Dear Tripwire Interactive. David Amata, Molly, Yoshiro. Dan Weiss, Alex Quick. Developers from Saber who may have a say, Tulio, Roberto, etc.
I have a proposal on a new official difficulty in KF2. You don't have to do much, as I already implemented all of the below and been testing extensively for >2 years and can just share it with you. I have 5K hours in this game and have been playing it and modding it for a number of years.
Here are the basic stats I've collected on server popularity depending on the difficulty they run.
There's probably a pattern here, which is shifting the game difficulties people play towards the hardest the game can offer. Easier difficulties lose the servers the most with time. This happens for a number of reasons:
1. Progress in gaming hardware which allows to have experience with more frames per second which affects ability to aim quickly and accurately tremendously;
2. Power creep of the recent years, a little in skills (a number of SWAT skills, a number of Survivalist skills, Sharpshooter's "Ranger" skill buff), but mostly in weapons (HRG Nailgun allows SWAT to effectively deal with fleshpounds, HRG Locust allows effortless play by almost any perk, HRG Kaboomstick trivializes the demolitionist play, HRG Incision allows the medic to deal with big zeds effectively, almost all perks now have weapons that allow to apply afflictions and allow for effective parrying/blocking, e.g. Frost Fang for support for easy freeze, HRG Disrupter for Gunslinger for easy EMP, HV Storm Cannon for Sharpshooter for easy EMP, etc);
3. The game getting old and time played overall by hardcore players improves their skill.
This all combined causes players in this game to seek a more challenging play. If they can't find that, they move on to other games. Which you don't want.
Yes, you've made an attemt to do it with the "Abandon All Hope" difficulty, but it has major issues, the biggest one is that it's active only once per every 20 weeks, and another one is it relies on difficulty techniques that are widely considered by the player community to be "artificial difficulty" that most don't enjoy, such as spawn rage mechanic on fleshpounds/quarterpounds.
Thus, a new, harder than "Hell on Earth", difficulty is warranted. I've made an attempt to offer one on a number of servers I've been tuning for more than 2 years and can offer specific changes. I've been interviewing the players a lot on the difficulty changes and I think have a good grasp what they enjoy and what they don't.
What this new difficulty should have? I have all specific numbers tested and implemented already and ready to share them, if needed, but in general:
* There is no need to develop any new resource intensive content, such as new animations, new monsters, etc.
* The game's spawn manager, game conductor and most difficulty values stay as is.
* Regular speed and damage values for "Hell on Earth" zeds is arguably enough, however, I can see merit in increasing their speed (calm and raged) and damage for about 7-10% as compared to Hell on Earth.
* It's warranted to increase the MaxMonsters value present on the map 1.5-2 times. The game handles that perfectly fine. Yes, there's some FPS drop on potato PCs, but it's been 7 years since the release, a lot of people run better PCs now.
* It's warranted to spawn more big zeds and earlier. For example, 1-3 scrakes on wave 1, depending on the number of players in a game, is perfectly fine. Overall you are looking at getting about 300 big zeds per 10 wave game, which is roughly 3-4 times more than regular "Hell on Earth".
* It's warranted to normalize the spawn cycles. I get that there was an idea to make the game's difficulty go up and down, but after all these years it can be stated with certainty that you went overboard with this initially. On one hand, no player enjoys sitting idle and doing nothing because there's simply no zeds around and there's nothing to shoot at. People play this game to shoot at monsters. On the other hand, dealing with 2 fleshpound + 6 quarterpound spawns is not fun, especially when exacerbated with the spawn rage mechanic. People don't play this game to die to RNG which doesn't take into account mistakes or right choices. I propose the play in difficulty is narrowed down a bit and squad difficulty is homogenized. I have specifics.
* It makes sense to reduce the unpopular zeds presence in the spawn cycles. I get that you have no intention to roll back the Quarterpounds or EDARs or Rioters, but you can easily make their presence in the game less annoying by just reducing their quantities as compared to vanilla "Hell on Earth". Squads like 2 fleshpounds + 6 quartepounds, 33% of them spawnraged, are just not fun to deal with, but it can be addressed by spawning less of them and spreading them across the wave more instead of spamming the player with them. E.g. a chance of a husk to spawn as EDAR can be reduced from 0.2 to 0.05. Or, instead of this "chance to spawn" mechanic, which brings too much RNG and breaks the logic of "husk only" waves for endless, EDARs can instead be directly put into the spawn cycles, thus, reducing the RNG even further and allowing to alter the share of EDAR trappers which are hated the most. It's viable and it's easy to do. The same applies to rioters.
* A lot of minor numerical changes, such as increasing the trader time a bit as even on official maps one isn't oftentimes in position to pick the weapon up and reach the trader both if one dies. This is warranted because on higher difficulties players die more often. Increasing the dropped weapon despawn time, addressing the things that were poorly tested and never fixed, such as Atk_RageLunge_V1 on fleshpounds being too slow to the point when a crouching sharpshooter can just crouch away from it without getting hit, etc.
It's unlikely that you want to implement everything 1:1 according to my vision, but it's fine, I'm open for discussing these things and no matter to what extent it gets implemented, if it gets implemented, it's still going to be an improvement.
I fully realize that, if implemented, it will likely make the servers I host less popular, because they are going to lose their uniqueness. But I want to do this for players. It's a great game and in the end I believe everyone benefits if it's advanced such that more players stay with it and enjoy it. Waiting for your answer, TWI.
I have a proposal on a new official difficulty in KF2. You don't have to do much, as I already implemented all of the below and been testing extensively for >2 years and can just share it with you. I have 5K hours in this game and have been playing it and modding it for a number of years.
Here are the basic stats I've collected on server popularity depending on the difficulty they run.
| servers worldwide: | hoe | suicidal | hard | normal | totals |
| 01/01/22 | 387 | 568 | 910 | 643 | 2508 |
| 01/01/23 | 533 | 319 | 623 | 547 | 2022 |
| 06/04/23 | 315 | 394 | 569 | 484 | 1762 |
There's probably a pattern here, which is shifting the game difficulties people play towards the hardest the game can offer. Easier difficulties lose the servers the most with time. This happens for a number of reasons:
1. Progress in gaming hardware which allows to have experience with more frames per second which affects ability to aim quickly and accurately tremendously;
2. Power creep of the recent years, a little in skills (a number of SWAT skills, a number of Survivalist skills, Sharpshooter's "Ranger" skill buff), but mostly in weapons (HRG Nailgun allows SWAT to effectively deal with fleshpounds, HRG Locust allows effortless play by almost any perk, HRG Kaboomstick trivializes the demolitionist play, HRG Incision allows the medic to deal with big zeds effectively, almost all perks now have weapons that allow to apply afflictions and allow for effective parrying/blocking, e.g. Frost Fang for support for easy freeze, HRG Disrupter for Gunslinger for easy EMP, HV Storm Cannon for Sharpshooter for easy EMP, etc);
3. The game getting old and time played overall by hardcore players improves their skill.
This all combined causes players in this game to seek a more challenging play. If they can't find that, they move on to other games. Which you don't want.
Yes, you've made an attemt to do it with the "Abandon All Hope" difficulty, but it has major issues, the biggest one is that it's active only once per every 20 weeks, and another one is it relies on difficulty techniques that are widely considered by the player community to be "artificial difficulty" that most don't enjoy, such as spawn rage mechanic on fleshpounds/quarterpounds.
Thus, a new, harder than "Hell on Earth", difficulty is warranted. I've made an attempt to offer one on a number of servers I've been tuning for more than 2 years and can offer specific changes. I've been interviewing the players a lot on the difficulty changes and I think have a good grasp what they enjoy and what they don't.
What this new difficulty should have? I have all specific numbers tested and implemented already and ready to share them, if needed, but in general:
* There is no need to develop any new resource intensive content, such as new animations, new monsters, etc.
* The game's spawn manager, game conductor and most difficulty values stay as is.
* Regular speed and damage values for "Hell on Earth" zeds is arguably enough, however, I can see merit in increasing their speed (calm and raged) and damage for about 7-10% as compared to Hell on Earth.
* It's warranted to increase the MaxMonsters value present on the map 1.5-2 times. The game handles that perfectly fine. Yes, there's some FPS drop on potato PCs, but it's been 7 years since the release, a lot of people run better PCs now.
* It's warranted to spawn more big zeds and earlier. For example, 1-3 scrakes on wave 1, depending on the number of players in a game, is perfectly fine. Overall you are looking at getting about 300 big zeds per 10 wave game, which is roughly 3-4 times more than regular "Hell on Earth".
* It's warranted to normalize the spawn cycles. I get that there was an idea to make the game's difficulty go up and down, but after all these years it can be stated with certainty that you went overboard with this initially. On one hand, no player enjoys sitting idle and doing nothing because there's simply no zeds around and there's nothing to shoot at. People play this game to shoot at monsters. On the other hand, dealing with 2 fleshpound + 6 quarterpound spawns is not fun, especially when exacerbated with the spawn rage mechanic. People don't play this game to die to RNG which doesn't take into account mistakes or right choices. I propose the play in difficulty is narrowed down a bit and squad difficulty is homogenized. I have specifics.
* It makes sense to reduce the unpopular zeds presence in the spawn cycles. I get that you have no intention to roll back the Quarterpounds or EDARs or Rioters, but you can easily make their presence in the game less annoying by just reducing their quantities as compared to vanilla "Hell on Earth". Squads like 2 fleshpounds + 6 quartepounds, 33% of them spawnraged, are just not fun to deal with, but it can be addressed by spawning less of them and spreading them across the wave more instead of spamming the player with them. E.g. a chance of a husk to spawn as EDAR can be reduced from 0.2 to 0.05. Or, instead of this "chance to spawn" mechanic, which brings too much RNG and breaks the logic of "husk only" waves for endless, EDARs can instead be directly put into the spawn cycles, thus, reducing the RNG even further and allowing to alter the share of EDAR trappers which are hated the most. It's viable and it's easy to do. The same applies to rioters.
* A lot of minor numerical changes, such as increasing the trader time a bit as even on official maps one isn't oftentimes in position to pick the weapon up and reach the trader both if one dies. This is warranted because on higher difficulties players die more often. Increasing the dropped weapon despawn time, addressing the things that were poorly tested and never fixed, such as Atk_RageLunge_V1 on fleshpounds being too slow to the point when a crouching sharpshooter can just crouch away from it without getting hit, etc.
It's unlikely that you want to implement everything 1:1 according to my vision, but it's fine, I'm open for discussing these things and no matter to what extent it gets implemented, if it gets implemented, it's still going to be an improvement.
I fully realize that, if implemented, it will likely make the servers I host less popular, because they are going to lose their uniqueness. But I want to do this for players. It's a great game and in the end I believe everyone benefits if it's advanced such that more players stay with it and enjoy it. Waiting for your answer, TWI.
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