This is kind of a tangent but Hedge also had posts about how having healthbars would change player behavior and make them more kill hungry in the same vein. Then the Darktide first gameplay footage had health bars, so they clearly played with the idea. I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, but I think a lot of what devs, CMs, and especially hedge say is just basically baseless conjecture/rationalization and the realities are far less complex.
I think the most likely explanation for no scoreboard is that they didn’t implement it on launch due to deadline constraints and it’s not an important enough feature to spend time on now that a mod exists anyway. It’s then easy to come out and say “oh we decided against it because of toxicity” because that sounds better than “the game is unfinished”
Maybe that is just the answer. But I have a hard time believing that, all the more difficult to make infrastructure and back end work for a scoreboard is there. That’s why the scoreboard mod exists, the game already tracks all of these stats you literally just need to make a chart pop-up on screen, and again most of that work is already done, the scoreboard mod just modifies the existing popup window.
This is work that would take a intern a week or two to do, if the team though it would improve gameplay they would do it. The way I see it, they are either working on a much more complex and in-depth system (like the one described in my scoreboard post), or they have rationalized themselves into thinking a scoreboard would make the game worse.
To be fair, Hedge was adding that in addition to what the previous poster had said re: VT2 healthbar mod not being sanctioned (at least FS had a stance then).
The fact that DT initially had HP bars but then dropped suggests intentionally dropping HP Bars after seeing how they impacted gameplay.
The same can be said for scoreboard, possibly intentionally dropped (ed: UI never implemented even though there are some front|back-end hooks) rather than just “no time to do it now”, but honestly, who the hel knows.
Sometimes FS does things on purpose, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it breaks things for a long karkin’ time and then sometimes says it was intended etc.; a magic eight-ball might be more consistent.
I think FS somehow broke Ockham’s razor in this reality and every other one out there.
I know mine is an unpopular opinion in this forum but at least to me, scoreboard is completely useless, and I also believe that can be harmful for learning how to play the game properly.
I’m not particularly against it, everyone can pick their poison, but for fatshark it should be the lowest priority.
Weird how the people who don’t care are left out entirely, I’ve noticed before that lots of polls made on this were seriously flawed and not objectively put.
Condensing that into a single template seems counterproductive.
anyway im not interested in discussing scoreboards yet again, ill pass.
Thing is that unlike a survey you have to fill out, a poll can just be ignored. Unless you gain anything by knowing which percentage of people don’t care, you gain no relevant information by adding it as an option. It’s why elections generally don’t include the option “I don’t care who gets elected”
sorry i wasnt clear , i didnt mean incomplete as in a whole survey of everyone . i meant peoples attitude towards it only being a small part of the info to look at , the actual affects of the scoreboard on behaviour being the main one , and no i dont mean toxicity .
when V2 launched with a scoreboard there was a similar though smaller call the other way people not wanting a scoreboard in a co op game. the last dev comment there was they were not going to remove it but would monitor the situation.
and Darktide then released without it. now it could of been omitted for other reasons but its not like the mod is big or was hard to do.. kind of makes me think they observed enough negative affects (no not toxicity) so they decided not to include it.
There were more detailed questions about a DT scoreboard in the 2023 Survey as well what to include and how. Just didn’t find it as relevant to post in OP, in link above you can see extensive questions, survey data was towards end about 80% down.
I also would question how they link behavior to scoreboard toxic or otherwise… if anything darktide may be that test.
I really don’t recall the mood about scoreboards in V2 beyond forum posts complaining about green circles or the V2 surveys regarding them. It could be a “you never know what you have till its gone” scenario.
elections are held with exact knowledge of how many people didn’t vote and it’s hugely important too knowing how engaged your populous is in voting.
1% vote.
results are 70%-30% in favor for implementing a scoreboard.
99% dont vote for various reasons
Question should FS consider catering to the less than 1%?
Are these numbers realistic? No, but we certainly don’t know them, so it’s ridiculous to try to push the idea that the majority wants something when that claim is based on a false assumption.
The actual presented numbers are “people who care about a scoreboard are in majority favor”
and my personal opinion that number is redundant without knowing how many people don’t care.
PS tho it might came across that way I didn’t only mean’t that many polls were flawed because they didn’t include people who don’t care. I meant that some were written more or less as leading polls, so having answers that tried to steer the voters to one particular side, both sides had these, also many people aren’t exactly pro or con scoreboard and have nuanced ideas and solutions who often were disregarded and not represented.
This is a sampling of most dedicated players since it’s confined to forums. The continued correlations among different spaces and time of the 2023 results, if they are to be believed, suggest it’s more prevalent opinion for interested users.
If not interested why would adding a scoreboard affect decisions. When clear player base supports a proposition.
Like an election in sampling a part of player base for pollster results. Yet also like elections as a majority of population doesn’t vote and live with the results… because they don’t care.
Fatshark could certainly do another survey to get a more accurate sampling but doubtful.
that was pretty much all that people kept complaining about it was only during the initial launch the wider behaviour was mentioned FS answered us, they said it wasn’t going to be removed but the situation would be monitored , so after that we stopped.
it could be. but behaviour tends to be shaped in pretty obvious ways, people do stuff based on the information they have, so if a scoreboard hands out bad information that behaviour would stick out.
i suspect the current compromise is intended, those that want it can use any of the mods and those of us that think its a bad idea can at least avoid having it.
It’s about time some mods were introduced into the game on a permanent basis. Regarding the table and toxicity - I don’t need to see the numbers to be toxic. I understand perfectly well that even if a person will drag at the bottom of the numbers, he can just do 1 action that will bring victory: will take the boss and the crowd behind him while someone resaets, himself will go halfway through the location and reset everyone, will give a victory ulta or something else, or what is even better will not die and do not spend unnecessary consumables, and leave for others.
Also, another reason why I don’t understand the lack of scoreboards is the test arena: why do they show us the numbers there and not show them in the match itself? We could have just limited it to enemy hp bars.
its based on two assumptions that are false, first that more kills = better but actually as a team gets better the kills go down. and second that getting a kill is only a positive event, also not true you can do a lot of damage to a team mate by taking a kill here.
Its myopic and only what is measured will get managed.
the board can not know or display the context of each kill. it measures performance not capacity. so more often its not a case of whose build and skill is capable of this result its a case of who got the kill first. and a build specialised to getting as many fast kills in all the trivial fight is not the same as a build tailored to surviving the few actually dangerous fights. ie it doesnt matter that you can beat your team to the first 3-4 specials / elites each fight it matters if you can survive the dangerous fights, but a scoreboard will give the win to the first person.
Really dont give a fluff about toxicity , its the negative way it affects the way people play.
(1) I think this can be mitigated by variety of data points being tracked and w/o green circle or mods total point systems. Ideally it would drive cooperative competition who can be the best team player. (Dwight vs Andy office politeness scene)
(2) I agree, in a good team kills should be spread about evenly sharing the burden unless you have a specialist killer while team protects which you will also see in stats as elites / specials /disablers counter.
When things go wrong and you see a particularly low kill and/or excessively high you have to interpret it correctly. Could be someone wasn’t carrying their own weight and was the weak link while high kill was the carry OR could be high kill was depriving low killer of valuable toughness restore kills. (could just be latency issue, also tracked!)
The more stat measurements the easier this process becomes about why team failed and how to fix. For example, adding toughness gains to tracking, successful dodges, toughness damage taken vs health damage taken. If that players sees he wasn’t restoring properly or was taking too much damage they could modify their playstyle.
(3)
Its myopic and only what is measured will get managed
people do stuff based on the information they have
Seems contradictory ideas and points, made to me then him.
(4) The board is more a tool for figuring out failures and measuring what is working to give further ideas on improving / optimizing. More data points would better dilute from the kill /damage, arms race. I’d also like beneficial measurements for example i like running boosted group crit on zealot if that could somehow measure when it effected team damage increases that would be very interesting or if the Zealot Shield of contempt group DR is even worth it could generate better input for improvements.
Someone in steam forums mentioned the good thing about V2 Scoreboard was damage taken and taking low damage was a sign you were ready for next difficulty, now there is no way to know just utter failure if your not ready.
Forums are usually made out of people who min max their games and are looking for the best builds to beat everyone else in their team. Thus there is fallacy regarding to the polling. It’s not taking into account casual players who do not read forums.
The fact that this many people on forum dislikes the idea, already would alienate big players base. Just use mods. This debate was over years ago on vermintide forums.
People talking about using scoreboard as tool while simultaneously insists that everyone should be forced to see it contradicts their argument.