I love Compilations!!!!

For the algo!

Agreed with everything you said. I’ve been saying this for a long time that there inside operations just seems very poor. I remember there was an interview, I believe with One Peg where Grayson and SDF mention they’re reaching +70 employees. “Am I like… so with progression of the game, why has everything been so slow?”. I understand they’re a small company, probably don’t have experience running one in the first place, but is time to start hiring the right guys for each section of the business.

It makes no sense to release a system feature complete in software engineering, the only way to do so is releasing a system with all the wrong features.

This season isn't even that bad it's just really "mid" imo. The content they added wasn't bad either but it feels like nothing has really changed, it feels like the same as last wipe to me with just another map to fight on and a boss that I'll learn within a week, the core replayability has become stale I still play every now and then but I just really want "content" that'll change the core gameplay every wipe, add stuff to classes, add a bunch of new weapons and armor, new spells, and reworks of old/unused perks and skills. Another gripe that I have with is that the test server has 0 testing and 0 content to do at all, it's just wasting time and money keeping a test servers up if ur not using it, add upcoming content to the test servers with balance changes, give players full affinity, gold, materials, and testing grounds to actually test it. It's been months and the test servers are still barebones.

SDF still needs to be reigned in on TTK. I seem to be the only saying it these days, but nerfing PDR into the ground was not a good idea. That saaaaaid... I noticed around 2 patches ago they majorly upped the drop rate on max health rolls and it has been very easy to spot the difference in the economy, despite them not mentioning it. This does help with the problem from a practical standpoint, though dumping a ton of HP on your gear shouldn't be the only solution.

Game is Hella fun right now imo. The last patch was really good. 👌

Your bard loves taking naps

Me 5 hours in... "spider mummies suck" Me 500 hours in... "please remove spider mummies"! Me 2000 hours in... "GET RID OF THE DAMN SPIDER MUMMIES!!!"

expressman loot remains looted status but you lose the found by you status?

Ironmace will screw it up. They seem to want two games. Either a dungeon crawler or a PvP sweaty arena like game. Loot is meh... Doesn't matter at all ... Might as well remove green or grey loot all together ... It's a melee game but hey let's make everything have a gun. Let's make it easier to shoot from distance and all the melee classes can suffer.

As always great takes 👍

Also I see that you are trying to branch out and I love that you made me known about other dungeon crawler games, I think that if someone can make a PvE version of DaD but expand massively on the enemies and game mechanics without having to worry about things like balance. The losing all your stuff on death works perfectly in a rouge lite setting and if you can bring a friend or 2 along I think a game like that will sell like hot cakes

Fyi they buff loot in the last 50% of wipe, it will be reverted next wipe (past 3 wipes they have done this)

The lich didn't get reduced magic damage. It is only "normal mobs" unless it's bugged. It might be the gear increase that's given you a different experience for lich.

Ok so, this man, is well seasoned and well spent in the dungeon, this is the first vid I've seen of him and every point was spot on. This is the time to play, this is the time to cheer. Well said mate

Good info and great game suggestions. demos? thanks!!

Looking forward to the deletion of random modifiers or the normalization of base stats across rarity tiers. Been playing since PT2 and have gotten bored of the tedium that high roller brings, its just not enjoyable and really too much of a toss up. So ever since they added the squire ive just been playing in 25 and under lobbies cause the pvp is way better and it removes the tedium. Stopped playing about a month ago though because having to redo the annoying quests just for white gear in the squire every season just became too much time wasted doing things i didnt want to do. This gear change will bring me back, though i will promptly be leaving when they delete duos. Always these devs with good changes next to terrible changes. Deleting duos is by far one of their most tone-deaf changes by far though. Trios is literally the least played mode by their own metrics, but theyre too prideful to recognize this so theyre just deleting duos. What a shame. They'll be losing a very large chunk of their playerbase because of this. Also as a sidenote that i forgot to mention, the loot buff is also really nice. Helps reduce that tedium i was talking about especially if they arent deleting random modifiers.

While people may say that seeing more higher tier loot makes loot unattracted completely forget that a major part of loot is the random rolls you get AND what kind of item it is, I'm going to be more excited about a orange spellbook with 3 rolls I want rather than a legendary flute. So even with everyone walking out of the dungeon with a ton of good loot, I think that it's a amazing change hands down. Maybe someone playing like 10 hours a day may get bored but you gotta throw the casuals a bone in some regard. Especially when people are complaining about getting gear diffed, so give them more gear. Finally, if the 10 hour a day neets need something to work towards there always is farming artifacts which is still a very low drop rate, in fact I think they made some of them lower, don't take my word for it, it was just something I saw in a video I can't remember at the moment.

The loot changes are going back to old dnd. It is the first step to laying the groundwork before they move onto once again tightening the gear disparity and lowering the ttk. This will allow players to play the game to get gear instead of sitting on the trade for a long time to make a kit before going in. Lowering the downtime. The upcoming gear changes will once again allow players is lower gear be able to potentially kill players in better gear and with the lower ttk, able to 1vX. They have stated they do want to move towards once again removing gbmm and queues the loot change along with what's to come lays the groundwork for that. This upcoming week will be the first pivotal change.

Loot and Expressman are both a huge W. Better loot makes the game more exciting and allows the more casual player to interact with the game rather than be mowed down by no lifers instantly, which kills the playerbase.

I think they heard enough feedback from us on major things. Now LET THEM COOCK!

Yep. 3 fucking hours of server down for patching and +2 hours of 'sorry something goes wrong'. Im sure that a big part of new members just never started the game because it was on maintenance. Sad that such a good game takes the wrong way

Meh I think the game is Greta but do wish there were more noobs

I didn’t realize so many had stopped playing in the last 90 days. That’s crazy. I have also felt that religions and arena were silly wastes of development time. Feels like the steam is running out on this game. Hopefully not.

They moving in the right direction

Range. No risk for missing. I'm okay with being punished for missing but seeing Two pdr fighters with long bows faster than me and never in melee range constantly peppering me with arrows... can't see how that's something someone is okay with. Good with holding multiple windlasses or a crap ton of hunting traps, it's just... makes the game feel really bad

I loved your point about banning cheaters and IM still not addressing legit players getting false banned (even if for a week). I was false banned a couple months ago and wasn't reactivated until a week had gone by. No explanation for why I was banned and support was 0 help. An IM dev even asked the recently false-banned people like me for remote PC access to make sure we weren't running cheat programs. My ban was completely false and I didn't even know I was unbanned until I randomly tried to log in and was able to get in. Imagine how many new people catch a false ban and then just decide to drop the game altogether? My activity in the game has been super minimal since. I don't know if I'll ever be "into" the game like I was before. Such a shame

Dont get me wrong you have a ton of valid points like a TON that I agree with but Kimchi truck is absurd LMAO

Let them cook lil bro; Roll with the punches or just tap out. We all appreciate the insight though.

Whats wrong with the ui?

commenting for awareness because you are making so many great points. there should be polls or something for them to gauge where the playerbase is at, other than what streamers say..

They had the gaming world in their hands until the last couple patches. Instead of balancing some shit, they do fucking arenas and religions. No one gives a shit about religions. Arenas might be ok one day, but not today. Finish the fucking game. Fix the servers, fix the broke shit, and then just add classes and maps. It’s not difficult. Why bother with this other shit

I dont wanna sound like one of IM haters, but I've been around since first playtests. I've held the line, I believed in the 9th, I was there all this time. And one thing I've started to understand is, Ironmace devs have no idea what they're doing. I kinda just feel like the core of the game, it's strongest point that made it completely explode in popularity is what was created during devs' time at Nexon, but now that they are on their own, having to ACTUALLY MAKE THE GAME now, they're just stuck. They go back and forth on balance changes because they just dont know how to deal with their classes interacting with each other, the new content is added with snail-pace and every time it feels like it was added at the lowest possible cost and effort, with Arena and Religion mechanic being top example: Arena is just copy-pasted existing room without any changes at all, with sub-bosses, chests, mobs and all, with shameless "New game mode" stample, and religion is just "drop gold to get + 0.0000001% to bowel movement efficiency" type of buff. Watching DaD's development as a fan was like watching your loved one slowly succumb to an illness with incompetent doctors take care of it.

Ive been addicted to this game since playtest 2 but finally quit a few months ago. I will list my core reasons. 1) I just can no longer deal with the approach to balance. Classes going from completely game breaking broken to useless in a single patch, then back the next one, then back again. Video game balance is very hard, but ironmace just cant seem to find a formula that works. 2) The pve is boring once you start to figure it out. The npcs are very basic and only difficult because of a lack of game knowledge at the start. Essentially everything is either spaced, kited, or cheesed. Bosses are incredibly cheap health sponges that rely on you to master a fight to win without taking a hit, which in an extract looter game feels very tedious. 3) Content is extremely low. The pvp is often shafted by the poor balance updates, wich leaves the rest of the game. The lack of fleshing out classes, new classes, new weapon mechanics, monsters, anything - there is basically nothing. We waited eons to get the druid update, then Iron mace cant figure out its balance and guts the class shortly after. 4) The biggest issue is direction. The game seems to have no idea what it wants to be. Combat has become a kiting range meta, a fraction of the player base engages with the new bosses added, yet they are given so much importance. Quests rely on going into dungeons and doing basic things that could take hours depending on if you get the right module and survive. The warlock bounces between being an op glass cannon melee assasin to an extremely abusable ranged character that kites forever. Certain classes are never touched even though no one or everyone plays them. Dont get me started on the ranked mode and ap, a nothingburger grind against mobs sped up to hyperspeeds to increase difficulty. Im starting to feel like they have lost the plot, lost their vision. The lawsuit sucks for sure, and maybe its true that no one else can lead and they Soley rely on sdf to tell them what to do. Overall, at this state, the game as a whole entirely does not respect your time and effort put in whatsoever.

This is a good video pushing for a positive direction but personally - I've already given up. Cheaters and the normalization of RMT are the biggest reasons, so many big names or even wardens and moderators of the discord which is the only place to get ANY info on anything from the devs are confirmed cheaters. Most of the people you see in there openly share it and do it or make excuses for it. The game isn't competitively respectable when every wipe the people in the top 10 on the leaderboard are known cheaters like Dytch or noskillbruv that get forgiven over and over again or even given positions of power in the community by the devs. If you can't even do that ironmace and actually punish the people ruining the game, why should I stay? I hope the game does well and I wish them the best but as someone here from the start that played in high level lobbies this is where I get off the train. I'd rather play deadlock or something else I have more faith in. Dark and darker is cool but I've come to actively dislike the community as we've bled all our casual players and we can't even be honest about calling out cheaters anymore. The map design of just sticking endless nightmare mobs in highroller and doing PVE bosses over and over just to grind money to lose it to a cheater is boring, I'm sorry but it is. It's not skilled and worse than that, it's boring.

Well let's hope it gets better. Would be a shame if the game would fail rn! I played a lot since the wipe. And I actually never had any rubberbanding since then. U guys play on the correct server? I play on central EU.

I'm one of the missing players, but don't worry I just forgot to tell sdf I was leaving so he probably put out a missing person report since he was worried. Unfortunately, although I love many of the ideas behind Dark and Darker, from the standpoint of a game designer and a competitive player there are just too many problems for me to continue putting up with. If Ironmace wants their game to be more competitive and PvP focused then the current combat system is lacking, since there's just not enough consistency for skill expression opportunities. Much of the combat is designed around melee-centrism, but with the way hitslow and ranged options are balanced (at least last time I played, correct me if I'm wrong) the punishment for attempting melee combat outside of quick finishing blows or all-ins with team members fully supporting you simply does not incentivize that kind of gameplay. Furthermore, there are very few abilities in the game that alleviate this issue, such as reliable disengage abilities, and the few abilities that meet these criteria are often given to ranged-focus classes such as ranger's backstep, wizard's invisibility, or warlock's phantomize. Meanwhile, engaging in melee with targets that are anything more than within one-shot range guarantees a sacrifice of precious hp which makes team fights harder to sustain and third party fights more difficult to avoid. The best strategy in the game (again, last time I played) was to rely on ranged options, preferably picking a class that excels at range, and force stalemates by running away and closing doors behind oneself to slow down pursuers. In a game so heavily inspired by D&D and fantasy style combat and adventure, where generally a well rounded team of melee, ranged, and magic specialists should be able to work around each other, you know you have an issue when the factors that determine what builds do the best comes down almost entirely to sustained range damage, move speed, and door breaching capabilities. On the other hand, if they want their game to be more focused on adventure, progression, and PvE, then they definitely need to be doing ALOT more than what they currently have, and as you said in your video they need to eliminate distraction content from their roadmap. The arena and religion system feel like optional minigames that are easily forgettable, such as the stratagem minigame in Helldivers 2 that's there simply to kill time between stretches of actual gameplay. There needs to be a tavern room with Tarkov-esque hideout progression, a revamped levelling system, or many other possible features that actually compliment the existing gameplay loop, on top of the absolute largest necessity of adding maps, enemies, bosses, equipment, loot, and classes to the game. Instead of DaD I went back to Overwatch 2 for a little bit, and even though it has plenty of its own problems I was able to enjoy it more from a competitive player's perspective. Luckily I wasn't stuck there long, since I've been playing and absolutely loving Deadlock recently. Right there's a game that knows what it is, what makes it good, what's important to keep it healthy, and how to further cultivate the ideas that make it unique from its predecessors. And if someone is looking for that PvE, fantasy adventure experience, I hate to say it but I don't think there's an option on the market right now that includes PvP, so DaD just may not be it. That being said, there's tons of co-op games out there, and if you're feeling frustrated with DaD I would highly recommend trying other games and occasionally checking back to see if IM manages to cook up some good changes while you're gone

This video gives really strong reddit vibes. There's a pithy, sassy, attempt at trying to be critical, and while you do bring up some valid problems that Ironmace is facing with managing the game, the attitude you're delivering them is really counter intuitive to the change you wanna see. Some Problems mentioned: RMT Content/Balance Cycle Player Loss Communication Development of Arena/Religion RMT: A very difficult problem that persists across all modern games, especially ones that have player driven economies and full loot. The only real solutions i've seen in gaming are designing systems around this to discourage the practice all together, Or building a rule set in the game that limits trading all together---(Albion online and solo self found modes.) Content/Balance Cycle: In my opinion, IM has done a really good job over the past year of building/re-hashing, and updating their Content. New maps/development of those maps over time, and listening to the player base of how those changes should be made. They jump the gun a bit when they announce things early and give themselves a due-date...In my opinion they should avoid this practice all together. Their balance changes have historically been too all in, but over the last few months they've done a good job of making the initial change and then walking some of the changes back in the next following weeks. This is probably the most difficult thing to manage in all of development. They get a par for me. Player Loss: Early access, The cycle of life for an extraction game combined with its difficulty, Lack of new player guidance explaining some of the finer mechanics of the game (Mob Kissing for example). I'm of the belief that they shouldn't add a new player experience, tutorials are never fun and attracting the lowest common denominator of players isn't healthy for the game. People who need a high level of hand holding will likely find multiple other reasons to bounce off of this game than just being a newb. Communication: I can't think of another game who regularly engages with their streamer-base to disseminate long-form conversations about the state and future of the game. We could use more communication for sure, but I'd bet there's something along the lines of lawyer advice for their ongoing court case. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT A BIG DADDY COMPANY IS TRYING TO SWEAT THEM OUT AND TAX THEM IN THE LEAGAL SYSTEM TO DESTROY THEIR GAME. This is incredibly difficult for any gaming studio to deal with, let a lone a new one. Arena: I was always a big proponent of not doing this, but after playing it I'm about 50/50 on it. Building a kit for arena is fun, getting insta pvp is fun. Having to trick the game out (leaving one alive) or being able to net huge sums of money via the skull key in demon throne are problems that seem unaccounted for. However, in a beginning state I think this allows for a different avenue of play...already different builds for classes are seeing some use and that means it's working in my opinion. Keeping it for the weekend or every couple of days is also great as it gives time for people to build kits/something to look forward to. I'd rather the sub-bosses be behind lever operated doors with possibly a higher level version of them. Some mobs in the arena are fine as it adds to the chaos. Religion: This needs to have more meaning than just a tab sheet in the UI. More specifically, it needs to be represented some what in the actual game.

I really liked this game, and primarily liked running norms. I was 12th on the normal ranked ladder at one point (FurdwarthBunkledunk in game name) and ended the season 22nd. I quit ranked play from consistently being teamed on, which has been somewhat addressed. I quit the game as a whole b/c of balance, being one shot by druids and the normal mode being dissected into the multiple gear score zones. This game is punishing. You lose everything on death (minus the crappy buy back mechanic.) So to continue to tune the game towards one shot deaths, dying to glitches, and having the sweats invade normal lobbies made it too punishing for me, and I'm pretty sweaty myself. I came to the realization that I either endure the pain of loss over and over or join the meta slaves and exploit the newbs. I didn't like either option so I left. IMO if they upped the time to kill, gave each class a ranged weapon of some sort as it gives a huuuge advantage (a sling and rocks for cleric/barb would slap) and maybe limit the number of equipped items you can loot off of a player this game would be more fun, and fun is what we're here for. It's so hard on the new players in general, but when things feel unfair (see one shotting) I think its just human nature to either join the cheese or to just leave as I did. Just one mans opinion. Thx for the vid.

Tweaking numbers by doubling them or halving them, sometimes even %300 +/- and calling it "balance" was why i dropped the game. Anyone with competitive gaming background would understand that balancing is done by statistics for low and high skill ceiling to tune numbers up and down. Yes i said tune, not DOUBLE or TRIPLE values on demand of Reddit, content creators or discord spammers. On top of that i realized that (after +500 hours playtime in 2 months) this company does not plan to invest into the future of this game. It feels like they have 1 coder, 2 designers, 1 guy that has no idea how to balance/polish the meta and a small house office. Goddamn, even the smallest hot fix takes hours to apply, then there is 20 new bugs that people abuse. Every...single...patch. Then there is one of the most toxic, fanatic, non-agreeable balance chatter community out there. It's always "my class is weak and needs a buff" and "it's skill issue" arguments. Try to say in any chat that one shotting bosses are not a good idea for an extraction looter, you will get curb stomped. They act like the same people that play a souls game for a month, memorize every powerspike item locations for their runs or every animation to dodge a boss, then to feel better, they go out there and tell new players "skill issue". Yeah, knowing how to cheese any mob by standing on top of an object or camping bosses (that nearly one shot you if you didn't pixel perfect position) to third party, what a gameplay that is, wow!

If the game dies a horrible death, atleast we'll know they dont watch these videos koopa. Keep making them!