Weaves are a big part of this expansion and probably a main reason to pay the asking price for the DLC.
But when I think about playing weaves, I and many other potential players are faced with three hard questions:
- Why should I play weaves?
They have no crossover to the base game. You start from zero, meaning you can’t even get the weapons you used to have right from the start. And the best gear/stats you can have is basically the same you ALREADY have in the base game, so there’s not even anything special to look forward to.
That leaves the experience of the weaves themselves, but as far as I understand they just repeat in difficulty after some point and replaying a particular weave is heavily discouraged by the reduced essence.
Finding the right gear for a particular weave is ALSO discouraged, contrary to the developer’s intention, because you have to level up the other gear in a long grind process just to see if it works better at the same level. This just fundamentally doesn’t work.
The only thing that remains from weaves is a portrait frame, an issue they share with Deeds. Remember Deeds?
- Who am I going to play weaves with?
Weaves are so numerous and separated that playing any particular weave with a big enough group is going to be difficult. There aren’t enough active players in this game to find strangers for weaves automatically, let alone in higher weave levels. Replaying is discouraged as well. So you’re pretty much forced to wait a long time or find people to play with outside the game to even have any chance of enjoying the content as intended. Sure you can attempt them with lower playercount, but you won’t get as far that way because it doesn’t really scale.
Later into a season it’s going to be near impossible to start serious progression in the weaves. It might not even take two weeks before it’s pointless.
- What is the purpose of seasons and leaderboards?
The idea of everyone starting fresh implies that everything you do in weaves except your leaderboard position is useless and temporary.
I saw the comparison to seasons in Diablo 3, but there are crucial differences: Anything you earn in a season there IS PERMANENT for the base game outside the season, and each season had unique bonuses and modifiers to incentivize starting something new. None of that is currently even conceptually mentioned about seasons in Vermintide 2. If you have a vision for this, it needs to be communicated.
Leaderboards are another issue because it’s guaranteed that the top positions are going to be filled a handful of people who are ridiculously good at this game (or found the right build to cheese it), and probably cheaters. Leaderboards themselves are barely a motivation for most players. The vast majority of them have no chance of making it anywhere close to a leaderboard position that could be considered high, and there is literally no reward for them other than, again, a portrait frame.
Unless some massive changes are made, Fatshark will have to realize that Weaves and seasons are not the way forward for this game. But I’m not sure the fundamental issues can even be solved.
Weaves are a total joke. I’m really shocked that Fatshark ignored all the criticism of this game mode and progression systems that they got in the Beta 1 and Beta 2. Matchmaking is already so tedious that it deters me from playing them and the wind modifiers are at best underwhelming. I won’t be playing weaves for more than a handful of hours. The only thing worth salvaging from this pitiful excuse for a “fun” mode is the weapon crafting system. VT2 is my favourite game but weaves are making me question Fatshark’s competence.
Given the idea, structure and implementation of the weaves, it’s probably impossible to do anything with them until release. Maybe they will be able to change it later, but literally EVERYTHING is hand-made in the weaves and that’s what took them so long and will probably take as much time again.
You get barely any essence if you repeat a weave. If you want to level up a second character’s items, you need to play normal campaign maps.
There was no game in matchmaking near the weave I was at on my mage, so I wanted to level my Dwarf, but I can’t just run through low weaves on him to level him. At least, the closest was 4 weaves below, and mage was already taken.
I bought the DLC for weaves and for many reasons it is unlikely I will ever play them. Ill thought out and lacking incentive. Sure people play for the thrill but actually no, people play for the reward and to provide enough players to fill teams you’ll need to find a way to reward them well.
Otherwise those of us playing for the thrill will be playing alone.
The fundamental problem with Weaves for me is that I don’t see myself playing them. I don’t want a new grind heavy game mode, I want new maps and enemies.
I have played a couple of them and I do enjoy the diversion from the main game, but it’s already almost impossible to find players for a particular (early!) weave that I need for progress, and there will never in the lifetime of this game be more people playing weaves. It can’t work.
3 days was my prediction for this, and lo! 3 days in, bingo.
If only (many)someone(s) had warned them about this problem two months ago when they had a chance to fix it before launch. Gee, that would have been great.
Weaves system, such as it is at the moment, is a system that somebody thought that it would be interesting and that would bring replayability to Vermintide.
I just can’t understand the arrogance behind the decision to pour so much time into weaves system without even checking first if that system would be interesting for the majority of players. I just can’t understand it. Especially when the overall feedback was crying for much or less 5 or 10 same things over and over again.
If they would take the weaves, substract the seasons and grind, add the mutability option (as an elaborate system of deeds) and introduce items, portraits and skins as a reward for defeating the weaves, they could get the “never ending” gameplay that they had tried to achieve at the first place.
For the sake of argument I will use “rank points (RP in further text)”. Changing the difficulty of the weave to Legend adds 200 RP. Then, you choose the “mutables”, you tweak the properties of the weave, basically create your own set of rules. Add more frequent hordes, +50 RP. Add more elites + 100 RP. Add HP bleed, etc. etc. Let’s say you get to 500 RP. If you Beat the weave, yay, you get 500 points which adds up to your stack of previously obtained points. And then, you use those points to buy portraits, skins, art, keep decorations, armor decorations (please Fat Shark, make that a thing, how hard could it be, I mean we could see our trinkets in V1)
1000 points - reward
10000 points - really good reward
50000 points - really really good reward
100,000, 500,000, 1,000,000 etc etc.
Matchmaking by reward tier - lobby browser display difficulty without accuracy but you get a notion of how difficult it is because the chosen reward tier is displayed.
I like the idea of better missions (objectives not arbitrary grind) with mutators attached to them by choice or random. Allowing non top end players to get some value out of the weaves. The maps are nice but the grind run grind run approach to game play is … ick. each five maps is the same on top of each failure re run is the same its just same same same same same same for no reward. It is disrespectful to players time.
I heard that the 120 weaves are actualy 3 set of the same 40 weaves but every set beeing harder that the one before, can someone confirme it? Because if that s the case i think weave are extremely lame and a seasonal systeme would barely make sens in this case imo.
Throwing my 2 cents in here as someone who almost exclusively plays in a 4-stack with friends who all bought the expansion:
We didn’t really know what to expect from the Weaves as we were mostly excited for the new mechanics, weapons, beastmen and Cataclysm but after we finished Dark Omens (to unlock the weapons) we were met by the “do a weave to get essence!” so thought to give it a shot.
A bit turned off having to start with a specific weapon (why not like the beta when you start with all of them?) we tried the first one and my friends were intrigued. We played them all night (from weave 1 to 23) and had a blast the entire time. We really like the system and are excited to keep going (23 is a doozy). I wouldn’t complain if there were some cosmetic rewards for doing them, but we are all more than happy to do them for the fun factor alone.
However thinking about Weaves from a solo-to-three player experience? They are just not made for that. And with how many there are, with only one of each character at a time you are looking at a lot of people simply not being able to play it at all, at least enjoyably. Bots are unreliable but could help for the people who don’t care about leaderboards but other than that I can’t see any way to make weaves enjoyable for less than a 4 player party.
Weaves are a ton of fun for a group of 4 friends just looking to play some VT2 for an evening hunting for a challenge, but for anyone else I can see them being a real disappointment.
I’d agree with some of you points, but overall I think that weaves are a success.
You are to choose 1 main for the season and go with it.
The main problem is that weave is only for pple with wom which is wrong imho.
I think that Fatshark, while taking inspiration from Diablo III when creating weaves, forgot that in Diablo (larger playerbase aside) difficulty also scales with number of players. Solo is a natural way to play, game is not centered around a set number of players, there are no bots, no disablers, no objectives etc. You also keep your loot after a season. That’s the whole problem with weaves - it’s a mode designed for a whole different genre.
Yeah, I play primarily with a friend in Sweden as a Duo, Saltz & Kruber. I was excited to play through all 120 Weaves as a Duo and see where we’d rank but the system is broken. The Weaves aren’t balanced based on party size. We’ve reached 41 so far and the 3 Boss + Horde finale is too much without a full team or a hell of a lot of luck. We work to get our other more casual friends caught up but it is also unrewarding getting 1/10th the essence or 1 Commendation Chest for 40 Weaves with one Career. It would be nice to have the bots be optional or better yet a scaling difficulty for each Weave based on party-size. Not everyone has 4 dedicated friends with similar free-time schedules to dedicate to beating these Weaves. This reminds me of the VT1 update that brought in Legendary Trophy tasks which were only manageable with a full party of 4 human players of good skill, ideally using active chat. It really ruined it for me. With 120 Weaves the likelihood of finding singles or duos looking for the same Weave level decreases ever more as you climb up the numbers.
Honestly after Weave 40 I anticipated mixed Weave affects… Brambles & Souls, Lighting Strikes & Fire Dmg, Haste/Curse & Hidden Enemies… This would have been a welcome challenge. So far it is the same singular Color & Level order just on a higher difficulty rating & different enemy composition. Meh.
I think the Weaves have huge potential but so far their approachability, reward, replayability, and balancing are all in need of careful analysis.
WoM is worth the small price tag but it needs a lot of work to make it awesome still.
The Diablo comparison is apt. Diablo also has tons of RNG content, weapons sets and build variety, and progression around that RNG loot and gear pickup system, Vermintide has none of that.
What are you even talking about? The weapons alone deliver enough replayability to make the price a good offer. I played over two dozen hours with the spear already and did only just get my hands on saltzs new toy.
Ontop of that we have a decent new map, weaves, cata and a new race to hack to bits.
If 16 Euros is to much to ask for, than youll have to go pirate games, since you wont get much more value than that.
Calling out FS on their pricing is just ridiculous. I dont know a single game that would deliver such hours for the price of meal in a restaurant. Ontop of that we dont have any shitty ingame “micro” transactions.
Back to Topic.
I really like Weaves, but I also ran into the “not enough players at my current weave” problem. Starting out pretty late, my friends and me wanted to take on cata first, we had at no time a full group. The biggest “Uff” we had was when we encountered that lower weave friends wont get the higher level weave counted as completed. So you are forced to grind your friend towards your weave, which still takes about 10 minutes per level, or you just dont play weaves until everyone is online at one time. Thats just… well… sh!t.
The next season has to have a catchup mechanic. Be it that you dont have to complete every weave in order, or some other solution, since the system right now is just making it hard for everyone. Be it pure QP guys, or those who play with friends.