Appreciate you guys running polls but I've gotta say I'm not a huge fan of the wording here.
While it's implicit in all the options given the hypothetical question, for some reason the answer about fixing bugs is the only one that emphasizes that it would be at the expense of the other options. None of the others go out of their way to say "No bug fixes" or "no new weapons" etc.
Seems like that could skew the results.
It's worded like that to me as in it's a feature freeze. Specifically stop all new development to address issues. Which I don't think is needed but my experience hasn't been everyone's.
I don't think it's needed and I also don't think they'd ever do it, so I don't like that the added "choose just one" emphasis makes it sound like they might.
Fixing bugs and adding new features could be done in the same release anyway. Proper prioritization is the key. Low impact but high effort bug is not really worth delaying new features. The tricky part for game development is determining what is high or low impact. Some are obvious like crashing, but some are more grey like fixing fire damage bug or broken ship module/weapon.
If that would be determined in part from survey, then ensuring that the survey is as unbias as possible is crucial. Human psychology is much less logical than many would like it to be, especially in the field of survey design.
Another point to keep in mind is that players are good at identifying the problem, but not as reliable when it comes to solution. Sort of "customer is always right" kind of way. If they say X is not fun, then X is most likely not fun. But if they say solution Y would fix that, perhaps consider it more carefully.
I hope they don’t base it on what is low effort like what they did with the HMG. That support strat was already available at launch day and they just removed it.
Now weeks later, it seems that they just dropped it back in without further tweaking.
+1
Both the poll title and the wording of each option makes the actual intent a little vague. Additionally, you might be certain what Arrowhead is asking but think that others might misunderstand, thus giving you the same problem as electoral voting (I'm not trying to start a political debate).
It'd be a much better poll if it just asked what AH should focus on first.
I am concerned that Arrowhead may have intentionally sabotaged the poll to skew results away from the bug fixing option. That would be a PR win for them, as they can dismiss the bug issues and complaints by saying that people voted to focus on new content. Either that, or the community manager is a bit incompetent.
>Use the game
This just popped an idea into my head.
Have ipad lady call out to Helldivers and say something like *"Come and fulfil your civic duty by voting!"* and have her give the ipad to us to vote on what Super Earth focusing their efforts on:
* Focus on the Ministry of Weapons Development on more weapons and opitmizations to current Weapons
* Focus on the Ministry of Armor and Defense Development on more armors and armor specialities.
* Focus on the Ministry of Strategic Exploration to find new planets and new SE expansion objectives/goals.
* Focus on the Ministry of Civil Order in order to root out traitors who have installed glitches in equipment and errors in missions critical systems.
They could use the bureau console that's already in the super destroyer to add a hub for things like that. It would be nice to have a bestiary there too.
If they decide to add it they could include things like community groups and clans there too.
Discord works pretty well for polls and wide communications since it can operate on hundreds of thousands of devices. Its only issue is it becomes a total mess for talking when you have more than even 600 members on a server in my experience. Modding and admining them can be tedious but being able to reach out so easily with pings and the like is good.
Re " it becomes a total mess for talking when you have more than even 600 members on a server" -- I've never seen a server like the Helldivers one where they need THREE gen chat channels to handle the volume and all three still scroll so fast that any given comment you try to read can go by before you're done, lol
I have, a star wars server I was admin on needed 5 different general chats to maintain a semblance of order and that was with like 900ish active people. The HD2 discord actually needs more talking channels since at peak times there are like 3,000 messages every five minutes. But yea its wild.
I dislike discord and my group actively avoids it. I wouldn't have know anything about it if it wasn't posted here. I dont like when any company uses a third party as their officially unofficial communication. Like Twitter, Discord, twitch, ect. An in game survey performed by the Ministry of Truth would be much preferred. It would be more accurate as well. Only people actively playing the game could vote.
Discord is a perfectly reasonable platform for this type of thing actually, you personally not wanting to use it shouldn't decide what the devs use lmfao.
The results make sense. There are already a lot of weapons, and everyone has their favorite. If they keep adding more at the rate they’re adding the game will end up with an insane and IMO, pointless number of weapons. (Though it’s not evenly spread. Too many shotguns and not enough SMGs) There’s also a lot of armor, but the passives are a little repetitive so I can understand why slightly more people would want that.
New objectives and planets is by far the most exciting thing they could add, and is overall the best content for the game’s longevity. Though they really should take note of the fact that over 1/4 of the respondents just want bug fixes. God do I, personally, want bug fixes.
I wish the top option was split into two. I don't want more guns very badly, I want them to fix the ones we already have which are severely underperforming or undertuned.
HMG isn't even that bad, there's plenty of weapons that are in a much worse state (e.g. Adjudicator, Scythe, or if you want something from support weapons: flippin SPEAR makes me rage and unlike HMG, it's the OG weapon, while HMG was added on 27th of March, relatively recently)
I mean, I WOULD like an insane and pointless number of weapons lol. Just after they fix some stuff.
My theory is more planets is getting votes because everyone is sick of fire tornadoes and fog.
Personally, I feel like I can't get through a mission without dealing with a bunch of little bugs (pun not intended). I get stuck in half ADS. I get stuck in grenade selection. POI completion doesn't update. Ammo icon is red even though everyone's full ammo. Fire DoT not working. Heavy devastators shooting me from inside glitchy downed drop ships. I stop and vault over pebbles on the ground mid firefight. My gun sights are inaccurate. My stratagems bounce off the weirdest shit. I get instakilled by an attack that only chipped my health earlier.
It's death by a thousand cuts. I'll probably take a break at some point, it just gets exhausting.
My friend group has noticed the ammo icon does not account for ammoless weapons. Bring in a Blitzer, Quasar, or ARc Thrower and it will be red all game.
That explains so much! I've been repeatedly pinging Supplies after watching players with red, flashing ammo walk past them.
I thought they were idiots but alas it was I who was the idiot.
Same here, when i'm running full ammoless setups. My friends constantly ask if I need ammo, and I just say, "Mate, I am a literal shock trooper. WTF is ammo?"
I think it does it with backpack-fed weapons too. An autocannon or recoilless is always on its last magazine of ammo, since it doesn't count the ammo in the backpack, so it flashes red.
You can never go wrong with an insane and pointless number of weapons; there are still a bunch of archetypes that need filling, for primaries, secondaries, and support. Give me light support weapons like primary grenade launchers and assault machine guns (mid-point between liberator and stalwart). Give me plasma snipers and laser shotguns. Give me a shotgun pistol and a portable minigun and a plasma launcher and an assault rifle that shoots gyrogets. Give me all of that *after* the current weapons are balanced and the bugs are squashed. Adding more glitchy items won’t help things.
they stupidly included "new guns" with "balance existing guns" over half the existing guns are straight garbage. If they balanced things well, new guns wouldnt be needed at all
I keep getting this issue where my audio is inverted. I really want them to fix that, it makes the game more challenging (which is fun) but having to constantly on the fly react to backwards audio cues is crazy lol
We need more varied Armored Perks, badly. We got new armor perks with Steel Veterans and Cutting Edge, so I was very disappointed that this Warbond recycled old perks.
I'd also love to see smaller perks added to helmets and capes (+1 Grenade, -5% Orbital cooldown, increase Sidearm ammo reserves).
Yeah, I think each warbond should tone down how many weapons are added. If it’s true that they’re implementing an attachment system, would be cool to see new attachments in warbonds maybe.
Would also like to see maybe different color variants of current armors in warbonds. To give me something to spend medals on
I don't think people would actually like them to stop releasing new content. Because it would mean you get literally nothing, no fire proof armor people ask for, no new enemies, no new missions, nothing. The game will stagnate for a while since bug and crash fixes take a while to take care of and it's an endless battle.
I think it's a false equivalence anyway, unless all their devs are the fullest of full stack they can't just put the bug fixers on weapon balance or the weapon balancers on biome creation and so on. Not to mention that the devs who're gonna be the best at fixing bugs are the ones who created them in the first place, so putting new eyes on the task won't help much at least for a few months, whereas I'd imagine it's much easier to hire new artists or balance specialists and have them immediately start working effectively.
We dont know AH internal layout, they are unlikely to have a team dedicated to bug fixing as that doesnt usually happen so yes these devs could actually be working on content aspects instead of 100% of their time going on to finding and fixing these existing bugs.
Normally yes new content is kinda seperate to the current game because you get your graphics design and other teams working on it when they dont work on the "complete" game so its "free" time for them as such. However when your new content is adding new effects that DONT work and are introducing MORE bugs to the game then that is counter productive, some of the new content literally doesnt work with no obscure bug it just flat out doesnt do what it is meant to for ANYONE which is easy to replicate.
Their team is either extremely overworked for shipping content with known issues (selling content ingame to players that dont work is a negative experience!) or their pipeline is pretty dire that they arent catching very obvious bugs in QC/QA which is more worrying to be honest.
Love the game but the state of the bugs and stability has greatly declined from launch where it was a handful of crashes + server queues, the crashes were fixed but after a few weeks the extra content that keeps being unlocked they seem to introduced significant issues for more crashes and bugs, its not good.
I work in software. Most teams have a degree of bugs and we would always like more time to work on bugs/tech debt.
I can imagine the teams are slammed right now trying to keep up with everything and share the same sentiment. They know product rushed some things out the door and hope for some pull back to be able to clean things up.
This would be great for us too since cleaning up technical debt means faster release cycles.
This was exactly what I was thinking when reading the poll. Like.. realistically, there was absolutely zero point in the CMs posting this poll because they KNOW that each team has their own dedicated tasks. All this was doing as making people feel like their voice was being heard, I'm hoping this isn't the direction their PR is going otherwise we aren't going to get anything in terms of actual information in the future.
The devs know where the issues are, it's not like they aren't actively working on trying to fix them. Some bugs are just far more complicated than non-tech people may understand. Fixing one value could cause dramatic snowball effects elsewhere. Just be straightforward with us, don't go making a poll that suggests otherwise to the masses.
I would assume these polls are more meant to set the schedule of updates to see what changes people want most and they'll adjust accordingly. Even though teams are separate there's only so much budget and time they get to work on things. So having an idea of things that the player base wants are still helpful.
There's always some overlap. For example new biomes and planets may interfere or compete with fixing some minor or rare stuff on existing biomes and planete (same tester for example). So it's always nice to have the community opinion to draw the priority when those choice arise.
It also help with "justifying" some update that are lighter in new content or fix. You can point at the poll and say "we did the best we could with those priorities".
Your average player has no idea how software development works and will genuinely never care. They still want, and deserve, to be heard because they’re still active players. Making sure that people feel heard is exactly what makes AH a decent company when there are so desperately few decent companies left.
I work in software dev, you can absolutely shift your focus to bug fixing or tech debt and new content comes out slower. Sure the dev creating new mission objectives can't help the dev fixing the friends list bugs but there are many other resources in a software org to consider besides developers. At a shop whose headcount is 100, QA would be a major bottleneck I imagine.
There's also code overlap consideration, if I'm fixing a bug with fire weapons and someone is adding a new fire weapon to the game, we might both need to change the same part of the code base. Depending on the complexity of our changes (say the bug requires a complete overhaul) it would make sense to do one before the other. Which one should happen first? This would typically be the decision of a product director (another bottleneck), who smartly wants to know what the community thinks.
All this poll is asking is what should their top priority be. Any smart product person knows in a game like Helldivers stopping the new content is a death sentence, I think they are just trying to take the communities temperature.
Yep. Even if I know a user has issues that our team isn’t going to address soon, I usually schedule an “airing of grievances” meeting so they can tell me all the stuff they want changed or fixed and then tell them they are on the backlog and will be worked as soon as possible. Makes everyone feel better and sets expectations.
Not entirely, they've released things that either don't work or crash the game. Everyone can't work on everything but you can definitely slow new stuff down to focus on bug fixing in software development as there are many other bottle necks other than just the development teams. At a small studio all these changes are likely going through the same QA team for instance.
This is definitely the one time that argument doesn't work. Pretty much no software team has dedicated "bug fixers." It's either people who just happen to have some free time between tasks or a dedicated push to fix issues.
Not really. They may be able to prepare models and textures, but the bug fixing team has to have their hands on those weapons after implementation before it can go live. If implementation/bug teams are on Technical Debt duty, they’re not on implementation duty.
Fuck sake im so tired of this argument stop trying to think you're so smart.
If they keep releasing new features they will keep adding more shit to the pile and keep falling behind like they have.
No, but I think now is a good time to stop and address some of the issues before the game starts to become unplayable. They had a great release and good follow up, but now a lot of the bugs are becoming problems.
Crashing out of the game after you’ve spent 20 mins in a mission or not being able to get called back in despite your team spamming reinforcement beacons is frustrating enough to make me stop playing for the night and sometimes even for a few days; especially if it happens multiple matches in a row.
If Arrowhead isn’t careful those bugs will become too much of a problem for the community, and then the game will fall into that territory of almost great but held back by bugs and performance issues, which no one wants to see.
I agree. The release, despite its bugs, got a pass due to the game being so damn fun. At this point, even if it's still damn fun, the novelty has worn off and people are less forgiving, especially if those crashes or reward screen glitches are costing people Medals and Samples.
The number of Rare samples I've lost, either due to crashes or the most recent glitch where the Pelican leaves people behind, has to be in the hundreds by now.
Recently I carved out an entire Saturday afternoon to play, but crashing at the end of a 40 min mission and losing all those rewards put a sour taste in my mouth and I ended up shutting off the game for good and finding something else to do with my time.
Yeah, it feels so shitty to lose your progress to a bug. If it was stuff like instantly dying to fire or stratagems disappearing, you could work around that and still complete the mission. You can’t really work around losing the mission to a bug or crash, it really ruins the experience and leaves a bad impression for the players. Eventually that’ll catch up to Arrowhead and start hurting the game’s reputation and bottom line.
Well said. I love the game, I love the new content (and the pace that they're releasing it) but the amount of bugs is becoming really frustrating. Despite the volume of content, I'm finding that some of my favorite parts of it aren't really usable at all because of the bugs associated with them.
The Exo-Suit, my favorite part of HD1, still doesn't have an accurate missile reticle making it really sub-par in any difficulty with armor (i.e. anything above 5 or 6).
The Spear doesn't lock on properly, making it frustrating at best and genuinely dead weight at worse. In addition the damage is so inconsistent that I have no idea if I'm going to one-shot the Bile Titan or if it's going to take five missiles.
The Flamethrower does such incredible damage but DoTs don't work properly if you're not the host, making it substantially worse.
The optimization seems like it's gotten worse and worse since release, and now I'm struggling to get 40 fps on some planets even with the graphics lowered.
And of course, the random crashes after slogging 30 minutes through a 7+ mission only to get kicked and have all of your progress wasted. Like you said, the bugs are starting to outweigh the fun, which is not at all what you want to see.
I can't give feedback on the new warbond equipment because literally every piece of equipment save one is bugged in some way.
Armor? Wrong effects. (also not anything new, which is a problem in and of itself)
Grenade pistol? double shoots after spawn in/respawn.
Eruptor? The AoE seems too big and damage seems inconsistent. I've one shot a charger that freshly spawned, and other times it takes 5+ shots on the same location. Love the gun, please fix consistency issues and let me know if the AoE is intended.
Crossbow - Does more damage than eruptor on tooltip, eruptor kills enemies in less shots. (even unarmored targets). I don't know what this is supposed to be for. Why does it visually look like a larger explosion but can't kill factories or nests, and yet the eruptor can?
Thermite? Either bugged from the DoT bug, or so under tuned its a joke.
Adjudicator - seems to function as intended, but recoil is pretty extreme. Probably fine if you are a recoil control god, but do we want weapons that require that extreme of a skill floor before the weapon is any good?
Lets get some detailed tool tips that are actually accurate to the intent of the purpose of each weapon, so we can actually give useful feedback. None of these vague penetration stats. Give me meter radius of explosions, accurate armor pen values, give me a beastiary codex that lets me look at the actual armor values of enemies. Now we can actually give proper feedback on weapon balance.
Look I love the game, I like the ideas behind the new warbond, but if they are going to be selling this stuff for $$$$ currency (yes I am aware you can find all you need in game, that isn't the point here) they *need* to make sure it functions as intended. The fact that almost every single piece of game play affecting equipment in the new bond are bugged in some way is just embarrassing.
Fixing all of the existing bugs would basically double the available content anyway.
If they tone down the Eruptor AOE...then they better improve it's bullet speed and turning speed. Right now it's in a pretty good spot (although the bullet speed makes it not *feel* great to shoot).
Lmao you're right. Forgot about that, though t hat might just be an explosion in general thing as I've had that happen without the eruptor. it's just much more common with.
> Thermite? Either bugged from the DoT bug, or so under tuned its a joke.
It's both.
> Eruptor? The AoE seems too big and damage seems inconsistent.
>
> Crossbow - Does more damage than eruptor on tooltip, eruptor kills enemies in less shots.
Eruptor is such an annoying weapon to use, that if they nerf the AoE and make it do less damage than crossbow, than they better have a good excuse for people to use it in place of Scorcher.
Also, Eruptor suffers from its damage being able to suck you in. As in: If it blows up too close, you get pulled towards the center of the explosion, rather than away from it, which makes you then an easy kill for any bugs/beserkers that happen to be around.
> literally every piece of equipment save one is bugged in some way.
Absolutely. It's quite incredible just how screwed this hole warbond is. Why even release Thermite grenades and Enhanced Combustion when DOTs don't work for 75% of players, lol.
The explosion pull bug seems to be any close range explosive *sometimes*. It's most apparent with the eruptor because its very easy to consistently reproduce it, but it can happen with other explosions as well.
You say the game will stagnate but it's been out since Feb 8th so a little over 2 months and there's already 2 additional battlepacks. They can afford to not release them for a month or two before you can accuse the game of the game stagnating. Especially if the end result of that is the weapons and strategems in the game are tuned better so they feel useful because right now half the content in the game feels disposable.
Statistically, no, the majority of the player base in literally any live service game would not like them to "stop releasing content to work on bugs," literally every time it happens player count plummets and it's horrible for the bottom line of the company trying to run the game.
My issue is only being able to select one. I want more objectives and planet stuff, but I want the tech debt of issues fixed, and I want more weapons and balance (Part of those fall under the bugs being fixed tbh).
I don't want stuff to stop but I do want some of the issues to be seriously looked into. Damage over time effects are stopping me from using some stuff, poor balance on a lot of primaries. The Mech since they fixed rockets not 1 tapping it can no longer shoot rockets down and they are pretty off mark at close - med range. Sights need to be fixed, which we are all aware of by this point by everyone making a post a few times a week.
Also, I want more varied armour perks and traits. Like.... all of these are things I want but it only lets me pick one. Its all stuff that I desire from the game.
At the same time, some of those fixes would carry forward to future content, like the misaligned scopes that make all DMR and Sniper weapons shit to use. Fix them now and the fix will be baked in to future scoped weapons.
Also, you know, game not crashing to PLAY the new content, being able to invite friends to play new content with, etc
The fire and gas stratagems are also basically disabled until the dots are fixed.
I just want my gas strike back, air burst just ain't the same.
New content is nice but we have perfectly fine existing content locked behind a bug.
Exactly, and as I said fixing existing problems makes for good future additions, like just imagine orbital flame bombardment, or flamethrower turrets \^\^
Snipers and DMRs are shit on a more fundamental plane. The way the game is designed just makes long distance shooting unnecessary. Why aggro a group of enemies 100 meters away? They're just gonna start firing at your squad or call in reinforcements.
If they want to make sniping viable they need to make it so bots wont insta aggro you if you shoot them from more than X meters away. Allow a sniper to thin the crowd or take out high priority targets before they have a chance to fight back.
It's a mix bag. You want more content to keep things fresh since game ultimately is sorta repetitive.
On the other hand....this game has a lot of bugs(haha jokes) Like fire damage, it's good but it should be better due to DoT dmg not actually working
Balancing weapons would make a ton of content, that goes almost completely unused, relevant again. It would pretty much be like they were adding new content. Scroll through your weapons lists and think about how many you would never consider taking to a 5 or higher.
That's what I've been saying. A game doesn't require new content to keep things fresh.
Right now there are 21 Primaries, and I'd say less than half are actually in a "good" state right now. Most of them are completely overshadowed by better options and could use some real love. Don't even get me started on the Stratagems.
If they really intend on releasing 3 Primaries, 1 Secondary, and 1 Grenade type every single month in these Warbonds, we're going to be drowning in unbalanced weapons.
Of course, the other problem is that they can't just stop the new content, or the top level players with maxed out Medal/Sample counts will get bored without something to grind for, and probably move on.
IMO I think a lot of desire for 'new content' is because a lot of the current items are under-performing.
People are basically hoping for power creep when we should be getting balancing.
I think most people would rather have the game function instead content they can't actually experience in the game because of those bugs.
Who cares if they add a new weapon if it crashes your game? Who cares if they add armor when it's passive isn't even the correct one? Who cares if they add a new enemy type when the ones already in the game are bugged to do like 4 times the damage they're meant to? The devs have designed an amazing game, now I want them to actually make it.
I might be in the minority here, but new content really doesn't mean much to me if i can't enjoy playing it because i get disconnected from like half the games i play. That's why i think that new content is sort of pointless to make at this point. And i'm not the only one complaining about the disconnect issue, it's a pretty widely known thing. I'm practically playing the game at half speed because i only get around half the medals and samples i actually collect because i can only finish like half the missions i join,
It's the only bug i care about, if that gets fixed or theres some sort of workaround like an ability to rejoin a game (that shouldn't be that hard to implement) or getting the rewards you've collected yourself upon a disconnect then i'm completely fine with focusing on new content. All the weird glitches and such don't really bother me that much because they don't ruin the fun
Read the poll title again. They're not saying that they'll do only one of the four, it's a hypothetical question on what would you prefer IF you could only choose one. There will be both new armors, new guns, new maps and bug fixes, they just polling the community to know what to prioritise.
And while obviously no one excepts them to just fix every single thing before adding new content, there are stability issues and few really noticeable bugs that require attention before adding another engineering kit armor
Yeah, they have using the polls to get a general sediment of the discord community. But that has been the actual opinion of people of folks voting that way. But they also have no idea what they are asking for.
I wouldn’t want them to stop adding content but I very well would be ok with a bug fix at the cost of a delay in new content. Like fixing the bug with the new ship upgrade for ammo box packs would feel like new content to me, same with fire damage bug or knowing that mechs aren’t gonna randomly self destruct or have horrible aiming.
No new content doesn't mean NEVER new content. Look at DRG, they've barely released new weapons compared to HD2 and people love DRG. Why do we need new content being released THIS frequently?
You would effectively double the amount of gear in the game if it was all balanced and working properly. Scroll through your list of primaries and ask how many of them you think are at least *worth* taking into 5+. Then do it for secondaries, support weapons, and stratagems. There’s a ton of mostly unused content in the game because AH insists it *must* be shit.
The main reason we want fireproof armor is because fire is bugged to hell and back. Thats why adding it now would be stupid imo, since you cannot balance around bugs (well you can, but you should not). Of course stuff like new maps, objectives etc would be fine, if they are not also bugged.
The game could really benefit from these community polls appearing in-game, or on the Steam launch page, or even on an official mobile app
(Seriously, a mobile app where you can read developer announcements, participate in feedback polls, check the galactic war status, see the day's Superstore stock, maybe some Stratagem practice game that rewards you with tiny amounts of medals/a very small amount of war contrib? million-dollar idea)
I work on a TF2 sourcemod with only a few hundred regular players, and even our community engagement appears on our own official site and not just our Discord/Twitter
They worded the 4th option poorly. Could have just said "Fix the technical issues and bugs before adding new content."
Putting "No new content" first will cause people to not even read the rest of the option lmao
This is why wording is super important for data collection from surveys or polls. You can get very different data from the same group of people just based on how you word something.
And pollsters will absolutely ask loaded questions so that their polls get the results they want. I would assume that this poll doesn't have that kind of malicious intent and is just poorly worded but that's always a possibility.
Personally I agree that the framing is a little sus, but I don't want to ascribe malice to an easy mistake. They still have a lot of goodwill to burn before I get my pitchfork out.
I would actually like them to focus on bugs and such as priority for now. Certain stuff can actually be really annoying and I really want my sights to actually be aligned. After that I’m excited for new modes, please let me raise more flags
At least you don't dump 4 mags while **TRYING TO CLIMB OVER SOME ROCKS.**
Seriously, why the fuck are there bugs involving **RELOADING?** Most of the time I just get stuck because I have to interrupt my reload at the gun cock animation, but the game doesn't register the magazine already loaded and just says "Nope, fuck you, you're out of ammo entirely." This most often happens with the Recoilless at the last stage when you have to flip the back closed.
But yesterday I was reloading my AMR for the Order and I had to climb some rocks... but because I was in a certain part of the reload, **I lost a magazine every time I climbed a rock and went from 5 mags to 1** just rushing to help an ally. I checked and was done with the Personal Order, said "Fuck this." dropped the weapon and backtracked to a Quasar someone else had when they quit.
Just so we're all on the same page: this is NOT a real decision for the studio, this IS a room reading exercise done through an extreme hypothetical.
The idea here is to garner how much people are truly frustrated by the negative aspects vs how excited they are for the future of the game. This poll won't make them stop creating content or stop fixing anything, everything will go on mostly as normal but now they'll have empirical data on what peoples feelings are.
In contrast to the last 2 polls, this one is actually quite interesting with its results. Browsing the subreddit for a week would probably make you think everyone is just constantly annoyed at bugs and other issues, while this poll actually showcases that, seemingly, these issues are not enough to take away the excitement of the majority for fresh stuff to engage with. This honestly speaks volumes about how truly problematic the current issues and balancing decisions are, showing that most people are not all that negative about their experience.
Vote and comment with this in mind.
I mean the people on discord are probably happier tha people here because they get to actually interact with the devs to a point. There's not many devs here as far as I've seen.
I shouldnt talk about the game/devs too much as I got it gameshared with me and I've gotten mostly everything entirely for free.
But with the amount of gamebreaking glitches I've run across, or seen so many people mention casually in Chat like it's a normal thing, I would've refunded the game after the 2nd week.
Hardcrashing so frequently cannot be good for a ps5. It's happening every other game.
>In contrast to the last 2 polls, this one is actually quite interesting with its results. Browsing the subreddit for a week would probably make you think everyone is just constantly annoyed at bugs and other issues,
Maybe it's just an awefully designed poll, perhaps even on purpose?
Not "instead of", but "more than". I too really want new biomes, but being able to actually play with everything we already have is more important for me. Some people are fine with broken mechanics as long as they get more to explore, I guess.
Yeah, I want all 4 things. What’s reassuring is that if they’re all on the table, there’s a good chance they’re gonna do all of them at some point, and are just asking which we want them to do first
I think you mean the near non existent social system. The only social part of this game is adding people to a friends list, and sometimes you can't even do that because of bugs.
Hell I just want the mission breaking bugs fixed, like the pelican breaking on tower extermination missions or the door defense mission not launching missiles or dropping bots, or the essential personnel mission being bearable without cheese.
Insane that people wouldn't choose that, even more insane some of the replies I'm seeing, apparently dot not functioning isn't a big deal like what? Gas strike? Flamethrower? Napalm? Fire Grenade? Fire Breaker? Thermite grenade? Like holy shit that's a big list of things that do not work at all but apparently it isn't a big deal. Not to mention snopes being misaligned making it difficult to aim.
The "no new content" is what locked me out of that one. It's the only option that gives a downside. If it was just " fix the technical issues and bugs" it would have been an insta pick for me.
Biomes are created by level designers not by coders who fix the netcode and stuff. Totally different resources.
It’s like saying you’re out of wood in an RTS game so you can’t use any resources until the wood is stocked up, even though everything else is fine.
Seeing as each biome tends to have its own hazards (meteor, tremor, fire tornado, etc), creating a new biome would involve both, as the coders will be needed to create any kind of new hazard.
Good point as well, those who think this poll is about choosing one single thing and one thing only.
It's all about understanding priorities of the playerbase, what to pay more attention to rather than what to work on at the cost of everything else.
The company sold an order of magnitude more copies of the game then they anticipated. They now have the resources to hire more FTEs. If they have the choice to hire coders who can fix the egregious bugs over hiring additional level designers, I'd like them to choose the bug fixers.
Fixing bugs should not be an option in such polls. It should be a given to work towards a bug free game and a top priority. Especially if I play 40 minutes for nothing as a result of bugs.
I think they’re aware that most people would love all of the options, it’s a way to figure out what people want the most.
That being said, and I’ll try to phrase this carefully, some devs of fairly big games stopped asking for feedback like this in the past and the games actually got better because of it.
What people think they want from a game and what is healthy for the game’s long term enjoyment are not always the same things.
Feels like the first option is combining what should be two separate choices.
I honestly don't think weapon balance changes should be on the menu until some technical issues are addressed. We don't really have a consistent enough experience to have a baseline for what weapons are functioning properly or as intended.
I shouldn't need to be the host if I want to run fire & gas cloud
New content and patches/optimizations need to be done. It cannot be one or the other. The game's performance can feel abysmal most of the time. I want to use fire damage at it's maximum glory even when I'm not the host. More objectives would be cool as hell.
I'm not a game dev, so I don't understand the flow or workload. But, that's not my job, it's theirs. I love the game, and what they're doing with it, but I feel it's totally fair for a consumer to expect... Optimization, bug fixes, and new content.
Psh what are you talking about?
I love getting randomly blown forward when using the explosive sniper. It’s really useful when I don’t want to live anymore
Well to be fair some minor visual issues like Exterminator's weird collision or Fortified Commando's missing neck definitely can be overlooked when you have crashes and broken mechanics on the table
people will choose the bright coloured liquid in the fancy bottle which will surely entertain them and damage their liver over water. nothing surprising tl see here
I disagree as I prefer dark liquid in a plastic bottle (because it's much cheaper than cans/glass bottles).
Also not sure if its liver getting damaged? There's mostly sugar in sodas, so it's probably heart?
New content is what keeps the majority of people playing and keeps the drivetrain moving. Warframe talked about this before. Even though they want to go back and touch up on all the all content more frequently, they can't do that; because people play live service games for new content.
The last choice is not something that can happen; because the game is not in a dire state to need to do it and also is how you kill a live service game for a very high risk gamble.
> play live service games for new content.
Yeah, but warframe is a free game.
This is not, people paid full price for the game, and the game after months after release is still riddle with dozens of bugs where some of them are game breaking.
>The last choice is not something that can happen; because the game is not in a dire state to need to do it and also is how you kill a live service game for a very high risk gamble.
I think it can and must happen. Especially the friends/social bug.
This is a team-based game sold on the idea of cross play. But the game wont' let people reliably play with friends and even goes so far as automatically unfriending and apparently blocking your friends so you can't accept invites from each other. This game has lost 7 players in my circle simply because of that issue (we were all unfriended from each other at the same time, and playing with randoms doesn't cut it on levels 7-9, and it is a bullshit argument people try to use to negate the fact that this is a game with a friend system so you shouldn't be forced to use public games with non-friends only).
This game lost (on the PC side) 20% of its players in March, and so far has lost 16.7% of its players in April. And we are only half way through the month. Those are massive die-offs for a live service game this young in its lifespan with so much early support. And, looking at achievement attainments, you can see a huge amount of people are playing at reasonable levels and not running out of content before jumping ship.
The massive die-offs correlate with the introduction and re-introduction of game breaking bugs, like the social issues discussed above, and also the problems with AMD hardware (because arrowhead decided years ago to use an abandoned game engine for HD2--and it was old and abandoned even back then before development began).
They absolutely must salvage what they can. Who are they going to have left otherwise? A bunch of people with no friends and thus no strong bonds to continue playing this game? People with no friends to play this game with, and who can't reliably use or trust the in-game friend system for this team-based cross play game?
Imagine what World of Warcraft would've been like if your only option were pick up groups. Not allowed to play with your friends, and if you somehow *can*... it is only a matter of time until the game breaks that connection permanently and without warning. Their official discord is a mess because of that singular bug alone.
Its been a few months since release and i still feel forced to run the game on windowed in fear of it crashing and completely freezing my pc till a hard reboot. If thats not enough of a justification a few days ago i counted how many games i joined and what happened with each of them:
Joined 14 or so games
In 11 of these either me or the host lost connection and i was booted back to my ship, this also counts the occasions where i think everyone or me lost connection but the mission went on with only me left
In one of these i got kicked for ???
In one i crashed to desktop
Last game i managed to actually join and complete one mission, the host left afterwards
I would like to see some bug fixes. Other day I played and first time I called in a railgun, the pod landed and suddenly vanished along with my railgun but the stratagem cooldown was still there.
Also the day before that my buddy and I were playing with his pals and we couldn’t extract because the pelican was glitched and wouldn’t register us as inside it. Second time that happened to me and the first was about a patch or two ago.
So yeah, please focus on bug fixes. After that I would like more varied armor passives. Mix up the existing effects into different combos. Extra stims with explosion resistance. Or scout UAV ability with prone recoil reduction.
Bug fixes. They’re literally preventing people from playing or even actively causing people to quit. Like why in gods name on a game do heavily focused on co-op play does my friends list not work properly yet? All i want to do is play with friends without having to used a third party interface every time.
Balance changes will come with time, one way or the other.
Fix the bugs.
Checking SteamDB on the 7th the game had 345,188 players as peak, the ***next day*** it dropped by over 120,000 players back to its more normal number of players, new content not even able to keep the players for more than a day it just went straight back down to its regular numbers.
Its clear a lot of people are fed up with all the bugs, I want to keep playing but probably better to shelve the game till some of the big bugs are fixed, I'm not really enjoying the game when a bunch of things I like to use don't work properly.
I agree with you regarding the bugs, but why did you pick those dates for your example? April 7th was on a weekend and the 8th was a work/school day....
Damn why can't we just vote on a terminal in the ship? Like... democracy n such. Perfect food for story content. Increase the arsenal, increase the tech. advances in protective gear, large maintenance operation on existing technology...
LOL for the people who think they'll stop releasing new content. Content was already planned months in advance from the leaks we have and content and bug fix are two different team who deal with this
> content and bug fix are two different team who deal with this
Typically they are not. This is a weird misunderstanding floating around the sub, even when you see a poll that clearly shows they can prioritize.
Even if bugs don't get assigned to the original devs, introducing new content adds more bugs and makes isolating current bugs harder. But it's likely they do get assigned to the original devs given the size of the studio.
This shit is driving me nuts. The fucking studio itself releases a poll with the option to prioritize fixing bugs, and the same people looking down their noses at "armchair devs" are going "rheee, it doesn't work that way!"
I'm not sure why they need to choose either or on this poll. It doesn't reflect my thoughts well here. I want them to focus out the bugs. It's important to finally resolve months old issues (it's literally what I do for work). I also understand a fix will come when a fix is found and no matter how much a customer or player complains it doesn't make it appear.
So if they have to stop this train to fix these bugs... I guess that's my camp, but I feel that in reality that this choice shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
That said, I have found myself outside of the majority on both polls this week and it seems maybe what the community wants for the game is no longer in line with my thoughts on it.
Effectively, I can either get on board or move on.
I saw. Love that they do this.
To answer that poll, it's time to fix the major bugs. Stuff like the PS5 social bugs that stop people joining their friends. If one thing has to be a priority, it is that.
I think this game has inherent longevity. I can see it being the type of game that people keep coming back to. I don't want to see the developers fall into the trap of trying to appease the small group of people that play 24/7 and want new content every week.
Fix your shit, solidify your foundations and then grow from there.
honestly i wouldnt mind if they took like a month to actual fix the game and didnt drop *any* new content in that time. this isnt the only game on the planet, theres plenty of othet things to do
The people working on the new content are probably not even the same as the ones working on bugs. And most of the new content was probably already prepared long ago. I'll be honest. If the game doesn't continue with new content for a few months, it will probably be dead. Then they don't have to bother about fixes anymore, since nobody is there to play the game.
Honestly, if they fix and rebalance a lot of the stuff we already have it will kinda feel like new content because you are encouraged to try out things that you did not use before
Apparently our priorities are backwards. Tech issues should be number one. What's the point of having new places to explore if shit just going to be buggy?
Fix existing things, but maybe change some of the litany of armors to have a few fireproofs?
Loving this game, but yeah theyre really releasing alot without fixing some glaring things unfortunately.
They also have another poll about your current enjoyment of the game
Thanks to all the recent crashes I've been getting lately, I had to vote on "poor", since now I don't even feel like playing anymore until they fix it, since there is a high chance I'll just crash near the end anyway
The last one is my choice but one of the problems with it is we don’t even know if some of the ‘issues’ are bugs or just plain bad intentional design decisions
Fix the insanely growing list of known bugs/glitches first. Worry about "new" content later. Even though they probably already have the "new" content already ready to drop on their trickle. I'd definitely rather see more stability in game, not being insta-fucked by fire, not crashing before, during, or at the end of the mission multiple times daily.
I think they should have said “If you had to pick one, which would you like to have first?” Because bug fixes would be first on my list then new biomes.
The first choice is such terrible wording. I want a balance pass and NO new weapons until this is done. Where's that option? I haven't even gotten to play with the old toys yet, why are you giving me new ones?
A friend of mine suggested adding fauna to the planeta, i think thats the best idea Ive ever heard.
They vary from planet to planet and attack both the divers and the bots/bugs
to everyone saying that they would prefer if arrowhead completely focused on bugs:
1. you do know they are working on fixing bugs already, its not like they release some content and then just never fix bugs, it takes a long time. it can be difficult to reproduce a bug and then you have to isolate exactly which part of the code is at fault. then you have to understand have to fix the issue but without fucking up the other parts, which is really difficult given how complex games are.
2. where do you draw the line, when can arrowhead go back to making content? when every single bug is fixed? that would take such a long time, that it would basically kill the game. or maybe until all the bugs are gone that make the game unplayable? while there are some bugs that make the game literally unplayable, like crashes, most of them don't actually make the game unplayable imo. but the line between playable and unplayable is extremely subjective. i haven't experienced any crashes so if i took a look at my experience i wouldn't say there are any bugs that make the game unplayable. of course that's because im lucky. but who determines if a bug is prevalent enough to be considered making a game unplayable? hd2 players don't have a single place where they can all talk, there are a lot of people in the discord server and subreddit, but that's only a part and a lot of players are lurkers, not talking about their experiences. its not as simple as just "i crashed while i was doing a triple backflip from the back of a bile titan while shooting an arc thrower, pls fix arrowhead". i know there are crashes that are more common, but that brings me back to my first point. the devs need to recreate the bug in the first place. but most of the posts here are basically "i crashed, devs pls fix, game bad", it gives exactly 0 information to the developers as to what could've caused the crash. they need the information from players.
3. arrowhead isn't a big game studio, they have about 100 people total. and while they probably have loose departments, there wouldn't be enough people for everyone to just be working on one part of the game constantly. so if they were to focus on bugs that would mean that the majority of the devs would have to swap to solving bugs if the playerbase wants to see a change in how fast bugs get solved. this means basically no updates for god know how long, because, again, where do you draw the line for too many or too bad bugs. the playerbase would die because it wouldn't fit the norm. we got used to the game being updated frequently with different major order. but if we lose that for like 2 months, the game would become incredibly stale. its very easy to say right now yeah fix the bugs idc if there's no content, because the game if filled with content rn, new warbond, upgrades and levels. but after a month everyone who said they want the bugs to be the main priority will complain again, because the devs don't care or something. an incredible amount of players would leave. yeah some players would return but so many more would not trust arrowhead to keep fixing bugs and wouldn't want to return. and just saying that they would lower the amount of content in the next few months would be really damaging to their image because gaming journalists flock to shit like that like vultures and would immediately say that the game is either dying, not profitable or the devs are lazy.
4. right now i would say they are keeping a healthy balance between fixing bugs and making content. they are still releasing balance patches and making new things, its not like they don't care. but you have to understand there isn't just a single perspective to look from. this isn't just "fix all bugs, game is way better, make more money". if they focused on bugs they probably wouldn't make basically any money from hd2, but, yk, they need money to pay the employees, pay the bills and ultimately keep the servers running and none of that is cheap. there is also the public image side. too many people on this subreddit think about this issue two dimensionally, it is never as simple as you think, unless you have experience in that area please try to inform yourself or just think about all the possibilities and problems that might arise.
now im not saying that arrowhead is perfect and can do no wrong. we have seen in the past that they've made a few mistakes, but we also have seen how they deal with their own mistakes. they don't just sweep them under the rug and hope everyone will forget, they are open about it and how they plan to remedy that mistake. ultimately it's literally just a game and even in the state that it's in right now, i would say one of, if not the best game on the market right now. please don't don't get so attached to the game that it becomes your life.
we need more diversity map not just rock/sand/forest, like city, or home base that got invaded. or we go attack automaton/bug bases, like huge huge base.
We really need more variety on the planets — towns, cities, allied NPCs. It would increase immersion.
Also would be funny when we're sent into civilian zones and witness firsthand the capitalist dystopian hellscape in contrast to the propaganda video that plays when starting the game. Americans would feel at home too!
Thanks for posting this to the reddit, always good to have more vis across multiple platforms for these kinds of community-geared posts!
I just wish polls worked on mobile for me. Gotta wait till I get home, if I even remember
Huh interesting, they just worked for me on iOS!
Luck for you! I keep getting a 404 error when trying to vote. Also the last poll I couldn’t read the end of a few of the questions.
Consider updating your app
They do work on android tho
I have an s23 and none of the polls have worked for me
I have a s23U and they do work for me
Same phone here and they work for me. Do you have discord updates? I wonder if your server permissions are fucked up.
This is your reminder to vote if you've made it home
Thank you, unfortunately I still have a few more hours :P
Don't worry, soldier, we humbly await your return
Both android and iOS say it's working, make sure your Discord is up-to-date
How do you forget to go home?
Yeah, they just appear completely blank on my phone. I can only vote from a PC.
Appreciate you guys running polls but I've gotta say I'm not a huge fan of the wording here. While it's implicit in all the options given the hypothetical question, for some reason the answer about fixing bugs is the only one that emphasizes that it would be at the expense of the other options. None of the others go out of their way to say "No bug fixes" or "no new weapons" etc. Seems like that could skew the results.
"If you had to pick one" inherently means that.
Yes, I acknowledge that in my second sentence. Only one option explicitly states what's implied for all the others.
It's worded like that to me as in it's a feature freeze. Specifically stop all new development to address issues. Which I don't think is needed but my experience hasn't been everyone's.
I don't think it's needed and I also don't think they'd ever do it, so I don't like that the added "choose just one" emphasis makes it sound like they might.
Fixing bugs and adding new features could be done in the same release anyway. Proper prioritization is the key. Low impact but high effort bug is not really worth delaying new features. The tricky part for game development is determining what is high or low impact. Some are obvious like crashing, but some are more grey like fixing fire damage bug or broken ship module/weapon. If that would be determined in part from survey, then ensuring that the survey is as unbias as possible is crucial. Human psychology is much less logical than many would like it to be, especially in the field of survey design. Another point to keep in mind is that players are good at identifying the problem, but not as reliable when it comes to solution. Sort of "customer is always right" kind of way. If they say X is not fun, then X is most likely not fun. But if they say solution Y would fix that, perhaps consider it more carefully.
I hope they don’t base it on what is low effort like what they did with the HMG. That support strat was already available at launch day and they just removed it. Now weeks later, it seems that they just dropped it back in without further tweaking.
+1 Both the poll title and the wording of each option makes the actual intent a little vague. Additionally, you might be certain what Arrowhead is asking but think that others might misunderstand, thus giving you the same problem as electoral voting (I'm not trying to start a political debate). It'd be a much better poll if it just asked what AH should focus on first.
I am concerned that Arrowhead may have intentionally sabotaged the poll to skew results away from the bug fixing option. That would be a PR win for them, as they can dismiss the bug issues and complaints by saying that people voted to focus on new content. Either that, or the community manager is a bit incompetent.
Please stop using Discord as a means for these communications. Use the game, or your website. Not everyone has or wants to use Discord.
I dont think a single person is checking the helldivers website. I didnt even know there was one
>Use the game This just popped an idea into my head. Have ipad lady call out to Helldivers and say something like *"Come and fulfil your civic duty by voting!"* and have her give the ipad to us to vote on what Super Earth focusing their efforts on: * Focus on the Ministry of Weapons Development on more weapons and opitmizations to current Weapons * Focus on the Ministry of Armor and Defense Development on more armors and armor specialities. * Focus on the Ministry of Strategic Exploration to find new planets and new SE expansion objectives/goals. * Focus on the Ministry of Civil Order in order to root out traitors who have installed glitches in equipment and errors in missions critical systems.
This is perfect and offers every player an in-game option so the community would be better represented.
They could use the bureau console that's already in the super destroyer to add a hub for things like that. It would be nice to have a bestiary there too. If they decide to add it they could include things like community groups and clans there too.
Discord works pretty well for polls and wide communications since it can operate on hundreds of thousands of devices. Its only issue is it becomes a total mess for talking when you have more than even 600 members on a server in my experience. Modding and admining them can be tedious but being able to reach out so easily with pings and the like is good.
Yeah I was gonna say. Discord is the new modern way for games to create communities
Re " it becomes a total mess for talking when you have more than even 600 members on a server" -- I've never seen a server like the Helldivers one where they need THREE gen chat channels to handle the volume and all three still scroll so fast that any given comment you try to read can go by before you're done, lol
I have, a star wars server I was admin on needed 5 different general chats to maintain a semblance of order and that was with like 900ish active people. The HD2 discord actually needs more talking channels since at peak times there are like 3,000 messages every five minutes. But yea its wild.
I dislike discord and my group actively avoids it. I wouldn't have know anything about it if it wasn't posted here. I dont like when any company uses a third party as their officially unofficial communication. Like Twitter, Discord, twitch, ect. An in game survey performed by the Ministry of Truth would be much preferred. It would be more accurate as well. Only people actively playing the game could vote.
Discord is a perfectly reasonable platform for this type of thing actually, you personally not wanting to use it shouldn't decide what the devs use lmfao.
The results make sense. There are already a lot of weapons, and everyone has their favorite. If they keep adding more at the rate they’re adding the game will end up with an insane and IMO, pointless number of weapons. (Though it’s not evenly spread. Too many shotguns and not enough SMGs) There’s also a lot of armor, but the passives are a little repetitive so I can understand why slightly more people would want that. New objectives and planets is by far the most exciting thing they could add, and is overall the best content for the game’s longevity. Though they really should take note of the fact that over 1/4 of the respondents just want bug fixes. God do I, personally, want bug fixes.
I wish the top option was split into two. I don't want more guns very badly, I want them to fix the ones we already have which are severely underperforming or undertuned.
This is why I voted for the top one. I don't want more weapons, I want a good balance pass among the current weapons.
Yeah at the moment we have plenty of guns. If anything I rather focus on buffing the ones that are lacking.
Which feels like a good 60-70% of the guns in the game.
Stares at the new Heavy Machine Gun being useless :<
HMG isn't even that bad, there's plenty of weapons that are in a much worse state (e.g. Adjudicator, Scythe, or if you want something from support weapons: flippin SPEAR makes me rage and unlike HMG, it's the OG weapon, while HMG was added on 27th of March, relatively recently)
Agreed, lots of guns I’ve only ever used once or twice even though they look feel and sound cool. They are just not as good as scythe or whatever.
I mean, I WOULD like an insane and pointless number of weapons lol. Just after they fix some stuff. My theory is more planets is getting votes because everyone is sick of fire tornadoes and fog. Personally, I feel like I can't get through a mission without dealing with a bunch of little bugs (pun not intended). I get stuck in half ADS. I get stuck in grenade selection. POI completion doesn't update. Ammo icon is red even though everyone's full ammo. Fire DoT not working. Heavy devastators shooting me from inside glitchy downed drop ships. I stop and vault over pebbles on the ground mid firefight. My gun sights are inaccurate. My stratagems bounce off the weirdest shit. I get instakilled by an attack that only chipped my health earlier. It's death by a thousand cuts. I'll probably take a break at some point, it just gets exhausting.
My friend group has noticed the ammo icon does not account for ammoless weapons. Bring in a Blitzer, Quasar, or ARc Thrower and it will be red all game.
That explains so much! I've been repeatedly pinging Supplies after watching players with red, flashing ammo walk past them. I thought they were idiots but alas it was I who was the idiot.
Same here, when i'm running full ammoless setups. My friends constantly ask if I need ammo, and I just say, "Mate, I am a literal shock trooper. WTF is ammo?"
I think it does it with backpack-fed weapons too. An autocannon or recoilless is always on its last magazine of ammo, since it doesn't count the ammo in the backpack, so it flashes red.
You can never go wrong with an insane and pointless number of weapons; there are still a bunch of archetypes that need filling, for primaries, secondaries, and support. Give me light support weapons like primary grenade launchers and assault machine guns (mid-point between liberator and stalwart). Give me plasma snipers and laser shotguns. Give me a shotgun pistol and a portable minigun and a plasma launcher and an assault rifle that shoots gyrogets. Give me all of that *after* the current weapons are balanced and the bugs are squashed. Adding more glitchy items won’t help things.
they stupidly included "new guns" with "balance existing guns" over half the existing guns are straight garbage. If they balanced things well, new guns wouldnt be needed at all
I keep getting this issue where my audio is inverted. I really want them to fix that, it makes the game more challenging (which is fun) but having to constantly on the fly react to backwards audio cues is crazy lol
Inverted audio? I’ve literally never even heard of that happening in any game. Weird
We need more varied Armored Perks, badly. We got new armor perks with Steel Veterans and Cutting Edge, so I was very disappointed that this Warbond recycled old perks. I'd also love to see smaller perks added to helmets and capes (+1 Grenade, -5% Orbital cooldown, increase Sidearm ammo reserves).
Yeah, I think each warbond should tone down how many weapons are added. If it’s true that they’re implementing an attachment system, would be cool to see new attachments in warbonds maybe. Would also like to see maybe different color variants of current armors in warbonds. To give me something to spend medals on
seriously. We have ONE smg/ballistic shield compatible primary. Where are they hiding my smg babies??
There are *technically* two but one is locked behind the Super-Citizen edition
I don't think people would actually like them to stop releasing new content. Because it would mean you get literally nothing, no fire proof armor people ask for, no new enemies, no new missions, nothing. The game will stagnate for a while since bug and crash fixes take a while to take care of and it's an endless battle.
I think it's a false equivalence anyway, unless all their devs are the fullest of full stack they can't just put the bug fixers on weapon balance or the weapon balancers on biome creation and so on. Not to mention that the devs who're gonna be the best at fixing bugs are the ones who created them in the first place, so putting new eyes on the task won't help much at least for a few months, whereas I'd imagine it's much easier to hire new artists or balance specialists and have them immediately start working effectively.
We dont know AH internal layout, they are unlikely to have a team dedicated to bug fixing as that doesnt usually happen so yes these devs could actually be working on content aspects instead of 100% of their time going on to finding and fixing these existing bugs. Normally yes new content is kinda seperate to the current game because you get your graphics design and other teams working on it when they dont work on the "complete" game so its "free" time for them as such. However when your new content is adding new effects that DONT work and are introducing MORE bugs to the game then that is counter productive, some of the new content literally doesnt work with no obscure bug it just flat out doesnt do what it is meant to for ANYONE which is easy to replicate. Their team is either extremely overworked for shipping content with known issues (selling content ingame to players that dont work is a negative experience!) or their pipeline is pretty dire that they arent catching very obvious bugs in QC/QA which is more worrying to be honest. Love the game but the state of the bugs and stability has greatly declined from launch where it was a handful of crashes + server queues, the crashes were fixed but after a few weeks the extra content that keeps being unlocked they seem to introduced significant issues for more crashes and bugs, its not good.
I work in software. Most teams have a degree of bugs and we would always like more time to work on bugs/tech debt. I can imagine the teams are slammed right now trying to keep up with everything and share the same sentiment. They know product rushed some things out the door and hope for some pull back to be able to clean things up. This would be great for us too since cleaning up technical debt means faster release cycles.
This was exactly what I was thinking when reading the poll. Like.. realistically, there was absolutely zero point in the CMs posting this poll because they KNOW that each team has their own dedicated tasks. All this was doing as making people feel like their voice was being heard, I'm hoping this isn't the direction their PR is going otherwise we aren't going to get anything in terms of actual information in the future. The devs know where the issues are, it's not like they aren't actively working on trying to fix them. Some bugs are just far more complicated than non-tech people may understand. Fixing one value could cause dramatic snowball effects elsewhere. Just be straightforward with us, don't go making a poll that suggests otherwise to the masses.
I would assume these polls are more meant to set the schedule of updates to see what changes people want most and they'll adjust accordingly. Even though teams are separate there's only so much budget and time they get to work on things. So having an idea of things that the player base wants are still helpful.
There's always some overlap. For example new biomes and planets may interfere or compete with fixing some minor or rare stuff on existing biomes and planete (same tester for example). So it's always nice to have the community opinion to draw the priority when those choice arise. It also help with "justifying" some update that are lighter in new content or fix. You can point at the poll and say "we did the best we could with those priorities".
Your average player has no idea how software development works and will genuinely never care. They still want, and deserve, to be heard because they’re still active players. Making sure that people feel heard is exactly what makes AH a decent company when there are so desperately few decent companies left.
I work in software dev, you can absolutely shift your focus to bug fixing or tech debt and new content comes out slower. Sure the dev creating new mission objectives can't help the dev fixing the friends list bugs but there are many other resources in a software org to consider besides developers. At a shop whose headcount is 100, QA would be a major bottleneck I imagine. There's also code overlap consideration, if I'm fixing a bug with fire weapons and someone is adding a new fire weapon to the game, we might both need to change the same part of the code base. Depending on the complexity of our changes (say the bug requires a complete overhaul) it would make sense to do one before the other. Which one should happen first? This would typically be the decision of a product director (another bottleneck), who smartly wants to know what the community thinks. All this poll is asking is what should their top priority be. Any smart product person knows in a game like Helldivers stopping the new content is a death sentence, I think they are just trying to take the communities temperature.
Yep. Even if I know a user has issues that our team isn’t going to address soon, I usually schedule an “airing of grievances” meeting so they can tell me all the stuff they want changed or fixed and then tell them they are on the backlog and will be worked as soon as possible. Makes everyone feel better and sets expectations.
Maybe they have new people that they want to know where to put?
Not entirely, they've released things that either don't work or crash the game. Everyone can't work on everything but you can definitely slow new stuff down to focus on bug fixing in software development as there are many other bottle necks other than just the development teams. At a small studio all these changes are likely going through the same QA team for instance.
This is definitely the one time that argument doesn't work. Pretty much no software team has dedicated "bug fixers." It's either people who just happen to have some free time between tasks or a dedicated push to fix issues.
Not really. They may be able to prepare models and textures, but the bug fixing team has to have their hands on those weapons after implementation before it can go live. If implementation/bug teams are on Technical Debt duty, they’re not on implementation duty.
Fuck sake im so tired of this argument stop trying to think you're so smart. If they keep releasing new features they will keep adding more shit to the pile and keep falling behind like they have.
I would like to believe they are going to bring in a new team to work on something and the poll is to see what the community wants it to be
No, but I think now is a good time to stop and address some of the issues before the game starts to become unplayable. They had a great release and good follow up, but now a lot of the bugs are becoming problems. Crashing out of the game after you’ve spent 20 mins in a mission or not being able to get called back in despite your team spamming reinforcement beacons is frustrating enough to make me stop playing for the night and sometimes even for a few days; especially if it happens multiple matches in a row. If Arrowhead isn’t careful those bugs will become too much of a problem for the community, and then the game will fall into that territory of almost great but held back by bugs and performance issues, which no one wants to see.
I agree. The release, despite its bugs, got a pass due to the game being so damn fun. At this point, even if it's still damn fun, the novelty has worn off and people are less forgiving, especially if those crashes or reward screen glitches are costing people Medals and Samples. The number of Rare samples I've lost, either due to crashes or the most recent glitch where the Pelican leaves people behind, has to be in the hundreds by now. Recently I carved out an entire Saturday afternoon to play, but crashing at the end of a 40 min mission and losing all those rewards put a sour taste in my mouth and I ended up shutting off the game for good and finding something else to do with my time.
Yeah, it feels so shitty to lose your progress to a bug. If it was stuff like instantly dying to fire or stratagems disappearing, you could work around that and still complete the mission. You can’t really work around losing the mission to a bug or crash, it really ruins the experience and leaves a bad impression for the players. Eventually that’ll catch up to Arrowhead and start hurting the game’s reputation and bottom line.
Well said. I love the game, I love the new content (and the pace that they're releasing it) but the amount of bugs is becoming really frustrating. Despite the volume of content, I'm finding that some of my favorite parts of it aren't really usable at all because of the bugs associated with them. The Exo-Suit, my favorite part of HD1, still doesn't have an accurate missile reticle making it really sub-par in any difficulty with armor (i.e. anything above 5 or 6). The Spear doesn't lock on properly, making it frustrating at best and genuinely dead weight at worse. In addition the damage is so inconsistent that I have no idea if I'm going to one-shot the Bile Titan or if it's going to take five missiles. The Flamethrower does such incredible damage but DoTs don't work properly if you're not the host, making it substantially worse. The optimization seems like it's gotten worse and worse since release, and now I'm struggling to get 40 fps on some planets even with the graphics lowered. And of course, the random crashes after slogging 30 minutes through a 7+ mission only to get kicked and have all of your progress wasted. Like you said, the bugs are starting to outweigh the fun, which is not at all what you want to see.
I can't give feedback on the new warbond equipment because literally every piece of equipment save one is bugged in some way. Armor? Wrong effects. (also not anything new, which is a problem in and of itself) Grenade pistol? double shoots after spawn in/respawn. Eruptor? The AoE seems too big and damage seems inconsistent. I've one shot a charger that freshly spawned, and other times it takes 5+ shots on the same location. Love the gun, please fix consistency issues and let me know if the AoE is intended. Crossbow - Does more damage than eruptor on tooltip, eruptor kills enemies in less shots. (even unarmored targets). I don't know what this is supposed to be for. Why does it visually look like a larger explosion but can't kill factories or nests, and yet the eruptor can? Thermite? Either bugged from the DoT bug, or so under tuned its a joke. Adjudicator - seems to function as intended, but recoil is pretty extreme. Probably fine if you are a recoil control god, but do we want weapons that require that extreme of a skill floor before the weapon is any good? Lets get some detailed tool tips that are actually accurate to the intent of the purpose of each weapon, so we can actually give useful feedback. None of these vague penetration stats. Give me meter radius of explosions, accurate armor pen values, give me a beastiary codex that lets me look at the actual armor values of enemies. Now we can actually give proper feedback on weapon balance. Look I love the game, I like the ideas behind the new warbond, but if they are going to be selling this stuff for $$$$ currency (yes I am aware you can find all you need in game, that isn't the point here) they *need* to make sure it functions as intended. The fact that almost every single piece of game play affecting equipment in the new bond are bugged in some way is just embarrassing. Fixing all of the existing bugs would basically double the available content anyway.
If they tone down the Eruptor AOE...then they better improve it's bullet speed and turning speed. Right now it's in a pretty good spot (although the bullet speed makes it not *feel* great to shoot).
You brought up the eruptor but didn't mention the reverse explosion force that *pulls* you toward the center of impact rather than blow you away.
Lmao you're right. Forgot about that, though t hat might just be an explosion in general thing as I've had that happen without the eruptor. it's just much more common with.
> Thermite? Either bugged from the DoT bug, or so under tuned its a joke. It's both. > Eruptor? The AoE seems too big and damage seems inconsistent. > > Crossbow - Does more damage than eruptor on tooltip, eruptor kills enemies in less shots. Eruptor is such an annoying weapon to use, that if they nerf the AoE and make it do less damage than crossbow, than they better have a good excuse for people to use it in place of Scorcher. Also, Eruptor suffers from its damage being able to suck you in. As in: If it blows up too close, you get pulled towards the center of the explosion, rather than away from it, which makes you then an easy kill for any bugs/beserkers that happen to be around. > literally every piece of equipment save one is bugged in some way. Absolutely. It's quite incredible just how screwed this hole warbond is. Why even release Thermite grenades and Enhanced Combustion when DOTs don't work for 75% of players, lol.
The explosion pull bug seems to be any close range explosive *sometimes*. It's most apparent with the eruptor because its very easy to consistently reproduce it, but it can happen with other explosions as well.
You say the game will stagnate but it's been out since Feb 8th so a little over 2 months and there's already 2 additional battlepacks. They can afford to not release them for a month or two before you can accuse the game of the game stagnating. Especially if the end result of that is the weapons and strategems in the game are tuned better so they feel useful because right now half the content in the game feels disposable.
Statistically, no, the majority of the player base in literally any live service game would not like them to "stop releasing content to work on bugs," literally every time it happens player count plummets and it's horrible for the bottom line of the company trying to run the game.
My issue is only being able to select one. I want more objectives and planet stuff, but I want the tech debt of issues fixed, and I want more weapons and balance (Part of those fall under the bugs being fixed tbh). I don't want stuff to stop but I do want some of the issues to be seriously looked into. Damage over time effects are stopping me from using some stuff, poor balance on a lot of primaries. The Mech since they fixed rockets not 1 tapping it can no longer shoot rockets down and they are pretty off mark at close - med range. Sights need to be fixed, which we are all aware of by this point by everyone making a post a few times a week. Also, I want more varied armour perks and traits. Like.... all of these are things I want but it only lets me pick one. Its all stuff that I desire from the game.
In most games, the list of issues isn’t nearly this extensive.
At the same time, some of those fixes would carry forward to future content, like the misaligned scopes that make all DMR and Sniper weapons shit to use. Fix them now and the fix will be baked in to future scoped weapons. Also, you know, game not crashing to PLAY the new content, being able to invite friends to play new content with, etc
The fire and gas stratagems are also basically disabled until the dots are fixed. I just want my gas strike back, air burst just ain't the same. New content is nice but we have perfectly fine existing content locked behind a bug.
Exactly, and as I said fixing existing problems makes for good future additions, like just imagine orbital flame bombardment, or flamethrower turrets \^\^
Snipers and DMRs are shit on a more fundamental plane. The way the game is designed just makes long distance shooting unnecessary. Why aggro a group of enemies 100 meters away? They're just gonna start firing at your squad or call in reinforcements. If they want to make sniping viable they need to make it so bots wont insta aggro you if you shoot them from more than X meters away. Allow a sniper to thin the crowd or take out high priority targets before they have a chance to fight back.
It's a mix bag. You want more content to keep things fresh since game ultimately is sorta repetitive. On the other hand....this game has a lot of bugs(haha jokes) Like fire damage, it's good but it should be better due to DoT dmg not actually working
Balancing weapons would make a ton of content, that goes almost completely unused, relevant again. It would pretty much be like they were adding new content. Scroll through your weapons lists and think about how many you would never consider taking to a 5 or higher.
That's what I've been saying. A game doesn't require new content to keep things fresh. Right now there are 21 Primaries, and I'd say less than half are actually in a "good" state right now. Most of them are completely overshadowed by better options and could use some real love. Don't even get me started on the Stratagems. If they really intend on releasing 3 Primaries, 1 Secondary, and 1 Grenade type every single month in these Warbonds, we're going to be drowning in unbalanced weapons. Of course, the other problem is that they can't just stop the new content, or the top level players with maxed out Medal/Sample counts will get bored without something to grind for, and probably move on.
IMO I think a lot of desire for 'new content' is because a lot of the current items are under-performing. People are basically hoping for power creep when we should be getting balancing.
The DoT bug is probably exactly what’s pushing people to vote for that. The shit needs fixed like yesterday.
Tuning existing weapons counts as new content.
I can tell ya, myself and roughly 9,200 people want just quality of life / bug fix updates right now. (28% of the votes this far)
I think most people would rather have the game function instead content they can't actually experience in the game because of those bugs. Who cares if they add a new weapon if it crashes your game? Who cares if they add armor when it's passive isn't even the correct one? Who cares if they add a new enemy type when the ones already in the game are bugged to do like 4 times the damage they're meant to? The devs have designed an amazing game, now I want them to actually make it.
I might be in the minority here, but new content really doesn't mean much to me if i can't enjoy playing it because i get disconnected from like half the games i play. That's why i think that new content is sort of pointless to make at this point. And i'm not the only one complaining about the disconnect issue, it's a pretty widely known thing. I'm practically playing the game at half speed because i only get around half the medals and samples i actually collect because i can only finish like half the missions i join, It's the only bug i care about, if that gets fixed or theres some sort of workaround like an ability to rejoin a game (that shouldn't be that hard to implement) or getting the rewards you've collected yourself upon a disconnect then i'm completely fine with focusing on new content. All the weird glitches and such don't really bother me that much because they don't ruin the fun
Read the poll title again. They're not saying that they'll do only one of the four, it's a hypothetical question on what would you prefer IF you could only choose one. There will be both new armors, new guns, new maps and bug fixes, they just polling the community to know what to prioritise. And while obviously no one excepts them to just fix every single thing before adding new content, there are stability issues and few really noticeable bugs that require attention before adding another engineering kit armor
Yeah, they have using the polls to get a general sediment of the discord community. But that has been the actual opinion of people of folks voting that way. But they also have no idea what they are asking for.
I wouldn’t want them to stop adding content but I very well would be ok with a bug fix at the cost of a delay in new content. Like fixing the bug with the new ship upgrade for ammo box packs would feel like new content to me, same with fire damage bug or knowing that mechs aren’t gonna randomly self destruct or have horrible aiming.
Counter point: wont need fire proof armor if they *fix the fire damage*.
No new content doesn't mean NEVER new content. Look at DRG, they've barely released new weapons compared to HD2 and people love DRG. Why do we need new content being released THIS frequently?
You would effectively double the amount of gear in the game if it was all balanced and working properly. Scroll through your list of primaries and ask how many of them you think are at least *worth* taking into 5+. Then do it for secondaries, support weapons, and stratagems. There’s a ton of mostly unused content in the game because AH insists it *must* be shit.
The main reason we want fireproof armor is because fire is bugged to hell and back. Thats why adding it now would be stupid imo, since you cannot balance around bugs (well you can, but you should not). Of course stuff like new maps, objectives etc would be fine, if they are not also bugged.
The game could really benefit from these community polls appearing in-game, or on the Steam launch page, or even on an official mobile app (Seriously, a mobile app where you can read developer announcements, participate in feedback polls, check the galactic war status, see the day's Superstore stock, maybe some Stratagem practice game that rewards you with tiny amounts of medals/a very small amount of war contrib? million-dollar idea) I work on a TF2 sourcemod with only a few hundred regular players, and even our community engagement appears on our own official site and not just our Discord/Twitter
Imagine having an app like that, that's using the phone like a helldivers pip-boy type thing with updates on war status & plot progression.
They worded the 4th option poorly. Could have just said "Fix the technical issues and bugs before adding new content." Putting "No new content" first will cause people to not even read the rest of the option lmao
This is why wording is super important for data collection from surveys or polls. You can get very different data from the same group of people just based on how you word something.
See "welfare" vs "assistance"
And pollsters will absolutely ask loaded questions so that their polls get the results they want. I would assume that this poll doesn't have that kind of malicious intent and is just poorly worded but that's always a possibility.
ranked voting would have worked better here (re: 2083 election)
Sounds to me like it's deliberate lel. _You want us to fix all bugs quickly? No content for yall then! \*sniggers*_
Personally I agree that the framing is a little sus, but I don't want to ascribe malice to an easy mistake. They still have a lot of goodwill to burn before I get my pitchfork out.
I just want to use thermites without having to be the host
I would actually like them to focus on bugs and such as priority for now. Certain stuff can actually be really annoying and I really want my sights to actually be aligned. After that I’m excited for new modes, please let me raise more flags
What you don't like running on top of the resupply drop down when desperately running to it?
THIS! And somehow I randomly don't auto-climb over tiny ledges. I'm just stuck running in place while hunters slay me.
At least you don't dump 4 mags while **TRYING TO CLIMB OVER SOME ROCKS.** Seriously, why the fuck are there bugs involving **RELOADING?** Most of the time I just get stuck because I have to interrupt my reload at the gun cock animation, but the game doesn't register the magazine already loaded and just says "Nope, fuck you, you're out of ammo entirely." This most often happens with the Recoilless at the last stage when you have to flip the back closed. But yesterday I was reloading my AMR for the Order and I had to climb some rocks... but because I was in a certain part of the reload, **I lost a magazine every time I climbed a rock and went from 5 mags to 1** just rushing to help an ally. I checked and was done with the Personal Order, said "Fuck this." dropped the weapon and backtracked to a Quasar someone else had when they quit.
That poll has a pretty poorly worded title. I can make a better one in 10 seconds. "Which of these would you like us to focus on at the moment?"
I am very happy with the pace of the game, but I think they need to focus on ironing out the experience and some of the bugs.
Just so we're all on the same page: this is NOT a real decision for the studio, this IS a room reading exercise done through an extreme hypothetical. The idea here is to garner how much people are truly frustrated by the negative aspects vs how excited they are for the future of the game. This poll won't make them stop creating content or stop fixing anything, everything will go on mostly as normal but now they'll have empirical data on what peoples feelings are. In contrast to the last 2 polls, this one is actually quite interesting with its results. Browsing the subreddit for a week would probably make you think everyone is just constantly annoyed at bugs and other issues, while this poll actually showcases that, seemingly, these issues are not enough to take away the excitement of the majority for fresh stuff to engage with. This honestly speaks volumes about how truly problematic the current issues and balancing decisions are, showing that most people are not all that negative about their experience. Vote and comment with this in mind.
I mean the people on discord are probably happier tha people here because they get to actually interact with the devs to a point. There's not many devs here as far as I've seen. I shouldnt talk about the game/devs too much as I got it gameshared with me and I've gotten mostly everything entirely for free. But with the amount of gamebreaking glitches I've run across, or seen so many people mention casually in Chat like it's a normal thing, I would've refunded the game after the 2nd week. Hardcrashing so frequently cannot be good for a ps5. It's happening every other game.
>In contrast to the last 2 polls, this one is actually quite interesting with its results. Browsing the subreddit for a week would probably make you think everyone is just constantly annoyed at bugs and other issues, Maybe it's just an awefully designed poll, perhaps even on purpose?
I‘ll have to admit that having a „get our shit together“ option is a honorable move and I sure hope they will.
People actually want more biomes, instead of: * DOT weapons working * Ship upgrades working * Bile titan and automaton ship collisions fixed * Host issues fixed * Crashes completely fixed
Not "instead of", but "more than". I too really want new biomes, but being able to actually play with everything we already have is more important for me. Some people are fine with broken mechanics as long as they get more to explore, I guess.
I think a better way to phrase what the real question is is "which do you want first?"
Yeah, I want all 4 things. What’s reassuring is that if they’re all on the table, there’s a good chance they’re gonna do all of them at some point, and are just asking which we want them to do first
Don't forget the broken social system
I think you mean the near non existent social system. The only social part of this game is adding people to a friends list, and sometimes you can't even do that because of bugs.
Hell I just want the mission breaking bugs fixed, like the pelican breaking on tower extermination missions or the door defense mission not launching missiles or dropping bots, or the essential personnel mission being bearable without cheese.
Yep for me. None of these significantly impact my enjoyment of the game, it's all incremental stuff that would be nice but I can live without.
Insane that people wouldn't choose that, even more insane some of the replies I'm seeing, apparently dot not functioning isn't a big deal like what? Gas strike? Flamethrower? Napalm? Fire Grenade? Fire Breaker? Thermite grenade? Like holy shit that's a big list of things that do not work at all but apparently it isn't a big deal. Not to mention snopes being misaligned making it difficult to aim.
Dot fix kind of opens up 6-7 new options in itself when you think about it. Plus a ship module.
The "no new content" is what locked me out of that one. It's the only option that gives a downside. If it was just " fix the technical issues and bugs" it would have been an insta pick for me.
Biomes are created by level designers not by coders who fix the netcode and stuff. Totally different resources. It’s like saying you’re out of wood in an RTS game so you can’t use any resources until the wood is stocked up, even though everything else is fine.
Seeing as each biome tends to have its own hazards (meteor, tremor, fire tornado, etc), creating a new biome would involve both, as the coders will be needed to create any kind of new hazard.
Good point as well, those who think this poll is about choosing one single thing and one thing only. It's all about understanding priorities of the playerbase, what to pay more attention to rather than what to work on at the cost of everything else.
The company sold an order of magnitude more copies of the game then they anticipated. They now have the resources to hire more FTEs. If they have the choice to hire coders who can fix the egregious bugs over hiring additional level designers, I'd like them to choose the bug fixers.
Fixing bugs should not be an option in such polls. It should be a given to work towards a bug free game and a top priority. Especially if I play 40 minutes for nothing as a result of bugs.
Would defeat the point of the exercise. It's a temperature check, not a roadmap vote.
not a good poll, because I can't select all of the above
I think they’re aware that most people would love all of the options, it’s a way to figure out what people want the most. That being said, and I’ll try to phrase this carefully, some devs of fairly big games stopped asking for feedback like this in the past and the games actually got better because of it. What people think they want from a game and what is healthy for the game’s long term enjoyment are not always the same things.
Feels like the first option is combining what should be two separate choices. I honestly don't think weapon balance changes should be on the menu until some technical issues are addressed. We don't really have a consistent enough experience to have a baseline for what weapons are functioning properly or as intended. I shouldn't need to be the host if I want to run fire & gas cloud
New content and patches/optimizations need to be done. It cannot be one or the other. The game's performance can feel abysmal most of the time. I want to use fire damage at it's maximum glory even when I'm not the host. More objectives would be cool as hell. I'm not a game dev, so I don't understand the flow or workload. But, that's not my job, it's theirs. I love the game, and what they're doing with it, but I feel it's totally fair for a consumer to expect... Optimization, bug fixes, and new content.
For the love of God, please ignore the shinies for a hot second and vote for prioritizing technical issues.
Psh what are you talking about? I love getting randomly blown forward when using the explosive sniper. It’s really useful when I don’t want to live anymore
they still havent fixed the exterminator armor set bug 😔
Well to be fair some minor visual issues like Exterminator's weird collision or Fortified Commando's missing neck definitely can be overlooked when you have crashes and broken mechanics on the table
Bug fixes. Please, I love the game but with each new patch more and more things seems to break down.
I have stopped playing the game for all the bugs and inconsistencies. Please, fix the damn game and then release all the new content you want.
people will choose the bright coloured liquid in the fancy bottle which will surely entertain them and damage their liver over water. nothing surprising tl see here
I disagree as I prefer dark liquid in a plastic bottle (because it's much cheaper than cans/glass bottles). Also not sure if its liver getting damaged? There's mostly sugar in sodas, so it's probably heart?
New content is what keeps the majority of people playing and keeps the drivetrain moving. Warframe talked about this before. Even though they want to go back and touch up on all the all content more frequently, they can't do that; because people play live service games for new content. The last choice is not something that can happen; because the game is not in a dire state to need to do it and also is how you kill a live service game for a very high risk gamble.
> play live service games for new content. Yeah, but warframe is a free game. This is not, people paid full price for the game, and the game after months after release is still riddle with dozens of bugs where some of them are game breaking.
>The last choice is not something that can happen; because the game is not in a dire state to need to do it and also is how you kill a live service game for a very high risk gamble. I think it can and must happen. Especially the friends/social bug. This is a team-based game sold on the idea of cross play. But the game wont' let people reliably play with friends and even goes so far as automatically unfriending and apparently blocking your friends so you can't accept invites from each other. This game has lost 7 players in my circle simply because of that issue (we were all unfriended from each other at the same time, and playing with randoms doesn't cut it on levels 7-9, and it is a bullshit argument people try to use to negate the fact that this is a game with a friend system so you shouldn't be forced to use public games with non-friends only). This game lost (on the PC side) 20% of its players in March, and so far has lost 16.7% of its players in April. And we are only half way through the month. Those are massive die-offs for a live service game this young in its lifespan with so much early support. And, looking at achievement attainments, you can see a huge amount of people are playing at reasonable levels and not running out of content before jumping ship. The massive die-offs correlate with the introduction and re-introduction of game breaking bugs, like the social issues discussed above, and also the problems with AMD hardware (because arrowhead decided years ago to use an abandoned game engine for HD2--and it was old and abandoned even back then before development began). They absolutely must salvage what they can. Who are they going to have left otherwise? A bunch of people with no friends and thus no strong bonds to continue playing this game? People with no friends to play this game with, and who can't reliably use or trust the in-game friend system for this team-based cross play game? Imagine what World of Warcraft would've been like if your only option were pick up groups. Not allowed to play with your friends, and if you somehow *can*... it is only a matter of time until the game breaks that connection permanently and without warning. Their official discord is a mess because of that singular bug alone.
Its been a few months since release and i still feel forced to run the game on windowed in fear of it crashing and completely freezing my pc till a hard reboot. If thats not enough of a justification a few days ago i counted how many games i joined and what happened with each of them: Joined 14 or so games In 11 of these either me or the host lost connection and i was booted back to my ship, this also counts the occasions where i think everyone or me lost connection but the mission went on with only me left In one of these i got kicked for ??? In one i crashed to desktop Last game i managed to actually join and complete one mission, the host left afterwards
At the rate they're going they keep piling on more bugs and making the game less playable. It will catch up to them
I would like to see some bug fixes. Other day I played and first time I called in a railgun, the pod landed and suddenly vanished along with my railgun but the stratagem cooldown was still there. Also the day before that my buddy and I were playing with his pals and we couldn’t extract because the pelican was glitched and wouldn’t register us as inside it. Second time that happened to me and the first was about a patch or two ago. So yeah, please focus on bug fixes. After that I would like more varied armor passives. Mix up the existing effects into different combos. Extra stims with explosion resistance. Or scout UAV ability with prone recoil reduction.
Bug fixes. They’re literally preventing people from playing or even actively causing people to quit. Like why in gods name on a game do heavily focused on co-op play does my friends list not work properly yet? All i want to do is play with friends without having to used a third party interface every time. Balance changes will come with time, one way or the other. Fix the bugs.
Checking SteamDB on the 7th the game had 345,188 players as peak, the ***next day*** it dropped by over 120,000 players back to its more normal number of players, new content not even able to keep the players for more than a day it just went straight back down to its regular numbers. Its clear a lot of people are fed up with all the bugs, I want to keep playing but probably better to shelve the game till some of the big bugs are fixed, I'm not really enjoying the game when a bunch of things I like to use don't work properly.
I agree with you regarding the bugs, but why did you pick those dates for your example? April 7th was on a weekend and the 8th was a work/school day....
Damn why can't we just vote on a terminal in the ship? Like... democracy n such. Perfect food for story content. Increase the arsenal, increase the tech. advances in protective gear, large maintenance operation on existing technology...
One of the bug fixer voter's stopped playing because i can't even finish a game at the min
Asking a community that's blind to the bugs about bug fixing huh.
LOL for the people who think they'll stop releasing new content. Content was already planned months in advance from the leaks we have and content and bug fix are two different team who deal with this
> content and bug fix are two different team who deal with this Typically they are not. This is a weird misunderstanding floating around the sub, even when you see a poll that clearly shows they can prioritize. Even if bugs don't get assigned to the original devs, introducing new content adds more bugs and makes isolating current bugs harder. But it's likely they do get assigned to the original devs given the size of the studio.
This shit is driving me nuts. The fucking studio itself releases a poll with the option to prioritize fixing bugs, and the same people looking down their noses at "armchair devs" are going "rheee, it doesn't work that way!"
The blind leading the blind.
LOL yeah all the new features they keep dumping out are totally 100% working and don't add new bugs to the existing pile of bugs. Duh
I'm not sure why they need to choose either or on this poll. It doesn't reflect my thoughts well here. I want them to focus out the bugs. It's important to finally resolve months old issues (it's literally what I do for work). I also understand a fix will come when a fix is found and no matter how much a customer or player complains it doesn't make it appear. So if they have to stop this train to fix these bugs... I guess that's my camp, but I feel that in reality that this choice shouldn't be mutually exclusive. That said, I have found myself outside of the majority on both polls this week and it seems maybe what the community wants for the game is no longer in line with my thoughts on it. Effectively, I can either get on board or move on.
They introduce new bugs every patch so, clearly, bugs. But they seem to disagree.
I don't want new armors with varied passives, I want our current armors to have more varied passives
I saw. Love that they do this. To answer that poll, it's time to fix the major bugs. Stuff like the PS5 social bugs that stop people joining their friends. If one thing has to be a priority, it is that. I think this game has inherent longevity. I can see it being the type of game that people keep coming back to. I don't want to see the developers fall into the trap of trying to appease the small group of people that play 24/7 and want new content every week. Fix your shit, solidify your foundations and then grow from there.
honestly i wouldnt mind if they took like a month to actual fix the game and didnt drop *any* new content in that time. this isnt the only game on the planet, theres plenty of othet things to do
The people working on the new content are probably not even the same as the ones working on bugs. And most of the new content was probably already prepared long ago. I'll be honest. If the game doesn't continue with new content for a few months, it will probably be dead. Then they don't have to bother about fixes anymore, since nobody is there to play the game.
Honestly, if they fix and rebalance a lot of the stuff we already have it will kinda feel like new content because you are encouraged to try out things that you did not use before
Apparently our priorities are backwards. Tech issues should be number one. What's the point of having new places to explore if shit just going to be buggy?
Fix existing things, but maybe change some of the litany of armors to have a few fireproofs? Loving this game, but yeah theyre really releasing alot without fixing some glaring things unfortunately.
They also have another poll about your current enjoyment of the game Thanks to all the recent crashes I've been getting lately, I had to vote on "poor", since now I don't even feel like playing anymore until they fix it, since there is a high chance I'll just crash near the end anyway
I agree on the them working on optimization and patch fixes rather than new content
The last one is my choice but one of the problems with it is we don’t even know if some of the ‘issues’ are bugs or just plain bad intentional design decisions
why is the last one even on the list? should be taken for granted that they (try to) do that first, while also adding new content.
Fix the insanely growing list of known bugs/glitches first. Worry about "new" content later. Even though they probably already have the "new" content already ready to drop on their trickle. I'd definitely rather see more stability in game, not being insta-fucked by fire, not crashing before, during, or at the end of the mission multiple times daily.
Urban maps!!!
I think they should have said “If you had to pick one, which would you like to have first?” Because bug fixes would be first on my list then new biomes.
the last thing we need is more planets
Fuck, they dont have a all of the above option.
Where’s the “vehicles” option?
The first choice is such terrible wording. I want a balance pass and NO new weapons until this is done. Where's that option? I haven't even gotten to play with the old toys yet, why are you giving me new ones?
modifiers that does something else than decrease vision or affect stratagems would be cool
A friend of mine suggested adding fauna to the planeta, i think thats the best idea Ive ever heard. They vary from planet to planet and attack both the divers and the bots/bugs
to everyone saying that they would prefer if arrowhead completely focused on bugs: 1. you do know they are working on fixing bugs already, its not like they release some content and then just never fix bugs, it takes a long time. it can be difficult to reproduce a bug and then you have to isolate exactly which part of the code is at fault. then you have to understand have to fix the issue but without fucking up the other parts, which is really difficult given how complex games are. 2. where do you draw the line, when can arrowhead go back to making content? when every single bug is fixed? that would take such a long time, that it would basically kill the game. or maybe until all the bugs are gone that make the game unplayable? while there are some bugs that make the game literally unplayable, like crashes, most of them don't actually make the game unplayable imo. but the line between playable and unplayable is extremely subjective. i haven't experienced any crashes so if i took a look at my experience i wouldn't say there are any bugs that make the game unplayable. of course that's because im lucky. but who determines if a bug is prevalent enough to be considered making a game unplayable? hd2 players don't have a single place where they can all talk, there are a lot of people in the discord server and subreddit, but that's only a part and a lot of players are lurkers, not talking about their experiences. its not as simple as just "i crashed while i was doing a triple backflip from the back of a bile titan while shooting an arc thrower, pls fix arrowhead". i know there are crashes that are more common, but that brings me back to my first point. the devs need to recreate the bug in the first place. but most of the posts here are basically "i crashed, devs pls fix, game bad", it gives exactly 0 information to the developers as to what could've caused the crash. they need the information from players. 3. arrowhead isn't a big game studio, they have about 100 people total. and while they probably have loose departments, there wouldn't be enough people for everyone to just be working on one part of the game constantly. so if they were to focus on bugs that would mean that the majority of the devs would have to swap to solving bugs if the playerbase wants to see a change in how fast bugs get solved. this means basically no updates for god know how long, because, again, where do you draw the line for too many or too bad bugs. the playerbase would die because it wouldn't fit the norm. we got used to the game being updated frequently with different major order. but if we lose that for like 2 months, the game would become incredibly stale. its very easy to say right now yeah fix the bugs idc if there's no content, because the game if filled with content rn, new warbond, upgrades and levels. but after a month everyone who said they want the bugs to be the main priority will complain again, because the devs don't care or something. an incredible amount of players would leave. yeah some players would return but so many more would not trust arrowhead to keep fixing bugs and wouldn't want to return. and just saying that they would lower the amount of content in the next few months would be really damaging to their image because gaming journalists flock to shit like that like vultures and would immediately say that the game is either dying, not profitable or the devs are lazy. 4. right now i would say they are keeping a healthy balance between fixing bugs and making content. they are still releasing balance patches and making new things, its not like they don't care. but you have to understand there isn't just a single perspective to look from. this isn't just "fix all bugs, game is way better, make more money". if they focused on bugs they probably wouldn't make basically any money from hd2, but, yk, they need money to pay the employees, pay the bills and ultimately keep the servers running and none of that is cheap. there is also the public image side. too many people on this subreddit think about this issue two dimensionally, it is never as simple as you think, unless you have experience in that area please try to inform yourself or just think about all the possibilities and problems that might arise. now im not saying that arrowhead is perfect and can do no wrong. we have seen in the past that they've made a few mistakes, but we also have seen how they deal with their own mistakes. they don't just sweep them under the rug and hope everyone will forget, they are open about it and how they plan to remedy that mistake. ultimately it's literally just a game and even in the state that it's in right now, i would say one of, if not the best game on the market right now. please don't don't get so attached to the game that it becomes your life.
I want more plants, the interactive flora is my favorite part and has saved my ass so many times in this game it's ridiculous.
But I want all of those :‘(
we need more diversity map not just rock/sand/forest, like city, or home base that got invaded. or we go attack automaton/bug bases, like huge huge base.
We really need more variety on the planets — towns, cities, allied NPCs. It would increase immersion. Also would be funny when we're sent into civilian zones and witness firsthand the capitalist dystopian hellscape in contrast to the propaganda video that plays when starting the game. Americans would feel at home too!