The Nervous Player's Manifesto: Getting Over Solo QP Jitters

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Player Guides
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Originally posted on r/Vermintide under the same name.

As someone who recently got started venturing into Quick Play solo again after almost a year of nerves stemming from a somewhat traumatizing incident, I thought I’d share some of the things I’d picked up in making Quick Play a little less scary for those of us with performance anxiety when going in solo:

  • Play what you want. No, seriously. Play what you want. You want to play Huntsman with a sword and shield? Go for it. That fireball staff you’re a touch rocky with friendly fire on? You bet. Let no one tell you your choices, meta or non-meta, don’t deserve your attention. If pubs are brave enough to run drakegun, you can try out that shiny new red you just got that maybe you don’t have enough experience on (but also see the next point if you’re a bit worried pubs won’t like your choices).
  • Still not certain? Host your own Quick Play! PC players have the option of using the sanctioned Host Your Own Games mod, which allows you to host your own Quick Play games. If you are console, host a custom game and open it up to pubs. This allows you to test things in a safe environment without fear of kicking (and usually tends to alleviate many Quick Play stressors in general).
  • Remember that the mute function is always an option. I’m pretty kick-adverse unless someone has AFK’ed for long periods of time or is being blatantly toxic, but I’ve certainly muted people and they’re usually none the wiser.
  • Don’t concentrate on being the best. Concentrate on being better than you were the day before. If you find yourself cracking under the pressure to perform while in groups, keep in the back of your mind where you came from. Did you just recently move up to Legend? Perhaps you’ve been in Legend for a while and only recently started to pull off successful clutches. Whatever the case may be, count these things as achievements and improvements.
  • If someone is actively making you uncomfortable, you have every right to leave. No amount of harassment is worth the QP bonus. Trust me.
  • Have faith in your own abilities. It’s easy to get bogged down in all you did wrong, or crumbling under the idea that you must do well to support your team, but honestly, mind over matter really shines here. You’ll do far better in a clutch if you tell yourself “alright, time to kite!” vs. going “oh god, I’m gonna die!” Performing under intense gameplay situations is far, far easier when you’re not sweating all the possible ways that you might fail before or if they happen.
  • Don’t take rage quitters and fast kickers too seriously. This one’s tough, I get it. Sometimes you just want a stable lobby and take these things to heart. But remember these things reflect on them and not you, should you be a courteous player who tried their best. You’ll find a group who will stick around the more QP’s you do, I promise. And on that note…
  • Don’t take your own failures too seriously, either. Sometimes the game just does not want you to win. Sometimes Ranald and the Director team up to give you silent disablers while dropping a Chaos Spawn on your head while you’re last man standing. Stuff happens—that’s what makes Vermintide, Vermintide. And finally…
  • The first game of the day will always be your most nerve wracking. No, really! That first one is just a roulette of who knows what you’re going to get. After you have that first win/wipe/whatever, the rest of the games following are much easier to queue up for.

NOW GO OUT THERE AND QUICK PLAY!
Edited to add a point about mind over matter.

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^^^ fixed that for you.

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-nervousness intensifies-

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bruce_lee
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I let people play whatever they want in my lobbies except for flamethrower dwarf. They get kicked on sight for making terrible life choices.

As for meta weapons, I will grab them if I see some rather strange choices from my party. When I see FK kruber and RV Bardin both rocking shields, I’ll grab the sword and Dagger on elf for the extra boss damage. As the lvl 16 conflag Pyro isn’t exactly inspiring confidence in me. As for low lvls in legend, I normally kick the people who try and kick them. In my experience,
It’s always the guy that’s super worried about their levels that dies constantly. Which is when you figure out the reason he’s so worried is because he needs to be carried.

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I actually want those maps but i almost never get em Q_Q

I do get gardens of morr pretty often though.

Well to be fair, íf the person is super low level like 10 or something then they are down a serious lot on hero power which means that they´ll have to struggle to even pull their part. …not to mention pull things up if things get tough.

“Edit”

Lower level also means lack of talents, those can be pretty dang important for some careers.

"End of edit. "

Legend might not be extremely difficult but mistakes do get punished.

Another type that you have to worry about though is the people saying they dont want the team to take grims because those “make you lose”.

As if a grim or two really makes a difference when a total wipe really does happen x)

Had one of em just yesterday, guy dropped 10 times in melee before we even got the first grim then he had the gall to blame our eventual wipe on the grims.

2000 damage taken indeed.

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Okay, but what do I do if someone in Quick Play tries to tell me that Müesli isn’t the unequivocal pinnacle of human ingenuity and innovation?

This is honestly the most nervewracking situation I’ve ever found myself in, in all of my Quick Play experiences to date.

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Good post. First boss in QP to a lot of people is always anxiety about dealing with potential salty behavior. I have most of my legend skins from solo-QP but it’s still a challenge to get over that.

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I get alot of flack for rocking shields on bardin/kruber I know it ain’t meta but I gotta admit. They are just damn fun to play in my opinion

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I do apologize if this was supposed to be sarcastic, but if it wasn’t then i couldn’t disagree more. It doesn’t really matter if you lack experience with a certain character or career as long as you are comfortable with the core gameplay (dogde, block, how much you can get away with). The stamina and dodge mechanics doesn’t differ much between careers, with some exceptions, so I’d rather take a player with 200 hours in one career only rather than a player with half that amount but all characters at 30.

If a person plays with a weapon *he is unfamiliar with then that would probably be way more notable. Thing is that it wouldn’t show anywhere if he did. in all seriousness don’t judge people because of weapon or class choices, or level, until you’ve seen them play. If someone is struggling with the axe and falchion on Saltzpyre you should definitely start to worry if they decide to switch it out and go with the axe.

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Just a question. But what is a “fast kicker”?

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Some who kicks people from games quickly (ergo, you messed up, someone institutes a vote kick),

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I’ve met a influx of these guys this week. Kick this guy for this minor mistake or I will disband the party. At that point, I just leave. I don’t have time for that negativity. :joy:

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Imo people are a bit more upset than the usual because of the influx of new players witch combined with harder event (Convocation of decay final event etc…) just makes the experience more frustrating.

Today i QP into 3-4 cata games witch were all full of new players, all dying at the first 1-2 hordes, that doesnt justify beeing toxic but i d rather kick them than insulting them in chat in order to make them quit. The same goes for legend and it will take time untile poeple relearn how to play vt2 again.

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I will never kick a learning player. Ever. As this might discourage them to try the difficulty again. My personal philosophy is this:

If I can’t stop a situation from going south in the difficulty I’m playing in, and I’m blaming my team, who are learning the difficulty themselves, then I, too, need to “git gud” at this difficulty.

Further, why would the idea of insulting your pubs to make them quit even cross your mind in the first place? D:

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Totally the truth. 10/10.

I’m with this. My peeve for a player not playing well is them intentionally being a leech. If they’re trying to learn or are just trying stuff out, I don’t care at all. But if someone is going to sit and knowingly be dead weight because they don’t care and just want to be carried to get all the yum yums, then I have no intention of playing with them. I don’t like playing with a person of selfishness and toxicity.
There is a sort of line and it’s knowing where a person is on it.

In all my time of playing this game, I’ve met my share of toxic people, obnoxious people, elitists, know-it-alls, scrubs, and so on. They’re out there, but I’ve had more good experiences than bad. As Exanimia said, you can host your own games to prevent things like being kicked or a host leaving.

I guess there are several things that are annoying to deal with, but one of them is definitely a person who constantly tries to tell other people what to do. “Oh that weapon isn’t good. Pick this or you’re bad.” “Why are you playing with those talents?” “Why aren’t you doing this?” “Why aren’t you doing what I say?” “By the way, let me tell you a bunch of random things about the game that you didn’t ask about, but I want to tell you anyways so I can comfort my ego.” I will never understand the need for people to do those things. The even more outrageous people are the ones where you display indisputable facts but they argue anyways.

Winds of Magic changes have certainly brought out all sorts of people.

rustlin%20memes
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Because when people are upset, their judgement slips and they’re prone to being abrasive.

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Haha my friends and I have this running joke whenever we QP into Skittergate (which feels like always) someone will put on an 80s announcer voice and be like: welcome to back-to-back episodes of the Skittergate.

We usually get Skittergate again quickly after.

I’ve found this to be generally true, most people don’t react much otherwise to low levels apart from asking them if they’re certain they want to do this.

That said, I’ve had some pretty random experiences with low levels during sales (guessing they either picked wrong difficulty, underestimated it or wanted to see what it was all about a bit way too early), like one of the first few runs I did on Legend (I was level 25), a level 1, a level 4 and and a level 10 joined. I kinda raised my eyebrow but shrugged.

First horde in conjunction with a chaos spawn and everyone is dead all within 2s and I’m at 10HP, needless to say it ended badly for me too a minute or two later. It was quite funny.

I dunno, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the occasional comment like ‘you shouldn’t do x, do y’ if said impassively, but it takes a lot to offend me.

I think it comes down to how you frame it, if you put people on the defensive they’ll naturally be less receptive (or not receptive at all) of constructive criticism - even I am less receptive to criticism if they act like I’m an idiot when they tell me, though I don’t lose rest over those kinds of teammates either way.

The best ones I can think of are people who have said things like ‘look out for SV overheads’ or ‘I like weapon because it does x’ in a neutral way, without attempting to attack the person they’re critiquing. You can also say it to the group at large if you don’t want to make one guy feel like he’s being picked on.

Or ‘don’t revive unless you can make sure the person getting revived won’t get instadowned’ (this was a big one back when I was learning as I at first thought you would have a bit of immunity for the first moment when revived, which you don’t).

What I don’t like are people who pick on one or more of the group to blame them the moment anything goes even vaguely wrong and I’ll usually leave there (if they’re host) or kick them instead.

Some people might be having a bad day so calmly telling them that you don’t appreciate their attitude (toward you or teammate x) can also work, in my experience it does happen. You can also tell them that you’re learning (or that the group member being picked on evidently is).

Then there are people who only get worse when you do that. For the latter group, again, you don’t have to play with them. (I mean you don’t have to play with the former either but if you can defuse the situation it might spare you finding another group).

If you’re going to be toxic don’t QP. Sadly I get the impression most toxic players QP exactly so that they get carried.

Most of my VT2 experiences have been great, like 90% of Legend (and a bit worse in Champ, at least before WoM). They haven’t all been experienced players but they’ve usually been non-toxic and eager to learn. Also been carried a few times myself (especially at the beginning of my Legend career) when a random joins midgame and then proceeds to cleave through every enemy like Sigmar himself.

I think another good goal when learning the ropes is, if you’re going to aim for a green circle, aim for least damage taken before the other ones. When you master survivability the rest is usually a lot easier to learn, and it leaves more healing supplies to help the members of your party that are behind you on the learning curve. Slower clear time beats straight up wiping every time, you have to be alive to deal damage, clutch etc.

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I’ve played on my wifes account a few times. She had elf on lvl 16 or something. Crafted a red bow and S&D with her red dust. Queue up Legend, take all the green circles XD

I’ve met a lot of really good lower level players and a lot of really bad +50 level guys bragging in lobby.

At the same time, being lower level is a handicap and will hamper performance. But I’d take a low level competent player that wants to improve and asks questions over a high level rage quitter any day.

Also, this was funny,

0oYW3Ta

What am I doing with my life… playing IB flamethrower. The shame…

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lol I’ve been rocking quickplay since day one. I’m used to being in the trenches with all of the filth and rats just trying to survive. When someone blessed by nurgle comes along and starts getting mad I usually just say something I know will tilt them into the next dimension before I leave. But yeah ignoring them is really easy because most people in quickplay have no idea what they’re talking about. Just the other day I was berated for pulling a patrol and not instantly killing it, a blight stormer and four disablers all single handedly. The kicker is that I didn’t even pull the patrol. Did I argue with this man? No, I simply uttered a single phrase that drives away all followers of nurgle just before they burst from receiving too many blessings from their foul lord, “get annihilated.”

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Oh I’m not denying that, I’ve met plenty of underleveled people who could pull their weight (however if they were undergeared to boot they definitely have an even harder time than max level players like you said, considering damage cleave etc. scales to HP), playtime isn’t necessarily proportional to skill and willingness to learn.

I’m just saying I’ve also had encounters that were the exact opposite. It doesn’t really bother me though, if I didn’t want to play with those people I’d leave and find people that were max level.

One run I had on Into the Nest while I was still learning Legend I could tell immediately none of them knew what they were doing well enough for Legend (and I wasn’t good enough to carry them all at the time) but they were trying. They weren’t underleveled, just champ players that had begun to move up. I was able to teach them a few things before the inevitable wipe, which they were grateful for, so they do better the next time etc.

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