now they need time to process all of it. You whiny kids don’t know how hard it is to process all this data.”
Then, after a month or so, they will start the prioritization process to determine what are the highest priorities. Then they need a couple of months more to engineer and rigorously (because FS just doesn’t do it any other way) test these solutions and about 6 months from now, we can finally sit back, relax and smile at how issue number 1 got resolved (if we ignore all the things it managed to brake). Time to repeat the process for issue number 2…

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There’s like 8k people still playing this game and average 2k online on the Darktide subreddit alone, and like 3k people screeching on discord. That is like 1/3 of players even if you assume there’s direct overlap and straight redundant accounts.

Also the survey is completely disingenuous. I have a next gen machine that can demolish more graphically and CPU intensive games, delivering very high consistent frames and amazing visuals. Here there are literally just rooms on a map with incredibly taxing lighting that kill performance with nothing going on. It isn’t my computer because it will be handling a massive horde scenario + a boss + specials and elites just fine the next. Their survey responses about the topic? ‘I haven’t optimized my visual settings properly’. Its them blaming the user.

Same with the progression complaints. There is no mention on the restrictions of crafting, just them assuming we think its too hard to make builds. So yeah its a fair video. The only way to get feedback to Fat Shark that wasn’t admitting you were playing their game wrong was to write paragraphs in the ‘other’ category. Which I hope others did because it was a waste of time otherwise.

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the issue with the survey isn’t that it exists, infact I’m glad it does. the issue is that not only was it rushed and more of a slap in the face that they think we wouldn’t notice. but it doesn’t even address most of the core issues.
there is 1 box that you can select for game stability being an issue. i still cant play for more than 5 min without crashing. (over 300 crashes in my 50 hours of play)
you have nowhere to talk about the server and client lag when playing on higher difficulties. you have 1 box that’s a stretch to say that the weapons are unbalanced.

its not that the survey is an issue, its that they put in the bare minimum and called it good… now where else have they done that I wonder