Hate to kick what is essentially the most kickable thing about this game, but what the heck is up with reds?
Terrible terrible terrible drop rates (For a game I payed 45 dollars for… okay.) For a unique weapon with a unique name and even a STORY BEHIND IT… but it’s just a scratched up stone on a rotten wooden stick with some glowy lights on it. Unique skins would have been cool I guess, like “this glaive was used by a feared elf and some say it steals the souls of it’s victims”(That was the one from the first game), wouldn’t it be awesome if that illusion had like a effect when you killed an enemy?! Wouldn’t it feel awesome when you found that cool thing in a lootbox? Would it be great to feel like the grinding upon grinding upon GRINDING UPON GRINDING WAS WORTH IT?!
Why is there so much grinding for this junk looking weapon! All the new dlc added was LITERALLY A DIFFERENT COLOR WHAT DID YOU SPEND 2.5 SECONDS CHANGING THAT. WHICH COLORS NEXT GHASTLY GREEN OR EDGY RED FATSHARK. Please I wanna know which awesome color I get to waste hours grinding for is next for the weapons I don’t use!
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH. Anyway cool game guys, this loot system was so worth the wait and SO much better the bounty board that literally everyone loved. 10/10.
Amongst all the whine I found something interesting. Why do people love the bounty board so much. I didn’t like it that much tbh.
Basically bounty board boiled down to two things:
Quaranteed ability to get an item that is displayed as a quest reward on the board
Contracts that grant you progress towards point 1. These quests had specific parameters (map + condition; eg. Bomb-kill 40 enemies in Tower of Magnus).
Here’s what I dislike about it:
People say the bounty board gave you chance to get something you like “quaranteed”. IMO it’s no different from a lootbox. There’s no quarantee there’s going to be an item you want (eg. If I want to play with Bok, there’s no quarantee there will be a quest for it within say the next 6 months). I guess you could argue that it gave you a bigger selection, but effectively in VT2 terms it’s the same as giving a chest every two days a player. The whole system could’ve been replaced with say a crafting system that would allow you to craft reds.
Contracts were pretty annoying in the sense that they dictated what maps were being played that day. Usually in VT2 I see a good distribution of different maps in the lobby browser. Not so much in VT1, where the contracts played a big part in what maps were popular in the rotation. This was bad on weekdays, but doubly bad on weekends (cata contract).
Ergo contrary to the clamor of many feedback posts, I don’t find there’s a good FS should’ve absolutely ported the system into VT2. I think the increased amount of loot (and decreased variance) more than makes up for the bounty board, which was IMO just essentially a minigame that was as a whole distracting and detrimental to game play experience.
I see your point and you’re right, it was flawed just as much as every other loot system fatshark has ever used.
I think the main thing that people (Maybe me more in particular) enjoyed about was it gave you something to work towards rather then just everything being a random chance. EVERYTHING about Vermintide 2 is about random chance where as the bounty board asked a specific challenge of you to work towards a cool red or trinket that would really help you out later. Having reds for your non specific character wasn’t a huge problem because A) It buffed the bots out for when you were alone B) Encouraged you to player a new character and learn everyone, maybe you’d enjoy it! C) It made seeing something amazing like a cosmetic or red for your character all the more exciting. Like you casually log on one day and Wow omg a red glaive?! I’d been farming for that for weeks! Now it’s my open opportunity to spend today challenging myself with unique mission quests to get that item!
Don’t get me wrong I think people whine about the loot system in VT2 a little too much but at the same time I get it, I have friends who quit after 400 hours because they hadn’t receive a single red or cosmetic for anyone… and now fatsharks offering an easier way but it’s behind a paywall. Personally, I think it should be colossally easier to get reds off legend, and then to awesome red skin variants should be the hard to get item. I don’t like the way we’re going with “Shiny light weapons” it’s super boring and doesn’t make my effort feel like anything. Anyway I got side tracked, that’s my 2c on the topic.
I guess I am one of the rare ones that doesn’t mind the loot system.
Only thing I would like to see is a way to break down red/veteran items to craft a different, possibly player selected type of red/veteran item.
FS said they’re working on this so we shall see.
Myself and the people I play with regularly seem to get plenty of red/veteran items.
Then again we typically save all our vaults and emp chests(from dailies) and open them all once a week.
So approx 20 vaults and a smattering of emp chests normally results in anywhere from 1 to 5 veteran items depending on RNG.
For me that ratio is just fine.
I know its RNG and all.
That being said, at this point, with this many hours in, we dont really play for the loot anymore. Its mainly about the addicting gameplay.
I understand your point of view however and sympathize. I have had people that I have played the game with for 300 plus hours quit because they were fed up with the loot system. Not getting a particular item they wanted but just dupes on top of dupes.
I hope they come back when the “red conversion” system is implemented, but my hopes are not high.