u/Abject_Scholar_8685

In 3 hours, or starting next patch you will not.

Gear will matter too much, TTK will be too low for skill expression, and anyone saying "Just run BIS" will not themselves be running BIS in solo queue against teams of 3. Why?
Aside from no longer starting on a level gear playing field which is half the reason this mode is so popular

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Because you can stack all the armor you want but when three people hit you with a combined total of their +20 true damage each that PDR/MDR might as well not exist.

Nobody is donating their kits to premade. Rat meta runs supreme, and the classes and builds than can poke and run will dominate the handful of solo players who didn't quit. This is not, however, the '1v3 fantasy' and 'heroic moments' SDF keeps alluding to wanting in his kitchen ramblings.

A person capable of learning would have taken these learnings and learned from them.

SDF? No shot.

"If we're going to die, we will die. I don't care about that."
Is literally what he said about how far he is willing to take these upcoming changes. There will be no course correction, no revert, no come to Jesus moment.

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RIP Game: Skill out, Gamble Gear in!
Anyone suggesting that doomerism is an over reaction has not been here long enough. We've seen it all before and I could tell you this was coming back from miles away two years ago, a month ago, a day ago.

The core problem with Dark and Darker has ALWAYS been about skill vs gear diff. See above post from 2 years ago. SDF lacked the technical ability to implement better skill diff mechanics, and he lacked the creative ability to balance around anything other than "Me have higher number me win". He literally said in the Tavern talk today that he was unable to program inventory sorting until a month ago without the use of modern AI. That's a damning admission coming from a guy who now says he "looked at the code base recently and it is a mess". Being a terrible software developer is not the only reason he keeps falling back to gear disparity as a substitute for combat balance. It's also because he's a gambling addict who's admitted enjoying those sorts of 'games' in the past. He would be better suited to work on casino slot machines and gacha games that are a thin veneer of 'game' aesthetic over a shallow skinner box just designed to exploit the lizard brain in humans.

I feel very bad for Paul who will now be given the literally impossible task to "balance" the game with 95% PDR, MDR, unhinged movespeed, +all, + true, and the CoD style one-hit TTK SDF constantly brings himself back to. I feel bad for the other developers who are being told to dig their own grave to implement this neurotic "Vision". I feel bad for Terry who tried so hard to reign in this outcome for so long but ultimately is not a licensed psychiatrist and finally threw in the towel. I feel bad for the players who discovered this game while under Paul's slow and steady repair and thought they found something different in an industry of CoD style combat and Tarkov gambling muck. I think the only person I don't feel sorry for is SDF. Instead of taking a step back and being thankful that a more talented insightful crew saved his game from the brink of annihilation, he sees their growing success and says "I can't have that".

To literally say in front of an audience thousands, AND the audience of your hundred employees that you know better than than several years of feedback given in every form imaginable telling you that your ideas are kinda trash (to put it lightly) and that you are willing to take this product, this company, and all of their careers to the underworld because you "don't care" and just want to see your vision take form is maybe the most astonishingly wackado thing I've ever seen a person do live.

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Solos
Just for fun, let's look at the world through the mind of SDF.

1. He says he could not add a Public Test Realm because that betrays Founders edition purchase. Obviously, as founders, we would rather the game die than isolate and evaluate massive changes before they decimate the remaining few thousand playerbase. That vague promise and $5 is all I care about, right?

2. He cannot remove race skin attributes because players have purchased these skins with money, they must remain unchanged.

3. He CAN, however, remove solos queue despite that being in the game since February 6, 2023. Let's just ignore however many full game purchases were based on that feature.

So here's something SDF never understood (or cared?) about why Solo queue is actually not mutually exclusive with trios queue. Many players who play solo don't do so only because they like the balance or matchups better. Here is a small list of things that you can do when playing solo that you CANNOT do when playing trios:

-AFK
-Multitask
which may come in the form of handling distractions from
-Work
-Kids
-Pets
-Life
-phone calls
-Shopping

Any decent person will not subject their teammates to a situation knowing they have a high probability of needing to go AFK for seconds to minutes at a time. In solos, this is perfectly fine. You stand silent, mostly safe, can get right back and continue when free. If you die or AFK the whole match the loss is only on you, there was no wasting the time and frustration, gear, and good will of friends or Randoms who did not deserve to be 1 man down because of your selfishness to play DaD without being 100% committed in your time and focus.

When you remove solo queue you are not 'forcing solo players to play the game how you want it to be played'. You are just removing the option for that type of player to play your game AT ALL. Lest they troll randoms and provide a very negative net experience for 2 other players as collateral, surely this is good for making people want to queue into your game with randoms at all. So yes, the damage extends beyond needlessly shrinking the playerbase for only marginal benefit to Trios queue size. Wasn't solo's shown to be half the playerbase? So you'll remove a majority of them from the game so that a portion of the remaining will be forced to spoil entire matches for Duo's queuing up. Smart! Very smart!

Alright, enough about solos that horse is as dead as this game.

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Good Lord
To recap I have consistently for years spoken about how SDF is incapable of learning (unless it's the wrong things), Predicted how he will always come back to this issue, and why he is the way that he is.

Today SDF, who again remember could not program inventory sorting by hand (insane) now feels empowered by AI to rapidly deploy his original vision... which is more of a gambling device than a fantasy exploration and combat game. This is all he knows, and all he loves. According to him, there is no stopping him from taking this IP to the grave and he "does not care" if it dies.

If I made a thread on what I would do differently, it might be faster to just say "virtually everything" based on what I saw in the tavern talk. I might do that just for fun. I've heard many of my suggestions echoed by people on this forum, content creators on twitch and youtube, and many of them have actually made it into the game over time. Nearly all of that gets tossed out the window with the return of SDF and his gear-check simulator. There are ways to make gear exciting to find, fun, interesting and powerful that amount to more than needing +20 true to cut through +95% PDR. Movement speed is a whole other topic, when it comes to latency, and physics bypassing collisions but who cares anymore SDF Send it! 500 movement speed let's go!

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Map Changes, but do all the wrong things!
There are ways to make Random maps and FoW, (even non-circular swarm) work fantastically with bosses and PoIs that SDF wholesale rejected in this interview. See item 4. He literally said you should just have to 'find the boss'. In a fully random hidden map. By stumbling into it. Just... wandering around until you find it maybe never- or with 1 minute left.

The sheer brilliance of this man on display, again, do you see the connection to gambling addict? He says in the tavern talk that "it's part of the RNG" that you should be able to find a boss or not. Just like your 0.0000001% artifact loot drop 'you will not see artifacts' he says. Okay, then why do they exist in the game? Content made to be aspirational and not experienced is again, gambling brained incentives which is all SDF knows of game design.

He can't even stomach the idea of guided RNG

Wander dungeon modules --> Find sub boss --> target and kill --> decent chance for boss-compass item --> move to boss room --> encounter other players who did the same.

This is anathema to the pure unbridled JOY, nah the THRILL, of wandering aimlessly for 15 minutes to find a boss that's been looted immediately by the team who spawned adjacent. Maybe if you queue 50 more times, that will be you! Now go stand 2 minutes at the gold pile you were BLESSED BY RNGesus enough to find and wait for that sweet sweet artifact that "you will never see" while being unable shuffle items in your inventory.

What else is there to say?

Today I wouldn't leave a negative review because it will help. This time, I'd do it because they deserve it.