with the release of the “no mans land” update bringing a new ogryn voice and the (as of writing this, unreleased) hive scum class, darktide has a massive amount to choose from when it comes to voices and personalities. and while most generally dont care either way, there are others, like me, who want to play all these personalities, going through the game again with a new character, new build, a new experience all revolving around these personalities.
however, we as players are only able to make a handful of operators at any given time, and while generally with a new class release (at least so far) we’ve been given two extra slots, its still not enough to go through every class personality.
and while I understand giving unlimited operator slots to players would be incredibly taxing on the data servers, thus upping operating costs for the studio itself, I’ve also figured the closest idea of a middle ground that i could: purchasable operator slots.
paid for with real money and unlocked forever (so certainly not a subscription) this would let those who actually want the feature to indulge in it while also further supporting the game financially, while letting those who couldn’t care either way and only have one operator per class not take up the additional space.
you’d still get two with every purchase of a new class dlc, but having the option to buy the slots individually would be a great middle ground imo provided they aren’t overpriced.
No, Fatshark doesn’t need nor deserve any money for a feature that should be part of the base game. If they can’t handle more operators because of the dedicated servers maybe they shouldn’t have made the game run only on dedicated servers, stopping people from getting the solo mode Fatshark advertised before launch and multiple times after launch and that will ultimately lead to the full disappearance of the game when the servers are shut down
Keeping simple lightly structured data, such as darktide character, is dirt cheap. Few thousands lines of data that are not rapidly accessed, are bread and butter of databases, and is incredibly well optimised. I’d be surprised if cost of keeping of all hundrets of thousands of allready existing characters would amount to any higher cost then few Euros.
In an ideal world the classes would be unrestricted by default. Ive been told multiple times in other threads ive made regarding the subject that it would be costly to keep such data constantly (despite games like PoE doing the same thing except with a 24 base limit and 255 max if purchased)
So I tried to come up with not only a medium but also in a way that might actually grab fatsharks attention because it has some form of monetary gain for them, because let’s face it, corps like these dont tend to listen to their communities less theres profit involved.
If its any consolation, I personally wish they would just do away with the limit entirely seeing as it really just seems pointlessly arbitrary to have it capped at such an odd number to begin with
It’s not an incredible burden to offer more slots (although it’s not free). 8 slots is an arbitrary limitation.
More than 8 slots is also a pretty niche ask. Filling a niche need for super-dedicated players with a monetary incentive for FS is imo a real neat solution.
If they dropped this today, I’d spend $3 to not have to delete my 2nd psyker. But I’m also really not too bothered by having to do that!
No, they didn’t raise the actual cap when Arbites came out. Just the soft limitation for non-modded users. 8 was always the back-end max. They’re working on upping that for Hive Scum now.
It really wouldn’t be bad. Most even small size MMORPGs with less players than Darktide with similar business models allow 50+ character slots and they also have way more data to store per character since they’re RPGs and have a big world with many questlines etc.
The reason Fatshark doesn’t allow more is either
a) they don’t care about it much and just picked a random number and are sticking to it for mystery reasons, and are possibly changing it in the future
b) they mistakenly thought 8 would be plenty and based their infrastructure on this for no real reason other than a lack of foresight (making it 50 would’ve cost them very little if anything)
Either way paid character slots are an absolute scam feature in any game that has it. It usually goes hand in hand with the game encouraging you to have many characters by letting you amass account currency per character, turning it into a P2W feature. You could argue that would even apply to Melk Currency, but it’s not like anyone actually gives a hoot about that worthless stuff. It’s not actually a reasonable thing to do.
Oh FINALLY, we got an expert in the thread!
But wait, I thought they didn’t allow unlimited character slots because of incompetence?
Now you’re saying…what?
Yea, they don’t care and defffinitely couldn’t have come to the limit based on consideration of typical player behaviors they’ve seen in VT2 (and now 3 years of DT). And let’s put aside that Quickpaw said freaking yesterday that they’re looking into upping the limit ASAP.
Based their infra-what? Dude, just no. As mentioned, Quickpaw said they’re working on upping the limit, and yet the OP would prefer to have as many slots as they’d like, not whatever the new default will be.