Fatshark, you need to do something to adress the very bad skill level of your playerbase – General Discussion

Hello

The general skill level of players in quickplay/random groups is very very bad at the moment.

This is frustrating in two ways:
… if you are good at the game you always have to give 120% to carry your group. Sometimes you just don’t want to do that. If you go down because of a tiny, that’s it. You can pray to the emperor or something but most times it’s a team wipe.

… if you are bad at the game you die around every corner and get frustrated too.

People are really bad at the game. At least in my experience of T5 quickplay more than half of the players I meet are a burden to say the least.

You NEED to do something about that. Either install any form of gatekeeping / matchmaking system by restricting difficulty levels to players that can actually handle said difficulty at least a bit OR train your playerbase better. We need some sort of advanced tutorial that actually deserves it’s name.

Edit: I don’t want to come across as an elitist. But I genuinly think the game starts becoming very fun, once you’re kinda decent at it. That’s where you start dumping 100 of hours into it. If you never reacht that point, you are likely to quit early because you find the game too frustrating or “don’t get it”. If you always have to carry random noobs on the other hand, you start think “Am I in for this mess today or am I playing something else”? Both cannot be in Fatshark’s interest. Or in our interest as a playerbase in general.

Wait until he figure out how VT2 was majority of Veteran difficulty players and very few above due to the skill ceiling. DT is way less frustrating and so much easier, people feels like they are at the same level.

i believe FS wish for making difficulties accessible and less frustrating for the majority of people instead of giving “big bois” a real challenge with little players, Look at the Auric tab, took them nearly a year, with only one maelstrom choice ( which again you cannot choose the type of maelstrom ) and the restriction for accessing it is only level 30.

The only way to see less “beginners” is adding a new tab with even harder content, with reduced rewards, sound dumb but i believe it’ll work. Anyway not a priority for FS

As for now i don’t mind them people, it’s funnier to clutch a game than fast pacing piece of cake.

If your so good just start playing auric.
It’s not a joke if you can clear a game with randoms you should just go even higher and then your the terrible player and all you got to do is stick close to your team and stay alive and after 10 games you will have a way better skill set.

Also people don’t get salty in auric because we kinda all know we are probably gonna die and if we wanted mats we could go play low intensity.

I’ve never stated “I’m so good”. However, I also play Auric regularly. No big deal.

I just happen to witness that the average skill level on T5 is very poor. Squads are dying left and right because people can’t do anything useful at all. T4 is even worse (was leveling my veteran lately). There I wonder how these folks happen to find their W A S D keys on their keyboards.

All I’m saying is that this game would profit from helping their players with the learning curve in any way that is more than being nonexistent at all at the moment

How about, just an idea, instead of scaring away potential new players by saying they are trash, you try to help them get better by yourself?

Player guides are a option here on the forums. Post builds on darktide.gameslantern.com where you explain your gear and talent choices.
Join the official discord and help new players there.
People who want to improve will do over time, other will either get seeded out, or drop down to T4 or non auric missions.

Here on the forums all I read are complains that the playerbase is dropping because steamcharts is something holy for many players and if only 10% are dropping, the game is dead.
Then we got crossplay and now people complain that console play shouldn’t be allowed to play with PC players?

The lower difficulties do very little to prepare you for the higher difficulties due to the uneven damage scaling among other issues. Look at assail as an example.

This is a classic problem with horde games.

There is also no single player to practice, let’s say, catachan parries or managing large mixed hordes when you are the last one alive. Have to just run a catachan and practice on the fly so there will be dozens of failures. This is how this game is designed.

Whenever you’re frustrated with teams and players, try to keep the RP aspects of the game in mind.

The Rejects are not Space Marines. Inquisitor Grendyl does not avail himself of a formal Chamber Militant, such as the Adeptas Sororitas. There are no Inquisitorial Stormtroopers at hand. This isn’t the Guard nor even the PDF. Inquisitor Grendyl is running his own private warband on his own terms, and the players are former prisoners under suspended death sentence thrown into the meatgrinder of Atoma.

The closest IRL equivalent you’ll see to that is Wagner in Bakhmut. Some of Wagner’s fighters were elite special forces operatives with top of the line gear and training, and some were elderly convict conscripts given a 50 year old rifle and told to run forward and draw gunfire to unmask enemy positions. Casualties were immense, progress costly and slow, and tensions erupted into violence, at some points addressed with literal hammers and murder between “teammates”.

That is the reality of the Rejects on Atoma. If you embrace and accept that aspect of the lore and just roll with the RP, and accept that a significant proportion of your conscript convict compatriots are worthless living corpses, it’s a lot less anger inducing.

I get the frustration OP must be feeling, I know it myself. I had to carry a group on Heresy with my Ogryn (thank the Emperor I was using him) the other day spending the entirety of the game rubber-banding backwards and forwards between the party members to try and keep them all standing or getting them back on their feet; it was exhausting and like a reverse whack-a-mole where I was trying to get the party on their feet the whole time.

When you want to play at a difficulty suitable to what you need at the time (i.e. a difficult challenge or near-mindless heretic bashing) it can be frustrating to be ‘let down’ as it were by other members in the squad increasing your workload. If you’re in a chill and forgiving mood to do that, then fine, but it can be jarring when you just want to bash through with people who are as geared and competent at the game with similar knowledge of the maps so it all runs smoothly and you do not always get that.

I’m not sure how OP thinks FS should train players (montage anyone?) and I am not hugely in favour of solid gates to prevent access. It is better for someone to learn that they are not ready for that difficulty through experience than to tell them “nope, not allowed, go away.” There are people who do not learn and will blame their poor experience, lower skill, and inadequate gear power on the rest of the team (how could they be at fault? They keep getting in games with complete noobs!) but I think those sorts of people are the types who leave halfway through after they’ve been downed for the umpteenth time and are in the minority.

I realize I’m being toxic by saying this, but Auric Maelstrom is a clown fiesta after the update.

When folks are worse than me, goes down several times in the beginning of thr mission and deal way less damage than my Support Veteran, you know things are bad.

Ah, the reliable “Jackie Chan”.
Sorry, it just rhymes too easily I can’t stop calling it that now!

I’ve noticed squads aren’t as good. But then we went from a hardcore survivalist player base to suddenly lots of new players. And lots of new players who want to get to the top level as fast as possible without necessarily learning the ropes.

I think an account level, rather than avatar level, visual indicator would be helpful. And I also think gating some levels (eg Auric) until you’ve done x regular missions at t4 (then t5 for t5Auric) isn’t unfair. Again, account wide.

-remembers character creation lore options- wow that was a thing i forgor.

Well, I know gating it by levels won’t work because leveling up to 30 takes no time. If they doubled the xp necessary, it might have helped a bit, but the boat has sailed on that.

With the addition of the skill trees, there are so many more options and skill ceilings depending on their choices.

People tend not too have the insight about how basic mechanics works in this game nor their own contributions to the team, so any form of help, especially written where you cannot infer a tone, will just come across as an attack on them.

So…? You ignore all valid points I state just to point your Fingeris at me?

Whatever.

So you’re just a hypocritical whiner

I mean the game has an extensive tutorial. People just don’t play it.

Reminds me to Dota 2. It has an entire training program and the game is full of people making newb mistakes. Same here.

No, but you are showing us that you are not really willing to improve the game by your means.
Going to the forums to complain about others is easy.
But you just said Fatshark should do something about it. Instead of trying to make the game better for other by yourself.

Geez. Even in the official forums a discussion is not possible anymore.

Fatshark, your community has a problem. Both in terms of player skill, which is nonexistent, and netiquette.

Sadly, some stereotypes about the infamous wh40k fanbase are true

To follow up on my previous post, I do want to acknowledge there’s definitely more the game can do, there’s a tutorial on basic mechanics, but it’s boring AF and doesn’t give you any way to actually practice anything outside of a mission. If I want to learn a Spawn’s attack patterns and how to dodge them effectively and consistently for example, that takes a significant number of runs, far more than it takes to just level a character to 30. I can go into the Psykanum and practice landing headshots, but not avoiding them. IIRC the tutorial doesn’t even cover how stuff like ammo and health packs work (e.g. ammo pack has 4 charges period that restores all ammo to a character, health pack has set amount of health it can restore to the party in total). It’s even worse as far as explanations of mechanics and items, you often need to go to third parties running their own analysis to understand how things like Power, Finesse, Rending, Cleave, etc work and interact.

Adding some interactivity to the Psykanum and some additional mechanics explanation would go a long way. You’re still always going to have idiots and players that don’t bother, but for those that want to learn, there’s a lot more the game could do. That’s not a situation unique to this game, many big live-service games have similar issues (good luck learning armor mechanics and overmatch/autobounce/etc in World of Warships from just what’s available in-game), but it’s definitely a frustrating trying to learn mechanics from what’s available in-game.

All that said, gatekeeping content isn’t a great solution, and doesn’t fit either the lore or game design ethos. But definitely more training and explanation content is needed.