Overall I really have enjoyed Vermintide 2 since I bought it last week, but I am baffled by the design decision to tie so many rewards to winning a mission. If you fail a mission, all you get is some experience, and absolutely no loot (well, commendation chest eventually) or quest progress. I was really surprised that even something like elite kills doesn’t count towards your daily quest if you fail the mission.
The reason I find this choice odd is that most coop games I’ve played tie rewards primarily to time played (though there is usually lesser bonuses for completion and/or performance). They do so in order to encourage players to challenge themselves and to allow players to have a good time even with bad allies. In most coop games, when I have a bad team I don’t really mind because I get a turn being the star player. In Vermintide 2, when I have a bad team I just feel like I’m almost completely wasting my time. The game is still fun, sure, but why not just leave the crappy team so I can have fun AND get loot? I really don’t like that the game naturally encourages hostility towards your team.
I think the game could greatly benefit from having less of an all or nothing approach to its rewards. Most quests could easily be changed to award partial progress (e.g. wiping halfway through the map counts as half a mission). Loot boxes could be decoupled from match completion and instead tied experience. Wins would earn you boxes faster, but losses would still get you progress (and the further you made it before wiping, the more progress you get). Or alternately, making it far enough into the map before wiping would award lesser loot boxes with fewer and/or lower rarity loot.
But these ideas are mostly high level concepts from a new player that doesn’t fully understand the game. Whatever the merit of these specific ideas, I think the general concept of making rewards less binary between win/loss would greatly benefit the game.