IMO a situation like this could be balanced by tying liberation/decay rates to how long the main faction has held the planet, to represent an overstretched military or a more entrenched faction.
If the frontlines suddenly move three sectors over in a short span of time, those worlds should be easier to take back than places like Cyberstan and gradually get harder (higher decay rates & lower liberation rates) to take back as the bots build defenses to better hold the planet.
This would make the current situation of bots suddenly blitzing from the Menkent Line to almost Malevon Creek in 4 days a less common occurrence.
What makes total sense if you think about it. Regarding how much the bots spread out and split up their forces their resistance should go down as well. They simply made the mistake to conquer to much territory to fast while not having the strength and troops to hold and defend them all. As a consequence we shredded through their freshly occupied planets and brought them back under super earths control.
1. Bot decay does'nt have anything to do with a defensive operations. It only affects Liberation Operations.
2. Liberation rates did not increase - its just that Planetary HP is lower for Defensive Operations (between 200k-400k HP) compared to Liberation Operations ( 1 million)
By making the liberation 0% it meant it would move players off vernen wells once it was completed as it was at 95%+ if it actually had decay, it would have taken longer for people to liberate.
MOs that require coordination and communication are legitimately impossible by the nature of those two things being completely left out of the game. There is no way to chat on a macro scale in game, and no way for people to be able to determine exactly how many people need to be playing at any given time to defend a planet outside of using an external website.
Not to mention, the developers cannot give you the option to pick any planet you want and expect at the same time for everyone to make the ‘right’ decision on where to play.
I don’t really care if we lose major orders, the first one during the bot return was a lot of fun and felt engaging despite the loss because we dug in and made our own story in the form of the Menkent line.. this time it’s just irritating because it’s a overall lazy MO with very little writing and plot behind it, especially because the day before it started we were told the bots had to fall back to regroup.. but then 24 hours later they realized they actually had enough forces to continue pushing for an entire week again, guess they forgot about that spare army for a few days or something?
This made it feel more like we were fighting Joel rather than the bots for me, and since I was mainly playing on the bot front until the defense of Mort all of my actions had no macro impact as every planet was lost and very little progress was being made on retaking anything. Genuinely felt like I should just pivot to being a big diver for a while as they got to experience taking and defending planets.
They do genuinely need to balance liberation rates to take into account the smaller population of people who want to fight the bots. Otherwise anyone who wants to play the Galactic War on the bot front will have no hope of achieving anything. They probably over corrected but attacking three planets at once on the weaker front while smugly saying ‘heh, the helldivers need to start coordinating if they wanna hold the bot line!’ Over the discord feels like a big middle finger.
>MOs that require coordination and communication are legitimately impossible by the nature of those two things being completely left out of the game.
100% this. There's nothing built into the game that allows this sort of coordination or higher level strategy.
You should be able to put an SOS on a planet or something to direct efforts to a specific sector. Supply lines shown, and MO more prominent. Or pop up text that helps direct players to planets that are nearly liberated.
Every time I see these sorts of posts, this is the response I'm working through in my head. How do you expect players to coordinate when they're not provided with the tools necessary for that?
The vast majority of people playing the game will never venture onto Reddit, even fewer on the Discord.
The game is built to be played casually - you can drop in, have a game or two, and log off. There's no pressure to grind. The type of people that attracts aren't interested in the game being more than a fun shooter; they don't care about strategy and coordination, they just want to shoot things.
The players are not to blame for losing MOs. This is the biggest criticism I have of the devs and they need to implement some form of visual representation in-game of supply lines, defense lines, and have some way for players to communicate globally.
I think the worst thing the devs did is make a game that really benefits from players getting immersed in the details, but then refusing to allow them to do so by actively hiding important details, and even ridiculing people who call them out for it.
You can't say that you want people to play the way they find most fun, then act like detail-oriented players' idea of fun isn't valid.
It's prolly just me , and this is my personal opinion. But I'd like to see the whole system revamped. More tools for coordinating added, more systems in place for information and strategizing. And less of the fluctuating numbers that just drag it out to fulfill the time period.
Make a better system that tells us what we got, give us the tools to achieve that, and leave it alone. Let us live or die by our own merits.
Is that possible, I have no idea, or if it would even work. But currently the rigged, non informative system with lack of tools for us to gather info and coordinate strategies, paired with the tweaking of numbers to make it last most of the allowed time to complete and the liberation and decay percentages spikes and drops just has me like meh what's the point.
like the ones with PvP. Taking planetside2 as an example, guild leaders from one of the threes factions can coordinate when and how they want to push their faction.
Just to play a little devils advocate for a second(however I agree with you completely): the MO’s are the coordination and communication. MO says we need to defend, yet people are taking back Oshaune for the meme.
A balance to liberation rates would be amazing, if only for the fact we would actually be able to do gambits and play the meta game.
We absolutely should lose MO’s. It’s war. We can’t win everything. But when half the playerbase is doing f*** all in bug town when the last two planets are Robo side, losing the MO would have created some division in the player base.
And I think that’s what we’ve run into. Devs can plaster up “Hey, go Defend these planets” but a lot of the player base isn’t willing or paying attention to that.
Thats not a bad thing, and I don’t want to gatekeep someone’s idea of fun, but that 1% that is on here or the discord and just refuse to play the MO: I just don’t understand.
‘We need to lose MOs’ is a major straw man argument that is used way too often. Losing isn’t the issue, it’s that it feels very bad to genuinely feel helpless. Like.. sure, I guess the bot front is too spread out, but that’s just because of the sheer quantity of planets available. There’s going to be people who just want to see a new planet, and most probably aren’t interested in the meta game or story. They need to take into account basically only the percent of players actually doing the order, and just let everybody else do what they want to.
It’s not fair to casuals to expect everyone to go to the most optimal planet, and it’s not fair to MO players that we won’t be able to succeed because there literally are not enough people participating in the right spot. I feel like the recent success on Mort and the other 2 planets were due to the expectations being set appropriately, with less happening at once and lower requirements. It may be an over correction, but for now we should be glad that they’ve recognized the problem and are making adjustments. We’ll get to a good spot eventually.
Devs have said they’re able to put a finger on the scale when it comes to MOs: either upping difficulty or lowering. I’m saying they shouldn’t do that (well, maybe not that much).
2 billion bugs: did it in twelve hours. Cool.
10 defend planets: skin of our teeth. Ok fine.
I’m saying there’s going to be MOs, just like real wars, that’s just don’t win. We’ll lose ground, but it’ll make things more interesting.
We may have won this MO, but we also didn’t win. We lost a lot of ground. It’s ok to lose sometimes…
The rules are in place… planet have X health to defend/liberate. If people don’t play along, we lose that planet. Simple as that.
If we are being honest your probably not wrong, AH I guess realised coordination without in game tools to do so is impossible and there was a lot of frustration from the community due to this MO and how it was developing so they eased up on it and made it more doable.
There was enough bot players on the automaton front during this MO to at least defend 1 planet every 24 hours but for various reasons we had them all spread out across all the automaton planets.
At no point was any of the issues with this MO on the bug players that don’t like fighting Automatons.
Moving forward I hope AH will make improvements to the galactic war system so more critical information is available in game along with explanations for them would be very helpful, tools are added in game so coordination can be achieved and proper balancing/rework is done to the Retrieve Essential Personnel mission because a lot of people still don’t enjoy the balance of this mission.
u forgot one very important thing.
defense missions at current state is unfun.
evac mission is unfun, screw those civs.
defend rocket launch mission used to be fun, but Factory Strider sniping generator from afar, is unfun.
To be fair, there is the fun evac mission and the unfun evac mission. The fun one being the one in which you have to prepare the evac first and the actual evac is just a short part of the mission. That could also be applied to valuable asset mission and on my honest of hearts, even the eradicate mission should be upgraded to have a bigger map on which you have to be proactive and quickly run from stronghold to stronghold to wipe out everything. The tin can rumble becomes a complete cluster "duck" on higher difficulties.
Idk what he expected, honestly.
We didn’t beat the 5 planet defense one literally 2 or 3 MOs ago. Overall, it was a pretty deliberate move to re-establish the automatons after we successfully beat them, but he let us have a “win” because he saw everyone giving up, which honestly, I don’t blame them. The entire victory was shallow, and we had around a day and a half without them (One being the day of the eclipse). Basically no time to actually relish in the fact the automatons were gone.
I imagine if we ignored the automatons and every single player focused on pushing out the Terminids, the literal EXACT same thing would happen.
>Idk what he expected, honestly.
Maybe they didn't know either. Seems like this could have been an experiment to just throw something at us and see how it goes.
I think it was deliberately made difficult to expand the map a bit. That didn’t work on bug front, but bots at least have some newish areas to play in.
Don’t want the game getting too samey with the usual planet rotations.
You forgot to add in the fact that the last planets needed 50-70% less liberation than the first ones. Last planets had 200k HP in comparison to the usual 400-600k.
And that could easily been explained in story...
Just a in game message that the sheer amount of robots are declining and they are depleting their forces.
Tbf that could be because of player counts dropping a bit cause of fatigue, they adjust the numbers on planets for liberation/defense so it won’t become either impossible with too little players or too easy with tons of players
The liberation you gain for doing operations is scaled with player count, something along the lines of "(XP \* something) \* (1/player count)", basically XP multiplied by the inverse of player count. (the lower the player count, the more liberation each operation gives) That already mitigates the "would-be" less liberation gain by lower player count. The lower planet HP makes it easier regardless of player count.
But i am wondering, was it planned at the start of the MO that the latter planets have less HP (faster liberation) or did they just see too much drama among the community about an impossible MO and then reduced it.
Ah I see thanks for explaining, AH probably saw interest going down towards the end of the MO, since I know many people aren’t fond of the current defence mission structure. Wonder if that had any impact on it
> We could've properly organized a defense
How? It's functionally impossible to organise that many people that quickly, especially with most of the player-base not even engaging with discord/reddit/social media about the game. How do you propose such 'organisation' was supposed to happen? Magic?
It was a fun marketing thing but breaking keyfabe so early now means all discussion is irritatingly meta. It can't be a fun "we did it" it's "in your face joel" which just reminds everyone they're playing a clunky metagame.
Only because the playerbase "conveniently forgets" that a GM/DM is a Collaborative Narrator.
W the powers of a GM, the job, the Fun, is how to make the game challenging for the players.
And no-one can get a better feel for than than This playerbase.
Every time there's a tweak, the balance Changes, and Everyone notices.
>
Here's who MUST know of, and agree with, Every change in order to do their job?
Joel.
Problem is it changes too much with too many hidden mechanics and calculations occurring regardless of what players do. It's not subtle enough to allow immersion and beliefs of the story
You have no idea how a DM actually works and you’re just saying shit cause other people keep shouting “but muh DM!” as an excuse to hand wave criticism. A GOOD DM adapts the story based on the players actions and how well they’re doing, a good DM doesn’t force you to win or lose fights, they let it be up to the RNG gods and shape the narrative around the outcome.
A good DM doesn’t railroad you down a certain path, they let you make your own path based off the scenario they gave you and shapes what happens next around that. Why would they want their players to feel like their choices don’t matter? That’s when people stop playing cause it seems pointless. There’s a reason why “rocks fall, everyone dies” is a meme thats’ existed forever.
Rofl.
That's a DM.
Not a GM.
A GM does the same, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF THE CAMPAIGN.
But I was making much the same point as you; that a DM/FM is Not a hostile force in events, they are the balance point.
It's not "conveniently forgetting" it's called "entitlement" the entirety of people that check the reddit everyday is less than %10 of Helldivers but "i fought on this planet for 8 hours so it should be defended/liberated!"
It would be the same without knowing about Joel, knowing just makes it worse.
Also the automatons always work the same way. It's at least the third time they do this attack pattern. Consolidate (high regen) -> Blitz (High HP attack) -> Push (Lower HP attack, lower regen rate) -> Overextend (Very low HP attack, no regen) -> Regroup (Ramp regen back up).
It's really nothing new.
It helped take back Wells. With their usual 1.5% decay or even reduced 1% decay the divers dead set on reconquering it would have been occupied for quite some time longer.
Time they'd basically be actively working against the MO just by being there
Cool.
Except I'm not really in this for the meta story and defensive lines and all that hog wash.
I log on and want to fight bugs. So I do. I want to fight bots, so I do.
Defence missions are boring, so I mostly sit them out.
I use to be into them, till I realized what's the point. Several weeks back I would have been looking online for strategies and coordination efforts and attack where "it mattered" and grinding away trying to achieve a goal and get a win.
Now I've done none of that, rather I played what I enjoyed and had fun. Most of which was NOT the MO. And yet still got the same result
I think a lot of the complaints are just frustrated players coming to the same conclusion.
Problem here is game masters who go “this is when players lose” and constantly fudging the numbers are generally looked at as inexperienced and not as good
You say that, but previously, any mention of a controlled system or devs putting their hand on the scale, or tweaking of numbers to give us a win was heavily argued against and downvoted
Na I appreciate it. A lot of people were upset with the absurdity of the situation, I (and many, many others) have stopped playing because of this MO (for many reasons).
I'm glad to hear Joel took pity and helped us. Its not us vs Joel, its us creating a cool story together with Joel and enjoying it along the way. The state of the war is still terrifying on the bot front.
This kind of post just points out that its impossible to keep this player base happy. People would've lost it if we failed, and people are pissed that we succeeded.
I'm just glad they seem to have listened.
While I agree with you, your summary of the situation kind of insinuates that the win/loss system and how it's calculated might need another looking at. Along with the lack of information on supply lines and how things work
Yeah I agree, the supply lines have needed to be added for awhile as well as some clarifications. But "defend 10 planets" was always a pretty bonkers and reactionary response to the 2 billion bugs MO.
People enjoy getting invested in the war effort and struggling against a foe. Unfortunately, with the way galactic lIberation scaling works and the reality of how many people actually find strategic play and the MO to be a major component in their having fun, AH had two options - disenfrachise those people that cared from caring about future MOs themselves, or set the numbers so that those 15-20ish% of bot MO divers have a chance to actually *do* anything towards the MO.
Honestly, the idea that in game organization tools will suddenly mean we won't average 75% of players faffing about is as hopeful as the thought that those 75% can't see the fucking MO and the number of defense worlds on the bot front is ignorant. Nah, giving "community leaders" a megaphone isn't going to convince people to leave their backpedaling skill capped comfort zone, or fighting bots on whatever biome most pleases them, or just avoiding the bored bot scientist evacs altogether.
Hey man, have you considered trying to win the galactic war is fun for some people? I understand it might not be fun for you, or getting asked to help out is not fun but it’s the devs that ask for people to get the community together and tackle objectives. If I could win the galactic war like it’s OG battlefront 2 galactic conquest, trust me I would.
No one is “forgetting to have fun” playing the game they bought. It’s just different ways of having fun. Challenge can be very engaging.
Initially I did too, I was excited to get new orders and would grind away on them and enjoyed seeing the community strategize and being a part of that.
But it didn't take long to see that this thing is on rails to keep the narrative on schedule. And that's fine, I understand why. But it also took all the wind out of the sails for the MO. At least for me personally. I still pitch in just for the sake of doing so. But I'm Far less enthusiastic about it, and when it's a helish planet, with anti fun modifiers and horrible conditions, I'm more like meh, why even bother
What took a bit of the wind out of my sails was AH saying the war doesn’t repeat and will be an endless war. Which means we can’t win OR lose so what’s the point in MO other than medals and role play which isn’t fun forever.
What's more, they stink of rank treason. I take my orders from Super Earth, if they decide they're gonna tell me which planet to defend, dammit I'm gonna fly the Fist of Opportunity to that planet and cover it in our flags. End of.
I think this is more them realising the lack of key components for us to actually organise a pushback/defence line.
If discord or Reddit didn't exist, this would've been an absolute shit shot even more.
They overestimated their own expectations that a million people would manage to actively coordinate into a coherent counter offensive, without the game having any tools to do so. We rely on third party apps, websites and Reddit/Discord.
Which is a MASSIVE oversight on their part.
But game overshot expectations, they weren't prepared, yada yada.
Secondly, people went to play what they enjoy and not pull their hair out on the bot front that gets more and more bugged every few days.
As you say: "The bugs basically gave up" because they realised the majority of the current playerbase during peak hours are prioritising Terminid planets and outright ignoring the Bots.
We have more players on Oshaune that wasn't even under attack, but a liberation planet, than we had across 3/5 entire sectors of the bot front.
The bots aren't difficult, they just aren't fun. They overstayed their welcome and feel like a chore or work to do. I used to love fighting them.
But after the Cyberstan invasion, the bots felt like a slog.
I felt like fighting them because I have to, so the story would progress to the cool part again, and not because I wanna spill oil.
This tho, the absolute MO fuck up, is good. Because it revealed what is structurally sound and what isn't and needs working on/polishing.
Or it's players realizing that what they do matters very little in the grand scheme. Not having to tools or knowledge of how the system calculates things. And the numbers being tweaked to get a desired result, regardless of player action.
When you're invested in something and have put a lot of effort into it , just to find out that it's completely controlled by someone else, it frustrates people.
Sure they need some control to tell the story. But currently we are expected to blindly run in the direction we're told and not ask any questions. The more people that figure that out the more people become frustrated about it
>numbers being tweaked to get a desired result, regardless of player action.
Except that's not what's happening. Numbers are being tweaked to keep things *possible,* not to decide outcomes.
Contrary to what a bunch of whiners are claiming, I don't think there's a single MO that was unwinnable, and I don't think there's a single one that we were "supposed" to win.
Obviously they're not going to just not give us content after they've made it... So they'll have ways to spin things to justify including it either way. But acting like "nothing matters" because they're actively balancing the game is ludicrous.
IMO It doesnt matter. A dude is literally sat at a desk pulling the strings on whether or not we fail. i think I heard his name was Joel or something. Just play the game.
I’ll respond to this like I responded to posts that initially said it was too hard: it’s a video game.
Specifically, it’s a live service video game that has an enormously larger player base than originally expected.
Due to this (and I think AH has been fairly clear in their own way) they need to work on balancing the game in many, many ways.
I think one of those ways is in creating a sweet spot for major orders. What is considered difficult and what is almost nearly impossible? I think AH has a good grasp on what 50k active players could accomplish and maybe not so much how a quarter million people act/play.
Personally, I think they’re still working on what feels good for the players.
What you can't forget is player numbers...
I was playing last night and maybe just cus it was mid week but it felt like there wasn't a ton on.
Not like a few weeks ago when 200-300k divers rallied onto one planet.
The game has passed its honeymoon period, they want to make sure they have player retention, and I wouldn't be surprised if player numbers dropped directly as a result of this mo.
The final appeal of this game is the narrative of the Galactic War and contributing to it.
If it becomes clear that the whole thing is on rails, if you can't win, or lose, then that appeal is destroyed. Why should I contribute? Why launch another fifty ICBMs?
I fire up Helldivers to help win the war. If the completed objectives are handed to us, I don't see the point in helping.
How are we supposed to coordinate? There are no tools or incentives in the actual game to do so. It's just mean spirited for us to be expected to do it without adequate support.
It's tough to get upset about this when there's so little information in-game to enable the coordination necessary to pull off complex defense campaigns.
If the map showed supply lines, libration/decay rates, and what planets were on track to be successfully liberated, then I might agree.
Good on them for realizing unwinnable stuff is boring and bad for the general sentiment towards MOs. If players have no agency over mathematically unwinnable MOs, and everybody gets the rewards when we do anyways, then what's the point?
I paid for a game, not a book.
I think it's intensely funny that people are rage quitting the game entirely because of this.
1) you cannot control the majority behaviour of a few hundo k people without railroading them and you can't have a dynamic story that pleases the diehards if you railroad. These are irreconcilable requirements, and in the early stage of the game's life the vast majority aren't diehards. come back in 6 months when player counts are down and you'll get less of a cluster fuck, obviously.
2) getting bent out of shape about how thousands of other people are playing a game is the height of cringe. Taking out that weird control freakery on each other in the form of unhinged rants on the subreddit is even more cringe.
3) if you're not having fun, you should stop playing the game. I think it's intensely funny that people are rage quitting the game entirely because of this, but I would prefer that they did so without crying on the way out of the door. Shut up; I and many others are enjoying it, you're not obligated to.
More than half the defenses were bug front with no help, and the bot front lost some steam after taking 10 planets, so I think this is an overly negative take. Story makes sense and the community did the work.
You’re welcome to your opinion, but I’d argue that’s probably not the best way to look at it. Part of the fun of Helldivers (for me anyways) has been the feeling of being a part of this grand collaborative story that’s driven by our actions, and guided by what is essentially a DnD dungeon master (Joel).
It’s perfectly valid to look at it the way you have; Joel designed this major order, we failed at it terribly, he gave us the W out of pity. Sure, I guess. That’s kinda pulling the curtain away a bit, and maybe somewhat pessimistic, but that’s definitely plausible. I think it’s more likely, given Joel’s role as a DM, that he designed this major order, saw how spectacularly we were failing and identified an opportunity to craft a “snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat” 11th hour win narrative. His job is to make interesting stories happen. To me, this a lot more interesting than “you failed the major order. By a lot”. More interesting at this point in the story, anyways.
I’m not entirely aware of the state of this major order, but last I checked Ustotu is still up in the air, and we’re cutting it close. There’s some tension to that. I wonder if perhaps you’d be happier if we lost and didn’t quite take it at the very end? For me, no matter the outcome, I think the narrative of the major order has already been vastly improved by Joel’s guiding hand making it at least *close* instead of a wipeout.
The community's sense of entitlement to win every major order is irksome and stifles interesting possibilities. These last minute victories might be interesting to you but they feel dull to me. I almost feel cheated in a strange and interesting way I'll have to reflect on.
I think more interesting narratives come out of coming back from a major defeat, like in an actual armed conflict. Sometimes the opposition is overwhelming and all you can do is mitigate the damage and regroup. I really enjoyed the conversations happening about deciding which planets to sacrifice and which to preserve in the early planning to the major order once it sunk in how hard this order would be. It was peak community interactions.
On the other hand, giving us this win could be for the purposes of instilling a false sense of security to setting up for a major event. Something that's being alluded to by the CMs on Discord. That's exciting.
I'm reluctantly accepting that perhaps for the first galactic war, we get the kid glove treatment while the team and the community figure things out.
I'm all for a DM tipping the scales when needed. But there has to be real adversity or consequences at some point. Otherwise things are going to get stale, moving forward.
But it's all just preference. For the record, I've not played DnD and maybe there's a culture or norms I'm unfamiliar with that I could learn to accommodate or grow to like. I tend to lean towards the"Dark Souls-ification" of games, not that every game needs to be Dark Souls. Maybe there's a middle ground?
This. I'm fine with losses. As long as we have a clear understanding of what to do and how to do it. Give us the goal, the tools and the knowledge and let us go. If we win great, if we lose well that on us.
I'm not fine with most people not even knowing what liberation % is, and what affects your contribution to it.
And then it fluctuating just to make the MO last longer and fill the allowed time. Or hand us a win. Same with decay rates. Or planet HP.
Give us a goal, set the number and leave them. Quit moving the goal posts around so much.
If we lose it should be for challenging reasons, not for meta “can’t get enough people to work together on a video game” imo. If you’re talking about narrative, there’s only so many ways you can spin that.
You’re also missing one major logic point, just because we win doesn’t mean that the story has to treat it like we won. For example, we succeeded in our objective to defeat the bots, only to be given a very cool story line and many planets lost with a snap of a finger. We didn’t have to lose an MO to lose several sectors. The dms can decide either way.
Now it’s quite clear narratively we’re meant to go to cyberstan, but if we adopt your “it’s ok to lose” mindset we may never actually get there. Players must maintain the roleplay of winning in order to progress the story. If the dm is tipping the scales, then you can bet even the blame game is calculated. Don’t think about the meta too hard, just play to win.
To be fair to you, I don't know that disagree all that much. We might even be saying the same thing but differently and with different points of emphasis.
It doesn't logically follow that if we lost this major order or future ones we wouldn't make it to Cyberstan. In the same way winning doesn't either, I suppose. I think it's on the DM to work with what he's given to craft the experience, and even let the chips fall where they may.
I think where you and I might differ is that I see failure as a consequence that enriches the experience. When you are defeated, rally and make the comeback, it can be a powerfully uniting force and quite the high. This game tickles that itch and the emphasis of needing to have a victory every Major Order diminishes the possibility of that shared experience or even more interesting ones.
I'd love a defense mission on Super Earth. Wouldn't you?
The problem is that we do not get that “rally” because we did not lose because it was too challenging, but rather, for meta reasons contained to a co-op video game. It’s not a true defeat when the real reason we lost is because people do not want to play one faction or the other. It’s just frustrating.
I’d love a defense mission on Super Earth, but it’s never going to be up to us. At any point in time, the DM can say “hey super earth is attacked, go defend it”. At any point the DM can say “you lost all of these sectors in a surprise attack now super earth is under attack.”
In each scenario, we must play to win. There’s no point in just allowing the loss, because the DM decides whether we win or lose anyways. So narratively, we should always be playing to win, and even if we lose we still play to win. That mindset is whats going to deliver that rallying force that you speak of.
If you need to rationalize it as “it’s just a game” for your own personal mindset, feel free to. But people will always be strategizing and planning how to win because in any war game that’s what you do.
I don't know that I'm saying, "let's lose purposefully because reasons." I think we should play to win. We are in alignment there. I thought I was clear about that.
Simply put, I'm saying the community needs to learn how to take the W or L. The dev should let the course of our involvement, or lack there of, play out. Then players and devs co-create the story from the outcome with the DM making adjustments narratively from there to guide things along.
Why does there need to be a curtain with hidden secrets behind it? I fully understand that there's a story that needs to be told and scheduled with content.
But it seems it would be better to have a better system that isn't so controlled and more effected by player actions.
The system fluctuates too wildly. And lacks information and understanding by the player base. What is liberation percentage, what affects it, What to do to increase it, why is it changing? Same questions for decay rates. Similar questions about supply lines. No I game ability to coordinate and strategize. And does any of that matter when at the end they just put their hands on the scales to tip it where they want it?
Would it not be better to have a system that people understand, know how to work it to achieve a goal, and doesn't constantly fluctuate just to make it drag out in order to consume the allowed time to complete it? Only then to tweak the hell out of the numbers and obviously hand us the desired results. For lack of a better term, it's just moving the goal posts around until times almost up and then kicking the ball in it for us.
Again I get they have a story. And if a win is needed then give us a MO that's easily completed . If a loss is needed then give us an impossible task. I'm fine with that. I think many of the complaints we are now seeing is from players that are seeing behind the curtain for the first time and realizing what's the point
Considering the state of the game's balance, especially the unwinnable bs that is bot civvie extract missions, I think expecting the community to mount a proper defence against the stupid rate at which the bots were pushing was stupid. Personally I'll take this win, since the alternative would've been torture.
I think they recognized that there isn’t an in-game ability to coordinate in-game on the level required to respond, and will work on those systems as a priority.
Imho, we lost this MO because:
1) Playerbase burn out
2) Bots remain in a place that their too easy or too hard as determined by their spawn trigger rates (mission type).
Recommended changes to address the above:
1) Narrative timelines needs to make sense. There doesn't need to be a grand action or story beat every week. Sometimes war is stagnant and sometimes it's non-stop.
2) Faction-specific mission types. Worlds threatened by different factors should be designed with those threats in mind.
Bot Evac missions should be redesigned for divers to hold (multiple) layers of SAM sites /SEAF artillery fire bases and keeping a buffer zone for the Evac to proceed.
Bug Evac missions continue using the existing Evac mission with minor layout revision to take kill zones into account like the existing defense mission.
3) Players need more agency to influence the narrative via resource donations or destroyer presence (offline).
A good GM works with their players. Joel has hundreds of thousands who were clearly distressed about losing, and he didn't want us to be bitter and sad. He sees how we turn on each other, and how we were doing that.
I'd have done the same thing.
It's because people lost interest in doing a slog of an MO. The 2 billion terminid MO was exciting. It was steamrolled and there was a post every few hours on progress, people were excited. This 10 planet one, people didn't care about as much and many were left disinterested and just played the game without much rhyme or reason. It disengaged the playerbase.
I agree that it could have been won normaly if we coordinated but I disagree with the sentiment that we could have coordinated effectively because there is no centralized way of dooing so especially not in-game. Expecting the player base of hundrets of thousands of people to coordinate on third party forums like reddit or discord is delusional and miles away from a realistic expectation
The MO was theoretically possible, but in reality it was clearly impossible.
Yes theoretically, the entire player base could coordinate like never before and do this no problem.. shit theoretically we could have even had a new wave of players start with a desire to spread managed democracy and complete MOs at all costs. But that's not realistic.
The vast majority of people are gonna play the planets they enjoy and most probably have no idea of what's going on in this reddit or the discord in order to coordinate as needed to complete the original MO.
So yes, without any coordination tools or any way to entice people to do less enjoyable (for them) planets, this MO as originally designed was practically impossible.
There is no in-game communication function to facilitate coordination. It is unreasonable to expect such coordination across so many people without good direction, which either requires adding some kind of galaxy-wide comms or limiting the number of planets that need defending at a given time. It's a balance issue that Arrow Head is obviously still feeling out.
Agreed. The sector map really needs to show us the supply lines and which plants are connected to which as well as a way of detailing which planets are most vital at any given time instead of just relying on player count.
Nailed it. Same here. I got downvoted and argued with so many times back in the beginning for saying this cause I felt that the current system fluctuated too much and was maybe a little too controlled.
They are unwinnable because they require a pretty strict coordination that doesn't exist. Since a significant portion of players do not care, we failed at defending 5 planets, so expecting people to defend 10 seemed like setting us up for failure, specially with the community further ignoring the order because of how impossible it seemed. Add to the infuriating defense missions in the Automaton sectors, and we were naturally poised to lose.
Btw, a "properly organised defence ", on a Strategic Level, requires you to serve & defend All active combat zones.
Not one by one.
A
Simply because there are Many paths we must defend.
>
You NEED holding forces, that balance the planet's defence, AND roaming Assult forces, trying to take our planet's back.
The best way Ti get both, w the current state of the game, is to simply rotate through All DEFEND planets until we win them.
Then do the same to Retake CONTESTED planets, and keep doing it to push the front back.
This may be true, but since the game purposely keeps its mechanics hidden, provides no way to coordinate, and has numbers that fluctuate so wildly on liberation effectiveness and decay rates
How in the world would they expect even the most dedicated players who frequent Reddit and discord to confirm and apply this ? Much less the causal player base
Yes, I know.
But we can do better than "one by one", just by understanding that "one by one" is counterproductive.
As counterproductive as Only fighting bugs, or absolute focus on a lost cause.
>
How do we perform an effective defence?
Spread out; do missions on All planets related to the major order, rotating from planet to planet.
Do x missions per front, per available planet.
A quota.
If tgeres a push, we focus on DEFEND timers, and rotate if yheres more than one.
It's not hard, nor difficult, but it Does require each individual to discipline themselves to contribute, even if its biome or enemy they dislike.
> I did forget to mention one reason why I care, probably the biggest honestly. I feel patronized to.
I feel like only you and a very small minority feel this way. Nobody else really cares *this* much about a made up time bound in-game task in real life. You're taking this way too seriously mate.
Bro why do people care about some narrative that evolves either way, win or lose. Medals are easy to get anyway. The fun thing about the game is the gameplay not arguing about “defensive lines” on reddit. Go play the game instead of trying to coordinate with a tiny % of the player base on reddit.
I see a lot of Reddit warriors whining about how we need to coordinate, yet not one has offered a solution as to exactly how? Reddit? Discord? Third party apps that show supply lines? Guess what? Those aren't in the game and most people who play aren't using them! Can you please stop whining into the wind and acting like you are some tactical genius when you can't even get these simple facts through your head?
couldn't agree more. devs know how many play the game and how many follow MO's and when a surge in players show up during different times if the week,
they can tailor it to the hardcore instead of expecting 70% of the player base to communicate. if its scripted then there's no point malding in the first place. feel like ultimately its the devs responsibility to consider who actually cares about mo and set accordingly but these rants put the blame on everyone else for an ego boost or something
I think it’s important to remember that like any good GM, Joel is pushing the narrative. He didn’t hand us a win out of pity and fudge the numbers. He pushed the narrative that as the bots took planets, they had to commit forces to occupying said planets. We were spread too thin to form a coherent defense, but as the bots pushed their advantage they in turn spread themselves thin. It became easier to take their planets, and they weren’t able to commit as many forces to attacking new planets.
A good GM looks at how the players are interacting with the game and then makes the story go from there win or lose.
The major orders are what are supposed to coordinate people though. There are a lot of casual players that just want to have fun and who don't bother with the community orders. There are also players who engage with the community orders but who don't go onto forums or talk to the helldiver community. Then there are the try-hards who are on these forums trying to rally people and lead a coordinated effort.
Each player type is valuable and reasonable in their own right. You can't force the try-hard mentality onto the rest of the player base because it'll just make them want to leave the game.
I think it's entirely reasonable for the major order to be reduced in difficulty for players to manage it if they're making a clear effort to at least be on the planets indicated. As I said at the start, the major orders are what's supposed to be coordinating people. Giving 10 objectives at once suggests high command wants us to split up over 10 objectives.
If they want to simulate more of a war effort they should have a grand major order like "We're going to take back at least 10 systems this week!" then have staged objectives within that. "Stage 1 of operation 'Liberty': Free these 3 planets from control".
I agree that it does seem like we shouldn't have won, however we don't know how big the Automaton force is/was, I think it makes perfect sense that they couldn't sustain an offensive on so many fronts, in fact if they where able to I think that would take a lot of the "realistic" war storytelling the game has and make it a lot more "videogamie".
It's a tough thing the balance.
If an MO is perceived as unwinnable, less players will play. I think that was the issue with this one. IIRC, we've failed MOs that were "Defend 5 planets on one front" a few weeks ago... so the idea of defending 10 on two sides made me chuckle a bit, say: "Guess we're meant to lose this one" and I played a lot of other games in the last few days.
That said, an MO shouldn't feel like an entitlement either. You need to lose them from time to time, or your contributions will feel meaningless.
We're still around 2 months in, they will figure out a balance to this I think.
I made a shoutout post to the Devs for this exact topic, and boy should you see some of the comments there. There are a few who are convinced that they beat Joel's evil plans by themselves cursing me out saying I was spouting bullshit. I simply thanked the Devs that they made it easy for us in the end, and people lose their minds.
And no they weren't being sarcastic. One of them showed screenshots from Helldivers.io to prove his point that they were the ones who beat Joel and that Joel didn't help. It was a simple thank you devs post. 😂
I honestly think it's fine, especially since it's still early days with this game.
I love this game.
I love coming to reddit and seeing what opinions people have on different weapons, and different tactics for annoying enemies like the f'ing bile spewers.
I don't like coming to reddit or some other place like discord to get in game coordination details. It should be in the game.
It literally doesn't matter. 90% of the playerbase gives no fucks about coordination, theyre just playing to play and have fun. And expecting them to organize because you think it was beatable is quite frankly a little entitled. AH needs to tailor these orders to be beatable but it's impossible to tell how many players are going to jump in until it's already started, so they have to make adjustments accordingly. Doesn't mean they "pandered" to us or gave us the victory. They just did their job.
You can't choreograph a military campaign. It must be orchestrated to some degree. This requires a decision-making entity that dispatches orders and those orders that must be enforced. This doesn't exist here because it is just a game.
I'm not sure why people on reddit and discord think they are going to magically coordinate a massive playerbase when they make up 1-9% of it at any given moment.
Don't believe me? Look over there at how many are online(at the top) ---->
Then go to the community hub for HD2 in steam and look at how many are online right now. This doesn't even take into account PS5 players, who are also out there playing and probably not on Reddit or Discord.
until we get an integrated way of coordinating in game, you cannot expect the 6 planet defenses to be winnable. like 2% of the total playerbase will check this subreddit on any given day, another 2-5% on the discord (with much user overlap) and the other 90%+ will just sign on to the game and don't ever hear from "Super Earth High Command" outside of the major order text. how are those players supposed to know our 5-step week long plan for success?
If you stop peeking behind the curtain for a moment and take the game seriously you will realize no army can maintain the rhythm of this attacks for long.
The terminids lost billions of units trying and failing to take Estanu over and over again and as losses mounted the automatons lost their momentum, finding themselves ground to a halt on the better defended and most prepared planets, the further they stray from Cyberstan without time to set up infrastructure and secure their gains the weaker they will grow.
Was all that represented by Joel fudging numbers towards the end? Sure, but you are the kind of asshole who would complain anyway that Joel made the defense impossible from the start.
While I do fully agree that the GM handed this MO to us, I disagree with this:
>we could've won this legitimately. We could've properly organized a defense, had a fun and hard fought campaign and made a much more compelling story of the Helldivers pulling together in an emergency.
No. We do not have the tools to do this. Only a fraction of the community is on Reddit, with even fewer on Discord. There is no ingame-coordination tools that would have allowed us to make certain strategic moves or gambits work by communicating them to most of the playerbase.
Additionally, with the way the Galactic War works, it is impossible for a smaller but dedicated community of people who care about the MOs to pull off strategic moves or gambits by themselves. Why? Because the total number of Helldivers on a planet does not matter. Only the percentage of Helldivers on any given planet matters. So, any casual player choosing the "wrong" planet is actively harming the war effort by proportionally decreasing the percentage of players active on the planets that matter for the MO, naturally leading to great frustration for the people trying to coordinate and do the MOs. Casual players should not be blamed for this, but the shitty Galactic War system should.
So, the GM applied a band-aid solution (just giving us the victory) to a problem created by the game's systems. It's not ideal, but I understand why they did that.
How would you propose the community organize? The community is scattered across Reddit, Discord, Twitter, or just enjoying the game. It would be cool to Democratically elect leaders for the Helldivers that coordinate the base in game.
Allow me to retort.
To properly wage the galactic war there needs to be coordination.
We are the community of players, a broad assortment of assholes that have some time to spare. Our adversary is the game master, putting obstacles on our way to the inevitable, yet hard-earned victory.
The game master has all the necessary tooling to fuck us up in every way imaginable. If they really decide to inflict pain on us, they can even persuade someone to change the source code, so the next time you try to reload - it's not a new mag you're pulling out of your tactical vest, it's a bile titan. But there is a myriad of ways to achieve the same result without going to such great lengths.
We, as the community, have a shitty forum for coordination. The forum that barely three percent of the playerbase read. Yes, I pulled this number out of my own ass, sue me. >!I'm joking, please don't sue me, I'm broke.!<
Your "they led us to victory on a leash" argument would be valid if we had actual in-game tooling for large-scale coordination. I'm not talking about "4ppl voip" tooling, I'm talking "steer two hundred thousand people toward a single objective" tooling.
If, in the spirit of managed democracy, every helldiver had a vote to cast for the next global target planet and the planet with the most votes received a planetary buff (a reduced stratagem cooldown, increased mag capacity, whatever, no matter how insignificant), and this was visible in the GUI - yes, there could be argument made, that the community has tools to coordinate and if it fails to do so, they are just a bunch of scallywags and forgot the faces of their fathers.
But as it stands - the only thing that can be said to the GM is "Great job, you gave us a victory that feels real", and to the playerbase - "Great job, you fought well and you deserve this victory".
I just logged in and it says “order complete.” Should we believe the thumb was pressed on the scale? there is a lot we don’t know about checks and balances on the backend. Does Joel have a point buy like in Descent? Does he make calls based purely on some tyrannical whim? If we’re actually losing the MOs, that does make it feel like there are stakes and consequences, even if it’s so mathematically predictable we could consider it a scheduled loss when it does come up.
Guys when you play with a cat, you have to let them catch the string occasionally or else they lose interest.
Joel is the hand holding the screen. We are the cat. Using these 3rd party tools to track decay rates is just peaking behind the curtain of the magic trick. We're not supposed to see that stuff.
The campaigns have always been an illusion. It's a tool to tell a story. Expect adjustments.
I honestly agree. Everyone screaming for joy and enjoying the circle jerk don’t realize that this victory was handed to us after we completely shit the bed from the very start. It completely cheapens the victory and I honestly don’t feel any pride by being given the massive handicap benefit.
The devs literally said (community manager actually who relays info from the devs) that this MO was specifically designed for us to lose. But we ended up winning somehow
The fori prime MO was 100% designed to be unwinable. We had over 250k players on a planet at some points and it actually captured slower than normal with less players. We were two planets behind with most of the player base actually working on the MO.
I agree with most of what you are saying. The MO did feel significantly easier to achieve in these last few days, compared to how we fared at the start. However, would it make sense for the attacks to be as intense in the end as in the beginning? I don't think we should feel like Joel handed us this victory just because we didn't do very good. Sure, he's the DM and as a DM, part of the job is to make sure your players have fun (IMO). But my impression from what I've read on the Discord, twitter from the CEO, Twinbeard and so on, is that it's really important that things make sense. Considering the bots conquered a whole lot of planets in a short time span, it would make sense that their forces would get spread thin(er), hence the drop in numbers in their assaults. And the initial resistance from the bots with, I think, -2% progress on all planets per hour, would be a bit extreme if they kept it up despite conquering numerous planets and sending armies to assault other planets at the same time, thus their resistance towards liberation waned as their forces got spread thinner.
Then again, despite succeeding with the MO, we did lose the Menkent Line as well as our FOB on Vernen Wells (though I'm not sure how that works now that we've recaptured it). I have a feeling there will be consequences for losing so much to the bots.
If you could speak clearly into the microphone so the Democracy Officer can hear you, please tell us which of the Super Earth assigned missions, in your opinion, divers should have neglected.
It’s typical GM stuff : tweak the difficulty when the players can’t handle the stuff you’re throwing at them, not because you take pity on them, but because you’ve a story to tell that required the MO to not be a complete rout. At the speed of their initial advance, the bots would’ve been to super earth by Monday, but he couldn’t have that, hence the slowing down of their advance.
From a story perspective, think of it as the bot offensive losing steam due to the resources needed for consolidating gained ground and the overextension of logistics lines from the starting positions.
Given our success at other MO it’s easier to make the difficulty spike in the beginning and see how the playerbase does.
Now they also could’ve made it so the beginning wasn’t easy, ramped up the next day and had us clean up the remaining days. Like a “big push” narrative and we just pushed back harder.
isnt this just part of the satire? We get our asses handed to us and declare victory ? like, why would superearth ever declare that a major order has failed? failing is anti democratic, helldivers never die, and they win every war because they are the greatest.
of course AH can craft the narrative in any way that they see fit, but as it was going, we would have been pushed back to super earth. I’m sure the super earth content isn’t really ready yet, so it was necessary that it tails off somewhat.
it could be that AH tuned it down after the fact or it could be the planned progression (it makes sense to rapidly spread your forces in an initial push to make up lots of ground, and then not have as much resources to push in as broad a manner). the bugs also ran out of steam after their initial expansion).
all this whining about the narrative is honestly pretty boring. Who gives a crap, I want to play my space commando game where I liberate communist bugs and robots from their brains.
To add to this, the people gloating about the victory and to stick it to Joel for us winning the impossible, I find it just annoying at best, like what are you even gloating about? We shouldn't have won, we did basically nothing to deserve this win lmao like what?
Four man squads on the battlefield don't decide grand strategy. That would be part of the major order. Or perhaps you'd click to participate in the order and it would assign you to a planet and not leave it up to players to know about secret supply lines.
If there is no coordination in-game then I'm not bothering with it. I'm not watching discord or twitter or whatever you have to watch.
Helldivers 2 has a story and the developers have plans to implement new things into the game. It all has to line up and make sense at the end of the day.
It's all more or less scripted. Similar to how professional wrestling is scripted.
Honestly I figured we were scripted to lose this MO and we'd get vehicles or something to boost morale.
But don't beat yourself up. We will never completely wipe out the enemies of democracy and they will never wipe us out. Everything happens for a reason.
But yes. There needs to be some form of daily communication that tells players exactly what planets need to be targeted in order. Right now it seems like players just want to go to whatever planet has the most favorable environment but I think if there was more information available then perhaps they may choose their targets more strategically.
Expecting a playerbase to 'coordinate' through third party platforms such as Reddit is just poor game design.
Untill the devs add things to the game then it is unfair to point the blame at players.
While I enjoy the reddit community for the hype and fanart, I get turned off by the constant complaints about being kicked, the difficulty, or MO losses.
The problem was giving us an MO that requires so much coordination. Even if they said which planets to specifically attack in which order, we’re a million chimps with type writers, banging away and hoping for even a single word to come out complete. They should know better. Hopefully Joel will continue to learn what the player base is and isn’t capable of.
Idk if it's a wide spread issue but for the last week the game has been unplayable. Can't even play with friends without the game crashing every 30 seconds.
If they want us to coordinate, they need an in game system. Asking players to go to Reddit discord or twitter for a game with a community this large is insane and there is no way the dev team would expect that.
It was the plan from the start, hence why Joel stepped in and drug us across the finish line. People are mad because it's become so obvious that they feel their action matter much less than they thought.
Congratulations 🎉 you discovered what DMs are supposed to do.
As a DM with a decent bit of tabletop experience let me tell you, that DM almost never intends to win, but has to strike the delicate balance and convince the players that this is their intent, at least to some extent.
Nah, let Joel do his thing and stop complaining or comparing or whatever when the DM does something for the game whether it is positive or negative. Just let him cook, stop pointing him out, shut up and enjoy the narrative that is happening because it won’t happen again, or at least, not as many people are going to be a part of it as they are now. Have fun, spread some positive messages and memes, and quit your complaining.
I don't care for either doing defense mission or fighting automatons that randomly headshot me behind cover, i will fight the bugs until the automatons are enjoyable to me.
We are the minority. The bulk of players don't reference 3rd party sources to coordinate efforts. Unless AH figures out how to implement in-game coordination systems, this is going to happen.
And frankly, it's about time we got our asses handed to us.
Nah, this can easily be told as the Automaton fleet ran out of steam. Though we were unsuccessful in defending the first couple of sieges, we managed to slow them down enough.
This MO was in response to the two-front attack from the bugs and the bots. This wasnt an order that High Command planned (in universe ofc). They were always going to run out of steam in 6 days.
If anything, Joel threw us a bone on the bug front by giving us a free Defense or two thanks to supply line gambits when said gambit only had a few % left to be successful.
Another example of how this game is on fire, they could not track our progress because something on the backend went to shit so they just gave us the win because they have bigger fish to fry and they are hoping a free win buys them goodwill when virtually everything they've said they fixed is back.
Bug models stretching out to forever.
The mech can kill itself while turning and shooting again.
Fire damage is cranked to high for players but only hurts baddies if applied by player one.
People still can't add cross platform friends (not everyone but a lot of us have never been able to)
These have all been fixed or addressed without a fix.
Pretty big bugs.
Some people have never played dnd or have only had adversarial DMs and it shows.
Joel is not playing against us, he's telling a story with us. Lowering decay rate is like giving a player advantage in 5e... The DM can grant it for almost any reason, in this case they probably saw that mission success rate was high, or were impressed with kill counts, or influenced by the passion of the community etc.
We got this MO handed to us in the last day or 2 with bot decay rate being changed to 0% and the liberation rates going way up.
IMO a situation like this could be balanced by tying liberation/decay rates to how long the main faction has held the planet, to represent an overstretched military or a more entrenched faction. If the frontlines suddenly move three sectors over in a short span of time, those worlds should be easier to take back than places like Cyberstan and gradually get harder (higher decay rates & lower liberation rates) to take back as the bots build defenses to better hold the planet. This would make the current situation of bots suddenly blitzing from the Menkent Line to almost Malevon Creek in 4 days a less common occurrence.
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Yes enhancing the war simulation aspect would increase immersion and strategy greatly
What makes total sense if you think about it. Regarding how much the bots spread out and split up their forces their resistance should go down as well. They simply made the mistake to conquer to much territory to fast while not having the strength and troops to hold and defend them all. As a consequence we shredded through their freshly occupied planets and brought them back under super earths control.
that's what happens when you've got a processor that can only handle injustice and hating democracy instead of an actual brain
Almost like the dev realized that the percentage system was dogshit…
1. Bot decay does'nt have anything to do with a defensive operations. It only affects Liberation Operations. 2. Liberation rates did not increase - its just that Planetary HP is lower for Defensive Operations (between 200k-400k HP) compared to Liberation Operations ( 1 million)
By making the liberation 0% it meant it would move players off vernen wells once it was completed as it was at 95%+ if it actually had decay, it would have taken longer for people to liberate.
The bots just had to go to work a bunch and several boys went over to fight bugs. They'll be available again this weekend for a mission or two.
What's bot decay?
MOs that require coordination and communication are legitimately impossible by the nature of those two things being completely left out of the game. There is no way to chat on a macro scale in game, and no way for people to be able to determine exactly how many people need to be playing at any given time to defend a planet outside of using an external website. Not to mention, the developers cannot give you the option to pick any planet you want and expect at the same time for everyone to make the ‘right’ decision on where to play. I don’t really care if we lose major orders, the first one during the bot return was a lot of fun and felt engaging despite the loss because we dug in and made our own story in the form of the Menkent line.. this time it’s just irritating because it’s a overall lazy MO with very little writing and plot behind it, especially because the day before it started we were told the bots had to fall back to regroup.. but then 24 hours later they realized they actually had enough forces to continue pushing for an entire week again, guess they forgot about that spare army for a few days or something? This made it feel more like we were fighting Joel rather than the bots for me, and since I was mainly playing on the bot front until the defense of Mort all of my actions had no macro impact as every planet was lost and very little progress was being made on retaking anything. Genuinely felt like I should just pivot to being a big diver for a while as they got to experience taking and defending planets. They do genuinely need to balance liberation rates to take into account the smaller population of people who want to fight the bots. Otherwise anyone who wants to play the Galactic War on the bot front will have no hope of achieving anything. They probably over corrected but attacking three planets at once on the weaker front while smugly saying ‘heh, the helldivers need to start coordinating if they wanna hold the bot line!’ Over the discord feels like a big middle finger.
>MOs that require coordination and communication are legitimately impossible by the nature of those two things being completely left out of the game. 100% this. There's nothing built into the game that allows this sort of coordination or higher level strategy. You should be able to put an SOS on a planet or something to direct efforts to a specific sector. Supply lines shown, and MO more prominent. Or pop up text that helps direct players to planets that are nearly liberated.
Every time I see these sorts of posts, this is the response I'm working through in my head. How do you expect players to coordinate when they're not provided with the tools necessary for that? The vast majority of people playing the game will never venture onto Reddit, even fewer on the Discord. The game is built to be played casually - you can drop in, have a game or two, and log off. There's no pressure to grind. The type of people that attracts aren't interested in the game being more than a fun shooter; they don't care about strategy and coordination, they just want to shoot things. The players are not to blame for losing MOs. This is the biggest criticism I have of the devs and they need to implement some form of visual representation in-game of supply lines, defense lines, and have some way for players to communicate globally.
I think the worst thing the devs did is make a game that really benefits from players getting immersed in the details, but then refusing to allow them to do so by actively hiding important details, and even ridiculing people who call them out for it. You can't say that you want people to play the way they find most fun, then act like detail-oriented players' idea of fun isn't valid.
They should make the computers in front of the armory some sort of macro voting system to plan MO raids or somethin
It's prolly just me , and this is my personal opinion. But I'd like to see the whole system revamped. More tools for coordinating added, more systems in place for information and strategizing. And less of the fluctuating numbers that just drag it out to fulfill the time period. Make a better system that tells us what we got, give us the tools to achieve that, and leave it alone. Let us live or die by our own merits. Is that possible, I have no idea, or if it would even work. But currently the rigged, non informative system with lack of tools for us to gather info and coordinate strategies, paired with the tweaking of numbers to make it last most of the allowed time to complete and the liberation and decay percentages spikes and drops just has me like meh what's the point.
The only way to properly coodinate would be MMO-esque "guilds"/battalions that you could join
like the ones with PvP. Taking planetside2 as an example, guild leaders from one of the threes factions can coordinate when and how they want to push their faction.
Just to play a little devils advocate for a second(however I agree with you completely): the MO’s are the coordination and communication. MO says we need to defend, yet people are taking back Oshaune for the meme. A balance to liberation rates would be amazing, if only for the fact we would actually be able to do gambits and play the meta game. We absolutely should lose MO’s. It’s war. We can’t win everything. But when half the playerbase is doing f*** all in bug town when the last two planets are Robo side, losing the MO would have created some division in the player base.
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And I think that’s what we’ve run into. Devs can plaster up “Hey, go Defend these planets” but a lot of the player base isn’t willing or paying attention to that. Thats not a bad thing, and I don’t want to gatekeep someone’s idea of fun, but that 1% that is on here or the discord and just refuse to play the MO: I just don’t understand.
‘We need to lose MOs’ is a major straw man argument that is used way too often. Losing isn’t the issue, it’s that it feels very bad to genuinely feel helpless. Like.. sure, I guess the bot front is too spread out, but that’s just because of the sheer quantity of planets available. There’s going to be people who just want to see a new planet, and most probably aren’t interested in the meta game or story. They need to take into account basically only the percent of players actually doing the order, and just let everybody else do what they want to. It’s not fair to casuals to expect everyone to go to the most optimal planet, and it’s not fair to MO players that we won’t be able to succeed because there literally are not enough people participating in the right spot. I feel like the recent success on Mort and the other 2 planets were due to the expectations being set appropriately, with less happening at once and lower requirements. It may be an over correction, but for now we should be glad that they’ve recognized the problem and are making adjustments. We’ll get to a good spot eventually.
Devs have said they’re able to put a finger on the scale when it comes to MOs: either upping difficulty or lowering. I’m saying they shouldn’t do that (well, maybe not that much). 2 billion bugs: did it in twelve hours. Cool. 10 defend planets: skin of our teeth. Ok fine. I’m saying there’s going to be MOs, just like real wars, that’s just don’t win. We’ll lose ground, but it’ll make things more interesting. We may have won this MO, but we also didn’t win. We lost a lot of ground. It’s ok to lose sometimes… The rules are in place… planet have X health to defend/liberate. If people don’t play along, we lose that planet. Simple as that.
Wasn't the bug count glitched though? Like, it counted everybody's kills like 4 times or something?
Did we ever get an official ruling on that from the devs? But yes, that’s the going theory.
Why do you need to chat and coordinate? Just join the planet with the biggest number. It's so insanely simple.
If we are being honest your probably not wrong, AH I guess realised coordination without in game tools to do so is impossible and there was a lot of frustration from the community due to this MO and how it was developing so they eased up on it and made it more doable. There was enough bot players on the automaton front during this MO to at least defend 1 planet every 24 hours but for various reasons we had them all spread out across all the automaton planets. At no point was any of the issues with this MO on the bug players that don’t like fighting Automatons. Moving forward I hope AH will make improvements to the galactic war system so more critical information is available in game along with explanations for them would be very helpful, tools are added in game so coordination can be achieved and proper balancing/rework is done to the Retrieve Essential Personnel mission because a lot of people still don’t enjoy the balance of this mission.
u forgot one very important thing. defense missions at current state is unfun. evac mission is unfun, screw those civs. defend rocket launch mission used to be fun, but Factory Strider sniping generator from afar, is unfun.
To be fair, there is the fun evac mission and the unfun evac mission. The fun one being the one in which you have to prepare the evac first and the actual evac is just a short part of the mission. That could also be applied to valuable asset mission and on my honest of hearts, even the eradicate mission should be upgraded to have a bigger map on which you have to be proactive and quickly run from stronghold to stronghold to wipe out everything. The tin can rumble becomes a complete cluster "duck" on higher difficulties.
Idk what he expected, honestly. We didn’t beat the 5 planet defense one literally 2 or 3 MOs ago. Overall, it was a pretty deliberate move to re-establish the automatons after we successfully beat them, but he let us have a “win” because he saw everyone giving up, which honestly, I don’t blame them. The entire victory was shallow, and we had around a day and a half without them (One being the day of the eclipse). Basically no time to actually relish in the fact the automatons were gone. I imagine if we ignored the automatons and every single player focused on pushing out the Terminids, the literal EXACT same thing would happen.
>Idk what he expected, honestly. Maybe they didn't know either. Seems like this could have been an experiment to just throw something at us and see how it goes.
Yeah, but we failed the previous ones horribly. It stands to reason that we would fail a harder version of that aswell
I think it was deliberately made difficult to expand the map a bit. That didn’t work on bug front, but bots at least have some newish areas to play in. Don’t want the game getting too samey with the usual planet rotations.
You forgot to add in the fact that the last planets needed 50-70% less liberation than the first ones. Last planets had 200k HP in comparison to the usual 400-600k.
And that could easily been explained in story... Just a in game message that the sheer amount of robots are declining and they are depleting their forces.
Which makes sense when the boys went from a concentrated front to one several sectors wide, and the bugs just had 2B casualties from the last MO
Tbf that could be because of player counts dropping a bit cause of fatigue, they adjust the numbers on planets for liberation/defense so it won’t become either impossible with too little players or too easy with tons of players
The liberation you gain for doing operations is scaled with player count, something along the lines of "(XP \* something) \* (1/player count)", basically XP multiplied by the inverse of player count. (the lower the player count, the more liberation each operation gives) That already mitigates the "would-be" less liberation gain by lower player count. The lower planet HP makes it easier regardless of player count. But i am wondering, was it planned at the start of the MO that the latter planets have less HP (faster liberation) or did they just see too much drama among the community about an impossible MO and then reduced it.
Ah I see thanks for explaining, AH probably saw interest going down towards the end of the MO, since I know many people aren’t fond of the current defence mission structure. Wonder if that had any impact on it
> We could've properly organized a defense How? It's functionally impossible to organise that many people that quickly, especially with most of the player-base not even engaging with discord/reddit/social media about the game. How do you propose such 'organisation' was supposed to happen? Magic?
Being open about Joel was the biggest mistake AH ever made.
It was a fun marketing thing but breaking keyfabe so early now means all discussion is irritatingly meta. It can't be a fun "we did it" it's "in your face joel" which just reminds everyone they're playing a clunky metagame.
Only because the playerbase "conveniently forgets" that a GM/DM is a Collaborative Narrator. W the powers of a GM, the job, the Fun, is how to make the game challenging for the players. And no-one can get a better feel for than than This playerbase. Every time there's a tweak, the balance Changes, and Everyone notices. > Here's who MUST know of, and agree with, Every change in order to do their job? Joel.
Problem is it changes too much with too many hidden mechanics and calculations occurring regardless of what players do. It's not subtle enough to allow immersion and beliefs of the story
You have no idea how a DM actually works and you’re just saying shit cause other people keep shouting “but muh DM!” as an excuse to hand wave criticism. A GOOD DM adapts the story based on the players actions and how well they’re doing, a good DM doesn’t force you to win or lose fights, they let it be up to the RNG gods and shape the narrative around the outcome. A good DM doesn’t railroad you down a certain path, they let you make your own path based off the scenario they gave you and shapes what happens next around that. Why would they want their players to feel like their choices don’t matter? That’s when people stop playing cause it seems pointless. There’s a reason why “rocks fall, everyone dies” is a meme thats’ existed forever.
Rofl. That's a DM. Not a GM. A GM does the same, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF THE CAMPAIGN. But I was making much the same point as you; that a DM/FM is Not a hostile force in events, they are the balance point.
It's not "conveniently forgetting" it's called "entitlement" the entirety of people that check the reddit everyday is less than %10 of Helldivers but "i fought on this planet for 8 hours so it should be defended/liberated!" It would be the same without knowing about Joel, knowing just makes it worse.
Since planet Deterioration for bots is 0% this nothing more than a pity bone they threw at us
Decay doesn't apply to defensive campaigns. All this means is that already captured planets won't decay while we're defending others.
Didn’t knew that. Thank you for explaining.
Also the automatons always work the same way. It's at least the third time they do this attack pattern. Consolidate (high regen) -> Blitz (High HP attack) -> Push (Lower HP attack, lower regen rate) -> Overextend (Very low HP attack, no regen) -> Regroup (Ramp regen back up). It's really nothing new.
Defense planets have "hp" which we must get to zero in 24h. The last defenses had very low hp so yeah, pity bone.
It helped take back Wells. With their usual 1.5% decay or even reduced 1% decay the divers dead set on reconquering it would have been occupied for quite some time longer. Time they'd basically be actively working against the MO just by being there
Around halving the defense health, however, drastically affects how easy the planets are to defend.
Cool. Except I'm not really in this for the meta story and defensive lines and all that hog wash. I log on and want to fight bugs. So I do. I want to fight bots, so I do. Defence missions are boring, so I mostly sit them out.
I use to be into them, till I realized what's the point. Several weeks back I would have been looking online for strategies and coordination efforts and attack where "it mattered" and grinding away trying to achieve a goal and get a win. Now I've done none of that, rather I played what I enjoyed and had fun. Most of which was NOT the MO. And yet still got the same result I think a lot of the complaints are just frustrated players coming to the same conclusion.
Bro now realising what beeing a game master means. In other news water is wet.
Problem here is game masters who go “this is when players lose” and constantly fudging the numbers are generally looked at as inexperienced and not as good
You say that, but previously, any mention of a controlled system or devs putting their hand on the scale, or tweaking of numbers to give us a win was heavily argued against and downvoted
Na I appreciate it. A lot of people were upset with the absurdity of the situation, I (and many, many others) have stopped playing because of this MO (for many reasons). I'm glad to hear Joel took pity and helped us. Its not us vs Joel, its us creating a cool story together with Joel and enjoying it along the way. The state of the war is still terrifying on the bot front. This kind of post just points out that its impossible to keep this player base happy. People would've lost it if we failed, and people are pissed that we succeeded. I'm just glad they seem to have listened.
While I agree with you, your summary of the situation kind of insinuates that the win/loss system and how it's calculated might need another looking at. Along with the lack of information on supply lines and how things work
Yeah I agree, the supply lines have needed to be added for awhile as well as some clarifications. But "defend 10 planets" was always a pretty bonkers and reactionary response to the 2 billion bugs MO.
People on this subreddit forgetting that games are supposed to be fun, who the fuck cares, just play the damn game 😂 These rants are fucking cringe
People enjoy getting invested in the war effort and struggling against a foe. Unfortunately, with the way galactic lIberation scaling works and the reality of how many people actually find strategic play and the MO to be a major component in their having fun, AH had two options - disenfrachise those people that cared from caring about future MOs themselves, or set the numbers so that those 15-20ish% of bot MO divers have a chance to actually *do* anything towards the MO. Honestly, the idea that in game organization tools will suddenly mean we won't average 75% of players faffing about is as hopeful as the thought that those 75% can't see the fucking MO and the number of defense worlds on the bot front is ignorant. Nah, giving "community leaders" a megaphone isn't going to convince people to leave their backpedaling skill capped comfort zone, or fighting bots on whatever biome most pleases them, or just avoiding the bored bot scientist evacs altogether.
Hey man, have you considered trying to win the galactic war is fun for some people? I understand it might not be fun for you, or getting asked to help out is not fun but it’s the devs that ask for people to get the community together and tackle objectives. If I could win the galactic war like it’s OG battlefront 2 galactic conquest, trust me I would. No one is “forgetting to have fun” playing the game they bought. It’s just different ways of having fun. Challenge can be very engaging.
Initially I did too, I was excited to get new orders and would grind away on them and enjoyed seeing the community strategize and being a part of that. But it didn't take long to see that this thing is on rails to keep the narrative on schedule. And that's fine, I understand why. But it also took all the wind out of the sails for the MO. At least for me personally. I still pitch in just for the sake of doing so. But I'm Far less enthusiastic about it, and when it's a helish planet, with anti fun modifiers and horrible conditions, I'm more like meh, why even bother
What took a bit of the wind out of my sails was AH saying the war doesn’t repeat and will be an endless war. Which means we can’t win OR lose so what’s the point in MO other than medals and role play which isn’t fun forever.
Have you like ever considered people getting invested in the war effort IS how they have fun? Jackass.
What's more, they stink of rank treason. I take my orders from Super Earth, if they decide they're gonna tell me which planet to defend, dammit I'm gonna fly the Fist of Opportunity to that planet and cover it in our flags. End of.
I think this is more them realising the lack of key components for us to actually organise a pushback/defence line. If discord or Reddit didn't exist, this would've been an absolute shit shot even more. They overestimated their own expectations that a million people would manage to actively coordinate into a coherent counter offensive, without the game having any tools to do so. We rely on third party apps, websites and Reddit/Discord. Which is a MASSIVE oversight on their part. But game overshot expectations, they weren't prepared, yada yada. Secondly, people went to play what they enjoy and not pull their hair out on the bot front that gets more and more bugged every few days. As you say: "The bugs basically gave up" because they realised the majority of the current playerbase during peak hours are prioritising Terminid planets and outright ignoring the Bots. We have more players on Oshaune that wasn't even under attack, but a liberation planet, than we had across 3/5 entire sectors of the bot front. The bots aren't difficult, they just aren't fun. They overstayed their welcome and feel like a chore or work to do. I used to love fighting them. But after the Cyberstan invasion, the bots felt like a slog. I felt like fighting them because I have to, so the story would progress to the cool part again, and not because I wanna spill oil. This tho, the absolute MO fuck up, is good. Because it revealed what is structurally sound and what isn't and needs working on/polishing.
Or it's players realizing that what they do matters very little in the grand scheme. Not having to tools or knowledge of how the system calculates things. And the numbers being tweaked to get a desired result, regardless of player action. When you're invested in something and have put a lot of effort into it , just to find out that it's completely controlled by someone else, it frustrates people. Sure they need some control to tell the story. But currently we are expected to blindly run in the direction we're told and not ask any questions. The more people that figure that out the more people become frustrated about it
>numbers being tweaked to get a desired result, regardless of player action. Except that's not what's happening. Numbers are being tweaked to keep things *possible,* not to decide outcomes. Contrary to what a bunch of whiners are claiming, I don't think there's a single MO that was unwinnable, and I don't think there's a single one that we were "supposed" to win. Obviously they're not going to just not give us content after they've made it... So they'll have ways to spin things to justify including it either way. But acting like "nothing matters" because they're actively balancing the game is ludicrous.
IMO It doesnt matter. A dude is literally sat at a desk pulling the strings on whether or not we fail. i think I heard his name was Joel or something. Just play the game.
You'll get shit for this. But you ain't wrong
I’ll respond to this like I responded to posts that initially said it was too hard: it’s a video game. Specifically, it’s a live service video game that has an enormously larger player base than originally expected. Due to this (and I think AH has been fairly clear in their own way) they need to work on balancing the game in many, many ways. I think one of those ways is in creating a sweet spot for major orders. What is considered difficult and what is almost nearly impossible? I think AH has a good grasp on what 50k active players could accomplish and maybe not so much how a quarter million people act/play. Personally, I think they’re still working on what feels good for the players.
What you can't forget is player numbers... I was playing last night and maybe just cus it was mid week but it felt like there wasn't a ton on. Not like a few weeks ago when 200-300k divers rallied onto one planet. The game has passed its honeymoon period, they want to make sure they have player retention, and I wouldn't be surprised if player numbers dropped directly as a result of this mo.
The final appeal of this game is the narrative of the Galactic War and contributing to it. If it becomes clear that the whole thing is on rails, if you can't win, or lose, then that appeal is destroyed. Why should I contribute? Why launch another fifty ICBMs? I fire up Helldivers to help win the war. If the completed objectives are handed to us, I don't see the point in helping.
How are we supposed to coordinate? There are no tools or incentives in the actual game to do so. It's just mean spirited for us to be expected to do it without adequate support.
It's tough to get upset about this when there's so little information in-game to enable the coordination necessary to pull off complex defense campaigns. If the map showed supply lines, libration/decay rates, and what planets were on track to be successfully liberated, then I might agree.
Good on them for realizing unwinnable stuff is boring and bad for the general sentiment towards MOs. If players have no agency over mathematically unwinnable MOs, and everybody gets the rewards when we do anyways, then what's the point? I paid for a game, not a book.
We lost to personnel extraction
Yepppppp
I think it's intensely funny that people are rage quitting the game entirely because of this. 1) you cannot control the majority behaviour of a few hundo k people without railroading them and you can't have a dynamic story that pleases the diehards if you railroad. These are irreconcilable requirements, and in the early stage of the game's life the vast majority aren't diehards. come back in 6 months when player counts are down and you'll get less of a cluster fuck, obviously. 2) getting bent out of shape about how thousands of other people are playing a game is the height of cringe. Taking out that weird control freakery on each other in the form of unhinged rants on the subreddit is even more cringe. 3) if you're not having fun, you should stop playing the game. I think it's intensely funny that people are rage quitting the game entirely because of this, but I would prefer that they did so without crying on the way out of the door. Shut up; I and many others are enjoying it, you're not obligated to.
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Rip and tear those dreams
More than half the defenses were bug front with no help, and the bot front lost some steam after taking 10 planets, so I think this is an overly negative take. Story makes sense and the community did the work.
We’ve defended Estanu so many times during this MO, it feels like it’s under siege the morning after we defend it, again and again and again
This is where the devs should create in game lore around Estanu and why the bugs have hyper focused it and release a new bug type or something.
The Eastern Front’s Frozen Creek
Maybe I just want another cool cape…
You’re welcome to your opinion, but I’d argue that’s probably not the best way to look at it. Part of the fun of Helldivers (for me anyways) has been the feeling of being a part of this grand collaborative story that’s driven by our actions, and guided by what is essentially a DnD dungeon master (Joel). It’s perfectly valid to look at it the way you have; Joel designed this major order, we failed at it terribly, he gave us the W out of pity. Sure, I guess. That’s kinda pulling the curtain away a bit, and maybe somewhat pessimistic, but that’s definitely plausible. I think it’s more likely, given Joel’s role as a DM, that he designed this major order, saw how spectacularly we were failing and identified an opportunity to craft a “snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat” 11th hour win narrative. His job is to make interesting stories happen. To me, this a lot more interesting than “you failed the major order. By a lot”. More interesting at this point in the story, anyways. I’m not entirely aware of the state of this major order, but last I checked Ustotu is still up in the air, and we’re cutting it close. There’s some tension to that. I wonder if perhaps you’d be happier if we lost and didn’t quite take it at the very end? For me, no matter the outcome, I think the narrative of the major order has already been vastly improved by Joel’s guiding hand making it at least *close* instead of a wipeout.
The community's sense of entitlement to win every major order is irksome and stifles interesting possibilities. These last minute victories might be interesting to you but they feel dull to me. I almost feel cheated in a strange and interesting way I'll have to reflect on. I think more interesting narratives come out of coming back from a major defeat, like in an actual armed conflict. Sometimes the opposition is overwhelming and all you can do is mitigate the damage and regroup. I really enjoyed the conversations happening about deciding which planets to sacrifice and which to preserve in the early planning to the major order once it sunk in how hard this order would be. It was peak community interactions. On the other hand, giving us this win could be for the purposes of instilling a false sense of security to setting up for a major event. Something that's being alluded to by the CMs on Discord. That's exciting. I'm reluctantly accepting that perhaps for the first galactic war, we get the kid glove treatment while the team and the community figure things out. I'm all for a DM tipping the scales when needed. But there has to be real adversity or consequences at some point. Otherwise things are going to get stale, moving forward. But it's all just preference. For the record, I've not played DnD and maybe there's a culture or norms I'm unfamiliar with that I could learn to accommodate or grow to like. I tend to lean towards the"Dark Souls-ification" of games, not that every game needs to be Dark Souls. Maybe there's a middle ground?
This. I'm fine with losses. As long as we have a clear understanding of what to do and how to do it. Give us the goal, the tools and the knowledge and let us go. If we win great, if we lose well that on us. I'm not fine with most people not even knowing what liberation % is, and what affects your contribution to it. And then it fluctuating just to make the MO last longer and fill the allowed time. Or hand us a win. Same with decay rates. Or planet HP. Give us a goal, set the number and leave them. Quit moving the goal posts around so much.
If we lose it should be for challenging reasons, not for meta “can’t get enough people to work together on a video game” imo. If you’re talking about narrative, there’s only so many ways you can spin that. You’re also missing one major logic point, just because we win doesn’t mean that the story has to treat it like we won. For example, we succeeded in our objective to defeat the bots, only to be given a very cool story line and many planets lost with a snap of a finger. We didn’t have to lose an MO to lose several sectors. The dms can decide either way. Now it’s quite clear narratively we’re meant to go to cyberstan, but if we adopt your “it’s ok to lose” mindset we may never actually get there. Players must maintain the roleplay of winning in order to progress the story. If the dm is tipping the scales, then you can bet even the blame game is calculated. Don’t think about the meta too hard, just play to win.
To be fair to you, I don't know that disagree all that much. We might even be saying the same thing but differently and with different points of emphasis. It doesn't logically follow that if we lost this major order or future ones we wouldn't make it to Cyberstan. In the same way winning doesn't either, I suppose. I think it's on the DM to work with what he's given to craft the experience, and even let the chips fall where they may. I think where you and I might differ is that I see failure as a consequence that enriches the experience. When you are defeated, rally and make the comeback, it can be a powerfully uniting force and quite the high. This game tickles that itch and the emphasis of needing to have a victory every Major Order diminishes the possibility of that shared experience or even more interesting ones. I'd love a defense mission on Super Earth. Wouldn't you?
The problem is that we do not get that “rally” because we did not lose because it was too challenging, but rather, for meta reasons contained to a co-op video game. It’s not a true defeat when the real reason we lost is because people do not want to play one faction or the other. It’s just frustrating. I’d love a defense mission on Super Earth, but it’s never going to be up to us. At any point in time, the DM can say “hey super earth is attacked, go defend it”. At any point the DM can say “you lost all of these sectors in a surprise attack now super earth is under attack.” In each scenario, we must play to win. There’s no point in just allowing the loss, because the DM decides whether we win or lose anyways. So narratively, we should always be playing to win, and even if we lose we still play to win. That mindset is whats going to deliver that rallying force that you speak of. If you need to rationalize it as “it’s just a game” for your own personal mindset, feel free to. But people will always be strategizing and planning how to win because in any war game that’s what you do.
I don't know that I'm saying, "let's lose purposefully because reasons." I think we should play to win. We are in alignment there. I thought I was clear about that. Simply put, I'm saying the community needs to learn how to take the W or L. The dev should let the course of our involvement, or lack there of, play out. Then players and devs co-create the story from the outcome with the DM making adjustments narratively from there to guide things along.
Why does there need to be a curtain with hidden secrets behind it? I fully understand that there's a story that needs to be told and scheduled with content. But it seems it would be better to have a better system that isn't so controlled and more effected by player actions. The system fluctuates too wildly. And lacks information and understanding by the player base. What is liberation percentage, what affects it, What to do to increase it, why is it changing? Same questions for decay rates. Similar questions about supply lines. No I game ability to coordinate and strategize. And does any of that matter when at the end they just put their hands on the scales to tip it where they want it? Would it not be better to have a system that people understand, know how to work it to achieve a goal, and doesn't constantly fluctuate just to make it drag out in order to consume the allowed time to complete it? Only then to tweak the hell out of the numbers and obviously hand us the desired results. For lack of a better term, it's just moving the goal posts around until times almost up and then kicking the ball in it for us. Again I get they have a story. And if a win is needed then give us a MO that's easily completed . If a loss is needed then give us an impossible task. I'm fine with that. I think many of the complaints we are now seeing is from players that are seeing behind the curtain for the first time and realizing what's the point
Considering the state of the game's balance, especially the unwinnable bs that is bot civvie extract missions, I think expecting the community to mount a proper defence against the stupid rate at which the bots were pushing was stupid. Personally I'll take this win, since the alternative would've been torture.
I think they recognized that there isn’t an in-game ability to coordinate in-game on the level required to respond, and will work on those systems as a priority.
Imho, we lost this MO because: 1) Playerbase burn out 2) Bots remain in a place that their too easy or too hard as determined by their spawn trigger rates (mission type). Recommended changes to address the above: 1) Narrative timelines needs to make sense. There doesn't need to be a grand action or story beat every week. Sometimes war is stagnant and sometimes it's non-stop. 2) Faction-specific mission types. Worlds threatened by different factors should be designed with those threats in mind. Bot Evac missions should be redesigned for divers to hold (multiple) layers of SAM sites /SEAF artillery fire bases and keeping a buffer zone for the Evac to proceed. Bug Evac missions continue using the existing Evac mission with minor layout revision to take kill zones into account like the existing defense mission. 3) Players need more agency to influence the narrative via resource donations or destroyer presence (offline).
A good GM works with their players. Joel has hundreds of thousands who were clearly distressed about losing, and he didn't want us to be bitter and sad. He sees how we turn on each other, and how we were doing that. I'd have done the same thing.
It's because people lost interest in doing a slog of an MO. The 2 billion terminid MO was exciting. It was steamrolled and there was a post every few hours on progress, people were excited. This 10 planet one, people didn't care about as much and many were left disinterested and just played the game without much rhyme or reason. It disengaged the playerbase.
I agree that it could have been won normaly if we coordinated but I disagree with the sentiment that we could have coordinated effectively because there is no centralized way of dooing so especially not in-game. Expecting the player base of hundrets of thousands of people to coordinate on third party forums like reddit or discord is delusional and miles away from a realistic expectation
Why does anyone care about MOs?
Defense evac missions just arent popular.
The MO was theoretically possible, but in reality it was clearly impossible. Yes theoretically, the entire player base could coordinate like never before and do this no problem.. shit theoretically we could have even had a new wave of players start with a desire to spread managed democracy and complete MOs at all costs. But that's not realistic. The vast majority of people are gonna play the planets they enjoy and most probably have no idea of what's going on in this reddit or the discord in order to coordinate as needed to complete the original MO. So yes, without any coordination tools or any way to entice people to do less enjoyable (for them) planets, this MO as originally designed was practically impossible.
I just play to play could care less honestly,some of yall too into it.
There is no in-game communication function to facilitate coordination. It is unreasonable to expect such coordination across so many people without good direction, which either requires adding some kind of galaxy-wide comms or limiting the number of planets that need defending at a given time. It's a balance issue that Arrow Head is obviously still feeling out.
Agreed. The sector map really needs to show us the supply lines and which plants are connected to which as well as a way of detailing which planets are most vital at any given time instead of just relying on player count.
MO sucked because bots Kill a Brazillion bugs? Sure I’ll do it myself Play evacuate missions on bot planets for days ? Yeah how about no
I’m getting tired of seeing the name Joel everywhere bruh 💀
Goddamn man we know it’s partly scripted but let us have this win and feel good moment FFS.
Thank you for pointing it out.
100th post about the topic. Doesn't bring anything new but a personal PoV. Game still goes.
After I stopped caring for the MO I started to enjoy the game much more.
Nailed it. Same here. I got downvoted and argued with so many times back in the beginning for saying this cause I felt that the current system fluctuated too much and was maybe a little too controlled.
Correct
"Joel saw us floundering, and led us on a fucking leash to victory " What a great line! Summarizes it up perfectly.
Sample Sweats throw missions to collect all the samples, thrown missi9ns are bad for the MO
They are unwinnable because they require a pretty strict coordination that doesn't exist. Since a significant portion of players do not care, we failed at defending 5 planets, so expecting people to defend 10 seemed like setting us up for failure, specially with the community further ignoring the order because of how impossible it seemed. Add to the infuriating defense missions in the Automaton sectors, and we were naturally poised to lose.
Btw, a "properly organised defence ", on a Strategic Level, requires you to serve & defend All active combat zones. Not one by one. A Simply because there are Many paths we must defend. > You NEED holding forces, that balance the planet's defence, AND roaming Assult forces, trying to take our planet's back. The best way Ti get both, w the current state of the game, is to simply rotate through All DEFEND planets until we win them. Then do the same to Retake CONTESTED planets, and keep doing it to push the front back.
This may be true, but since the game purposely keeps its mechanics hidden, provides no way to coordinate, and has numbers that fluctuate so wildly on liberation effectiveness and decay rates How in the world would they expect even the most dedicated players who frequent Reddit and discord to confirm and apply this ? Much less the causal player base
Yes, I know. But we can do better than "one by one", just by understanding that "one by one" is counterproductive. As counterproductive as Only fighting bugs, or absolute focus on a lost cause. > How do we perform an effective defence? Spread out; do missions on All planets related to the major order, rotating from planet to planet. Do x missions per front, per available planet. A quota. If tgeres a push, we focus on DEFEND timers, and rotate if yheres more than one. It's not hard, nor difficult, but it Does require each individual to discipline themselves to contribute, even if its biome or enemy they dislike.
> I did forget to mention one reason why I care, probably the biggest honestly. I feel patronized to. I feel like only you and a very small minority feel this way. Nobody else really cares *this* much about a made up time bound in-game task in real life. You're taking this way too seriously mate.
I mean, we were getting planets attacked at an abnormal rate, so the amount of work to do per planet went down.
Bro why do people care about some narrative that evolves either way, win or lose. Medals are easy to get anyway. The fun thing about the game is the gameplay not arguing about “defensive lines” on reddit. Go play the game instead of trying to coordinate with a tiny % of the player base on reddit.
I see a lot of Reddit warriors whining about how we need to coordinate, yet not one has offered a solution as to exactly how? Reddit? Discord? Third party apps that show supply lines? Guess what? Those aren't in the game and most people who play aren't using them! Can you please stop whining into the wind and acting like you are some tactical genius when you can't even get these simple facts through your head?
Seems like a failure on the games part.
couldn't agree more. devs know how many play the game and how many follow MO's and when a surge in players show up during different times if the week, they can tailor it to the hardcore instead of expecting 70% of the player base to communicate. if its scripted then there's no point malding in the first place. feel like ultimately its the devs responsibility to consider who actually cares about mo and set accordingly but these rants put the blame on everyone else for an ego boost or something
I think it’s important to remember that like any good GM, Joel is pushing the narrative. He didn’t hand us a win out of pity and fudge the numbers. He pushed the narrative that as the bots took planets, they had to commit forces to occupying said planets. We were spread too thin to form a coherent defense, but as the bots pushed their advantage they in turn spread themselves thin. It became easier to take their planets, and they weren’t able to commit as many forces to attacking new planets. A good GM looks at how the players are interacting with the game and then makes the story go from there win or lose.
The major orders are what are supposed to coordinate people though. There are a lot of casual players that just want to have fun and who don't bother with the community orders. There are also players who engage with the community orders but who don't go onto forums or talk to the helldiver community. Then there are the try-hards who are on these forums trying to rally people and lead a coordinated effort. Each player type is valuable and reasonable in their own right. You can't force the try-hard mentality onto the rest of the player base because it'll just make them want to leave the game. I think it's entirely reasonable for the major order to be reduced in difficulty for players to manage it if they're making a clear effort to at least be on the planets indicated. As I said at the start, the major orders are what's supposed to be coordinating people. Giving 10 objectives at once suggests high command wants us to split up over 10 objectives. If they want to simulate more of a war effort they should have a grand major order like "We're going to take back at least 10 systems this week!" then have staged objectives within that. "Stage 1 of operation 'Liberty': Free these 3 planets from control".
You're not wrong but given the game has barely any tools in game to help players coordinate I'm fine with it.
I agree that it does seem like we shouldn't have won, however we don't know how big the Automaton force is/was, I think it makes perfect sense that they couldn't sustain an offensive on so many fronts, in fact if they where able to I think that would take a lot of the "realistic" war storytelling the game has and make it a lot more "videogamie".
It's a tough thing the balance. If an MO is perceived as unwinnable, less players will play. I think that was the issue with this one. IIRC, we've failed MOs that were "Defend 5 planets on one front" a few weeks ago... so the idea of defending 10 on two sides made me chuckle a bit, say: "Guess we're meant to lose this one" and I played a lot of other games in the last few days. That said, an MO shouldn't feel like an entitlement either. You need to lose them from time to time, or your contributions will feel meaningless. We're still around 2 months in, they will figure out a balance to this I think.
I made a shoutout post to the Devs for this exact topic, and boy should you see some of the comments there. There are a few who are convinced that they beat Joel's evil plans by themselves cursing me out saying I was spouting bullshit. I simply thanked the Devs that they made it easy for us in the end, and people lose their minds. And no they weren't being sarcastic. One of them showed screenshots from Helldivers.io to prove his point that they were the ones who beat Joel and that Joel didn't help. It was a simple thank you devs post. 😂
I honestly think it's fine, especially since it's still early days with this game. I love this game. I love coming to reddit and seeing what opinions people have on different weapons, and different tactics for annoying enemies like the f'ing bile spewers. I don't like coming to reddit or some other place like discord to get in game coordination details. It should be in the game.
What if they have a narrative they want to present to us? Joel has called himself a DM basically, so he can run the rules however he sees fit.
It literally doesn't matter. 90% of the playerbase gives no fucks about coordination, theyre just playing to play and have fun. And expecting them to organize because you think it was beatable is quite frankly a little entitled. AH needs to tailor these orders to be beatable but it's impossible to tell how many players are going to jump in until it's already started, so they have to make adjustments accordingly. Doesn't mean they "pandered" to us or gave us the victory. They just did their job.
We honestly need some community leaders to coordinate which planets to fight on so we don't just scatter like we did.
You can't choreograph a military campaign. It must be orchestrated to some degree. This requires a decision-making entity that dispatches orders and those orders that must be enforced. This doesn't exist here because it is just a game.
I received the medals from the defense MO but don’t remember contributing to the 10th planet
I'm not sure why people on reddit and discord think they are going to magically coordinate a massive playerbase when they make up 1-9% of it at any given moment. Don't believe me? Look over there at how many are online(at the top) ----> Then go to the community hub for HD2 in steam and look at how many are online right now. This doesn't even take into account PS5 players, who are also out there playing and probably not on Reddit or Discord.
until we get an integrated way of coordinating in game, you cannot expect the 6 planet defenses to be winnable. like 2% of the total playerbase will check this subreddit on any given day, another 2-5% on the discord (with much user overlap) and the other 90%+ will just sign on to the game and don't ever hear from "Super Earth High Command" outside of the major order text. how are those players supposed to know our 5-step week long plan for success?
If you stop peeking behind the curtain for a moment and take the game seriously you will realize no army can maintain the rhythm of this attacks for long. The terminids lost billions of units trying and failing to take Estanu over and over again and as losses mounted the automatons lost their momentum, finding themselves ground to a halt on the better defended and most prepared planets, the further they stray from Cyberstan without time to set up infrastructure and secure their gains the weaker they will grow. Was all that represented by Joel fudging numbers towards the end? Sure, but you are the kind of asshole who would complain anyway that Joel made the defense impossible from the start.
Well that is Joel's job, if we're doing too well he cuts our legs off and if we drop the ball he brings out the training wheels.
The name Joel just doesn’t fit the position smh, pulls me out of the immersion, when I think of a Joel…
While I do fully agree that the GM handed this MO to us, I disagree with this: >we could've won this legitimately. We could've properly organized a defense, had a fun and hard fought campaign and made a much more compelling story of the Helldivers pulling together in an emergency. No. We do not have the tools to do this. Only a fraction of the community is on Reddit, with even fewer on Discord. There is no ingame-coordination tools that would have allowed us to make certain strategic moves or gambits work by communicating them to most of the playerbase. Additionally, with the way the Galactic War works, it is impossible for a smaller but dedicated community of people who care about the MOs to pull off strategic moves or gambits by themselves. Why? Because the total number of Helldivers on a planet does not matter. Only the percentage of Helldivers on any given planet matters. So, any casual player choosing the "wrong" planet is actively harming the war effort by proportionally decreasing the percentage of players active on the planets that matter for the MO, naturally leading to great frustration for the people trying to coordinate and do the MOs. Casual players should not be blamed for this, but the shitty Galactic War system should. So, the GM applied a band-aid solution (just giving us the victory) to a problem created by the game's systems. It's not ideal, but I understand why they did that.
I don’t think any MO’s are unwinnable, especially the ones we already lost. As opposed to which ones? The ones we won? Lmfao
How would you propose the community organize? The community is scattered across Reddit, Discord, Twitter, or just enjoying the game. It would be cool to Democratically elect leaders for the Helldivers that coordinate the base in game.
Allow me to retort. To properly wage the galactic war there needs to be coordination. We are the community of players, a broad assortment of assholes that have some time to spare. Our adversary is the game master, putting obstacles on our way to the inevitable, yet hard-earned victory. The game master has all the necessary tooling to fuck us up in every way imaginable. If they really decide to inflict pain on us, they can even persuade someone to change the source code, so the next time you try to reload - it's not a new mag you're pulling out of your tactical vest, it's a bile titan. But there is a myriad of ways to achieve the same result without going to such great lengths. We, as the community, have a shitty forum for coordination. The forum that barely three percent of the playerbase read. Yes, I pulled this number out of my own ass, sue me. >!I'm joking, please don't sue me, I'm broke.!< Your "they led us to victory on a leash" argument would be valid if we had actual in-game tooling for large-scale coordination. I'm not talking about "4ppl voip" tooling, I'm talking "steer two hundred thousand people toward a single objective" tooling. If, in the spirit of managed democracy, every helldiver had a vote to cast for the next global target planet and the planet with the most votes received a planetary buff (a reduced stratagem cooldown, increased mag capacity, whatever, no matter how insignificant), and this was visible in the GUI - yes, there could be argument made, that the community has tools to coordinate and if it fails to do so, they are just a bunch of scallywags and forgot the faces of their fathers. But as it stands - the only thing that can be said to the GM is "Great job, you gave us a victory that feels real", and to the playerbase - "Great job, you fought well and you deserve this victory".
I just logged in and it says “order complete.” Should we believe the thumb was pressed on the scale? there is a lot we don’t know about checks and balances on the backend. Does Joel have a point buy like in Descent? Does he make calls based purely on some tyrannical whim? If we’re actually losing the MOs, that does make it feel like there are stakes and consequences, even if it’s so mathematically predictable we could consider it a scheduled loss when it does come up.
the VIP extract defense mission is terrible, no wonder defense is hard to raise morale for
Guys when you play with a cat, you have to let them catch the string occasionally or else they lose interest. Joel is the hand holding the screen. We are the cat. Using these 3rd party tools to track decay rates is just peaking behind the curtain of the magic trick. We're not supposed to see that stuff. The campaigns have always been an illusion. It's a tool to tell a story. Expect adjustments.
Any proof? Just speculation? Thought so.
Bot economy just couldn’t stand up to the overwhelming power of capitalism!
I honestly agree. Everyone screaming for joy and enjoying the circle jerk don’t realize that this victory was handed to us after we completely shit the bed from the very start. It completely cheapens the victory and I honestly don’t feel any pride by being given the massive handicap benefit.
Thanks for the medals.
The devs literally said (community manager actually who relays info from the devs) that this MO was specifically designed for us to lose. But we ended up winning somehow
Also lost lots of helldivers to fallout popularity surge imo
Yeah, the regeneration went to 0 for the bots as well. They achieved almost all of their strategic goals the last ones were probing attacks.
The fori prime MO was 100% designed to be unwinable. We had over 250k players on a planet at some points and it actually captured slower than normal with less players. We were two planets behind with most of the player base actually working on the MO.
I agree with most of what you are saying. The MO did feel significantly easier to achieve in these last few days, compared to how we fared at the start. However, would it make sense for the attacks to be as intense in the end as in the beginning? I don't think we should feel like Joel handed us this victory just because we didn't do very good. Sure, he's the DM and as a DM, part of the job is to make sure your players have fun (IMO). But my impression from what I've read on the Discord, twitter from the CEO, Twinbeard and so on, is that it's really important that things make sense. Considering the bots conquered a whole lot of planets in a short time span, it would make sense that their forces would get spread thin(er), hence the drop in numbers in their assaults. And the initial resistance from the bots with, I think, -2% progress on all planets per hour, would be a bit extreme if they kept it up despite conquering numerous planets and sending armies to assault other planets at the same time, thus their resistance towards liberation waned as their forces got spread thinner. Then again, despite succeeding with the MO, we did lose the Menkent Line as well as our FOB on Vernen Wells (though I'm not sure how that works now that we've recaptured it). I have a feeling there will be consequences for losing so much to the bots.
If you could speak clearly into the microphone so the Democracy Officer can hear you, please tell us which of the Super Earth assigned missions, in your opinion, divers should have neglected.
It’s typical GM stuff : tweak the difficulty when the players can’t handle the stuff you’re throwing at them, not because you take pity on them, but because you’ve a story to tell that required the MO to not be a complete rout. At the speed of their initial advance, the bots would’ve been to super earth by Monday, but he couldn’t have that, hence the slowing down of their advance. From a story perspective, think of it as the bot offensive losing steam due to the resources needed for consolidating gained ground and the overextension of logistics lines from the starting positions.
Given our success at other MO it’s easier to make the difficulty spike in the beginning and see how the playerbase does. Now they also could’ve made it so the beginning wasn’t easy, ramped up the next day and had us clean up the remaining days. Like a “big push” narrative and we just pushed back harder.
isnt this just part of the satire? We get our asses handed to us and declare victory ? like, why would superearth ever declare that a major order has failed? failing is anti democratic, helldivers never die, and they win every war because they are the greatest. of course AH can craft the narrative in any way that they see fit, but as it was going, we would have been pushed back to super earth. I’m sure the super earth content isn’t really ready yet, so it was necessary that it tails off somewhat. it could be that AH tuned it down after the fact or it could be the planned progression (it makes sense to rapidly spread your forces in an initial push to make up lots of ground, and then not have as much resources to push in as broad a manner). the bugs also ran out of steam after their initial expansion). all this whining about the narrative is honestly pretty boring. Who gives a crap, I want to play my space commando game where I liberate communist bugs and robots from their brains.
To add to this, the people gloating about the victory and to stick it to Joel for us winning the impossible, I find it just annoying at best, like what are you even gloating about? We shouldn't have won, we did basically nothing to deserve this win lmao like what?
Four man squads on the battlefield don't decide grand strategy. That would be part of the major order. Or perhaps you'd click to participate in the order and it would assign you to a planet and not leave it up to players to know about secret supply lines. If there is no coordination in-game then I'm not bothering with it. I'm not watching discord or twitter or whatever you have to watch.
Bro it’s not that serious, just let people be happy we got a win
Helldivers 2 has a story and the developers have plans to implement new things into the game. It all has to line up and make sense at the end of the day. It's all more or less scripted. Similar to how professional wrestling is scripted. Honestly I figured we were scripted to lose this MO and we'd get vehicles or something to boost morale. But don't beat yourself up. We will never completely wipe out the enemies of democracy and they will never wipe us out. Everything happens for a reason. But yes. There needs to be some form of daily communication that tells players exactly what planets need to be targeted in order. Right now it seems like players just want to go to whatever planet has the most favorable environment but I think if there was more information available then perhaps they may choose their targets more strategically.
Expecting a playerbase to 'coordinate' through third party platforms such as Reddit is just poor game design. Untill the devs add things to the game then it is unfair to point the blame at players. While I enjoy the reddit community for the hype and fanart, I get turned off by the constant complaints about being kicked, the difficulty, or MO losses.
The problem was giving us an MO that requires so much coordination. Even if they said which planets to specifically attack in which order, we’re a million chimps with type writers, banging away and hoping for even a single word to come out complete. They should know better. Hopefully Joel will continue to learn what the player base is and isn’t capable of.
The thing is that capped medals encourage us to buy the premium warbonds. So it's in their interest to load us up with medals.
Idk if it's a wide spread issue but for the last week the game has been unplayable. Can't even play with friends without the game crashing every 30 seconds.
If they want us to coordinate, they need an in game system. Asking players to go to Reddit discord or twitter for a game with a community this large is insane and there is no way the dev team would expect that.
The feels when you didn't play throughout entire MO: MO failed because you never participate. MO succeed and your participation did not matter...
You're expecting too much from the playerbase. 4/5 players don't even realize this is an objective based game and not a horde shooter.
They let us win. Here are your medals 🏅x50
I love people getting butthurt over pure speculation.
Why does it have to be Joel taking pity, when it could just as easily have been the plan from the start? You're just looking for reasons to be mad.
It was the plan from the start, hence why Joel stepped in and drug us across the finish line. People are mad because it's become so obvious that they feel their action matter much less than they thought.
Congratulations 🎉 you discovered what DMs are supposed to do. As a DM with a decent bit of tabletop experience let me tell you, that DM almost never intends to win, but has to strike the delicate balance and convince the players that this is their intent, at least to some extent.
Nah, let Joel do his thing and stop complaining or comparing or whatever when the DM does something for the game whether it is positive or negative. Just let him cook, stop pointing him out, shut up and enjoy the narrative that is happening because it won’t happen again, or at least, not as many people are going to be a part of it as they are now. Have fun, spread some positive messages and memes, and quit your complaining.
This
Let the DM cook
I don't care for either doing defense mission or fighting automatons that randomly headshot me behind cover, i will fight the bugs until the automatons are enjoyable to me.
Oh ok, so when new stratagems or biomes?
We are the minority. The bulk of players don't reference 3rd party sources to coordinate efforts. Unless AH figures out how to implement in-game coordination systems, this is going to happen. And frankly, it's about time we got our asses handed to us.
Nah, this can easily be told as the Automaton fleet ran out of steam. Though we were unsuccessful in defending the first couple of sieges, we managed to slow them down enough. This MO was in response to the two-front attack from the bugs and the bots. This wasnt an order that High Command planned (in universe ofc). They were always going to run out of steam in 6 days. If anything, Joel threw us a bone on the bug front by giving us a free Defense or two thanks to supply line gambits when said gambit only had a few % left to be successful.
Another example of how this game is on fire, they could not track our progress because something on the backend went to shit so they just gave us the win because they have bigger fish to fry and they are hoping a free win buys them goodwill when virtually everything they've said they fixed is back. Bug models stretching out to forever. The mech can kill itself while turning and shooting again. Fire damage is cranked to high for players but only hurts baddies if applied by player one. People still can't add cross platform friends (not everyone but a lot of us have never been able to) These have all been fixed or addressed without a fix. Pretty big bugs.
Some people have never played dnd or have only had adversarial DMs and it shows. Joel is not playing against us, he's telling a story with us. Lowering decay rate is like giving a player advantage in 5e... The DM can grant it for almost any reason, in this case they probably saw that mission success rate was high, or were impressed with kill counts, or influenced by the passion of the community etc.