Mayson, my mousketeer friend, I’ve been out of the loop here for a while. Who and who?
4 Likes
I know I’m not a Skaven, but they’re 2 new community moderators for the forums. I believe Hank is a moderator for the Discord as well but I am unsure about Incandescent.
They are also both community playtesters and talked a bit about it in this and other threads:
(They only show up at around 600 replies in)
2 Likes
Aside from playtester stuff I moderate the discords as well (both verm and darktide)
I’ve been around community stuff since 2019. I was one of the people who spearheaded the balance mod that became the big community balance update for verm in 2020 and started doing moderator stuff around the time darktide got announced as a favour to hedge (I offered to help out since there were no mods at the time and you can imagine how that was lol). Otherwise I also help run Onslaught Series, a community ran event, for vermintide.
I’ve been, and still am, very vocally critical of FS. You’re free to scour the discord or even some recent forum posts for proof of that. I can tell you anything I feedback on is from the standpoint of what I believe would improve the game but you’ll have to take my word for it I suppose, which is up to you if you wanna or not.
As for whether or not itemization will happen on the 25th, I don’t know, I just know based on my experience with FS it’s always safer to just not hold my breath for anything lol
17 Likes
Why do they keep asking for that? It’s useless. The weapons don’t work because Fatshark killed them. All they’re going to achieve is having to farm more to get the same garbage performance as always, not to mention the crap balance patches they release where they always favor the veteran.
Can you explain what you meant by this?
Community sentiment seems to be the opposite of this. The Survivalist nerf they got was big, and imo the buffs Marksmen Focus got don’t change that.
1 Like
Almost all melee weapon variants perform poorly since they buffed the enemies. Literally, you can count with one hand the ones that still have decent performance for each class. A clear example is, for instance, the ogryns whose maces barely do any damage, or the hammer and the heavy tigrus of the zealot. Similarly, ranged weapons like the agrapinaa are useful in lower difficulties but become useless afterward. The terrible sights and recoil of the vraks and the fact that all their damage only counts if you hit the head make them even more useless. Or take, for example, the revolver, where sometimes you need to shoot an elite three times to kill it. 3 out of 6 shots is absurd.
The veteran community perhaps only knows how to cry… Literally, their ‘nerfing’ was just an adjustment. A real nerf is like the one they gave to the zealot or the ogryn, especially the latter, whose only useful aspect left is melee, and they even want to kill that.
Personally I disagree with a lot you have to say. However I would rather not discuss it in this thread, as this is more discussing the upcoming patch (which even if it doesn’t have an Itemization aspect, will hopefully come with a lot of weapon balance changes 
)
If you really feel that way, I think you should make a thread discussing the issues you have with their balancing philosophy.
4 Likes
Yeah I voted no, but to clarify that isn’t also saying I’m terribly concerned either way, it’s more important to me that the itemisation update is good than soon.
If anything later just gives the testers more time to be like “yeah not sure about this bit reckon you could give it another pass?”
7 Likes
So… I didn’t vote. Because I don’t hold out much hope. Maybe I’m just a little bit waiting for a bolt pistol or double-barreled shotgun (Yo Doom).
Anyway. Well they’ll release on the 25th, but hey. Coldfix, oops…hotfix, you’ll see in a month or two.
They won’t? Ok, let’s wait, maybe they’ll come back from holiday and check the update again, fix something and then release it? Hehehehe.
mmm, yeah. Sad
I always assume the worst with Darktide, so no i dont think it will. As a sidenote, the crafting and itemization process is pretty much the final main gripe with the game. Everything else is fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. So, they pretty much need to get it right the first time. Could you imagine if it was broken at release, or somehow even worse than the current one? Not only would that look extremely bad with Fatshark’s record, but it would just be another disappointment for us as players. So, we should all hope it is released in great state, even if it means a delay.
2 Likes
And so what if it isn’t? What will people who are “critical” of the system that’s in place do then? Continue as normal? Or are they going to move on? Or will they give up and continue to enjoy the game?
1 Like
Here’s the thing.
Maybe you think you’re being as critical and outspoken as any other community member. Maybe you really, actually objectively are. It would be surprising, though. Because…
Spending a lot of time over several years together, being connected through shared responsibilities, shared fortunes (modmakers and streamers), talking a lot back and forth, testing back and forth… Social bonds are going to form, a sense of shared purpose, in-jokes and all the rest.
On top of that, it is very foolish to use the same people over and over for testing and feedback, across multiple titles. No matter how good their feedback is, it will be their feedback, from a very limited pool of people. Even if the testing is very focused and in no way about wider direction for the game, this is bad. When testing movesets and the feel of weapons, melee or ranged, do you think it’s a good idea to always go back to the same well?
It’s not.
Even if somehow every single person in the testing group is somehow, despite all human nature, completely objective and not skewed in the slightest from all the interaction with the devs, it’s a monstrously bad idea to use the same small group of testers for such a long period of time. It’s downright idiotic.
Obviously large scale testing would be much better, but at the very least the closed testing group should be changed wholesale every few months.
Edit: Obviously the makeup of the testing group is presumably one of FS’ minor problems in the grand scheme of things, with company structure and management much bigger problems. But it is a problem, and certainly isn’t helping when stacked together with all the other problems.
1 Like
It should be the bare minimum for testing. Feedback is a very critical component for software development in general - more data from a bigger group is always good. There’s a reason why some companies invest heavily into telemetry for data collection. It gives you more points to draw from.
Even in gaming, we have so many companies that exude the virtues of Steam’s Early Access program precisely because of how much data it provides.
2 Likes
Can confirm, from a background in precisely that going back to the era of sending out dev builds and patches on floppies, then CDs, then dedicated ftp clients, that playtesters have always felt like they are perpetually ignored.
Meanwhile, my vote: Yes something will release, no it won’t be what was fully intended.
5 Likes
What products did you work on if you don’t mind me asking. The OGs from that era are slowly dying off so it’s always a delight for me when I see someone from that era.
1 Like
Pride of place are probably my original Ultima Online dev build discs. Also Blue-Robed with them for a while, good times. But going a little(!) further back we have Master of Magic as the first thing I saw an internal copy of. Diablo (1&2), Asherons Call, Horizons, Sacred, Anarchy Online were also relatively big projects that I have hard copies of early builds from. Post that the list continues, but it’s all downloaded doohickies and no copies of faxed NDAs or anything fun like that. Not sure I qualify as an OG, but certainly an O at this point!
4 Likes
I very much value your input, thank you very much for your insight. Also yes you ARE an OG to me, and a cool one at that. Much respect. Not at a lot of people give credit to those that came before.
2 Likes
If you saw the release state of Horizons, you might not be so quick to offer credit. I STILL apologize for that one, even if I mostly only worked on crafting and not-falling-through-world-geometry! But thanks, really, it’s very kind of you to recognize even we small cogs. There’s a lot of cogs in a game now, way more than ever before, but all of them matter.
…'cept those nerds in accounting, of course… 
2 Likes
Voting on when I believe the itemization update may come?
I couldn’t think of a less relevant thing to poll for to be completely honest.
The only things that matter are that the update is done well and happens at all. Don’t care if that’s in two years or tomorrow.
4 Likes
In fairness, having worked QA and support before (for SCEA and other software companies), you can tell devs and management all sorts of things, with screenshots and videos and everything.
If they have a deadline, an incentives goal, a particularly large chip on their shoulder, or any number of other things, it won’t matter. Often times major things that people scream “how could QA miss that?” are things QA didn’t miss, they’re things the Devs chose not to (or didn’t have time to) address.
One company I worked for (many moons ago) had their tech support working mandatory overtime for months after they shipped a product where the licensing would fail and require a full uninstall/manual file clean/reinstall if the the program closed unexpectedly (crash, power outage, etc), didn’t have an internet connection when the program started up, ran Windows XP and restarted the computer, changed date/time (including Daylight Savings), or if the program were run under a different Windows user account. They knew all of this before launch (QA even threw themselves a cake party for proofing the product on time before launch) and the company shipped it anyway.
7 Likes