Let's discuss the elephant in the room—perks resetting for prestige. Well, actually, let's not discuss that. It's already been done:

1. The most upvoted user thread ever, discussing the issue
2. My comment on the matter, in an unrelated thread
3. etc...

My suggestion is simple: LET US VOTE ON IT!

You have a fantastic voting system. Please use it for this; it's critical, in my opinion. I assume you will receive a straightforward and overwhelming mandate from your players.

For context and to show the "heatedness" of the subject, here are some opinions for and against the "prestige perk reset" concept:

Pros for Resetting

1. More grind makes some people more involved (source)
2. Having to unlock all the skills again gives some "sense of progression" (source)
3. Potentially populating lower difficulties, since perks on each class are back to 0 (source)
4. Prestige is optional (source)

Cons against Resetting

1. Having to unlock things you've previously unlocked may feel like a chore (source)
2. Playing lower difficulties with all the acquired gamesense and skill will certainly feel like a downgrade from gameplay perspective (source)
3. If the players end up playing on lower difficulties after prestiging, the grind will become slower, due to lower exp gains (source)
4. Class "maining" may become more rampant (source)
5. Specific class builds will suffer from not being "online" for most of the prestige leveling (source)
   1. In the example linked, only 8% of the time leveling Bulwark will be "online"
   2. For leveling Vanguard, one build will be online 0% of the time since it requires the capstone perk
6. Build variety will be hampered/eliminated for many classes while leveling (source)

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John_Astartes wrote:

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Voghelm wrote:

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Deadbyte wrote:

It's clear that player feedback holds no weight here. Despite thousands of upvotes across various social media platforms, they chose to ignore it. At this point, any further effort seems pointless. ​

I will unfortunately have to agree. There's way more to this topic than "it's tedious" and "it takes too long", but they chose to ignore this (either on purpose or because they did not really go through feedback in the previous thread).

Really makes you wonder if they just don't want to spend any time to change/re-design this system at all.

Anyway, a vote would've been really great, but I have a very hard time believing we'll get one at this point.

I just updated the post with a "collection" of arguments for and against the changes. Hopefully, if it's condensed, they can see "Hmm, we should really rethink this". Again, holding out hope here.

You can also throw in the fact that it'll kill any build variety that classes with all unlocked perks have. Some of the classes, like sniper, definitely have more than one viable/fun build.

Same goes for other classes, which you can tune towards your playstyle, especially after some of the perks were buffed. It's still nowhere perfect, but it's some variety and it's there.

Being stuck in a prestigeing loop means that you simply are dissuaded from experimenting with anything, since you want to constantly reset all the time to keep getting rewards, especially if you are "maining" just a couple of classes, up until the moment where you unlock everything.

As I said in another thread. I hope they don't go through with resetting on prestige. there are going to be a lot of "mains" for classes I feel that won't bother doing it 20 more times and this is going to make matchmaking much worse with people only presteging 1 class. And while many will have 25's. Most are not going to switch off to a class who will gain no benefit from an already maxed out non prestiged one. When they are working to prestige 4 another that is going to be their main one.

And why would they then play on a class that has four less total perks on the class that they worked on to then play on a class they haven't got them on?

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PiousSkeleton wrote:

The beauty of gaming is that it can appeal to a wide variety of players from casuals to sweats. You don't enjoy the concept of Prestige. That's fine, it just means it isn't for you. The devs don't need to make Prestige be Prestige in name only because you happen to dislike the concept of a purely optional feature intended for a certain category of the playerbase other than yourself. It's the same reason why there are various difficulty levels and classes. Not everything is made for everyone.

This is such insane logic, or lack there of logic really, because it makes absolutely no sense applied in this scenario.

You are quite literally saying, "Look, I can justify that the thing that ​vastly overwhelming majority of the playerbase wants we shouldn't do because not everything is made for everyone. Because not everything is made for everyone, out of this group of 100 people, when presented with an option that would make 90 of them happy, or 90 of them angry and only 10 happy, I should make 90 of them angry, because I mean, oh well, can't please everyone am I right? My hands are just completely tied here with no real option that has a more favorable outcome, what a shame :("

This argument only makes sense if the thing you are in support of is actually favored by the majority.

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John_Astartes wrote:

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PiousSkeleton wrote:

The beauty of gaming is that it can appeal to a wide variety of players from casuals to sweats. You don't enjoy the concept of Prestige. That's fine, it just means it isn't for you. The devs don't need to make Prestige be Prestige in name only because you happen to dislike the concept of a purely optional feature intended for a certain category of the playerbase other than yourself. It's the same reason why there are various difficulty levels and classes. Not everything is made for everyone.

The concept of prestige has always been used in games, where you could quickly return to the playstyle you wanted. You could try out new ones each time, as well.

This game does not have that capacity. You have to level all the way to max to unlock some core talents for most builds. This makes leveling a forced path, which is antithetical to fun. I was playing Call of Duty when the concept of prestige started. I've been doing it since it's been around.

The difference here is that this system is NOT implemented to support prestige reasonably. They are night and day. There are absolutely tweaks that could be made, which would make resetting less difficult.

That's pretty much exactly this.

DRG, Darktide, Vermintide 2 and other similar games in the genre either went for progression systems that do not reset your progress, or systems that give you infinite levels. Darktide's revolves around difficult (or bullshit, sometimes) achievements that reward you with unique cosmetics/titles/frames for completing them, for example.

I may be mistaken, but Payday 2 had a similar prestige system which also wiped some of your progress and access to your weapons/unlocks, and the developers later added a way to avoid this by essentially allowing players to grind more EXP than a full reset would've taken (and this idea was taken from a community-made mod), which allowed you to progress by playing without having to reset.

Killing Floor 2 is the only game I played that does prestige the way CoD did, but it has a very decent reason to do so. Unlike SM2 and other games, it doesn't have bots, so if everyone played only on the highest difficulties - low difficulty servers would not be populated at all, so new players would've had to play solo most of the time. In there, prestige actually solves this issue, since it makes old players fill the servers and play on lower difficulties. In SM2, anything lower than Ruthless could be cleared with the bots without much trouble, even if you're a new player, so this reason cannot be applied here. KF2 also has such a massive shitton of easily accessible cosmetics that people who don't want to prestige are not losing that much either.

All these games are similar in that their leveling is more or less a tool that gets you invested into the game, lets you feel the growth (both yours as a player and of your characters), and also teaches you how to play the game by gradually giving you more and more things to mess around with. Despite what many people seem to think, these sorts of games get the most enjoyable after you've unlocked as many things as possible, since this allows you to try different builds/loadouts/strategies while engaging with content that is of your desired difficulty. And people want to keep progressing somewhere while doing so, since it shows their "veterancy", while allowing them to see the numbers grow bigger and feel good about themselves as they play their favorite game in a way they want to play it.

In a game like this, once you've already leveled all 6 classes, you have sufficient knowledge and gamesense to play them to a decent degree. You aren't going to get better or more knowledgeable by doing this 4 more times per class, since it would be the very same process, that also may potentially send you back to lower difficulties that you enjoy less just to get back the core perks you need for your build.

It's a hassle that makes you want to keep prestiging if you want to progress, which in turn doesn't let you play with everything unlocked until the point you're done with the system.

In CoD it was called "prestige" because you dropped your advantage to show that you can still dunk on players that potentially have more advantage than you do. It at least makes sense in a PVP game.

It makes way less sense in a PVE-focused game where experimenting and trying different things is supposed to be a part of its charm.