Re-reolling QoL Request

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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I know that you guys at Fatshark are not keen on suggestions in you feedback, but bear with me on this one. It’s not the “cheeky gamer telling devs how to do their job” variety, it’s more of a “common sense” variety. But first, the issue.

Re-rolling properties/traits makes me wanna claw my eyes out. And I’d wager I’m not alone on this. Yesterday evening I got a red handgun for Kruber and decided to keep it, despite the fact that I salvaged the last three. Figured, I could use an alternative for different builds. And so, I got to rolling. 54 tries to get the properties I wanted, 21 to get the trait. The only thing that was missing was “U mad, bro?” in shining letters after every unsuccessful roll.

Now, you might think it’s about the dust cost, which is a sensible assumption. But my beef lies with the infuriating waste of time that is the process of re-rolling itself. Instead of enjoy the gameplay of Vermintide (which is, quite excellent) you have to sit there, for Sigmar knows how long, and press the same button and watch the same animation, over and over and over… You get the point. And my example is a single red item. What if you wanna roll multiple? What if you wanna roll an orange? Or, oh the horror, multiple oranges?
I tried that once, few months ago. About 40 minutes of non-stop re-rolling and I gave up. Never rolled an orange item since.

Making builds is a major draw, be it a hardcore theorycrafting, or just screwing around to break the monotony, and it brings lots of replayability. But if sitting through this purgatory is a requirement, many may choose not to participate at all. And seeing how this game is rather thin on the content side, that’s not a good thing. From my perspective, the system governing this should be streamlined and easy to use, to capitalize on that replayability, and not punish a player with a arbitrary time-out every time he wants to try something new. Bottom line: if I have the resources to for it, it should take me a couple minutes at most to tune my build to my liking.

Finally the suggestion, a simple and non-invasive one, methinks: Add an additional menu for auto re-rolling. Don’t touch the random cost of it, if you think it’s fair, don’t implement dupe protection for traits etc., just allow me to choose the properties/traits/percentages that I want, and tell the game to roll the item until I get those stats, or the dust runs dry. If you can’t code around it, you can even leave that silly animation in. Just don’t make me sit through it, so I could at least go and fix myself a sandwich.

There, pure time-saving QoL tweak. Pretty please?

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But then you won’t buy the eventual, less frustrating, paid loot boxes. I assume that someone(s) in management are still holding out to reintroduce the idea, hoping that the SWBF2 furore will be forgotten and they can bump up their revenue.

Everything about the game’s design screams paid progression. Unnecessary, indefensible grind extenders that are intended to be exactly as boring and frustrating as they are. It’s the same way all those casual iphone games are designed, and they are seen to be reliable cash cows.

I’m sure that the developers are nice people who understand how damaging this design is to the game, just like I’m sure Hedge et al want to answer our questions but are limited by the information they are given / allowed to share.

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I actually don’t think they will ever introduce paid lootboxes, for whatever flaws FS have, that kind of self-destructive greed isn’t one of them.

They just like RNG a lot . . .

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it’s a lot to do with their overall philosophy in game. a large part of the community(and me) has complained about the artificial and deliberate delays they place into the game, causing a lot of frustration. people want to eat the meat of the game which is the combat, but the other systems are just frustratingly delaying.

outside of combat scenarios, ANYTHING that takes away player control is really frustrating

  • long starting camera pans when mission starts. was quite fun to use the glitches to run forward, kinda wish they just made it so everyone could move at the start (see your characters running off)

  • the extreme long waits and UI lockout after the mission ends (even after the speed up, i still find it unacceptable) this includes waiting for the xp bar to fill up, waiting yet again for the animation popup box to display when you are unlucky enough to have levelled up, then moving on to another long wait for the loot dice to add up, then again for another animation popup lootbox, and finally the animation and showcase of the scoreboard which has a timer and a ready button which pretty much doesn’t do anything.

it’s frustratingly long. just kick everyone back to keep, and show a “last mission debrief” window which can be closed and re-opened any time in the keep.

  • the keep itself. why do we need to keep reloading the keep after host leaves, or we have to leave a party etc? ideally the players should be the ones popping in and out.

  • no ready button and have to run all the way to the start portal. want to practice some swinging while waiting? sorry, best you can do is run to the target dummies, collect them and bring them back to the portal. want to dance around the keep? sorry, you gotta head back to the portal. minor frustration but i will still question this design.

  • not being able to leave a game easily. when loading a game, you can’t quit. when a player is trying to join your game, you can’t disband or leave as host. moral debates aside, taking away control from the player is frustrating.

  • and of course, crafting. as you said, people gotta sit there and roll for many many minutes. i also gave up on rolling for oranges after a while, played until i got my reds then rolled. and it still took me ages to get what i want. a player got a new red on a run? sorry guys, wait up, i gotta roll this new weapon. gonna take maybe 5 minutes.

i’m really passionate about this argument because i hate it when games take away control from the player. for example, any game which has long unskippable cutscenes is just absolutely frustrating,especially when you have to rewatch them over and over again. vermintide manifests this in my above examples, and this has been highlighted by many people many times. just wished they would do more about it

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I once wrote a long-long post concerning these same points. I agree absolutely - these things are those which make me answer the question “do you really want to wade through all this s h t just to have a chance of some team based fun?” everytime I think about playing the game. Seriously - it is frustrating beyond belief and it does not make sense. I’m yet to imagine a single argument in favour of such UI design. And it seems I’m not the only one.

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Besides, with the EU commission entertaining the view that loot boxes might be considered gambling and therefore require a government issued gambling license and all, I doubt they’d risk that.

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Normally, I would shrug it off as conspiracy theory, but the way whole loot system is structured, it does not seem far-fetched, does it? The other explanation being that they had some pretty significant setbacks during development and had to focus on more pressing issues rather than consider the long term impact of crafting UI.

Both you and @OrsonMaxwell make very good points. The whole game is choke full of these arbitrary time walls. I focused on this particular issue, as it is the biggest offender IMHO, since you can’t really do anything about it. During end screen I can at least get up and stretch, put the kettle on, check my e-mails etc. Rolling? Nope, sit there and click you peon, and click, and click, and click…
But even then, it all adds up to a ridiculous degree. I played a lot this weekend to make use of the double xp event, and by the end of it had 30 boxes to open. 3 contained items of value: a red weapon (dupe ofc), red charm and a hat. The remaining 27 was salvage fodder. That means that 27 “chest update screens” post match were just a waste of time, just like opening those boxes, and putting the items into salvage (only 9 at a time!). Boggles the mind really.

On it’s own, they would be irritating, but tolerable. But all of it? Actively discourages people from playing. Maybe not as direct or apparent as a crash to desktop, but if the game is obtuse and annoying to deal with, that irritation will build up over time. I made a thread about it because it seems like an easy fix, and an easy way to gather some goodwill too.

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