I’m sure I’m not the first person to talk about this, but there’s always room on the internet for someone else’s unasked-for opinion.
I played the original Vermintide for some time (over 700 hours) and am almost already halfway at that timestamp with the sequel: Despite the fact that I’m about to rake the game’s primary method of matchmaking over the coals, I do think overall that so far it’s superb.
The TLDR is that the bonus from Quick Play feels less like a ‘bonus’ and more like a punishment for choosing specific levels. The original game had the issue that not all the maps were worth the time, as it were, if you were looking for loot, but of those that were, you could freely choose which ones you wanted to do. This helped to make what levels there were (particularly before the expansions) from getting too stale too fast, as you could cycle through them at your leisure. Yes, there were the joyless individuals who did nothing but Horn of Magnus for a time, but I choose not to think about that sort of person for too long (though I understand Quick Play was introduced as it was as a way to prevent that scenarion from repeating).
As it stands, without some method of helping to priortize what maps Quick Play puts you in, I’ve found there’s some maps I tend to get a lot and others I see pop up rarely. I realize this all boils down to luck (frig off, Ranald) and that whining about RNG is about as useful as spitting on a Stormfiend, but there are things that can be changed to mitigate the RNG factor. I’d also like to believe I pull from a fairly substantial sample size: I’d say on average I play anywhere from 30 to 50 games a week, and some maps will stick out more than others to the point where I have that “Oh no, not this place -again-” feeling. And that’s not a feeling I remember having in the first game, even at the start when there were less maps.
I can suggest some solutions, all of which I’m sure are easier said than done. I think the best solution would be to change how the Quick Play selection works to include a priority system. I.E., when you finish a map through Quick Play, it puts it to the bottom of its selection priority. If multiple people are getting into the queue from the same lobby, it would do its best to pick whatever map is of the highest priority for all of them. Again, that’s something that would probably take a lot of work in terms of coding, but a man with no working knowledge of computers can dream. At the very least, this would cut down on the instances where you get the same boss map back to back 3 times in a row.
An alternative, more patchy fix would be to remove the Quick Play bonus from contributing to the loot chest progress and add some sort of other, probably time-limited, bonus for using it. As a brief, top-of-my-head example, maybe 3 times per day, finishing a map on Quick Play gives a Commendation Chest or something along those lines, or perhaps limit the Quick Play bonus that’s already there to 3 times per day (and before you panic, the implication with this change is that queueing WITHOUT Quick Play would have the same baseline chest progress that queueing WITH Quick Play has now). Obviously this could be tweaked in any matter the devs saw fit, such as making the bonus only accrue once per day but stacking up to three times, akin to the quest board.
The Challenges are a very welcome addition to the game, but the character portrait frames/outfits seem to highlight the issues with Quick Play: People have to choose between actively pursuing those cosmetics at the cost of reduced reward, or rely on Quick Play to eventually get them through all the maps (and I’ve spoken to several people who have been actively doing this since the Challenges were released and have yet to get to every map).
The TLDR-TLDR is that making Quick Play an integral part of the rewards for finishing a map ultimately reduces the enjoyment of those maps.