It’s the opposite. I come from a day and age before such meters and score screens. From the days of DOTA 1 and Dark Age of Camelot. Those UI elements exist because people were already toxic about such things AND made those claims anyways.
It’s funny you mentioned EQ 1, where people would intentionally aggro half a zone of mobs and intentionally train them onto other people to kill them. Jerk players have always been jerk players. EQ 1 also had it’s fair share of elitism.
But gamers had a sort of pride and there was also more self policing back then too. So habitual offenders tended to get shunned and persecuted.
This is not because of new meters. This is because the demographic for gamers is radically different than it was. Gamers used to be a rare breed of mocked and insulted technically proficient individuals for the most part. With strong negative stereotypes and made fun of and threatened by jock types.
Now a gamer is your average person, and your average person kind of sucks. Don’t believe me, go work tech support or read reddit/facebook/twitter lol. Trying to blame new UI features for the results of a complete change in demographics is insanity.
Everyone is a gamer now. The sense of identiy and pride is largely gone, spread too thin to matter. The idea of self policing is pretty dead in most games, instead people expect the game companies to police us while also giving us full freedom. It’s a sad state of affairs with US as the primary cause. But hey, blame the company so we have no responsibility right. It’s all the design, and WE are never the problem…only those other guys that everyone agrees are a problem anonymously on the internet where nobody can see our lies.
You will indeed always have toxic jerks. You can’t change that. But you can change this one particular aspect of people desperately chasing after damage at all costs. Will that stop folks from spewing vitriol in chat whenever they lose? No (although I haven’t actually seen much of that in Vermintide). But it will reign in the guys who dash out of a chokepoint into the open, taking a million damage so that they can get a higher kill score than the rest of their team on the mission failure screen. And that is something that I see in 9/10 matches.
You are also getting way too caught up in this idea of some mythical, pure oldschool gamer that has been diluted by the dreaded normies. Every original counterstrike match in existence had legions of idiots screaming at each other in 1337, and t was impossible to have a public game of Diablo 1 without some dickhead hacker coming in and townkilling everyone. Changing demographics are not to blame.
No, you can’t. Because the actual gameplay elements of it are the central allure. It’s more fun to DEAL damage than it is to tank. Than it is to heal. Than it is to support. Because video games can’t do what D&D does and custom tailor unique scenarios, we are heavily based around combat. And even then D&D eventually made clerics really powerful in combat to desperately entire people to play them. Because supporting was less fun. Dealing damage is more proactive, less subtle, and more immeadiately rewarding. It makes you feel more directly poweful. It’s also more cathartic. When you come home to relax the idea of nursemaiding 3 people is just less appealing than the idea of cracking some skulls.
Power gamers, who used to be more of the general gaming demographic, will split up roles more and embrace a wider variety of roles. Usually for effectiveness, but because of that they become more varied in what they like too…though DPS is still favored. But your average gamer just wants to kill rats man. DPS being overladen in every game isn’t some global UI conspiracy. It’s a central appeal to the common gamer.
They won’t take away stats to achieve your goal, because they already know it won’t work.
Damage roles will definitely always be more popular, but I do not think folks will be so quick to do stupid things to deal more damage than their teammates (to the point of actively sabotaging their competing teammates) if the game does not give them a score to obsess over. This holds true for every game I have ever played where such things are not recorded vs ones where they are, and in ones that originally had no such thing but introduced them later.
The opportunity cost for removal is also very low in the case of Vermintide. You don’t really lose anything except the ability to brag about fairly meaningless numbers. At least in something like an MMO, meters can help you work optimize your damage rotation or burn phases. Here it just means you pointlessly placed yourself a few feet past your teammates during a horde, or rush to spam friendly fire enabled arrows on harmless ambient rats before anyone else can.
I’m going to stop replying to this because I literally just got a forum popup telling me to stop taking over the thread with this conversation.
This is the status quo based on decades of gaming, sports, Olympics, leaderboards, and even Clicker games. It’s a strong allure to people that would be lost and this allure has been added into many games an achievements and RPG systems for a reason. To disprove that status quo you need something better than “in my opinion I know better than decades of game developers”, though likely it’s more like disproving history lol. I invoke Hitchen’s Razor .
There is nothing wrong with wanting to change a situation from one thing to something better. The gaming industry has went through various phases and companies have and will continue to target toxicity in various different ways, with Blizzard setting some strong examples in recent times, directly contradicting what you are saying. The recent surge of PC culture has also reinforced this tendency. The argument that companies will not target certain information that fuels toxicity because the competitive aspect is central is simply factually and logically incorrect. And the same is true for professional sports. The tendency to reinforce cooperative behaviour and discourage toxicity has been an ongoing trend in all human activity since the dawn of civilisation, not the other way around. And this hasn’t hurt professional sports, like your logic would suggest, but has had quite the opposite effect. People in general want sportsmanship to be the norm and have been actively working towards that goal.
So your mythologised, anecdotal experiences of ‘a day and age without such meters and score screens’ means very little and bears more resemblance to an ideology disproving history than actual input. lol
yea! nothing matches the intricate healing of wow back in the day. it was an art to understand the timings and use grid to synchronise with other healers. taking in all the information on active hots, who was healing who at that moment, the choices i have to make to prioritise triage etc… was amazing.
I really hope they add this. IMO, one of the best trackers of a players skill level is their ability to block/avoid damage at higher difficulties. But the problem w/ damage taken is that some dmg is unavoidable (team taking too long to help from stab rats/etc), as such, damage blocked would show a better picture of how much ppl are playing defensively. hope they add more stats like this!
I agree with the OP wholeheartedly. The whole focus on competition, this out of game garbage and number monkeying is a major let down.
This game could have been so much better. It could have felt like “A desperate battle to survive.” I want to pretend I’m a BA knight for an hour after work. I wanna fight for my life once in a while in a dark universe full of beautifully horrific things trying to kill me. I want the three cool people around me to be my only hope. I want to feel like “we survived!” at the end of a game.
I don’t wan’t to be in this “community” with these “gamer” children.
I don’t want my mate who died the most playing the elf to brag about his green circle collection after the match.
I REALLY don’t want strangers doing that while complaining about being “agro’d”.
I don’t want to play missions “for loot” or to play with anyone who does.
I don’t want to be treated like a risk/reward balance statistic like I’m a dog chasing a carrot. F@#$ you.
I strongly feel that this game and genre need to move away from “boss” format ideas in order to maintain their identity and distinguish themselves from the other garbage. This iteration of vermintide has taken a big step in the wrong direction on account of the devs not appreciating this and these problems. I’m ready to drop this game and wait for another one that gets this.
The real short term solution to the problem is to give EVERYTHING in the game less health. “Tanking” should be an endangered concept, as well as “DPS”. Both concepts break immersion mainly because they aren’t and never have been real. Real tanks don’t “tank”, they simply are impervious or not. The “bosses” need to kill us faster and die instantly when shot in the eye, for example. This would cause more immersion and more tension, not to mention faster play times. Difficulty can and should come from FASTER and MORE enemies, not health bars and statistics.
Protracted fights and fight scenes as well as object hoarding and hero lusting have long been the domain of plebs, a domain to which this game seems to have gone probably not to die but to get mainly hollow and soulless iterations peopled and funded by idiots who used to play MOBA and watch twitch.
They just need to buff the supports a bit. In V1, every character was capable of pretty comparable devastation. In V2, even though I like Kruber, I never play him because he’s bascially a DPS babysitter with extremely limited damage potential. They need to bring back some of his ol’ minigun razzle dazzle to a degree. They should give Bardin’s pistols back their stagger. That kinda thing will let them get away with throwing the crazy crap they want at us because there won’t be so much of a meta anymore, just people playing the classes they love to the best of their ability.
Well if they would do a “Healing done” and “Healing received” stat along with a Healing type Career, i.e. Kerillian with some kind of druid or something working with HoTs, that would thin out the stat junkies a little bit further because they could get top score at healing … you would indirect help the co-op play imo
I would LOVE to see a healing spec/career. I love playing tanks and healers in games, and i know that VT1-2 dont really aim towards healers per say, but… idc I would love being able to use an ability and turn temp health to real health or somthing.
I don’t think enough people get it. Coming from a long history with VT1 into VT2…it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you are supporting your team in the best way YOU intend with the objective of finishing the run. I have to say that a lot of the time this is going to be killing as effectively as possible which is why ranged is so popular. Defending your party is great, and in situational hordes, 2 people are plenty to get everything dead. In VT1 there was a lack of additional mechanics, and everyone could dish out some decent ranged. Now they tried to make it that there are squishier ranged toons compared to melee toons to widen this dynamic with the objective of giving more unique feeling roles. The game is designed that there IS meant to be at least 1 frontline guy to protect ranged units. Otherwise the engagement will turn into a lot of kiting and usually breaks your solid defensive lines when chokes are lost. This was less necessary in VT1 as they didn’t have a focus on roles as it was more just about killing rats.
There was frontline in V1 without sacrificing the fun factor of any jobs. Repeater Handgun being inferior to Repeater Pistol is asinine no matter how you slice it. They’ve got it so, without factoring in class traits, the Pistol is vastly superior to its much heavier and logically more powerful counterpart in every way. There’s no defending it. It’s a terrible design choice at every level.
Most classes are capable of comparable output. Kruber gets screwed over.
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because they could get top score at healing … you would indirect help the co-op play imo