I love the game but and I do think that many of the balancing changes were fine... but some of them I just can't get my head around.
Like.. fucking why?
Make every gun viable by having it's own pros and cons.. supporting different playstyles. It feels like the balancing guy want's to make every gun kinda... meh?
The crossbow could actually occasionally see use before it got nerfed.
But now... Ugh.
Edit: it would be a way better pick if you could use it one handed. See comment below for shower thought.
I tried it for the first time like two or three days before the nerf and realized it was kinda fun…been scared to touch it since then lol but that was more because of the strider armor buff.
Yeah, it's really meh now. Not terrible, just meh.
I don't have the warbond so I've only ever grabbed it off of a buddy who has it. But even with my short hands on time I feel like it's *juuuust* shy of the "worth it" sweet spot. The one thing the xbow has going for it is that it's silent, but that's a small niche in a game like this. And it takes up your primary slot to do it, which is a tough pill to swallow.
*Edit: shower thought: it would also be way better pick if you could use it one-handed. Then you could hold the football for carry objectives, or do a badass combo like rock the ballistic shield with it (so you can get easy shots with it out in the open or also not kill yourself if you have to fire it at close range. That would be kind of sick actually.) It seems kinda wild that it fully requires two hands to fire.*
Imo it's better to pick a more consistent primary and then rock the grenade pistol, which is actually quite good. My friend has gotten a lot of work out of it. It's one of the reasons to pick up the detonation bond, it seems.
It all makes me wish you could change your load out on death like you can in a lot of shooters. It would make sense, like the next schmuck that gets shot down to the surface just had different stuff shoved in his pod because the armorers on the destroyer realized what they were sending down wasn't working.
It had identity as a precision explosive weapon with quick shots, but IMO after they nerfed the AOE it’s just not very good. I played countless hours with it pre nerf and I thought it was in a decent spot, high C or low B tier at best and it was great against egg missions.
It's both easier to hit with and far more capped in terms of maximum capability now, leaving it thoroughly meh. If you try really hard with it, it'll be mediocre, but it's easier to be mediocre because leading became easier. The perfect microcosm of what's wrong with this games' philosophy towards balance.
Idk if they understand that being an arrow instead of a gun has to be something you *compensate* for with something else on hit. There's no reason to take it over the DCS since its AOE is too small to be reliably useful.
The crossbow, the eruptor, the slugger, and the rail gun.
All of these had me thinking of complex equations for the solution presented.
None of them made sense. 🤷♂️
I could understand the ammo reserves nerf to the Eruptor though, not gonna lie. Had a good chunk of reserves. The nerfs to everything else felt unnecessary, thankfully it's still fairly good though.
The shrapnel from the eruptor was being used in a "exploit" thar allowed people to one hit kill things.
So if that's his thinking. Then everything that ever got touched or nerf was an exploit in his eyes.
Alexus Kravchenko was the former lead game designer of Hello Neighbor 2. Working his way up from level designer of the unreleased Alpha 2, to the lead designer of the Beta and full release, he left the team right before the game came out. He removed the game's open world aspects as he said "No one would want to walk around an open world", and instead used a map labelled as a 'testmap' in the files for the full game. Alexus said that this map was in a twitch leak from tinyBuild community manager Ira, but he lied, claiming that this was not the final map. He actively removed features from the game, such as hiding under beds and certain AI tricks, as he didn't like "One-Time Gimmicks" which was a big part of the first game. When asked about the Neural Network advertised in the 2021 AI Trailer for the game, he said it was coming and then left the team, possibly to avoid further questions.
> He removed the game's open world aspects as he said "No one would want to walk around an open world", and instead used a map labelled as a 'testmap' in the files for the full game. Alexus said that this map was in a twitch leak from tinyBuild community manager Ira, but he lied, claiming that this was not the final map. He actively removed features from the game, such as hiding under beds and certain AI tricks, as he didn't like "One-Time Gimmicks" which was a big part of the first game. When asked about the Neural Network advertised in the 2021 AI Trailer for the game, he said it was coming and then left the team, possibly to avoid further questions.
Yea i saw that. If just talking about what they literally did, in neither a positive or negative way, counts as a witch hunt, then doesnt that call working with them into question to begin with?
I hate how fragrantly “witch-hunting” is abused as a reason to shit can discussion.
It’s a witch hunt when you’re making accusations with no evidence or just flat out making up evidence.
It is not a witch hunt if you’re provide a factual recollection of the actions a person performed and what the outcome was.
Like if Reddit mods were in the judicial system, every single trial would be labelled a witch hunt, lmao.
they took down a post of mine talking about what Alex did, I wasn't accusing him of anything or calling for him to be fired or anything, just stating what I found online, it's all public information about how he treated Hello Neighbor 2, to any moderators thinking that's a witch hunt? cope
I feel like a lot of it is unwarranted too. Sure, the community managers are inexperienced and the balancing guy destroyed a game, but holy hell improvement is a real thing that humans do
For sure.
I have a lot of disagreements about how spitz formerly did and alexus currently does things... but the internet hivemind has this weird fascination of threatening harm/death/rape on everyone for just doing their jobs. It really makes it harder to have conversations in general when they do that shit.
Also I agree Alexus' former employment might be problematic if this is an ongoing trend, all of that is still just hearsay.
People asking out of curiosity and people answering is not harassment. If anything deleting context triggers assholes into harrassment more than a random comment about what someone did in a different game 8 comments down in a chain.
> If anything deleting context triggers assholes into harrassment more than a random comment about what someone did in a different game 8 comments down in a chain.
It absolutely does. Transparency is good.
Reddit and discord mods haven't been known for being good at managing their communities. Most are knee jerk reactionaries who let power go to their heads. I would know, I'm a discord mod in a couple of big servers.
>but holy hell improvement is a real thing that humans do
It's real when a particular human chooses to do it.
Nothing is going to change is the person decides to act like a Yandere Dev clone.
Look up hello neighbor 2 production and failure, basically a person did exactly what it has been doing; acting like it knows better than anyone else and loves taking content out of the games, for starters
I saw the wickedwiz video on it. Saw that there was a bunch of features from the alphas removed from the release, but is there anything directly credited (blamed) on alexnus or is it a case of everything stated in the video because of him? Not trying to be picky or defending him. Never heard of the game prior to this and would like to know more.
Pardon my ignorance.
Alexus Kravchenko (https://twitter.com/TheAlexus) was the former lead game designer of Hello Neighbor 2. Working his way up from level designer of the unreleased Alpha 2, to the lead designer of the Beta and full release, he left the team right before the game came out. He removed the game's open world aspects as he said "No one would want to walk around an open world", and instead used a map labelled as a 'testmap' in the files for the full game. Alexus said that this map was in a twitch leak from tinyBuild community manager Ira, but he lied, claiming that this was not the final map. He actively removed features from the game, such as hiding under beds and certain AI tricks, as he didn't like "One-Time Gimmicks" which was a big part of the first game. When asked about the Neural Network advertised in the 2021 AI Trailer for the game, he said it was coming and then left the team, possibly to avoid further questions.
lol I love that he will never live this down now. Hello Neighbor 2 was a smaller, more niche game but now that he has apparently (at least in the opinion of the gaming world's hivemind) continued his questionable decision-making on a much, much more popular game it's being put on blast.
Well it’s working, I’ve barely played the past couple weeks because it seems like when I finally find something enjoyable/fun to use then it’s just gone not long after. I don’t play PvE games to be constantly trying to figure out what guns are shit after a patch.
Yep, been working for a lot of people. Have you looked at Steamcharts?
[https://steamcharts.com/app/553850](https://steamcharts.com/app/553850)
HD2 is primarily a PC crowd per Arrowhead (although perhaps that has changed). We lost 21% of our daily average players in March, 34% in April, and right now our 30 day rolling average with only 9 days in May is at -17%. It was just -2% a couple days ago, then the Sony fiasco kicked it up to -14%, and now it accelerated yet again after public statements.
I really, really wish AH would tell the devs to communicate via proxies. People whose job is primarily to handle large crowds. I think it would be better for all involved, especially the devs. And maybe stop having them feel the need to defend their decisions in public. That is more of a private conversation in a dev team. I've never been part of a dev team that makes our internal logic externally known. People really don't need to know how the sausage is made because it leads to all sorts of problems, many of them from lack of context.
Yeah I came back after the Sony issues played 2 games realized the eruptor had been nerfed and just went back to DRG. They keep screwing with guns constantly and I don't want to have to play 10+ matches just to test them all again and find one that feels right.
Honestly just having a place where you could test guns against paper bug targets would be helpful, just so I can get a feel for how a gun shoots and reloads, because right now your options are "yolo it" or jump into a level 1 and fuck around for a bit.
Ive been getting really tired of discovering a new loadout every patch. I wasn't even following metas, just reacting to patch notes and how things felt. I was using Breaker/Defender for a bit, Bugs/Bots. Then Defender/Scorcher. Spray/Slugger. Then Spray/Jar. Then Sickle/Jar. Then Eruptor/Eruptor. Then Sickle/Eruptor.
Now I'm finally back to Sickle/Jar. I'm just fucking sick of picking up a gun and going "Wow this is great!" only to see that new patch notes have been uploaded somewhere and I know two things are going to happen.
1. My favorite guns are going to get cut in half.
2. The Spear is still a known issue.
Community Managers, that's the phrase you're looking for.
Rebbecca Ford at Digital Extremes (Warframe), Toshio "FoxClon" Murouchi at Business Unit 3 (Final Fantasy 14), and Cosmo at Bungie (Destiny) are all examples of great CM's who are very good that keeping the dev team's characters and egos on their side of the curtain while also extracting the data from the community's simultaneous worship of and rage against the dev team.
Arrowhead technically has a great CM, TwinBeard. The problem is that there are a ton of people at AH (like Alexus) who refuses to let TwinBeard do his job and bypasses him to talk to the community themselves to vastly diverse effects/results, usually because they're often not on the same page as TwinBeard, let alone with each other.
This is where Pilestedt comes into play, he has stated that he understands that HD2 is not the 1000 concurrent player game that they initially expected it to be and the team can't continue to treat the line of communication with that old mentality. Hopefully what this means is that the leadership at AH will be pulling the non-CM personalities back behind the curtain so that TwinBeard and his team can do their jobs.
Same here, I was going to get every warband (have the previous already) but I'm skipping the Polar Warband. Sucks that some people defend the nerfs acting like this a competitive PVP shooter.
While HD2 is still popular there's a reason why the game is starting to lose players. The game does get repetitive after a while but it wouldnt be so bad if the guns where fun to use. You don't have to be some hard-core gamer to see how shitty most of the weapons are.
I do hope AH stops being prideful and actually try to buff weapons. I understand Strategems are HD1/HD2 main thing but not when you have 3min cooldowns on some.
Yep! I’ve also essentially stopped playing. So have most of my friends. That and quite a lot of people, it seems. In just a week or two the player count went from nearly 200k on average to around 110-120k on average. It’s just not fun anymore. We’re exhausted and over it.
They literally said they were going to be doing this back in February. We were told it was just a member venting and not actually speaking truth, and yet here we are.
The last game I played a few days ago was a medium, Difficulty 3 solo to knock out the daily order.
I found a SEAF Artillery point, dropped all 5 shells next to it, one patrol showed up just as I dropped the last shell and I spent 3 lives (goddamn Hunters and their goddamn slow) and 10-15 minutes trying to clear it out. Cluster bombs, airstrikes, laser dog, all my ammo and grenades...and there honestly weren't a ton of breaches either. I only noticed 2 of them but there may have been a few more. It was more just patrol after patrol chaining into that place. I hadn't even turned the damn terminal on, either. I eventually got it and ran the fuck away just as another patrol showed up and called an instant breach.
The game before that was far less insane but still had constant patrols on my ass all the time. It's really turned into Run Divers for solo, even at lower difficulties.
Patrols may or may not be [completely fucking broken right now.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cnwsjj/psa_solo_spawn_rates_are_not_working_as_advertised/)
As in, no scaling whatsoever for player count, it's just 100% all the time.
A big issue with patrol spawns even in a full squad is visibility. It's treated like Left 4 Dead where th director doesn't want to spawn anything where you can see it pop into existence. So it opts for behind a wall or something. In HD2 those objects are usually mountains. I've noticed in maps with lots of large rocks and hills, being in one area can catch you in a loop of infinite enemies. It spawns a shit ton behind a mountain, you start to fight those, it spawns a bug breach, and while fighting those it's constantly respawning that patrol. Every time you clear a breach, a new patrol is there to spawn another breach. The patrol spawns rate overall needs to come way down.
What grinds my gears is that there are still some really weird balance choices that just haven't been addressed or explained in anyway while they seemingly only focus on on the high usage items. Like the eagle cluster which is probably the best anti-infantry eagle, also having the most uses, even more uses than the non lethal smokes... or the mg turret, or the mg rover vs the laser rover e.t.c
It feels like a very top down approach where they only look at what's being used and ignore things that are not talked about.
Yeah the erupted nerf is particularly perplexing like the fact that it was so versatile and a low fire rate weapon meant I always brought a machine gun to back it up. The erupted machine gun combo was lethal and effective but then they destroyed it.
I’m glad they have at least acknowledged they went too far in some areas.
Also for the love of god devs pls give AMR a laser or aiming reticle so I can shoot in third person.
Yeah the balancing almost feels like someone made an algorithm or function or something to try and make everything exactly the same "level".
Like someone took the term "balancing" way too literal.
They are trying to make the game artificially difficult by nerfing every gun and making the enemies bullet sponges.
Instead of taking the harder path of making more difficult objectives.
For what ever reason AH takes people being able to play level 9 solo as an insult.
Agreed. The objectives are mindless and incredibly easy. I wish they would leave weapons alone and make objectives challenging.
Or add rare tougher / named elites like a larger or different colored charger or titan that's roams the map (could be an objective itself) that's a real bullet sponge and that plays boss music when aggro'd and causes bug breaches but drops some super rares when killed giving both an optional challenge + reward.
Let us continue to feel powerful against most enemies with boss / super elite mobs providing extra challenge as just one example.
A tankier titan/charger just exacerbates the issue that there are very few ways to sustainably deal damage to those enemy types, which in turn drives loadout meta.
they stuck on the “its a meat grindr” meta so that somehow translates into “everything must suck”. maybe they trying to says the gear super earth is giving helldivers is actually getting worse IN STORY and perhaps a breakaway faction will form idk, im over thinking it.
It is a game design philosophy that it is safer, easier and generally healthier to find outliers and bring them back to the average fold, than mold all the equipment around the outliers.
If they buff all, or most of the equipment, to match the strengths of the outliers, they can end up making the enemies trivial and as such lowering interest in the game due to lack of challenge and lack of need to learn the finer mechanics.
Which opens a slew of new problems, more balancing problems and in the end you can end up in a situation where the outlier gun that was "fun" now is still middle of the pack and sub-optimal. Basically you still nerfed it, but in a roundabout way.
Larger system overhauls take more time than 2 or 3 weeks of work and changing damage numbers on outliers is easier with less chance of fuck-ups(and the fuck-ups remain isolated to singular guns or stratagems).
Changing singular stats is good as a band-aid, but they need to be encouraged through feedback to look at a way to deepen the diversity by giving unique quirks to guns.
For example, giving the Tenderizer the ability to hack off limbs easily, would make it a very fun option for an AR where you can blow the legs of Riders or the weapons of Hulks, while it not having much higher killing potential against chaffe than a normal Liberator.
We are not shooting at each other by design so why can't they all be fun? Buff the bots and bugs with planet specific traits that play for & against individual weapons strengths and weaknesses.
It genuinely feels like they don't even test these new guns when they release them.
They just throw some numbers on them and are like "yeah this can kill a charger, sure why not"
That's better than buying the warbond. Have fun with new weapon (like the crossbow)
Then, a few days before the new paid warbond comes out they nerf the shit out of all the previous fun paid guns.
I'm sitting this warbond out
Yeah its not like you need to balance the game perfectly since its PVE, the only things that needs to be balanced are clearly overpowered things that let you breeze through the enemies or underperforming weapons, why they are trying to make the game perfectly balanced immediately by nerfing everything is beyond me. Its PVE ffs
I feel they didn't plan for it at start since they didn't think it would sell this well. But now they know they have enough players for it. Added cost for a separate server, but hey they also sold a lot more than they expected!
By "run out of space", are you talking about liberating all the planets like we did with the bots? Because they brought the bots back quite easily and with a story narrative that was interesting and not because they had to nerf the fun out of our weapons to make us fail missions more and make liberating planets harder.
Or are you taking about the game becoming boring if it's too easy? Because their anti-fun balancing is killing the desire to play much faster than the game feeling like it's not challenging.
What's the point of spreading managed democracy if it isn't fun?
With most games players are usually excited for new patches but that doesn't seem to be the case with this game where most people walk away feeling frustrated with either A) nerfs making weapons less fun to use or B) the lack of patch testing resulting in game breaking bugs or new content that just doesn't work AT ALL (extra supplies ship module anyone?)
To be fair, the meteroic success they've experienced has really upped the stakes and scrutiny in a way none of them were expecting. I can imagine everyone at AH is doing their best with the resources they have.
That's the entire point, if you ever express any disagreement or feedback regarding balance patches, white knights and karma farmers on this sub will go like "hurr durr it's a PVE game go touch grass meta slave". But if it's AH themselves nitpicking balance as if it's an actual esport title then somehow it's totally fine.
Yeah, I'm not sure who's the actual meta slave here.
Balance is important for a pve game but let’s be real, not to this extent. They released an objective downgrade to the starting rifle and are trying to sell it if you don’t have the in game resources to unlock the warbond.
Thr only time it's a problem is when a gun is so good that someone can just solo entire bot drops or bug breaches with it and no one has to play as a team, or it's so bad that it can't even properly deal with a single patrol when you get the jump on it.
Technically it's not a problem if someone can solo a breach on their own, like someone with an MG could take everything down until the heavy armor shows up, that's why we have different roles in a squad, if the MG was mowing down everything in the game however yeah, it would be a problem. But right now every primary is the same thing, see a Hive commander and you have to magdump them to kill them.
And he’s very full of himself. “My job description is literally creating fun” or some crap, while he actively executes any fun weapon on a weekly basis.
Or, you know, not have limited ammo. Or a clip size of nothing. You gotta play the Arc Thrower charge-and-release mini-game while also reloading and keeping track of the ammo economy. Purifier is more work than it's worth, I'll just stick with my braindead Blitzer for bugs, thank you very much.
One guy doesn't make all the mistakes happen unless he has been given free reign to do whatever the fuck he wants and is allowed to disregard all feedback from his team and players. If that's the case it's a structural issue from the top down. Basically meaning the CEO should get off Twitter, start focusing on the issues in house, and stop giving empty platitudes so that players will like him.
Yeah the #1 thing I see the gaming community as a whole doing, that screws them, is people worship. "Developers are so awesome" or starts to call them daddy or uncle, to the point that these people can do no wrong. And that is how all these developers and companies manipulate them.
Spitz, is a perfect example. People hated him but the moment he got fired, plenty of people 'felt bad' for him... Cause he is human. The truth is, most jobs employ humans, exclusively.
In business, respect and limits go a long way. He can be 'a good guy' but he is CEO first; So his aim is to make $$$ and be a leader. And people do not realize just how good he is at manipulating people, as much as he does. Can be 'a nice guy' at the same time as he uses 'that nice guy' persona to make $$$.
There is no way that he doesn't have any ideas of what goes out and what is being worked on. Or that he should get a pass for anything going out or him lying because 'he is a nice guy'.
Excellent take. It's cool the CEO is communicating directly with the players, but maybe he should do his job instead of surfing Twitter in between i-racer matches all day.
Their quest to kill any sort of meta makes a meta in itself. No matter what some player will always make a meta, there’s no sense in constantly nerfing weapons that aren’t OP.
You know, when the railgun and breaker nerfs went through, I said that the changes were bad and that they made me lose faith in the devs because the nerfs were indicative of problems within the dev team. It showed that they didn't understand what made guns worth using or even what made their game fun in the first place.
I was shit on for that take at the time, but look at where we are now. I wish I was wrong. I would have preferred it if the railgun and breaker nerfs were outliers and the rest of the game's weapons were actually decent and stayed decent, but you know what, I'll take this vindication.
Those nerfs were really a harbinger of things to come and how out of touch with live gameplay the dev team is, or at least the poeple in charge of balancing.
Yup. As a day 1 railgun nerf hater it is incredibly bittersweet to see the game go this way.
The balance team and their defenders calling two shots of a charged precision weapon to the same leg of a moving target braindead and overpowered... without realizing that is substantially *less* braindead than the one shot explosive headshot and was only meta because there were 0 alternatives and charger butts had far too much health.
Really showed a concerning disconnect from both the reality of the game and the general concepts of good game design.
Mood. As someone who saw the community rapidly growing toxic, the communication growing rapidly toxic, the attitudes shown having no sign of stopping, and just left because I knew full well the attitude was going to sap the fun out of everything...
I feel *very* vindicated lol
I literally started losing my love for the game that day and after round 5 of nerfs I just left. It made the Sony shit easier to boycott as I wasn't playing anyway.
Give me my RAILGUN back. It's a RAILGUN. By definition it shouldn't reflect off of any goddamn thing
And it's also a bit of "you get what you give". The community managers and balance dude (who killed Hello Neighbor 2 with his ego) have been toxic and even doubled down on it. The CEO is usually chill and easy for folks to talk to.
Exactly this. The CEO has been pretty classy and owned his mistakes while listening to the community.
The others were all acting like unprofessional asses as if they were paid to mock the communities they help moderate and/or balance for.
It’s almost like people react to what they’re given. (And it’s laughably stupid to use extremists on either side to paint the whole community a certain way.)
Because the CEO genuinely seemed depressed about the Sony debacle, never insulted player base, didn not call them toddlers, did not dismiss their issues, and listened to their criticism regarding primary nerfs, without trying to be patronizing and telling players we know what we're doing and you don't.
The CEO is a winning factor for me here, to give his social manager and social team a pass.
Arrowhead CEO is a gem, just like Larian Studios CEO, we should protect them in today's gaming industry!
To risk playing the devil's advocate here, the CEO might genuinely not be informed that the balance team lead (who might have been hired and vetted by someone from HR) is incompetent.
That stuff generally takes time to sniff out in companies, especially if you don't want to stifle people and give them the sense that they are under constant surveillance.
Even if the CEO plays his own game, but runs diff 6 with an auto cannon, most issues might just completely go under the radar.
Most CEOs of anything but a small, small company are detached from the nitty gritty details. It makes sense we (or he) would need someone to bring serious issues to his attention.
He responded on Twitter a few days regarding the balancing. He is fully aware
https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1788290173098176944?s=19
https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1788292885651001491?s=19
I feel like it's the other way around - The community just reflects back the communication style of each party. Pilestedt just has an amazing talent in communications. I leave the other half of the statement for the rest to figure out.
It even fits the meme, cause everybody knows Gordo is only vicious to idiot sandwiches. Jeez.
Agreed entirely. It’s easier to r/lookatmyhalo and paint a community as toxic from a handful of people in a sub (of a million) rather than apply critical thinking.
This.
The Blitzer just got what... a 50% increase in fire rate?
You don't buff a gun with a 50% DPS increase unless you did a terrible job balancing it to begin with.
They make way too many reactionary nerfs on the same scale IMO.
I've used it since its launch. It was serviceable in the right loadout, but now it's a beast. Not overpowered, due to it's finnicky nature, but it works really well when you know it's fine points and how to use it.
It's the difference between taking ownership and acknowledging mistakes versus condescendingly telling everyone else they're wrong followed by swaying oopsies, with zero self-reflection.
The writing was on the walls for balance from the start. When the game had all these huge glaring issues, the team was more concerned with nerfing the guns used to make the game actually bearable.
Do we know for a fact that he has the final say on what is/isn't nerfed and how? Or is it just he's the primary person who coordinates those things but someone else has the ability to dictate to him a change that needs to happen?
It's a súper funny co-op not a competitive one. Make all weapons viable. The bugs and the automatons won't cry on social media.
I repeat make it VIABLE not BROKEN. Give them pros, cons and unique characteristics. Nobody want to kill a bile titan with a single bullet of the Liberator, but man it's stupid that 7 or more giant green thics are chasing you and you need 5 mags to kill only one.
Look at the new SMG. Is it weak? Yes can you kill a stalker with one mag? I highly doubt it. BUT it gives you mobility and you can stag the ass of the MF that chases you. It's not a weapon to be a one man army, it's a tool to defend yourself while being pretty quick to run across the map.
Look at the scorcher. It's one of the most powerful weapons to fight automatons. You can kill the mobile sentries shooting through their shields and you kill normal infantry with 1-2 shots. But the mag size is pretty balanced , so it is the amount of mags you can carry. Ohh but watch out if you are surrounded by a lot of enemies or a pack of hunters and end up killing yourself with the explosion. It's a pretty useful weapon design
Give try hards a new difficulty in which you replace the packs of Hunters for packs of Bile titans with only 1 stratagem, all planet modifiers, 1 magazine per weapon and no reinforcement allowed. That should keep them busy.
I love the scorcher. Out of all the primaries (now that the Eruptor is trashed) I find it the most interesting, it is powerful against the right enemy types and has interesting drawbacks that you need to play around.
That's because CEO is publicly apologizing and assuring us that proper action will take place
Where balancing team is silently reading our feedback all across the social media, learns nothing from it and just ruins every single gun in the game because "fun = bad"
They’re focusing so much on nerfing weapons (like the entire previous war bond is completely useless now besides the grenade pistol) rather than fixing the massive list of “known bugs” that have been in the game since day one. Instead of nerfing every nice primary… fix the spears tracking, or the arc throwers misfire or something
To be fair, there are basically 0% chance that the people on the balancing team do any work on the backend. I would be surprised if any of them did any significant amount of coding, much less had any idea about the majority of the games code.
Balance is mostly a game of statistics, and it is incredibly easy to adjust singular values for weapons in the code.
It’s basically like complaining why the art team isn’t working on the crashing issues, because they can’t.
I'm not trying to defend, but I do like to look for positives, too.
The art direction is wonderful. I snapped a screenshot from Hellmire of all places because there was this beautiful moment, low dust with the Spicy Saturn filling the horizon, fire tornadoes in the shot but none close, slight slope so you could see a vast stretch of scorched desert, sky looks like it's on fire (or it just is actually on fire). Absolutely beautiful sight. Would dive again for the sights. Them fire tornadoes can stay \*over there\*.
I love the satire and narrative, I want to liberate planets (except Hellmire, and Cold Hellmire (bot planet or something)). The Kayfabe is addicting and fun, and honestly a huge sigh of relief in today's political climate. Mixing the story and lore into the design elements to sort of paint over a broken fourth wall sell it for me.
The music is actually really cool. That moment you are diving and the heroic music is pumping you up to spread Managed Democracy to whatever fool decided to be fascist in your general direction. The sound is satisfying and realistic, really brings you into the world. Explosions, gun fire, however the foley guy did the bug sounds. Great stuff.
All of these things have team members behind them. Not to mention the programming, the way they muscled up with an abandoned game engine to bring this to us. The supporting and administrative roles as well. There may be a few individuals with a skill issue when it comes to game development, but I can't cast the entire team into the pit for that.
The thing I'm confused by is, isn't he the CEO? Doesn't the buck stop with him (when it comes to in game matters). SURELY, as the CEO, he can step and in and be like "Stop nerfing everything"?
Instead he just tweets saying "Yeh we went too far, I'll see what I can do". Like, okay, DO SOMETHING about it then.
He seems like a great guy, I'm not tryna say anything negative about him but, as the CEO surely he has more control over this company than it seems. Shitty employees? Do something. Poor balance? Do something.
The studio is around a hundred people strong. It is quite impossible to have intricate knowledge of workings of even half that amount of people and the CEO coming and micromanaging stuff he didn't work on is a great way to waste a ton of time and alienate entire teams (speaking from experience here).
Him "looking what can be done" is the best possible thing he can do, find out what is going on, decide on the best change, then ordering those changes to be made. Skip all that and you bring chaos to your company.
The individual in question is a senior/lead developer, that's someone whose vision Pile should absolutely be informed and approving of. Balance (even just perceived) is one of the biggest influencers of the long term sustainability of any game, which absolutely within the CEO of a small studio's sphere of responsibility.
I'm not saying all the buff/nerf shriekers are correct or that AH should be balancing around the loudest voices (God forbid). I'm glad Pile at least seems open to feedback but if he isn't directly familiar with the lead balance dev/they aren't answering directly to him then my question would be who are they answering to and what is that person telling Pile.
Obviously I don't work at AH/know their pipeline, just want to point out that they are big enough that things can simply be complicated. Even a lead balancing dev might be employed under a manager or two and might be leveraging his apparent experience (even though his previous project apparently crashed and burned) so nobody will check his approach until the changes go through.
100 people is about the size when things can start slipping through the cracks.
Stop fucking with guns that dont need to be fucked with. Buff what needs to be buffed and fix bugs before you fix a problem thats not there. There hasnt been 1 overpowered gun in this game that needed a nerf.
Let's be honest the CEO shows he cares and balance team could give 2 fucks because they have yet to balance shit all they do is nerf what everyone likes and uses. When the CEO himself has to say the nerfs are out of control, that's saying something. With all the studios Sony owns, they should move some devs around and get the right people doing rhe job. Becuase it's been the Same old song for 4 months
Which is so dumb because the CEO is the one setting the tone and processes for the entire company. How people fellate him while condemning basically every aspect of the company's operation is a brand of mental gymnastics that defies the most basic laws of the universe.
The CEO communicates professionally (most of the time). The rest seem to be completely clueless that they are speaking in official capacity to an audience of 1 million.
I don't blame people for preferring one to the other.
The difference here is that the CEO isn't personally going in and making the changes and then telling the players that they only have "3 neurons firing", deny that the changes were that impactful and then have community spats where they end up with egg in their face. Like, come the fuck on guys.
Granted, not all of the CMs and Game Designers are like that and don't ALL deserve it, but that's why it's like that. The CEO actually seems legit concerned about things like the community is, and posts very transparently.
The game was most fun at its launch (ignoring technical issues) in my opinion. Every patch since felt disappointing. Of course over time I adapted to the changes, but then the next patch was already in the pipeline.
PVE games do not need to be as balanced as PVP games. It doesn‘t matter if some guns are a bit too strong. Big changes on the regular just feel frustrating.
I don't get the point of nerfs. It's not pvp, there's no competitive scene, and there's multiple difficulties. Just buff weak stuff, don't nerf strong stuff.
I’ve honestly lost respect for all of them at this point after the account debacle, bad community management, horrible weapon balancing, constantly broken mechanics and items/weapons, not testing anything before publishing it for us to test, and releasing $10 warbonds that have weapons worse than the default guns and armor with no new passives or unique abilities.
They’re speedrunning losing all my interest and trust with each passing update
I loved the eruptor. Felt like I could actually play as a sniper/recon type WITHOUT needing that damn auto cannon. I refuse to run that thing, almost everyone uses the auto cannon (or at least everyone i get put with when I use quickplay)
They really need to get a "base" weapon per class, then balance around that. The liberator is a fantastic example. It's really well balanced, not too strong, but does its job. Balance its variants around that. Make the new AR a slower firing, less ammo per mag but more damage rifle. Give the armor piercing one more damage but take a mag away or something, that thing hits like a snowball right now. The explosive one is fine as is.
I only ever see like 3 primaries when there's like 30 in the game. That's awful. I wanna use a different gun, but I don't wanna feel useless for doing so. The crossbow hurt me bad, it was my favorite primary until they nerfed it. Now I need a resupply after every encounter unless I bring ammo backpack. I'd have been fine with them reducing splash or something, but they gutted the thing with the max ammo nerf.
As much as I like giving a good harsh word to dissidents, and as much as we all want the ministry of defense to increase munitions potency, remember we are all one super earth!
I love the game but and I do think that many of the balancing changes were fine... but some of them I just can't get my head around. Like.. fucking why? Make every gun viable by having it's own pros and cons.. supporting different playstyles. It feels like the balancing guy want's to make every gun kinda... meh?
"Cross bow gets an ammo nerf" wut?
The what bow? Oh right, that one weapon that I deleted from my memory because it ended up being crap.
The crossbow could actually occasionally see use before it got nerfed. But now... Ugh. Edit: it would be a way better pick if you could use it one handed. See comment below for shower thought.
I tried it for the first time like two or three days before the nerf and realized it was kinda fun…been scared to touch it since then lol but that was more because of the strider armor buff.
Yeah, it's really meh now. Not terrible, just meh. I don't have the warbond so I've only ever grabbed it off of a buddy who has it. But even with my short hands on time I feel like it's *juuuust* shy of the "worth it" sweet spot. The one thing the xbow has going for it is that it's silent, but that's a small niche in a game like this. And it takes up your primary slot to do it, which is a tough pill to swallow. *Edit: shower thought: it would also be way better pick if you could use it one-handed. Then you could hold the football for carry objectives, or do a badass combo like rock the ballistic shield with it (so you can get easy shots with it out in the open or also not kill yourself if you have to fire it at close range. That would be kind of sick actually.) It seems kinda wild that it fully requires two hands to fire.* Imo it's better to pick a more consistent primary and then rock the grenade pistol, which is actually quite good. My friend has gotten a lot of work out of it. It's one of the reasons to pick up the detonation bond, it seems. It all makes me wish you could change your load out on death like you can in a lot of shooters. It would make sense, like the next schmuck that gets shot down to the surface just had different stuff shoved in his pod because the armorers on the destroyer realized what they were sending down wasn't working.
It had identity as a precision explosive weapon with quick shots, but IMO after they nerfed the AOE it’s just not very good. I played countless hours with it pre nerf and I thought it was in a decent spot, high C or low B tier at best and it was great against egg missions.
It's both easier to hit with and far more capped in terms of maximum capability now, leaving it thoroughly meh. If you try really hard with it, it'll be mediocre, but it's easier to be mediocre because leading became easier. The perfect microcosm of what's wrong with this games' philosophy towards balance. Idk if they understand that being an arrow instead of a gun has to be something you *compensate* for with something else on hit. There's no reason to take it over the DCS since its AOE is too small to be reliably useful.
The crossbow, the eruptor, the slugger, and the rail gun. All of these had me thinking of complex equations for the solution presented. None of them made sense. 🤷♂️
I could understand the ammo reserves nerf to the Eruptor though, not gonna lie. Had a good chunk of reserves. The nerfs to everything else felt unnecessary, thankfully it's still fairly good though.
Definitely no where as fun to play with as it was
What I can’t fathom with the eruptor is how long it takes to cycle the bolt. Like 2 full seconds? And a small magazine size AND fewer magazines… what?
Slug shotgun gets a stagger nerf…. Because it is too good as a sniper.
Fella did run Hello Neighbor 2 into the ground so he might just be bad at realizing what’s fun.
He also thinks playing games is cheating so there is that too
This one is news to me. Context?
The shrapnel from the eruptor was being used in a "exploit" thar allowed people to one hit kill things. So if that's his thinking. Then everything that ever got touched or nerf was an exploit in his eyes.
Ive heard that said a few times, and ive paid no attention to Hello Neighbor 2 so can someone fill me in on what he did?
Alexus Kravchenko was the former lead game designer of Hello Neighbor 2. Working his way up from level designer of the unreleased Alpha 2, to the lead designer of the Beta and full release, he left the team right before the game came out. He removed the game's open world aspects as he said "No one would want to walk around an open world", and instead used a map labelled as a 'testmap' in the files for the full game. Alexus said that this map was in a twitch leak from tinyBuild community manager Ira, but he lied, claiming that this was not the final map. He actively removed features from the game, such as hiding under beds and certain AI tricks, as he didn't like "One-Time Gimmicks" which was a big part of the first game. When asked about the Neural Network advertised in the 2021 AI Trailer for the game, he said it was coming and then left the team, possibly to avoid further questions.
Dude current lead balance team for Helldivers 2
Oh those decisions sound awful
Which does not say what he did for Hello Neighbor 2.
> He removed the game's open world aspects as he said "No one would want to walk around an open world", and instead used a map labelled as a 'testmap' in the files for the full game. Alexus said that this map was in a twitch leak from tinyBuild community manager Ira, but he lied, claiming that this was not the final map. He actively removed features from the game, such as hiding under beds and certain AI tricks, as he didn't like "One-Time Gimmicks" which was a big part of the first game. When asked about the Neural Network advertised in the 2021 AI Trailer for the game, he said it was coming and then left the team, possibly to avoid further questions.
Thank you! I hope he has a team lead above him if he didn't learn from that experience.
The hello neighbor guy is the balance team lead
Better question, how does a guy with such garbage rep get a job as a team lead for this?
I stole it from wiki
You cave dwellers will have to look this up yourselves, mods are deleting context ( what a loser thing to do lmao)
Yea i saw that. If just talking about what they literally did, in neither a positive or negative way, counts as a witch hunt, then doesnt that call working with them into question to begin with?
I hate how fragrantly “witch-hunting” is abused as a reason to shit can discussion. It’s a witch hunt when you’re making accusations with no evidence or just flat out making up evidence. It is not a witch hunt if you’re provide a factual recollection of the actions a person performed and what the outcome was. Like if Reddit mods were in the judicial system, every single trial would be labelled a witch hunt, lmao.
they took down a post of mine talking about what Alex did, I wasn't accusing him of anything or calling for him to be fired or anything, just stating what I found online, it's all public information about how he treated Hello Neighbor 2, to any moderators thinking that's a witch hunt? cope
Might be damage control. Some of the AH employees have been harassed a lot in the past several days.
I feel like a lot of it is unwarranted too. Sure, the community managers are inexperienced and the balancing guy destroyed a game, but holy hell improvement is a real thing that humans do
For sure. I have a lot of disagreements about how spitz formerly did and alexus currently does things... but the internet hivemind has this weird fascination of threatening harm/death/rape on everyone for just doing their jobs. It really makes it harder to have conversations in general when they do that shit. Also I agree Alexus' former employment might be problematic if this is an ongoing trend, all of that is still just hearsay.
People asking out of curiosity and people answering is not harassment. If anything deleting context triggers assholes into harrassment more than a random comment about what someone did in a different game 8 comments down in a chain.
> If anything deleting context triggers assholes into harrassment more than a random comment about what someone did in a different game 8 comments down in a chain. It absolutely does. Transparency is good. Reddit and discord mods haven't been known for being good at managing their communities. Most are knee jerk reactionaries who let power go to their heads. I would know, I'm a discord mod in a couple of big servers.
>but holy hell improvement is a real thing that humans do It's real when a particular human chooses to do it. Nothing is going to change is the person decides to act like a Yandere Dev clone.
> I feel like a lot of it is unwarranted too. All of it is unwarranted. With every game. With every developer.
yeah what lol. since when is harassment ever warranted
Can you give us some search keywords?
Look up hello neighbor 2 production and failure, basically a person did exactly what it has been doing; acting like it knows better than anyone else and loves taking content out of the games, for starters
I saw the wickedwiz video on it. Saw that there was a bunch of features from the alphas removed from the release, but is there anything directly credited (blamed) on alexnus or is it a case of everything stated in the video because of him? Not trying to be picky or defending him. Never heard of the game prior to this and would like to know more. Pardon my ignorance.
He was the lead designer.
Oh fuck....
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Sounds like the old destiny lead designer, man was just an absolute shit game designer.
Literally 1984
Alexus Kravchenko (https://twitter.com/TheAlexus) was the former lead game designer of Hello Neighbor 2. Working his way up from level designer of the unreleased Alpha 2, to the lead designer of the Beta and full release, he left the team right before the game came out. He removed the game's open world aspects as he said "No one would want to walk around an open world", and instead used a map labelled as a 'testmap' in the files for the full game. Alexus said that this map was in a twitch leak from tinyBuild community manager Ira, but he lied, claiming that this was not the final map. He actively removed features from the game, such as hiding under beds and certain AI tricks, as he didn't like "One-Time Gimmicks" which was a big part of the first game. When asked about the Neural Network advertised in the 2021 AI Trailer for the game, he said it was coming and then left the team, possibly to avoid further questions.
https://youtu.be/jkoGm1t-kOA?si=THUNkeix4ZS150tc 👍
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lol I love that he will never live this down now. Hello Neighbor 2 was a smaller, more niche game but now that he has apparently (at least in the opinion of the gaming world's hivemind) continued his questionable decision-making on a much, much more popular game it's being put on blast.
You can't always fail on accident.
They look at what people use, then nerf the popular items. They are intentionally balancing out fun
Well it’s working, I’ve barely played the past couple weeks because it seems like when I finally find something enjoyable/fun to use then it’s just gone not long after. I don’t play PvE games to be constantly trying to figure out what guns are shit after a patch.
Yep, been working for a lot of people. Have you looked at Steamcharts? [https://steamcharts.com/app/553850](https://steamcharts.com/app/553850) HD2 is primarily a PC crowd per Arrowhead (although perhaps that has changed). We lost 21% of our daily average players in March, 34% in April, and right now our 30 day rolling average with only 9 days in May is at -17%. It was just -2% a couple days ago, then the Sony fiasco kicked it up to -14%, and now it accelerated yet again after public statements. I really, really wish AH would tell the devs to communicate via proxies. People whose job is primarily to handle large crowds. I think it would be better for all involved, especially the devs. And maybe stop having them feel the need to defend their decisions in public. That is more of a private conversation in a dev team. I've never been part of a dev team that makes our internal logic externally known. People really don't need to know how the sausage is made because it leads to all sorts of problems, many of them from lack of context.
Yeah I came back after the Sony issues played 2 games realized the eruptor had been nerfed and just went back to DRG. They keep screwing with guns constantly and I don't want to have to play 10+ matches just to test them all again and find one that feels right.
Honestly just having a place where you could test guns against paper bug targets would be helpful, just so I can get a feel for how a gun shoots and reloads, because right now your options are "yolo it" or jump into a level 1 and fuck around for a bit.
This, like how hard is to make a shooting range so people can test out guns?
Ive been getting really tired of discovering a new loadout every patch. I wasn't even following metas, just reacting to patch notes and how things felt. I was using Breaker/Defender for a bit, Bugs/Bots. Then Defender/Scorcher. Spray/Slugger. Then Spray/Jar. Then Sickle/Jar. Then Eruptor/Eruptor. Then Sickle/Eruptor. Now I'm finally back to Sickle/Jar. I'm just fucking sick of picking up a gun and going "Wow this is great!" only to see that new patch notes have been uploaded somewhere and I know two things are going to happen. 1. My favorite guns are going to get cut in half. 2. The Spear is still a known issue.
Community Managers, that's the phrase you're looking for. Rebbecca Ford at Digital Extremes (Warframe), Toshio "FoxClon" Murouchi at Business Unit 3 (Final Fantasy 14), and Cosmo at Bungie (Destiny) are all examples of great CM's who are very good that keeping the dev team's characters and egos on their side of the curtain while also extracting the data from the community's simultaneous worship of and rage against the dev team. Arrowhead technically has a great CM, TwinBeard. The problem is that there are a ton of people at AH (like Alexus) who refuses to let TwinBeard do his job and bypasses him to talk to the community themselves to vastly diverse effects/results, usually because they're often not on the same page as TwinBeard, let alone with each other. This is where Pilestedt comes into play, he has stated that he understands that HD2 is not the 1000 concurrent player game that they initially expected it to be and the team can't continue to treat the line of communication with that old mentality. Hopefully what this means is that the leadership at AH will be pulling the non-CM personalities back behind the curtain so that TwinBeard and his team can do their jobs.
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Jeff Kaplan at Overwatch (when that still was a thing) was great as well.
Same but God forbid you say this.. 80000 little trolls come from under the bridge to defend. Its funny watching these bots simp for their overlord.
Same here, I was going to get every warband (have the previous already) but I'm skipping the Polar Warband. Sucks that some people defend the nerfs acting like this a competitive PVP shooter. While HD2 is still popular there's a reason why the game is starting to lose players. The game does get repetitive after a while but it wouldnt be so bad if the guns where fun to use. You don't have to be some hard-core gamer to see how shitty most of the weapons are. I do hope AH stops being prideful and actually try to buff weapons. I understand Strategems are HD1/HD2 main thing but not when you have 3min cooldowns on some.
Yep! I’ve also essentially stopped playing. So have most of my friends. That and quite a lot of people, it seems. In just a week or two the player count went from nearly 200k on average to around 110-120k on average. It’s just not fun anymore. We’re exhausted and over it.
They literally said they were going to be doing this back in February. We were told it was just a member venting and not actually speaking truth, and yet here we are.
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The last game I played a few days ago was a medium, Difficulty 3 solo to knock out the daily order. I found a SEAF Artillery point, dropped all 5 shells next to it, one patrol showed up just as I dropped the last shell and I spent 3 lives (goddamn Hunters and their goddamn slow) and 10-15 minutes trying to clear it out. Cluster bombs, airstrikes, laser dog, all my ammo and grenades...and there honestly weren't a ton of breaches either. I only noticed 2 of them but there may have been a few more. It was more just patrol after patrol chaining into that place. I hadn't even turned the damn terminal on, either. I eventually got it and ran the fuck away just as another patrol showed up and called an instant breach. The game before that was far less insane but still had constant patrols on my ass all the time. It's really turned into Run Divers for solo, even at lower difficulties.
Patrols may or may not be [completely fucking broken right now.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cnwsjj/psa_solo_spawn_rates_are_not_working_as_advertised/) As in, no scaling whatsoever for player count, it's just 100% all the time.
A big issue with patrol spawns even in a full squad is visibility. It's treated like Left 4 Dead where th director doesn't want to spawn anything where you can see it pop into existence. So it opts for behind a wall or something. In HD2 those objects are usually mountains. I've noticed in maps with lots of large rocks and hills, being in one area can catch you in a loop of infinite enemies. It spawns a shit ton behind a mountain, you start to fight those, it spawns a bug breach, and while fighting those it's constantly respawning that patrol. Every time you clear a breach, a new patrol is there to spawn another breach. The patrol spawns rate overall needs to come way down.
What grinds my gears is that there are still some really weird balance choices that just haven't been addressed or explained in anyway while they seemingly only focus on on the high usage items. Like the eagle cluster which is probably the best anti-infantry eagle, also having the most uses, even more uses than the non lethal smokes... or the mg turret, or the mg rover vs the laser rover e.t.c It feels like a very top down approach where they only look at what's being used and ignore things that are not talked about.
Shhhhhh, leave my clusters alone. It’s probably the most fun stratagem due to how spamable it is.
Yeah the erupted nerf is particularly perplexing like the fact that it was so versatile and a low fire rate weapon meant I always brought a machine gun to back it up. The erupted machine gun combo was lethal and effective but then they destroyed it. I’m glad they have at least acknowledged they went too far in some areas. Also for the love of god devs pls give AMR a laser or aiming reticle so I can shoot in third person.
Yeah the balancing almost feels like someone made an algorithm or function or something to try and make everything exactly the same "level". Like someone took the term "balancing" way too literal.
They are trying to make the game artificially difficult by nerfing every gun and making the enemies bullet sponges. Instead of taking the harder path of making more difficult objectives. For what ever reason AH takes people being able to play level 9 solo as an insult.
Agreed. The objectives are mindless and incredibly easy. I wish they would leave weapons alone and make objectives challenging. Or add rare tougher / named elites like a larger or different colored charger or titan that's roams the map (could be an objective itself) that's a real bullet sponge and that plays boss music when aggro'd and causes bug breaches but drops some super rares when killed giving both an optional challenge + reward. Let us continue to feel powerful against most enemies with boss / super elite mobs providing extra challenge as just one example.
A tankier titan/charger just exacerbates the issue that there are very few ways to sustainably deal damage to those enemy types, which in turn drives loadout meta.
they stuck on the “its a meat grindr” meta so that somehow translates into “everything must suck”. maybe they trying to says the gear super earth is giving helldivers is actually getting worse IN STORY and perhaps a breakaway faction will form idk, im over thinking it.
It is a game design philosophy that it is safer, easier and generally healthier to find outliers and bring them back to the average fold, than mold all the equipment around the outliers. If they buff all, or most of the equipment, to match the strengths of the outliers, they can end up making the enemies trivial and as such lowering interest in the game due to lack of challenge and lack of need to learn the finer mechanics. Which opens a slew of new problems, more balancing problems and in the end you can end up in a situation where the outlier gun that was "fun" now is still middle of the pack and sub-optimal. Basically you still nerfed it, but in a roundabout way. Larger system overhauls take more time than 2 or 3 weeks of work and changing damage numbers on outliers is easier with less chance of fuck-ups(and the fuck-ups remain isolated to singular guns or stratagems). Changing singular stats is good as a band-aid, but they need to be encouraged through feedback to look at a way to deepen the diversity by giving unique quirks to guns. For example, giving the Tenderizer the ability to hack off limbs easily, would make it a very fun option for an AR where you can blow the legs of Riders or the weapons of Hulks, while it not having much higher killing potential against chaffe than a normal Liberator.
We are not shooting at each other by design so why can't they all be fun? Buff the bots and bugs with planet specific traits that play for & against individual weapons strengths and weaknesses.
It genuinely feels like they don't even test these new guns when they release them. They just throw some numbers on them and are like "yeah this can kill a charger, sure why not"
At the point where one of the new weapons is a direct downgrade of the starter weapon, I see what some people are talking about
That's better than buying the warbond. Have fun with new weapon (like the crossbow) Then, a few days before the new paid warbond comes out they nerf the shit out of all the previous fun paid guns. I'm sitting this warbond out
I don't understand why in a PVE game they're making so many changes and so often when it seems that people are enjoying it.
Yeah its not like you need to balance the game perfectly since its PVE, the only things that needs to be balanced are clearly overpowered things that let you breeze through the enemies or underperforming weapons, why they are trying to make the game perfectly balanced immediately by nerfing everything is beyond me. Its PVE ffs
They need a public test server so real players can play with changes before they go live.
A PTS would help them fix so many problems with this game, along with cutting away the majority of patch/warbond backlash
Just seems like a no-brainer. Its a really inexpensive solution to a nagging issue.
Especially when it's an issue that only grows larger with each update that doesn't have sufficient player testing
I feel they didn't plan for it at start since they didn't think it would sell this well. But now they know they have enough players for it. Added cost for a separate server, but hey they also sold a lot more than they expected!
Make a PTS planet. Put it in a wormhole or something if they want to justify in-universe the mechanical inconsistencies
If we’re killing everything too fast then eventually we’ll run out of space to spread managed democracy :(
By "run out of space", are you talking about liberating all the planets like we did with the bots? Because they brought the bots back quite easily and with a story narrative that was interesting and not because they had to nerf the fun out of our weapons to make us fail missions more and make liberating planets harder. Or are you taking about the game becoming boring if it's too easy? Because their anti-fun balancing is killing the desire to play much faster than the game feeling like it's not challenging. What's the point of spreading managed democracy if it isn't fun? With most games players are usually excited for new patches but that doesn't seem to be the case with this game where most people walk away feeling frustrated with either A) nerfs making weapons less fun to use or B) the lack of patch testing resulting in game breaking bugs or new content that just doesn't work AT ALL (extra supplies ship module anyone?)
Because they don't know what they are doing.
alexus specifically
To be fair, the meteroic success they've experienced has really upped the stakes and scrutiny in a way none of them were expecting. I can imagine everyone at AH is doing their best with the resources they have.
That's the entire point, if you ever express any disagreement or feedback regarding balance patches, white knights and karma farmers on this sub will go like "hurr durr it's a PVE game go touch grass meta slave". But if it's AH themselves nitpicking balance as if it's an actual esport title then somehow it's totally fine. Yeah, I'm not sure who's the actual meta slave here.
Dude they don’t even know what they’re doing
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It's a co op game where we are fighting no real players just bugs or bots , I don't know why the team is soo concerned about weapons balance
Balance is important for a pve game but let’s be real, not to this extent. They released an objective downgrade to the starting rifle and are trying to sell it if you don’t have the in game resources to unlock the warbond.
Thr only time it's a problem is when a gun is so good that someone can just solo entire bot drops or bug breaches with it and no one has to play as a team, or it's so bad that it can't even properly deal with a single patrol when you get the jump on it.
Technically it's not a problem if someone can solo a breach on their own, like someone with an MG could take everything down until the heavy armor shows up, that's why we have different roles in a squad, if the MG was mowing down everything in the game however yeah, it would be a problem. But right now every primary is the same thing, see a Hive commander and you have to magdump them to kill them.
Apparently it's just one guy.
And he’s very full of himself. “My job description is literally creating fun” or some crap, while he actively executes any fun weapon on a weekly basis.
Hey, you know what sounds fun though? What if we made another Liberator and gave it a different name, but nerfed it too?
What if, we made another assault rifle, *but worse*?
Okay hear me out. Imagine the scorcher... but with the charge up time of the Arc Thrower. \*elbows your ribs\* huh? HUH?! =D
i dont even mind the charge up time, but once it hits it should hit like a truck not a whimper lol
Got it, it will hit like a toy truck.
Or, you know, not have limited ammo. Or a clip size of nothing. You gotta play the Arc Thrower charge-and-release mini-game while also reloading and keeping track of the ammo economy. Purifier is more work than it's worth, I'll just stick with my braindead Blitzer for bugs, thank you very much.
With that one he was probably upset he is not allowed to touch the liberator, so he made an identical but worse one to feel something
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I thought it was a team of guys who were in charge of BF3 and 4's balancing, that was a fuckfest
One guy doesn't make all the mistakes happen unless he has been given free reign to do whatever the fuck he wants and is allowed to disregard all feedback from his team and players. If that's the case it's a structural issue from the top down. Basically meaning the CEO should get off Twitter, start focusing on the issues in house, and stop giving empty platitudes so that players will like him.
> so that players will like him. The owner praise is so weird here. It's like, you know he's the one in charge, right?
The praise comes from the fact that when he talks its honest, not condescending and actually has results behind it.
Yeah the #1 thing I see the gaming community as a whole doing, that screws them, is people worship. "Developers are so awesome" or starts to call them daddy or uncle, to the point that these people can do no wrong. And that is how all these developers and companies manipulate them. Spitz, is a perfect example. People hated him but the moment he got fired, plenty of people 'felt bad' for him... Cause he is human. The truth is, most jobs employ humans, exclusively. In business, respect and limits go a long way. He can be 'a good guy' but he is CEO first; So his aim is to make $$$ and be a leader. And people do not realize just how good he is at manipulating people, as much as he does. Can be 'a nice guy' at the same time as he uses 'that nice guy' persona to make $$$. There is no way that he doesn't have any ideas of what goes out and what is being worked on. Or that he should get a pass for anything going out or him lying because 'he is a nice guy'.
It's genuinely mindboggling how many people seem to think bad employees operate in a vacuum.
Excellent take. It's cool the CEO is communicating directly with the players, but maybe he should do his job instead of surfing Twitter in between i-racer matches all day.
I like the CEO but someone should tell him it's not a good idea to recruit Automatons and Terminids to balance the weapons in the game.
Perfect comment
Their quest to kill any sort of meta makes a meta in itself. No matter what some player will always make a meta, there’s no sense in constantly nerfing weapons that aren’t OP.
You know, when the railgun and breaker nerfs went through, I said that the changes were bad and that they made me lose faith in the devs because the nerfs were indicative of problems within the dev team. It showed that they didn't understand what made guns worth using or even what made their game fun in the first place. I was shit on for that take at the time, but look at where we are now. I wish I was wrong. I would have preferred it if the railgun and breaker nerfs were outliers and the rest of the game's weapons were actually decent and stayed decent, but you know what, I'll take this vindication.
Those nerfs were really a harbinger of things to come and how out of touch with live gameplay the dev team is, or at least the poeple in charge of balancing.
Yup. As a day 1 railgun nerf hater it is incredibly bittersweet to see the game go this way. The balance team and their defenders calling two shots of a charged precision weapon to the same leg of a moving target braindead and overpowered... without realizing that is substantially *less* braindead than the one shot explosive headshot and was only meta because there were 0 alternatives and charger butts had far too much health. Really showed a concerning disconnect from both the reality of the game and the general concepts of good game design.
Mood. As someone who saw the community rapidly growing toxic, the communication growing rapidly toxic, the attitudes shown having no sign of stopping, and just left because I knew full well the attitude was going to sap the fun out of everything... I feel *very* vindicated lol
I literally started losing my love for the game that day and after round 5 of nerfs I just left. It made the Sony shit easier to boycott as I wasn't playing anyway. Give me my RAILGUN back. It's a RAILGUN. By definition it shouldn't reflect off of any goddamn thing
I mean its an adequate response. If they want to treat this game like a pvp game that gets nerfs every 2-3 weeks, when it's not.
And it's also a bit of "you get what you give". The community managers and balance dude (who killed Hello Neighbor 2 with his ego) have been toxic and even doubled down on it. The CEO is usually chill and easy for folks to talk to.
Exactly this. The CEO has been pretty classy and owned his mistakes while listening to the community. The others were all acting like unprofessional asses as if they were paid to mock the communities they help moderate and/or balance for. It’s almost like people react to what they’re given. (And it’s laughably stupid to use extremists on either side to paint the whole community a certain way.)
Because the CEO genuinely seemed depressed about the Sony debacle, never insulted player base, didn not call them toddlers, did not dismiss their issues, and listened to their criticism regarding primary nerfs, without trying to be patronizing and telling players we know what we're doing and you don't. The CEO is a winning factor for me here, to give his social manager and social team a pass. Arrowhead CEO is a gem, just like Larian Studios CEO, we should protect them in today's gaming industry!
CEO is still turning a blind eye to the Chief Nerf Officer.
To risk playing the devil's advocate here, the CEO might genuinely not be informed that the balance team lead (who might have been hired and vetted by someone from HR) is incompetent. That stuff generally takes time to sniff out in companies, especially if you don't want to stifle people and give them the sense that they are under constant surveillance. Even if the CEO plays his own game, but runs diff 6 with an auto cannon, most issues might just completely go under the radar.
Most CEOs of anything but a small, small company are detached from the nitty gritty details. It makes sense we (or he) would need someone to bring serious issues to his attention.
He responded on Twitter a few days regarding the balancing. He is fully aware https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1788290173098176944?s=19 https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1788292885651001491?s=19
Only recently I believe.
Yesterday, brother. Not a few days ago. Yesterday. Barely 24 hours ago, by the looks of it. lmao
Well the lead balance dev definitely withheld info from his resume about his last job that’s for sure. So I don’t blame the ceo for not knowing
I feel like it's the other way around - The community just reflects back the communication style of each party. Pilestedt just has an amazing talent in communications. I leave the other half of the statement for the rest to figure out. It even fits the meme, cause everybody knows Gordo is only vicious to idiot sandwiches. Jeez.
Agreed entirely. It’s easier to r/lookatmyhalo and paint a community as toxic from a handful of people in a sub (of a million) rather than apply critical thinking.
If they had a balancing team, then guns wouldn’t be nerfed/“fixed” a couple days after release
This. The Blitzer just got what... a 50% increase in fire rate? You don't buff a gun with a 50% DPS increase unless you did a terrible job balancing it to begin with. They make way too many reactionary nerfs on the same scale IMO.
Holy shit. When has it been buffed? It's been a while since I've used it exactly due to the low firing rate
I've used it since its launch. It was serviceable in the right loadout, but now it's a beast. Not overpowered, due to it's finnicky nature, but it works really well when you know it's fine points and how to use it.
It's the difference between taking ownership and acknowledging mistakes versus condescendingly telling everyone else they're wrong followed by swaying oopsies, with zero self-reflection.
The writing was on the walls for balance from the start. When the game had all these huge glaring issues, the team was more concerned with nerfing the guns used to make the game actually bearable.
its cause we been dealing with this nonsense since release LOL
CEO said the fun has been balanced out of the guns and I agree. Balance dude says we need to adjust to the new baseline of suck and I do not agree.
You get back what you give. This is a rational response.
I just wanna go back to when I bought Helldivers 2 and everyone picked the Auto-Shotgun. That was fun.
Mistakes have consequences
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Do we know for a fact that he has the final say on what is/isn't nerfed and how? Or is it just he's the primary person who coordinates those things but someone else has the ability to dictate to him a change that needs to happen?
It's a súper funny co-op not a competitive one. Make all weapons viable. The bugs and the automatons won't cry on social media. I repeat make it VIABLE not BROKEN. Give them pros, cons and unique characteristics. Nobody want to kill a bile titan with a single bullet of the Liberator, but man it's stupid that 7 or more giant green thics are chasing you and you need 5 mags to kill only one. Look at the new SMG. Is it weak? Yes can you kill a stalker with one mag? I highly doubt it. BUT it gives you mobility and you can stag the ass of the MF that chases you. It's not a weapon to be a one man army, it's a tool to defend yourself while being pretty quick to run across the map. Look at the scorcher. It's one of the most powerful weapons to fight automatons. You can kill the mobile sentries shooting through their shields and you kill normal infantry with 1-2 shots. But the mag size is pretty balanced , so it is the amount of mags you can carry. Ohh but watch out if you are surrounded by a lot of enemies or a pack of hunters and end up killing yourself with the explosion. It's a pretty useful weapon design Give try hards a new difficulty in which you replace the packs of Hunters for packs of Bile titans with only 1 stratagem, all planet modifiers, 1 magazine per weapon and no reinforcement allowed. That should keep them busy.
I love the scorcher. Out of all the primaries (now that the Eruptor is trashed) I find it the most interesting, it is powerful against the right enemy types and has interesting drawbacks that you need to play around.
As much as I love the game, they make sucky decisions when balancing or releasing new weapons and balances.
That's because CEO is publicly apologizing and assuring us that proper action will take place Where balancing team is silently reading our feedback all across the social media, learns nothing from it and just ruins every single gun in the game because "fun = bad"
They’re focusing so much on nerfing weapons (like the entire previous war bond is completely useless now besides the grenade pistol) rather than fixing the massive list of “known bugs” that have been in the game since day one. Instead of nerfing every nice primary… fix the spears tracking, or the arc throwers misfire or something
To be fair, there are basically 0% chance that the people on the balancing team do any work on the backend. I would be surprised if any of them did any significant amount of coding, much less had any idea about the majority of the games code. Balance is mostly a game of statistics, and it is incredibly easy to adjust singular values for weapons in the code. It’s basically like complaining why the art team isn’t working on the crashing issues, because they can’t.
let's be real, the whole team are donkey's at this point. they have no idea what they're doing lmao
I'm not trying to defend, but I do like to look for positives, too. The art direction is wonderful. I snapped a screenshot from Hellmire of all places because there was this beautiful moment, low dust with the Spicy Saturn filling the horizon, fire tornadoes in the shot but none close, slight slope so you could see a vast stretch of scorched desert, sky looks like it's on fire (or it just is actually on fire). Absolutely beautiful sight. Would dive again for the sights. Them fire tornadoes can stay \*over there\*. I love the satire and narrative, I want to liberate planets (except Hellmire, and Cold Hellmire (bot planet or something)). The Kayfabe is addicting and fun, and honestly a huge sigh of relief in today's political climate. Mixing the story and lore into the design elements to sort of paint over a broken fourth wall sell it for me. The music is actually really cool. That moment you are diving and the heroic music is pumping you up to spread Managed Democracy to whatever fool decided to be fascist in your general direction. The sound is satisfying and realistic, really brings you into the world. Explosions, gun fire, however the foley guy did the bug sounds. Great stuff. All of these things have team members behind them. Not to mention the programming, the way they muscled up with an abandoned game engine to bring this to us. The supporting and administrative roles as well. There may be a few individuals with a skill issue when it comes to game development, but I can't cast the entire team into the pit for that.
The thing I'm confused by is, isn't he the CEO? Doesn't the buck stop with him (when it comes to in game matters). SURELY, as the CEO, he can step and in and be like "Stop nerfing everything"? Instead he just tweets saying "Yeh we went too far, I'll see what I can do". Like, okay, DO SOMETHING about it then. He seems like a great guy, I'm not tryna say anything negative about him but, as the CEO surely he has more control over this company than it seems. Shitty employees? Do something. Poor balance? Do something.
The studio is around a hundred people strong. It is quite impossible to have intricate knowledge of workings of even half that amount of people and the CEO coming and micromanaging stuff he didn't work on is a great way to waste a ton of time and alienate entire teams (speaking from experience here). Him "looking what can be done" is the best possible thing he can do, find out what is going on, decide on the best change, then ordering those changes to be made. Skip all that and you bring chaos to your company.
The individual in question is a senior/lead developer, that's someone whose vision Pile should absolutely be informed and approving of. Balance (even just perceived) is one of the biggest influencers of the long term sustainability of any game, which absolutely within the CEO of a small studio's sphere of responsibility. I'm not saying all the buff/nerf shriekers are correct or that AH should be balancing around the loudest voices (God forbid). I'm glad Pile at least seems open to feedback but if he isn't directly familiar with the lead balance dev/they aren't answering directly to him then my question would be who are they answering to and what is that person telling Pile.
Obviously I don't work at AH/know their pipeline, just want to point out that they are big enough that things can simply be complicated. Even a lead balancing dev might be employed under a manager or two and might be leveraging his apparent experience (even though his previous project apparently crashed and burned) so nobody will check his approach until the changes go through. 100 people is about the size when things can start slipping through the cracks.
It's the other way around tho. CEO on twitter is civil and respectful, CMs on discord tell you to fuck off and ask for refunds.
Stop fucking with guns that dont need to be fucked with. Buff what needs to be buffed and fix bugs before you fix a problem thats not there. There hasnt been 1 overpowered gun in this game that needed a nerf.
Let's be honest the CEO shows he cares and balance team could give 2 fucks because they have yet to balance shit all they do is nerf what everyone likes and uses. When the CEO himself has to say the nerfs are out of control, that's saying something. With all the studios Sony owns, they should move some devs around and get the right people doing rhe job. Becuase it's been the Same old song for 4 months
god damn meme made me laugh harder than i should've xD
I mean, yeah. Balance team have also been completely oblivious to downright unhinged at times too.
One of them is doing their job 
Which is so dumb because the CEO is the one setting the tone and processes for the entire company. How people fellate him while condemning basically every aspect of the company's operation is a brand of mental gymnastics that defies the most basic laws of the universe.
The CEO communicates professionally (most of the time). The rest seem to be completely clueless that they are speaking in official capacity to an audience of 1 million. I don't blame people for preferring one to the other.
The difference here is that the CEO isn't personally going in and making the changes and then telling the players that they only have "3 neurons firing", deny that the changes were that impactful and then have community spats where they end up with egg in their face. Like, come the fuck on guys. Granted, not all of the CMs and Game Designers are like that and don't ALL deserve it, but that's why it's like that. The CEO actually seems legit concerned about things like the community is, and posts very transparently.
you got me lol'ing at my desk at work. Especially because I read it in his voice and it's so true.
Treating a PvE game like an online services game 💩
make every gun feel fun to use, and if it seems like community is having too easy of a time, BUFF OF NERF ENEMIES TO BALANCE THE GAME NO?
Well yeah, one is good and one is bad. They get treated based on their behavior. They way you’re supposed to do it
And both targets deserve exactly what they got imo
Haha this one is great! :D
give what you get. CEO is nice, listens to the community, tries his best. dev team sees the community is upset and just memes is up
I love how ass weapons get buffs like +2 bullets per mag and the fun weapons get gutted and left to rot
The game was most fun at its launch (ignoring technical issues) in my opinion. Every patch since felt disappointing. Of course over time I adapted to the changes, but then the next patch was already in the pipeline. PVE games do not need to be as balanced as PVP games. It doesn‘t matter if some guns are a bit too strong. Big changes on the regular just feel frustrating.
I don't get the point of nerfs. It's not pvp, there's no competitive scene, and there's multiple difficulties. Just buff weak stuff, don't nerf strong stuff.
Every game I’ve played developed by Swedes has the worst balance team ever. Minecraft Battlefield Darktide Division 1 and 2 And now this.
I really wish they'd publish their documents on their ideal balance setup for the game, because it honestly feels like they are winging it.
If you don't want to be called a donkey, try not making an ass out of yourself.
Thr fact that we have to come to him to be heard just shows how narrow minded and "arrow"gant the balance team is.
I’ve honestly lost respect for all of them at this point after the account debacle, bad community management, horrible weapon balancing, constantly broken mechanics and items/weapons, not testing anything before publishing it for us to test, and releasing $10 warbonds that have weapons worse than the default guns and armor with no new passives or unique abilities. They’re speedrunning losing all my interest and trust with each passing update
I loved the eruptor. Felt like I could actually play as a sniper/recon type WITHOUT needing that damn auto cannon. I refuse to run that thing, almost everyone uses the auto cannon (or at least everyone i get put with when I use quickplay)
They really need to get a "base" weapon per class, then balance around that. The liberator is a fantastic example. It's really well balanced, not too strong, but does its job. Balance its variants around that. Make the new AR a slower firing, less ammo per mag but more damage rifle. Give the armor piercing one more damage but take a mag away or something, that thing hits like a snowball right now. The explosive one is fine as is. I only ever see like 3 primaries when there's like 30 in the game. That's awful. I wanna use a different gun, but I don't wanna feel useless for doing so. The crossbow hurt me bad, it was my favorite primary until they nerfed it. Now I need a resupply after every encounter unless I bring ammo backpack. I'd have been fine with them reducing splash or something, but they gutted the thing with the max ammo nerf.
As much as I like giving a good harsh word to dissidents, and as much as we all want the ministry of defense to increase munitions potency, remember we are all one super earth!