i wasn’t denying anything, but i won’t be looking at V2’s crafting system with rosa tinted glasses and pretend it was good in any imagination
it was acceptable, where DT’s isn’t
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All they did was give us 12X the permutations of filler garbage to chose from while making everything surrounding it worse…
I’m glad you like what’s new about it but I really enjoyed the fact that I didn’t spend over 99% of my time not getting what I wanted…
I wasn’t trying to suggest you were^^ poor wording on my part.
I ment that I find it inarguable which is better.
I also remember what wasn’t ideal about VT2 crafting but I didn’t care about it’s flaws while I was interacting with it and I still don’t mind it today. Half of that reason being the mods ofc but even when I played vanilla when I started out, I didn’t mind. I only started to mind once the game got updated and mods stopped working for a few days.
You’re absolutely right, VT2s was acceptable in that I didn’t spend any time in a mission thinking of having to collect plastic bottles, trying to cash them in with the smithy.
DTs is all gacha garbage that simply doesn’t fit into a coop horde shooter and is therefore unacceptable.
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Of course, yet that has nothing to do with anything I said. Games like Darktide have progression systems primarily as a way to try to keep more players interested in the game longer than they would by strength of gameplay alone.
So I reiterate: if a game’s player retention rate is substantially worse than expected then it stands to reason that the mechanics and systems put in place to address player retention are not good enough.
While I agree that Vermintide 2 is a far superior game to Darktide at the moment. I must politely ask what the devil are you smoking? Vermintide 2’s crafting and loot was a spectacular garbage fire. The only sliver lining was that it had a logical end point that could be reached in only like 1000 hours and then you were home free. As opposed to Darktide’s nebulous RNG cloud where the only certainty is that you will get screwed over repeatedly until the end of time.
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maybe because player retention isn’t something you can influence with manipulating systems.
old games like left for dead had 0 specifically designed mechanics to this end, and they retain players way longer than anything that specifically tries to retain, so whats the difference?
fun gameplay, and self-surstaining content generation. in form of community made maps/ or even gamemodes
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There are entire genres full of huge games that give the lie to that line of reasoning. ARPGs, MMOs, gacha, etc. All of these games use ‘progression’ as a primary means to drive and retain their players long term.
And of course, there are also plenty of examples of failures in these systems backfiring and causing players to quit. The biggest one I have personal experience with being WoW’s implosive decline between around 2017 to 2022. Where a successive string of catastrophically bad ideas in progression systems turned one of the game’s highest points ever into a string of horrifically reviled expansions.
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Appreciate the info, thanks.
I can only speak for myself, but the changes haven’t made me interact with the crafting system any more than before.
There’s a range of reasons I mostly stay away from it, but the locks are central to it all.
The locks mean that balance changes can brick my good weapons. That makes me stock up on half-decent unmodified weapons that I can modify if that happens. Having a ton of weapons in my inventory makes dealing with them a chore, because the interfaces around gear and crafting are clunky and inefficient to work with when you’ve got a ton of items.
The non-linear progression around blessings is also a problem - I get a decent item which has potential to be crafted, but I don’t have the blessings I want to put on it. So I just don’t modify it, because if I do ever get that blessing and the weapon has been modified, I might not be able to modify it in the way I originally wanted to and thus have wasted its potential. So now I’m not only stocking up weapons that I can use if my “good” weapon gets bricked by balance changes, I’m also stocking up on items I want to modify, but can’t. This further exacerbates the interface problems by bloating the item lists.
Collecting blessings is also a chore, since it relies on either buying a weapon with the blessings you want from Melk (which only rotate once a day and gives very low chances of getting a blessing you’re interested in) or mass-upgrading items, which is a tedious process of hunting through lists, clicking in and out of menus and waiting for animations to finish. The odds on the latter don’t even matter to me because the process itself is a chore.
The whole system seems to be built and tuned for people who want to main a specific weapon long-term, and even if we discount the issues around maining and balance, that’s just not how I play games.
I hope this has been helpful.
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the uses of RNG items into game while isn’t exactly ideal it lacking neunece. if your level 30 your gear shouldn’t be sub-250 base weaponary on all items including the Bought ones and the RNG. in v2 there wasn’t a problem when you hit your first 300 then every item basically from there will be 300.
While agree the system is desgined for Maiming weaponary, the reason is there no point in change to a weapon that could be off by quite a large margine. a few % points in one level or another could change how viable the weapon is on anything above Malice. while i do appreciate the demand for a weapon customization system, there is a limit to how much would should be able to change their is a reason why we have different forge-world variants which is meant to have different type of extra. while Special action like torches, Bayonet and special ammunition should be able too be change if it makes sense. like Bayonet on IG guard bolter no. but Torch or ammo sure. with an option of use of ammunition like all rounds in the shotgun is Slug or Fire and the special actually just Change the ammo loaded so if you hit C when loading you change the ammo if you have loaded ammo then you have to reload the full mag to provide balance. Scopes need to be added and maybe stocks but that cosmetics in every sense of the word. like Skeletal, Full, Wood stocks. the reason why a limited customization system works is if you remove all the items to crat a fully customize weapon, then there no point in having Forgeworld variant which detracts from the Lore of weapons.
that is only true if you, concede to the idea that a progression system has no other purpose than to retain players, wich i don’t…
why because our monkey brains enjoy em and that alone is enough to justify these systems.
also every game ever, was created with the aim to make players play it, the reasons for this differ ofc,
passion, creativity, or greed, but that doesn’t mean that every mechanic aimed to accomplish this is a manipulation, at least i don’t think this way.
what i was talking about is the specific property of a system that is an illusion. it only purpose is to mimic something player want, without actually providing it.
DT’s system isn’t purely an illusion, you do actually increase in combat prowess but you reach a point where it moves over to an illusion of progress, the difference of a 79% and a 80% stat is so utterly minuscule that the system itself often doesn’t bother to actually give you an numerical increase in any stat. many weapons behave this way btw.
and the late game progression in DT is basically only this all over, going from a 520 weapon to a 525 weapon, your monkey brain thinks bigger number better, but the difference ingame is nonexistent to the point that you could finish hundreds of maps where not a single one was influenced meaningful by this extra 5 points of weapon power…
so at that point its pointless to pursuit it for any other reason than OCD,
so that’s the difference progression systems can be content, illusions can never be anything.
and if you put in illusionary systems in your games it becomes a manipulation, because its purpose is solely to mimic something a player seeks without providing it.
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FS, now that the overwhelming majority of people willing to give you feedback on the forums have voted against being content with crafting locks in the other thread, can we please have something change?
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People have been giving them this sort of feedback since before they even ‘fully implemented’ crafting (and it’s in soft quotes because it’s really still not). They either haven’t budged on it because they’re the hare in a race thinking they’ve already won before the finish, or because they’re the turtle still trying to make it to the finish line. Most likely a little bit of both really.
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Without a lock removal, this redo in October really won’t be the relaunch this game deserves.
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So your argument for doing nothing is basically “well if it’s not every registered player that hates it and comments as such, it technically isn’t something that should be fixed”
You might wanna check your player retention stats to help you decide faster.
On a level from Sedition to Auric Maelstrom: Just how deep up their own rectum are FS game designers?
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Isn’t this the fallacy of ignorance?
Since they claim that they don’t know the feedback of the bigger part of the community, they essentially assume that they like the current system.
If the assumption was that the unknown feedback would say that they don’t like it, they’d have to change it.
I’d love to hear the reasoning for that claim since I cannot imagine that anybody has any evidence that would logically support it.
Seriously @FatsharkCatfish ,being reminded that you can’t have the full picture is fair enough and all but it’s not logically supported.
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That is something not possible. Can’t get feedback from all players. So can only make do with feedback that do respond.
Around 600 responses as example. Further below
“Active Players” - Unique logins in the last 30 days would be example.
Then decide if 600 out of active players is a good sample representation as a whole. 600 is a good sample considering daily player count.
There is a solution to every problem.
Do you want everyone/nearly all to respond to a poll?
OK do it this way. Add poll into game for a month for one time response, if they respond to poll they get X amount of dockets. Incentive right there and you know it is unique login validated response.
Asking for text feedback is too much as someone has to read wall of text per player. Keep it simple as a poll.
- Leave crafting as it is
- Soft locks - Unlock using dockets, plasteel etc
- Completey unlock
If somehow ends up being 2. Let it be reasonable. i.e. 100 missions to gain enough materials to unlock 1 blessing too much, 1 is too little, so it has to be something reasonable in between.
But if FS seem to think locks is what keeps players engaged and would be bored too quickly. The locks is the very system putting people off.
I get it - You need numbers as justification. That is my solution above to encourage feedback. Give people incentive to respond and know their responses are actually collected and processed in controlled manner.
It is same tactic used to for marketing surveys - by offering something or potential reward. Could be simple as first 100 responders get merchandise etc anything really. Lots of ways to do this.
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It’s just a lazy justification not to listen to the active community. The community has been providing ‘feedback’ for a year on various aspects, chief among them being the crafting system and weapon customization. FS claiming they don’t have enough feedback from the player base is insulting.
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do you take into account feedback and responses around the game on platforms other then this Forum? such as Steam, DT discord, Reddit, ect,ect. as a large majoirty of Players i figure don’t use this forum due to the fact they don’t feel like they need to create a account to fatshark it self and instead use their steam account.
But why would they spend money to gather feedback that they have already gathered and are already fully aware of? (And have been for nearly a full year)
The response of: “but think of all the players we haven’t heard from” is a typical response from someone defending their actions with something that is impossible to rebuddle, if you play their game.
Oh but you see, it’s so much worse than an insult to our intelligence…
Saying that you don’t have enough feedback is essentially saying: “we don’t know what we are supposed to be doing because we can’t be certain most people will like it, so we chose to do nothing”.
That’s essentially what you’re saying, you think, their message means. Not trying to put words in your mouth, I just want to draw a comparison.
I see it much more as an attempt of justifing someones (in)actions / viewpoint by saying something you can’t rebuddle, if you were to argue against them.
The difference is in the intentions behind the statements.
Your version is pleeding: “not wanting to make more misstakes” at best and “incompetence” at worst.
Mine is: “say something to make them shut up” at best or “no Catfish, I don’t care that the playerbase hates our layered gambling systems, it makes shareholders happy so it stays”.
Obviously I don’t believe that to be a quote or the like but think about it:
How many different times have they said something that infers that they know of more than they talk about?
In the devblog that announced the lock “changes” they said this:
You can’t claim that you don’t have enough feedback which is why you chose to not act on it while having done so in the past. Any patch would prove this point but I chose this blog because it highlights the 2nd problem I have with it in one quote.
Does this quote read like they were unsure of what we wanted? Does it sound like they chose these changes while having had to consider what other feedback they didn’t get?
Sure looks like they got some feedback and ajusted accordingly while not considering what feedback they were “missing”.
There’s just one problem for me. The inconsistant and deliberately arbitrary application of the feedback.
Why give us the most obvious QoL update (time waster RNG removal) while also being real tame with the changes to the RNG mechanics that tied to “engagement RNG”? Funny “coincidence” that.
You have to love that the apparent reason for it is: “…would have a big impact on item acquisition…”
Which is essentially saying that they are afraid of sweeping changes to the retention part of the game when it is in our favour but then also go:
Which is essentially the exact same situation except now that it negatively effects our gear, it’s fine to do even bigger sweeping changes. -.-
Who cares if we have to regrind a ton of new gear, that’s what we’re supposed to do!
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If CM needs the numbers to make the higher up suits really understand then lets go for it. These suits need their stat sheets for something so trivial. Lets go for assumption CM agrees on all this but just needs ammo for the presentation.
The ball is in FS’ court to create the mechanism by which to gather the information and we just engage with feedback. A mechanism that involves unique, not alt, validated login feedback/poll.
Or CM can just accept the recent poll as good enough sample as starting point of change. To me it is.
I am cynical enough to think nothing will happen in future in regards to crafting unlocks, in 2023 at least.
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The issue with “keep giving feedback” is the onus of responsibility. That statement says “We havent gotten feedback from you. The locks are your fault,” whether or not they wanna say that part out loud.
That’s not it.
They have aknowledged that their own changes are not what we want as I’ve highlighted above.
Aknowledging that the changes are not what we want is also an aknowledgement that they have gotten feedback.
This isn’t a “it’s your fault” statement.
It’s a “I have taken your feedback into consideration and chose to ignore it” statement.
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