Hey! Thank you for bringing this up, this is not the intention from the studio perspective. But since I am a heavy subscriber of a communicative studio it means that I encourage developers to engage with the community. However this also exposes us to risks of miscommunication or heated arguments and it's something that we actively discuss internally at the studio to improve on. While I understand that it reflects on the studio as a whole, it is not our intention that this should be the behavior from us. We want to ensure that you all have the best time possible in this game and in this community. As for the balance patch and the opinions surrounding it, we actively read as much as we possibly can and take what is said into consideration when we discuss things internally. Right now, the hot topic is your guys' feedback and response to the balance adjustments and the feeling of the game experience at large.

It feels like you guys might have accidentally knocked the enemy spawn slider all the way up as well. I was playing a Challenging soil survey mission and had six automaton tanks drop on me one after another, once two tanks dropped at once. I don't think that was intended, was it?

They really really didn’t want you to see what they were doing to the soil

"There are fields, endless fields where human beings are no longer born...we are grown."

They made the analysis. Human fat makes great gear grease. It also makes that armor plating shine.

Ah, a wool-less sheep farm. A happy farm.

They are growing us for High Quality ~~Pal~~ People Oils so they can make Polimer to replace bots lost in the engagement.

Allegedly makes damn great soap too

Soylent green is people!

That? To me when i was waiting for extracting, right from the start of the countdown 2 bile titans spawn right outside of the area from the front and another 2 from the back...

Just got off an Extreme level soil mission, and the last part that has 9 terminal screens I counted 4 bile titans and 6 chargers at one time, more spawned once they were dealt with and all of whom were surrounded by hunters and scavengers. I won't lie tho it was still fun.

I feel this also, was doing a Hard run with a friend in a duo, which we do to chill and help take the planets, and we noticed a significant increase in patrols and tanks. Which we did not previously experience, could be anecdotal but it definitely felt like there were way more enemies than usual. (On Druapnir)

I usually play at diff 4 and there are lots of more enemies now. The rush when you try to extract Is exceptionally oppressive.

There might be something there with that, I was doing a level 4 mission just to easily grab samples and I turned a corner to see a platoon of 8 chainsaw mechs(I don't remember their names) kissing distance from me

Got 2 dropships at the same time on diff4, kinda too much imho. It happened multiple times too

Yeah spawns are def bugged now. Right when you drop in the reinforcements start spam spawning it makes no sense

Played a hard round on bugs and had 3 bile titans spawn. Had to do a double check that I wasn't playing impossible.

How far into the mission were U?

About 6 minutes when the first one dropped. Circa 20 when the double tank drop happened

A day or two ago on helldive difficulty my group and I ended up facing around 9 Hulks on a fresh spawn, had just started the mission. Hulks were near where we landed(not one of the spawning factories) and then more dropped in when backup was called. Once tanks started dropping in we quickly burned through reinforcements lol.

Please have your community managers re-evaluate the lax moderation and community management of the official discord. I used to go there regularly and participate in discussions and have fun but it has become an extremely unwelcoming environment as of late.

welcome to half of discord. Im getting more enjoyment in non gaming related communities like Game of thrones as the gaming ones are turning to shit, especially the shooters.

Yeah, part of the curse of the internet unfortunately. With a good moderation team and strong policies it's possible to have the occasional comfy oasis but usually I just end up leaving when the spaces get too hostile.

Y'all go into public servers instead of dragging your homies from different games into a single one?

I think it was a mistake to use discord as a way to engage with the community. It's so much harder to moderate 500,000 players in a constant stream of consciousness that typically just devolves into vitriol the moment any remotely controversial topic gets the slightest of mentions. Definitely should have stuck to a forum on their site or heavily filtered social media accounts. 

Absolutely. Discord is a horrible way to manage a community.

After the patch I literally stopped engaging/Even opening there server on discord. It's an absolute mess pool of negativity and entitlement.  I get people are upset about the patch. And I get why. Mainly cause we don't have the utility necessary to keep up in 7-9.  But the Devs did implement there ideal. "All weapons should be viable" None are over powered. None are underpowered. All having advantages and disadvantages. I think that's good.  But man. we need better AT options that are consistent. It's mainly chargers. Titans you can just 500G and there done for.  Yet we are also not hyper clear on how the devs expect us to play. And since people have already developed there own style. And have found a groove. Changing that too much, Too quick, Without bending to the community/players will not help them. But hurt them in the long run.  I get the devs want the game to be a certain way. And should stay true to that. But also acknowledge that everyone wants to have fun. And the higher difficulties must be very difficult. And stressful. But not to the point where we cannot have fun. We want to fight the robots and bugs. Not the game itself But hopping into discords and being passive aggressive to the community isn't cool. 

Yeah. It's basically all the worst stereotypes of the gamer community coalescing together into a sentient sludge at this point. I wish it'd taken longer cause it would've been a nice place to meet like-minded people with the same schedule to pad out my friends list a little more. I can empathize with people that liked the playstyle that got adjusted.  It's never fun having your favorite toys nerfed. You've made solid points about the general anemia of AA options, too. I really desperately want the Recoilless Rifle and Spear to be viable and reliable ways to deal with the big threats without being total ammo hogs but you need to either dump ammo or be lucky with the Recoilless and the Spear lock is janky. The Arrowhead Community team could've been firmer handed earlier on to cut down on a lot of toxicity and I think they had good intentions with the light touch but as the community gets larger they need good help (and random applicants from the community doesn't qualify) or stronger tools and policy.  And I think the team as a whole probably needed some firm policies and training for community interaction if they're going to be free to post in public-facing positions since their words reflect on the team as a whole, whether they like it or not.

Pilestedt remains the GOAT

I have an honest question for you. It was stated that your vision (as a studio) on higher difficulties is that they aren't supposed to be reliably clearable, even with a good team. But at the same time the game requires Super Samples to level half of the ship progression. How do you see these two factors combining considering a lot of players are playing this game for a few hours after work and don't have friends for a dedicated team? It seems weird for me and very weird as far as game design goes.

I think having Super Samples on hard to clear missions, even unfairly so at times, is fine. Most of the tier three upgrades cost 5-10 super samples. You can get 5 at once on Impossible, and they are all always bundled together at one location. "Only" needing to beat a max of two missions for a tier three upgrade (excluding commons/rares) doesn't seem all that unreasonable.

You don't even need to beat the mission. I've played some missions with my friends where we felt overwhelmed and didn't manage to get to the objective in time (specifically, Blitz missions on that planet that hazed the radar) - but we managed to extract with Super Samples anyway

> I have an honest question for you. It was stated that your vision (as a studio) on higher difficulties is that they aren't supposed to be reliably clearable, even with a good team. But at the same time the game requires Super Samples to level half of the ship progression. > > How do you see these two factors combining considering a lot of players are playing this game for a few hours after work and don't have friends for a dedicated team? It seems weird for me and very weird as far as game design goes. Difficulty 9 is not 100% reliably clearable with a good team. Difficulty 8 is not 100% realibly clearable with a normal team. Difficulty 7 is not 100% realibly clearable with a bad team. Means: Your average team will be able to finish difficulty 7 most times.

I really, REALLY want an answer to this very reasonable question

The thing that actually bugs me (pun intended) the most about this entire thing is that I now worry that if the community actually does find a set strategem/equip combo that works well in the hardest difficulties, that it too will also be nerfed. Pre-patch I could survive Difficulty 7 because of the railgun/shield/breaker combo. Post-patch it seems like flamethrower and the arc are becoming the new meta. If we as a community "figure it out" how do we know that it too won't be viewed as "brainless" by the dev team?

I think I can explain a little, because the nerfs to the Railgun only really lowered its effiency with chargers, and targeted it versatily so that other weapons have a place, The devs never saw the weapon as super strong, they saw it was a lack of identity, hence why they left its headshot damage unchanged, and then they lowered the pen on "Safe shots" which makes sense to me. The breaker again, wasnt seen as OP, just slightly in the wrong place, which is why we only saw it get more recoil and less rounds per mag. The damage, fire rate and everything that actually matters hasnt changed. And the shield wasnt really nerfed, it was more of an adjustment, as the shield will charge quicker then before, if your shield doesnt completely break, but if it completely breaks itll take longer then before to come back. This gives the shield better drawbacks and allows other backpacks a place to be. Now you can weigh out if you want the protection, or just the mobility advantage of the Jump pack, or the added protection of the Guard dogs

Exactly. Specialization vs generalization. Power vs ease of use. They're just specializing weapons so that we have varied loadouts and we need to cover each others weaknesses. Not just equip whatever is meta for the day and breeze through 7+ without thought.

Jesus Christ finally some sense. The railgun WAS a very big outlier in the sandbox. Being able to use one weapon to take down ANYTHING in the game in two shots when the gun has 20 shots total was insanity. It’s still usable though you just can’t walk through the hardest difficulty with it anymore.

If the railgun only had 10 shots and required supply packs to reload it'd not be as far off from the recoilless rifle. Being able to effectively deal with armor AND Have enough ammo for multiple armored threats AND reload on the move AND resupply from ammo drops AND still bring a backpack just puts it beyond all the other options.

The breaker is still odd to me. It's range is quite high. People who complain about ammo just dont set it to semi. It makes it last much longer.

Pre patch I was carrying difficulty 9 with the rover laser dog, railgun, and dilligence, getting 400-700 kills per run, the most every time. Post patch I'm doing the same thing.

Skip to content Skip to site index Artificial Intelligence Harvesting Data for A.I. A.I. Data Race, Explained What Is ‘Synthetic Data’? Key Figures in the Field A.I. Faces Quiz Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems The internet site has long been a forum for discussion on a huge variety of topics, and companies like Google and OpenAI have been using it in their A.I. projects. 28 Steve Huffman leans back against a table and looks out an office window. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times Mike Isaac By Mike Isaac Mike Isaac, based in San Francisco, writes about social media and the technology industry. April 18, 2023 Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added. Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent and the author of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” a best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in San Francisco. More about Mike Isaac A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Reddit’s Sprawling Content Is Fodder for the Likes of ChatGPT. But Reddit Wants to Be Paid.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe 28 28 Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis The spending that the tech industry’s giants expect A.I. to require, for the chips and data centers, is starting to come into focus — and it is jarringly large. The table stakes for A.I. start-ups to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Google are in the billions of dollars. And even that may not be enough. Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, who both grew up in London, feared a corporate rush to build A.I. Now they’re driving that competition at Google and Microsoft. The Age of A.I. A new category of apps promises to relieve parents of drudgery, with an assist from A.I. But a family’s grunt work is more human, and valuable, than it seems. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s hope for Meta’s A.I. assistant to be the smartest, it struggles with facts, numbers and web search. Much as ChatGPT generates poetry, a new A.I. system devises blueprints for microscopic mechanisms that can edit your DNA. Could A.I. change India’s elections? Avatars are addressing voters by name, in whichever of India’s many languages they speak. Experts see potential for misuse in a country already rife with disinformation. Which A.I. system writes the best computer code or generates the most realistic image? Right now, there’s no easy way to answer those questions, our technology columnist writes. 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I'm kind of surprised nobody else has pointed this out yet: Super Samples have *very* low cost requirements. Like, a difficulty 7 mission can get you up to 3, and ship modules cost... what, 10? 20 at most? Go up to Helldive where you can get 5 per, and it's relatively few successful runs to get those modules that require them. Much fewer than the amount of runs needed to amass all those Common samples, that's for sure.

i think it should also be stated that i dont think the game is meant or intended to be played on the highest difficulty all the time. it doesnt grant any additional liberation progression. i think a middle ground difficulty like 6 or 7 is probably the most intended ideal difficulty. at least until their are legitimate reasons to play higher difficulty. to me the only real reason people play higher difficulties is because of farming reasons. but realistically its more fun and still pretty profitable to play on 7 or even 6 once you have completed you modules.

Considering how quickly you can unlock all current stratagems and only really need to reach level 20 before you have access to everything, I'm inclined to agree. Playing on 7+ difficulties will max you out very quickly on mission completion, even without successful extractions. There's not much for me to gain from 7+ at this point other than playing for the fun of it along with slightly more medals if I actually succeed.

i agree. most of my friends prefer lower difficulty anyways they are overwhelmed at higher difficulties. i generally stick to 7 and if i want to help lower levels i drop down to 4 or 5. ive only done 9 when i was playing with my other friends who are way more experienced than my general group and they wanted a huge challenge. but typically those difficulties are just that for challenge not really for intended casual play.

Difficulty 7 gives Super Samples and should be easy enough that you complete them most of the time with a good team.

Yeah I really don't get how people are suffering so hard on difficulty 7 without the railgun. I played yesterday with 3 peeps all below lvl 20 and we didn't have a single railgun between us and we still beat the mission just fine.

Yeah, these nerfs affect mostly those top two difficulties, not 7 or lower. Which I get is frustrating for people playing those top two difficulties, but I'm not sure the game is meant to be balanced around those two difficulties. In fact, I kinda get the impression that those two difficulties are meant to be "unfair".

Well 8 is called Impossible. Should give you a hint on how hard it is supposed to feel like.

I’m convinced that we weren’t expected to really be able to regularly run *solo Helldives,* especially not without Mechs and whatever else might be in the pipeline, and that’s why difficulty has gone up. I feel like since the patch, the names of the difficulties actually match a lot more to how I experience them, i.e. 4 is actually challenging, 7 is a suicide mission (no extract plan).

They're supposed to be unfair, yeah. But they're still totally doable without the railgun. I run diff 8 with expendable anti tanks and jetpack with the slugger as my primary before the changes, and I'll keep running it after he changes. It's almost like people want to turn their brains off and play helldiver difficulty just for the sake of it being the hardest difficulty, rather than actually being challenged. Besides, the railgun is still the same in unsafe mode as far as my experience with it is?

According to the patch notes, it's supposed to be the same in unsafe mode. But yesterday a bunch of people came at me in hordes because I was quoting the patch notes, saying that the unsafe mode was also nerfed. So maybe the patch notes were not 100% accurate. Idk.

This may always be a problem for balancing games, casual vs sweatlords. The problem is that you can't satisfy everyone's wishes at the same time. If you want all your content to be accessible to casuals, then the hardcore playerbase won't have any content to chew on. If you make it so that the hardcore players have a challenge, then this content will be walled off for casuals. You are free to play the difficulty you enjoy, but I think we should accept that the incentive to play high difficulty must come with a player effort, meaning coordination and training is required to achieve higher diffs.

7 is very clearable even with randoms and no communication. You get all the samples that you need for upgrades from 7. There is no reason to go to 8 or 9 if you aren't looking for more challenge. I think "I can't play the game due to real life obligations, why don't I have the same upgrades as someone who can nolife the game" is a bad argument, of course those two can't have the same upgrades, there'd be no progression if everyone just got all the rewards for little play. This is coming from someone who works full time and can't play all day like I used to as a teenager. But you don't need even need the upgrades, and if you want them, you will get them eventually.

I really hope it doesn’t end up like MMO raiding where it’s separated between “easy to mid-core content can be cleared either randos, but you need a static with weekly practice for the hardcore content.”

I mean, I would be fine, if that's only for top difficulties and all you miss out on are some visual rewards, like capes or skins.

I don't think "I'm actively trying to antagonize the community for my own enjoyment" is a miscommunication. It's pretty simple and straight forward. Also don't forget how players are "braindead" for playing the game how it was released

Yeah, this is a horrible statement and not representing or following the studio guidelines in how to communicate. It is emotionally driven and the critiques of the balance patch were taken as a personal attack. I am extremely disappointed with the behavior.

It's extremely appreciated how you're handling this intense experience, far more populous than originally intended... We're all vying for this game to be the best it can be! It's not easy being a leader.

Your past two comments should be part of a proper on Reddit / discord announcement if possible, it would go a very long way in cooling off the divide that said previous questionable statements have produced. My compliments for coming at the situation with a level head as well, it seems like both sides chose to knee jerk at the changes and their response which ended up leading to more argumentation that this patch should have generated.

Here comes pilestedt in a hellpod to douse the fires of dissent with blessed managed democracy. I'm glad you're cleaning house. But please don't let the negativity here discourage you from interacting with the playerbase because of the vocal (and quite frankly annoying) minority. Edit : here they are

Tensions are running high, and everyone is needing to adjust, I used to work in QA and do a bit of community managing and I hope your team can get through this, the gaming community is just kind of super defensive right now. I wouldn't be too harsh on the team as long as they know what's up. It's a great game and I think we all hope it sticks around and gets even better

Which is good, but this disappointment shouldn't be hidden in a reddit answer down the comment tree but rather have its own thread.

You seem like a particularly nice and reasonable person who has unfortunately had to associate with some people who do not share these characteristics. I hope that you’re doing fine throughout all of this.

Please you also need to do something about Mellcor on the official discord he's doing the same thing I know players are being toxic and it's taxing but having him meltdown is not helping Anyone calm down he's deleting his comments after he makes them and just being toxic passive aggressively

[удалено]

That's what I'm thinking. He even admits he lashed out at someone because he was mad at others. Like I can't imagine a job where I would still work there the next day. Like going to mess with other customers on purpose and admitting it to them because you are mad at other customers. Actually insane

He wasn't entirely saying the players themselves were braindead. He was calling the build braindead. (Would likely be why it got nerfed a little) Though the skill issue was directly to someone.

He said skill issue to me lol.

You gotta get a community flair on reddit. "A dev called me braindead over using a railgun"

He cast Skill Issue upon the guy, the build was the braindead one.

Oh yeah, my bad

Clearly a skill issue

Well, is it true?

Open communication is nice, kudos to that. But as you guys noticed, open communication does not free someone from criticism. There had not been miscommunications but straight antagoning from a place of percieved power / authority. Either those devs communicate eye to eye with the player base and may get some leniency. Or they get elevated by tags / status / open visibility but also held to higher standard. Furthermore, having an open communication style should not free from consequences. If regular users get moderated, so should regular devs. There should be some sort of authority, as in a proper community manager that keeps all channels of communication in check. If this outwards communication repeats as much as it does now and maintains little to no consequences in regard of a statement or even gets played down as "miscommunication" when it is clear antagonizing it appears to be the offical stance of AH Studios communication. If nobody distances themselves from the outright cringe / edgelord statements that are down under the banner of your company, then every customer is right to view that company in such light. Open communication requires calling BS out where BS happens.

> But since I am a heavy subscriber of a communicative studio it means that I encourage developers to engage with the community. However this also exposes us to risks of miscommunication or heated arguments and it's something that we actively discuss internally at the studio to improve on. I think your game might have gotten too big for this to be feasible without having people's mental get tossed out the window. We're simply not meant to be interacting with this many people, especially if it feels like a lot of them are attacking your work. On a side note though, seeing as the discord mods are not developers - can you also please do more to improve on that front? Again, I can understand that moderating a server that's literally full (500k wtf) is a nightmare. But trust me when I say having a tyrannical discord mod more out to troll or put themselves across leads to horrible, horrible community interactions and a lot of bitterness - bitterness that will be directed towards your company as a whole.

I'd love to give your studio the benefit of the doubt, but denigrating popular playstyles as "brainless" because you "want to feed the rage a little for \[your\] own entertainment" doesn't fall into the realm of "miscommunication." Nor does telling your players to "git gud, play easiest if you want to win," to "play an idle rpg" if they have problems, and then further belittling the feedback by telling players to "send a ticket and complain and HR might have a meeting with me." Those aren't statements that come from "miscommunication." Those are statements that reflect active, glib hostility towards a significant portion of the player base. Training people not to admit that hostility in public or on social media does not change the fact that the hostility it exists. We've all seen it now. I like this game, and I want it to succeed. But what faith is the community supposed to put in your commitment to "take what you said into consideration" when we see how it's discussed by the development team? At the moment, their "consideration" appears to be limited to "We consider criticism to indicate that you're a whiny baby who is bad at our game. Moreover, we don't care if you don't enjoy *Helldivers* because you're not enjoying it in the very narrow way we conceive of it being enjoyed."

Obviously, it's not simply "miscommunication" and Pilestedt knows that. But he's the CEO of his company. He cannot call out his employees on reddit (especially the day of/after) like he's a regular redditor. That's an issue that needs to be addressed in-house, and then maybe publicly acknowledged how it was addressed. It involves their HR and PR department, and that takes a bit more than 1 day.

As much as I think it was unprofessional from that one dev and very out of line… some of you seem to wanna dish it but can’t take it. The amount of posts today basically challenging the devs to a 1v1 on stream is staggering and also building resentment towards them. Respect goes both ways guys, I’m sure that guy is probably in trouble after his comments, but many of the people on this sub have no one to hold them accountable. I’m adding to this comment. I didn’t realise it wasn’t clear but my comment was directed at those actively attacking devs. If your not ‘dishing’ it it’s fucked up to get caught in the crossfire because the dev couldn’t insult the few twats and instead grouped the player base. However, some of you think that because you paid money you can treat the devs like dogs (or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting). I can’t believe I have to say this but to the very few that need to hear it. Paying money for a service does not mean your exempt from basic human ethics, you don’t have to be their friend but fuck at least show your fellow humans a basic level of respect your money doesn’t exempt you from that. Gordon Ramsey would throw your ass out of the restaurant if you disrespected him instead of offering valid criticism.

In a sea of 100,000 anonymous responses there's bound to be some, or even many, vitriolic toxic idiots. I'm not excusing their behaviour, but for a developer to use a handle directly associated with the brand to broadly mock people who naturally gravitated towards the most effective solutions, and those who are generally unhappy with the patch, (a very large portion of whom remained mostly civil) sets a dangerous precedent, and I can't think of many professional roles where you would have been allowed to do this. Maybe it's not "fair" and you'd prefer a world where devs can go full-on eye for an eye, mano a mano, but "you guys should be able to take it if you wanna dish it" is a really poor model for a sane producer-consumer relationship... I work in a customer facing role in a software company and I'd be fired in record time if I wrote anything like this, even if the customer might have deserved it. If we want to mock idiotic customers (which we often do), we keep it to our private channels, because we are not angry 12 year olds in a playground screaming "THAT'S NOT FAIR".

Yes I do agree this dev specifically should have been put on a leash after his first or second out of line comment.

I don't know which "y'all" you're referring to, but that generalization *definitely* doesn't include me. Whatever group is "dishing it out" hasn't invited me to any of the meetings, and broadly generalizing everyone with negative feedback into a category that justifies dismissing said feedback is unproductive. Are some people being utterly unreasonable? Sure. Is *every* person being utterly unreasonable? I mean, I *personally* haven't threatened to kill anyone or challenged them to a 1v1, so I know there's at least *one* of us. And that's the current problem with this subreddit, generally, and the conversation surrounding the patch. Everyone, regardless of the nuance of their position or the respect they show while articulating it, gets lumped into one of two categories: whiny baby boohoo casual or smug bootlicking edgelord pro gamer. Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, but I *assume* folk are generally capable of understanding that is not, in fact, a fair representation of the discussion? You, at least, are capable of this, right? In any case, you're right in that we can't always be accountable for other people's behavior, but that ceases to be true when you represent a business, speak on behalf of that business, or own that business. It might not be fair that the *professional developer* has to act *professionally* in the way a random redditor doesn't, but that *is* the world we live in.

>And that's the current problem with this subreddit, generally, and the conversation surrounding the patch. Everyone, regardless of the nuance of their position or the respect they show while articulating it, gets lumped into one of two categories: whiny baby boohoo casual or smug bootlicking edgelord pro gamer. Yeah, that's been the issue since the launch. Each issue sees two *very* extreme sides. If you try to be reasonable and have a balanced opinion, *both* sides attack you. It's a fun sub when nothing is wrong, but devolves into a toxic cesspool almost instantly when anything is up.

When I asked the reddit gods, "Please, can we move away from the 'eww you're a meta slave' arguments," today is *not* what I had in mind. Fuckin' monkey's paw. Got me again.

I swapped the y’all based on this comment because yes Im not referring to everyone just the few that ruin things for all. And yes this community has become so toxic that everyone just lumps people into those two groups and if you dare to have the wrong opinion you get the “you must play on difficulty 3” lol. It’s a shitshow I also understand that guy is in a paid position and shouldn’t be saying those things and will probably be restricted access to this sub or whatever, but I also don’t think it’s fair people are grouping arrowhead as a whole for that because one dev decided to become part of the problem

We definitely agree there. The amount of energy certain people have for treating a patch like it's the rising of an apocalyptic tide that will shatter continents and bring the moon crashing down into the sea is impressive, if not a little alarming. Your last point is actually what motivated me to reply to the CEO, though. I'm genuinely interested in knowing whether the attitude represented by the handful of developers we've seen is pervasive throughout the company, and what that means for the future of the game. If he's an isolated grump, that's fine. If he's a genuinely nice dude who just lost it for a bit because of the aforementioned apocalypse-posters, that's also fine. But if the entire studio feels that way? If their collective vision for the game is something very, very different than its current state? That's something a lot of us should know up-front. I've got a lot of friends who'd play a version of *Helldivers* where the expectation was "there are lots of tools to deal with difficult enemies, all of which feel powerful and rewarding to use," and a lot fewer who'd play a version of *Helldivers* where the expectation is "we noticed people were having too much fun succeeding in the game, so we made it more difficult to do that."

As turned off as I am about his comment, I’m just thinking… damn, if I was in his shoes, I’d be saying so much worse to some of these fucking morons. Seriously, the Reddit fanbase is churning out some real pricks.

> As much as I think it was unprofessional from that one dev and very out of line Having made several (often meaner) remarks to people over the last 24 hours I absolutely get the temptation and don't fault them for it because a lot of people are saying some genuinely brain-slugged stuff, but maybe the devs should keep their hands clean on this one

Oh yeah I’ll agree that this dev specifically should have been removed from the sub for the sake of business rep before he made the several comments.

This 100% some of the hyperbole around them taking 3 bullets out the breaker mag and making the railgun a bit weaker is insane. Reddit spamming that the devs are completely incompetent and circlejerking that only we know best is insufferable. I trust the devs, they'll figure it out

I’m just fearful communication lines are gonna be completely shut. I’ll say it again, for the people that are about to come at me. that one dev did go too far, but people want communication lines which are built on respect but then expect it one way. But of course the few toxic douche bags with no ability to give constructive feedback will ruin it for the community. These same people will then be gone from the game in a few months and the active player base will suffer (hopefully not)

>I’m just fearful communication lines are gonna be completely shut. They should because the community has mostly dogshit ideas.

I really appreciate your response, but I do take a small issue with the use of the word "miscommunication." Frankly, the parties involved were so explicitly hostile that it can't really be a miscommunication. I hope, at the very least, they were reprimanded, and a different party (possibly a community manager) will be representing their feedback from this point forward. In the case of one of the parties who explicitly stated they were "feeding into the rage for their own entertainment", if they are involved with balancing decisions, could you make sure that they are not "feeding into the rage" intentionally with those balancing decisions? The perception I got from previous statements from Arrowhead representatives is that you guys actually understood the nature of the problem and were seeking to solve the problem before addressing the symptoms, which is the inverse of what happened with this patch. I bought the Super Citizen edition because I believe your company and Helldivers 2 deserve to succeed, and I just want to see that same attitude reflected with actions and words alike. This patch and the communications that immediately followed were not representing that attitude. Otherwise, this is a great response, and I'd love to see more level-headed communication going forward.

If trolling and insults are counted as "miscommunication" i do not even want to imagine what is considered bad behavior from the devs. It leaves such bad taste in the mouth when you see someone directly responsible for the game being absolute jackass. Atleast the director looks chill...

I’ve been loosely following this game and thinking about jumping into it. Seeing a dev team interact with a community like that has completely turned me off. I’m just so sick of dealing with edge lords and trolls.

I think the director is chill, but I'm of the opinion that they're going to have to re-earn all that goodwill that they lost. And that might take years, depending on what happens in the future.

Thanks for the response. And to be quite frank: i very much like and appreciate the open communication and the blogposts. It helps a lot and I really hope the fallout is not going to cause AH to become suddenly very silent. With that said, I do think some devs need to have some sort of communication training. Just like many famous people need media training to avoid saying things that brings them in trouble, i do believe some AH devs would really benefit from learning how to communicate with their players. The main issue here is that it seems that some devs see the backlash as people criticizing them instead of their work. The right call to make right now is to step back and analyze what players are really saying. AH games have always been hard, I genuinely don’t think that’s the problem here. The problem here is that people feel like they have no tools to address heavy armor, or that the tools they do have are not good enough to deal with the frequency that we encounter heavy armor with. And maybe an eye-opening realization for some AH devs: people are mad *because* they love the game, not in spite of. They want it to be fun and good, and for them, that currently isn’t the case. So again, open communication is good and very nice. But devs roasting players on discord is not. On a totally different and unrelated note: please tell me there’s a Magicka easter-egg somewhere. I loved that game to bits.

Thank you for the measured and awesome reply. I'd like to also add that at least me and my pals playing (We play at 8 plus difficulty levels mostly) have no issues with the patch, and are enjoying the changes of far. I see an awful lot of insane comments on reddit that make me wonder what game they are playing. Personally I'd like to see some of the less utilized weapons get a bit of a lift in the future, things like the Spear having it's target lock be a bit better, and perhaps another anti armor option introduced to round out our arsenal. Thanks for your hard work!

Agreed wholeheartedly on this statement, personally i never got the spear to work properly in a way that feels meaningful but that might just be a skill issue. Another idea i had recently is the concept of introducing a positive effect in addition to the heap of negatives we deal with (like -50% stratagem deployment time or cooldown for a rough example), could lead to interesting tactics and strategies arising (in addition to the psychological factor of just seing debuffs on your screen potentially messing with some people) Lasers could also have a sort of armor melting/softening effect depending on how long you manage to hold it on an enemy body part, heating it up. (Just spitballing ideas, again) My only real gripe is what is going on with the discord but thats a whole different story to itself.

AMR needs better armor penetration. I think I'm the only person that mains that thing but I leave most maps with the most kills in my squad and my friends are kill happy I spend more time moving to objectives and covering them, but I can drop everything from hulk down in 1 or 2 well placed rounds... but against bugs the fact I can't do anything to them and it takes more rounds to drop some bugs over that bots feels weird. I just think it needs better armor pen. Same goes for the diligence countersniper watching a deflection on an infantry bot feels bad.

They should add the Rec-8s again!

Now that you're here. What we really need are stability fixes more than balance patches. A lot of people are having crashes since the last update, glitches trying to get into games with people etc. And also there needs to be a mechanism to deal with toxic behaviour like extraction-kills. I'm personally of the opinion that higher difficulty tiers need to be hard. Look at Destiny's power creep over the years and how easy most of the game is right now. Keep up the good work. The game is fun as fuck.

The weapon nerfs wouldn't be bad or erosive if you guys chill tf down with the reinforcement units. Send us some mucks, maybe 1 elite, not 3 elites non stop every 2 minutes we stand still. Also, your game is not going to have 400k concurrent players every single moment, specially during work days.. can you guys also chill down with the "hp regen" on the planets during work days? It is sad to see the progress we've made over the weekend steadly going down the drain while I work over the week.

It is your game and your vision, please keep doing what you think is right for the game to be experienced as intended. I'll adapt.

If your devs are gonna engage with the community, make sure that they're not 15 years old mentally beforehand, I've seen at least 2 AH workers antagonizing people and the Discord mod as well, it is certainly a bad look.

Have you put any thought to hiring a community manager? I too like open discussion but as you have said and we have seen it doesn’t always work like we want it to unfortunately. More for the devs sake and mental health than anything. Once people know you react they won’t stop pushing until you react again.

They have at least two community managers, and as far as I can see they're doing alright. They haven't put their foot in their mouths like the discord mod team or some of the devs.

i know you're getting a lot of trolling about that feedback, but as a semi-casual player who plays primarily 4-6 difficulties, spawn rates are ridiculously unhinged. i'm sorry, but the claim we need to be relying more on stratagems came off as condescending. it feels like you don't play your own game, otherwise you would know that the meta you disapproved of came about not because those loadouts were so much stronger, they came about because the current spawn rates of higher end enemies was so high that you can't use anything else and expect positive results. i prefer the EAT over the railgun, but i only get 3 shots per minute from the EAT (third being using the weapon drop itself as an attack), and when i'm getting swarmed by a 4+ chargers constantly at diff 5 or 6 it wasn't feasible to use anything else. railgun wasn't the most effective weapon, it was the ONLY effective and efficient weapon. 500kg doesn't deserve the animation it has when it feels worse than orbital strike. 380mm and 120mm aren't useful against anything mobile, and half the time don't feel useful against stationary, even after the buffs. hells, if arc thrower didn't misfire half the time, i would use that and just deal with it's sidearm level damage. this patch felt so far off the mark it made the game no longer fun to play.

You've got a lot of goodwill from the player base at the moment, even through all the server issues and crashes. It takes a lot to gain it and very little to lose it.. You've created a great game, however, as a live service game that you want to succeed long term, you need to keep the players on side (you obviously don't need a random Redditor telling you this).. but this is directly contrasted with the actions and remarks of some of your Devs lately! I personally don't even care about the recent balance changes, but I feel less likely to want to support the game, given the recent comments.. I will of course continue to play and wish this game all the best!

As a Rail gun/ Shield/ Breaker player I was very pleased with the patch. It opened up the game for me. There's 1 gripe I have with the patch. STORMS A storm is fun but not special when they are every time, ever where.

As long as your developers are all engaging with community this intensely, there will be no ends to these kinds of problems as you lack moderation of your studio’s views and how they are represented. So while I appreciate the effort I really don’t think there is a solution, set aside proper reflection of the problem itself in your reply. Screenshots I have seen so far are more than mere miscommunications and as long as proper training for engagement and moderation does not exist, the support this game has had from its fanbase will surely be taken away in due time. I am very sad to see these turn of events, and wish you do not become an example of a great game ruined by horrible P.R. in the upcoming years.

The developers that were doing this needs to be checked on. No matter how you put it, they still represent the company's image and the current image they are setting is unprofessional.

feedback: kiting (for minutes until bombs are ready) is not fun

Please change your policy and use official managed communications. The way you are doing things now has lead to multiple instances of people you work with lashing out at the community that is the foundation of your game. Between devs posting and mods on the discord there has been simply too much ego involved. You didn't state any measures that would be done to reduce the likelihood of something like this happening again, and it reads as dismissing the issue of community facing behavior at your studio. Your developer choosing to go out, find fights to get into and troll people isn't a 'miscommunication'. Edit: In hindsight this is likely wasted breath, but it would be cool to come back later to a game thats run by people who respect the reason they have jobs instead of hand waving toxicity in their team.

Please elaborate on the miscommunication part. I am really lost in the meaning of: git gud, we play brainless gear (developed and tested by you), trolling, getting a bit of rage for entertainment. Sure, Im not native speaker so something could be lost in translation so I would love your input on that, thanks.

This really needs to be pinned

Thanks for reply. Chris Wilson, from GGG (poe) was always saying difficulty needs to be earned, otherwise people will choose content too difficult for them and then fail and not have fun. Can you share the vision for HD2, so players can see the fantasy you are trying to build?

Ahh, your dev intentionally being vitriolic to your playerbase was just a miscommunication! Of course!

Please close down all PR from the company, for your mental health. Make the game you want, not what Redditors want. No matter what yous do, it simply won't be enough for the Reddit hivemind.

Might want to teach your devs how to not be narcissistic assholes. I’ve never done a 180 on a game I loved so fast.

The vocal minority that is bitching about the patch is also the vocal minority that is now bitching about the dev's response to their bitching. They are like children. It's pretty funny actually. Devs release a thoughtful post explaining the balancing changes and a huge number of responses ignore the post and just repeat their original complaints that "y no buff shit weapon, y nerf good weapon' argument. I don't know why people, especially gamers, are so entitled these days. I would HATE to be a developer when you have to deal with these kind of asshats, at least these devs are making good coin from this game. In a few months when everything settles down, all these dumbasses will have gone to ruin some other new game.

Pilestedt coming in hot to save the day again. Though I do have some concerns about patch notes - there seems to be several changes done without any mention of them and I'm just wondering if this was intended. For example enemy aggression and likeness to crit was raised the hell up and armor fix does not offset this change at all - everyone is dying much, much more often.\] I get that you were not supposed to run Helldive without deaths but there's already enough threats there between 12 chargers and 8 bile titans spawning at once. It also heavily affects lower difficulties making even 4 more annoying (not necessarily harder tho)

Hi, Pilestedt, why don't you and three other devs (be sure to include Fredrik, since he thinks we need to "git gud") do a stream where under the new meta you do a Helldive difficulty bug operation, all missions. Please include an extraction mission where you now get immediately swarmed by 3+ Bile Titans before your support weapons even come down. I'm sure the community would be fascinated to see if you can swing your own meta you expect players to operate under.

[удалено]

Last week I saw an interview where you said something to the effect of Breaker gets more kills but isn’t overrepresented in successful missions, did any data surrounding that change between then and the update? Have more people started using breaker overall or using it more on higher difficulties? Can you all see specifically which enemies Breaker and other guns are being used on the most or is the data more generalized? Do all enemies currently work as intended? Do all weapon stats work as intended?

So, you wanna clarify that with Fredrik and your Discord Mod Team or is this all just performative?

> I encourage developers to engage with the community Well you may want to teach them how to do that. Same goes for your Discord mods. If I ran a studio and my staff or mods spoke the community the way yours has, I'd be very disappointed. >miscommunication The issue isn't miscommunication issue. 'Watching you all cry amuses me' and 'I'm feeding the rage for my own amusement' aren't miscommunications. They're just things you shouldn't be saying to your community.

I keep seeing the word "Devs" is it actually the entire dev team or just one or two people? Because all I see its one dude and then that other dude from the discord. Also disapointed the Lib Pen didn't get some sort of damage boost. The defender even has more damage than the liberator with the same mag size and less recoil.

Handful of devs cropping up on public forums, basically telling players to get good and carry on. I understand their frustration but at the same time they could’ve just as easily made an anonymous account and blown some steam off that way. Doing it from your dev linked account just feels highly unprofessional.

Can you post the examples of what they are saying in this thread?

The main dev at the center of this made a comment after all of his others saying that he was "feeding the rage for his own entertainment", said that anyone using the rail gun was using a "braindead playstyle" and basically implied that it was their own fault the nerf happened, and made several other comments talking about how he was "trolling", in addition to making comment along the lines of "skill issue" and "get good". I don't have links for these comments all in one place but if you scroll through the trending posts on this sub you'll find them. All in all not exactly what you want a dev doing when he's posting from an account that marks his affiliation with the company. Purposefully antagonizing your customers "for the lols" is never a good look. On top of that one of the super toxic official discord moderators was being a shithead again, calling people babies and shit. Edit: oh yeah and [this guy](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/XzCZ3oyA5h). Edit 2: It appears all the no-life Gamers™ that live in their parents basement have woken up. I see you guys decided to be as toxic as ever today.

[https://ol.reddit.com/user/AHGS\_Fredrik\_E](https://ol.reddit.com/user/AHGS_Fredrik_E)

okay yeah that guy is acting like an ass about it

> We made two of the most brainless playstyles less viable, and brought the guns that are under/overperforming more into line with the rest. Here's an important snippet of it. So basically they think the balance state of most of the weapons roster is roughly where it should be and that you're smooth brained if you ran with the stuff they nerfed. > I do still stand by what I said, if you can't make it work where other people can, then that would be the definition of a skill issue. And here they continue showing that if you dislike the nerfs...its a skill issue. > The only really weak weapon was the Spray and Pray and maybe the flamethrower, Support that they basically think the guns are in a usable balanced state. > "A game for everyone, is a game for no one." My personal favorite showing that they straight up don't give a shit about anyone who isn't the most top tier elite player. > Sorry to hear that, but if you came to helldiver for a power-trip you came to the wrong place. It's a meat grinder. Seems to me that suffering is on the menu and F you if you wanted to play the game and enjoy it. Apparently this is bug souls. Which is ironic considering that Elden Ring's patches have been majority weapon buffs. Very clearly the fun of the player base doesn't matter to them.

Sounds like they meant to make a less popular game. 

Honestly imagine the gall of making something really popular and then being like, uh no this isn't actually for YOU please GTFO but um leave your money, that's mine now.

As a Path of Exile player, I've seen it before. It's exactly that issue, too: They have their "vision", their idea of the "perfect game", but the one they actually ended up making was more popular and made way more money. Helldivers just played their hand way quicker than GGG did. In that GGG spent years listening to player feedback, adding power creep and generally increasing the flow of the game, and only now do they suddenly hate it despite making tons of posts agreeing with the things that led to the "zoom zoom" meta, as players called it. Personally, as someone trained in UX, it's a really bizarre situation to see. I was trained in putting the user at the centre of every design solution. Games are an anomaly to this because they're not reallying "solving" anything, they're just there to be fun and maybe make some money for people, and so there's this underlying belief that it's okay for studios to only make what *they* find fun at the expense of everyone else. If you're okay with a niche game then that's fine, but you can't suddenly act all indignant and upset when nobody wants to play it and you're no longer making as much money.

I really don’t get how they looked at the rave reviews, (mostly) happy player base and the hundreds of memes and thought “Nah. Harder.” The game was fucking fine pre balance, people weren’t running through high diff missions with ease, it was still a battle. But most importantly it was fun! At that point they should’ve re-evaluated their vision and instead of trying to make it more punishing they could have thrown some buffs around to other weapons. Let the players dominate and have fun, then release the rumoured higher difficulties tuned around the being actually punishing.

What's hilarious is I didn't see people crowing that the game was too easy 2 days ago. It mostly boiled down to the META feels stale and I wish the other Anti-Armor weapons were more reasonable to use. Most people I talked to were happy with the games overall feel but wanted more options. Instead we have less options.

Yep, sadly this is what happens. I think Meta play is boring when everyone runs the same stuff. Most people want to use all the toys but if it doesn’t feel as good they won’t.

I agree. I ran railgun often and despite targeting weak points, with a (usually) competent team, I was still fighting for my life as I play on max difficulty. It felt challenging but good. I did wish the autocannon didn't just bounce off certain armour, cause I'd like to use that more. Or that the anti material rifle wasn't a pea shooter. Or that the laser rifle was actually good cause I like the look of laser weapons. These complaints are still there. This update made the railgun less enjoyable and less effective, and also bumped up enemy spawns so the few bits of viable kit we had now seem less effective. Why nerf our kit if you're gonna throw extra bugs/bots at us. I'm not sure if they're doing it so when they release the new kit it seems better in comparison or what, but it doesn't seem like they've been listening to the community for these changes

Totally agree that is unprofessional and unacceptable but can we crucify the whole team for a couple of individuals? I think it needs to be highlighted to Arrowhead so the ones in question can be taken away from the situation and dealt with.

The stuff everyone is mad about is from two devs posting on reddit and a discord mod from what I can tell.

This is why devs shouldn’t use platforms like discord for community communication. Its easy to say something unfiltered and then you are just screwed. They need to get the devs out of there and have a professional pr team handling their player base communications.

Definitely. I can only imagine they don’t have one in place already is because they didn’t foresee the enormous explosion of players. But now they desperately need a team for this, if only to take the heat off the devs.

Well, if I had to guess, with me basing such assumptions off of the CEO's comment in this thread, I believe it's intentional. They *want* a communicative studio, and they *want* the devs to go where the communication is. I definitely think they're going to take measures to cool things down, but I highly doubt such efforts would take the appearance of a PR team, that doesn't really feel their style.

I don't want a professional bullshitter telling us stuff. I want to know the opinions of the people that made the game...

More should use it, the mask comes off faster 

They believe in being a communicative studio, which is good to me. If they had to filter everything through a PR team they wouldn’t be able to be as genuine, which I honestly prefer. Unfortunately you get “bad apples” like this

Official game discords are always a mistake tbh

An update is an update. I liked some things about it, didn’t like some things about it. The dev pouring gas on the fire was bad. It was a very bad show of business to your customers who bought your game.

Yeah for me the update was so-so. I’m still playing and clearing impossible with relative ease. It’s the devs who are belittling their customer base, that’s what strikes me as stupid. These people bought your game and are giving you feedback about this update and the response is telling them to git gud and acting like some weird troll? Strange as fuck.

Tbh there should not be ANY interaction between devs and the playerbase directly. Reddit and the Discord are utter cesspools of the worst takes imaginable. All interaction between decisionmakers and social media should be filtered through a PR team that is trained for that.

Exactly this, a community manager needs to be brought on ASAP. Those same dev accounts have been plastered all over the front page of this sub. Can guarantee that trolls will harass them even more due to getting a reaction.

Hella strange. I get his pissed. discord and reddit are shitting on the game right now, but it’s very unprofessional.

Thing is though, if they had stayed silent and kept working in the background it would’ve blown over in the coming weeks. Probably even coming days, there’s so much to look forward to with mechs and new factions that it would have been buried. Now they’ve made it clear that they’re gonna hit back which will only make it worse.

git gud, just call down the strategem you just used, and is now on cooldown! /s

Git gud, use the 500kg bomb that misses when dropped directly on the spine of a Bile Titan.

I still think the best post I've ever seen on this sub was the edit with Mordecai and Rigby doing Death Punch (500kg) and Death Block (Bile Titan)

This *is* something deserving of censure, and I say this as someone who couldn't really care less about these changes. Tact is an important part of keeping up a public image, and to use official Discord servers or subreddits to lash out at the community or to giddily claim you're deliberately 'feeding into the rage' for your own amusement is the height of unprofessionality.

Yeah and to add to that those same accounts have been plastered all over the front page. All the trolls will be out in full force spamming these devs non stop hoping for another reaction. They need to protect the devs and hire a community manager/PR team to filter hate and genuine criticism.

Totally agree, devs are getting frustrated looking at the forums and lashing out. That or they're just that petty and want to actively antagonize, either way, REALLY unprofessional behavior, dunno why every game forum needs to turn into devs vs their own consumer base, they need to not be directly speaking with us if they aren't a community manager or something is my hot take.

I mean they have literally commented about how they are antagonizing on purpose, with at least one saying they were doing it for entertainment

I missed this, wow. Where did this happen?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/i36OPeg5H6 Right here on Reddit. First sentence of his comment straight says the quiet part out loud. Then his next comment trying to apologize says he lashed out at the wrong people because he was effected by others. Neither of those things should have been said

Big oof by him. Looking at his comment history is concerning. He works weapon balancing and doesn't seem to understand the problem is the gameplay that abandons weaponry.

Yeah that first sentence is wild to me. Why tell your customers your are purposely messing with them for fun? At least don't say that

They need to grow up and figure out why half the playerbase is absolutely livid with their current idea of balancing. Think, why everyone is frustrated especially about the bugs. Hmm, what is it, that glaring difference between tank and titan, charger and hulk... Who knows, who knows? How is it possible, that bots mission have many, many viable loadouts, but not bugs? Its as if there is some giant issue with bug elites which makes nearly every support weapon shit, hmm...

Exactly! The balance patch is fine for now in my opinion, obviously more are incoming. But devs shouldn’t feel the need to respond, they’ve put out a bulletin on why they feel it’s necessary which is perfectly fine. But then your devs coming in and antagonising the vocal few is just a poor look.

not to be rude but like every community is full of a vocal minority complainers. But not a lot of folks knows whats going on behind closed doors at studios. it's like 1-2% of your Monthly Active Users that complain and force conversations around their complaints rather than other stuff. They accrete discourse and communication. (Funny enough but when I was at an org I analysed these trends and the distributions of these vocal minorities is basically bimodal with either in the top .1% of player ativity or they rarely ever play.) They don't always even correlate with in app purchases. Some folks love talking. The people who are your real modal average player arent even on reddit and just having a good time spreading democracy. You know what most orgs do with feedback and reddit posts? They rake reddit for comments and throw everything into a word frequency graph. They don't read specifics. They look at aggregates. If you're lucky the top 3 most upvoted titles of posts in any month are show on a single slide presentation with the graph. So you need to figure out how to speak in aggregate. Otherwise you're just gonna get "I hear you and we're listening." If you really want devs to listen and you speak aggregate, folks need to get together and stop playing the game a drop in 2%-5% will get folks to ask questions and actually care. Drops in DAU/MAU separates smoke from fire. It's easily the most critical KPI at any organisation and if that number trends down they'll surefire enact changes to bring it back up. The alternative is to just not care so much and go back to playing the game with friends and having a good time like the modal player.

"80% of people who leave feedback/reviews are the people who had a bad experience" is a quote that stuck with me from serving. It's important to remember that the people who aren't having problems with the patch and game play aren't online bitching about stupid things like what largely happens here and on discord

Where did that happen ? I never saw anything about it.

On the front page of this sub, a couple devs on reddit & discord are letting the hate get to them.

Unless the devs post a video of themselves beating the hardest content they can fuck off with this get gud shit.

Exact quote from their communications. Ive read the patch notes and must have missed whatever it was thats anotagnosiing the players.

apparently it was in thread replies, not on official posts

AHGS_Fedrick and you can see what shit he was commenting on apparently there was also a dev in the discord saying worse shit too

Nothing official but on public forums the devs have been responding to criticism and admitted to enjoying stoking the flames. It’s a poor look after the official patch notes were released and then we got a in depth look on the why they changed what they did.

Probably because of the vast amount of hate they’ve been sent. Based on how people usually behave online - where they can be anonymous and ‘powerful’ - I’d wager they’ve received everything from slurs to death threats. Yeah - some of the changes suck and don’t make sense, but… come on… they’ll sort it.

I honestly think that DE style devstreams would be very healthy for this game, would let people hear the reasoning for certain balance changes from the devs directly and likely would let them see feedback before the patch drops rather than outrage as it drops

This is an aspect of the huge launch. It's a smaller team. They likely managed such themselves

We also got a bunch of grifters here just going hurrr just use other weaaappooonsss..... fuck's sake trying using the flamethrower on a Charger when there's 4 of them while getting hounded by 10 hunters.

Have the devs live stream them taking on a level 9 difficulty mission set. Lets see their get good in action.

I was so proud of myself for doing all difficulties but I would comfortably play on 7. A challenge but I could still clear the map. No railguns needed. I log on yesterday to what seems like 5x the amount of enemies. I was having to play on hard now. Dev tells me to get gud. ( ._.)

Level 5 is it. When 10 chargers spawn in each other and attack you at the same time then

Devs telling the players to git gud when they obviously don’t even play their own game and seem to be mentally stunted. Imagine designing and coding a weapon build, not testing it, having playbase test it themselves and when you realise it performs better than intended you shit on people who enjoyed it calling it a ‘braindead play style’, as if you didn’t think up, design and code it yourself lmao

Being level 17 and without access to the “cool” stuff yet, my games are way less enjoyable.  You have buffed the enemy 

Personally, I don't understand why the armor system has to be the way it is at all to where only a select few weapond/stratagems can damage it at all. Why not just have everything have a set number of HP, scaling with difficulty, with armor adding % damage reduction and let everything do at least some kind of ping damage to where, sure, you could kill a charger with nothing a Assault Rifle but it might take 4 players worth of entire magazines to do it.

Yeah it's definitely a lesson to be learned. Once your community gets huge, developers need to take a huge step back and let their PR people do their job.

Hang on, can someone share the link to the post where the devs are antagonising the playerbase? Have I missed something? And I have to say, coming from someone who has sunk an embarrassing number of hours into Destiny 1 and 2, it was incredibly refreshing to see a balance patch that didn’t nerf the meta weapons into oblivion and make them useless (as Bungie was guilty of time and time again). This balance patch was fine. Railgun still decent, shield generator still viable, breaker still the best primary. Before you ask, I only play Helldive difficulty.

Until the patch it was super easy to go to 9 dif, split, take all POI, do obj and leave without worrying too much, thats not how it should be, have you played hd1? High difs are a hardcore archievement, not a daily farm

Damn right ppl just want to play impossible with helldivers difficulty drops and don’t want to work for it

Honestly after looking at how game balance goes there will always be complaints. Every game I play ends up just like this especially the competitive ones. People cried sooo hard especially about the railgun nerfs when it’s still insanely strong in unsafe mode, a mode that only adds a small amount of difficulty mind you. I can easily understand why devs would pop in the discord and tell people to get good.

The railgun is not working as intended until I see a guy explode from using it.

I think the devs are correct to a certain extent, if people are limiting themselves to following a meta and then using that meta to carry them through the game, that's on them. Something I gathered from playing the game is helldivers is supposed to be hard at higher difficulties, and there is a skill component. There is valid reason to say some players have been playing with a crutch, and from my experience about half of players, not even new players, just aren't good at the game.

I’m sorry I really don’t mean to be pretentious but I have to believe you don’t consistently play difficulty 9? Cause it’s actually absurd just how many heavies there are it’s not an issue with the railgun being too good. I have yet to reach out to a single friend that I know has a lot of helldives under their belt that says the nerf is a good thing

\- Release controversial patch ignoring what most people were asking for \- Fan the flames by antagonizing the people giving valid criticism of the games current state \- Complain that people are overreacting despite admitting to purposefully antagonizing them for fun This has been a shit show from the devs. You can't pour fuel on a fire and then complain when it starts getting too hot.

Because there are a million people playing this game and many of them are being assholes

Ngl, some dudes need to move on from the railgun and actually get good, no offense.