Since fatshark seems to still be struggling with this topic after almost a year of listening to player feedback and intense internal discussion, I figured that the appropriate course of action is to describe the solution in as simple of terms as possible.
Get rid of the locks. Entirely. Throw in vermintide style red weapons with maximized base stats while you’re at it.
That’s it. Enjoy your next vacation secure in the knowledge that this troublesome pain point will have been conclusively resolved.
I think there needs to be a change, but I doubt they are going to give unrestricted and uncosted freedom to remove locks since it would trivialise the loot system.
So if there is going to be a way to change any perk or blessing it needs to be costed in some way.
Personally I like the idea of rare crafting materials as loot drops from beating bosses/missions that can be spent to change perks/blessings. There’s quite a few benefits to that approach like frontloading the RNG and making it so that you slowly improve a weapon in steps instead of saving up a million dockets/plasteel/diamantine and cycling the crafting until you get it in one go.
I hope they come up with something as the current system doesn’t seem to be loved by any part of the player base and is at best meh.
However, lot of players that ask the locks removal can’t describe what is their problem with the game.
considering locks will stay, people should focus on what are the problems and what devs should aim for.
Even players are using words that don’t mean the same. A good weapon is not the same for everybody. Same for an excellent one.
From the OP post, I guess that this player wants a way to get a sort of perfect weapon. This was not what was described for a long time here… people complained for 7 months about the odds to get a good weapon.
Maybe the priority of FS should be to put this sort of red weapons and delay the new contents (subclasses, maps, missions).
The problem IS the locks. It inhibits the player’s ability to create the builds that they want to play, and artificially restricts content by making it impractical to experiment with alternative builds without first spending an insulting amount of time and resources rolling the dice on new gear to try different build strategies.
The players have been very precisely describing the problem this entire time. The problem is that you can’t listen and continue to latch onto your flawed “accurately describe to me what 2+2 is AND DON’T SAY 4” comment.
An item that you can get from running missions to break ONE of the locks, and just one. Meaning that if you get a max level perk or blessing you want in combination with the item bars setup in the way you want it you could your “perfect” weapon.
I feel like that would be a middle ground, perhaps not something that would make everyone happy. But if you look at the coming change to curious, it gives you the blessing from the start and does not have to worry about getting the stat bars correctly because it has none, so by finding a curio with the right blessing and one perk which you want means you can change the rest to suit your playstyle.
Not really… again it depend of what you think is a something that is excellent.
It seems that a good weapon for several players is what I call a perfect weapon.
In the current system you can get with little work a weapon 375+ with 2 blessings T4 (or the blessings you aimed) and with a T4 perk. This just take time. And, I think that it takes too much time.
However, it seems that several players want the perfect item. It can be made by multiple features. But, I doubt that they will introduce that now… at the beginning of the life of DT. Giving such feature is often a way to recover part of the player base.
And I doubt that the more than 100k players that tested the game and left it have think to an end game feature as the main reason why they don’t keep playing. And yes, I can be wrong.
I am really not sure what would bring to the game the possibility to have weapon maxed actually. You don’t need them, so it is not mandatory to play even at highest difficulty, this would mean that you will never get something better, and if the solution is just to remove the locks, it destroys the entire game system they have built.
Tbh, removing locks would seem for me like activating cheats on a solo game. It is fun at first… but quickly you think that the game has no more interest.
Ok… I will let people speaking about how bad are the locks in a 165 895th thread. I already know the outcome. This is bad. FS needs to remove them. 6 months later locks will be here and nothing would have come from these discussions.
I think that, from all the discussions of the last days, we can now see that the reasons behind the demand to remove locks are multiple. Part of player find too difficult to get something they would want (good, excellent… matter of feeling) and part of players want just a way to get the perfect weapon.
First players could find a solution in the current system with few changes, the others will have to wait until they release some sort of red weapons. But sure, such discussions were people just want to talk to other people that think the same and just repeat “remove the locks” will surely bring lot of input to the devs and will surely change their mind… or not.
Sure it would, but who cares if it does? It’s a bad system, and could use a replacement, but the interim and extremely quick and easy solution is removing the locks. They can make a new system while locks are removed.
There is one common reason behind - both categories get frustrated when a good stat weapon being bricked with useless stuff, it works like ruined orgasm. This isn’t a first game with item progression, so people expect it to be good, cause they want to enjoy it, it’s like a standart thing in modern games. But there is just one weapon chasing loop and no way to control the outcome.
In that crafting material system you wouldnt be able to change any blessing/perk without using crafting materials, so only being able to change 1 out of 4 would be rough
I get wym though, ig in this context you would be able to change change 3 out of the four blessings/perks using crafting materials with the last one perma locked.
But I think it would be fine if you could change all of them though, in the end the current system isn’t really a hard barrier, it’s just a resource barrier, because if you have enough resources you will eventually cycle through enough crafting to get the 2 perks/blessings you want on a weapon and then you can change the other 2 to be also what you want. The resource barrier is similar with the crafting material system as you are acquiring rare material drop resources to get what you want, except in that case it feels way better, gives more control, and can improve a weapon steadily over time which is much more pleasant to work toward.
To keep lore friendly the crafting material could be some special purity seal, which I guess you would use up one or a few of to change 1 perk/blessing depending on how FS wants to balance it. Could do rarer gold purity seals for t4 perks/blessings, silver purity seal for t3 etc etc.
(A) It lets players build what they want so long as they have the right base components (good base rating and stat distribution, and the desired blessings). BUT - there’s a steep resource cost. If you have to break two locks to get it kitted out, that’s 2,000 Diamantine. Basically 6 missions worth of Diamantine on damnation (3-4 hours of game time assume no fails).
(B) It also deals with the oversupply of Diamantine problem by giving a special use for it (and does not rely on adding another resource).
(C) It retains the grind for resources. Even if you can now craft your desired item, if you then want to respec it to something else it will cost you more. So it will still encourage grinding for more good base weapons so you can have multiple different weapon builds on hand.
EDIT (now that the patch is out):
(D) Since the patch game out, we now have to deal with the frustration of locks that were on weapons before the patch keeping their current locks as is with no ability to change them or benefit from the new locking changes. Adding an option to remove the locks would make the new changes work with older weapons.
It just makes so much sense to me and completely retains the function of other crafting elements.
It’s always funny to me when someone (including FS) says that removing the locks would make item acquisition too easy.
Have you all forgotten why the tide games are as beloved as they are? It’s because the gameplay is outstanding, not because the loot/item systems.
What is the problem with it being easy to get the gear you want?
If you wanna tell me that people stop playing once they have gotten all the gear that they want, you’d be dead wrong.
Even if the locks were fully removed from any gear, it would be very compareable to how it was in VT2, once red items get added in a compareable fashion.
Did VT2 have a problem with people stopping to play once they had all the gear they wanted? I have never even heard of a suggestion of such a claim.
So then why would the same happen now in DT? Even if I got all the gear I could ask for this very instance, I wouldn’t stop playing DT, I’d probably play it even more!
The only reason I could see for stopping to play DT would be because I’d eventually have seen all the content so many times that I’d want something new.
The inverse is true as well: I’m not going to keep playing DT or VT2 because there is still gear I don’t have!
I’d stop once my need for new content is greater than my enjoyment of the current selection of content.
So no, that highligted argument makes no sense what so ever.
Or you could have “keys” you could earn by simply gaining a level. If those keys remove a lock permanently or once wouldn’t matter now that we can directly pick both blessings and perks.
I like the diamantine idea as well ^^
But yes the punchline is clear, this aspect needs to be changed still!
On paper a good progression system can enhance the gameplay loop because you feel like you have accomplished something and been rewarded for it.
The concept is fine, and it seems to be what FS is dedicated toward. Tide games are also expected to have progression, it’s an attraction because people do actually like that kind of thing and want it in the game.
The problem is that Fatshark decided to reinvent the progression system wheel which resulted in something that nobody loves.
There are games with beloved progression systems out there, it’s a shame Fatshark did not copy them as this would be a non-issue.
The problem is that Fatshark tried to shoehorn a free-to-play Gacha-style progression system into a very niche genre where the community expectations are for progression systems that are anything BUT that. Fatshark got blinded into thinking the item chase is what keeps people playing these games.
But all the other - far more successful titles - in this genre like Deep Rock, Payday 2, or Left 4 Dead (latter of which has NO progression at all) all have a significantly larger player base. There are other reasons that play into this, but they indicate that a more deterministic progression system is what fans of this genre want overall.
I’m for any idea that doesn’t involve the use of pickup resources. The plasteel and diamantine being tied to pickups found randomly through the map is another design decision that really messes with the flow of the game.
Most of the time it’s a horde event broken up into people running around trying to find empty crates, when the game could be a smoother flow from objective to objective. If you’ve ever had the chance to go through l4d2 with dev commentary turned on, you would learn that valve actually experimented with this, then eventually landed with what they have now in terms of how to obtain weapons and consumables througout the map.
vt2 has a similar regard to this, aside from the books people pick up, but for some reason decided just go 11/10 with it in DT to send people on goose chases for materials for every single run. It’s annoying, and only helps justify their current crafting system design.
The way the materials economy is currently designed could be disposed of with the locks and it would only help the game.
And, thinking about it a bit more, I remembered that somebody I played with mentioned there could be stashes within maps that you would need to break into for resources, rather than just finding it randomly lying around. That’s sort of design is right up in line where I was thinking too, having it integrate better with gameplay and add it as more of an objective, something able to be accomplished. And, just so I’m clear on this: I’m not against the use of resources for progression, but rather how they’re obtained in the current design. It’s currently just as meaningless as having locks.
Thanks! I appreciate hearing when things get passed along. Hopefully the above idea or something similar that allows us to temporarily remove/adjust locks can be implemented near future. Much appreciated.
EDIT: I’ll also add that since the patch game out, we now have to deal with the frustration of locks that were on weapons before the patch keeping their current locks as is with no ability to change them or benefit from the new locking changes. Adding an option to remove the locks would make the new changes work with older weapons. This would be really great.
In theory, I’m not a fan of scouring the map for resources either. It feels weird thematically, breaks the flow of combat, etc.
But realistically I don’t think that’s going to go away unless it were to happen alongside a total rework of the crafting system, which I don’t think is going to ever happen.
In practice, I don’t mind the resource pickup really. It’s a fun brain tickle to find a mother trove of resources, and when you get a mountain of pickups accumulated it ratchets up the stress of wanting to complete the run and not lose everything you found. I think it adds somewhat to the intensity of the experience.
Why?
They could just remove the pickups and simply add the ressources as a reward for completing the mission.
Does not really need a rework of anything else that is in the game.
