Text description for the party finder? WHEN?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

THIS is getting ridiculous.

Every time I want to test a new build in Havoc, I have to go to that emperor damnned Personality Scourge, change my character’s name to something like “Build Tester” In my native language. So that players who are serious about winning the game don’t join my team and end up suffering a crushing defeat.

Why can’t I just open a Party Finder, and write “Testing new builds here”?

How outdated, how silly, and how incompetent do developers have to be to let the game become this out of touch with reality? Can we ever get this basic functionality?

2

The developers are following a sophisticated development strategy greatly informed by bio-system and evolutionary design.

That’s why everything takes so long, seems needlessly complicated, and so many features are just good enough for the game to stagger on for a few years, generate enough money for another game, and then die.

3

I’m sure if this feature is added to the game, players will start abusing it by using offensive, racist messages, and only the Emperor knows what they might write there.

4

By that logic, we might as well just ban all text input features, like the chat

5

In previous seasons I used to have a pre-written message I would copy / paste into the party chat. Just to inform people joining, that “yes I’m playing a psyker, but not I’m not running bubble or inferno staff”. :man_shrugging:

Havoc offers at least some of the stuff I want from the game, but comes with its own list of issues. Party finder experience / general restrictiveness of the game mode are certainly on the top of that list.

6

Can we not call it that? The function is not perfect and may not be meeting your requirements, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t implemented successfully.

As to why - my guess would be UI unification for consoles and making as much of the user experience tied to fixed UI elements rather than text input boxes - that’s what the lobby tags were made for, which doesn’t necessitate text censorship or filtering. And yes, there could be more tags made, but it’s not like the devs can account for all the needs the players will have in that function.

And I suppose that tags are supposed to be aligned with a certain heuristics that constitute looking for a party of people to play with - this does not inherently involve player-made concepts of „build testing", since your idea is misaligned with the designers’; and that’s not to say either of them is wrong, because both have pros and cons.

7

Let me give an example of a problem that I didn’t come up with myself, but that I’ve witnessed:
If someone is unfortunate enough not to have reached Havoc Assignment Rank 40 yet, it’s not hard to imagine some people demand that Vet must use VoC, Psyker must use Bubble, Ogryn must use Taunt, and so on, because they can’t afford to lose several games in a row.
Having to go through such tedious conversations every time someone joins the party—why can’t this just be written directly in the party finder?

An even better and more common question: what if you want to complete a specific penance? Why can’t this be easily done through the party finder?

8

I don’t know, but if there is no text to embed in what little the information box allows for, then there likely is a reason for it that sits with the design and why it wasn’t committed. I doubt that the devs are so ignorant they would not consider this, but, I do keep in mind the user experience is made with consoles in mind too, so maybe it doesn’t need all the functions that PC would allow for (and it limits the need to moderate the system).

The system is supposed to provide a streamlined means of conveying what a lobby wants to achieve, and the tags do give an idea as to what’s to expect in a certain lobby.

Let’s take this for instance, assuming two scenarios (language tags are optional but I included them to present complimentary ideas):

  • Anyone is welcome to join my lobby, for specifically Mortis Trials, and I will be undertaking some penances - whatever those are, it’s on me as a player to define the criteria. Polish folks I will try to approach for comms but won’t be stringy about it, and it may ease up some comms.

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  • I want people applying to consider the language, because it might be easier for us to discuss strategy for “hardcore” playstyle, as in - all “public-defined” meta for any character that joins.

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The system is not supposed to be exahustive - there is only so much information you can embed on the UI element that may or may not be relevant to people queueing for a specific experience, for folks that want to engage with the party finder in the first place.

Now there’s problems with the system:

  • It’s generic - it does not convey specific information, and I suppose it’s on the player holding the lobby to convey these items to whoever joins; be it text (probably PC) or voice communications (probably console),
  • Tags are exhaustive and may not include all the concepts that were conceived by the playerbase.

Say, considering that there is a constraint you cannot allow the players to use text to convey some information - and - keep the system easy and intuitive to use:

How do you convey that? Do you want to convey that? Do you expect a player to know what these concepts are? Where do we draw the line? How can this be exploited?

But then can we really expect the designers to get all the ideas the players have and give them the freedom to define just about any text that they conceive and want to convey?

I don’t oppose the idea, but it carries with itself a risk that - again, remembering what I’d typed earlier - there is something about the design that has to be restrictive, for the functionality to fill certain desgin criteria.

I wouldn’t mind having text in the box - but I can think of a couple of ways for it to be exploited and the very sensation of that seems to me the system was made with the idea it won’t be exploitative in any shape or form, to meet some objectives necessary for it to be implemented.

Mind that things are always put in live as “finished” in a way - FS does not rework ideas greatly past their initial inception and implementation, and they don’t really remove them if they don’t work either. If it was conceived the way it is working right now, then straying from the idea is counter-productive, unless more people scream about it (which I’m fine with - I’d like the party finder to get future updates).

9

True. Also they might go Dark Souls way, allow us ot compose messages of predetermined words. Im sure just like in Dark Souls poeple will find a way to make for example sexual metaphors, but it will limit the explicit words.