There's a Big Feature Missing in Darktide, and Players Aren't Happy

There's one feature in Warhammer: Vermintide 2 that was dropped for Darktide, causing some disagreement and debate in the community. If you're familiar with both games, then you probably already know what I am talking about. It is the Scoreboard. 

In Vermintide 2, at the end of every game, a scoreboard is displayed showing some stats for each player (or bot) who took part in the level. 

For many players, this is a helpful way of judging how well they played and if their build is measuring up to its intended role - for example someone playing a build focused on long ranged weapons will likely want to see if they are doing a good job of eliminating specials before they cause problems for the team. 

Or, less specifically, players might simply want to know how much damage they are taking and dishing out in comparison to others. I know that I have had quite a few games in Vermintide 2 where I felt like I did a lot of damage, but the scoreboard showed that I didn't, and likewise some games where I felt like I played poorly but the scoreboard showed that I actually helped the team out quite a lot. 

So this begs the question, why has Fatshark decided to remove this feature? 

There has been some discussion and debate about this over on a Reddit thread, and the main arguments for the removal of the Scoreboard boil down to two things - toxicity and a problematic incentive to push your luck in risky situations to get the best scores. 

The idea is essentially that players who are emboldened by getting the highest damage output or the most amount of kills may be more likely to be mean to party members in subsequent games and blame them for any mishaps, and that due to the "green circles" that players have on their scoreboard for each stat they performed the best at, players are more likely to run ahead and get themselves into bad situations rather than staying in the team - something that can quickly lead to a bad situation if they make a simple mistake. 

There was a pretty good counter argument against this from one user though, who put forward the idea that toxic players are always going to be toxic regardless of whether or not there is a scoreboard - and the lack of a scoreboard could actually make toxic behavior more of a problem because some players will have a tendency to blame others for party wipes, when in many cases the scoreboard could show them to be wrong to do so. 

A possible middle ground could be to have a scoreboard but remove the "green circles" that, in the view of some players at least, incentivize unnecessary risk-taking. 

There are quite a few players asking for the Scoreboard to be reinstated in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, so it's not out of the question that Fatshark will relent and reintroduce it before the game's full release on November 30th.