What should Fatshark focus on?

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
41

What has the quoted part to do with what you answered? What you have written says nothing about the validity of a statistical approach. Obviously they have seen this earlier already, the data and the forum have both shown this. However, seeing something and acting upon it are different things. In the end only Fatshark knows why they waited so long. Also the Battle Wizard argument was only to show that even for something as broken as BW, there was an opposition to nerfing her, nothing more, nothing less.

Because even the best players reach dumb conclusions or make analysis on wrong premises? As I wrote before, being good at the game doesn’t make you good at analyzing the game and vice versa. I am just against shunning the opinion of dozen to hundreds Cataclysm players of equal or higher skill than the people in this forum because they don’t bother to speak out. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate the opinion of all players regarding certain difficulties?

And for QoL changes I also just said that their use is subjective. Actually, just me disagreeing would be enough to prove this point. Not everyone is interested in QoL fixes especially if the time could be invested otherwise. Personally, I have three (maybe four) sanctioned mods of which two I could immediately drop without caring. And this is all I said, that there are people who don’t deem QoL fixes important. Because it is subjective. I think people are getting stuck on the argument that there is “objective” stuff. Why is it so bad to say that our opinions are just that: subjective opinions. And not some kind of undeniable facts set in Stone.

I am halfway sure this is a reason why FS does NOT implement certain stuff. Because if it causes trouble it is not their responsibility. Is that good behaviour? No. But it is less work for them. And if People REALLY want something they can just be directed towards the mod.

42

Can you name an instance in which that’s applicable to V2? I don’t really see the crossover. The balance debate is really about buffing worthless talents/weapons on one side while Adelion thinks FS has some sort of telemetric data telling them bad weapons and talents and traits are actually all secretly balanced. How would buffing bad weapons/traits/talents make the game less fun for new players?

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43

I do quote Mattie on the exact instance where it can be applied. It seems that the dot not applying to armor was problematic. And probably not for us, veterans.

No he said the telemetric data is more relevant than our opinion. Which is different than “The game is already secretly balanced”.

And given the infamous WoM release, where all topics pointed to stagger being horrible and balance way worse than before => Months after : there were never as much as interesting weapons and talents to play in 1.6, I do think that he’s kinda right.

I do think though, that feedback should still be considered “manually”. But yeah, telemetry data can give us more insight on what’s working and what’s not. Probably not “why” though. It have to be analyzed.

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44

I don’t think this applies to the bw example. If there was an enemy that had a mechanic and cata players know how it works and by doing that the boss get super easy, and then you have low difficulty players who don’t know that mechanic and it’s super hard. If then cata players asked for a buff to that specific enemy then i woudl say the dota example makes sense. It’s not like bw was hard to use. Yes you could still die to positioning and stuff and if you were only used to champion and you were able to get into cata because of a broken build then the data could show bw being weak.

Edit:

Am i the ‘he’? Cuz i didn’t mean that with what i wrote

45

How can you scoff at 1000 hours? Not even I have that. It’s a lot of experience with the game. Like honestly, just picking a random player I know the name of, I’d rather trust FuuPlayz than Fat Shark’s telemetric data on game balance because he’s got a lot of personal experience playing the game while data doesn’t capture nearly as much as personal experience does.

Is our anecdotes open to bias? Yes of course, but what the telemetric data doesn’t tell you is how much fun something is or people’s reasons behind doing what they do. “Oh, people overwhelmingly choose this talent …” But, why?

I picked movement speed because I’m fast boie but now that people have said it’s the worse option, I yield to their expertise. Because this is something the telemetric data can’t show you: player logic. Ultimately, why do I need the movement speed? Sure the option is okey, but ultimately why do I need to move that fast when I’m supposed to kill everything anyway? Telemetric data doesn’t tell you that!

46

I feel like you’ve only read one brief part of the argument.

This wasn’t problematic. Per Fatshark, the change was made for the sake of consistency. This change came with a whole group of changes that were intended as “bug fixes” to gauge the actual strength of careers when working properly before making any balance changes.

It may be in another thread, but Adelion and I have had several conversations about weapon balance. He thinks the meta should be nerfed down to the level of the lower tier weapons in the game rather than the lower tier weapons in the game being buffed so that every weapon has a particular role it is good at but it is bad at other roles to encourage team play.

Adelion’s opinion is perfectly valid, but given that information, your argument doesn’t make any sense.

47

No you were not the he :stuck_out_tongue:

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48

That data is better at gauging weapon effectiveness. I’m not saying statistics are bad, it just seems you are blindly trusting it. The bw example was to show that every player immediatly spoke up the moment bw rework was in the game, then buffed her, then nerfed her wrongly, then finally nerfed her correctly. If their data is so good how come they first buffzd her, then nerfed her wrong, if it’s so easy to see what is overperforming etc.

Not when it’s backed up by objective facts. Take a look at the spear push feedback, or even ws ammo regen, or ranged ult gain. The subjective part is just on how you wanna nerf it or what should be changed, a fix is not up to us, we can suggest things based on our playing and testing but our feedback stays correct. A new player would’t of thought about spear push being too strong, or ranged ult gain being broken. So yes i do think experienced players are better at judging weapons. Are they better at proposing fixes? No, some are, some aren’t.

Yes Qol are subjective, let’s leave it there.

About the mod implementation i agree, if that’s their stance on it then that’s a very bad mentality and i hope it’s not true.

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49

I am not trusting it blindly. Alone for the reason that the data is evaluated by humans and that the changes are made by humans gives room for error (like applying a wrong nerf). I am just saying that there are many players of all skill levels which do not take part in the forum discussions. And I would like to integrate their opinion for balance questions too. The data makes this possible.
As long as their decisions in talent/weapon picking is consistent with what the active forum members have done their is no issue. But imagine that the forum says unison Choice A is the only viable while the rest of the Cataclysm players pick Choice B. This should something which should be looked upon and questioned. It is not that I blindly trust the data but more that I mistrust singular opinions even if provide by some facts. I just leave the option open for me and you to be wrong instead of saying: The forum said so, this is it. There are solutions and applications I might not even imagine.

Even dumb conclusions can be backed by objective facts. Is it that bad that I want to have the largest possible pool of opinions? Like I said, this has not necessarily to be all players but let’s say all Cataclysm players so that they have at least some kind of insight. The smaller the group the more prone it is to error. And I firmly believe that the examples you make were also visible in the available data. Again, if it is correctly evaluated or acted upon is a different story. But it is visible.

And the reason I am this strict is because I have seen players here in this forum making claims firmly believing them to be true which can easily be checked. There was someone who said some months ago that Convocation of Decay on Legend or Cataclysm can’t be pugged. A look on the data does prove this to be wrong.

To repeat: My main interest is to get the largest pool possible of opinions within “qualifications”.

50

Even that opinion differs from the “secretly balanced” fact :stuck_out_tongue:
I do often think there’s a middleground though, and that data is clearly relevant.

Ah that, I can be guilty of this.

51

I’m actually really interested what data you mean here. Do you have access to something the majority doesn’t? Or did I miss something?

52

That could be a mis-characterization. That’s how I interpreted the line about “some people not liking what the telemetry suggests” given the surrounding context.

53

Thank you for making this post, I fully agree with it, you just expressed it a lot better than I could have had, had I bothered with it.

For me the worst addition has been the weaves, and it baffles me that they spend and plan to spend so much time on them. New game modes are the worst additions we could get (imho) and sadly it’s what we are getting - weaves and versus.
I’d focus on quality of life and new game maps.

QoL because some things are sorely needed. In this regard the worst aspect of the game, is, for me, the temporary hp system. I’ve been thinking of doing a post for a while, but in short: it’s annoying, because you have to switch talents when you change weapons, it has bad synergies with some classes/weapons, which is specially true on quick plays, like when you have health on cleave and somebody brings a flamethrower, or when everybody has kills (or only you have but shade/BH kill everything before you can), so it’s an unnecessary variable annoying to factor into career decision. But also because some careers have no choice to go with the best choice for the weapon you use, be that kill or cleave, or whatever. I’d be very, very, very glad to get a change which takes into account stagger, cleave and kills, so you get decent hp if you either kill big boys, or stagger a lot, or cleave a lot. healshare or health on headshots/crits can be there as the 2nd and 3rd talent for the row: It’d be a choice between vanilla, headshots, and hs talent.

After quality of life changes (which should include some of the most popular mods, like some of the UI mods especially, to say just a few, player list plus, and at the very least show us when a player is in white health!) I said I’d go for maps. Because, except for weave fanatics, maps is how we play the game, and as you said, any other change won’t make it feel like a new game as much as new maps can.

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54

I have literally never head anyone ask for a new hero until now. Obviously a new hero is new content and is therefore welcome, as long as it gets implemented well enough so it doesn’t break the game. As you can read multiple times in this thread alone, while new content is cool and all, it’s not even close to being the most wanted or important thing for this game. We want a game we like to play. Not to only come back for a day to see the new stuff every 6 months.

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55

Is that how it has been interpreted? No, that was not what I meant. I mean we had a go at weapon balance and I am pretty sure that I agreed with you that there are imbalances in the weapon which would be the contrary of “secretely balanced”. I also went out of the way to say that your approach is not wrong. Similar to the base power line, it is a matter of design philosphy. I would just chose the way which includes everyone’s opinion.

What I meant is that Fatshark has the data and can easily take this approach. And to a certain degree they are doing it. And to a certain degree they are taking a look at the forums.
It is just that people get kinda defensive if their opinions gets challenged and would be ready to throw all data out of the window for their personal believe. The comment most likely stuck to my mind during discussions of balancing map endings where people always claim this, that, there is not doable in pugs up to absolutes. Do I have access to this data. Lookingleft Looking right. Nope. But I play a lot of public games and I can say that most of the mentioned finales are very well doable in pugs even with a sufficient quota. And either I am on the awesome side of statistics or the initial claim of some people is wrong. So some people might not like what telemetry suggests.

On telemetric data: We know at least what is tracked. Fatshark has confirmed this at one point for us.

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56

Completely agree. Saying something that absolute is clearly untrue.

This is why I thought you were saying the weapons were largely balanced. The idea that FS is keeping up with balance and actually making changes per the telemetric data. I guess I just misunderstood your opinion.

I see what you’re saying here. I just disagree that telemetry necessarily gives any feedback on weapon strength as people run weapons for a whole spectrum of reasons not related to strength. But on this point we’ve decided to agree to disagree I think. Sorry for the mischaracterization.

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57

Lucky you. The fact that you didn’t heard anyone doesn’t prove that there’s anyone unfortunately.

58

So… you haven’t been reading the subreddit or the Steam forums, like, at all? It’s been a recurring question since launch. Ever since hero-based games have become a thing, people tend to essentially equate ‘new characters’ with ‘major new content’. Apart from new maps, weapons, game modes, balancing and QoL improvements, a ‘new character’ (or ‘new career’) is a box that has been left unchecked by Fatshark in the eyes of a lot of interested players.

59

Nah, it is fine. You are reasonable to discuss with, especially considering that our design philosophies are rather far apart from each other. And misunderstandings are bound to happen if texts get longer or arguments heated. I do make mistakes often enough myself. I don’t actually enjoy discussing so I am glad for everyone who can express himself.

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60

Great post! I’m glad to see someone encouraging devs to remember where there is room for game improvements. I made a post sharing my thoughts on areas devs could make game changes as well! Might I add, I STRONGLY hope they add another dwarf if considering adding new characters. Dwarves are so damn cool, and I would freak out if they had another on the team. Some addition and rework of certain game areas could seriously make vermintide 2 and its replay value pristine. I hope the devs consider our thoughts!