I don’t think you know what a straw man means. A straw man logical fallacy is when you falsely present someone’s argument as representative of their position and knock it down when it doesn’t accurately portray what their stance is. Me making statements about reasonable expectations about someone’s play time and what one should expect after 1800 hours… isn’t a straw man at all. You could argue it’s a non sequitor. But it’s not a straw man. In general, you want to steel man your opponents. However it’s quite tedious conversing because you seem to intentionally misunderstand things to try and help your position… or you’re just genuinely very confused at what others have been stating.
In short, saying that someone shouldn’t be expected to continuously chase mechanical upgrades to gear, with 65 weapons in the game (assuming you even played multiple classes and aimed for all weapons) is not a good metric to have. It is not a demographic to fight for (people that have 1800 hours and would be bored of the game if they suddenly had no chance at rolling “better” gear). It is just one criticism among many.
^This doesn’t affect the “straw man” nature of your claim… this is just based on the information you gave. You didn’t care to qualify it, you gave me the number. Maybe you also played it on console and game pass. I have no idea. I only know what you give me. If you want to tell me 1000 hours of that time is idle I don’t have much choice except to move forward assuming that piece of information is true. You could have done a lot of things, but in the end you’re the one that gave the number. If you want to give me the “REAL” real number, by all means.
But it doesn’t matter. The real question is, how much time should it be reasonable for someone to accomplish their goal? For example, DRG when they released their seasons played around with how much season points you get per mission. Their GOAL was 200 hours per season to complete it, so that’s how they balanced it.
If Fatshark wants a player to spend on average 15 hours to get one “great” and near perfect weapon… Why not just make it a deterministic grind that ~15 hours equates to unlocking a specific goal?
How do you know this? Do you know it wasn’t popular? What’s your source? I saw lots of cataclysm tournaments, and even modded realm with higher tiers of cataclysm, more difficult than the base one. All the build guides (that you can actually use unlike Darktide) are focused on cataclysm. You could get borders from beating Cata as an incentive. So it’s not like there was “no rewards”. But after you get all the reds you want… why not? There’s pleasure to be sought in doing something that’s difficult. You said it yourself right? Reward isn’t good if it’s just a “handout” and you seem to value challenge as part of a reward… so why not play the higher difficulty content? (I guess beating Cataclysm modded levels are easy than “beating” darktide’s crafting).
I am not sure why you have such a hard time understanding this concept. Darktide’s current crafting/itemisation system fails all audiences. Every single one of them, however you define “casual” and “veteran” players. As @Headhunter poignantly called out.
Current Darktide crafting/itemisation system.
Casual: Doesn’t play a lot of hours.
Won’t have enough time to check melks and armoury. Won’t likely even get the weapons they have from EMPs gifts. Will be missing lots of blessings. Likely won’t use/know about browser plugins or mods to buy and look at gear.
Won’t have a clear direction or way to work iteratively towards what they want. The odds (how bad they are) aren’t communicated clearly at brunts.
Will struggle just knowing what weapon marks are good, what blessings to go for, what bases to buy etc. (All weapons should be balanced to be viable but that’s a separate item)
Will waste a lot of time just to discover a certain weapon mark is inferior to others or that a blessing sucks… or sleep on a weapon and not know a blessing is mandatory/has the capability to make a weapon good (and then internally scream at not spending on bases for the weapon they know want). This is all due to the huge barrier of time required and in ability to easily experiment effectively. Is the weapon bad because of the base scores? Does it need that blessing I don’t have? Should I spend more ordos and crafting materials investigating or looking at something else? I only have so much time.
Result? FAILURE.
Casual: Doesn’t care/look at the mechanics doesn’t think about anything seriously
Doubtful many who would sit here would learn all the nuances to Darktide (like dodge sliding, which they never teach you) and play on higher difficulties, but there’s a possibility. They may just want someone to tell them what the meta is and never think about it again.
Crafting system requires too much time. Time to look at and buy weapons and hunt for blessings. Doubtful they will spend much time filtering all their weapons and comparing them if they’re indifferent to minutia in mechanics. They won’t compare 15 guns of the same mark to see if one is 1% better than another.
Won’t have a clear direction or way to work iteratively towards what they want. The odds (how bad they are) aren’t communicated clearly at brunts.
Will struggle just knowing what weapon marks are good, what blessings to go for, what bases to buy etc.
Result? FAILURE
Veteran: Puts a lot of hours into the game. A lot defined as in 300+
The systems are indifferent to the time you put in. The chances of rolling bases you want and weapons hasn’t changed since you were level 30. There is no benefit to have been playing so long in this front.
Will have more of a collection of blessings, but especially if playing wide across multiple classes and trying to make several builds across various weapon families will still likely be missing several blessings. New weapons will be released that they can’t use with the same effectiveness as other weapons already in their arsenal.
Frustration with patches. Some patches will brick their weapons. The blessing they have that’s locked was just nerfed (Hand-Cannon) and will now require starting the process all over again. Or new weapons will drop (like the new shovels) but since you were never interested you didn’t spend resources getting blessings for them and essentially have to start all over like a new player.
Time is not rewarded. It’s entirely possible, and likely, to spend 100 hours getting ordos, melk bucks, plastic, and diamonds, and then waste it all in brunts, melks, and hadrons at rolls to never get a good base with perks and blessings you’re looking for. You already have an ok weapon. You want something BETTER.
Result? FAILURE
Veteran: Theory crafting and stress testing builds.
This one is super obvious. To be scientific about something you need to be able to repeat things easily. In VT2 I could get a grey 300 weapon and it would be the same as everyone else’s. The game could be balanced around it easily and I could know exactly how to feel about it. With varied modifiers… I have to ask, is it bad, or are my modifiers just bad?
If I want to try out a build from:
Or achieve results here:
Here I can’t easily do this. I can’t reproduce it in every detail to see if I have the same results and expectations. (You know a key component to the scientific process). And for games like this… sharing and recommending builds, even just meme builds (not just for clearing the hardest difficulty) is a fun part of the community that’s basically been neutered by the heavy RNG here.
Frustration with patches. Some patches will brick their weapons. The blessing they have that’s locked was just nerfed (Hand-Cannon) and will now require starting the process all over again. Or new weapons will drop (like the new shovels) but since you were never interested you didn’t spend resources getting blessings for them and essentially have to start all over like a new player.
Result? FAILURE
Veteran: Grinding is life. Lots of hours
Some small percentage of players seem to only enjoy the game if there’s some small chance they can get a small upgrade. Otherwise they would stop being engaged or feel the game is rewarding. Would feel aimless and experience existential angst. A loss of Raison d’Être. The rest of the game wouldn’t be enough to appeal to them on it’s own.
Likely it’s fueled by an attitude of “I got mine, so screw others”. Low empathy reported.
At risk of being manipulated by freemium games, gacha, and gambling in general.
Has the strange propensity to post about what weapons they rolled and gloat about it.
Result? SUCCESS
Jokes aside, the current systems hurt both hard core and casual players alike. And despite your comment of “unsure which direction to commit to” no game SHOULD commit to one audience over another. Success, like in biology, is in adaptability and flexibility. You should have something for as much diverse groups as possible without sacrificing things to the point of mundanity. This is a cooperative game. Not all friend groups are going to comprise of the same types. I have friends who have played darktide hundreds of hours with me… I also have friends who have barely got one character to level 30. Skill is going to be a major factor here but you should try and close the gap as much as possible where it doesn’t feel like if I bring my causal friends they get wrecked, and when I drop to their difficulty I trivialize the whole mission. There should be some accommodation but I shouldn’t have to tell my casual friends “Yeah sorry that hammer you like is pretty garbage without thrust. You’ll have to spend god knows how long looking for it”. They won’t do that. They just get frustrated they don’t have power cycler or infernus seeing what I can do, and give up at the nebulous method’s as to how they could get these weapons and weapon configs. If there was a progress bar I could point them to, much like the talent tree and journey to level 30, it would be easy! I could just say “Just play the game for around 5 more hours and you can unlock it GUARANTEED here as a reward when we complete/gather X”.
Some players don’t have the skills. Putting better gear in their hands will increase their chances of survival and do better, and thus enjoyment and more likelihood at playing higher difficulties with other people.
Even if the crafting/item system “worked” for most players it’s still not a streamlined or enjoyable process, especially without mods. The constant rolling, buying, throwing out, comparing at rotating stores for small differences, no hub hotkeys so moving back and forth, a giant inventory of crap incase a patch changes things and emergency bases, etc. It’s just not even fun interacting with all the vendors in terms of how much time it asks of you. I literally have a personal excel sheet keeping track of what blessings and weapons I am pursuing so I can remember when I look at the rotating stores.
And for veterans. Sure I have a good void strike and force sword that are decent enough. Not perfect. But maybe I want to try dueling swords? I just can’t get one good enough to justify the swap. I am sick of the same combos. I want to try new things, things that are already in the game, ways of playing a class or with weapons I WANT to experience AT a specific difficulty and specific efficacy level to have that experience. I want to know how this hammer build feels two shotting bulwarks… NOT three shotting them. I want THAT specific experience.
I should really have a FAQ or something. It’s always the same arguments from the pro-RNG crowd (clique more like) Nothing new here. Heard it all before.
Not value achievement at all… is again a gross misrepresentation. A straw man logical fallacy. Saying I want gear progression to be deterministic or require FEWER hours doesn’t equate to no progression or grind AT ALL. I am not sure why you are having difficulties wrapping your head around this strange concept that less than 1000 doesn’t equal 0. Maybe I just want 100.
But that aside, I still have yet to understand why should ANYONE feel achievement from randomness? Things they don’t have control over? Should I feel proud and that I achieved something because my parents decided to birth me in a country that isn’t third world? I didn’t do anything. Why be proud in location of birth? Should I feel accomplished that I was randomly selected to be a jury member? What an accomplishment. Or maybe that email saying I was randomly selected and won $10,000? You know what? I DID work hard to get that money from that company I never heard of. A bit of a tangent but I don’t celebrate my birthday. Why? Because it wasn’t particularly challenging for me to… not die this year. Why would I waste time celebrating that? And on the day I happened to emigrate from my mother’s womb and the earth just happened to complete a solar rotation (Which isn’t even exactly 365 days). Maybe if I had a life threatening disease or lived in a war zone I would. But I don’t. And so I don’t feel particularly accomplished for me or others when someone tells me they rolled 300 weapons and got 2 380 bases. Sounds more frustrating than accomplishing as most of those resources were lost to the warp. Penances I get. Beating hard difficulties I get… rolling a good weapon in Darktide? I genuinely do not understand the phenomenological experience as to how someone could take pride in that or feel accomplished. I am not being sarcastic, please elucidate this problem for me so I might better understand the opposition.
You know, I have never made an alternative account in my life. The possibility an account is an alt is never something I even consider. Sometimes I think the people who are quick to assume alts are the types to use them. Kinda like with affairs and jealousy. Study showed that a lot of people who were excessively jealous and anxious about affairs were actually those had affairs, or were having affairs.
This cuts both ways. The roughly no more than a dozen people I have seen on the forums defend crafting could all be alts. You could all be the same one guy defending crafting. It’s not a good argument to use. Maybe fatshark admins could tell with source IP addresses and login times and such but it’s not worth the effort.
Even if we assume a bunch have changed their minds/are alts we still only need 385 users for a sample poll to be 95% accurate that this opinion represents the larger whole.
Honestly your argument would be better off not trying to prove that this isn’t the majority and just say “Yeah crafting isn’t popular… but we need to use the awful systems and toxicity to hook people and make em addicted for these MTX’s. That’s gaming nowadays”. At least that I could rationally see that, even if I disagree.
Give people long-ish clear and deterministic paths to get what they want and they will spend a lot more time chasing it.
Why is it the median play time for Darktide is about 60 hours? Seems to me they just finished levelling some characters to level 30, stopped the deterministic progression talent system and have suddenly hit the “Crafting wall” where they have become disillusioned.
Every. Single. Argument (not being facetious) I have seen levied at why the crafting system is objectively better than a deterministic one, could also be levied against the talent system for classes. Would the talent system be better if it was random? Roll up new character to see if you get what you want? Don’t worry you can change 5 of them before you’re locked out. It’s boring if your talents are the same as everyone else’s. Need players engaged.
I don’t even expect you to respond at this point. Or if you do, you’ll try and interpret it in some weird way again. And it doesn’t bother me. Why? Because this is all a win. Keeping this thread active, at the top of the forum, keeping the topic engaged and people reading it. It all helps. I could even go so far as to talk about people uniting over common issues/enemies and public enemy theory.
So let me end with this.
You say it’s just a vocal minority. Fine. Go and show me anywhere on social media that extols the current system. I don’t care where. I don’t care if you posted it or one of your alts. Reddit, youtube, discord, fatshark forums, steam, I don’t care. Go and show me any inkling that there’s some commentor who was like: “You know what guys? This crafting system is pretty good” with 50 upvotes. Go on. I’ll wait.
Because in a video game… indifference and tolerance is not a win. ALL your systems (especially the core ones) should be FUN and engaging. Not just there in the background you begrudgingly or apathetically engage with. That is a loss.
If fatshark is going to address the bulk of these issues I don’t think they’ll be able to leave the amount of RNG in it that you want. Maybe they won’t fix it and we can just ignore the game properly and stop kicking this dead, nurgle infested, horse and stop this business of rallying folks to make the game better for more people, and you can enjoy it the way you want.
