Regarding the Cosmetic Store

[Send4Kolchak]

(This is the first post I’ve made on the forums, so I apologize if this isn’t as well-written.)

I have a first-world problem. I have a stable income, I’m easily able to pay my bills on time, and have little to no debt to worry about currently. Simply put, I make enough money to live a healthy and happy lifestyle and still have money left to spend on whatever I want (within reason of course). This isn’t meant to be a flex of wealth, this is just an explanation of my current situation. (I promise it is very relevant to the discussion).

A while ago, a friend bought me Darktide, and I fell absolutely in love with the game. It very well may be my favorite videogame ever. One of the things I like the most about the game is the customization for your operators. I can look at almost every cosmetic in the game for whatever class and instantly like it. Furthermore, I want to support the development of Darktide in any little way I can. I’ve especially liked the vast majority of recent changes/updates to the game, and I want to show that I like the direction the game is going by further supporting it.

Thus, for me personally, spending money on the cosmetics in the Commodore’s Vestures is a win-win situation. With any purchase I make, I actively support the development of the game while getting more customization for my operator’s appearances. I do not take issue with the fact that the items in the Commodore’s Vestures cost real money, nor do I take issue with the pricing of the items. Note that that is simply my opinion on the subject. You’re more than welcome to disagree.

To summarize, I actively want to spend money that I can reasonably and responsibly spend on supporting the development of Darktide.

The problem is that

I can’t.

The Commodore’s Vestures shop rotates one page worth of items every two weeks. Furthermore, the shop only appears to have three or four pages of items available for purchase at any given time. I could buy out the entire inventory of the store in less than two minutes at any point in time. Concisely, the issue is that there simply aren’t enough items available for purchase in the cosmetics store at any given time. I literally cannot spend money that I want to spend on the game because the vast majority of premium items aren’t available. I’m not saying that you aren’t allowed to have limited time items, but making every single premium item in the game limited time is arguably absurd.

There are two solutions I can offer for this problem as I’m certain I’m not the only player who feels this way. Firstly (arguably the more preferable option), all premium items should be available for purchase in the store at any given time. As stated before, a few limited time items here and there is absolutely fine. But the majority of items should be available for players to purchase if they want to. Second (most likely the easier option), there should be more than just three or four pages of items available for purchase at any given time. I would say ten or eleven pages is a far more reasonable number, but I may be biased.

Do note that I don’t write this out of any type of spite for Fatshark. I personally think they’ve done a fantastic job with Darktide. I simply wish to provide feedback on a part of the game that I find very lacking so that it (hopefully) is improved in the future. I realize I’m probably not the first person to discuss this topic, but I figured that no change will be seen if the problem isn’t discussed. Feel free to disagree with anything and everything I’ve written if you wish.

Thank you for reading.

TLDR: The current state of the Commodore’s Vestures is lacking and does not allow players to support the devlopment of Darktide as much as they would like to.

[MunKy]

No matter which angle one comes at the shop from, it seems like bad design to me.

[Murderer]

The whole design of rotations is aimed at whales who purchase all or most of every rotation, that’s the entire point of the FOMO stuff. They’re basically guaranteeing a stable monthly (or so) income which is a pretty sweet dynamic for a game like this (for the company). The whales also don’t like it, but they’ll still pay up.
Unfortunately and evidently this is more profitable than just letting people buy what they want, otherwise they would’ve stopped a long time ago, and the model wouldn’t be so widespread. More evidence for that can be found when looking at the fact that Fatshark runs a different store model within VT2. To me it seems obvious that if they could get an easy win by making the Darktide store more like the VT2 store, they would do it, unless the VT2 store yielded far less revenue. They have the direct comparison.

[MunKy]

Youre right of course, however: to me, this seems like bad design.

Maybe it makes the most money, maybe it doesnt, companies are as famous for bad business choices as much as good ones.
In some ways I hope it at least keeps FS afloat if without it the game would fail. A necessary evil maybe.

With the shop the way it is right now, I personally will never spend a single penny on it.

[MixedLetters]

Me,

I’ve had multiple occurrences where I’ve almost thought ‘dang, I kinda wanna get something…’ but then just don’t, because I have no idea if it’s a re-color, or if there’s something I’d like more, or if they will release a re-color that I like more.

The shop just sucks, might ‘trick’ some casual gamers/spenders into dumping some money here and there, but I personally feel you’re overall losing money. Because like, when I see a cool cosmetic someone’s wearing from eons past, I go ‘dang, that would be cool to run around with!’.

Then I remember the shop doesn’t and probably hasn’t had it for years more than likely, and I’m like ‘oh right, well I’ll just ignore anyone that looks cool then’. I’m sure there’s a vast majority of the community who have felt that exact way, and completely written off the cosmetic store because ‘what I want will never be in there when I check anyway’.

And I mean, you can still have a rotating store that ALSO has an inventory. I look at stuff like D2, keep the ‘this year’ stuff on rotation for those in the corporate chain that feel the fomo is somehow useful, make everything a year+ old available in the shop for purchase. Make all the money from those that want to nab stuff when they see something cool and those that want specific things.

Just…confuses me greatly why that’s not done, though it would need a new UI for it…and that’s probably the biggest hang up really.

[Murderer]

Just trying to put the whole dynamic into perspective: there’s people who bought out every single cosmetic in darktide so far. That’s like what, 40 rotations? 40 rotations of buying out the set, all the little offpieces, for every class.
Assuming a hypothetical where the shop isn’t fomo, if you were to buy two full sets for each of your classes with the different system (most probably wouldnt even buy that much), there’d need to be literally like 30+ of you to make up for the one guy who buys out the entire store because of fomo under the current system. And I honestly don’t think there are 30 guys like that for each one of those. And again it’s pretty generous napkin math, most people don’t even play every class, most probably wouldn’t buy a set for more than one or two classes. And this didn’t even consider yet that they’re planning to keep the store rotating for a couple more years.

In other words those whales buying from a place of FOMO are right now are realistically buying 100x more cosmetics than you would buy if the store wasn’t FOMO. The longer the fomo store goes on, the higher that number gets. That’s generally how these things work out, it’s why it’s being done