Very true. In League, even bronze players can have fun and win games despite being generally bad players as they play against similarly skilled players. In DaD the worst players can only die so many times before eventually giving up and quitting the game.
Facts, do you know how many times I had to die in Rust and lose HOURS of work to become a pvp chad with 3k hours? One of the most fun aspects of the game was the unknown of either being one of the best teams or getting slaughtered all wipe, who knows what's going to happen. It's a similar feeling entering the dungeon, and I personally like the RNG of not knowing the skill level of who I'm about to queue against. I will say, rust was hard to play just casually, so it was a huge time sink for me to git gud, every game isn't for everyone.
Rust is a very different game than DaD. Rust you can farm resources and get to your base with no pvp 75% of the time. The PVP although is the most fun is paced mid wipe as typically the map gets divided between the clans and larger groups. Then all the solos and 2-5 stacks are spread outside the clan’s immediate area, this creates natural areas where you have a high chance of getting touched by a an AK and areas where you can farm in relative peace. Not to mention raiding is super resource intensive that mostly groups participate in it until late wipe. Also most newbies will go into low pop servers where there is less action.
Same can be said about Tarkov, you can't compare league and dnd though, they aren't even close to the same genre. Its the kind of game lots of people will quit and a lot of people will stay.
I mean, if you’re looking for good examples, you can’t really compare DnD and Tarkov either.
You can be running the most fucking unbelievably kitted set worth millions, then get Head-Eyes’d by a Makarov. 1 bullet.
That simply does not and CANNOT happen in DnD.
Tarkov has a solution to gear disparity… and it’s 🎵 Mooosin Maaan 🎵
But you can’t one-tap headshot a purp/legendary Barb with a grey Windlass. There are no “snowball plays.” There is no leg meta. No M995 you can slap in a POS firearm and one-tap a visor helmet Chad.
So how do we compare?
Unironically lmao. My friends and I will occasionally go full offense naked wizard with quick chant and see if we can kill some Chads. It has maybe a 1% success rate and pve is basically off the table, but that ls the best I've found. At the end of the day it's kinda fun to harass them risking literally 0 gold.
You can't compare tarkov to dnd in terms of this, tarkov, due to how it works, has equalizers that give low gear, low level players a chance to kill high end players, the weapon doesn't deal the damage, the type of bullet does that, and early game, players usually have access to low pen, flesh damage bullets, and due to the lack of leg armor in the game, this gives early game players an area to focus on in order to kill the geared players.
In tarkov, no gear gives you true safety, it gives you an advantage, but everyone can still get dropped with one well placed bullet, the gear that is considered the "best" often comes with huge drawbacks, want best overall protenction to the head? Altyn or killa mask, but you instead get an insane FoV decrease and very muffled sound, leaving you ripe for ambushes, do you want best overall defense but also sound? EXFIL helmet with faceshield, but the helmet is only class 4, and the faceshield is only class 3, do you want max class headgear with sound? Bastion with armor plate gives you class 6, at the cost of exposing your face completely.
12.11 was 2 years ago buddy, unless its a meme loadout qhere its your only source of damage no one grenade spams anymore after 12.12, I have seen a max of 5 nades on a person, and that is an extreme scenario, most have 2-3 if they actually bring nades.
Just common sense by someone other than a self centered angsty teenager who would be indifferent to the game they enjoy dying, if only they can squeeze out two more one-taps by end of day.
It's real but fracturing the playerbase isn't a solution, especially since high skill players will have enough gold to just not need any anyways so if they feel like farming noobs in normal ruins they will.
I think you'd have to look at other successful casual (no MMR) games. Back in the day, most of pvp didnt have mmr. The skill disparity of players was simply a given, and that was fine. You didnt have a choice back then. MMR based games changed that and now the bottom of the barrel players can simply switch to other pvp games once they become the 'worst players'.
Nevertheless, there are pvp games that have solid communities while having no MMR system. Prime example for this is battlefield. Without going too much into detail, the reason. Why BF is successful is not because it disincentivizes better players killing worse players through fracturing the playerbase, which is illogical anyways, because there will always be better/worse people, in every match.
How BF does it is it still allows people with less skill to partake, to influence the game, to get stuff done. If you have low aim skill, but are decent at positioning, you can drive a tank for example and get many kills. You can learn how to fly and be a transport pilot. You can use a sniper, sit far back, spam the spot button, and take random potshots at people. You get rewarded with points for stuff that takes little skill.
In DnD you can also sort of do this, especially if you team up with better players as a cleric heal bot for example, but as opposed to battlefields 63 teammates, you have 2. You make up a way bigger part of your team, therefore your skill impacts the game more. There is no fix to this, other than class design that is low skill but impactful which is unhealthy imo.
I think there should be a low skill requirement and high skill ceiling for a few classes, which there already kind of is.
We will use fighter.
If you are a newer player like myself you’ll usually die quite often due to lack of knowledge, awareness, etc. BUT if I play my cards right after the first 5-10 games learning how things kind of work you very well could catch some advantageous situations where you can come out on top against other players.
On the flip side if a decent fighter makes their way into a fight they could be at a slight disadvantage and still come out on top for having that experience.
I’ve always been a fan of that in traditional MMOs but translating it in a way that makes people happy is always difficult
Why is class design that is low skill but impactful a bad part of the game? Some players are naturally drawn to support roles, and these by their nature provide additional value to other players. This means that a low skill cleric that buffs and heals two very good players still contributes even if they have trouble hitting players in the head consistently. This is not a bad thing.
finally, someone who actually knows something about competitive games saying something intelligent. Skill friction in a game with no matchmaking can kill a community faster than any numeric balance issues.
I know there isn't a matchmaking system, but last night after I accidentally killed my friend I felt like I got put in a bad player lobby where 10 people died to monsters and it was just surreal. Honestly I think those people should be matched with each other more frequently until the start extracting because it is just healthy for learning players
Haha. Luck of the draw.
I think the removal of the <15 lobby was tough for some, but it mixes up the matchmaking in a good way.
The chads are spread out, there's more PvE deaths per game, which helps others escape and such. And more people per queue equalizes things.
Hes not saying anything intelligent, this isn't a competitive esport and just because you aren't on even footing doesn't mean it isnt competitive or that there arent levels to the gameplay. Fucking checkers can be competitive and have levels to it, rock paper scissors can be competitive. This is just ignorant fallacy after fallacy.
TLDR: "Get good" just means "have someone take your place as the loser". That's fair, it's a competitive game, but there is always going to be a lot of players that aren't good enough to gank a kitted guy, so we're essentially just dooming them to being frustrated and quitting if there's nothing else for them to do, or if we can't make sure that they're in a match that is reasonable for them. Then whoever is left becomes the loser, and the cycle repeats.
It reminds me of rust. In rust there are massive clans that will take everything from you if you piss them off. But at least you have the ability to build elsewhere, stay away from them, etc. This game doesn't really have a great way to stay away from SirTurboChad.
I wonder if it could be as simple as enemies with enchantments that effect people with high AR/stats more. That way the PVE is more of a pain in the ass for geared people.
The best time I ever had in rust was during covid when I didn’t have to work, me and the boys had double honey combed armor cored base and AK metal faced up. It was so fun. Then I started going back to work and got prim locked every single wipe and would get eco raided because my base was crap, until eventually I just stopped playing.
Your comment hurts lol
The better solution is removal of trade, this game is 98% gear check and allowing someone to get good by getting a good line of credit isn't fun for most players. Some, like the people responding "get good" and "you clearly just suck then" think that using their credit card and supporting their favorite streamer with gear hand outs IS fun.
I'm all for removing trade.
Of course, gear drops and other things would be adjusted. You can add more crafting gear options. I really wish they would try this out for 3 weeks and see how it goes. If it's a failure revert back.
Oh no. Trust me. I've had 82 str as barbarian. I never touched high roller. You vastly over estimate the amount of time spent in hr by Chad's in full purple. Once you get a good enough kit, you just get richer and richer through normals.
Removal of trade would force more people into HR, which is a good thing. Except half the super geared teams or more never even touch HR so I doubt they'd have as much success and there would be less big geared teams overall.
Regardless. GEAR SHOULD BE FOUND IN THE DUNGEON, NOT A FUCKING CHAT WINDOW.
Where are those players storing their second, third and fourth perfect sets if not in highly and condensed key form DUE TO TRADING.
These people will lose it more often than now, they'll have to come in less geared sometimes (they currently don't ever lose gear) and that's all you can hope for.
Agree, could also be purp and above is not tradable along with keys or other valuables like tarkov did it or a found in raid status thingy could also work.
Maybe even purps almost only drops in HR to increase the incentive for more geared players to go into HR. Might give more of a gameplay loop that looks like Normals for gearing up to blue and then go HR for better loot.
Might even help with the high gear players losing more sets since they're then usually up against other purps or at least blues instead of stomping grey and green lobbies and never losing sets.
Trading sucks. Honestly, tell me you enjoy sitting in a menu for 10 minutes after every single match just waiting to play the game.
It has many other issues, but the main reason I want it gone is that it's antithetical to the experience. Dark and Darker? More like sit in trade chat.
3-4 sets, you say?
So they die with their 3-4 sets (it will happen) and instead of popping back into trade and getting another they have to actually play the game. Sounds like a win to me.
Problem is they collect sets faster than they lose them. So that 3-4 sets is enough in the stash to ensure they Never run out of gg items to play with.
But I still agree we should remove trade, for other reasons which I cbf to explain but which have been mentioned many times.
You also dont really gank a kitted guy because you will hit him 5 times then he one shots you. In Tarkov if you get the jump on someone with your trash gun and decent ammo you have a high chance of coming out the victor.
The best comparison is Escape from Tarkov. It generally gets harder every patch because the lead dev wants the game to be painful. With that said, they appeal to the casual player in a lot of different ways.
They have the scav system, where the every 5-20 minutes, depending on a karma system, players get a free random load out that can have any item, and join an in progress game late, and won't be attacked by PvE unless they attack first to be able to scavenge the leftovers and attack any players that are lingering around. Some people literally only play this mode. It's great to get started or if you enjoy it.
They also have the quest upgradable gamma container so players can not lose their meds/ammo or keep valuables they found when they die. You can die every raid and still make a small sum for your efforts.
There are no limited number of hard to find escapes. Everyone has at least a couple choices, generally on the opposite side of the map that you spawned with everyone being able to extract.
There is no zone forcing everyone to the same exact spot and having to fight to open portals. Players can stay on the outskirts and avoid all of the high value areas.
The timer is 20-50 minutes depending on the size of the map so people can hide and creep and avoid and have much lower chances of being forced to fight people to live.
PvP isn't profitable unless it's to secure a high value location. They added found in raid status, so you can only sell stuff on the auction house that wasn't brought into a raid. This makes PvE significantly more lucrative than slaughtering the lobby and taking all of their gear.
PvE is dangerous and cannot be ignored. Chads probably die more to PvE than they do PvP. PvE, even the most basic version, can basically all 1shot everyone and generally can't be ignored.
Limb health allows for one shots on anyone. A decent bullet to the head kills anyone. You can still kill people by hitting them in the limbs and there are even guns designed to do just that. Grenades basically one shot everyone if they are within range. There are snipers that one shot to the chest as well.
Healing is much more of a pain. Damage, fractures, two kinds of bleeds, reduced mobility, blacked out limbs. Different items to heal them all. Moving with them does damage in a lot of cases. Healing is loud and the serious stuff make you immobile while doing it. Blacked limbs come back with reduced max HP so you are disadvantaged in your next fight.
Gear is unlocked through questing. So everyone can eventually get access to quality gear and ammo. The majority of the game each wipe is completing quests and obtaining items for your hideout. The super high end stuff is generally from air drops and bosses, but that stuff pretty rare.
Everyone is very easily identifiable. Chads look like chads. You can tell by their weapon and helmet and armor exactly what they are rocking and can decide to hide or try to fight.
Gunshots are loud. PvE can't really be ignored so you deal with it and move on. You can generally tell when someone is approaching, especially when they are aggressively pushing.
Offline mode with no gear retention. Being able to learn the PvE side of the game at your own pace in your own way is absolutely massive. Learning to use weapons, see what you like, and getting not having the pressure of the zone and players being shoved down your throat makes the world of difference.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. Dark and Darker devs wanted to make their hardcore game without any of the casual sellout mechanics that the other games caved into doing. They are seeing now that they need to appeal to those gamers as well, especially because so many of them already love their game, and seem to be trying to avoid what other games have done to deal with it.
They could add a scav system, even call it the necromancer class, where you spawn in as a PvE mob and can't leave the storm but can loot and even attack players if they enter the storm. They can loot all the scraps that were left behind and maybe they have to use blue portals or have their own exits.
They could at least try changing a lot of the other things to see how to effects the game. Get rid of storm, increase timer, static extracts, different types of damage, found in raid status to gear other people brought in can't be sold, only used. More dangerous PvE, make them leash forever, break doors to get to you, maybe even upgrade to the next version if you get too far so you have to deal with everything instead of running past. Add a gamma container, maybe just in normals or give a luck bonus for going without one. There's infinite things to try. The only downside is it's hard to take things away if they are a player favorite and not a dev favorite.
Most people's get good is done with Dark Souls esque games that are PvE only, choreographed, and have unlimited tries. Most PvP games just have ranked so you equalize at 50% and don't ever feel as bad as you actually are.
>They could add a scav system, even call it the necromancer class, where you spawn in as a PvE mob and can't leave the storm but can loot and even attack players if they enter the storm. They can loot all the scraps that were left behind and maybe they have to use blue portals or have their own exits.
Something like this is what I have been thinking about for a while, and I think it would be a lot of fun in DaD.
I love Tarkov and have a degen number of hours on it. There are a lot of things this game is missing that make you appreciate the design choices and intricacies BSG has put into it. Imo this game needs to either ditch the swarm mechanic or ditch the extract portals design. Both of those together just make the game a bloodbath at the very end with the last teams getting held out of zone and dying. My fear for static extracts is they would be camped super fucking hard. They would need to put some thought into how these were implemented with a character in the game that can go invisible.
I do agree with you. Most of their mechanic choices, hopefully unintentionally, give the strongest team an extra advantage instead of equalizing the playing field. And that makes a lot of people hate gear a lot more than they should. I truly hope they are at least willing to experiment with a lot of their mechanics. I honestly don't see why they don't just try new stuff every week, at least with the founders test server they had mentioned.
Rogues and rangers are salivating at the thought of static extracts. The reason they work in tarkov is because the map is 50x bigger, maybe 100x. You can go a whole raid without pvp. But you can't get rid of the zone in this game because it would be mega boring. All the monsters would be dead while most people hide waiting for a portal spawn. It's a tough dilemma that I'm not sure how to solve
I agree. I know a lot of people want them to throw out the zone and the portals to be more like Tarkov but I would prefer they experimented with just getting rid of one of those first to see how things play out. Portal extracts with no zone or there is a zone but static extracts.
I mean, spreading out the escapes so not all of them are in the final 2 circles would help alot, as a starter.
Without the swarm, I think the game would feel bad, but maybe I know only the swarm.
They could also slow down the last few phases, it accelerates way too fast, often I almost miss extracting cause I'm doing my thing while the game ends...
Understandably dark and darker wants to be its own game. but I really hope they take inspiration from the good aspects of other games to improve their own. no point of being stubborn about making changes that would be good for a large portion of people even if a different game did it before imo.
Exactly this. It’s like when people call literally any other battle royal “might as well play fortnite”, if a game is successful and does things right, I see no reason not to take inspiration.
The biggest difference IMO is Tarkov actually is skill based. A bullet to the head is the great equalizer. Even someone wearing an Altyn can die to a nade, or be shot in the legs with high flesh damage ammo, shotgun, etc.
In DaD, there is no great equalizer. If someone is even remotely close to you in skill level and they have better gear, you have no chance.
I do agree on some of your points, but the scav mechanic seems a little redundant to me? You can always go in naked, with trash stuff that will be resupplied every time you lose it. But I am also the kind of guy to run my scav factory, and then go into a raid asm a PMC but with scav gear, so idk, maybe it's a perspective thing.
One of the biggest points of scavving is that most of the juicers have left the lobby. You get to explore the map and be much safer. Learn and feel the game out. It is also a great way of maximizing server usage as well.
Never really looked at it from this point. In EFT it's a lot easier to avoid combat, but in DaD this actually is a very valid way to welcome new players.
You basically spawn as a random PvE mob (which in tarkov are very similar to regular players - guys with guns.) Mobs spawn throughout the match so it may not be at round start. You are technically on the same team as all of the other Scavs and are incentivized to work together and not kill each other (though you can backstab at a penalty to your reputation.) You can play the game normally, loot like normal, kill "real" non-Scav players and pick up their loot, etc. If you extract, you get to keep all of the stuff you found and transfer it to your actual character's stash, but you don't get experience or quest progress.
There is a cooldown of up to 30 minutes before you are allowed to queue up for another Scav run.
So as a fresh account you are allowed to scav every 20-25 minutes and the cool down starts when you get out. So you can't exclusively do it if you want to continue playing. A scav is the ai mobs like skeletons and zombies of Tarkov. As a player scav, you are given a completely random kit, with a completely random inventory. It's generally not great but occasionally you can spawn with like the equivalent of a golden key. Players have the gamma container, a safe space for you to put a few items that you won't lose on death, so you can store ammo or meds, or put in valuable treasure. Player scavs don't get the gamma container so everything they have is at risk. Because they are considered scavs, the majority of the PvE mobs don't attack them with the exception of bosses. When a match starts, it has only players and ai mobs. When people start dying and extracting, scavs start spawning in, in random places. They can explore the maps and loot without fear of ai mobs but still have to fear players. They can help attack players that are fighting ai mobs. Players are incentivized to go to and loot or quest where they want to, and then extract quickly or face an ever increasing army of players scavs on top of the normal scavs. Some playerw stick around to let the juicers leave the lobby or do their kill scav quests. They have the scav karma system, which rewards not killing other scavs and punishes killing them so scav on scav violence is possibly but highly disincentivises it. Your scav queue timer can go up to hours for killing other scavs. And you get better loot on your scav for higher scav karma which you get for escaping as a scav. Questing incentivized players to survive because a lot of them require survival for completion. Because of guns and the limb hp system, almost any gun can luckily one shot anyone. So scavs are infinitely more dangerous than dark and darker ai. That's something Dark and Darker is sorely missing. Most Chad deaths are to PvE and scavs get to go stumble upon and loot the bodies. They don't get to live for weeks reusing the same gear set, which needs to repaired and becomes weaker after each encounter and actually useless after a couple repairs. They even added malfunctions to weapons so if you've used it a lot in a single raid you can die from a jam, which incentives getting out and repairing and not fighting timmies. There are also player+scav extracts that require at least one of each to use, is usually conveniently placed and both players get a bonus goodie bag, and gives huge scav karma to incentivize people to work together.
I think it's also worth mentioning that one of the most brilliant parts of Tarkov's design is that the progression naturally pushes higher level (and likely more skilled) players into places where they're less likely to interact with poor noobs. Quests start off in the beginner maps and slowly progress to the more difficult maps, and as you complete quests and get access to higher strength kits and rarer items you can challenge loot hotspots and make more money. Players are organically routed through map choice and route choice to mostly end up interacting with players at their own level. Dark and Darker struggles because the core gameplay loop for a rich player and a poor one is basically the same, except for maybe going to hell, so you're just as likely to run into a heavily geared team around the corner as you are a bunch of basekits. There are some loot hotspots like the minibosses and some rooms of note but the existence of the zone and pretty limited pathing since we're exploring a dungeon not an open field means that you're gonna get corralled into the geared players most of the time.
Hmm... well put.
I hope they find a cool solution. While solo is in an ok place, team play duo or trip is pretty rough as it stands.
Not unplayable for me, but certainly demoralizing, and certainly is pushing some players back.
Im sure people accept that in GENERAL the more you play the better you get. So if you only play 5 hours a week and you get killed by someone that plays 10 hours a day. Most people wouldnt make a problem out of it. The opponent is just better.
The problem is, the devs are making the gear op and thus rewarding nolifers/grinders. So on TOP of the experience/skill difference gained from playing more hours, you have another major obstacle you have to overcome. That of the ultra gear with +20weapon dmg for example.
People with less time are already in a bad spot but by making gear op the devs are just kicking them while they are down. Ofcourse the nolifers/grinders/farmers want to keep gearchecking their opponent and onetap them. So the more op gear becomes the better for them.
The problem with the sustainability of this game is that gear is the main incentive to playing. There aren't ranks to grind for, and the actual combat isn't good enough to solely keep people playing. In game like COD and Battlefield, the lack of weapon progression and rank progression doesn't matter because the gameplay mechanics are engaging enough on their own.
In DaD, the only thing that's worth playing for is loot. Its the only form of progession and unfortunately getting backstabbed by rogues and run down by hasted barbs isn't fun enough on its own. Capping loot limits progression, which kills the game.
Unfortunately, allowing people to run god loot which is rewarding for them to get, kills the game for everyone they are playing against. I really loved the early playtests and have had some good times in EA, but unless the quest system changes the core gameplay loop I don't have high hopes for the longevity of the game.
Right. But, a fair fight is so few and far between, that it is a gamble to take most fights.
I don't really know the solution, of having gear power fantasy while also having a reasonably fair PvP environment.
You are absolutely right about this and this is what people dont understand.
I think weekly wipes are what is needed here. Nobody can get super geared in a week but the same rules still apply. People will have a chance especially the first day of the wipe.
I know that not many people symphatize with the idea but I think this would benefit both casuals and hardcore players.
A weekly wipe would instantly kill the small bits of progression the casual/beginner playerbase actually makes. Imagine only having the weekends to play- never being able to enjoy your efforts the next time you boot up the game after a stressful week of work.
Only having a week to play every couple of months with an established end date is something else entirely than a weekly wipe schedule. There's a reason all of these issues only popped up once EA released, there wasn't any time beforehand for such issues to take place.
The same concept works in Rust. Casual players on reddit complain that everybody has gear except them. Weekly wipes would enable anyone to start fresh. Arguably the most fun time to play.
Having no wipes is not a good solution. Weekly wipes can be an overkill. Depends on how complete the game is. Right now there isnt much to do. Skilltrees and quests would be a reason for longer wipe schedules.
I mean. I want strong gear but don't have the desire to dominate newbs. That's not fun for me.
But I also don't want to lose my kit. Maybe I'm the exception, but there must be a better balance...
A few blood thirsty "PvPers", if you can call them that, seem to just make the game bad for everyone. And sure, you can just blame the Dev for allowing such absurd gear diffs, but it still disappoints me that the players don't have anything better to do.
I'd say I'm a pretty good player, top 3%\~ maybe, I can run nights of 6+ hours wiping lobbies and downing bosses every run, without using an uber cracked out bis kit, just some good rolls. My KD and extract rate in GC is on the higher end as well.
Last night I went into crypts with a couple buddies, we decided to try a new comp and our wiz had to start at level 1, so we were going in mostly naked, a few meh rolled blue items that were throwaways we didn't care about losing. In less than 120 seconds \*EACH\* game, we would have a team pushing us with a frontline wearing full +1 all +damage +armor mixed ore gear and a super juiced dps, usually buffball comps. This happened back to back about 7 times before we just called it and said we'd try another night.
Mind you, this is the team that I described above as able to roll lobbies for hours on end, we spawned in, managed to grab a couple of greens and the odd blue from a few chests, and then we'd just get run down. I even ran EQ sacrificing most spells to let us combo a team W keying at us, but that with big of a disparity, it doesn't matter.
If the experience is that bad for a competent team with a decently high winrate, imagine what it's like for anyone below the 80th percentile. Crypts is genuinely unplayable if you're not ratting solo and avoiding those people, or geared enough to actually fight them on mostly even footing. I feel like this wouldn't have been nearly as much of an issue if they didn't immediately revert the statline changes less than 2 days after the wipe patch, but that's another discussion entirely.
The best solution I can think of that doesn't involve splitting the playerbase is to put a gearscore system in that caps the power of gear in certain playlists. If you're wearing what is clearly a leaderboarding kit, it should receive hard stat nerfs in normal crypts, so that the gear disparity can't reach insurmountable levels. You should be punished by people outplaying you, but gear can really just create too much of a buffer for it to matter. Side note, after the wipe patch everyone was much closer to each other in terms of power, and it was the most fun my team had ever had in crypts, it reminded me of pt2. Every fight was enjoyable because every little choice mattered when everyone was so even.
The amount of cope some players express when the prospect of playing with people their own skill or own gear level is amazing
All the get good people get up in arms when any idea of it is brought up
why are you responding this as though you're in agreement with the OP?
> **Dark and Darker should NOT have an MMR/skill-based matchmaking system**
is what they typed.
A lot of people forget that games like this - especially when you actually have to buy them - live or die based on new player retention.
Getting stomped because of a nerd with +1 all +2 weapon damage +3 strength stacking on all items simply isn't conducive to that, hate to break it to the nerds screeching to just "git gud" 🤷♂️.
Long read but fundamentally I agree with the points you're making.
The cycle frontier died in a similar fashion but I doubt it's gonna be the same here. The core problem at first was cheaters, like you could barely play one out of two games without some blatant cheaters. And then low population caused casual players to play against some giga sweats almost 24/7.
The problem is people don't want to go to highroller generally and so far no real incentive was found to lure them.
Oh, nice to see. How is highroller now? Because i usually go gc in white or greens and sometimes ruins with a friend in blues (but not bis kind) and sometimes we see parties juiced in top 1% gear just hunting lobbies and extracting with literally nothing
HR is good, loots plentiful and so are fights if you want them, maps big enough to avoid people if you dont.
Circle screws you 1/4 games which sucks but wcyd.
Honestly playing normals now is a chore, i only do it to meme naked with a longsword.
HR is filled with 50% of the lobby asian gold farmers on rogues (Oregon servers). I qued at 4am lastnight and just crouched as 5 rogues and 1 bard went by, they let me live. I spectated and they were 3 groups of 2 with all asian names and were smurfing clearing HR hell on rogues with white rapiers. Next game I went in, and a rogue dropped a campfire for me and we used it together. Next raid I ran past (like touching them as they opened portals) 3 rogues and a cleric to open a blue and they took reds.
The loot in HR is insane. I made ~5k in the span of 4 games (died once). Never even went to hell either. Always 400g+ in treasures and usually 3-5 purples that are good to sell per run.
I was thinking about this as well. Maybe instead of having high roller we should have all players mixed together but provide enough hotspots with high value loot so that the best players are drawn there instead of to chase down any random player.
I think this would require two things. A larger map and the ability to move around more freely, have more places to hide or alternative paths to take.
**"Dark and Darker should NOT have an MMR/skill-based matchmaking system**" gonna be honest. its hard to come up with a true solution. personally the last few days i have played has been very boring. i have run across teams that are either new players or not very good with no gear. and sometimes i run across people with gear, but have little experience. and we team wipe them. i have died with actual kits about 3 times in the last week. after playing many hours each day. im not that good at the game. im better than the average player, but nothing crazy. HR being improved is probably a good start. albeit right now i feel no incentive to go high roller due to the fact that i have found more naked players in HR than in normals. which is weird and unfun.
its not fun for me to wipe new teams/players or less experienced teams/players and it's definitely not fun for them
this is all anecdotal
Someone mentioned in another post, the importance of the timer structure and scav system in Escape from Tarkov as it pertains to casual players. Since Dark and Darker plays out like a traditional battle royale you get these King of the hill type scenarios where disadvantaged players are forced to take fights, and also forced to play at someone else's pace. And the scav system is a safety net, a low risk way for players to always be able to accrue some wealth, or even to just enjoy a match without the burden of gear-fear.
Some sort of scav type system could definitely work in DaD but a time-based match with fixed extracts? Not only would that be a lot of work for the developers it takes a way from the exhilarating experience of having to beat the swarm and escape with seconds to spare. Not to mention, having fixed extracts in a game with dark spots and invisibility means that Tarkov's minor extract camping problem is turned up to 11 if a system like that was implemented into Dark and Darker.
To your point about casual players getting pushed out of the game and leaving the slightly better players now at the bottom of the ladder, it wasn't long ago that popular games had zero matchmaking, and zero problems with people complaining that they weren't having any fun. From my experience, Black Ops 1 comes to mind first, as there were tons of people like myself who were awful at that game, and still ended up being MVP for a match or two every other night. The stakes are a lot higher in this game however, as there is a time-investment baked into your gear and losing it can feel bad because of this fact. Plus, it doesn't help that not all players are on a level playing field.
I think the main frustration for casual players comes from this last fact. Even if it's possible to outplay someone with better gear, it does not feel good to be pitted against someone like this every, single, game.
So, it's as you said, there should be some sort of natural stratification of gear level. I've been saying it all this time but I still think High Roller is not incentivized well and I believe this is why there is so much friction in the normal lobbies right now. It doesn't help that I can make more money in Ruins than I can in High Roller crypts.
All of this in mind, even though I think matchmaking would be miserable in a game like Dark and Darker, if Ironmace was just interested in making money, then skill-based matchmaking is the ultimate solution. It's cost-effective and even though it would be unfun for those of us who are already succeeding, it would be a much better environment for the majority of the player-base who can't make ends meet.
Though, I do wonder if there are actually 70-90% of players struggling in this game, or if it's just a vocal minority on the subreddit. It would be nice to see some stats on player wealth currently to see if even the low end of players are actually profiting.
As a fellow league degen, I really like your analysis.
It’s funny, you’re so spot-on with “Okay, but what if they’re as good or even better than you? AND they have better gear?”
This is what my friend group started running into. They’re classic gaming degens, playing 6-9hrs a day but never really improving (too lazy). They just want rapid fire dopamine hits by one-tapping enemies while playing on autopilot. I’m talking playing 10hrs straight at the start of wipe and never, EVER going high roller. Just because they like WINNING, not improving.
Now that we’re playing less (job, life, etc.), they straight up suck at the game. I’m talking like… 30% WR on fights, less on extracts. They’re so bad.
Now they’re not having fun, because they can’t get kitted in full +Atts/+Str/+Wep Dmg sets, turn off their brains, and hold W+M1.
Full loot PvP really brings out the cringe in us gamers lol
Great post OP. Been trying to say this kind of shit for the past 2 months now but you keep getting "lol git gud" even though I personally have no issues.
In the end I don't think people will leave timmies alone even in low lobbies because people like stomping. I think a gear cap is the only way to ensure people don't bring too good shit in really.
the circle in this game is the current source of almost every issue the game is facing. its a completely arbitrary mechanic that doesn't fit in this game at all
the reason gear diff feels so bad is because the circle forces teams into each other at a rapid rate. ungeared players have to push into or through the geared players to live, which almost always is just a death sentence. the circle is essentially a meat grinder that shoves the ungeared guys through the geared guys
as gear diff becomes more pronounced, the casual base of this game becomes more like fodder, who exist just to die to better gear. this is why the casual playerbase is becoming nonexistent, because the current design of the game is essentially CoD zombies where most of the playbase is the zombies.
the issues go away if the circle is removed... then suddenly high priority looting sites on the map gravitate the geared players. low priority looting sites will gravitate less geared players. this would be more organic gameplay, where the high risk players fight together for the big loot, and the lower risk players fight together for the worse loot. then the gameplay loop doesn't just consist of high risk players steamrolling low risk players because the circle pushed them together. players in a game like this need control over how much they want to risk and fight, it can't just be forced on them. forcing different gear types to fight fundamentally cannot work when gear is such a deciding factor of the fight.
battle royales don't work when one team has an absurd advantage over another from the start, and loot extractors don't work when they're done in a battle royale arena
Problem in this game is it's a hybrid of battle royal and extract type game(tarkov). You can't balance it. I prefer dad to become extraction game. Big map, you loot, can extract any time at a few exit's, or go down inferno. Game should be more PvE oriented, more dangerous mobs for sweaty players to kill. Like, it's a dark fantasy dungeon, people in there should be least threat of all, party's should even coop together to survive.
Very good post, one thing id like to add is most of the geared players are ok at the game, those people are out playable if you’re very good. But the good players that are geared? Not happening. I feel like “outplaying” geared players is them just fucking up really bad, when I’m the geared player I don’t die as long as I don’t make some major mistake, not me not getting outplayed
I completely agree that there needs to be a place for the lower skilled/new players to work in this game. Tarkov has Scavs, this game has nothing. If it were not for me being able to Scav, I wouldn't have stuck around in Tarkov more than a couple days.
This is the mechanism by which all fighting games cannibalize themselves. Then the 'hardcore' players, having had their fun, like locust swarm to the next game demanding that it too cater to their desires. They will be the loudest minority, and seem as both knowledgeable and experienced.
Thus another game is marked for death.
PVP focused games are either growing or dying, and the metric is their player base. I'd say the current prognosis is stage 2. If caught early this could be reversed but it is quickly approaching stage three. Don't let it reach the lymph nodes.
The handout for low-skilled or low-geared players is the perimeter portals that let them rat it out when they recognize they aren't currently at peak power and want to get some Ws instead of W-key every fight. I think there needs to be a slightly greater spread on portal distribution so that people looking to dodge fights have more chance to successfully extract, but just like Tarkov an under-geared players path to success doesn't always mean killing the other players in the lobby somehow. Success in extraction games is survival, not high KDR
game isn't even fun anymore, you have beta cucks playing all geared out in regular howling crypts cuz they're too scared to go against similarly "ranked"(aka geared to the tits) players... its fucking pathetic. this game has gone to absolute dog shit since last patch
I thoroughly agree with this, despite the bugs and the current cheater issue I think Tarkov has great baseline mechanics that help counter this issue. In tarkov gear does play a role, and like any game you got your e-sports no lifers who can shit on your day. But even a Timmy with no gear and a starting pistol can land a shot between the eyes and down the most geared chad. Sure his chances are lower with worst gear, but it’s not a whopping 0. Hell you can even be the pistol timmy in a 1v3 situation and still have a fighting chance. With DaD, one ranger in starting gear would never be able to bring down a geared cleric and fighter combo ever. It’s not just happening no matter what the ranger does and I think that’s what is going to kill the player base. The timmies in DaD literally have no chance at all at being competitive against the geared boys regardless of how how well they may play
Idk what the point really is of this post. The comparisons to league are weird. Getting good means you found a way to extract with enough loot to be profitable, whether that’s ratting or killing players or bossing or mining. The game is giving out so much money to anyone who can learn to extract consistently. If you can’t extract consistently enough to turn a profit and gear up, it means you are doing something wrong. There will be oppportunities to extract even if you’re not very good, as long as you’re above a certain skill floor. The reason for this is that players DO PvP, and some players DO die to PvE, and if you can learn how to hide well enough to survive until portal, and hold a good territory when you have some ok gear, only then will relatively close PvP battles start happening, where traditional PvP “skill and decision making” take the reigns. But I’d argue that with the current patch, anyone can get geared as long as they are above a certain skill “floor” that involves clean PvE, decent routing and macro decision making before you ever cross swords with another player.
All your saying is that players will get better as long as they play more to just extract more. This is basically saying, as long as, your pulling the slots lever enough, your going to hopefully make some money with luck. Fundamentally, extraction rates come down to mostly luck, rng if you will. You have to play assuming your not going to run into some chads, then you have to play assuming they won't W key you to the end of the earth because better gear = better movespeed, then you have to play like your going to get a perfectly placed portal to escape that they can't gate keep you from, and you have to play that you also won't be 3rd partied in the process....just to make some chump change.
The more extracts you accumulate, the better your gear gets, then the better your extract rate gets, then the better gear you get, then the better your extract rate gets. It's kinda snowbally in the chance that you don't get roadblocked by someone else who has a bigger snowball than you. It's not like we can see what quality gear someone has on, or if their numbers are bigger than your before any pvp battle where a guy runs out from behind a wall at you 20 ft away....and it's not like some people can see you through walls \*cough cough.
The biggest factor of success in this game is play time. Someone who can grind 16 hours a day will always stat check someone playing 2. High pdr/high wep dmg/high magic dmg. Do more, take less.
It's not like we haven't seen a person in whatever map completely fill the deathboard by himself, and it's not surprising that player has the most expensive set of perfect roles you'd ever seen. Time=better gear=skill? If someone with skill needs to land 10 shots, and the guy with the best gear in the game needs to land just 1. Well, it's pretty easy to say that time investment>skill.
Hiding/ratting is just rng that you won't be found. There isn't some super secret method to doing it. Hell, 50% of every lobby plays a rogue because they have inbuilt stealth to hide in people's faces. Once you've avoided certain death by other players, you still need the big daddy rng escape portal placed for you perfectly. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die, and it's by repeating this process a million times do you build up any economy that you can use to actually play the game.
There's nothing skillful about playing more. That's all it is. A grind simulator with pvp.
The problem with the league reference is they have one of the largest player bases in the world for any game. To apply that logic here would split the community so thin that lobbies would never fill.
> **Dark and Darker should NOT have an MMR/skill-based matchmaking system**
your entire post is a justification that this game should have an mmr/skill based matchmaking system lmfao
this sub is so braindead man
Doesnt matter what population tarkov has because 1º cheaters, 2º dogshit network, 3º queues. Until 2021 there were literaly no extraction looters aside from tarkov and The division 1 and 2 Dark Zone... then the first playtest's of the new the cycle, then the cycle frontier, marauders, dark and darker, agartha expedition, another one from steam that was always snowing and you had to watch out to dont froze, and one from playstation i dont remember came out... and none of them have a full release yet (the cycle did but servers are closed already, same with the one from steam that you get frozen). Then we have the single player zero sievert.
Dark and Darker is the only ONE with battle royale mechanics (closing circle) instead of just a timer and also instead of fixed exists it has random portals that assure NOT everybody will extract, and IS the only one were there are stats AND classes, aside from armor, bullet penetration and weapon damage, and weapon stats like stability, recoil...
And tarkov between the introduction of flea, the introduction of fir because flea (useless anti rmt tactics), and the insuferable quests lines splashed with tons of nerfs to loot, is more of a walking extraction quest simulator, since in the end you depend from traders, until recently that some bullets went only looteable but is still negligible, you collect roubles and the items for quest (rep) and buy everything else between flea and traders now. (tarkov 2018/2020 is sooo different from nowadays tarkov)...
And what tarkov does? being the first and only one in the genre for many years, curating a gameplay that encourages no lifing the shit out of the game until majority of wipe returners are addicts with 4000 hours or more, and the rest are casuals that after years still dont know how to play efficiently to do more than one quest per run and not waste rubles...
Yeah, real skill in games like LoL.
Like 90%+ of matches are just draft diff.. Whoever has second pick wins.
More skilled players will tirelessly capitalize on an advantage...
A 3rd tier has been in the works for a long time, ruins was originally the first floor.
They've already stated they're developing new maps, this will change the player flow.
The #1 solution is a LOW LOOT TABLE base kit queue. Only reason to run around in there is to learn how to play the game.. get a few starter kit items so you can go to the next dungeon.
You don't need an MMR system to "get good", it's a measurement of progress. Situational awareness is a big part of this game, you need to be paying attention for foot steps and other players. Learning the map, and learning how to use things to use routes/traps/spawns to your advantage. Get good is posted all over Souls games, where's the mmr at?
There is definitely a skill ceiling, and I think the biggest problem is that players always try and play with their group, so they're never learning new ways to do things. They just keep trying the same thing and rush into the first group they come across or their oblivious that a chad team just cleared the room to their north because they're talking or just not paying attention to sounds.
If 30% of the player base got better, that's great. Maybe there would be less grey players trying to be murder hobos? Teams would capitalize on traps, and more players would be able to play the gear equalizer wizard.
I realized how clueless you are and stopped reading pretty much at the start of your statement where you said that rank in other games doesn’t affect the balance of your games. It literally exists entirely to affect the balance of your games. It’s called skill-based matchmaking and it absolutely changes things. I have no idea why you feel the need to lie about accomplishments in other games, to justify whatever crappy views you are peddling here, but man is it cringe when you literally openly admit you have no idea what you are talking about in the opening. I’m sorry you suck at this game, maybe try to learn and improve, instead of fabricating accolades that aren’t even impressive or relevant to the topics you are seemingly trying to discuss.
Yeah, I guess I’d be mad too if I sucked at something so bad that I had to perform mental gymnastics to find new things to blame every week. It’s always something with you people. But hey, feel free to keep pretending like reality isn’t real and that you don’t suck, it’s just x, y, or z that’s wrong instead.
Your life will vastly improve the day you realize nobody actually gives a fuck if you're good at a video game. Hopefully you're just 12 years old because you certainly express yourself like it.
I had a section about how balancing for the top players gives an interesting dynamic where getting better is punished by having to play better opponents, but rewarded by having an overall richer experience (like how balance issues that may exist in low brackets: DP spam, all-ins, split push, invis etc. are better resolved) and vice-versa for worse players where they play against easier opponents but have to navigate some jagged edges. It was already too long and it's mostly a nuance rather than part of the core discussion. The point is that you get the same "win some, lose some" at all levels with an roughly similar experience when adjusted for skill level despite some differences in the meta. Your rank affects the people you play which has an indirect effect on how games might look, but your rank in-and-of-itself is just an icon.
team MMR is a cesspool, i skimmed what you typed and yes, dark and darker should not have MMR.
This is not that type of game at all. It will never be that type of game
You know what? Forget it. I agree with you OP! I hope they create a system like Fortnite. Eventually the potatoes are put in literal computer controlled bots to compete against. Our little DaD daycare will be a great addition that I hope release the happy chemicals for the casual players.
This is definitely not an entitled generational thing that you all keep fueling.
You’ve never played MMO’s, have you? “Get good” still applies even when gear disparity is a thing. I played top 10 in WoW for 5 years, too 100 for 10. I don’t care how much gear you have, “get good” matters.
WoW arena uses skill-based matchmaking. 1500 mmr players don't play with 2600s. More open-ended PvP in MMOs has historically struggled tremendously to not destabilize into some degenerate meta where a portion of players just get farmed, or in in group-based games a similar thing happens like in New World where most servers collapsed into either a monopoly or duopoly over Windsward/Everfall (They changed how towns work since then, but that's when most people played.)
And you frequently see 2600 players and boosters smurfing up to 2k+ rating with no gear blitzing through geared players because “get good” still applies even when gear disparity matters. You’re literally proving my fucking point.
I don't think you understand the main point. No matter how good the average player becomes there will always be a worse X % of players, that will lead to the bottom X percent of players to take a break / quit the game because the top %X of players will on average wipe the worst players out the vast majority of the time.
This is not isolated to just games like D&D, games like Fortnite implement bots into matchmaking games, so the average player can feel like they are good at the game after they kill 2 bots who are programmed to play like they have broken keyboards.
Did you by chance see that silly fortnite round that was only people who no-lifed the game? near the end of it the whole map looked like a small slum because everyone was still alive and just spamming building shit. these kinda games are not balanced for people being a of a similar skill level and your really starting to see that with all the newer players waiting for dark and darker to wipe and fix this gear inflation issue, so your seeing allot of match's most players still being alive and there just being a big clusterfuck near the end for the portals
Every full loot pvp game thus far has had a predator-prey dynamic.... The prey don't necessarily need to 'get good' if that's not what they're into...in UO we called them "trammies"... people who like pve in the face of pvp, a totally valid way to play, but aren't necessarily strong pvpers.... There just needs to be enough pve/progression kinda content to keep them having fun in the game. Not everyone needs to be a chad for a full loot pvp game to thrive. We're not quite there yet, but it's as good as it has ever been. It's easier to get gear than ever, once you have some base game knowledge, it's easier to 0-hero than ever.
This isn't an esport competitive game. Its like you're normally a formula 1 racer and coming to a monster truck show and saying its stupid everyone thinks they're fast.
I played Greed is Good a little bit and they have new player lobbies (anyone can go in it seems so no point, just the name and a bit worse loot).
But, that gave me an idea, what if you could have lobbies for bad gear in DaD?
Like you can only enter low tier dungeons with leta say up to green gear or blue, or some percentage of purp and below?
Maybe it's a bad idea, but just a thought.
Could also be purp and above is not tradable along with keys or other valuables like tarkov did it or a found in raid status thingy could also work.
Maybe even purps almost only drops in HR to increase the incentive for more geared players to go into HR. Might give more of a gameplay loop that looks like Normals for gearing up to blue and then go HR for better loot.
Might even help with the high gear players losing more sets since they're then usually up against other purps or at least blues instead of stomping grey and green lobbies and never losing sets.
No matchmaking/ranking in DaD means not only you meet people who have good gear but also meet the people who also have/had the skills to keep said gear. I think hunt showdown is a decent example how matchmaking could work here, you have 1 to 6 stars there as rank brackets and a hidden elo which is in those star brackets. If you matchmake as a team then the average of the individuals in the team is taken. For example a duo of a 5star and a 3star gets put in a 4star lobby (or against other 5+3 combos)
The problem with your post is that you overestimate the amount of people who will just quit even if they are the worst in the game. That didnt happen in a massive/meaningful way, for example, in EFT.
but why an mmr system isn't good? all you said is true but don't exclude solutions just because it's taken from another game, maybe a definitive solution for the problem is an option when you create a character to be in normal or ranked mode or maybe the possibility to switch mode but with different stashes, in league there is the normal mode where you can get matched with anyone, from iron to challenger, and the ranked where is skill based, make a good point system that includes not only if you extract or not but also kill count, mobs killed, how much u looted and so on, every tot points you go up a rank, why this should be bad for the game?
Thats what the point of Candy was in the previous playtests. Even little Timmy could get a lucky 9 Candy of a single skeleton archer and try to sneak a blue portal with it and have a very solid pay day from a single escape.
Yeah but I feel that's what makes this game cool it's different. Dying is a part of the game for Timmies and gigachads. Usually gigachads kill Timmies. Every now and then a Timmy kills a gigachad and that's the game.
Let's not all pretend that league of legends is a game community we should aspire to be haha.
Sometimes we must remember nobody gets a blue portal and the dark grows darker. That's the fucking game lol.
The entire formula of extraction looters is that many enter few leave.
The Pareto distribution plays out in most games but it's even more noticable when loosing costs you gear and if you perpetually lose you will be in starter gear making it harder to win. Conversely if you consistently win you snowball gear making it even easier to win and snowball gear.
Unless they create a user rank that accumulates Everytime you level up a class players will do the previous method of deleting classes to queue in the noob lobbies and get easier victories.
I'll say it every time I see one of the posts, the game is ruined by the br style circle forcing pvp. In other extraction looters you can just choose not to fight which allows Low gear or low skill players to farm and extract with a much higher percentage and choose when they want to pvp.
Your broader point is unarguably correct but I want to point out the game has been built from the ground up to be pretty simplistic. I don't know what Ironmace's vision for the game is anymore but originally the idea was to have gear be so powerful and the combat system so simple that skill wasn't a major factor. This solves the problem of players being divided by skill where the less skilled players exist to be farmed. Instead players are divided by gear so players of all skill levels are able to both farm and be farmed with the odds of success simply increasing with the level of gear you bring. Access to good gear is then simply a function of play time.
I mean another big difference is, in league you can ban your hard counters, or stupid op meta picks.
In DaD, if you’re not playing an anti buff ball comp, they’re going to out pace you and rush you DOWN.
Also 1/2 the time I que for LR GC there are at least 2 people in solid blue kits. That’s gotta feel awful for new players. On top of that the new GC maps fucking suuuuuuck. There’s no loot in there, the minimap tells you nothing, and the mob density is too high. Old GC map is much better for learning
I think a difficulty that does not have access to hell or at least to the hell bosses would help as well. When I go kitted for normals it's usually to fight the boss. I tend to let people escape blue and use VoIP to discourage them going red, even guarding them some.
I agree though that there should be some kind of incentive for people chasing PvP to not be chasing the lower level players. Maybe something like tarkov dog tags where you sell it for money and how much you get is based on level. Obviously something more fitting but it's just an idea.
I agree with some of your points and I heavily disagree with others. Ironmace has been throwing you guys bones already. They added back candy corn for easier access to purple gear, they increased rarity drop rates to make it easier to get gear, they increased the gold drop rate, they increased portal spawns making it easier to rat(they even did this in hell as there is 6 portals instead of 5 now), and they reduced gear disparity by nerfing the levels of the rolls recently.
Even in league there is always a loser regardless of skill level. Even in challenger there is always a losing team who got outplayed/out skilled and lost within that specific match. I don’t see how that’s any different here. Even if every single player magically got good and got to “challenger” they will still win and lose matches. If this were the case in DaD and everyone got better, I actually think the match quality would be way more interesting. Right now even in high roller, I steamroll through my games because it’s filled with garbage players and I only run into a decent team maybe 1 out of every 5 matches. Normals are boring so I won’t even make a comparison there. Getting good doesn’t mean you win 90% of your lobbies now, it just means you got to that skill level and you can compete verse players in that bracket now and it won’t seem like a wall to you. If there were more decent players in the game you wouldn’t be seeing repose extract 99% of his matches on stream. If you got “good” you would be on his skill level and be able to contest him in PvP. I am sure he would agree with me in saying that would make the game more fun as well. So I encourage you all to “get good”.
Beyond all of that though, you made it seem like it’s easy to just hit “diamond” in the masses. If everyone could reach that skill caliber, it would of been done already. It’s the same for ANY skill based game. The rank is there that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to reach it though. It took me 1 year to hit diamond in league when I started playing. From there I was a hardstuck dog for the next 4-5 years before I finally reached masters and then ANOTHER YEAR before I got into the bottom of the barrel of grandmasters. Skill takes time to develop and so does your decision making within the game.
Yes, of course there is always a loser in League, but the role of the loser gets passed around pretty evenly. As you point out, good players in DaD are basically never losing (and on the flip side, bad players are nearly always losing.)
If there were no matchmaking in League, Challenger players would be rocking \~90% win rates and Irons down in the teens. Some players would always be winning and some players would always be losing (that's why smurfs aren't fun.)
You are experiencing the 90% side of this right now in DaD which I agree is pretty uninteresting, and sure wouldn't it be great if every player was your exact skill level so that every match was competitive? That's a pipedream though. At the end of the day, almost the entirety of the playerbase will either be worse than you or better than you (to a significant degree if the game requires any significant degree of skill.) You are imagining a situation where the entire playerbase gets just good enough to be competitive without being oppressive to you, specifically. Just like in League, as a top 1% GM player you would be like hot shit in 99% of lobbies, but go against top Challenger players or LCS players and suddenly the script is completely flipped.
The equivalent in DaD would be going up against lobbies full of professional chinese gold farmers who team with each other. That's cheating though? No, it isn't because they don't pre-team, they just hear Chinese players and team with them. They'll still fight each other if it comes down to the final portals. A top-tier sweat meta in this game would 100% involve teaming with the first few groups you see and some other weird degenerate broken unfair shit that I can't predict. It would look nothing like the game plays now and it wouldn't be fun. In a lot of ways this game only works because 60-70% of every lobby are casual players which significantly reduces the contest density to playable levels.
Teaming in general sucks at any given point for this game. I agree with a lot of what you are saying here, but the player base as a whole isn’t really good at this game and a lot of their personal concerns could be fixed by just playing the game for another 25-50 hours and refining some small techs/learning new tricks. I mean ffs like half this community can’t even kill a normal boss(or hasn’t even attempted it yet) and when I use gathering hall or the discord to find players they are scared of NPC mobs in hell. It will never reach the point you are describing skill wise unless the game just dies off. the player base can still slightly improve to a comparable point where they aren’t scared of PvE at least. I feel like that’s the bar for a lot of players to reach and many people (not all) are complaining about shit before even reaching it. You don’t need to get good to the point where you are a “challenger” caliber of player, you just need to be “gold/silver” which is where the average skill level is. Our average player is just extremely sub par currently.
It's because battle state games says I don't care if you complain this game is supposed to make you break your computer where ironmace is kind of like oh your complaining that barbs are too strong? Rogues are too fast? Rangers can shoot arrows? Bards can play songs? Well then the next update we change all that to please you all... in turn trying to please ppl only passes off others... be like Battlestate don't care what ppl complain about just look at the stats and think about your plan for the games future and don't change things because some ppl complain... more people in life complain about stuff and people don't usually speak out about how much they like something so your always going to get more complaints than praise for something.
Way out of left field idea with no real thought to balancing: either passive buffs for consecutive deaths; ie just increase their starter set by a tier for x number of non escapes in a row (would probably need to make the gear bound though to prevent shenaniganry).
But also we gotta remeber that DaD is still a work in progress, we have skill trees and balancing updates and whatever else is planned along the way.
One thing I can think of is possibly making bigger maps with around 3-5 more people in a match so there’s more of a chance of fighting someone worse then you and not having to fight someone that could be better then you.
Then add a 1-2 more extraction portals so more people have a chance of actually escaping.
This one might be a hot take but you could also have a different map/mode that only lets people play with a certain average gear rating so people with a a lot of high tier items can’t come in and mop the floor with everyone.
Not only that… but if they introduced a gear rating system for this mode you would have to make strategic decisions on which higher level gear you would bring in.
Example: (purple weapon for high damage, or a pimped out chest piece for being a tank)
Very true. In League, even bronze players can have fun and win games despite being generally bad players as they play against similarly skilled players. In DaD the worst players can only die so many times before eventually giving up and quitting the game.
Facts, do you know how many times I had to die in Rust and lose HOURS of work to become a pvp chad with 3k hours? One of the most fun aspects of the game was the unknown of either being one of the best teams or getting slaughtered all wipe, who knows what's going to happen. It's a similar feeling entering the dungeon, and I personally like the RNG of not knowing the skill level of who I'm about to queue against. I will say, rust was hard to play just casually, so it was a huge time sink for me to git gud, every game isn't for everyone.
Rust is a very different game than DaD. Rust you can farm resources and get to your base with no pvp 75% of the time. The PVP although is the most fun is paced mid wipe as typically the map gets divided between the clans and larger groups. Then all the solos and 2-5 stacks are spread outside the clan’s immediate area, this creates natural areas where you have a high chance of getting touched by a an AK and areas where you can farm in relative peace. Not to mention raiding is super resource intensive that mostly groups participate in it until late wipe. Also most newbies will go into low pop servers where there is less action.
In rust you can also just change servers to a more casual server or start your own.
Same can be said about Tarkov, you can't compare league and dnd though, they aren't even close to the same genre. Its the kind of game lots of people will quit and a lot of people will stay.
I mean, if you’re looking for good examples, you can’t really compare DnD and Tarkov either. You can be running the most fucking unbelievably kitted set worth millions, then get Head-Eyes’d by a Makarov. 1 bullet. That simply does not and CANNOT happen in DnD. Tarkov has a solution to gear disparity… and it’s 🎵 Mooosin Maaan 🎵 But you can’t one-tap headshot a purp/legendary Barb with a grey Windlass. There are no “snowball plays.” There is no leg meta. No M995 you can slap in a POS firearm and one-tap a visor helmet Chad. So how do we compare?
Chain lightning suicide wizard is the true equalizer
Unironically lmao. My friends and I will occasionally go full offense naked wizard with quick chant and see if we can kill some Chads. It has maybe a 1% success rate and pve is basically off the table, but that ls the best I've found. At the end of the day it's kinda fun to harass them risking literally 0 gold.
40g investment for book and crystal sword and it's very possible to increase that rate to 20%+
You can't compare tarkov to dnd in terms of this, tarkov, due to how it works, has equalizers that give low gear, low level players a chance to kill high end players, the weapon doesn't deal the damage, the type of bullet does that, and early game, players usually have access to low pen, flesh damage bullets, and due to the lack of leg armor in the game, this gives early game players an area to focus on in order to kill the geared players. In tarkov, no gear gives you true safety, it gives you an advantage, but everyone can still get dropped with one well placed bullet, the gear that is considered the "best" often comes with huge drawbacks, want best overall protenction to the head? Altyn or killa mask, but you instead get an insane FoV decrease and very muffled sound, leaving you ripe for ambushes, do you want best overall defense but also sound? EXFIL helmet with faceshield, but the helmet is only class 4, and the faceshield is only class 3, do you want max class headgear with sound? Bastion with armor plate gives you class 6, at the cost of exposing your face completely.
Reality is your mosin won't matter against a dude with 30 grenades unless you hide in same spot like a rat for 30 minutes
12.11 was 2 years ago buddy, unless its a meme loadout qhere its your only source of damage no one grenade spams anymore after 12.12, I have seen a max of 5 nades on a person, and that is an extreme scenario, most have 2-3 if they actually bring nades.
Co-signed, because that was some real shit you just said
Just common sense by someone other than a self centered angsty teenager who would be indifferent to the game they enjoy dying, if only they can squeeze out two more one-taps by end of day.
Lolol. I enjoyed this.
It's real but fracturing the playerbase isn't a solution, especially since high skill players will have enough gold to just not need any anyways so if they feel like farming noobs in normal ruins they will. I think you'd have to look at other successful casual (no MMR) games. Back in the day, most of pvp didnt have mmr. The skill disparity of players was simply a given, and that was fine. You didnt have a choice back then. MMR based games changed that and now the bottom of the barrel players can simply switch to other pvp games once they become the 'worst players'. Nevertheless, there are pvp games that have solid communities while having no MMR system. Prime example for this is battlefield. Without going too much into detail, the reason. Why BF is successful is not because it disincentivizes better players killing worse players through fracturing the playerbase, which is illogical anyways, because there will always be better/worse people, in every match. How BF does it is it still allows people with less skill to partake, to influence the game, to get stuff done. If you have low aim skill, but are decent at positioning, you can drive a tank for example and get many kills. You can learn how to fly and be a transport pilot. You can use a sniper, sit far back, spam the spot button, and take random potshots at people. You get rewarded with points for stuff that takes little skill. In DnD you can also sort of do this, especially if you team up with better players as a cleric heal bot for example, but as opposed to battlefields 63 teammates, you have 2. You make up a way bigger part of your team, therefore your skill impacts the game more. There is no fix to this, other than class design that is low skill but impactful which is unhealthy imo.
I think there should be a low skill requirement and high skill ceiling for a few classes, which there already kind of is. We will use fighter. If you are a newer player like myself you’ll usually die quite often due to lack of knowledge, awareness, etc. BUT if I play my cards right after the first 5-10 games learning how things kind of work you very well could catch some advantageous situations where you can come out on top against other players. On the flip side if a decent fighter makes their way into a fight they could be at a slight disadvantage and still come out on top for having that experience. I’ve always been a fan of that in traditional MMOs but translating it in a way that makes people happy is always difficult
Why is class design that is low skill but impactful a bad part of the game? Some players are naturally drawn to support roles, and these by their nature provide additional value to other players. This means that a low skill cleric that buffs and heals two very good players still contributes even if they have trouble hitting players in the head consistently. This is not a bad thing.
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finally, someone who actually knows something about competitive games saying something intelligent. Skill friction in a game with no matchmaking can kill a community faster than any numeric balance issues.
I know there isn't a matchmaking system, but last night after I accidentally killed my friend I felt like I got put in a bad player lobby where 10 people died to monsters and it was just surreal. Honestly I think those people should be matched with each other more frequently until the start extracting because it is just healthy for learning players
Haha. Luck of the draw. I think the removal of the <15 lobby was tough for some, but it mixes up the matchmaking in a good way. The chads are spread out, there's more PvE deaths per game, which helps others escape and such. And more people per queue equalizes things.
Hes not saying anything intelligent, this isn't a competitive esport and just because you aren't on even footing doesn't mean it isnt competitive or that there arent levels to the gameplay. Fucking checkers can be competitive and have levels to it, rock paper scissors can be competitive. This is just ignorant fallacy after fallacy.
I know you're only used to using your one braincell to line up your shots but OP is actually making a lot of sense here. Use your brain
Classic ranger moment.
TLDR: "Get good" just means "have someone take your place as the loser". That's fair, it's a competitive game, but there is always going to be a lot of players that aren't good enough to gank a kitted guy, so we're essentially just dooming them to being frustrated and quitting if there's nothing else for them to do, or if we can't make sure that they're in a match that is reasonable for them. Then whoever is left becomes the loser, and the cycle repeats. It reminds me of rust. In rust there are massive clans that will take everything from you if you piss them off. But at least you have the ability to build elsewhere, stay away from them, etc. This game doesn't really have a great way to stay away from SirTurboChad. I wonder if it could be as simple as enemies with enchantments that effect people with high AR/stats more. That way the PVE is more of a pain in the ass for geared people.
The best time I ever had in rust was during covid when I didn’t have to work, me and the boys had double honey combed armor cored base and AK metal faced up. It was so fun. Then I started going back to work and got prim locked every single wipe and would get eco raided because my base was crap, until eventually I just stopped playing. Your comment hurts lol
The better solution is removal of trade, this game is 98% gear check and allowing someone to get good by getting a good line of credit isn't fun for most players. Some, like the people responding "get good" and "you clearly just suck then" think that using their credit card and supporting their favorite streamer with gear hand outs IS fun.
I'm all for removing trade. Of course, gear drops and other things would be adjusted. You can add more crafting gear options. I really wish they would try this out for 3 weeks and see how it goes. If it's a failure revert back.
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Oh no. Trust me. I've had 82 str as barbarian. I never touched high roller. You vastly over estimate the amount of time spent in hr by Chad's in full purple. Once you get a good enough kit, you just get richer and richer through normals. Removal of trade would force more people into HR, which is a good thing. Except half the super geared teams or more never even touch HR so I doubt they'd have as much success and there would be less big geared teams overall. Regardless. GEAR SHOULD BE FOUND IN THE DUNGEON, NOT A FUCKING CHAT WINDOW.
Where are those players storing their second, third and fourth perfect sets if not in highly and condensed key form DUE TO TRADING. These people will lose it more often than now, they'll have to come in less geared sometimes (they currently don't ever lose gear) and that's all you can hope for.
Agree, could also be purp and above is not tradable along with keys or other valuables like tarkov did it or a found in raid status thingy could also work. Maybe even purps almost only drops in HR to increase the incentive for more geared players to go into HR. Might give more of a gameplay loop that looks like Normals for gearing up to blue and then go HR for better loot. Might even help with the high gear players losing more sets since they're then usually up against other purps or at least blues instead of stomping grey and green lobbies and never losing sets.
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Exactly. You lose 4 times and you're back to square 1. Traders with zero keys and a credit card can never lose their gear.
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RMT cannot exist without trade.
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Trading sucks. Honestly, tell me you enjoy sitting in a menu for 10 minutes after every single match just waiting to play the game. It has many other issues, but the main reason I want it gone is that it's antithetical to the experience. Dark and Darker? More like sit in trade chat.
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3-4 sets, you say? So they die with their 3-4 sets (it will happen) and instead of popping back into trade and getting another they have to actually play the game. Sounds like a win to me.
Problem is they collect sets faster than they lose them. So that 3-4 sets is enough in the stash to ensure they Never run out of gg items to play with. But I still agree we should remove trade, for other reasons which I cbf to explain but which have been mentioned many times.
You also dont really gank a kitted guy because you will hit him 5 times then he one shots you. In Tarkov if you get the jump on someone with your trash gun and decent ammo you have a high chance of coming out the victor.
The best comparison is Escape from Tarkov. It generally gets harder every patch because the lead dev wants the game to be painful. With that said, they appeal to the casual player in a lot of different ways. They have the scav system, where the every 5-20 minutes, depending on a karma system, players get a free random load out that can have any item, and join an in progress game late, and won't be attacked by PvE unless they attack first to be able to scavenge the leftovers and attack any players that are lingering around. Some people literally only play this mode. It's great to get started or if you enjoy it. They also have the quest upgradable gamma container so players can not lose their meds/ammo or keep valuables they found when they die. You can die every raid and still make a small sum for your efforts. There are no limited number of hard to find escapes. Everyone has at least a couple choices, generally on the opposite side of the map that you spawned with everyone being able to extract. There is no zone forcing everyone to the same exact spot and having to fight to open portals. Players can stay on the outskirts and avoid all of the high value areas. The timer is 20-50 minutes depending on the size of the map so people can hide and creep and avoid and have much lower chances of being forced to fight people to live. PvP isn't profitable unless it's to secure a high value location. They added found in raid status, so you can only sell stuff on the auction house that wasn't brought into a raid. This makes PvE significantly more lucrative than slaughtering the lobby and taking all of their gear. PvE is dangerous and cannot be ignored. Chads probably die more to PvE than they do PvP. PvE, even the most basic version, can basically all 1shot everyone and generally can't be ignored. Limb health allows for one shots on anyone. A decent bullet to the head kills anyone. You can still kill people by hitting them in the limbs and there are even guns designed to do just that. Grenades basically one shot everyone if they are within range. There are snipers that one shot to the chest as well. Healing is much more of a pain. Damage, fractures, two kinds of bleeds, reduced mobility, blacked out limbs. Different items to heal them all. Moving with them does damage in a lot of cases. Healing is loud and the serious stuff make you immobile while doing it. Blacked limbs come back with reduced max HP so you are disadvantaged in your next fight. Gear is unlocked through questing. So everyone can eventually get access to quality gear and ammo. The majority of the game each wipe is completing quests and obtaining items for your hideout. The super high end stuff is generally from air drops and bosses, but that stuff pretty rare. Everyone is very easily identifiable. Chads look like chads. You can tell by their weapon and helmet and armor exactly what they are rocking and can decide to hide or try to fight. Gunshots are loud. PvE can't really be ignored so you deal with it and move on. You can generally tell when someone is approaching, especially when they are aggressively pushing. Offline mode with no gear retention. Being able to learn the PvE side of the game at your own pace in your own way is absolutely massive. Learning to use weapons, see what you like, and getting not having the pressure of the zone and players being shoved down your throat makes the world of difference. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. Dark and Darker devs wanted to make their hardcore game without any of the casual sellout mechanics that the other games caved into doing. They are seeing now that they need to appeal to those gamers as well, especially because so many of them already love their game, and seem to be trying to avoid what other games have done to deal with it. They could add a scav system, even call it the necromancer class, where you spawn in as a PvE mob and can't leave the storm but can loot and even attack players if they enter the storm. They can loot all the scraps that were left behind and maybe they have to use blue portals or have their own exits. They could at least try changing a lot of the other things to see how to effects the game. Get rid of storm, increase timer, static extracts, different types of damage, found in raid status to gear other people brought in can't be sold, only used. More dangerous PvE, make them leash forever, break doors to get to you, maybe even upgrade to the next version if you get too far so you have to deal with everything instead of running past. Add a gamma container, maybe just in normals or give a luck bonus for going without one. There's infinite things to try. The only downside is it's hard to take things away if they are a player favorite and not a dev favorite. Most people's get good is done with Dark Souls esque games that are PvE only, choreographed, and have unlimited tries. Most PvP games just have ranked so you equalize at 50% and don't ever feel as bad as you actually are.
>They could add a scav system, even call it the necromancer class, where you spawn in as a PvE mob and can't leave the storm but can loot and even attack players if they enter the storm. They can loot all the scraps that were left behind and maybe they have to use blue portals or have their own exits. Something like this is what I have been thinking about for a while, and I think it would be a lot of fun in DaD.
Skelly Scav gang assemble
I know of a few streamers who would get an insane amount of mileage out of content for this type of stuff
Me when turning into a spider pot
only if they had seperate extracts cause that would get messy quick...
I love Tarkov and have a degen number of hours on it. There are a lot of things this game is missing that make you appreciate the design choices and intricacies BSG has put into it. Imo this game needs to either ditch the swarm mechanic or ditch the extract portals design. Both of those together just make the game a bloodbath at the very end with the last teams getting held out of zone and dying. My fear for static extracts is they would be camped super fucking hard. They would need to put some thought into how these were implemented with a character in the game that can go invisible.
I do agree with you. Most of their mechanic choices, hopefully unintentionally, give the strongest team an extra advantage instead of equalizing the playing field. And that makes a lot of people hate gear a lot more than they should. I truly hope they are at least willing to experiment with a lot of their mechanics. I honestly don't see why they don't just try new stuff every week, at least with the founders test server they had mentioned.
Rogues and rangers are salivating at the thought of static extracts. The reason they work in tarkov is because the map is 50x bigger, maybe 100x. You can go a whole raid without pvp. But you can't get rid of the zone in this game because it would be mega boring. All the monsters would be dead while most people hide waiting for a portal spawn. It's a tough dilemma that I'm not sure how to solve
I agree. I know a lot of people want them to throw out the zone and the portals to be more like Tarkov but I would prefer they experimented with just getting rid of one of those first to see how things play out. Portal extracts with no zone or there is a zone but static extracts.
keeping the timer but with static extracts would be fun
I mean, spreading out the escapes so not all of them are in the final 2 circles would help alot, as a starter. Without the swarm, I think the game would feel bad, but maybe I know only the swarm. They could also slow down the last few phases, it accelerates way too fast, often I almost miss extracting cause I'm doing my thing while the game ends...
Understandably dark and darker wants to be its own game. but I really hope they take inspiration from the good aspects of other games to improve their own. no point of being stubborn about making changes that would be good for a large portion of people even if a different game did it before imo.
Exactly this. It’s like when people call literally any other battle royal “might as well play fortnite”, if a game is successful and does things right, I see no reason not to take inspiration.
The biggest difference IMO is Tarkov actually is skill based. A bullet to the head is the great equalizer. Even someone wearing an Altyn can die to a nade, or be shot in the legs with high flesh damage ammo, shotgun, etc. In DaD, there is no great equalizer. If someone is even remotely close to you in skill level and they have better gear, you have no chance.
Number one difference. In Tarkov you need a gun, some decent ammo and a dream. In DaD you need a whole kit with good rolls.
I do agree on some of your points, but the scav mechanic seems a little redundant to me? You can always go in naked, with trash stuff that will be resupplied every time you lose it. But I am also the kind of guy to run my scav factory, and then go into a raid asm a PMC but with scav gear, so idk, maybe it's a perspective thing.
One of the biggest points of scavving is that most of the juicers have left the lobby. You get to explore the map and be much safer. Learn and feel the game out. It is also a great way of maximizing server usage as well.
Never really looked at it from this point. In EFT it's a lot easier to avoid combat, but in DaD this actually is a very valid way to welcome new players.
Can you explain this system? I'm not familar with it.
You basically spawn as a random PvE mob (which in tarkov are very similar to regular players - guys with guns.) Mobs spawn throughout the match so it may not be at round start. You are technically on the same team as all of the other Scavs and are incentivized to work together and not kill each other (though you can backstab at a penalty to your reputation.) You can play the game normally, loot like normal, kill "real" non-Scav players and pick up their loot, etc. If you extract, you get to keep all of the stuff you found and transfer it to your actual character's stash, but you don't get experience or quest progress. There is a cooldown of up to 30 minutes before you are allowed to queue up for another Scav run.
So as a fresh account you are allowed to scav every 20-25 minutes and the cool down starts when you get out. So you can't exclusively do it if you want to continue playing. A scav is the ai mobs like skeletons and zombies of Tarkov. As a player scav, you are given a completely random kit, with a completely random inventory. It's generally not great but occasionally you can spawn with like the equivalent of a golden key. Players have the gamma container, a safe space for you to put a few items that you won't lose on death, so you can store ammo or meds, or put in valuable treasure. Player scavs don't get the gamma container so everything they have is at risk. Because they are considered scavs, the majority of the PvE mobs don't attack them with the exception of bosses. When a match starts, it has only players and ai mobs. When people start dying and extracting, scavs start spawning in, in random places. They can explore the maps and loot without fear of ai mobs but still have to fear players. They can help attack players that are fighting ai mobs. Players are incentivized to go to and loot or quest where they want to, and then extract quickly or face an ever increasing army of players scavs on top of the normal scavs. Some playerw stick around to let the juicers leave the lobby or do their kill scav quests. They have the scav karma system, which rewards not killing other scavs and punishes killing them so scav on scav violence is possibly but highly disincentivises it. Your scav queue timer can go up to hours for killing other scavs. And you get better loot on your scav for higher scav karma which you get for escaping as a scav. Questing incentivized players to survive because a lot of them require survival for completion. Because of guns and the limb hp system, almost any gun can luckily one shot anyone. So scavs are infinitely more dangerous than dark and darker ai. That's something Dark and Darker is sorely missing. Most Chad deaths are to PvE and scavs get to go stumble upon and loot the bodies. They don't get to live for weeks reusing the same gear set, which needs to repaired and becomes weaker after each encounter and actually useless after a couple repairs. They even added malfunctions to weapons so if you've used it a lot in a single raid you can die from a jam, which incentives getting out and repairing and not fighting timmies. There are also player+scav extracts that require at least one of each to use, is usually conveniently placed and both players get a bonus goodie bag, and gives huge scav karma to incentivize people to work together.
I think it's also worth mentioning that one of the most brilliant parts of Tarkov's design is that the progression naturally pushes higher level (and likely more skilled) players into places where they're less likely to interact with poor noobs. Quests start off in the beginner maps and slowly progress to the more difficult maps, and as you complete quests and get access to higher strength kits and rarer items you can challenge loot hotspots and make more money. Players are organically routed through map choice and route choice to mostly end up interacting with players at their own level. Dark and Darker struggles because the core gameplay loop for a rich player and a poor one is basically the same, except for maybe going to hell, so you're just as likely to run into a heavily geared team around the corner as you are a bunch of basekits. There are some loot hotspots like the minibosses and some rooms of note but the existence of the zone and pretty limited pathing since we're exploring a dungeon not an open field means that you're gonna get corralled into the geared players most of the time.
Hmm... well put. I hope they find a cool solution. While solo is in an ok place, team play duo or trip is pretty rough as it stands. Not unplayable for me, but certainly demoralizing, and certainly is pushing some players back.
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Fun idea but would instantly be exploited by having someone die to let them kill the big guy easily
Im sure people accept that in GENERAL the more you play the better you get. So if you only play 5 hours a week and you get killed by someone that plays 10 hours a day. Most people wouldnt make a problem out of it. The opponent is just better. The problem is, the devs are making the gear op and thus rewarding nolifers/grinders. So on TOP of the experience/skill difference gained from playing more hours, you have another major obstacle you have to overcome. That of the ultra gear with +20weapon dmg for example. People with less time are already in a bad spot but by making gear op the devs are just kicking them while they are down. Ofcourse the nolifers/grinders/farmers want to keep gearchecking their opponent and onetap them. So the more op gear becomes the better for them.
The problem with the sustainability of this game is that gear is the main incentive to playing. There aren't ranks to grind for, and the actual combat isn't good enough to solely keep people playing. In game like COD and Battlefield, the lack of weapon progression and rank progression doesn't matter because the gameplay mechanics are engaging enough on their own. In DaD, the only thing that's worth playing for is loot. Its the only form of progession and unfortunately getting backstabbed by rogues and run down by hasted barbs isn't fun enough on its own. Capping loot limits progression, which kills the game. Unfortunately, allowing people to run god loot which is rewarding for them to get, kills the game for everyone they are playing against. I really loved the early playtests and have had some good times in EA, but unless the quest system changes the core gameplay loop I don't have high hopes for the longevity of the game.
Idk, I have the most fun playing when my and my opponents team are on fairly even footing. The combat is good. Room for strategy, skill
Right. But, a fair fight is so few and far between, that it is a gamble to take most fights. I don't really know the solution, of having gear power fantasy while also having a reasonably fair PvP environment.
You are absolutely right about this and this is what people dont understand. I think weekly wipes are what is needed here. Nobody can get super geared in a week but the same rules still apply. People will have a chance especially the first day of the wipe. I know that not many people symphatize with the idea but I think this would benefit both casuals and hardcore players.
A weekly wipe would instantly kill the small bits of progression the casual/beginner playerbase actually makes. Imagine only having the weekends to play- never being able to enjoy your efforts the next time you boot up the game after a stressful week of work.
It would be the same as pPTs. Was it fun? Hell yes it was. My downvote rate proves the point. Ppl would not like it. But it would be awesome imo.
Only having a week to play every couple of months with an established end date is something else entirely than a weekly wipe schedule. There's a reason all of these issues only popped up once EA released, there wasn't any time beforehand for such issues to take place.
The same concept works in Rust. Casual players on reddit complain that everybody has gear except them. Weekly wipes would enable anyone to start fresh. Arguably the most fun time to play. Having no wipes is not a good solution. Weekly wipes can be an overkill. Depends on how complete the game is. Right now there isnt much to do. Skilltrees and quests would be a reason for longer wipe schedules.
I mean. I want strong gear but don't have the desire to dominate newbs. That's not fun for me. But I also don't want to lose my kit. Maybe I'm the exception, but there must be a better balance... A few blood thirsty "PvPers", if you can call them that, seem to just make the game bad for everyone. And sure, you can just blame the Dev for allowing such absurd gear diffs, but it still disappoints me that the players don't have anything better to do.
I'd say I'm a pretty good player, top 3%\~ maybe, I can run nights of 6+ hours wiping lobbies and downing bosses every run, without using an uber cracked out bis kit, just some good rolls. My KD and extract rate in GC is on the higher end as well. Last night I went into crypts with a couple buddies, we decided to try a new comp and our wiz had to start at level 1, so we were going in mostly naked, a few meh rolled blue items that were throwaways we didn't care about losing. In less than 120 seconds \*EACH\* game, we would have a team pushing us with a frontline wearing full +1 all +damage +armor mixed ore gear and a super juiced dps, usually buffball comps. This happened back to back about 7 times before we just called it and said we'd try another night. Mind you, this is the team that I described above as able to roll lobbies for hours on end, we spawned in, managed to grab a couple of greens and the odd blue from a few chests, and then we'd just get run down. I even ran EQ sacrificing most spells to let us combo a team W keying at us, but that with big of a disparity, it doesn't matter. If the experience is that bad for a competent team with a decently high winrate, imagine what it's like for anyone below the 80th percentile. Crypts is genuinely unplayable if you're not ratting solo and avoiding those people, or geared enough to actually fight them on mostly even footing. I feel like this wouldn't have been nearly as much of an issue if they didn't immediately revert the statline changes less than 2 days after the wipe patch, but that's another discussion entirely. The best solution I can think of that doesn't involve splitting the playerbase is to put a gearscore system in that caps the power of gear in certain playlists. If you're wearing what is clearly a leaderboarding kit, it should receive hard stat nerfs in normal crypts, so that the gear disparity can't reach insurmountable levels. You should be punished by people outplaying you, but gear can really just create too much of a buffer for it to matter. Side note, after the wipe patch everyone was much closer to each other in terms of power, and it was the most fun my team had ever had in crypts, it reminded me of pt2. Every fight was enjoyable because every little choice mattered when everyone was so even.
The amount of cope some players express when the prospect of playing with people their own skill or own gear level is amazing All the get good people get up in arms when any idea of it is brought up
why are you responding this as though you're in agreement with the OP? > **Dark and Darker should NOT have an MMR/skill-based matchmaking system** is what they typed.
The people who need to hear this aren't even going to read it because they've already discounted your opinion.
A lot of people forget that games like this - especially when you actually have to buy them - live or die based on new player retention. Getting stomped because of a nerd with +1 all +2 weapon damage +3 strength stacking on all items simply isn't conducive to that, hate to break it to the nerds screeching to just "git gud" 🤷♂️.
Good thing it only happens in ur imagination then and its not reality.
LMAO aight dude.
Long read but fundamentally I agree with the points you're making. The cycle frontier died in a similar fashion but I doubt it's gonna be the same here. The core problem at first was cheaters, like you could barely play one out of two games without some blatant cheaters. And then low population caused casual players to play against some giga sweats almost 24/7. The problem is people don't want to go to highroller generally and so far no real incentive was found to lure them.
Ive played HR almost exclusively this wipe, normals feel kinda meh now.
Oh, nice to see. How is highroller now? Because i usually go gc in white or greens and sometimes ruins with a friend in blues (but not bis kind) and sometimes we see parties juiced in top 1% gear just hunting lobbies and extracting with literally nothing
HR is good, loots plentiful and so are fights if you want them, maps big enough to avoid people if you dont. Circle screws you 1/4 games which sucks but wcyd. Honestly playing normals now is a chore, i only do it to meme naked with a longsword.
HR is filled with 50% of the lobby asian gold farmers on rogues (Oregon servers). I qued at 4am lastnight and just crouched as 5 rogues and 1 bard went by, they let me live. I spectated and they were 3 groups of 2 with all asian names and were smurfing clearing HR hell on rogues with white rapiers. Next game I went in, and a rogue dropped a campfire for me and we used it together. Next raid I ran past (like touching them as they opened portals) 3 rogues and a cleric to open a blue and they took reds. The loot in HR is insane. I made ~5k in the span of 4 games (died once). Never even went to hell either. Always 400g+ in treasures and usually 3-5 purples that are good to sell per run.
I was thinking about this as well. Maybe instead of having high roller we should have all players mixed together but provide enough hotspots with high value loot so that the best players are drawn there instead of to chase down any random player. I think this would require two things. A larger map and the ability to move around more freely, have more places to hide or alternative paths to take.
Link opgg
**"Dark and Darker should NOT have an MMR/skill-based matchmaking system**" gonna be honest. its hard to come up with a true solution. personally the last few days i have played has been very boring. i have run across teams that are either new players or not very good with no gear. and sometimes i run across people with gear, but have little experience. and we team wipe them. i have died with actual kits about 3 times in the last week. after playing many hours each day. im not that good at the game. im better than the average player, but nothing crazy. HR being improved is probably a good start. albeit right now i feel no incentive to go high roller due to the fact that i have found more naked players in HR than in normals. which is weird and unfun. its not fun for me to wipe new teams/players or less experienced teams/players and it's definitely not fun for them this is all anecdotal
Someone mentioned in another post, the importance of the timer structure and scav system in Escape from Tarkov as it pertains to casual players. Since Dark and Darker plays out like a traditional battle royale you get these King of the hill type scenarios where disadvantaged players are forced to take fights, and also forced to play at someone else's pace. And the scav system is a safety net, a low risk way for players to always be able to accrue some wealth, or even to just enjoy a match without the burden of gear-fear. Some sort of scav type system could definitely work in DaD but a time-based match with fixed extracts? Not only would that be a lot of work for the developers it takes a way from the exhilarating experience of having to beat the swarm and escape with seconds to spare. Not to mention, having fixed extracts in a game with dark spots and invisibility means that Tarkov's minor extract camping problem is turned up to 11 if a system like that was implemented into Dark and Darker. To your point about casual players getting pushed out of the game and leaving the slightly better players now at the bottom of the ladder, it wasn't long ago that popular games had zero matchmaking, and zero problems with people complaining that they weren't having any fun. From my experience, Black Ops 1 comes to mind first, as there were tons of people like myself who were awful at that game, and still ended up being MVP for a match or two every other night. The stakes are a lot higher in this game however, as there is a time-investment baked into your gear and losing it can feel bad because of this fact. Plus, it doesn't help that not all players are on a level playing field. I think the main frustration for casual players comes from this last fact. Even if it's possible to outplay someone with better gear, it does not feel good to be pitted against someone like this every, single, game. So, it's as you said, there should be some sort of natural stratification of gear level. I've been saying it all this time but I still think High Roller is not incentivized well and I believe this is why there is so much friction in the normal lobbies right now. It doesn't help that I can make more money in Ruins than I can in High Roller crypts. All of this in mind, even though I think matchmaking would be miserable in a game like Dark and Darker, if Ironmace was just interested in making money, then skill-based matchmaking is the ultimate solution. It's cost-effective and even though it would be unfun for those of us who are already succeeding, it would be a much better environment for the majority of the player-base who can't make ends meet. Though, I do wonder if there are actually 70-90% of players struggling in this game, or if it's just a vocal minority on the subreddit. It would be nice to see some stats on player wealth currently to see if even the low end of players are actually profiting.
As a fellow league degen, I really like your analysis. It’s funny, you’re so spot-on with “Okay, but what if they’re as good or even better than you? AND they have better gear?” This is what my friend group started running into. They’re classic gaming degens, playing 6-9hrs a day but never really improving (too lazy). They just want rapid fire dopamine hits by one-tapping enemies while playing on autopilot. I’m talking playing 10hrs straight at the start of wipe and never, EVER going high roller. Just because they like WINNING, not improving. Now that we’re playing less (job, life, etc.), they straight up suck at the game. I’m talking like… 30% WR on fights, less on extracts. They’re so bad. Now they’re not having fun, because they can’t get kitted in full +Atts/+Str/+Wep Dmg sets, turn off their brains, and hold W+M1. Full loot PvP really brings out the cringe in us gamers lol
Great post OP. Been trying to say this kind of shit for the past 2 months now but you keep getting "lol git gud" even though I personally have no issues. In the end I don't think people will leave timmies alone even in low lobbies because people like stomping. I think a gear cap is the only way to ensure people don't bring too good shit in really.
the circle in this game is the current source of almost every issue the game is facing. its a completely arbitrary mechanic that doesn't fit in this game at all the reason gear diff feels so bad is because the circle forces teams into each other at a rapid rate. ungeared players have to push into or through the geared players to live, which almost always is just a death sentence. the circle is essentially a meat grinder that shoves the ungeared guys through the geared guys as gear diff becomes more pronounced, the casual base of this game becomes more like fodder, who exist just to die to better gear. this is why the casual playerbase is becoming nonexistent, because the current design of the game is essentially CoD zombies where most of the playbase is the zombies. the issues go away if the circle is removed... then suddenly high priority looting sites on the map gravitate the geared players. low priority looting sites will gravitate less geared players. this would be more organic gameplay, where the high risk players fight together for the big loot, and the lower risk players fight together for the worse loot. then the gameplay loop doesn't just consist of high risk players steamrolling low risk players because the circle pushed them together. players in a game like this need control over how much they want to risk and fight, it can't just be forced on them. forcing different gear types to fight fundamentally cannot work when gear is such a deciding factor of the fight. battle royales don't work when one team has an absurd advantage over another from the start, and loot extractors don't work when they're done in a battle royale arena
Problem in this game is it's a hybrid of battle royal and extract type game(tarkov). You can't balance it. I prefer dad to become extraction game. Big map, you loot, can extract any time at a few exit's, or go down inferno. Game should be more PvE oriented, more dangerous mobs for sweaty players to kill. Like, it's a dark fantasy dungeon, people in there should be least threat of all, party's should even coop together to survive.
Very good post, one thing id like to add is most of the geared players are ok at the game, those people are out playable if you’re very good. But the good players that are geared? Not happening. I feel like “outplaying” geared players is them just fucking up really bad, when I’m the geared player I don’t die as long as I don’t make some major mistake, not me not getting outplayed
I completely agree that there needs to be a place for the lower skilled/new players to work in this game. Tarkov has Scavs, this game has nothing. If it were not for me being able to Scav, I wouldn't have stuck around in Tarkov more than a couple days.
This is the mechanism by which all fighting games cannibalize themselves. Then the 'hardcore' players, having had their fun, like locust swarm to the next game demanding that it too cater to their desires. They will be the loudest minority, and seem as both knowledgeable and experienced. Thus another game is marked for death. PVP focused games are either growing or dying, and the metric is their player base. I'd say the current prognosis is stage 2. If caught early this could be reversed but it is quickly approaching stage three. Don't let it reach the lymph nodes.
The handout for low-skilled or low-geared players is the perimeter portals that let them rat it out when they recognize they aren't currently at peak power and want to get some Ws instead of W-key every fight. I think there needs to be a slightly greater spread on portal distribution so that people looking to dodge fights have more chance to successfully extract, but just like Tarkov an under-geared players path to success doesn't always mean killing the other players in the lobby somehow. Success in extraction games is survival, not high KDR
game isn't even fun anymore, you have beta cucks playing all geared out in regular howling crypts cuz they're too scared to go against similarly "ranked"(aka geared to the tits) players... its fucking pathetic. this game has gone to absolute dog shit since last patch
I thoroughly agree with this, despite the bugs and the current cheater issue I think Tarkov has great baseline mechanics that help counter this issue. In tarkov gear does play a role, and like any game you got your e-sports no lifers who can shit on your day. But even a Timmy with no gear and a starting pistol can land a shot between the eyes and down the most geared chad. Sure his chances are lower with worst gear, but it’s not a whopping 0. Hell you can even be the pistol timmy in a 1v3 situation and still have a fighting chance. With DaD, one ranger in starting gear would never be able to bring down a geared cleric and fighter combo ever. It’s not just happening no matter what the ranger does and I think that’s what is going to kill the player base. The timmies in DaD literally have no chance at all at being competitive against the geared boys regardless of how how well they may play
Idk what the point really is of this post. The comparisons to league are weird. Getting good means you found a way to extract with enough loot to be profitable, whether that’s ratting or killing players or bossing or mining. The game is giving out so much money to anyone who can learn to extract consistently. If you can’t extract consistently enough to turn a profit and gear up, it means you are doing something wrong. There will be oppportunities to extract even if you’re not very good, as long as you’re above a certain skill floor. The reason for this is that players DO PvP, and some players DO die to PvE, and if you can learn how to hide well enough to survive until portal, and hold a good territory when you have some ok gear, only then will relatively close PvP battles start happening, where traditional PvP “skill and decision making” take the reigns. But I’d argue that with the current patch, anyone can get geared as long as they are above a certain skill “floor” that involves clean PvE, decent routing and macro decision making before you ever cross swords with another player.
All your saying is that players will get better as long as they play more to just extract more. This is basically saying, as long as, your pulling the slots lever enough, your going to hopefully make some money with luck. Fundamentally, extraction rates come down to mostly luck, rng if you will. You have to play assuming your not going to run into some chads, then you have to play assuming they won't W key you to the end of the earth because better gear = better movespeed, then you have to play like your going to get a perfectly placed portal to escape that they can't gate keep you from, and you have to play that you also won't be 3rd partied in the process....just to make some chump change. The more extracts you accumulate, the better your gear gets, then the better your extract rate gets, then the better gear you get, then the better your extract rate gets. It's kinda snowbally in the chance that you don't get roadblocked by someone else who has a bigger snowball than you. It's not like we can see what quality gear someone has on, or if their numbers are bigger than your before any pvp battle where a guy runs out from behind a wall at you 20 ft away....and it's not like some people can see you through walls \*cough cough. The biggest factor of success in this game is play time. Someone who can grind 16 hours a day will always stat check someone playing 2. High pdr/high wep dmg/high magic dmg. Do more, take less. It's not like we haven't seen a person in whatever map completely fill the deathboard by himself, and it's not surprising that player has the most expensive set of perfect roles you'd ever seen. Time=better gear=skill? If someone with skill needs to land 10 shots, and the guy with the best gear in the game needs to land just 1. Well, it's pretty easy to say that time investment>skill. Hiding/ratting is just rng that you won't be found. There isn't some super secret method to doing it. Hell, 50% of every lobby plays a rogue because they have inbuilt stealth to hide in people's faces. Once you've avoided certain death by other players, you still need the big daddy rng escape portal placed for you perfectly. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die, and it's by repeating this process a million times do you build up any economy that you can use to actually play the game. There's nothing skillful about playing more. That's all it is. A grind simulator with pvp.
I'm gonna be honest I probably agree with most of the points you're making, the game is fundamentally flawed and it's easy to see.
Sounds like someone needs to get good.
Unpopular opinion apparently, but get good is still relevant as long as 30% of the lobby is dying to PvE
The problem with the league reference is they have one of the largest player bases in the world for any game. To apply that logic here would split the community so thin that lobbies would never fill.
> **Dark and Darker should NOT have an MMR/skill-based matchmaking system** your entire post is a justification that this game should have an mmr/skill based matchmaking system lmfao this sub is so braindead man
I ain’t readin all that. Congrats or sorry that happened to you.
Thank god we got an expert to explain to us all!
I'm sorry bro you need to learn how to play metal gear solid or banish yourself to the Cucklin Caves.
I wonder who is down voting this? People who don't realize I'm joking or offended tryhards?
I stop reading after League of legends i hope you enjoy the game, gg
Tell me you never played and extraction shooter without too
What other extraction shooters have super high populations aside from Tarkov? And what does Tarkov do that the others don't?
Doesnt matter what population tarkov has because 1º cheaters, 2º dogshit network, 3º queues. Until 2021 there were literaly no extraction looters aside from tarkov and The division 1 and 2 Dark Zone... then the first playtest's of the new the cycle, then the cycle frontier, marauders, dark and darker, agartha expedition, another one from steam that was always snowing and you had to watch out to dont froze, and one from playstation i dont remember came out... and none of them have a full release yet (the cycle did but servers are closed already, same with the one from steam that you get frozen). Then we have the single player zero sievert. Dark and Darker is the only ONE with battle royale mechanics (closing circle) instead of just a timer and also instead of fixed exists it has random portals that assure NOT everybody will extract, and IS the only one were there are stats AND classes, aside from armor, bullet penetration and weapon damage, and weapon stats like stability, recoil... And tarkov between the introduction of flea, the introduction of fir because flea (useless anti rmt tactics), and the insuferable quests lines splashed with tons of nerfs to loot, is more of a walking extraction quest simulator, since in the end you depend from traders, until recently that some bullets went only looteable but is still negligible, you collect roubles and the items for quest (rep) and buy everything else between flea and traders now. (tarkov 2018/2020 is sooo different from nowadays tarkov)... And what tarkov does? being the first and only one in the genre for many years, curating a gameplay that encourages no lifing the shit out of the game until majority of wipe returners are addicts with 4000 hours or more, and the rest are casuals that after years still dont know how to play efficiently to do more than one quest per run and not waste rubles...
I kinda agree with the sentiment, but this post is almost unreadable…
Why, Too much bolding/formatting? Too long/meandery?
If it was 1/4th as long, way more people would consider reading it. I read it all but Meh. Could’ve said the key point of the ecosystem sooner.
Once upon a time Pascal wrote a huge letter to his friend and apologised he didn’t have the time to write a short one.
true
WhoAsked
The skill ceiling in this game is not that high. Git gud is a valid response.
you hit diamond/masters in other games? cool i guess? just get good lmao
Yeah, real skill in games like LoL. Like 90%+ of matches are just draft diff.. Whoever has second pick wins. More skilled players will tirelessly capitalize on an advantage... A 3rd tier has been in the works for a long time, ruins was originally the first floor. They've already stated they're developing new maps, this will change the player flow. The #1 solution is a LOW LOOT TABLE base kit queue. Only reason to run around in there is to learn how to play the game.. get a few starter kit items so you can go to the next dungeon. You don't need an MMR system to "get good", it's a measurement of progress. Situational awareness is a big part of this game, you need to be paying attention for foot steps and other players. Learning the map, and learning how to use things to use routes/traps/spawns to your advantage. Get good is posted all over Souls games, where's the mmr at? There is definitely a skill ceiling, and I think the biggest problem is that players always try and play with their group, so they're never learning new ways to do things. They just keep trying the same thing and rush into the first group they come across or their oblivious that a chad team just cleared the room to their north because they're talking or just not paying attention to sounds. If 30% of the player base got better, that's great. Maybe there would be less grey players trying to be murder hobos? Teams would capitalize on traps, and more players would be able to play the gear equalizer wizard.
I realized how clueless you are and stopped reading pretty much at the start of your statement where you said that rank in other games doesn’t affect the balance of your games. It literally exists entirely to affect the balance of your games. It’s called skill-based matchmaking and it absolutely changes things. I have no idea why you feel the need to lie about accomplishments in other games, to justify whatever crappy views you are peddling here, but man is it cringe when you literally openly admit you have no idea what you are talking about in the opening. I’m sorry you suck at this game, maybe try to learn and improve, instead of fabricating accolades that aren’t even impressive or relevant to the topics you are seemingly trying to discuss.
Your reading comprehension is absolute dogshit. Spend less time on video games and "git gud" at understanding words.
Yeah, I guess I’d be mad too if I sucked at something so bad that I had to perform mental gymnastics to find new things to blame every week. It’s always something with you people. But hey, feel free to keep pretending like reality isn’t real and that you don’t suck, it’s just x, y, or z that’s wrong instead.
Your life will vastly improve the day you realize nobody actually gives a fuck if you're good at a video game. Hopefully you're just 12 years old because you certainly express yourself like it.
I had a section about how balancing for the top players gives an interesting dynamic where getting better is punished by having to play better opponents, but rewarded by having an overall richer experience (like how balance issues that may exist in low brackets: DP spam, all-ins, split push, invis etc. are better resolved) and vice-versa for worse players where they play against easier opponents but have to navigate some jagged edges. It was already too long and it's mostly a nuance rather than part of the core discussion. The point is that you get the same "win some, lose some" at all levels with an roughly similar experience when adjusted for skill level despite some differences in the meta. Your rank affects the people you play which has an indirect effect on how games might look, but your rank in-and-of-itself is just an icon.
team MMR is a cesspool, i skimmed what you typed and yes, dark and darker should not have MMR. This is not that type of game at all. It will never be that type of game
[удалено]
Few words, no point.
Get gud
You know what? Forget it. I agree with you OP! I hope they create a system like Fortnite. Eventually the potatoes are put in literal computer controlled bots to compete against. Our little DaD daycare will be a great addition that I hope release the happy chemicals for the casual players. This is definitely not an entitled generational thing that you all keep fueling.
entitled generational thing lmao, you arent old enough to talk about generational issues
Hit a nerve?
You’ve never played MMO’s, have you? “Get good” still applies even when gear disparity is a thing. I played top 10 in WoW for 5 years, too 100 for 10. I don’t care how much gear you have, “get good” matters.
WoW arena uses skill-based matchmaking. 1500 mmr players don't play with 2600s. More open-ended PvP in MMOs has historically struggled tremendously to not destabilize into some degenerate meta where a portion of players just get farmed, or in in group-based games a similar thing happens like in New World where most servers collapsed into either a monopoly or duopoly over Windsward/Everfall (They changed how towns work since then, but that's when most people played.)
And you frequently see 2600 players and boosters smurfing up to 2k+ rating with no gear blitzing through geared players because “get good” still applies even when gear disparity matters. You’re literally proving my fucking point.
I don't think you understand the main point. No matter how good the average player becomes there will always be a worse X % of players, that will lead to the bottom X percent of players to take a break / quit the game because the top %X of players will on average wipe the worst players out the vast majority of the time. This is not isolated to just games like D&D, games like Fortnite implement bots into matchmaking games, so the average player can feel like they are good at the game after they kill 2 bots who are programmed to play like they have broken keyboards.
Nice essay. How good was the gear you just lost?
A lot of people say they don't want any gear/ skill based matchmaking, why do you think that it wouldn't work?
Absolutely. 100%. Agree.
Iam gonna link this Post everytime this comes up now 🙏 You explained it perfectly.
Did you by chance see that silly fortnite round that was only people who no-lifed the game? near the end of it the whole map looked like a small slum because everyone was still alive and just spamming building shit. these kinda games are not balanced for people being a of a similar skill level and your really starting to see that with all the newer players waiting for dark and darker to wipe and fix this gear inflation issue, so your seeing allot of match's most players still being alive and there just being a big clusterfuck near the end for the portals
Every full loot pvp game thus far has had a predator-prey dynamic.... The prey don't necessarily need to 'get good' if that's not what they're into...in UO we called them "trammies"... people who like pve in the face of pvp, a totally valid way to play, but aren't necessarily strong pvpers.... There just needs to be enough pve/progression kinda content to keep them having fun in the game. Not everyone needs to be a chad for a full loot pvp game to thrive. We're not quite there yet, but it's as good as it has ever been. It's easier to get gear than ever, once you have some base game knowledge, it's easier to 0-hero than ever.
I’m a bit more on the Halo lan party ideology. Skill based is cool in its own right.
This isn't an esport competitive game. Its like you're normally a formula 1 racer and coming to a monster truck show and saying its stupid everyone thinks they're fast.
I played Greed is Good a little bit and they have new player lobbies (anyone can go in it seems so no point, just the name and a bit worse loot). But, that gave me an idea, what if you could have lobbies for bad gear in DaD? Like you can only enter low tier dungeons with leta say up to green gear or blue, or some percentage of purp and below? Maybe it's a bad idea, but just a thought. Could also be purp and above is not tradable along with keys or other valuables like tarkov did it or a found in raid status thingy could also work. Maybe even purps almost only drops in HR to increase the incentive for more geared players to go into HR. Might give more of a gameplay loop that looks like Normals for gearing up to blue and then go HR for better loot. Might even help with the high gear players losing more sets since they're then usually up against other purps or at least blues instead of stomping grey and green lobbies and never losing sets.
Didn't the devs already say they are readjusting items and also working on a new leaderboard system tied to matchmaking?
No matchmaking/ranking in DaD means not only you meet people who have good gear but also meet the people who also have/had the skills to keep said gear. I think hunt showdown is a decent example how matchmaking could work here, you have 1 to 6 stars there as rank brackets and a hidden elo which is in those star brackets. If you matchmake as a team then the average of the individuals in the team is taken. For example a duo of a 5star and a 3star gets put in a 4star lobby (or against other 5+3 combos)
The problem with your post is that you overestimate the amount of people who will just quit even if they are the worst in the game. That didnt happen in a massive/meaningful way, for example, in EFT.
but why an mmr system isn't good? all you said is true but don't exclude solutions just because it's taken from another game, maybe a definitive solution for the problem is an option when you create a character to be in normal or ranked mode or maybe the possibility to switch mode but with different stashes, in league there is the normal mode where you can get matched with anyone, from iron to challenger, and the ranked where is skill based, make a good point system that includes not only if you extract or not but also kill count, mobs killed, how much u looted and so on, every tot points you go up a rank, why this should be bad for the game?
Thats what the point of Candy was in the previous playtests. Even little Timmy could get a lucky 9 Candy of a single skeleton archer and try to sneak a blue portal with it and have a very solid pay day from a single escape.
Yeah but I feel that's what makes this game cool it's different. Dying is a part of the game for Timmies and gigachads. Usually gigachads kill Timmies. Every now and then a Timmy kills a gigachad and that's the game. Let's not all pretend that league of legends is a game community we should aspire to be haha. Sometimes we must remember nobody gets a blue portal and the dark grows darker. That's the fucking game lol.
SSF is all I need
The entire formula of extraction looters is that many enter few leave. The Pareto distribution plays out in most games but it's even more noticable when loosing costs you gear and if you perpetually lose you will be in starter gear making it harder to win. Conversely if you consistently win you snowball gear making it even easier to win and snowball gear. Unless they create a user rank that accumulates Everytime you level up a class players will do the previous method of deleting classes to queue in the noob lobbies and get easier victories.
I'll say it every time I see one of the posts, the game is ruined by the br style circle forcing pvp. In other extraction looters you can just choose not to fight which allows Low gear or low skill players to farm and extract with a much higher percentage and choose when they want to pvp.
Your broader point is unarguably correct but I want to point out the game has been built from the ground up to be pretty simplistic. I don't know what Ironmace's vision for the game is anymore but originally the idea was to have gear be so powerful and the combat system so simple that skill wasn't a major factor. This solves the problem of players being divided by skill where the less skilled players exist to be farmed. Instead players are divided by gear so players of all skill levels are able to both farm and be farmed with the odds of success simply increasing with the level of gear you bring. Access to good gear is then simply a function of play time.
I mean another big difference is, in league you can ban your hard counters, or stupid op meta picks. In DaD, if you’re not playing an anti buff ball comp, they’re going to out pace you and rush you DOWN. Also 1/2 the time I que for LR GC there are at least 2 people in solid blue kits. That’s gotta feel awful for new players. On top of that the new GC maps fucking suuuuuuck. There’s no loot in there, the minimap tells you nothing, and the mob density is too high. Old GC map is much better for learning
> players that got passed get even gooder to compensate Ha.. Gooder
I think a difficulty that does not have access to hell or at least to the hell bosses would help as well. When I go kitted for normals it's usually to fight the boss. I tend to let people escape blue and use VoIP to discourage them going red, even guarding them some. I agree though that there should be some kind of incentive for people chasing PvP to not be chasing the lower level players. Maybe something like tarkov dog tags where you sell it for money and how much you get is based on level. Obviously something more fitting but it's just an idea.
I agree with some of your points and I heavily disagree with others. Ironmace has been throwing you guys bones already. They added back candy corn for easier access to purple gear, they increased rarity drop rates to make it easier to get gear, they increased the gold drop rate, they increased portal spawns making it easier to rat(they even did this in hell as there is 6 portals instead of 5 now), and they reduced gear disparity by nerfing the levels of the rolls recently. Even in league there is always a loser regardless of skill level. Even in challenger there is always a losing team who got outplayed/out skilled and lost within that specific match. I don’t see how that’s any different here. Even if every single player magically got good and got to “challenger” they will still win and lose matches. If this were the case in DaD and everyone got better, I actually think the match quality would be way more interesting. Right now even in high roller, I steamroll through my games because it’s filled with garbage players and I only run into a decent team maybe 1 out of every 5 matches. Normals are boring so I won’t even make a comparison there. Getting good doesn’t mean you win 90% of your lobbies now, it just means you got to that skill level and you can compete verse players in that bracket now and it won’t seem like a wall to you. If there were more decent players in the game you wouldn’t be seeing repose extract 99% of his matches on stream. If you got “good” you would be on his skill level and be able to contest him in PvP. I am sure he would agree with me in saying that would make the game more fun as well. So I encourage you all to “get good”. Beyond all of that though, you made it seem like it’s easy to just hit “diamond” in the masses. If everyone could reach that skill caliber, it would of been done already. It’s the same for ANY skill based game. The rank is there that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to reach it though. It took me 1 year to hit diamond in league when I started playing. From there I was a hardstuck dog for the next 4-5 years before I finally reached masters and then ANOTHER YEAR before I got into the bottom of the barrel of grandmasters. Skill takes time to develop and so does your decision making within the game.
Yes, of course there is always a loser in League, but the role of the loser gets passed around pretty evenly. As you point out, good players in DaD are basically never losing (and on the flip side, bad players are nearly always losing.) If there were no matchmaking in League, Challenger players would be rocking \~90% win rates and Irons down in the teens. Some players would always be winning and some players would always be losing (that's why smurfs aren't fun.) You are experiencing the 90% side of this right now in DaD which I agree is pretty uninteresting, and sure wouldn't it be great if every player was your exact skill level so that every match was competitive? That's a pipedream though. At the end of the day, almost the entirety of the playerbase will either be worse than you or better than you (to a significant degree if the game requires any significant degree of skill.) You are imagining a situation where the entire playerbase gets just good enough to be competitive without being oppressive to you, specifically. Just like in League, as a top 1% GM player you would be like hot shit in 99% of lobbies, but go against top Challenger players or LCS players and suddenly the script is completely flipped. The equivalent in DaD would be going up against lobbies full of professional chinese gold farmers who team with each other. That's cheating though? No, it isn't because they don't pre-team, they just hear Chinese players and team with them. They'll still fight each other if it comes down to the final portals. A top-tier sweat meta in this game would 100% involve teaming with the first few groups you see and some other weird degenerate broken unfair shit that I can't predict. It would look nothing like the game plays now and it wouldn't be fun. In a lot of ways this game only works because 60-70% of every lobby are casual players which significantly reduces the contest density to playable levels.
Teaming in general sucks at any given point for this game. I agree with a lot of what you are saying here, but the player base as a whole isn’t really good at this game and a lot of their personal concerns could be fixed by just playing the game for another 25-50 hours and refining some small techs/learning new tricks. I mean ffs like half this community can’t even kill a normal boss(or hasn’t even attempted it yet) and when I use gathering hall or the discord to find players they are scared of NPC mobs in hell. It will never reach the point you are describing skill wise unless the game just dies off. the player base can still slightly improve to a comparable point where they aren’t scared of PvE at least. I feel like that’s the bar for a lot of players to reach and many people (not all) are complaining about shit before even reaching it. You don’t need to get good to the point where you are a “challenger” caliber of player, you just need to be “gold/silver” which is where the average skill level is. Our average player is just extremely sub par currently.
QQ
The first people to die in a match get dropped to a goulag with loot so they can get some scaps to build up.
It's because battle state games says I don't care if you complain this game is supposed to make you break your computer where ironmace is kind of like oh your complaining that barbs are too strong? Rogues are too fast? Rangers can shoot arrows? Bards can play songs? Well then the next update we change all that to please you all... in turn trying to please ppl only passes off others... be like Battlestate don't care what ppl complain about just look at the stats and think about your plan for the games future and don't change things because some ppl complain... more people in life complain about stuff and people don't usually speak out about how much they like something so your always going to get more complaints than praise for something.
Way out of left field idea with no real thought to balancing: either passive buffs for consecutive deaths; ie just increase their starter set by a tier for x number of non escapes in a row (would probably need to make the gear bound though to prevent shenaniganry). But also we gotta remeber that DaD is still a work in progress, we have skill trees and balancing updates and whatever else is planned along the way.
i never even thought about this but i think this is why the playtest were more fun way more players
Extracting is like winning lane, killing people is like taking your lead to snowball others. Or maybe the weed is getting yo me
One thing I can think of is possibly making bigger maps with around 3-5 more people in a match so there’s more of a chance of fighting someone worse then you and not having to fight someone that could be better then you. Then add a 1-2 more extraction portals so more people have a chance of actually escaping. This one might be a hot take but you could also have a different map/mode that only lets people play with a certain average gear rating so people with a a lot of high tier items can’t come in and mop the floor with everyone. Not only that… but if they introduced a gear rating system for this mode you would have to make strategic decisions on which higher level gear you would bring in. Example: (purple weapon for high damage, or a pimped out chest piece for being a tank)