When it seems like it’s the same argument being brought up over and over and over again with the same shot for shot responses and questions then yeah kind of.
I’m pretty sure no one a really expects a person to read all 2k+ posts but when it seems like the exact same point which was brought up 10 other times gets brought up an 11th time people tend to question if you are doing it as a bit and assume you aren’t arguing in good faith. This especially comes with many of the arguments such as “well sone of these must be alt accounts” or just flat out ignoring sources of player feedback because they don’t for neatly into an argument.
Personally I’m just tired and get tired of dealing with a system that I utterly despise and having to re explain why every single time with essentially equal results every time.
Like the crafting system I largely feel like I’m wasting my time and I’m just tired hence why I’m fine with others to do the majority of the arguing while letting previous statements stand on the wall for the most part.
Edit: late edit but I think the biggest argument that gets brought up which is just plain annoying is the “silent majority” because it’s a claim that doesn’t hold up to really any kind of measurement or scrutiny and anyone who makes the claim has absolutely no way of know that a silent majority in any way, shape, or form actually exists.
It’s not even really an argument that is backed up by anything it’s just a claim anyone can throw out there to excuse a lack of research, polling, or statistics on their part.
We have a thread full of compiled responses and requests to be added to the post which has a concrete number of responses many of which have quoted associated which is being compared to an unmeasured and unmeasurable pool which is being asked to be taken at face value next to actual polling.
If we are talking about a real silent majority then that would be a staggering number of people who picked the game up and then dropped it without coming back which is an actual measurable statistic through steam player numbers.
Well that’s what we have you know, reviews and feedback for. The whole point of a review or a survey or feedback is to highlight what the game did or does well, what it does ok or what isn’t a huge factor and what isn’t done well or needs serious improvement.
The data is there and people can literally go look. There are 30k negative reviews and 60k positive out of 90k total. Considering current player numbers sit around 9-10k as a peak and if you discard junk reviews it’s not even an unreasonable sample size. Hell even in the abstract of overall numbers that’s 1 in 3 players.
Taking this thread only we have 532 people listed on the wall which in itself equates to roughly 1/9th of the total players active in the game on average for this month. It may not be a majority but it’s not a small number either. This is also as I may stress again only this thread. This is not measuring steam, Reddit or any other social media.
Even doing a basic glance of around 20 reviews that wrote things down about half mentioned crafting. Even glancing at the positive reviews the directly mention the crafting system named progression not being good.
It’s not like any of this is hidden, it’s there, you can look at it.
My question is pretty simple. What sample size would you consider to be enough or does that sample size exist? At what point does “silent majority” just not apply anymore or is it constantly going to shift and be considered subjective no matter how many data points you get?
My entire problem with the silent majority argument comes in when you literally have more data points than people who play the game but it still keeps being brought up.
“No feedback is good feedback” is what my dad told me they used to say whenever a company he used to work for released a new product. People tend to not give positive feedback because the baseline expectation is for something to work. If something goes wrong or doesn’t work as well as expected, well, that shouldn’t be happening, so then you say something about it in effort for the issue to be solved. It’s not unique to games, and it’s not in any way new behavior. Praises usually come in the effect of referrals: “hey this thing is great! you should try it!”, but not to the company/person themselves.
Alright, i finally got irritated enough with the silent majority talk that im literally speed scrolling through the steam reviews and looking for every instance of the word crafting.
One funny thing I’m finding is that lot of the reviews mentioning crafting isn’t even negative reviews but positive ones cautioning that the gameplay is good but the progression systems are…not.
As a note this method is going to be limited because:
A) Steam does not have a key word search function for reviews
B) People can mention crafting multiple times in a review so it’s not going to be perfect
C) It’s not accounting for synonyms for the systems such as grind, progression, and others.
Yeah that part works but it doesn’t search every review, i mostly need to keep scrolling the entire set of reviews and get the whole bunch loaded.
It’s also really hard to tell how many reviews are actually loaded.
In an ideal world steam would add a search function that would just show how many reviews had that key word but unfortunately they don’t have that so manual method it is.
Past a certian point it’s also showing up as over 1000
Well it’s looking like a noise marine in my scroll bar now but i think im coming away with several interesting notes so far. As a note I’m only counting English reviews at the moment since i can, well, only speak and read English.
The constant for a lot of reviews including positive ones open with “The core game-play is great but the systems around it aren’t” with more detailed write ups for some and others leaving it there.
A lot of the negative reviews have over 100 hours of play time and thus had the time to interact with the crafting system they are criticizing. This is to be fair on par with a lot of positive reviews but many of those are around the 1k+ mark.
A ton of reviews are very out of date and either mention things that were fixed past release or mention things as if they are coming up or being improved over time and haven’t been updated since. I’m pretty sure searching recent would fix that but part of the reason was to check reasons that people left the game or stopped playing as well on an overall scale.
There are a lot of 1k+ negative reviews for the game.
If people thought that DRG got brought up a lot on the forums wait till you read the steam reviews
Overall really hoping steam adds a better filtering method so i can actually measure this stuff rather than doing this rough shot method but it’s already painting a pretty comprehensive picture.
I will say I don’t believe the crafting system is why a lot of general players left. I believe it is part of a reason why there isn’t a larger hard core playerbase, but not a general one.
Personally I still attribute that to both a poor new player experience, and a poor leveling experience.
The only reason I have put as much time and passion into this game is because I went out of my way to learn how to play, or at least “play correctly,” (this is a loose term). By that I mean understanding game flow and how melee works. Damnation kicked my ass the first couple times I played it, because I didn’t understand how to play. And there is a real chance I could have left the game there if I didn’t go to 3rd party sources to get better. That’s what happened to me with Vermintide 2.
And the leveling experience is both too long and too short. And maybe it reinforces bad play for higher levels. Although I think it would be alleviated with some better tutorials.
Imo advanced tutorials should includes some in game videos, showing and explaining a person fighting a horde with maybe a melee elite or 2 with a combat axe. “I’m using my light attack combo for horde clear, as they have sweeping attacks and enough damage to kill in 1 hit. I do a push attack here to create space. There is an opening, so I do a heavy attack on the mauler. As I’m clearing the horde, the Mauler swings at me so I either dodge or use the special action to stagger him.”
A 1 minute video like that would have helped me so much, although I also don’t remember if you could view your weapon combos with inspect at launch.
I do want to say discussing reviews, only players who are more invested in the game will leave a review. There are lots of games I have played, that I did not like, that I never left a review for.
I’m not saying poor crafting hasn’t caused people to leave. But I believe it is more an issue for post level 30 players, and other things caused most other “casual” players to leave.
