Vermintide 2 is being strangled by design flaws and false advertisement/promises and is losing its playerbase

What bugs me the most about this is that the game got advertised as 9/10 best game EVEEEER by payed magazines and scoreboards and still proudly promotes those “badges” on the steam site while basically all of the good reviews from actual players are from people who haven’t seen the game in total and already left. I also was positviely surprised shortly after the beta but that changed fast. Thats the archetype of a corporate greed cashcow. False or shady advertising, gamedesign that revolves around generating good reviews in the first few days and ratings that are simply not mirroing what the game acutally has to offer. Not a problem if I buy a shovelware game from some big corp like EA but my intention when supporting indie devs is to get a product that is not garbage promoted as the holy grail.

Anyway I found a pretty good workaround for all these problems. Simple software you can acquire in the Steam shop, most people left probably already have it.
Its called Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide and its basically like this game but you can have fun with it and since FS is busy running V2 into the ground with supersonic speed, there are no devs to ruin it anymore.

Most importantly I learned my lesson to NOT spend money on things I can only see the “box” of.
Preordering in particular. Giving people money before they deliver because they promise to do so is what kills games since people get their cash and just dont give super happy bunny rabbit anymore after that.
I wont make the same mistake with Fatshark again.

Also:

Yeah sure. Calling a multiplayer dead that looses 80% of its playerbase in roughly three months, because of flaws that aren’t even touched by now while the people behind it are concerned with random weapon balances, no one ever remotely asked for is fatalistic.
Especially when the tendency of people leaving isn’t significantly slowing down. I remember a thread just a few weeks ago in which a user posted stats around 9k. Whoops, 5k. Basically everyone who reaches beyond veteran abandons the sinking ship in astonishing time.

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I find it amusing, that all the apologists, that ferociously defended the game and all developer decisions, have fled first.

Somehow now the forum is filled with more or less adequate people, that truly care about the game. That’s a good thing on hand, but on the other hand that’s likely a very bad sign.

Not to mention, that forum seems to lose people faster then the game iself.

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… Except for the fact that the devs are clearly working their behinds off working on patches and improving the game, prioritizing fixes over paid DLC. If they were just trying to get money we’d have seen paid DLC by now.

Want to go into specifics on any advertising that was false or shady?

Again, then why are they still putting so much effort into patching and balancing? If everyone liked it so much right after beta, wouldn’t it have been better for them to leave it, drop some DLC, make that sweet $$$ you think they’re obsessed with, and call it a day?

Again would love to see specifics for what ratings you think weren’t accurate to what the game is/was.

Not really, the game is still at mostly positive overall. My rating is still positive after ~230 hours, so is that of several of my friends with similar playtime. If you look at negative recent reviews you’ll see a whole lot of people upset about one of the following:

  • Their favorite character got nerfed and they’re angry
  • The problem they personally find most annoying hasn’t been fixed yet

And despite the hundreds of hours they’ve played, which obviously most of those hours they enjoyed, they decide to change their review to a negative.


Balancing a game is a rough process with lots of ups and downs on the way. Bugs take time to fix and changes take time to implement, and it’s going to take time for a dev team of their size to fix everything. Now, let me make one thing clear: I DO agree that the game was released in simply too rough of a state in terms of bugs. It makes sense they would need some balancing tweaks, but the sheer amount of things just not working right at release is a bit ridiculous. They’ve been fixing them steadily but I agree with everyone who has said this should have been an Early Access release. But to claim that

Is just ridiculous. It’s the archetype of an indie studio that rushed their game out the door before it was ready, and are now having to scramble to fix everything. This is basically the same patching&balancing roller coaster ride that happened for Vermintide 1; if you weren’t around for it, go read Reddit threads from the time, it was a mess on release and Fatshark kept patching and balancing until it was amazing. It’s disappointing that they clearly didn’t learn from their mistakes enough to not repeat them, but I have every confidence that they’ll get V2 to a good place just as they did with V1.

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read again:

Not a single core problem got fixed. Not a single one. Green dust, sound problems, rng everything, krubers ult bug, weapon swap, AI director, the list goes on and on and on. These are things pointed out since the beta. Instead we got fine changes like exe sword and glaive which everyone was just like “eh… what?”.

No I don’t want to. This topic has been discussed over and over again with the same outcome that its not false advertising if you advertise stuff false as long as people subjectively think “its ok” even if they didnt get what they bought. Thats just gonna drive us in circles.

Again read the first one. Throwing around random balance changes and patches that obviously no one really tested or even implementing stuff that gets pointed out as glitchy in the beta patch by users isn’t “putting in so much effort”.

I’ll just give you my favourite ones:
If there was one other thing from the original game that really needed to be addressed for the sequel, it was stability. While Vermintide was definitely improved by way of a number of patches, it’s fair to say the game’s initial launch was a bit wobbly. A number of bugs and stability issues made the game rather frustrating at points so it’s a relief that the second instalment is largely free from these issues.

A highly accomplished sequel that innovates without losing sight of what made the first one great.”
Recommended (thats from the steam page)

Still, the melee combat deserves a callout of its own. It’s fundamentally no different than it was before, but it’s still an absolute blast.

The dozens of weapons available are varied and balanced enough that each one feels different[…]Picking one weapon over another feels like a matter of preference, not the temptation of raw power.
-Warhammer Vermintide 2 Review - IGN

Google will find you tons of these. Praising the innovative crafting system etc. etc.

Nice that your rating is still positive, the steam rating isn’t and the 80% playerbase loss also tells another story. 24k players dont abandon the game because they are angry about nerfed careers.

No annoying problem has been fixed yet.

Vermintide 1 was an underdog indie title that wasn’t advertised and hyped as the next big thing. Vermintide 2 had more PR than Lindsay Lohans ladyparts.

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You’re getting a like purely for this, pure gold :rofl:

Fair enough, I’ll give you that one… definitely not accurate to V2 at release.

Either you’re being hyperbolic or haven’t been paying attention, there’s been tons of good fixes and tweaks in every patch. Obviously there’s a lot more work to do, but if you want to focus on the work not done yet instead of the good things already getting done then have fun being pessimistic, I guess?

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While I don’t agree to everything said in this thread, I’ll just put this out there.

Instead of doing a small code change in a patch, so that all players had…I dont know…500 green dust when they logged back in…

They decided to fix F2 F2.

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I get why they don’t do it- it would completely trivialize crafting and thus be a show of how useless the crafting system is. Instead of doing that they could make all crafting free and it wouldn’t make any difference for any of the players who played enough to have the green dust problem in the first place. Crafting needs a total rework IMO.

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Yeah, it does. It has taken a step backwards from V1, and I’m not really looking forward to a dust converter at all. It depends on the amount you get, if it is like the screenshot we saw where you get x10 green dust for x10 blue dust… well, that just looks tedious, like the crafting already is.

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If converting dust will work like other crafting menus where you have to hold LMB and wait, then I think I might curl into a ball and cry, wondering why someone wants me to waste precious seconds of my life for nothing.

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You ever heard about regret? This game has been littered with false promises which have to this point not been met, let alone the strange priority fatshark has when it comes to what to balance and what to fix. Besides, I am free to not recommend something despite spending lots of time on it, especially when it overall is just frustrating and unrewarding.

Saying that the negative reviews are from people who are mad their favorite character has been nerfed is just slandering, and it shows you’ve not delved into genuine complaints at all because you’re not addressing the actual problems, from performance, balancing and the credibility of fatshark which has tanked.

I want V2 to be a good game, but untill the lessons taught by V1 actually improve the way V2 is handled, I’m not going to encourage my friends to buy it, in fact, I’m doing the opposite. And I’ll recommend V1 instead.

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I’m not saying you’re wrong, far from it! I actually agree on most of the points you make.

But when I see posts like this, all I can think is “why not just take a break for a while?” You already have 380 hours, which is quite a lot to have accrued in two months. With that much playtime in such a short amount of real time, the flaws are certainly going to become more and more apparent and annoying. If you liked the game initially, but don’t so much anymore, just uninstall the game for a week, month, however long you need until you feel like playing it again. But playing it obsessively until you literally can’t stand it anymore is just unhealthy.

Again, there are some valid points brought up in this thread. I’m just trying to be real here.

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Im at 600 hours and even though i recognize most if not all of the postet issues i have to say that i dont find it to be that bad. I rarely experience bugs that does anytying but make me laugh or raise an eyebrow. Never met a silent patrol but a few silent specials here and there but its a rare occasion. I get the hate but i dont get it… i understand the issue that the product was shipped before it was rdy and that the devs shouldnt be using its playerbase as involentary beta testers. That is what early access is for and in that regard the game is per diffintion still in early access or just comming out of it. I understand the frustration in that regard but the game is fun, it brings a solid challenge, the devs are working on the problems and trying to mske everybody happy and so i dont get the hate concerning the game itself. Yes the game was shipped prematurely now get over it and watch as it gets better.

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To me, you are then unbelievably lucky. Silent specials and patrols happen regularly for me, now, 2 weeks ago, a month ago, and it hasn’t shown much improvement. This is my experience, of course.

But it is no secret that sound in general is a mess in V2 at the moment, from looping music and incredibly inconsistent dialogue.

With this statement you tell me you don’t want or don’t care if the perception of V2 is good or bad. I’m pointing these things, because it gives fatshark a bad image, and in turn their game. V2 can not keep people hooked, people quit on mass because these things are not being adressed. “just get over it” is helping no one, fatshark perhaps least of all.

It is, but I’ve had several breaks already, about 3 and a half weeks in total, playing in bulk. Returning to these problems untouched again and again just makes it all the more disheartening, and if people who loved the first game are going to be pushed away by these things, new players are far more likely too just ditch this unfinished product and play something advertised correctly, or actually finished.

I spent far more spare time on V1 in short periods of time, and never was it this frustrating, never so many crashes, never did it feel so unfair to lose, where as in the first you knew well it was you who made a mistake.

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This game came out unfinished. Period. It will take about 4-6 months for FS to get it fully done (june or august, but this is only my wild guess). Now the only question is will they do anything to compensate the prolonged beta state of the game or not.
I (and I guess some of you as well) went through a similar thing when BF4 came out: The game was majestic on trailers and had a lot of cool features. But fuc*ked up netcode and various problems plagued the game for almost a year. They gave away a lot of free stuff later and often made double XP weekends, but for many people it was already too late.
I really hope we won’t need to wait for a year for FS to deliver all the promised features.

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Yis exactly this.
Right now I’m logging in every now and then to look how its going and everytime stuff that has driven me away since 1.04 or even beta jumps right into my face. Mixed with the new stuff here and there.
But I have to correct myself since I realized that few days ago, I actually heard the skulls of a packmaster rattle for the first time ever in V2, just took a few months. Hooray!

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Good to hear I’m not delusional when I say these things are a reason why my want to play near disappears entirely.

I was killed on Into the Nest today.
What killed me, you might ask? A point of no return, a spot where you are meant to drop down, before the rat ogre pens. I died midair, RIP grim.

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FS drops a 22g patch to fix bug issues and makes the game drastically worse than it was before. Silent everything, tons of the same old bugs, no fixes to glaringly obvious issues like huntsman active bug, nerfs, nerfs, nerfs, and no changes to issues like the pss poor crafting system, green dust, red drops / duplicates, cosmetics. The game is going from “it has some issues but I still enjoy playing it” to "wow V2 is pretty fcking bad"

Today I decided to get on and play some elf since huntsman got gutted and is basically a waste of a hero slot (rip my 30+102 Kruber) and was constantly getting bugs, sound issues, just general bullsht not to mention playing 7 games strait without finding a single other person to play with in QP (US servers mind you). To add insult to injury cause screw it, I get a red drop and its my 10th trinket, which means I have 32 reds now and use 3… like come on, can the game not be absolute sht for 5 seconds?

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Maybe I’m a bit… lucky… (using the term very loosely)… but I’ve had no real drop OR improvement in performance since beta. There are still sound bugs, silent patrols, crashes, host crash at the drop-of-a-hat, getting punched by a rat in the distance, 2 poison rats appearing within three feet of me and putting a poison globe in each of my pockets (Unchained goes BOOM!) and like @Revy I’ve gone from “Wow this game has some bugs but I’ll grit my teeth and enjoy what I can” to “Wow they should have launched at Christmas.” I can only hope that they give us a nice fat 1.1 patch with a free illusion for every weapon called “patience of a saint” and enough green dust to snort myself into oblivion.

I really hope that FS give me this great working 1.1 patch, but as a famous Librarian once said “Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.”

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Finding games is becoming harder and harder, but finding them as an elf is almost impossible. So many people play Shade because…well, we all know why, and those that don’t play Shade play WS. The elf slot is almost always taken, and it’s easier to find games as other characters.

This is in northern europe/western russia area, so not at all unique to US.

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