The Crafting Memorial; lest we forget

[Tempest_yo]

Ok quick rundown/reiteration of what we want in general since we are over 1300 posts deep.

• No locks. Scrap 'em. They suck. Everyone knows this. They are far and beyond the primary point of contention, and why players can brick their weapons. This is extremely punishing.

• The ability to remove/wipe stats off a good base item. As it stands you can get a god rolled 380, and then immediately brick it at hadron within 2 rolls. This is extremely punishing.

• The ability to farm blessings more effectively. Some are must haves to weapons, and there’s no way of getting them in any deterministic sense with some players being months deep into trying to get a blessing for their weapon. This is extremely punishing.

• Brunt’s shop being far too RNG heavy. Making 350 to 380 would be more acceptable, but currently it is 300 to 380. This is extremely punishing.

• No way of getting materials back off of scrapping weapons. This is just kinda sucks tbh.

Your game is fun FS, but you are 100% losing players by keeping this crafting system.

Imagine being a new player and you spend your hard earned plasteel from 10+ missions on Malice and not only do you not get a good weapon out of it because of blessings and perks you find out that it’s actually a really bad weapon type on top of it all.

A non trivial amount of them would certainly quit right then and there. I definitely have in similar situations in other games when I found out I had wasted my time, and just cut my losses.

Player retention mechanics make players quit mad. A player quitting mad does not come back. A player quitting from running out of content will come back when they see a shiny new update.

This I also speak from experience.

[zaygr]

The crafting also runs counter to a lot of fundamental concepts of User eXperience, the biggest one is the a lot of people mainly remember the first and last part of their session, and crafting usually gives a bad experience at the beginning (checking the shops and there’s nothing there, or there is something there and it gets bricked) and at the end of a session, where you craft up some stuff only to have it brick.

It feels like they’re hunting for customer satisfaction in the same way players are hunting for item upgrades.

[Mayson]

@brosgw

I think it’s true they want to make more changes, but with the feedback online they were discussing the silent majority/loud minority with that comment. Speaks much more loudly than what I was referencing:P

I mean they kinda do have a point generally speaking. There is a lot of Brigading…
Just Crafting possibly happens to be the one thing where I see almost universal agreement. Even the biggest Darktide detractor will happily admit Crafting was part of his heel-turn.

[NihilistZealot]

@Tempest_yo

• No locks. Scrap 'em. They suck. Everyone knows this. They are far and beyond the primary point of contention, and why players can brick their weapons. This is extremely punishing.
• The ability to remove/wipe stats off a good base item. As it stands you can get a god rolled 380, and then immediately brick it at hadron within 2 rolls. This is extremely punishing.

If the locks are removed, then points 1 & 2 are effectively the same.

I’d also float the idea that with Brunt’s shop the profane items you can buy a specific weapon mark of should have a higher probability to roll high ratings; or (more preferably) make it so the profane items from Brunt’s catalog will be based on your own inventory and be more likely to be AT the average rating or higher (up to the current maximum 380) to enable players to actually more effectively increase the power of their arsenal and increase probabilities of better blessings/wargear as a whole.

[Tempest_yo]

I was fully aware. Even while writing it.

Critical redundancy.

First: We don’t know if locks are even being removed.

Second: We don’t know how much it would cost if implemented.

Having a way to reset a weapon should be cheap. So rolling until and resetting might be cheaper than breaking locks of you’re lucky.

It’s like rolling a 6 link in PoE. You can pay for one based on the average of fusings needed, or you can try for one yourself and maybe get really lucky and roll under the 1500.

With weapons having different blessing numbers theres going to be a different approach to each one in making the optimal version.

That, or red weapons will be a thing.

[FASAStampede]

@Ol_Jakal

this thread is like 5-7 dudes circlejerking about how much they hate the lock system, which happens to every single announcement on here. of course lardflounder doesn’t respect the demands when the demands come from the circlejerk constantly.

Note the number of accounts that’ve posted - easy data there. And if it happens every patch, there might be something… hmmm… funny that, eh?

@Ol_Jakal

stop pretending there’s anything keeping you from enjoying the game with the weapons you have besides feeling entitled to what you heard about from someone else.

Reasons I no longer play DT, but would if addressed:

1. Crafting.
2. Progression past 30 - which crafting can and should address.
3. Nothing to work towards after mastering hardest difficulty, which crafting can help with, by letting me experiment and play around.
4. Server issues.

@Ol_Jakal

that’s some dude pulling names without them signing off on it to pretend their argument has a big backing, literally a cerclejerk.

I asked to be here, after making threads, back a year ago when the memorial was just getting started. I asked brosgw how to help. And the pal said he didn’t even need help… the madlad

@Badwin

Sorry, you lost me. Why is it either solved or not solved? Why can’t it be somewhat better or worse?

This idea of a gradual dial-in that FS have to arrive at supposes a relationship with the devs I neither wanted nor care about currently. Before DT turned out to be a half-backed shitshow at launch (and still is, despite all the talk of saving this and being back that…), I might’ve enjoyed a creative back-and-forth, but I’m not FS’s godfather, I’m a customer. I don’t really care about their journey as developers. I don’t want to test their game. I don’t really have any incentive to understand their process at any level or “be part of the family” or w/e the marketing of today is. I also don’t care for engagement strategies, promises, excuses or elaborate corpo-talk.

My interest began with their offer of a 40K tide game based on all the lessons they’ve learned in their specialization in this niche of the gaming market. It was further enhanced by the community that gathered around the game in the early weeks and months, most of which I still hang around with.

My interest ends there, and it’s diminished with every day they try to navigate this debacle. And from the conversations I’ve had and the time spent in these forums I can summarize plainly - they marketed something, released 3/10 of it, and people were unhappy. They then messed up even more, people were more unhappy. And now, when they finally did something semi-decent, it’s expected that I rubber-band all the way to the other end and throw my wallet at them? Eeeh, no?

The game hasn’t changed for me, if anything it’s become easier and less engaging. This journey of gradients and (miss)communication goes both ways - to me this has been a great formative lesson in GaaS, niche genres and my spending habits.

But if gradients, stages and steps in directions are what we’re going by - then I’ll skip the in-between and use threads like this to follow the game, while spending my time in more competent and well-founded games. If at some point the service has improved enough and I deem it’s fixed, I’ll play it again.

See, “fixed” and “not fixed” isn’t a perspective FS need to have. It’s one I need to have.

[Ol_Jakal]

@FASAStampede

@Ol_Jakal

this thread is like 5-7 dudes circlejerking about how much they hate the lock system, which happens to every single announcement on here. of course lardflounder doesn’t respect the demands when the demands come from the circlejerk constantly.

Note the number of accounts that’ve posted - easy data there. And if it happens every patch, there might be something… hmmm… funny that, eh?

Oh did you farm unrelated complaints to try to claim your personal opinion is the will of the people? Did you go to all the work or typing them into a list? you’re the definition of a circlejerk, buddy. If they agreed with you they’d have come in here and co-signed but keep pullin’ that chain, I’m sure fatshark’s just a few more tugs from giving in.

[Bankrotas]

Just spent 20k Melk Marks on mystery boxes, didn’t expect much and got so much less. Highest modifier roll was 371, two were in 360s, rest below.

@FatsharkCatfish 20000 Melk Marks is a long time investment to get jack shite.

[CommanderJ]

This is also the person who said

“I would like to be able to work towards having better communication in the future.”

This is a statement that means nothing, says nothing, and assumes offensive levels of stupidity in the reader.

This is also the person who said they postponed an info drop for “technical reasons” to make it align with a warhammer yearly event.

When they say “they do care” and that there is “concern” around the crafting systems, I trust them about as much as the whole “We totally don’t want RNG!” post that preceded the most horrific RNG one could imagine.

[Badwin]

@Bankrotas

Just spent 20k Melk Marks on mystery boxes, didn’t expect much and got so much less.

Why would you do this to yourself?

[Rocker_Fox]

I mean to be fair what else is there to do with them?

Part of the problem with the crafting and item system as it stands is you really only have 2 ways of any meaningful progress.

You either wait and hope that something comes along, sometimes days and even a weeks at a time or you start pulling the 1 armed bandit and hope something tolerable pops out.

Option 3 is I guess waiting for a good emperor’s gift but I think you would have a better chance at finding a snowman on the surface of the sun.

That’s the crux of it really, there is no such thing as steady progression or steady improvement. You either find nothing or you get an item that makes the build shine. Even then you can’t even experiment in the mean time because everything is locked once you modify 2 things.

[Badwin]

@Rocker_Fox

I mean to be fair what else is there to do with them?

You could choose the option to not gamble with them. Maybe I’m a unique case, but I’m hundreds of hours in and still finding T3/T4 blessings I don’t have on Melk quite regularly.

[Rocker_Fox]

I did cover that in my post.

I don’t think it’s really on people for choosing it as an option. I personally did it once and went “nope, it’s way worse than just doing brunt’s”.

As mentioned before it’s either wait or spend a very dumb amount of resources which both aren’t great options. Neither are great options.

[Benny89]

Ye, but not all people like to waste their life, time and resources/money/currency on gamble, you know? We would prefer to spend X to get Y. I work towards getting Y, Y costs X, I spent time getting X, I spent X - I get Y, no strings attached. Every normal person would agree it’s better, it’s a fact.

Gambing is always bad and the only person who would tell you gamble is good is gambler, but that has the same strength of argument as smoker telling you that smoking is good.

[NihilistZealot]

I also have plenty of t3/t4 blessings I don’t have and I’m 360+ hours deep… because the game has rolled me the same exact handful of t3s on the same exact weapons repeatedly.

It. Isn’t. A. Fun. Or. Rewarding. System.

[Ryshek]

I hate to beg, but if they need me to beg I’ll do it.

[MeatVegetable]

BTW, I’m not even using a weapon I enjoy currently, I’m using a tac axe for my zealot and running a dodging crit build. Not because I want to but because that is the only damnation viable weapon I have. Literally the only one aside from firearms, but Zealot isn’t really a shooting class unless you do a weird and awkward build.

[Schuetzenhaus]

It’s been said before and it’ll been said again - the core issue with the crafting is that there is 0 tie-in to the quality of weapons you can get to progression, or investment of time because it’s all RNG - there has to be systems in place that directly tie components of the crafting to something tangable and something the player has control over.

What really gets to me is how many systems are already in place that could be used to achieve this. Nothing new has to be added, and crafting can be fixed. Many people have also offered many other ideas out there that are very, very good and creative that are probably better than these suggestions, but I’m just trying to think what already exists in the game that serves no function, and to actually give them purpose and give players a better experience.

The game tracks levels passed max but does nothing with it - why not use that to directly correlate extra levels to reducing the spread of item levels. The more you play, statistically the better loot you get. Or prestige thresholds - every 5 levels passed max reduces the spread by 5-10 points. This makes sense lore-wise as well, because if I’m out there making a name for myself by destroying these heretics, I should be rewarded by being given better weapons by Brunt. This would also provide purpose to extra XP curios.

Melk’s random item box is currently useless and is an objective waste of melkbucks so no one uses it. Why was it there in the first place? Why not have it guarantee a random weapon with a max tier blessing you don’t already have? This gives more reason to want to chase Melk quests across all characters and may encourage players to try new weapons. This means the more quests you do, the more blessings you’ll be able to get and will eventually guarantee getting the one you want. Although, that’s still pretty RNG centric so it’s definitely still not ideal.

Diamantine is functionally useless, everyone has an insane surplus. Why not use it to be able to break locks by paying a large amount, like 1,000. You get rewarded by playing the game more and gathering resources.

These 3 fixes probably don’t require much adjustment on the coding side of things at all - and they fix or at least mitigate most of the layers of RNG just by playing the game more. Which…is what they wanted right?

[FASAStampede]

No, I went to the Discord, and in the year that I’ve been there the number of people who sincerely enjoyed the crafting is a single digit. And some who felt particularly strong and also got hooked on the game did come in here, and did write, some as late as last week…
I then went to the streamers, who to this day cannot go an hours without having something to say. Then, I checked the YouTubes and every video, even the ones blatantly praising the game, can’t resist but add a little asterisk about the crafting by the end…
I also checked the topics about wishlists for DT, and the wave of complaints from the new blood of Patches 13 and 14, who about now are running out of content and are hitting the crafting wall hard…

Big circle, lots of jerk.

As to FS and whether they change the system and how much - that’s on them. I’m not pressed to play their game, nor would I be opposed if it got more interesting. The best I can do atm is about 15 minutes every other Sunday, to check the forums…

Now, do tell, how many hours have you spent in fervent conversation about how much you’re enjoying yourself with the crafting in DT? Do link a vid or an article that sincerely points out the merits of it.

I’ll be here, maybe next Sunday. Take your time.

[brosgw]

@Benny89

Gambing is always bad and the only person who would tell you gamble is good is gambler

The house which facilitates the gambling will tell you gambling is good.