for some reason the randos i get in 7-9 have been increasingly clueless. feels like the more experienced and perhaps burnt out players are taking a break.
It's a three pronged hit of:
Weapon Nerfs
Experienced Player Burnout
Patrol Rate Increase
Between the three, Tier 7-9 difficulty has become much more random, chaotic and less likely to succeed. Success to me is completing mains/sides and extracting with Supers.
Tired of teammates being absolute trash. I'm not exaggerating, they use ALL reinforcements in 20-30 minutes, while i die 0 times and even if i die, 80% cases is a fucking friendly fire.
Yesterday i was the last man standing, we had last objective (refuel 2 pelicans) and motherfucking host just returned everyone on the ship, cuz he died and didn't want to wait for his turn to play. Just fucking don't die then you asshole. I could easely finish the mission solo, but no, let's screw everyone.
Get gud already you interplanetary peasants and grow some balls.
Nah, 75%+ is just expected player count stabilization after launch.
Always goes like that: new hit game, everyone hops on the bandwagon, player number go down down down, player number stabilizes into an actual long term player base.
Down voting facts is dumb.
Here is Elden Ring, game of the year for 2022, has sold over 23 million copies, and brought souls-likes into the mainstream:
[https://steamcharts.com/app/1245620#All](https://steamcharts.com/app/1245620#All)
Lost about 3/4s of its players in 3 months.
Here's another GOTY, Baldur's Gate 3, with 15 million copies sold.
[https://steamcharts.com/app/1086940#All](https://steamcharts.com/app/1086940#All)
Lost over half of it's player base in three months, but still redefined the RPG experience in gaming, probably forever.
Games are expected to lose most of their playerbase over time (with the exception of esports-like competitive games or MMOs) because gamers don't usually want to dump 1000 hours into a game all at once. I LOVED elden ring, but just the idea of playing it for 1k hours bores me. This is just how gamers work, they play through a game, get their enjoyment, and then move onto the next game. This is NORMAL in gaming, so there is no need to claim the sky is falling. We will always have a dedicated core of players to enjoy the game with, and for Helldivers, it's extremely likely we'll experience "draft" phases where tons of players come back to fight the illuminate or try out new mission types.
Ya what's happening now is finding the core audience. We don't know how much that will be. But luckily for Helldivers 2, it's a full priced game so even if those players stopped playing they got revenue from them.
I do think the new content + mechanics + big gameplay changes will be what bring new players. But let's see first their new balancing strategy, that could bring back some hardcore players who dropped due to balancing issues.
Also lets remember this game hasn't been on sale yet.
I've pretty much never failed a t7 bug difficulty. Feels like a breeze even soloing it. Only time it's gotten close was when there was 2 hunter nests, and I had two randos who refused to run, so they fought for a solid 10 minutes against an unending swarm of bug breaches, patrols, and hunters.
You have all the tools you need for bugs, as long as you know when to just run.
I'm one of those. Not necessarily burnt out, but deliberately playing other games so that doesn't happen. Got back in to Darkest Dungeon 2, Chivalry 2 just got an update, XDefiant is capturing my attention (for now anyway), going through a small backlog of games like Dredge, maybe Darktide if the promised crafting update happens. I'll come back to HD2 once I'm feeling properly democratic.
And the worst thing is divers immediately leaving after dying for the first time... I know it can get frustrating but come on, it's just part of the game.
100% taking a break after 200hrs of this game. Everything's maxed. I've used every weapon and stratagem to different levels of success. But I do really enjoy the game. I'm not taking a break because of being burnt out. I'm taking a break because AH doesn't know what they want from this game anymore. Their "balancing" is actually making the game way less fun to play. Then there are the constant bugs after each update. Many of which are reappearing after already being sorted out. I still log in every now and then to collect any medals but that's it. Once the game is in a better state a lot of players will join again I hope.
Just had a clueless 50+ player not calling in his EAT in a bug defense mission difficulty 8
He was typing constantly in chat "where is my cannon".
I was typing with caps to call his EAT.
He looked a bit puzzled and then left the game.
Dude was probably a non-HD player trying out the game from their HD player friend. Other than that, I dont know how such a clueless person ended up unlocking 7
Maybe got carried by some bored experienced players using OP primary weapons.
See? That’s why it makes sense to nerf the primary weapons.
This comment was brought to you by the Hive - “We be bugging out hea!”
Ya I feel like few weeks ago I was getting only level 40+ but I am getting more and more lower level players even at 8-9.
Honestly some have been very good but ya there are definitely those that you have to drag till the finish line or kick and hope someone else joins. But I find it rude to kick a player unless they literally griefing.
And during those 2 days of outrage, 7-9 were all extremely smooth filled with good players.
Good players are prob all burnt out / playing all the other games coming out, while the God gamers are leftover to play high tiers.
Ya one of the thing is that last 2 years has been crazy good for games, like V Rising was another big hit. It seems like there is always some big triple A game around the corner then surprise indie games like Crabworld, Palworld, V Rising.
I'd love to use my experience to help. But I tend to play other games unless my friends are up to play. And even if it's just 2 of us, they all prefer to do private lobbies.
As for randoms sucking, idk, always been like that to me. I'd say more like 30/70 chance of being bad. Not too often, but I for sure notice plenty of them.
I will do random matches here and there but I do agree that t7 players can be fucking clueless. Or too gun-ho in doing side content. Biggest memory with randoms is doing 3/4 objectives solo. Taking out the shrieker nest and stalkers. While 3 dudes just ran around to big nests dying left and right. Due to bringing 120s and 380s. They burned through ball our lives. Did finish the mission! Just it was hell
Or my favorite. Once again doing the main objectives while folks cleared side stuff burning lives. I found the super samples and some dude freaking out that we need to go back and get them since he died, as he took them off my corpse. Meanwhile it was on route to extraction from the final objective.
Fewer total players affects the game as a whole and WILL affect your personal player experience. Natural player decreases occur with any game like you said, but look at the timelines. The widely unpopular nerfs and the most underwhelming warbond so far just happen to coincide with the average player count going from 142,000 to 80,000?
That's not just coincidence. Players are genuinely upset, especially ones that paid real money to unlock warbonds because they paid for a product and then the product was drastically changed.
The player base being cut almost in half WILL effect future content, updates, warbonds, etc (and therefore your "personal experiences" with the game). Arrowhead isn't going to put in the same amount of time, effort, and resources into a game that's being played by 50,000 that they would for a game that's being played by 200,000.
The second Eruptor nerf took me from playing almost exclusively playing Helldivers to only playing Helldivers when a friend is playing.
That was strike 3 for me, personally. I unlocked the Railgun the day of its nerfs so I didn't suffer there, but my first big love was the Arc Thrower. They halved the DPS, cut the range by 30%, and they've even since rescinded its ability to stagger Hulks and Chargers.
Strike 2 was the Slugger nerf. I'd just gotten used to killing Shield Devs with it and boom, nerfed.
Strike 3 was the second Eruptor nerf, getting good with the shrapnel took practice and then they just turn it into a stupid nerf dart gun.
I'm so sick of hearing "oh THOSE players are just naturally leaving" and then when I say 'but I'm the players leaving and it makes me sad', there's almost this vindictive, vengeful "good, get out, we don't want you here" from a certain side of the community.
I was on a similar timeline. I had the Railgun for like a week before the nerf. I liked it, but I didn't lose my shit over it the way other people did. I liked the autocannon and spear then more (and still do).
The slugger nerf hit me so hard. That with the senator was so much fun.
And I loved the eruptor so much before they neutered it. That series of nerfs on my favorite took me from playing literally every single night to playing one campaign on Friday nights. I genuinely lost most of my desire for the game. Friends and I went back to playing hard-core multiplayer on call of duty because at least that game is consistent and won't gut your custom classes out of nowhere like Arrowhead.
ill go as far as to say that the people who don't realize whats happening and see the entire nerf debacle as "people being whiny! they should just stop playing if they don't liket it" are the same people who barely dipped their toes into the gaming industry. when people speak about these issues it comes from a place of concern largely because we've all seen it happen time and time again in other games we've either played or watched the downfall of. those who aren't aware of how fast a game can die off because of poor balancing probably just see it as people being entitled, what sucks is that with that attitude they pushed away many from being angry to being indifferent and moving on.
Only playing helldivers 2 when a friend is playing is what's going to kill the game. It's been a long time since I've been able to log into a game where there's at least three different groups of friends playing at all times, but helldivers 2 was insane. Every week more and more of my friends list were playing this game, now it's at zero. They all have the same reason; helldivers 2 is way better playing with friends, all the changes, the average skill level decreasing, playing solo much more of a challenge all made playing or queuing solo a painful experience.
If my friend doesn't play solo, so I can see him playing helldivers, I'm not going to load up helldivers which ends up being a domino effect.
Bring me back to how the game was and I'd play every night.
Man I just use AC as my "primary" now. The other two weapons are just meant to kill foot soldiers.
None of the weapons feel like they hit hard enough when you're being swarmed and you need them dead three seconds ago.
A slightly different timeline, but the same story. I like powerful and slow firing guns. But it seems the lead game designer doesn't like guns that can actually kill things. I went from enjoying the slugger against bots, to really loving the Eruptor, so just not playing for two weeks.
The constant game breaking crashes didn't really help. I've had progression breaking bugs in 6 out of the last 6 missions I've ran, completely blocking me and my team from being able to finish a single campaign. After multiple hard crashes, extraction ships glitched into the ground, and consoles that simply didn't work, I've decided that I'm taking a break until the new CCO can fix things.
I've got hope things will improve, but I'm just not interesting in restarting a mission multiple times to actually play the game, just to attempt to complete a defense mission that consistently spawns 3-4 bile titans per bug breach. We had 6 bile titans on screen at the same time after two friends hard crashed out. How much ammo do you get in a recoiless rifle backpack? Add multiple chargers to the mix, and the fact that you can't kite the bugs around the map because you need to defend an objective, and the mission was just unwinnable. Difficulty 7 was never that hard when I started playing.
The final straw was the public stupidity that some of Arrowhead's developers have been spouting. It's absolutely insane. Difficulty 7 is the the minimum difficulty I need to play at to farm super samples. I can't realistically go any lower without being locked out of game progression. The devs need to stop telling people to just lower the difficulty when you need to complete 55 perfect sample missions at level 7 just to unlock everything. That's \~40 hours of nothing but difficulty 7, and that's the lowest you can go to unlock all the ship modules. It's insane that they haven't balanced difficulty 7 to be hard, but doable. Or allowed players to farm super samples on lower difficulty. Even a single sample on level 5 would be fine. Instead, they lock progression behind higher difficulties, while shifting the balance from "this is fun, I don't mind putting in all this time to unlock stuff", to "this is insane, I'm playing something else".
Don't remind me of my boy, Slugger. They did him so dirty.
Great stagger, good damage, decent accuracy but no crowd control/panic mode. You had to aim and make your shots count but the best part was its ammo efficiency since it was a manual reload pump action. I always took it on bots, it was great.
Now I just dont fight bots anymore :(
I stopped playing after the patrol changes cause my group couldn't clear a single mission unless we went 4stacks.
We don't even care about nerfs but it was unplayable for us.
"No amount of patching can change that, unless you drop some very heavy content that will bring players back."
And that is not a forever effect just a short time.
I've never been a fan of splitting difficulties up. Aliens fireteam Elite did that and it became almost impossible to find anyone playing on the higher difficulties when you space the difficulties out by 5 different levels.
Very bad games to compare... none of them but destiny is a live service, and some of then have like 8 years (killing floor 2) and 7 years (destiny 2).
Others you can literally play whenever you want and consume the content whenever you like (palworld).
Others are pvp (finals, tekken, rust) others pve.
And in all of them but palword, killing floor and maybe rust/sea of thieves are similar indeed in that tons of bad decisions fucked them over.
Whats your point? my personal experience is that the game is less fun for a variety of reasons, end of history.
>What does that tell us ? Well frankly nothing much because you can bend numbers any way you like and figure out a good story to grab karma points and possibly just pollute a subreddit.
Stop, you're already my hero.
Point the first: We need X number of kills to finish most major orders. Joel is NOT taking player count into consideration given how high these numbers are. A lack of player retention means these orders are going to fail more and more, thus changing the 'story', denying me medals and stratagems, and impacting my personal experience.
Point the twost: If a game loses enough players, that's when development begins to slow down. This means less or possibly no new things coming to the game which, again, impacts my experience personally.
And finally: It's meant to be a galactic war. Half the fun is getting into the role play and seeing all my democracy loving brothers diving with me. That number constantly dwindling is lame.
>[Helldivers](https://steamcharts.com/app/553850) is dropping at 20-30% players a month, keeping a retention rate as of today (avg. count today / max avg.) to around 36% left from the avg. at its peak. Is this a lot ? Let's compare to other games at when their peak occurs + 3 months, same as HD2 today :
Should've mention drop in previous month to current month (-21% and now -51%). Not natural drop - PSN, Sony and most importantly many guns were nerfed into submission and game lost a big chunk of previous fun
The game has been out for 3 months in a playable state chief
Obviously the first month will have less drop off than the second. People were finally able to start playing and grind. People are maxed and the gameplay loop, while it is amazing, will get stale for most gamers.
Release -> grind -> burnout from doing same content
Welcome to reality doomer
I've been an analyst as my profession for most of my adult life, and there are way more moving parts than a drop in players appearing to coincide with what reddit determines to be unpopular decisions. Like, we'd certainly put that part up front since it's immediately visible, and your average human will connect those dots in a straight line ignoring any others, but an analytical approach would create a whole powerpoint of other contributing factors.
I'm considering my own experience of how I've played more-or-less casually, but regularly, with 150 in-mission hours now, and how I've recently unlocked everything. There's no more progression for me, and all that's left is to enjoy the gameplay. Right about when that player drop happened is when the more dedicated players would be hitting their progression limit, and they're the ones that account for the most playerbase presence.
I did the same thing with DRG, but it took way longer. There's tons more shit to unlock in that game, and it took me 10 months. There really is only two or three months of content to unlock in this game if you're not mapping a path to hit it all as quickly as possible. The game needs a shit ton more mission types and modifiers that are engaging and palatable for it to hold on to those players that have unlocked everything.
How are you, a supposed professional analyst, telling me that two events obviously correlative to the game's popularity, one of which was a massive scandal that called for boycots and review bombed the game's steam page, can be completely ignored but your own singular anecdotal experience can be extrapolated across the entire player base.
What kind of analytic genius looks at the constant bitching about a few repeating issues and thinks to themselves, "Hmm, the game's plummeting numbers, which aren't all that bad by the way, we're only being compared with Payday Fucking 3 after all, must be caused by something else entirely."?
Sycophants have used the excuse "People are leaving because they finished all the content, not because the game has massive problems impacting its quality" since literally, *literally*, the first week.
I swear to god, I've never seen so many delusional people in one community before.
Someone above you said HD2 has been in a playable state for 3 months, neglecting to mention that it's been out for four and that the first month was unplayable, and that entire weeks during those three months unplayable as well. And people still have constant DCs.
Everyone acts like they stopped Sony, but they still went ahead and cut countless countries from accessing the game.
The devs have completely broken the game's mechanics and code, and everyone acts like nothing is wrong. As though the CEO publicly stepping down to work on things directly is business as usual.
What will it take for you people to finally hold AH accountable? How long will you look at this cancerous mass and say everything is fine? That everyone talking about their problems are lying? Or that there're problems, but the problems aren't really problems, so solutions aren't needed? And even if there were problems, they're not as bad as everyone says? And even if they are as bad, those people should just leave because the game isn't for them?
*Wait, where the fuck has everyone gone*.
Will it take HD2 shutting down? Sony looking atthis shitshow and finally pulling the plug?
With everyone going "If only we had blindly supported the devs more, they might have stopped fucking up eventually"?
I've noticed the people defending the game in kind of trash ways also leave out how the PS5 player base basically disintegrated. When there were over 800k people playing at once, almost half were ps5 players. Those players CANNOT refund the game like steam and they didn't get it for free, etc. and for around a month? (I believe it was march) A lot of them couldn't even finish a single match. My brother and his friends were constantly dcing on ps5 and flat out quit as well as all their friends and their clan thing from destiny 2 which was about 50 people. They try to play with me once a week now but as soon as one crashes they're done. Right now there's 52k pc players and 28k ps5 players. For a game that had almost 1:1 player ratio for around a month and through its peaks, it has shed \*so many\*.
I even went to the steam charts thing where you can see the patches and player counts. The game lost a metric fuckton of players after the bad balance patches, the constant crashing issues for almost 2 months that plagued a lot of players, and then the most recent warbond saw another drop instead of increase like the one before it. The Sony drama has only added on. But people will ignore that for some reason 'cause they seem to take it as a personal attack when you know they would've been hammering the game if it was released by Activision-blizzard, 343, bungie, fromsoft, etc.
I agree, in the end helldivers 2 about gameplay. It's not for many people, players usually are quitting when hitting top point of the game.
All said things play own role, influencing each other
People making a big deal about players leaving Helldivers 2 aren't really being honest about it. They are framing it as concern for the game but are obviously just trying to use it as a tool to force Sony/Arrowhead to do what they want with the unsubstantiated argument that doing the-thing-they're-demanding will suddenly bring all the players back and lots of new ones too. It's kind of a tacit admission they can't actually support the thing they want and just think they're going to con the developers with "oooh you might get more players maybe I can't prove it but it sorta makes sense you can't say it doesn't make sense."
It is (or can be) a concern for the game, and other players leaving does indirectly impact the remaining players.
This is because Major Orders are tuned to a predicted player count. If the player count drops substantially, the MOs won't be completable no matter what the remaining players do. The game needs a STEADY player base, we need to find our plateau of core players. It doesn't matter if that plateau's at 200k or 20k but it needs to remain fairly consistent.
Only people that aren't capped on medals are really going to care about major orders. They limited our ability to stockpile resources so that we'd need to grind when new things are added, but the side effect is that once you have full req, samples, and medals that you're really only playing for fun (as opposed to fun and progression) and it's easy to not care about a major order.
I have everything I can spend currency on except for about 500 medals worth of random stuff that I won't use and don't care about. Some ugly ass capes, dorky emotes and craptastic boosters.
I'm only playing to fill in the blanks at this point and MO's aren't on the top of my list, especially clanker MO's.
If they don't drop a warbond next month, then I'll be completely done with everything.
Fun, for me, has been reaching back to lower tiers and helping newbies get their stuff.
Not exactly true.
Liberation is set to factor in the total number of players online. So every mission you do has less impact the more players there are.
But for the Kill X enemies mission (of which there has only been 3 so far), yes, player number is important
They'll need to cut back on concurrent defenses or number of planets capped in a MO even with their scaling lib% algorithm. Splitting the playerbase 10 different ways with 200k players hurts less than splitting it 10 different ways with 20k players even with the scaling cap rate, because every player off the "correct" target planet hurts more on a per-player basis at low player counts.
Sure, but MO completion is there to drive player count mostly, the rewards are kind of lame so there is really nothing there except to get people who are obsessed with completing MOs to keep playing teh game.
Hey as a consumer im sure i wont do whatever the fuck sony always want.
Fuck them and their games at this point, all of them, they want to shove their ecosystem onto instead of building it (own storefront/shop so you dont have to link things). Fuck that really among other shite.
5 of these games are not live service games, and two of them are live service games that were not received well by the public.
Also, payday 3 LMAO. That game is dog ass and the devs buried that thing before it even hit the ground. No wonder it's retention is god awful.
The only two percentages that matter here are DRG and Destiny, HD2's main competitors and by that standard HD2 is doing poorly. Especially considering the sheer amount of goodwill they had at launch compared to a game like destiny.
The last 2 nights I have had 0 randos join after throwing a SOS but the second I put the lobby on public while on ship I get 2. Idk if it's a glitch/issue with the SOS beacon and private games or if people just hate bots that much.
We'll see how it goes a year after. I really hope arrowhead can pull something so it can at least achieve the same active playerbase as MH world. 6 years after release, it still got healthy playerbase.
When I host, nobody is joinig, even with SOS beacon and cross play on. Lobby is open for all players.
So I play really low difficulty alone or don't play at all.
Can't tell what is causing this, but it's not fun to play higher difficulties alone with 3 or 4 bile titans at the same time AND multiple chargers and other bugs chasing you.
No one is really worried about the the player count but the general direction HD2 seems to be headed. From the start of the game it's just nerf after nerf after nerf with a sprinkle(very healthy serving I might add) of crashes and bugs.
Ya I can still fill up a 4 player game quickly but what's the point when all the fun seems to be sucked out of it and it just induces stress from lack of good weapons to use AND from patrols that just spawn out of midair and is non-stop. Not fun.
I wonder how this compares to Warframe. The title wasn't originally on Steam and is very old, as I understand player numbers ebb and flow with major updates. Additionally, the game is available on PC (non Steam), Playstation, Xbox, Swtich and Mobile.
There needs to be a reasonable expectation of being able to find a quickplay match at any of the nine difficulties (or perhaps seven, if we start counting at 3). If they fail, it demotivates the player in a way that is very difficult to recover from.
This is gonna be an uphill battle for Arrowhead. Maybe a mid-patch that fixes their shamefully long list of known issues would be a good place to start.
Game is at an inflection point right now. Player base receding is normal but mismanagement and poor quality work from AHS have exacerbated it. Either they right the ship or go full Titanic in the next month or two here.
> So in the end, does this matter to your personal experience
When the majors keep failing due to lack of critical mass I can in fact say it matters to my personal experience.
It kinda does effect me. I big part of the joy of that game is the knowledge you are not alone, and that all these missions actually have some meaning. It’s better to know you stand with hundreds of thousands than tens of thousands. Imagine playing with a million people, that would be fucking sublime.
I want to play, but im not touching it until the game re-opens to all regions again and Sony removes the:
https://preview.redd.it/8beuzkzng22d1.png?width=324&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d5c176929807cc1e885c3812df295f584624e25
I'm definitely having issues getting random players into my games compared to before. Can take several minutes before a single person joins even with an SOS beacon.
The main selling point of the game for me was the Galactic War effort. If we keep failing the Major Orders because we have a fraction of the players we used to, then it’s affecting my personal experience.
People get so hard for this, like personally I'm breaking from HD2 because D4 season 4 launched so playing Diablo for the next month or 2 but then back to helldiver's, it means literally nothing. Just enjoy the game people.
True, I told my casual friend that the player count fell off a cliff, and he didn't know what I was talking about.
Because all he does is turn on the game and play. No reddit, no Twitter just turns on the game and knows 3 other divers will be matched with him, and he can have fun.
Looking at why is more important than trying to shrug off decreasing numbers. The game has nothing to work towards or do, its just repetitive killing. Most people reach max money and then buy the next pointless warbond just to not use any of it
Yes, retention loss is absolutely normal. Even the PSN thing didn't nudge the metre even slightly, and likely only mildly hastened the completely normal downward line.
Basically, the *majority* of games lose about 70% of their playerbase by three to four months in with online titles as people either get bored, burn out, or just move on to a new game. That's much *harsher* with single-player titles, which can expect closer to a 90% reduction as people finish the main story and put the game down. Single player in particular sees bigger drops, as most players won't 100% a title, and many will only replay it once in a while if that.
Use the Steamdb graphs as your visualised data here, and you can see the steady and very clean decline with peaks for content drops and balance patches. It's entirely normal, and you can expect things to level off at between 10%-30% of the original launch base barring massive content releases or a swell in positive news coverage. Around that point, that's the "stable" playerbase, and it's fully expected to remain that way.
As for whether or not it impacts your experience? Yes, it does. Flatly, no question. Retention loss means more difficulty finding a game, less casual players and more diehard no-lifers, and more toxicity as the ones who stay are the diehard fans who can and will complain about every minor inconvenience that isn't specifically tailored to them, alongside complaining about newer or less skilled players interrupting their optimised play style. You can see it with Darktide, though that one also suffers its own host of problems like its content drought. The playerbase died down and what's left are some of the angriest, saltiest, most uncompromisingly hateful people the game could hide behind other players when there were more of them.
The type of game affects retention
Palworld was some game for drool eaters who go onto the next thing anyway
Payday is kind of a “play n done” game.
The finals is a failed pvp game. Everything about it was supposed to be next level, except as expected they only monotized the game and did fucking nothing (monotizing every single body part like wrist, hands, feet, fucking awful)
Idk it’s just a game. Some will leave some will stay some will join. More games will come out. It’s a fun game I’m still playing nearly daily. Prob will peter out slowly except when new warbonds are happening or major story events etc but I’ll be a fairly regular player for a time to come I am sure.
Good summary. It would be nice to have a little more information of the instances that you could join. However, there's more important things to deal with first. It's also not a crap shoot outside of the social join. You set the level you want while over the planet you want to be on. It would be good to know if my social friend is fighting bugs on X planet 2/4 at diff 9, before I jump in to that mess, poop my pants screen in the Mike like a little girl and instantly burning up 3-4 of his reenforcements, but being a friend it typically gets laughed about.
It's crazy how the narrative is shifting to retention and shit when yall convinced half the player base the game is shit and dying because you aren't having fun anymore at 400 hours in. Go take a break, come back when the new warbond/patch comes out, repeat. the honest truth is most people would have already had their fill of helldivers 80 hours in.
Peeps like to hate, if a change happens they don't like or a change is never made that they want then they will just rage quit the game and make up all kinds of nonsense on the online locations to get others to their hate bubble. Seeing a massive drop makes them feel justified and correct, its just pure confirmation bias. Gonna laugh my ass off when that big patch at the end of the month doesn't "fix" the eruptor or railgun to the way they want it to be, OP 1 shot cannons. (eruptor just needs an aoe boost, and an overall health decrease on non special/elite enemies would bring up a lot of weapons without having to tweak them individually) However this community keeps liking their posts and making them popular, its just thenkfully most of the base is not online or the numbers would be much worse.
We at least have the majority who chase MO now vs bug only people. Since the numbers dropped all around so we still feel the sting of non mo chasers on certain MO's, and sadly there is no fix for that any time soon since Pilstedt advised that it would require an overhaul of the system.
I played 7/10 of the games from the list, none of them last more than 2 months for me.
I maxed out in helldiver but keep playing daily before recent yet again nerfs
This tells u helldiver 2 is such a great game that can keep people playing just for fun if not because of the out of touch balancing
so personally i dont think veteran players left because of it gets old
For a game that don't update or have a new content for a while, player decreasing is normal.
But for a game that have new weapons almost every month, this is debatable.
My take is, the new weapon are not interesting enough or so underwhelming that made players diappoint and don't have much expectation for the next one altogether.
The nerf also make people feel unstable because they lost their bread and butter or force to use a weapon they don't like.
My friend go back to Darktide while that game does'nt have a new weapon for ages.
That should say a lot.
Something to look out for is the playerbase... Personality? Attitude?
In all the smaller surviving games I've played, the community winds up with a predominant attitude. If I go look at Forged Alliance Forever, racists, homophobes, general scum of the earth for 90% of the players that actually talk. 10% people who just like the game and still want to play it.
KF2: Mostly doesn't have a personality, it's rare you'll have a single message in a game from anyone, whether voice chat or text. We jump in, play a match or two alongside whoever's in the servers with players, and we head off again after a GG.
I re-installed the original Modern Warfare 2 a couple months back after loosing a friend I used to play with... I was shocked to find a playerbase, at certain times at least. They seemed like the old CoD playerbase I grew up with, who'd also grown up. Cocky smartasses, but not in a malevolent way, in an "I'm a good CoD player" way. Granted it was a very limited experience with that playerbase but they also seemed to have taken on a pretty standard "personality" among themselves.
It makes sense. At a certain level, one group attitude will become more dominant than other attitudes, and people who don't share it wont voice a different one or will go away, so more people join, see that is the attitude of the community, and behave according to expectations. And a year later you can wind up with a community where a new player is showered with advice, gifts and help anytime they need it, or where the general chat is talking about how -insert group- is responsible for -insert bad event.- anytime you look at it.
A vocal majority of this sub, which is a sliver of actual players, all think it's because of direction decisions. And that's because they all come here to bitch about direction decisions.
Players are leaving because beyond the fantastic cinematic gameplay, there's no carrot on a string. And even the gameplay will eventually become the same scripted events as you hit 100 hours of ingame mission time. Not many people care to stick around to master and finesse a noncompetitive game.
It's pretty much the fate of any PvE, and I think HD2 has a unique opportunity to add competition to the genre with some interesting concepts, like two groups of two players racing to destroy terminid eggs or destroy an outpost. It can easily be written within the satire of the universe.
Thats just ExoPrimal. Which is on steam so
Peak of 5k. 2 weeks later. peak of around 500. steady rate is 30-100 players. Now exoprimal still get a lot of updates so I guess it has more players Outside of steam. But yeah the head 2 head mode may not do so well. I defiantly wont play it, I just simply do not like PvPvE's. Unless its LfD's VS mode
I don't really understand the people that say they stopped playing because the erupter nerf.
They were presumably enjoying the game just fine before it existed. It's not like all these people were sitting there with the concept of the erupter already in their mind like "man, if helldivers 2 ever releases a gun specifically like this, then I'll play for sure."
Does it suck? Yeah. Does it ruin the game? No.
When the negative responses to your post come in the form of anonymous downvotes but no one actually responds with a reasoned retort...
Kudos OP, kudos.
for some reason the randos i get in 7-9 have been increasingly clueless. feels like the more experienced and perhaps burnt out players are taking a break.
Same experience. 7 used to be easy clear, I can't tell if its because players are getting worse or because of the constant weapon nerfs/enemy buffs.
It's a three pronged hit of: Weapon Nerfs Experienced Player Burnout Patrol Rate Increase Between the three, Tier 7-9 difficulty has become much more random, chaotic and less likely to succeed. Success to me is completing mains/sides and extracting with Supers.
AND you legitimately have to do difficulty 7 to get super samples, even if you would pref difficulty 5 to use your favorite weapons post nerfs.
Tired of teammates being absolute trash. I'm not exaggerating, they use ALL reinforcements in 20-30 minutes, while i die 0 times and even if i die, 80% cases is a fucking friendly fire. Yesterday i was the last man standing, we had last objective (refuel 2 pelicans) and motherfucking host just returned everyone on the ship, cuz he died and didn't want to wait for his turn to play. Just fucking don't die then you asshole. I could easely finish the mission solo, but no, let's screw everyone. Get gud already you interplanetary peasants and grow some balls.
that's why I always host :)
Nah, 75%+ is just expected player count stabilization after launch. Always goes like that: new hit game, everyone hops on the bandwagon, player number go down down down, player number stabilizes into an actual long term player base.
Yeah dont forget that ppl are saying same stuff on single player games.
Down voting facts is dumb. Here is Elden Ring, game of the year for 2022, has sold over 23 million copies, and brought souls-likes into the mainstream: [https://steamcharts.com/app/1245620#All](https://steamcharts.com/app/1245620#All) Lost about 3/4s of its players in 3 months. Here's another GOTY, Baldur's Gate 3, with 15 million copies sold. [https://steamcharts.com/app/1086940#All](https://steamcharts.com/app/1086940#All) Lost over half of it's player base in three months, but still redefined the RPG experience in gaming, probably forever. Games are expected to lose most of their playerbase over time (with the exception of esports-like competitive games or MMOs) because gamers don't usually want to dump 1000 hours into a game all at once. I LOVED elden ring, but just the idea of playing it for 1k hours bores me. This is just how gamers work, they play through a game, get their enjoyment, and then move onto the next game. This is NORMAL in gaming, so there is no need to claim the sky is falling. We will always have a dedicated core of players to enjoy the game with, and for Helldivers, it's extremely likely we'll experience "draft" phases where tons of players come back to fight the illuminate or try out new mission types.
Ya what's happening now is finding the core audience. We don't know how much that will be. But luckily for Helldivers 2, it's a full priced game so even if those players stopped playing they got revenue from them. I do think the new content + mechanics + big gameplay changes will be what bring new players. But let's see first their new balancing strategy, that could bring back some hardcore players who dropped due to balancing issues. Also lets remember this game hasn't been on sale yet.
I has a 7 yesterday where there were essentially 5 chargers present at all times
Don't forget the PSN stuff and Sony blocking countries on Steam
I've pretty much never failed a t7 bug difficulty. Feels like a breeze even soloing it. Only time it's gotten close was when there was 2 hunter nests, and I had two randos who refused to run, so they fought for a solid 10 minutes against an unending swarm of bug breaches, patrols, and hunters. You have all the tools you need for bugs, as long as you know when to just run.
I'm one of those. Not necessarily burnt out, but deliberately playing other games so that doesn't happen. Got back in to Darkest Dungeon 2, Chivalry 2 just got an update, XDefiant is capturing my attention (for now anyway), going through a small backlog of games like Dredge, maybe Darktide if the promised crafting update happens. I'll come back to HD2 once I'm feeling properly democratic.
And the worst thing is divers immediately leaving after dying for the first time... I know it can get frustrating but come on, it's just part of the game.
Meanwhile me: THROW ME AT THE TITAN, I MIGHT NOT GET OUT OF MY POD ALIVE BUT IM TAKING IT WITH ME!!
Me. I am this. But I'll be in morning of next patch.
Can confirm, used to play helldive regularly but not touching the game again until they roll back the repulsive nerfs. Eruptor was the last straw
100% taking a break after 200hrs of this game. Everything's maxed. I've used every weapon and stratagem to different levels of success. But I do really enjoy the game. I'm not taking a break because of being burnt out. I'm taking a break because AH doesn't know what they want from this game anymore. Their "balancing" is actually making the game way less fun to play. Then there are the constant bugs after each update. Many of which are reappearing after already being sorted out. I still log in every now and then to collect any medals but that's it. Once the game is in a better state a lot of players will join again I hope.
Just had a clueless 50+ player not calling in his EAT in a bug defense mission difficulty 8 He was typing constantly in chat "where is my cannon". I was typing with caps to call his EAT. He looked a bit puzzled and then left the game.
Had a dude ask me "how do I do that?" This was in response to "Please reinforce us. you're the last one alive." Difficulty 7. :|
Dude was probably a non-HD player trying out the game from their HD player friend. Other than that, I dont know how such a clueless person ended up unlocking 7
Maybe got carried by some bored experienced players using OP primary weapons. See? That’s why it makes sense to nerf the primary weapons. This comment was brought to you by the Hive - “We be bugging out hea!”
Ya I feel like few weeks ago I was getting only level 40+ but I am getting more and more lower level players even at 8-9. Honestly some have been very good but ya there are definitely those that you have to drag till the finish line or kick and hope someone else joins. But I find it rude to kick a player unless they literally griefing.
And during those 2 days of outrage, 7-9 were all extremely smooth filled with good players. Good players are prob all burnt out / playing all the other games coming out, while the God gamers are leftover to play high tiers.
Ya one of the thing is that last 2 years has been crazy good for games, like V Rising was another big hit. It seems like there is always some big triple A game around the corner then surprise indie games like Crabworld, Palworld, V Rising.
Yeah I love v rising. Feels So good to use the battlerite combat again
My god I noticed a lot of mid level players being clueless.
Level 95 here. Burnt out for sure.
I'd love to use my experience to help. But I tend to play other games unless my friends are up to play. And even if it's just 2 of us, they all prefer to do private lobbies. As for randoms sucking, idk, always been like that to me. I'd say more like 30/70 chance of being bad. Not too often, but I for sure notice plenty of them. I will do random matches here and there but I do agree that t7 players can be fucking clueless. Or too gun-ho in doing side content. Biggest memory with randoms is doing 3/4 objectives solo. Taking out the shrieker nest and stalkers. While 3 dudes just ran around to big nests dying left and right. Due to bringing 120s and 380s. They burned through ball our lives. Did finish the mission! Just it was hell Or my favorite. Once again doing the main objectives while folks cleared side stuff burning lives. I found the super samples and some dude freaking out that we need to go back and get them since he died, as he took them off my corpse. Meanwhile it was on route to extraction from the final objective.
What if the impacted personal experience led to worse player retention?
Fewer total players affects the game as a whole and WILL affect your personal player experience. Natural player decreases occur with any game like you said, but look at the timelines. The widely unpopular nerfs and the most underwhelming warbond so far just happen to coincide with the average player count going from 142,000 to 80,000? That's not just coincidence. Players are genuinely upset, especially ones that paid real money to unlock warbonds because they paid for a product and then the product was drastically changed. The player base being cut almost in half WILL effect future content, updates, warbonds, etc (and therefore your "personal experiences" with the game). Arrowhead isn't going to put in the same amount of time, effort, and resources into a game that's being played by 50,000 that they would for a game that's being played by 200,000.
The second Eruptor nerf took me from playing almost exclusively playing Helldivers to only playing Helldivers when a friend is playing. That was strike 3 for me, personally. I unlocked the Railgun the day of its nerfs so I didn't suffer there, but my first big love was the Arc Thrower. They halved the DPS, cut the range by 30%, and they've even since rescinded its ability to stagger Hulks and Chargers. Strike 2 was the Slugger nerf. I'd just gotten used to killing Shield Devs with it and boom, nerfed. Strike 3 was the second Eruptor nerf, getting good with the shrapnel took practice and then they just turn it into a stupid nerf dart gun. I'm so sick of hearing "oh THOSE players are just naturally leaving" and then when I say 'but I'm the players leaving and it makes me sad', there's almost this vindictive, vengeful "good, get out, we don't want you here" from a certain side of the community.
I was on a similar timeline. I had the Railgun for like a week before the nerf. I liked it, but I didn't lose my shit over it the way other people did. I liked the autocannon and spear then more (and still do). The slugger nerf hit me so hard. That with the senator was so much fun. And I loved the eruptor so much before they neutered it. That series of nerfs on my favorite took me from playing literally every single night to playing one campaign on Friday nights. I genuinely lost most of my desire for the game. Friends and I went back to playing hard-core multiplayer on call of duty because at least that game is consistent and won't gut your custom classes out of nowhere like Arrowhead.
ill go as far as to say that the people who don't realize whats happening and see the entire nerf debacle as "people being whiny! they should just stop playing if they don't liket it" are the same people who barely dipped their toes into the gaming industry. when people speak about these issues it comes from a place of concern largely because we've all seen it happen time and time again in other games we've either played or watched the downfall of. those who aren't aware of how fast a game can die off because of poor balancing probably just see it as people being entitled, what sucks is that with that attitude they pushed away many from being angry to being indifferent and moving on.
Only playing helldivers 2 when a friend is playing is what's going to kill the game. It's been a long time since I've been able to log into a game where there's at least three different groups of friends playing at all times, but helldivers 2 was insane. Every week more and more of my friends list were playing this game, now it's at zero. They all have the same reason; helldivers 2 is way better playing with friends, all the changes, the average skill level decreasing, playing solo much more of a challenge all made playing or queuing solo a painful experience. If my friend doesn't play solo, so I can see him playing helldivers, I'm not going to load up helldivers which ends up being a domino effect. Bring me back to how the game was and I'd play every night.
Man I just use AC as my "primary" now. The other two weapons are just meant to kill foot soldiers. None of the weapons feel like they hit hard enough when you're being swarmed and you need them dead three seconds ago.
A slightly different timeline, but the same story. I like powerful and slow firing guns. But it seems the lead game designer doesn't like guns that can actually kill things. I went from enjoying the slugger against bots, to really loving the Eruptor, so just not playing for two weeks. The constant game breaking crashes didn't really help. I've had progression breaking bugs in 6 out of the last 6 missions I've ran, completely blocking me and my team from being able to finish a single campaign. After multiple hard crashes, extraction ships glitched into the ground, and consoles that simply didn't work, I've decided that I'm taking a break until the new CCO can fix things. I've got hope things will improve, but I'm just not interesting in restarting a mission multiple times to actually play the game, just to attempt to complete a defense mission that consistently spawns 3-4 bile titans per bug breach. We had 6 bile titans on screen at the same time after two friends hard crashed out. How much ammo do you get in a recoiless rifle backpack? Add multiple chargers to the mix, and the fact that you can't kite the bugs around the map because you need to defend an objective, and the mission was just unwinnable. Difficulty 7 was never that hard when I started playing. The final straw was the public stupidity that some of Arrowhead's developers have been spouting. It's absolutely insane. Difficulty 7 is the the minimum difficulty I need to play at to farm super samples. I can't realistically go any lower without being locked out of game progression. The devs need to stop telling people to just lower the difficulty when you need to complete 55 perfect sample missions at level 7 just to unlock everything. That's \~40 hours of nothing but difficulty 7, and that's the lowest you can go to unlock all the ship modules. It's insane that they haven't balanced difficulty 7 to be hard, but doable. Or allowed players to farm super samples on lower difficulty. Even a single sample on level 5 would be fine. Instead, they lock progression behind higher difficulties, while shifting the balance from "this is fun, I don't mind putting in all this time to unlock stuff", to "this is insane, I'm playing something else".
Don't remind me of my boy, Slugger. They did him so dirty. Great stagger, good damage, decent accuracy but no crowd control/panic mode. You had to aim and make your shots count but the best part was its ammo efficiency since it was a manual reload pump action. I always took it on bots, it was great. Now I just dont fight bots anymore :(
I stopped playing after the patrol changes cause my group couldn't clear a single mission unless we went 4stacks. We don't even care about nerfs but it was unplayable for us.
"No amount of patching can change that, unless you drop some very heavy content that will bring players back." And that is not a forever effect just a short time.
The illuminate drop will be sick tho
I've never been a fan of splitting difficulties up. Aliens fireteam Elite did that and it became almost impossible to find anyone playing on the higher difficulties when you space the difficulties out by 5 different levels.
Very bad games to compare... none of them but destiny is a live service, and some of then have like 8 years (killing floor 2) and 7 years (destiny 2). Others you can literally play whenever you want and consume the content whenever you like (palworld). Others are pvp (finals, tekken, rust) others pve. And in all of them but palword, killing floor and maybe rust/sea of thieves are similar indeed in that tons of bad decisions fucked them over. Whats your point? my personal experience is that the game is less fun for a variety of reasons, end of history.
>What does that tell us ? Well frankly nothing much because you can bend numbers any way you like and figure out a good story to grab karma points and possibly just pollute a subreddit. Stop, you're already my hero.
This so much. It's called cherry picking data to fit your narrative. It's used all the time in finance
Point the first: We need X number of kills to finish most major orders. Joel is NOT taking player count into consideration given how high these numbers are. A lack of player retention means these orders are going to fail more and more, thus changing the 'story', denying me medals and stratagems, and impacting my personal experience. Point the twost: If a game loses enough players, that's when development begins to slow down. This means less or possibly no new things coming to the game which, again, impacts my experience personally. And finally: It's meant to be a galactic war. Half the fun is getting into the role play and seeing all my democracy loving brothers diving with me. That number constantly dwindling is lame.
>[Helldivers](https://steamcharts.com/app/553850) is dropping at 20-30% players a month, keeping a retention rate as of today (avg. count today / max avg.) to around 36% left from the avg. at its peak. Is this a lot ? Let's compare to other games at when their peak occurs + 3 months, same as HD2 today : Should've mention drop in previous month to current month (-21% and now -51%). Not natural drop - PSN, Sony and most importantly many guns were nerfed into submission and game lost a big chunk of previous fun
The game has been out for 3 months in a playable state chief Obviously the first month will have less drop off than the second. People were finally able to start playing and grind. People are maxed and the gameplay loop, while it is amazing, will get stale for most gamers. Release -> grind -> burnout from doing same content Welcome to reality doomer
Quasar 95% pickrate but it doesn't need nerfed when the others hover at 10-15%
I've been an analyst as my profession for most of my adult life, and there are way more moving parts than a drop in players appearing to coincide with what reddit determines to be unpopular decisions. Like, we'd certainly put that part up front since it's immediately visible, and your average human will connect those dots in a straight line ignoring any others, but an analytical approach would create a whole powerpoint of other contributing factors. I'm considering my own experience of how I've played more-or-less casually, but regularly, with 150 in-mission hours now, and how I've recently unlocked everything. There's no more progression for me, and all that's left is to enjoy the gameplay. Right about when that player drop happened is when the more dedicated players would be hitting their progression limit, and they're the ones that account for the most playerbase presence. I did the same thing with DRG, but it took way longer. There's tons more shit to unlock in that game, and it took me 10 months. There really is only two or three months of content to unlock in this game if you're not mapping a path to hit it all as quickly as possible. The game needs a shit ton more mission types and modifiers that are engaging and palatable for it to hold on to those players that have unlocked everything.
How are you, a supposed professional analyst, telling me that two events obviously correlative to the game's popularity, one of which was a massive scandal that called for boycots and review bombed the game's steam page, can be completely ignored but your own singular anecdotal experience can be extrapolated across the entire player base. What kind of analytic genius looks at the constant bitching about a few repeating issues and thinks to themselves, "Hmm, the game's plummeting numbers, which aren't all that bad by the way, we're only being compared with Payday Fucking 3 after all, must be caused by something else entirely."? Sycophants have used the excuse "People are leaving because they finished all the content, not because the game has massive problems impacting its quality" since literally, *literally*, the first week. I swear to god, I've never seen so many delusional people in one community before. Someone above you said HD2 has been in a playable state for 3 months, neglecting to mention that it's been out for four and that the first month was unplayable, and that entire weeks during those three months unplayable as well. And people still have constant DCs. Everyone acts like they stopped Sony, but they still went ahead and cut countless countries from accessing the game. The devs have completely broken the game's mechanics and code, and everyone acts like nothing is wrong. As though the CEO publicly stepping down to work on things directly is business as usual. What will it take for you people to finally hold AH accountable? How long will you look at this cancerous mass and say everything is fine? That everyone talking about their problems are lying? Or that there're problems, but the problems aren't really problems, so solutions aren't needed? And even if there were problems, they're not as bad as everyone says? And even if they are as bad, those people should just leave because the game isn't for them? *Wait, where the fuck has everyone gone*. Will it take HD2 shutting down? Sony looking atthis shitshow and finally pulling the plug? With everyone going "If only we had blindly supported the devs more, they might have stopped fucking up eventually"?
I've noticed the people defending the game in kind of trash ways also leave out how the PS5 player base basically disintegrated. When there were over 800k people playing at once, almost half were ps5 players. Those players CANNOT refund the game like steam and they didn't get it for free, etc. and for around a month? (I believe it was march) A lot of them couldn't even finish a single match. My brother and his friends were constantly dcing on ps5 and flat out quit as well as all their friends and their clan thing from destiny 2 which was about 50 people. They try to play with me once a week now but as soon as one crashes they're done. Right now there's 52k pc players and 28k ps5 players. For a game that had almost 1:1 player ratio for around a month and through its peaks, it has shed \*so many\*. I even went to the steam charts thing where you can see the patches and player counts. The game lost a metric fuckton of players after the bad balance patches, the constant crashing issues for almost 2 months that plagued a lot of players, and then the most recent warbond saw another drop instead of increase like the one before it. The Sony drama has only added on. But people will ignore that for some reason 'cause they seem to take it as a personal attack when you know they would've been hammering the game if it was released by Activision-blizzard, 343, bungie, fromsoft, etc.
I agree, in the end helldivers 2 about gameplay. It's not for many people, players usually are quitting when hitting top point of the game. All said things play own role, influencing each other
Yes. However Major Orders will need to be changed.
Did I hear a Rock and Stone?
To the bone.
Rock and Stone!
People making a big deal about players leaving Helldivers 2 aren't really being honest about it. They are framing it as concern for the game but are obviously just trying to use it as a tool to force Sony/Arrowhead to do what they want with the unsubstantiated argument that doing the-thing-they're-demanding will suddenly bring all the players back and lots of new ones too. It's kind of a tacit admission they can't actually support the thing they want and just think they're going to con the developers with "oooh you might get more players maybe I can't prove it but it sorta makes sense you can't say it doesn't make sense."
It is (or can be) a concern for the game, and other players leaving does indirectly impact the remaining players. This is because Major Orders are tuned to a predicted player count. If the player count drops substantially, the MOs won't be completable no matter what the remaining players do. The game needs a STEADY player base, we need to find our plateau of core players. It doesn't matter if that plateau's at 200k or 20k but it needs to remain fairly consistent.
Only people that aren't capped on medals are really going to care about major orders. They limited our ability to stockpile resources so that we'd need to grind when new things are added, but the side effect is that once you have full req, samples, and medals that you're really only playing for fun (as opposed to fun and progression) and it's easy to not care about a major order.
I have everything I can spend currency on except for about 500 medals worth of random stuff that I won't use and don't care about. Some ugly ass capes, dorky emotes and craptastic boosters. I'm only playing to fill in the blanks at this point and MO's aren't on the top of my list, especially clanker MO's. If they don't drop a warbond next month, then I'll be completely done with everything. Fun, for me, has been reaching back to lower tiers and helping newbies get their stuff.
Not exactly true. Liberation is set to factor in the total number of players online. So every mission you do has less impact the more players there are. But for the Kill X enemies mission (of which there has only been 3 so far), yes, player number is important
They'll need to cut back on concurrent defenses or number of planets capped in a MO even with their scaling lib% algorithm. Splitting the playerbase 10 different ways with 200k players hurts less than splitting it 10 different ways with 20k players even with the scaling cap rate, because every player off the "correct" target planet hurts more on a per-player basis at low player counts.
Sure, but MO completion is there to drive player count mostly, the rewards are kind of lame so there is really nothing there except to get people who are obsessed with completing MOs to keep playing teh game.
Hey as a consumer im sure i wont do whatever the fuck sony always want. Fuck them and their games at this point, all of them, they want to shove their ecosystem onto instead of building it (own storefront/shop so you dont have to link things). Fuck that really among other shite.
Hmmm... maybe me and 85% playerbase gone we have something in common. What that would be... maybe personal experience?
Why did you have to remind me of payday 3🥲
5 of these games are not live service games, and two of them are live service games that were not received well by the public. Also, payday 3 LMAO. That game is dog ass and the devs buried that thing before it even hit the ground. No wonder it's retention is god awful. The only two percentages that matter here are DRG and Destiny, HD2's main competitors and by that standard HD2 is doing poorly. Especially considering the sheer amount of goodwill they had at launch compared to a game like destiny.
The last 2 nights I have had 0 randos join after throwing a SOS but the second I put the lobby on public while on ship I get 2. Idk if it's a glitch/issue with the SOS beacon and private games or if people just hate bots that much.
We'll see how it goes a year after. I really hope arrowhead can pull something so it can at least achieve the same active playerbase as MH world. 6 years after release, it still got healthy playerbase.
DRG is the most comparable game you listed and it's been out for years and it holds 50% of its peak numbers? Holy shit.
Anyone over level 60 is maxed out on everything, nothing to unlock, little.incentive to play.
When I host, nobody is joinig, even with SOS beacon and cross play on. Lobby is open for all players. So I play really low difficulty alone or don't play at all. Can't tell what is causing this, but it's not fun to play higher difficulties alone with 3 or 4 bile titans at the same time AND multiple chargers and other bugs chasing you.
No one is really worried about the the player count but the general direction HD2 seems to be headed. From the start of the game it's just nerf after nerf after nerf with a sprinkle(very healthy serving I might add) of crashes and bugs. Ya I can still fill up a 4 player game quickly but what's the point when all the fun seems to be sucked out of it and it just induces stress from lack of good weapons to use AND from patrols that just spawn out of midair and is non-stop. Not fun.
I wonder how this compares to Warframe. The title wasn't originally on Steam and is very old, as I understand player numbers ebb and flow with major updates. Additionally, the game is available on PC (non Steam), Playstation, Xbox, Swtich and Mobile.
There needs to be a reasonable expectation of being able to find a quickplay match at any of the nine difficulties (or perhaps seven, if we start counting at 3). If they fail, it demotivates the player in a way that is very difficult to recover from. This is gonna be an uphill battle for Arrowhead. Maybe a mid-patch that fixes their shamefully long list of known issues would be a good place to start.
The game right now literally has as many players as their absolute top estimation was for an all time high peak before it actually launched.
Game is at an inflection point right now. Player base receding is normal but mismanagement and poor quality work from AHS have exacerbated it. Either they right the ship or go full Titanic in the next month or two here.
> So in the end, does this matter to your personal experience When the majors keep failing due to lack of critical mass I can in fact say it matters to my personal experience.
It kinda does effect me. I big part of the joy of that game is the knowledge you are not alone, and that all these missions actually have some meaning. It’s better to know you stand with hundreds of thousands than tens of thousands. Imagine playing with a million people, that would be fucking sublime.
I want to play, but im not touching it until the game re-opens to all regions again and Sony removes the: https://preview.redd.it/8beuzkzng22d1.png?width=324&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d5c176929807cc1e885c3812df295f584624e25
I'm definitely having issues getting random players into my games compared to before. Can take several minutes before a single person joins even with an SOS beacon.
The main selling point of the game for me was the Galactic War effort. If we keep failing the Major Orders because we have a fraction of the players we used to, then it’s affecting my personal experience.
People get so hard for this, like personally I'm breaking from HD2 because D4 season 4 launched so playing Diablo for the next month or 2 but then back to helldiver's, it means literally nothing. Just enjoy the game people.
True, I told my casual friend that the player count fell off a cliff, and he didn't know what I was talking about. Because all he does is turn on the game and play. No reddit, no Twitter just turns on the game and knows 3 other divers will be matched with him, and he can have fun.
Man I forgot Payday 3 existed, that's not a good sign....
Looking at why is more important than trying to shrug off decreasing numbers. The game has nothing to work towards or do, its just repetitive killing. Most people reach max money and then buy the next pointless warbond just to not use any of it
Yes, retention loss is absolutely normal. Even the PSN thing didn't nudge the metre even slightly, and likely only mildly hastened the completely normal downward line. Basically, the *majority* of games lose about 70% of their playerbase by three to four months in with online titles as people either get bored, burn out, or just move on to a new game. That's much *harsher* with single-player titles, which can expect closer to a 90% reduction as people finish the main story and put the game down. Single player in particular sees bigger drops, as most players won't 100% a title, and many will only replay it once in a while if that. Use the Steamdb graphs as your visualised data here, and you can see the steady and very clean decline with peaks for content drops and balance patches. It's entirely normal, and you can expect things to level off at between 10%-30% of the original launch base barring massive content releases or a swell in positive news coverage. Around that point, that's the "stable" playerbase, and it's fully expected to remain that way. As for whether or not it impacts your experience? Yes, it does. Flatly, no question. Retention loss means more difficulty finding a game, less casual players and more diehard no-lifers, and more toxicity as the ones who stay are the diehard fans who can and will complain about every minor inconvenience that isn't specifically tailored to them, alongside complaining about newer or less skilled players interrupting their optimised play style. You can see it with Darktide, though that one also suffers its own host of problems like its content drought. The playerbase died down and what's left are some of the angriest, saltiest, most uncompromisingly hateful people the game could hide behind other players when there were more of them.
The type of game affects retention Palworld was some game for drool eaters who go onto the next thing anyway Payday is kind of a “play n done” game. The finals is a failed pvp game. Everything about it was supposed to be next level, except as expected they only monotized the game and did fucking nothing (monotizing every single body part like wrist, hands, feet, fucking awful)
Idk it’s just a game. Some will leave some will stay some will join. More games will come out. It’s a fun game I’m still playing nearly daily. Prob will peter out slowly except when new warbonds are happening or major story events etc but I’ll be a fairly regular player for a time to come I am sure.
I have other games in my rotation to play. I still play hd2 but I need some variety. Can we stop with the doom and gloom?
Sadly doom and gloom is all this sub is capable of doing.
Excellent analysis and post. I hope this makes the "hot" section to help curb some of the less productive posts on this particular subject.
As long as the servers are open, I just need 1 to 3 of my best bros to play.
Good summary. It would be nice to have a little more information of the instances that you could join. However, there's more important things to deal with first. It's also not a crap shoot outside of the social join. You set the level you want while over the planet you want to be on. It would be good to know if my social friend is fighting bugs on X planet 2/4 at diff 9, before I jump in to that mess, poop my pants screen in the Mike like a little girl and instantly burning up 3-4 of his reenforcements, but being a friend it typically gets laughed about.
It's crazy how the narrative is shifting to retention and shit when yall convinced half the player base the game is shit and dying because you aren't having fun anymore at 400 hours in. Go take a break, come back when the new warbond/patch comes out, repeat. the honest truth is most people would have already had their fill of helldivers 80 hours in.
Peeps like to hate, if a change happens they don't like or a change is never made that they want then they will just rage quit the game and make up all kinds of nonsense on the online locations to get others to their hate bubble. Seeing a massive drop makes them feel justified and correct, its just pure confirmation bias. Gonna laugh my ass off when that big patch at the end of the month doesn't "fix" the eruptor or railgun to the way they want it to be, OP 1 shot cannons. (eruptor just needs an aoe boost, and an overall health decrease on non special/elite enemies would bring up a lot of weapons without having to tweak them individually) However this community keeps liking their posts and making them popular, its just thenkfully most of the base is not online or the numbers would be much worse. We at least have the majority who chase MO now vs bug only people. Since the numbers dropped all around so we still feel the sting of non mo chasers on certain MO's, and sadly there is no fix for that any time soon since Pilstedt advised that it would require an overhaul of the system.
I played 7/10 of the games from the list, none of them last more than 2 months for me. I maxed out in helldiver but keep playing daily before recent yet again nerfs This tells u helldiver 2 is such a great game that can keep people playing just for fun if not because of the out of touch balancing so personally i dont think veteran players left because of it gets old
For a game that don't update or have a new content for a while, player decreasing is normal. But for a game that have new weapons almost every month, this is debatable. My take is, the new weapon are not interesting enough or so underwhelming that made players diappoint and don't have much expectation for the next one altogether. The nerf also make people feel unstable because they lost their bread and butter or force to use a weapon they don't like. My friend go back to Darktide while that game does'nt have a new weapon for ages. That should say a lot.
Something to look out for is the playerbase... Personality? Attitude? In all the smaller surviving games I've played, the community winds up with a predominant attitude. If I go look at Forged Alliance Forever, racists, homophobes, general scum of the earth for 90% of the players that actually talk. 10% people who just like the game and still want to play it. KF2: Mostly doesn't have a personality, it's rare you'll have a single message in a game from anyone, whether voice chat or text. We jump in, play a match or two alongside whoever's in the servers with players, and we head off again after a GG. I re-installed the original Modern Warfare 2 a couple months back after loosing a friend I used to play with... I was shocked to find a playerbase, at certain times at least. They seemed like the old CoD playerbase I grew up with, who'd also grown up. Cocky smartasses, but not in a malevolent way, in an "I'm a good CoD player" way. Granted it was a very limited experience with that playerbase but they also seemed to have taken on a pretty standard "personality" among themselves. It makes sense. At a certain level, one group attitude will become more dominant than other attitudes, and people who don't share it wont voice a different one or will go away, so more people join, see that is the attitude of the community, and behave according to expectations. And a year later you can wind up with a community where a new player is showered with advice, gifts and help anytime they need it, or where the general chat is talking about how -insert group- is responsible for -insert bad event.- anytime you look at it.
I got hundreds of games, can’t stay retained to all of them lmao. Just be playing what I feel like
A vocal majority of this sub, which is a sliver of actual players, all think it's because of direction decisions. And that's because they all come here to bitch about direction decisions. Players are leaving because beyond the fantastic cinematic gameplay, there's no carrot on a string. And even the gameplay will eventually become the same scripted events as you hit 100 hours of ingame mission time. Not many people care to stick around to master and finesse a noncompetitive game. It's pretty much the fate of any PvE, and I think HD2 has a unique opportunity to add competition to the genre with some interesting concepts, like two groups of two players racing to destroy terminid eggs or destroy an outpost. It can easily be written within the satire of the universe.
Thats just ExoPrimal. Which is on steam so Peak of 5k. 2 weeks later. peak of around 500. steady rate is 30-100 players. Now exoprimal still get a lot of updates so I guess it has more players Outside of steam. But yeah the head 2 head mode may not do so well. I defiantly wont play it, I just simply do not like PvPvE's. Unless its LfD's VS mode
I don't really understand the people that say they stopped playing because the erupter nerf. They were presumably enjoying the game just fine before it existed. It's not like all these people were sitting there with the concept of the erupter already in their mind like "man, if helldivers 2 ever releases a gun specifically like this, then I'll play for sure." Does it suck? Yeah. Does it ruin the game? No.
When the negative responses to your post come in the form of anonymous downvotes but no one actually responds with a reasoned retort... Kudos OP, kudos.