So what happened to helping each other?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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When I started playing Vermintide 2 many years ago, I learned to prioritize helping downed teammates even when it was risky. Beyond the gameplay, the camaraderie among strangers is what hooked me. Seeing others fight fiercely to revive you was inspiring, and knowing how great it felt, I made sure to do the same for others.

Apart from a slight calibration in Auric (sometimes it’s just impossible or not worth it), most other players seemed to bring that mentality going into Darktide up until recently.

TLDR; Nowadays it often feels like there’s no hope when you go down as your team won’t react even if you’re lying right beside them. Same goes for waiting for a rescue unless someone’s the last man standing. What happened?

With enemy density cranked up to 11 and less solo clutch opportunities compared to VT2, one would think helping others at least to have another source of damage and someone to share enemy aggro with would be good reasons to help each other, but it feels like there’s an overarching selfish vibe going on nowadays. Anyone else feel like this? Maybe we need more collab-focused penances to get people back into the co-op mindset.

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This hasn’t been my general experience, unless I somehow bumbled my way out of positioning, away from the group. And I always prioritize getting teammates up, because having 3/4 of the damage and aggro pull and decision making is a brutal handicap.

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V2 is a gem, the pacing allows for an easy path to reviving teammates.

In Darktide, I blame sprinting in this case, in comparison to V2. Movement is fun, slide-sprint is an enjoyable task to manage, even as an ogryn with charge or vet with shout. I play with abilities that prioritize reviving teammates.

Most of the time, I am unable to save you because you have split up. Think triple the distance from an ogryn charge. I just can’t get to you. The access to easy movement and accelerated kiting means players who panic can run away, instead of work towards teammates.

Its an interesting take on teamwork. I cant say as to why players on auric just don’t revive, its probably more economical. Like @Badwin said, I don’t really have a problem in most of my games, players who go “down” (and stay) know what they did wrong. Maybe some players also think just alt+F4 and save yourself?

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Firstly, a large portion of the player base is completely oblivious to all things. Downed players, ammo crates, med stations, ammo counts, stims in front of them, scripts in their inventory. If you ever play malice a single hound or trapper can often be a death sentence regardless of how many enemies are around or how close teammates are, they just don’t care.

Secondly, Darktide does have a harder issue with punishing players for trying to rescue when it’s not safe. There are way more instant kill threats in the game at any given point (at least on auric) than in v1 or v2. A well coordinated team can generally revive but if it’s all randos and they don’t have abilities off cool down there might not be enough CC on the team to hold off the 3 maulers, 8 ragers, 13 gunners, a stealth crusher, and 2 trappers long enough to revive before the 3 bombers 2 flamers, and a conga line of poxbursters spawn in from around a corner 3 meters away.

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I agree with Badwin, unless it is my fault being far away from others, then people will get you up, and even if you are out of position, some superstars will come and help you if they can.

Where I see people being slower to get others up is when there is a dog or a Trapper net. With the former, I have noticed there is a preponderance towards not shooting the dog off the person, but running up with a melee weapon to hit it. With the latter, people tend to work on clearing the area first, rather than doing a simple push for a second’s breathing space and get the net off quickly.

I always have half an eye on the team status on the corner of the HUD, so I notice quite quickly when someone is down and will do my best to get them back up quickly. If they die, then I should have done better to get to them.

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I’m rather having the opposite experience lately. Also on auric shock troop.

I sometimes get teammates that stick uncomfortably close to me like glue. Trying to babysit me. Not trusting me to handle a single mutant charging in from behind.

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This is usually a mistake, risky revives often lead to wipes. You usually have time to clear stuff or at least keep severe threats off the downed teammates, like fire bombers. Most revives can be done safely in a timely fashion, dropping everything to revive someone on a risky situation is a good way to screw over the rest of the team.

Assess the situation, and if the risk to the rest of the team is too high don’t wipe to do it, sometimes someone can’t be revived. Often times the brainless rushers put themselves in impossible situations, they are definitely not worth a wipe.

The flip side of this of is ppl being completely oblivious to easy rescue or revives, nets, dogs, using ults and grenades to cover etc. If you get pounced or netted it’s often a death sentence with randos.
There are a lot of bad, purposely unprepared players these days and it can be a coin toss in some matches.

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today we have the alt-f4 epidemic, that’s why many don’t stay and help and you end the mission with other people than those you started with. might be caused by the ASS penance, or ragequitting by pressing alt-f4 when you can just leave the mission in-game, whatever: it’s really demotivating to stay and fight for someone who is downed and then they just leave.

anyway, if one player goes down, it’s better to continue with the rest as a team until that player can be rescued, rather than starting the often seen trail of lemmings rushing to the rescue one by one and going down as well.

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This game is alot easier than VT2 and because of that soloing is much more viable. In some cases even for me letting somone die to solidify my positioning is the choice i make. And in some cases it keeps the whole team alive in the long run as i can get them all up also on the flip side if i die in a bad place i will tell my teammates to go without me and let the enemies waste time hitting me whilst bleeding out. Just my experience tho might differ for others. Some ppl can be cowards or make stupid decisions to not revive when they probably should have but theres definitely times where leaving someobe to die is the better choice and much moreso in this game than VT2

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an anecdote about not reacting to things that should be obvious to any experienced player, like netted teammates: it gets even funnier on lower skill levels. i leveled a new zealot a few months ago, played a bit of sightseeing just to slowly get the character to 30. i wasn’t taking it seriously, but a net is a net, even on malice. should still have been free a second later. but now picture 1 guy firing his gun into poxwalkers, then crouching tactically while reloading and taking hits, and ignoring me completely right in front of him. the other one nearby pointing his gun up and down because of problems with his controller i guess, and the third one completely oblivious looking for goodies in a corner (where the valve puzzle is on enclavum baross). and i sat there watching fascinated how our group got overrun.

but when you think those playing auric maelstrom should know better: just notice how often pings or drop / help requests get ignored. then there’s the lack of coordination and not knowing how to play certain sections. for example the part with inserting 3 batteries into a pole in the middle of a sandy crater in excise vault. why do people stay at the pole and get shot at from 360 degrees? it’s not that the dregs would try to pull the batteries out again. or the comedy with moving the trains out of the way in ascension riser, they hop around in the open when they can just retreat to the guardhouse. generally , “tactical retreat” and “chokepoint” seem such strange concepts. and lastly, they scatter as soon as they reach a large area. so many games have been lost like this. and then some won’t even learn from such failures.

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Mate :pensive:
That is pretty sad

In my experience, that is mostly fine, they do not revive me if I am too far, and do revive if everything is fine

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I basically agree, OPs frustration makes sense because it can often feel like people are ignoring you, but especially in higher difficulty, commiting to a risky revive is a very common way for things to fall apart.

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Having 1 person down poses minimal risk to mission completion unlike in VT2, so risking revive isn’t worth it generally.

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too many players left the game as soon as they go down, so I stopped actively helping them.
This is because it is not worth the risk to help them.
Of course, if I know a player won’t do that, I will help them

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scoreboard mod mentality, you being down offers up the chance of getting more kills. your not an ally now your the competition , if they spend time helping you up thats wasting time that could be done scoring to cut down the targets to score from.

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Completely understandable and relatable, especially when it comes to rescues from dogs or nets. It’s 3x worse when you get the dogs off or free them from a net before a single hair gets singed or out of place, only for them to go out of their way to not return the favor. They literally just watched you chuck a nade, ult or slide to free them but them chasing the fleeing trapper just made it to the top of their priority list. “You couldn’t spare the 0.5s to free me as I did you before you run off?”

It’s death from a dozen frustrations sometimes, and I’ll say it again, the player base is much less team oriented than in VT2, part of that is the game’s fault TBH.

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The player characters were power crept to the point most players don’t feel like they need their team mates. The times when VT2 was at its best cooperatively was when it was at its relative hardest and cooperative gameplay was a requirement for the vast majority of players to get through a mission successfully. I have a lot of my best memories of the game from those time periods.

I know a lot of people love to yap about the “quick play environment” and how you simply can’t make people actually rely on each other in a cooperative game because that might require an actual attempt to use comms or whatever other cope (the real reason is always just that they simply enjoy being self reliant and don’t care what that costs).

Yes the game should have better social features to facilitate this, allow loadout changes when joining a mission in progress, giving you the necessary info to inform that decision etc.

But the game doesn’t feel cooperative because it doesn’t actually force you, in fact it barely even incentivises you to be cooperative to succeed and I’m tired of pretending this is good because “uhhh most people pug and are allergic to microphones actually”.

Edit: To add to this all attempts to increase difficulty to compensate have just lead to the complete destruction of any sense of pacing or ebbs and flows in intensity, unreliable (or impossible to reliably hear over everything else) sound cues, and compounding issues with netcode/latency related issues. This further makes reviving under pressure harder and makes not going for it at all the right call more often than it should be.

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hmmm.

I joined VT2 via a Steam sale, so by that point it was already a mature game. Those playing it were playing their level, more or less. So point 1 …

  1. People are often playing above their skill level in DarkTide

I see it loads, particularly if I’m playing in Tier 4s or high intensity 4/5s. You can see these players as they just get totally focussed on melee fighting the trash mobs in front of them, to the point where their mindset means they simply cannot break off the fight. They don’t see anything apart from those groaners in front of them.

Easy fodder for this game.

Better players don’t even “see” the trashmobs in front of them. It’s all muscle memory while you’re scanning the battle field behind them. A quick double dodge, then special or blitz, and you’ve freed yourself up to help.

Then the flip side of this; people git gud with their range weapon, but haven’t learned how to melee. First sign of pressure and they melt. Basically: they can’t get to you, even if they were trying to.

  1. DarkTide is too generous with health and toughness regeneration, compared to VT2

VT2; if you can avoid a patrol of Chaos Knights, you do. No point in losing health. DarkTide conversely brings with it the “FPS Shooter” mentality; i.e. if I can hose down a horde of enemies, I’m going to 'cos pew pew pew. If I can just nip off here to clear this pocket of groaners, I’m going to, chop chop chop. Doesn’t matter if you lose a bit of health as there’s tonnes of the stuff, and toughness to boot.

And ranged guns allow people to shoot the other side of the map. So basically, people just bring a load of unnecessary aggro, which bites you on the bum at times.

  1. DarkTide spams specials and elites

Simple one. It’s harder to cut through to save you.

  1. You went left, everyone else went right.

And you’re now about 50metres away from us, on the other side of a ravine. I don’t recall VT2 having such different routes to the same end point. VT2 maps were more open (iirc), and less corridor-like, so you weren’t so split by geography, and it was easier to regroup.

Others may recall VT2 differently … :wink:

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Please stop making me empathise with filthy heretics.

Seriously though can’t stop giggling at that pic never been happier to be corrected.

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