Never said it is acceptable to keep as is. I just commended on the “replay” factor.
For a lot of people, the release of weaves wasn’t the endgame, but the end of the game 
I fully agree that business-wise, there’s more sense in focusing on the future than fixing weaves, which probably made by far most of the money they will ever make for Fatshark already.
For a reference point, steam review ratios point to a rate of 1 in 30 owners of V2 buying WoM (be that lifetime or since season 4 started). It might be more because the majority of reviews are negative and people are more likely to post negative reviews since they’re upset, but the inverse works for the base game (which reviews much better) so it probably evens out.
EVEN if they completely reworked weaves to make them more replayable and accessible, there’d still be the issue of all these separate matchmaking queues. You’re more likely to get the Coronavirus than filling a weave quickplay lobby beyond the first days of a season. Separate matchmaking for dlc-gated content owned by a few percent of players might work in a game that has over 100k concurrent players, but we have to live with a few thousand.
The DLC being relatively expensive and negatively reviewed will turn a lot of people off no matter what they change about weaves. So I’ll go as far as calling for this drastic measure:
Any substantial attempt to change/rework/improve weaves REQUIRES a complete removal of the WoM DLC and adding everything in it to the base game (beastmen being an optional checkbox for hosts 
).
Otherwise, weaves are going to stay a vanity side activity for premade teams (and cheaters) because they’re not accessible to anyone else, no matter how good they are.
From the way Chaos Wastes is sounding like a game mode, it will also face the same matchmaking issue. It’s something to think about.
I wouldnt call it expensive really, but the rest I consider true. People have not the mental capability to let go of their hatred. Even if it would changed in a way that it is the suprior gameplay experience people would still rant against it.
In a game where you only need four people the separate matchmaking queues are not the issue. The issue is that there is no reason/motivation to replay already beaten Weaves. This results in every public player having a different starting line. This is additionally hindered by only being able to search for Weaves below my current starting line. I would play Weave 80 if it would allow me. But I got only to 48, so I dont even see it. Weaves suffer mostly from the accessiblity (heavily) and its presentation.
I think if they adjust the framework around Weaves (and community gets rid of its hatred) it would be completely workable and sufficiently popular.
WoM is 2/3 of the base game at full price and its lowest sale price (like right now) is higher than that of the base game. For the average player, that’s pretty expensive.
Steam has the “recent reviews” to point out improvements, but the terrible lifetime reviews would still turn a lot of people off I think.
Granted, while I generally don’t have issues finding Cataclysm games during active hours, which is a subset of WoM owners and very active players, I’m in a geographical location with a huge reach of viable connections. There would need to be a LOT of weave players to have a sensible quickplay experience in many parts of the world.
The growth of separate matchmaking queues is kind of an issue either way. 5 difficulties each for quickplay adventure mode, the weekly event, quickplay weaves, possibly soon Chaos Wastes… plus lobbies are closed off with a deed active.
As long as we only have a few thousand concurrent players, many of these are pretty much unusable.
Exactly. I liked playing the weaves in beta - which is the last time I played them.
I loved how they looked and a lot of other stuff in the actual play, though I guess I would be fed up with how scripted they were in the end - but the way they are stuck into the existing game - a completely separate game mode that shares next to nothing with the rest of the VT2 made me bitterly hate their addition. FFS, there is even a completely separate item/crafting system.
I think I repeated this objection - that the weaves are a separate game, not really a mode - so many times that I feel like a bore.
This is, considering how less friendly DLC content accessibility is compared to VT1, my major objection with the WoM DLC: it makes the entire VT2 feel more like a broken weave crafting system. Instead of fixing the issues with matchmaking (including deeds, FoW separation, weekly), they added a new game AND new inaccessible elements to the existing game.
IMO, if FS simply gave access to the non-weave content of the WoM to any VT2 owner, that would help the game a lot.
I think I should first apologize for the fact that my formulation
was simply wrong.
But I would like to rephrase that statement in retrospect to: " Personally, the implementation of Weaves is acceptable in general, meaning the concept of the game as such, not the execution in its entirety."
Why I chose the statement previously was due to my fundamentally different understanding of the goal of the Weaves, namely this:
FatShark’s choice of a finite mode that therefore scales “absurdly” may seem like a missed goal to some, but to me it was an understandable design decision.
To clarify my point again - for me, weaves are a different game mode that serves a different target audience.
Which is precisely why I disagree with the changes proposed in the OP, at least in the area of Ranked Weaves. I don’t think you need to wash the mode with the base game just to make it more accessible to the general audience. Where is the added value there? In contrast, taking elements from the Weaves and making them more accessible (like the weave effects in twitch mode) I consider a better solution.
Furthermore, the statement:
is not justified either.
155 people who have reached Weave 160 so far, after 5 weeks. Unfortunately I can’t see the exact player numbers, but I think for a ranked mode this is quite a high value if one would assume a normal distribution.
I just think you should also consider, that there is an audience for Weaves, that’s all I wanted to say.
Some very interesting discussions here. Personally, I find the biggest problem in the low number of players. How can FS make weaves more interesting for new players? What can someone do with Season 1, 2, or 3 if they buy the DLC now? Nothing at all. There is absolutely no way to unlock any items from the earlier seasons. What if FS opens the leaderboard I mean for all the time without tying it to the individual seasons? And if you can repeat the individual seasons to unlock the portrait frames and the boxes. In this way, weaves might fall more interesting for more people. From my point of view, this would be a very sensible adaptation of weaves.
Seasons resetting is hardly adding anything. The maps are the same, just the weave effect changes and most of them are hardly affecting anything. The only “replay” value that gets added is new frames. Without those, I would bet a fortune that no one would be interested at all in ranked weaves. The constant repetition of maps even during the same season is an annoying struggle.
You still need to buy the base game and the dlc ontop of that. If you dont like what the common VT2 experience hands you, there is absolutely no reason to invest into the DLC that dropped.
If weaves werent part of the DLC, but an FLC experiment, your point would be alot more valid.
The players on the leaderboards only do Weaves for the recolored frames. If it didn’t award anything, no one would play it.
Have you even looked at the lobby browser?
I would say 0-3 Weave matches a week is quite a failure.
I’m gonna make a bold guess here that a whole bunch of those on the leaderboard are chinese cheaters and such. The fact that there’s at least one person aggressively offering cheat help for the weave frame and that one of the #1 ranked quartet team has a big fat “banned for cheating” label on his steam profile makes it pretty clear how meaningless this is.
Yes I have also looked at the lobby browser. That there are fewer lobbies is completely normal, since this is also just an additional mode for the game. Especially for Ranked Weaves, you need as previously mentioned, ideally 4 people who are online at the same time, so these lobbies (which are also only displayed if you include closed lobbies) are usually only present at peak game time or on weekends in higher numbers.
But what influence does the fact now have for possible changes of the Weaves? I have never denied that the mode is anything but perfect, which certainly also affects the player numbers, yes. But why should this fact underpin the proposed changes in the OP? All I’ve said in all my posts is that I think the proposed changes to ranked mode are over the top, as I think they interfere too seriously with the basic principle.
Furthermore, I don’t understand how FS’s statements from 2 years ago in the run-up to WoM, speculations of the motivations why players play Weaves at all or the number of lobbies are supposed to support exactly these proposed changes now?
What @zaru mentioned is certainly another problem, but I can’t and don’t want to judge if and who of these people cheated. Surely the decision to introduce a frame for Weave 160 was also a crucial point for this (I also find this “innovation” questionable).
I’ll just summarize again how I understood the OP regarding Ranked Weaves: @SirKruber basically wants Random Weaves (i.e. Map/Wind/Spawns) with 2 fixed difficulty levels (Legend/Cata) to reduce the queues to 2 and thus make matchmaking easier.
But for me this contradicts the competitive approach of weaves, besides it basically shrinks the skill level to 2 levels and makes the leaderboards actually only a reflection of the number of played weaves. Or did I misunderstand something here? This is basically just QP Weaves as it is now, with just Legend and Cata to be rated…
Surely the matchmaking is problematic in its current form, but I see especially in cooperative games (especially with such a “small” number of players like V2 the player himself in the “duty” to organize, this is the same in any other team game. That’s what 404 people in the Vermintide 2 weave group on Steam managed to do…
Here it might be helpful to build a kind of “bulletin board” into the game, so regardless of whether you are online or not, to look for other players in the same weave area (I would divide into 4 levels like it already is). This could also include information such as region, preferred classes, language. Just to name another suggestion for this problem.
Versus might work, although I have my doubts, because it’s sold as a standalone game, while WoM was a 20$ priced expansion for an existing game. Especially considering that VT2 is a relatively niche game, it’s quite unrealistic to expect new players to flock to it. “Oh, I’ve heard there’s this new game content for that game I am not interested in, it has leaderboards now so I’ll definitely buy it and pay the 20$ on top to try it”. I mean, if you think that WoM contents are locked for non-owners, and the amount of new grind related to it, it’s impossible for new players to try that without investing fully in it.
It’s quite clear to me that the mode has been designed as a new grind for players already invested in the game. That, or FS’ vision is even more wishy-washy than I thought.
My big question is: Is that the correct phrase because “This is about the numbers you are going to pull for this kind of game” or “Because of issues with this particular execution of this kind of game, that’s how many players are going to opt in/stay in for it”?
I was just paraphrasing. I mean that trying to cater to new players rather than the fans is a bad choice, unless it’s a standalone game like versus is aimimg to be. It’s so unlikely that a player who hasn’t bought the base game is willing to cough up big time just to try a new feature.
To anser your question: the issues with the state of the game are certainly a deterrent for new players, which might avoid something or leave it after a while - currently the game is in a sorry state, a friend of mine is losing a huge portion of his imputs. he hasn’t stopped playing altogether just because, like me, he’s terribly invested in it.
There is something to be said about “this is the amount of numbers you are going to pull for this kind of game” but that’s only true speaking in magnitudes: of course there’ll be a smaller cap compared to most competitive games, mmos and the like, but FS has had a good income of people with the last free weekend. Imo, stuff like that is way more likely to pull new players in than releasing a new mode in a DLC - which can also antagonize the veterans.
Besides, FS seems focused on quick cash grabs, as support for these mods is abandoned in favor of releasing new stuff - cosmetics and careers.
Taking a step back from a game we are so familiar with, if a new player doesn’t immediately fall in love with the mechanics, he/she’s bound to consider the game “completed” once he’s played through the maps. New maps - in my humble opinion - are once again the best way to improve the game’s life.