It should’ve been a matchmaker with a filter, made visible to us as a new NPC standing at the mission terminal. Call the NPC a ‘Recruitment officer’ or something. Make groups formed this way stay together after a run. Problem solved.
Even if we set aside the fact that they buried it in menus, raw group finders are really old school. Modern gamers need something that’ll do all the work for them.
I need a vid of your run(s) then because there is no way you can say this without being in a godly team or trolling
Don’t doubt many leave due to how tight the timer is and them thinking there won’t be enough time to complete the mission (or whole team down lol)? I haven’t had many leave in my games but that’s my best bet when they do (hell I’ve debated leaving a few due to it.)
I’ll try and get one.
I won’t pretend that it’s not 100% team-dependent, but when you do get a team where 3/4 people will listen to basic shotcalls (which anyone with a mic can do), there’s just no mistakes and you end with a full minute or more. In my experience, most of the failures are because of silly things like people not noticing that someone is separated, or nobody being on the minigame. Just making people aware of these things usually gets them solved.
As I said, this particular map seems to lead to people grouping up, so that definitely helps.
This is why I am absolutely certain that not a single person with a hand in designing these missions (or games in general) has spent time with or as a decent game master for a tabletop. Because a decent GM will recognize the difference between players being idiots who need a harsh “reminder” and situations where one turn of bad luck started a snowball and its time to apply the brakes. This particular mission could be a full lecture on how to not run a module.
As for the attidudes. Well welcome to how 95% of the people on this forum act. Its never luck with them but always “skill” while anyone complaining just needs to “git gud”. Evidence? Nope they don’t need evidence because they KNOW they are a right. Gate keeping combined with circular logic. One heck of a drug.
Could you elaborate on how horde shooter missions are similar to table top roleplaying games? The ttrpg seems about as comparable as golf.
Always interested to hear new perspectives.
My problem with a lot of circulating arguments–revolving around ‘punishing noobs’ and ‘preventing people from playing in a difficulty they don’t belong in’–is that they’re insanely maligned and don’t solve any issues; mainly because:
A) That isn’t anyone’s call to make but the individual player, and
B) This is discrediting the fact that this is a random mission you can quickplay into.
Special Operations were created explicitly for challenge missions like the Karnak Twins. The fact that this was put into normal map rotations is honestly shocking to me, given the circumstances in which this mission is relatively punishing for random pub teams that may not have balanced loadouts to deal with every situation this mission presents on top of the timer.
The consequence of Special Operations is that they aren’t hooked into quickplay, and thus can die or have little to no player traffic. (Otherwise we return to the hell age of VT2 where nobody played ‘suboptimal’ farming maps).
If ‘operations’ are a unique mission mode where a challenge is presented, maybe the devs can add a toggle to the mission table to allow the player to quickplay into these missions.
I’m closing in on 1300 hours played and only play in Auric Damnation/Maelstrom. The chaotic randomness of pubs is more fun to me and the current mission design paradigm makes unbalanced loadouts more interesting when literally anything can be thrown at you.
Rolling Steel is a cool map. It’s a fun and different challenge. Fatshark is still experimenting with Darktide and I appreciate that. But this mission made quickplay miserable for me and a lot of other people I know.
I think there should be a ‘hidden’ bonus side objective spread across the map (perhaps randomly generated per train car) that adds an emergency brake circuit you can destroy. This would slow down the train temporarily (you gain +5 or +10 seconds to the timer).
If not, completing each main objective should probably just give +5 seconds to the timer.
There could be a ‘separate’ version of the map in Special Operations that is a finely tuned and hand-crafted challenge, ideally with a unique boss, but I doubt Fatshark wants to put that many resources into this issue right now. Rolling Steel is not far off from being a good experience, there’s just no room for the usual amounts of error.
The timer is fine.
I’ve had a win with only about 2-3s on timer left in pubs.
The issue, as always, is pub being bad. And that’s something you’re not going to fix with longer timer(why even have a timer if even typical trash pubs can finish it comfortably). Dumbing down the game for bad players is never a good idea, see spacemarine2/helldivers2 for example.
The typical pub players think they’re good enough to play at at least 1-2 difficulties higher than what they’re actually comfortable at, so there needs to be more level gate(true level +30 or something) for auric.
Did manage to beat it at last. As it turns out, having a team with an Ogryn and people who stick together and do the objective fixed it - they actually went and grabbed the batteries rather than faffing about trying to kill individual poxwalkers and despite some sticky bits with a tox bomber and sniper train they pulled through and we managed to beat Auric with time to spare.
No it checks out.
The analogy is in how encounters and such are constructed - a good/experienced GM will not be so heavy handed on stuff and will focus on making things fun rather than trying to railroad everyone involved.
I wouldn’t say RS is ‘railroady’ so much as it’s punishing for the usual pub crew on the higher difficulties.
They both have the same core issue - keeping a group of people happy & interested in an activity over weeks, months, or even years (sometimes decades). Make things too easy or encounters too bland and your players get bored and leave. Conversely if you make things almost impossible to the point where players must follow the “one true way” every time and they will get frustated then angry and quit (as well as possibly punching the GM in the face). At the same time if they don’t enforce the game rules and keep the players on track even the best designed setting will rapidly become a jumbled & confusing mess resulting frustation and, yep, players quiting.
A good GM learns to thread that proverbial needle each session. All the while competing on a weekly or monthly basis with all sorts of other activities. Its the same skill that a good game developer should have. All the skill in coding, graphics, etc does you jack diddly if you can’t keep the players coming back. Even all the market tricks (FOMO, sunk cost, etc) won’t work forever when people realize that they aren’t having fun in what is supposed to be a leisure activity.
Too bad it seems that most developers seem to design games for themselves and expect players to love them anyway. cough “Managing inventory is FUN!” cough" stupid McQuaid cough. I can not emphasis this enough - Minecraft was a fluke. An absolute random chance where something staff at a small studio wrote to amuse themselves just happened to find a marketable niche at the right time. Its also something that has not been repeated since. Copied yes, improved on maybe, but not repeated. To any developers reading this - STOP TRYING! We get that you think you are Gods gift to the world but We Do Not Care. You want players to respect you and enjoy your products, then make them for the people playing them not for what you find interesting.
That makes a lot of sense, thankyou. Very different pastimes but that Vygotsky-like need to get the right challenge level is similar.
The fact that players in this game pick the difficulty before going in does put that responsibility on the players.
It does but conversely it doesn’t.
Maps don’t really get more difficult with higher settings. They just spawn more opponents with a greater percentage being elites/ specials/ etc. Which is really about the worst thing a GM who wants to challenge their players can do. Sure it works in a fashion if the 4 players just all happen to have a collective skill level, builds, etc that puts them right at the ragged edge where a few more mobs might just start a snowball effect. It can also be too much where the only way a group can move forward is by lucky rolls, or it can fall flat if the group is just a bit too well equiped.
If difficulty levels had been done right the number of opponents wouldn’t have to substantially increase nor would they need more health etc. They would get smarter. Instead of the whole mess charging head-first they would employ tactics like most of the elites using alleys, maintenance tunnels, etc to try to flank the group while the pox walker horde and a few “leaders” becomes a distraction. Think how many times someone who runs ahead willy nilly would have been splatted if crushes would use that feral cunning orgyn are known for and waited around a corner in ambush.
Its just too bad that Obesetubafish took the lazy route and copy-pasted big chunks of Vermintide instead of taking advantage of improved computing tech to make the game smarter. Then again that isn’t exactly new. Seems like despite games ballooning in size and budget no one wants to put some of that into making them better able to adapt to their players. Maybe they think that fancy graphics that 95% of players won’t notice are a better selling point?
yah that’s pretty much my only major issue with that mission too. Tox bombers are highest priority picks, and if nobody can insta-deal with them, then you’re likely sol.
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