Have you not seen the all the new accounts popping up since patch 13 to complain about the gear system? People keep coming here unprompted to make their voices heard and they are welcome to do so.
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Almost as dead as Diabl0 4
Dude, ninety percent of people have a problem with the itemization in both item acquisition and item upgrading.
Your statement that it’s ‘how they designed it’ runs counter to the reality that they stated they wanted to reduce randomization in item crafting and released something that is almost entirely random. It’s purely counterfactual.
And then there’s the fact that every few days a brand new forum account pops up complaining about it. It’s a damn near universal thing that people hate.
EDIT: So, as far as I can tell, you’re just…mad because you think the forum is not correct to complain about something? Seriously, again, why does it bother you?
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In the years Iv been on these forums, I see most of the regulars being quite civil, even when butting heads and sternly telling each other how uncivil each other are being 
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You say that, but if there is one identical talking point I find everywhere, even on Steam and Reddit (two places that couldn’t be more different in their “population”), then it’s really the point about crafting in Darktide being a tedious affair.
I see it everywhere where people talk about the game.
Reddit, Steam, Youtube, Nexus mods wherever the topic comes up, these Fatshark forums here.
There is no place related to Darktide where the topic doesn’t come up.
It’s the one thing that brings everyone together, no matter where on the spectrum of opinions they normally fall.
If really everyone who voices their opinion says that your crafting could use some improvements, then just maybe there is something to that point of critique that rings true.
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it’s mostly the same group of people on steam, reddit, here, ect. most of them people who don’t actually play the game but feel they’re entitled to “their” rewards for whatever reason so they complain about it thinking they’ll get what they want if they just make enough noise.
you can really tell on steam, several of the dudes here have the same name and avatar as here. the vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t actually care about (or even really engage with) weapon optimization, they just come on, do weekelies out of habit, and then leave unless a new map drops. if anything the numbers show they should ignore the crafting system and focus on building out the map system they were touting.
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Which numbers are those?
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Generally if your most engaged and high-profile users are repeatedly telling you the same thing across every interaction platform possible for an extended period of time, we in the business world consider that a “huge clue”. If nothing else, at a minimum it’s a perception problem that’s going unaddressed and festering publicly.
Companies pay lots of money for that sort of feedback and to analyze it, that’s the whole point of stuff like Google Reviews. Some of us get paid to do just that.
Handwaving all that away like it’s a conspiracy of people who aren’t heavily invested and interested in the game is what we in the business world usually call “ignoring reality”.
Even if it’s not an actual fundamental issue, it needs to be addressed, and Fatshark is not doing that. In my business, our single most common negative review complaint because we don’t sell to the public, you need a license to buy from us, and people who don’t like that leave lots of negative reviews. Now, these people aren’t actually our customers, and we’re telling them as much, but it’s not something we can ignore either. As a result, we put additional effort into our online presence and listings to make this explicitly clear, and respond to each negative review left on that subject individually noting as much and some of the reasons why (liability, etc). This means we head some problems off before they start, and people seeing the complaints see our response and understand the situation, and as a result our overall negative reviews have fallen and ratings increased, improving perception.
Fatshark meanwhile…gives us more shovels.
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that’s true in finance, but not in videogames. if your high profile users are repeatedly telling you the same thing but your sales are holding steady, your high profile users are just part of a very minor segment of your customer base and should be avoided in case they make you alienate youre paying majority.
a good example of that is payday, whose community was so famously toxic they made it impossible to build the playerbase by appealing to new market segments.
it’s dipping below 10k average
I really don’t think that’s what FS, or tencent for that matter, is fine with, even if vt2’s hovers around 3k
3k daily average is actually good for a 4-player co-op game, people shouldn’t be playing 6 hours of this a day or every day so that average would be a lot more individual people. they don’t want people to grind until they burn out. regardless of the people that explictly want that out of the game…
Are sales the numbers you are referring to? I would love to put those numbers into a graph if you have the data. I expect there was a spike in sales after the patch 13 xbox release. We also saw a big spike in new users on these forums complaining about crafting around then. I’d be surprised if sales have not dwindled since then.
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i have to admit, the game’s getting boring now. i haven’t felt the need or really even the urge to play in a couple days now. the crafting is ass, the levels are getting repetitive, and there’s no real need to even try new builds at this point; at least for me.
i wanted to try the knife on my vet, but then i remembered the frickin’ lottery you have to win in order to get something decent. despite having millions of dockets, i find it pointless to basically just blow through it all in the hopes of getting a single weapon, but most likely not even getting anything good at all. i basically just do the daily check-in to see what’s in the shop, but that’s it. this is starting to feel like destiny, which is not a good thing.
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I wanna do Aurics… but I don’t ever feel like being “100% on” the whole time… so I’ll just enjoy Damn quickplays, with the occasional HiSTG to get the blood flowing.
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l4d2 hovers around 35k
project zomboid is around 40k
I don’t see how else to describe the way they designed it
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semi-casual teamplay. you play a little while each week, unlock a new class of weapon every so often and if you’re enjoying the missions maybe buy in on microtransactions. at the end game, when you’ve got piles of semi-optimised drop weapons you can modify a few to fit your playstyle better as you have a good grasp on how you play with the weapons you like.
fatshark’s never intended people to spreadsheet all the statistics, because they don’t see that kind of minmaxing as good gameplay but people do it regardless. look at pokemon. same thing. you should not be hatching 8000 evee eggs to get a perfect shiney, and you should be burning 19k plasteel to perfect your gun but some people can’t stand not potentially hitting their breakpoints alone.
And yet people do min max. They did in their past 2 games.
Did they magically think they weren’t in this one?
40k tonally isn’t exactly a setting that brings forth unpassionate people who are just “kinda cool with whatever, man”.
You are gonna get some sweaty nerds who want to do math, and grind their mechanical skill to perfection.
Not accounting for them given their audience history is short sighted at best.
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And how would that experience be destroyed by less RNG heavy crafting?
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You’re really telling us:
All the negative steam reviews
All the steam forum threads
All the reddit threads
All the discord discussions
All the threads on the Fatshark forums
…relating to the crafting system are always the same “few” people everywhere.
Even if that were true (it is not), we’ve got alone in this forum a list of +600 users saying the crafting at current is not satisfactory (courtesy of @brosgw who listed them all in his thread).
That alone is a very significant potion of the daily player base, unless you think 10%~30% of the active playerbase is neglectable (it’s not).
Video games are pretty big industry, having surpassed Hollywood. Of course it’s true for video games and the number speaks for itself, too.
Darktide started out with a lot more players than VT2 did and Darktide sank to the same daily player numbers pretty fast.
It’s okay numbers, but it could have been a lot more. Darktide shot it’s load into an empty cartridge by having the botched start and the Xbox relaunch could have been a 2nd windfall, but that moonshot is now over, too.
Why are only ever a few percentiles of the new users sticking around?
Hint: It can’t be the core gameplay that finds praise wherever it is mentioned.
It’s definitely not as casual as L4D2 and the latter is outperforming Darktide in player numbers. Weird…
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