Nice try buddy but I told you I’m not getting pulled into another asinine argument with you over a topic you’ve already thoroughly lost the popularity vote on anyway. Have fun pulling someone else into that vortex instead. Hope you’ve got some much more convincing arguments against the tidal wave of people who think the grind in this game is god awful.
Seriously, not responding further to you, wasted enough time on these forums doing that already.
You wont get into it because you lose. The facts are there, simple as that, but someone who is already overwhelmed after reaching level 9 will certainly not understand this. Maybe play the game first before making ridiculous statements.
If people are getting to the point of cheesing it, that’s a sign of how bad it is. Sure it may be veterans that are getting past it to get to the meat of the game, but it doesn’t improve the new player experience and that’s where VT2 stumbled too.
Its more of a point of efficiency. We can see it in every game that features an rpg level system. Eventually people will figure out the fastest way to progress to the end. The gaming community is a community about efficiency, which is the reason why games are getting guides already shortly after they get released.
Just look what happened in Vermintide when a new map released, the community immediately came together sharing the book locations so the new map can be cleared with the highest reward in mind.
I think we’re talking about 2 different things here.
Yes, there will also be a subset of players who want to get to the endgame as fast as possible, but if the progression system is bad people will also do what they can to shorten the amount of time they have to interact with said system. Both groups won’t be mutually exclusive, either.
It’s not just about the levelling though.
If the progression system (including itemisation) is bad, then my main point is that it is extremely new player hostile and won’t be able to keep new players playing because of how slow, grindy, opaque and bad it feels, especially if one wanted to try a different class.
It’s a clear attempt at game as a service retention strategies, but it’s clumsy at best and user hostile at worst, somehow detrimental to both casual and dedicated players.
The moment to moment gameplay is good enough to paper over some of the flaws, but you get reminded of their progression systems every time between missions, mainly because you have to interact with them to progress.
Agreed with the itemization progression, even though i have to see the full system yet with crafting enabled, but the leveling is literally the same as every else. You play the part of the game that gives you exp and then you level up. There is very little reason to think its badly designed and then rush through difficulty 1 levels for hours to get the exp you want. Its done because its simply the most efficient method to level up. Its really nothing new and if we would go with alsozaras idea of letting all difficulties give the exp of the highest difficulty then rushing through diff 1 would be standard.
Of course the progression system isnt perfect and i certainly have nothing against optimization, i am only here because i question the statement that some Vermintide 2 veterans couldnt handle the leveling grind.
I don’t think it’s a case of ‘couldn’t’ handle it but rather don’t want to keep on going through the same motions for it because it doesn’t really add anything to the game.
Even with optimisation, say it’s about 15-20 hours to get to level 30, multiply that by 4 for Darktide and another 5 for Vermintide 2, that’ll be 135-180 hours just levelling. Sure that may be a small percentage of total play time over a longer period of time, but that’s still doing hours and hours of something that doesn’t really add to the experience.
But what exactly adds to the experience though? We are constantly running through the same maps, usually with our preferred loadout that developes after we tried out different weapons. I mean, the question here would be why do you want to reach level 30 in the first place?
Since there’s no time to make drastic changes, here’s what I think they could practically do:
#1. The Forge needs to be live. No, that doesn’t solve all progression issues but we have an incomplete picture of gear right now without the ability to re-roll it.
#2. Radically bump the drop rate of post mission item rewards. I’ve gotten about 10 in 60+ completed missions. We should be getting one per mission pretty much all the time. This helps keep the drip feed of new gear going in between the shop rotations. I suspect they’ve artificially lowered this for the Beta. Since people demand their progress carries over they don’t want to give out the saucey purples and oranges too readily before release. That’s my theory anyways. God Emperor help us if this is what they intended it to be for release.
#3. Reduce the shop rotation time from 60 minutes to 35 minutes. The average run takes about 25 minutes.
#4. Tweak the tables for which weapons show up in the shop most often. It is so heavily weighted to the <Rank 15 weapons that you only see higher tier weapons once every 2 or 3 rotations. (So hours.) I swear this feels like older versions of Vermintide where you were getting whites and greens on Legend difficulty. Stop being so cheap!
#5. Either make the weekly contracts less extreme (i.e cut the requirements in half for most of them) or add daily contracts that have much shorter requirements and pay outs. Some of the weekly contracts are reasonable (complete 3 missions without anyone dying.) Some are just begging to be done cheaply. (25 missions? Trying to beat Heresy? Even in a week I’m not sure I’d complete 25 of them.)
#6. Award Mechanicus Tokens for completing missions on higher difficulties and/or for picking up scriptures. WTF do Scriptures even do beyond bonus XP and Dockets? In VT they guaranteed you a better loot roll. Here they’re barely worth picking up.
#7. Specific objectives on specific maps are bad, stop padding the contract tables with that junk. 6 secondary objectives on maps where you can’t reliably predict the difficult, missions or conditions isn’t fair.
Somewhere along the line someone mistook our love of VT2’s gameplay as as willingness to live inside these games to complete challenges. The simple fact the shop rotation takes an hour, or that Global Conditions last for HOURS speaks to someone’s ideas about how long they think we’re going to be spending in game.
For me, I want to use all the weapons with all the class perks as I want without something arbitrary like unlocks via level getting in the way.
The way the classes are currently designed, when you don’t have some perks or being stuck with unfun weapons for a while at the beginning does kinda drag the experience down a bit.
For this kind of horde shooter game I generally abhor this kind of levelling progression, I’m more inclined towards the jump in style of games like Left 4 Dead and V1.
In DT, same with V2, the early game involves being stuck with partial class kits and weapon sets (including properties and traits) on difficulty levels that don’t really represent the “good parts” that take fairly significant time investment to get into. Because of the opaque power systems tied to the levelling, the game tends to actively teach the wrong things in the early game often to the detriment of players, especially new players when they make the jump to a next difficulty.
Its a reasonable request and Vermintide 1 did quite good in that regard. But Vermintide 1 also didnt have any talents and featured a semi-progression part that apparently didnt turn out well in regard to community friendliness.
Still i could see a world where Darktide could have the same system, though much of the foundation needs to be changed for that and i doubt that will ever happen.
Yeah, unlikely the structure would change all that drastically between now and release. I just wish that they tried something a bit different. At least they didn’t go the Killing Floor 2 route.
Weeklies are way too grindy. There is a saying that when you have these kinds of things, you aren’t playing for fun, you are playing to maximize rewards for time spent in hopes that it will pay off.
I’ve had 6 in 40 hours, one purple at level 10 which is long past its expiration date, and it was an autopistol anyway, i’m a Psyker
Everything else, Grey and White grade
Wtf is the point
Weird, I also got a purple Autopistol around that time and that was like my last significant drop for a very long time.
After bleeding and dragging ourselves through Heresy we finally beat it, on Endless Hordes no less, and my reward was a White Axe. That was my first mission reward in like 20 hours.
Thank you oh my beneficent Emperor for such largess.
Ive also gotten like 1 green and rest grays from the weekly currency random drops
Hi there,
+1k hour “veteran” in VT here… and I do in fact care about how they’ve made it even worst then V2, which is fun in end game but so bad to level in.
In V2 to you have to level 4 characters to level 30 and that was it, all their subclasses didn’t have to be leveled to 30 individually. How much do you want to bet when they release “new” veteran, ogryn, etc subclasses they will want you to level up each individual subclass to level 30.
I have tried to get 3 different groups of 3 to play V2 and only 1 out of the 9 got a character to level 30 and then he started to level Salt and got bored of the grind and quit.
When you say "can already be “cheesed” I’m going to guess our one of the many that takes your level 3 into malice until you hit level 6 so you go leech/ruin peoples time trying to play heresy. Also if you think stopping people from cheesing the progression system isn’t a top priority and isn’t part of what the beta’s are looking for, then your more delusional then I think.
I love VT but it is extremely grindy to the point where only 3% of players have all characters to level 30, and I’d love to see the % of how many players have all red gear mid/maxed for individual subclass like me… I bet it’s less then 1% of the total player base. But getting rid of rng chest “bc players didn’t like the rng” and replacing it with a FOMO rng shop and the fact nothing is shared between characters (unlike in V2). Should be enough to tell you some “higher up” told Fatshark they better do something to “up the player retention” in DT. You can shil all you want but don’t speak for all “+1k hour veterans” bc me and the only other psycho like me I talk to are not a fan of DT atm.
Weeklies should mostly just be freebies given to you on a weekly basis. Making it a 8 hour grind is excessive, let alone its per character
Alright so I have five hours clocked in so far and I’m still stuck with the stupid axe that Zealot starts with; only this time the one I have is a green variant, woo. I’m super upset because I can’t switch the weapon out for something that I’d want to actually use. If I’m going to spend hours upon hours being engaged with the game’s combat systems. I’d want to to do so with a weapon that’s going to be enjoyable for me to use - it’s not rocket science. I wanted to try Thunder Warhammer or the giant Chainsaw Greatsword; but none of those cool options are showing up in an armory I unlocked. I only get the same list of items that I’m simply not interested in.
Please, please, tell me that the developers don’t seriously expect me to dump tens of hours just to use a weapon that I want.
They could have smoothed levelling a bit more psychologically by dangling a proper carrot in front by telling you when you are going to unlock something, and giving you a grey or green version of the thing you unlock when you hit the level that unlocks it. But instead it get this opaque levelling system and layers of RNG just to get a weapon you want. Hopefully crafting will help in alleviating getting the type of weapon you want, but I feel like it’ll either be unable to craft items, so you’re still at the mercy of the store, or you can only craft items after buying them once from the store.