In Steam Forums there is at least one user insisting that Minotaurs can spawn from Chests of Trials IF the current area the chest is standing in is populated with Beastmen. Personally though, I have never seen that happening. So that is either some false flag or even then the chance for a Minotaur is very very low (@FatsharkJulia@Fatshark_Hedge : Could we have a confirmation one way or another if Minotaurs can spawn from Chests of Trial on a theoretical base?).
Other than that, IF there absolutely has to be a change (and I don’t think so because if your prime issue for Vermintide is getting skins you aren’t gonna use then it is a player issue and not a design issue) I would say just lower the condition for the five monster-types quests to four monster-types so if you fought any four combination from the five monsters we have, the quest will trigger (so it could be (Rat Ogre, Stormfiend, Chaos Troll, Chaos Spawn or Rat Ogre, Minotaur, Chaos Spawn, Chaos Troll or …). The only real “issue” is with Minotaur though. Because if you play four expeditions and fight 16 Grudge Marked monsters there is very low chance to not encounter each of the original 4. If this happens repeatedly to you consider gambling because you belong to the Chosen Ones in the 1 % range.
Realistically though, this will not happen anyway. How many Okri’s challenges did Fatshark actually change (change not fix) since Vermintide released? I remember one for sure (MWP consecutive headshots) and I think there was a second OE challenge. And now I would have to think about it really hard. There may have been more. But in this case it is unlikely because the challenge works. And if you play the game normally with the classes you like you will get the skin naturally in time.
I think this is the kind of conversation where it’s useful to return once you’ve surpassed the intellectual maturity of a 12-years old. Feel free to envision laughing-crying emojis and other symbols or acronyms with a humorous implication at the end of the sentence.
I feel like most of this problem would be solved if FS offered more ‘middle-ground’ rewards, ie a hat for each career at 50 runs for more casual and laidback players (or those who spread their time between many careers), then in this case some skins that take half the grind.
Right now the game seems to suffer from rewards being: a) practically handed to you, b) total RNG and only very very low chances at that, or c) long term grinds. There’s very little inbetween.
Having long term goals to work towards is fine but you need some medium term ones as a stepping stone.
As far as RNG goes I wouldn’t be against having a way to fulfill requirements that takes a little more effort but lets you circumvent some of the RNG that would otherwise be involved.
The OP is talking about the problem with RNG (not the problem with grindy (or not) challenges) but the Mino not spawning causing the grind to become artificially long.
I tend to lean towards @OrsonMaxwell in that you should simply enjoy playing the game anyway, and there should be at least some means of gating getting the challenge. As there’s already an example in this thread of people gaming the system to blast through the first map and get the cosmetics I think that if players are going to game the system to shortcut it, they’re going to do that no matter what the system is.
The mino is the only real gate to getting the cosmetics and this is there to stop people rerunning the first map to get their stuff in a really short time. My personal opinion is that if you’re running the first map over and over and quitting if you don’t get the thing you need then you’re not really there to play Chaos Wastes and just ticking a box for the cosmetics. That’s ok if that’s what you get your kicks doing, but there should definitely be some way of stopping players from just getting it all within a day or so. @James example very early in the thread mentions people getting all skins within 3-4 days and I actually think that’s fair for those people who want to skew things in their favour to get things fast - that’s their way of playing and up to them, but it shouldn’t be possible to get all skins faster than that.
The Mino Grudgie is the bottleneck to getting the skins, and RNG seems to be a core tenet of VT2 so if you’re expecting something other than RNG at this point you’re in for a bad time. It could’ve been gated far worse, such as grudges not even showing up until third map or whatever.
The locked-in-last-map Mino feels like a fair compromise between those players that will do whatever just to get their new clothes, and those who want to play Chaos Wastes normally and get the skins over time.
I personally think there’s a much bigger problem with first/second map grudge marked monsters turning veteran teams into a smear of jam, skewing the difficulty even more towards early runs that whether or not the Mino spawns - but then I play chaos wastes to enjoy it, not for the skins.
every Expedition spawns ~3 grudged monsters and ~4 for the citadel (because 2 fixed at the end)
every monster has the same likelyhood of spawning (little bit flawd, because minos cannot spawn from trials, as stated above)
you have to complete every expedition at least once to get the outfit (to complete the other mandatory challenge)
there are 5 different monsters that you need
Based on this assumptions:
3 + 3 + 3 + 4 = 13 random grudged monster spawns over all expeditions
likelyhood to get a speficic monster = 1/5 = 0.2
we only need to kill a monster once to progress the challenge
You can now plug this numbers into a Bernoulli formula and calculate the probability of success, but if you are lazy, you can also type “probability of at least 1 successes in 13 trials with p=.2” in Wolphram alpha. The Result:
==> ~94.5% chance to spawn a specific monster during 4 expeditions.
Of course this is heavily simplified - you have to hit this probability for each monster, which brings it down to ~73% (0.94^5 - is that right? I think so… no expert here :D), but it matches my observations. I unlocked 5 purified outfits so far, and i only had to play each expedition once. Have you experienced otherwise? Because in my opinion there is no issue here… i don’t think you have to ‘farm’ or ‘grind’ for outfits - the RNG is fine with this numbers
You know, math is probably on your side, but I don’t believe you.
I’ve been farming new skins since the start of the update, since there are some that potentially look good, and I’ve noticed that game heavily favors one type of monster during an expdetion.
For example, two days ago most of both regular and grudged marked monsters were stormfiends.
Yesterday and today they are mostly trolls.
I have a chaos spawn left to kill to get a skin I need, and I met it twice, both times in Citadel of Eternity finale, and both times it had shield-shatter + illusionist/relentless + vampirism. And I had bots in my team. 10/10 experience, recommend to everyone.
Maybe, I’m getting the short end of the stick, maybe, my AI director is on its period, maybe I’m just being trolled, I don’t know. But it’s kind of annoying.
It’s PC.
Actually, I’ve just started another expedition and got chaos spawn as the first grudge marked monster, so I’m happy and chill for now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
And, if my knowledge of probability theory is correct, such streaks of the same result are actually bound to happen. Looks like, I simply got really unlucky.
But, if you think otherwise, I can provide console logs or any other information.
Sorry again.
Good post. Only remark I could make is that your calculation is assuming you play on high difficulty (whereas the chance for grudgemarks on lower difficulties is lower, I think), which might not be representative for a significant part of the community.
As for the original topic of this post / more in general:
I don’t think most people in general are oppossed to cosmetics that are difficult to get or even take a long time to unlock, but rather to the fact that they are locked behind random chance, which feels bad and cheap. Even if it generally isn’t nescessarily so - like your calculation shows - there are still about 5% of people that didn’t get the reward for the same amount of effort that the 95% other people that did get the reward put in. And you can’t say that that is fair or reasonable.
Personally, I don’t fundamentally object to having cosmetic rewards being locked behind a long grind, even if that means they become practically unattainable for me and my responsible adult family life. But I do want to say that I find challenges that amount to “it’s not exactly hard, but rather just spend a lot of time” don’t feel as satisfying as “do a certain proof of skill” kind of challenges. It just feels better to finally finish a hard-fought cataclysm run for the very first time than it feels to have completed your 100th Legend run on auto-pilot, so to say.
Criticising the choice to make the grudgemark challenges “grind, and also sorta locked behind RNG as well” instead of “I bet you can’t pull off this cool stunt” is perfectly valid, and has little to do with people feeling entitled and / or being no-lifers. (I know I’m not always completely innocent to it as well) but I do have the feeling that the ad-hominems with a dash of strawmanning in this thread are derailing it a bit. Especially because a sensible discussion about what kind of challenges would fit this game could have a lot of value.
I just want to say @TmanDW absolutely nailed it, their post completely covers my feelings on the matter. Even if the grind doesn’t look bad on average, that doesn’t excuse the fact that some unlucky people are gonna have to sink significantly more hours to get the same reward, for the really unlucky ones it could potentially be a LOT more hours, and frankly that just stinks. FS’s continued obsession with RNG fueled progression (most concerningly with no attempt at features to protect from overly bad luck) is so perplexing at this point. I really hope it’s a design trend they shake off in Darktide.
Okay if i have understood correctly, the main problem is the RNG and the fear (and/or the experience) of never getting the monster that you need. And also the uncertainty about when and if you even get it, in contrast to others, who get theirs right away. Felling of unfairness.
How do you wanna tackle it? Any ideas?
In my opinion there are 4 things that you can adress:
Make it so that the monster spawns are not completely random anymore
That means when you start a trial, the game has to lookup the achievement for each participating class and check which monster is needed. But which player should you prioritize? The one who started the trial? And if this player already has all monsters, which player comes next? You have to implement some RNG here too i’m afraid…
But yea, i think that could work and would be better than before.
Change the objective of the challenge
Since you need SOME kind of RNG to see all monsters, there is no way to make it absolutely fair. Therefore you have to change the objective of the challenge to a goal which doesn’t need RNG. I don’t go further into this solution, because this is really unlikely to be changed.
Add a way to summon a specific monster
Maybe a different type of shrine, or a miracle that the player can buy, to spawn a specific grudged monster. This could be a solution for very unlucky players to prevent grinding.
Edit: Why didn’t i thought about this earlier Let each final end mission spawn a specific grudged monster
Each arena already spawns a grudged monster - the citadel spawns 2. In total 5 monsters (all you need). If you get rid of the RNG at the end e.g. “Citadel always spawns a minotaur and a troll at the end”, then you also solve the general RNG problem. Somehow i think this might even be implemented already… always got Minotaurs at the slaneesh citadel… but then we need some kind of ‘information’ about the spawns with each chaos god rotation. In the end this solution is basically identical with ‘Play all expeditions once’
