[2021] New Player Here Trying To Give Devs Constructive Criticism...

TLDR: New player here, the game is amazing but no private lobbies is a headache that I won't even entertain at this point in my gaming "career" if you will.

I've been holding out on this game for a long time because I saw it as Monster Hunter's little Fortnite brother and was going with the line of thinking "why play Dauntless when I have Monster Hunter World right now." Well, after 1500 hours of MHW and with no more new content coming out for the game, I decided to give it a fair chance. And I must say, I was pleasantly, surprised! Even the starting Behemoths in this game are interesting, the weapon mechanics are much more deep than what early gameplay of Dauntless implied, and the ease of starting quests and knowing what to do made this game very easy to get into. I must say, I was completely wrong about this game just being a worst Monster Hunter, from gameplay alone (at least in the very first few hours of the game) it was shaping up to be just as good if not even MORE fun than the time I had in Monster Hunter World and Iceborne... Except for one thing.

No private/solo hunts..... How? Why? Who thought of this idea and how in the hell did it actually get past even the drawing board? Like, I hope I'm not alone in this, but I don't want to just beat a boss by having some level 100 person come in and kill it in less than 30 seconds for me. That's not fun and I learn NOTHING in that process. I want a sense of accomplishment when I am able to overcome a challenge and beat an enemy by actually getting better in a game. I want to earn my loot, not just have it handed to me, and last but not least, when I get to the really hard late game grind, I sure as hell don't want to put my trust in random players to not fail the quest for me...

So believe me when I say that I played Dauntless for less than 2 hours not because of the gameplay being bad, not because of lag or a horrible community, but because I cannot fathom having to play a looter shooter/Monster Hunting genre of game where we aren't allowed to play Solo in any way shape or form. Like, I don't know about you guys, but I have horror stories from past games already about trusting randoms to do Raids in Destiny 2, to kill the Behemoth in Monster Hunter, or even just telling people to just not die in the Dark Eater Midir Boss Fight while I kill it for them. And let me tell you something, those moments were only bearable because I knew that if I got too fed up, that I could always just solo or find a group of good players from my friends list or LFG to team with. And yes, I know that I could try to find other new players to team with every time I do a hunt but I would argue that I shouldn't NEED to do that especially when Solo hunts were a thing in this game not that long ago (based on time stamps I've seen on complaints about private hunts being taken away). I don't have the patience to find a big enough group of friends just for this game just so I can avoid the horrible matchmaking system that they have in place at the moment (which is especially hard for me because I don't play at consistent times at all, I work at home and fall asleep when tired so no consistent sleep schedule means I'm always playing at different times). And I definitely don't have the patience to slog through trying to learn how to play this game when every monster I face so far just dies before I can even learn its full moveset or even how to use my weapon (I'm an Axe main atm) against it effectively....

Anyways, this is long-winded as hell, honestly way longer than I expected it to be in the first place, which is a good sign because I actually want to enjoy this game, but at the moment no private lobbies is a dealbreaker and I hope this community can convince the devs to put them back in, because when they do I will definitely be giving it another chance again.

Edit: Here is my stream I did for context, I like the game and you can skip to around 2 hours and 3 minutes in and then to the end of the stream to see my original raw thoughts at the moment, I think it highlights even better the thoughts of new players attitudes when faced with the realization that they can't solo hunt. https://youtu.be/eFxfRbZ43c0

External link →

Originally posted by JiminezBurial

"I hope this community can convince the devs to put them back in"

PHX have stated that our feedback isn't enough. ThEy NeEd ThE dAtA before they'll make any changes. That data apparently includes 'time logged in', and 'slayer activity/hunt duration'... so if people want Private Hunts reinstated, the best thing to do is to literally stop playing the game. I think that's f**ked and I would much rather PHX actually place importance on player feedback rather than basically forcing us to go on hiatus, but this is only the latest in a string of stupid decisions they've made so I don't have much faith in them. If you're interested in these other 'stupid decisions', then look into the re-introduction of the Overgrowth hunt pass, how they implemented the vault, how they constantly mis-interpret well spoken feedback, and can't even produce a decent survey.

It's true that we are wating for data and balancing that against the feedback we are hearing. It's not that we don't trust the feedback -- it's that we want to make sure that player feedback AND behaviour are taken into account in case the behaviour we see does not match up with the most vocal feedback. We now have a month of data to look at since the launch of Reforged so expect an update from us soon!

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