L4D2 is handed out for free all the time, darktide costs 40 bucks. it’s easy as crap to maintain high player numbers when you’ve handed out millions of free copies of the game to broke people and let the mod it all the way to oblivion.
All his alts. This is known now.
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Remember there’s an ocean of difference between lying and them not delivering. Like the crafting system, obviously if its supposed to encourage less stockpiling and monotonous repetition scrapping/upgrading then they succeeded in droves and should really pat themselves on the back. So much so that they had to move the storage of those items off their back (end) at one point.
And yes its probably easier for whoever actually likes this crafting system to believe every negative comment is from the same 10 guys in dozens of alts. That makes the most sense. Obviously this is a conspiracy against the game and gambling in general. I wonder if those same rapscallions are paying content creators to somehow work crafting complaints into their videos too. They must be stopped, the Ordo Player Retentionus is infallible and their works cannot be thrown into doubt. To do so would be to doubt the Emperor’s plan.
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Historically, most videogames make the bulk of their sales on launch. The closest I’ve been able to find is that Darktide made about $60M during its release month, and made it up to $82M in total since then, I have no idea how valid those numbers actually are, but they track for general trends.
We can see that player numbers are holding roughly steady, but that’s not the same thing as sales. People logging in just to complete Melbucks missions for the week isn’t the same thing as people excitedly grinding for something and recruiting friends, or people energized to buy lots of MTX cosmetics to show off. We don’t know the relative revenue value of those players, only that the number of people logging in to play isn’t moving much.
In this case, the fact that so many people are making the same complaint almost everywhere means it’s an issue FS should address, both so it doesn’t scare off new players, but more importantly to retain existing players that are already the bulk of the playerbase they’re likely to get given the sales trends being so frontloaded, and…they’re just not doing anything in either case.
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.
I can’t speak to PayDay, but again, there’s a single central theme here that’s pretty universal, and it’s that nobody like the existing gear acquisition and crafting paradigm. There is no counter-narrative really of people saying “it’s fine”, nobody willing to stand up and proclaim they like it, nobody talking about how it engages and excites them. The most we hear is “eh, the differences between ‘okay’ and godroll weapons aren’t what people make them out to be, don’t get so worked up about it”.
It’s not people being toxic just for its own sake, most people complaining are quick to mention all the cool stuff Darktide does well, and it’s not just a handful of butthurt neckbeards, it’s almost everyone talking about the game in almost any setting on pretty much every platform. We see new posters create threads and join existing conversations about crafting here possibly more than almost any other issue.
FS needs to get ahead of something like that before it becomes overwhelmingly toxic…and they’re just not.
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when exactly do they come off vacation again? feels like its been forever
Soon™
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All of you writing everywhere how bad the crafting is, are a minority mkay?!
The crafting system is great and FS doesn’t want you to play the game for longer than 5 minutes even though their goal was to keep people playing as they stated exactly that in pre release articles, mkay?!
So stop complaining and buy reskins for absurd amounts of money!
/s
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I know quite a few people who got the game for free and all of them, without exception, dropped the game because of crafting.
Also DT is still/again in the game pass which has 30+mil active subscribers, yet I hardly see any non-steam players in quickplay. So if its easy to maintain a high player count when you give access to the game to 30+mil players, why dont you encounter more of them?
Sure it might just be me, but from videos, streams and other players Ive heard the same. You hardly encounter non-steam players
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Proof?
Because I can present the dev blogs where they discuss their ‘design intent’ for crafting, and to my knowledge, it mostly discussed how they want to avoid randomization and give the player agency… something the initial version of the ‘crafting’ system failed hard at and the current one is not much of an improvement upon.
Where’s your proof that Fatshark designed this system for ‘semi-casual’ play?
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Point of order, it’s ‘only’ over 500 right now. Still hilarious considering that that’s about 1/6th of their daily player count…out of a small fraction of their overall player pool because most people aren’t going to bother making a forum account to complain.
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Jackal deserves to be ignored.
Guy claims that it is a minority and that the complaints are not justified.
Guy does not offer a single argument for why the crafting system is good as it is, or why any of the complaints about the current system, are not valid.
What a damn clown…
By the way, nobody else has ever brought up a good argument for why the system is good as it is, either.
Because nobody can. Because it is bad.
Even if only a loud minority of 1% (which we are not) was complaining about the crafting system, it would not matter.
Because the points that we bring up, stand. This is independent of who writes them down, or how many people point them out.
We are objectively right and nobody can argue with our criticism.
—-
Dear FS:
Let’s imagine that someone pooped in your pool.
It is not only likely, but guaranteed, that not everybody will come forward to complain about it.
It is likely that not even a majority of the pool users will come forward to complain about it.
Most people simply do not go out of their way to give feedback on anything.
Thing is, the truth of the matter is not based on how many people tell you about it.
Even if just a single person comes forward and shows you the floater, you should have a look at it and tackle the problem.
Even if just a single person shows you the turd, you can still be pretty certain that the turd is an issue, and that the number of people who would prefer a pool without a floating turd, is probably larger than 1.
Your approach so far, was to leave the turd in the pool for the past year.
Those who are telling you about it, must be a loud minority, so what they say certainly does not matter, right?
This is not a case of a bunch of loud mouth idiots banding together, trying to pressure someone into doing something unreasonable.
There is a ton of reasonable feedback that simply can not be argued with.
We are telling you that your house is on fire, and your reaction is to do nothing about it, while claiming “the people who tell us about it, are just a loud minority“.
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but people still play l4d2, consistently. And darktide has mods too. The last major darktide update got about 33k-ish peak players, and it since dwindled down to the same peak player count as last january. l4d2 hit a peak of 85k in oct’22, hit it again in feb’23, 78k in august, 70k in nov. Currently riding between 40-50k. Darktide has seen a steady decline since its last peak, and it’s sitting 80% behind a title that’s nearly 15 years older. Doesn’t matter if it’s been free, and darktide has also had major discounts already, because people wouldn’t play it (and continue to play it) if they didn’t find it fun, regardless if it was free.
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Bro, people agreeing with each other on criticisms of the game drives away the CMs? Fatshark’s lack of responsibility in response to those criticisms is what ACTUALLY drives away the CMs 
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Playing less doesn’t make the itemisation or crafting any better.
The “vocal minority” argument yet again: @brosgw actually bothered to document people who “expressed” their dislike for those systems. Wasn’t that a 500+ unique users so far?
A decent enough stat sample. At this point the only thing which makes this a minority, is the fact those people actually bothered to create an account and / or expressed their opinion on these forums.
Tide Itemisation and crafting are terrible game systems from perspective of the player experience. An average player might not notice that, anyone with basic maths skills and some time spent in-game can.
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I think it’s ridiculous that we have 1 month without a patch and people are moaning about DEAD GAME, but to be honest FatShark deserves it for flirting with the Live Service garbage.
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I have asked this multiple times before and can confirm, no direct answer. Even if it came down to something as simple as personal enjoyment, I would take that as a legitimate answer.
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Seems to be a weird sort of cult of austerity that comes with some of these attitudes. No one really posts that they like the system but rather that the difficulty it creates is good for you. Like the combat portion of the game is serving up candy, but you need to get your fiber somewhere.
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500 out of the 2,000,000-odd buyers (depending on how much we count gamepass players) isn’t a meaningful percentage, it’s a rounding error. moreover it’s specifcally a cherrypicked segment of the playerbase who specifically engages with the forum for the sole purpose of hating.
the items system is fine, you can modify weapons a great deal and pick what you get from alteration. you’re all just mad because you can’t perfectly minmax your gear to “experiment” with perfect stats every time which was never something they intended to do.
You can modify 2 layers of an item with the other 5 still being completely random and out of your control.
Out of the 2M sales how many are still playing? Out of the ones still giving feedback how many are still playing? And how many aren’t playing because the itemisation progression and crafting is an RNG mess?
Any source on reaching an endpoint with perfect weapons not being part of the design intent? Because however you put it, almost impossible to reach (due to randomness) but theoretically reachable is bad design either way due to it being way more on the frustration side of frustration/reward balance.
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…wow, didn’t know Fatshark management had an account here, because that is the exact same nonsense about how there must be, somewhere, a great silent majority of players who have no issue with the ‘crafting’.
You seriously misunderstand how statistics work, how player feedback works, and how, quite frankly, actually competent game development works.
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