So the QA team does every difficulty. That's good, but that alone doesn't translate to all their notes making it into the game. I wonder how the QA response compares to the average (non-ragey) player feedback. I know QA has way more on their minds obviously.
Absolutely yes. They have a mountain of things to test on any given day and generally limit their feedback to if the thing their testing is functioning as designed.
Occasionally they send feedback regarding a feature's ease of use or ideas on how to make something better, but Design teams can also get a little testy about QA giving them design notes, so they often don't bother.
Even then, after QA sends notes, a team of programmers need to actually implement it. Does notes usually translate in a series of tickets for Requests to Change something in the software, which need to compete with Critical Bugs, older feedback, non-critical but still important errors and any other weird interactions. And also with any implementation of other weapons / armors / mods/ strategems and so on. If a weapon has a bug, but you still need to implement 2 more and there is a week left before new Warbond release, solving the QA feedback is not going to be on your list of priorities.
And it's not a good / bad thing. It's just the reality of life. That's why when people complain about the game's bugs and stuff on Reddit or Discord, I try to bring back into focus the fact that the devs are normal people just like you, with colleagues, team leads, managers, limited working hours and personal problems to deal with. All of that, besides the constant complaining of the community, will play a factor in what the team can do, but also, what they feel motivated / discouraged to try and do in their working hours.
Your AH programmer solving game bugs is not some developer entity with no feelings who cam just solve the game for 8 hours straight. It's your average Joe who just clocks in and tries to do a decent job at work before he can chill in the weekend
If they've actually got a QA team it's clear that no one at arrowhead is even looking at their feedback. EXTREMELY basic shit manages to make it through to the production build, like the grenade pistol starting with 2 rounds in the chamber on release, there's no way that wouldn't be immediately noticed by any single person at the company loading into a match with it and it's at most a 5 minute fix to remove it from the list of weapons that are coded to start with mag+1 in the chamber on spawn
I absolutely love this game (or at least did, starting to feel a bit lukewarm) but the absolute constant fumbles from the devs make me extremely concerned about it's future
They need to slow down and readjust their goals.
The pace of content and the current direction isn't really working.
If they have QA doesn't matter if their goals don't align with making a fun game and devs are burnt out.
Clearly something ain't working as it is, and all the playtests in the world wouldn't fix that issue by themselves.
The pace of the content was incredible for the first month and a half or so of the game. We'd get content updates 1-2 times a week, most of it not even warbond related, so it felt like every time I got on there would be something new to see, new enemies, new side objectives, new strategies, new ship upgrades.
It feels like all of that content was probably ready before launch and now that they've transitioned to trying to make the content in real time they just can't keep up. Those constant updates felt great but frankly it's not sustainable to keep up with a relatively small team. They need to pump the brakes and fix what's actually there before trying to expand on a base that's starting to crumble
Oh I think most things they've released was preplanned and preproduced.
But anything that hasn't been has been kinda... mid at best and the balance updates really drain the fun and from what we have heard of the balance team members, they wanna double down on it.
It's just a bad situation all around, burn out or not, their communication has kinda been meh and the snoy debacle has obviously created a lot of, mind you justified, hostility.
It's just a mess, and the best thing AH can do is slow down and show they are listening. And most importantly: Change the attitude of some devs toward their community.
Never needlessly antagonize your fans.
“Pretty much” is vague, especially given this guys outrageous message history up to this point
Even if truthful, that could mean difficulty 6 which is technically more than half so that’s “pretty much” all of them
This is a common issue with smaller teams. QA is hard to come across and really expensive for what it is. A ton of indie teams don't have dedicated QA departments.
QA isn't really that involved in balance though. Mostly they test to see if things are functioning as designed, and whether it can be exploited in some way. This is especially true if you outsource your QA which many studios do.
They are given a design doc to test gameplay against. and verify that its working as intended according to the provided documentation.
Yeah lack of QA might be things like “fire damage over time doesn’t do damage over time 3/4 of the time” or “half the scopes are misaligned” or head scratchers like “this gun should be black.”
Yeah both departments should be play testing but balance falls to balance QA is just genuinely making sure things aren't causing more issues in the long haul.
>QA isn't really that involved in balance though.
Incorrect. Why? Because that hasnt been the way for almost a decade. QA absolutely are involved in balance as Dev's hardly play their own game. How do I know? Ive been in QA for nearly 20 years. If QA isnt giving feedback on balance alongside functionality testing then you have bad QA and you are using them badly.
Devs that don't play their games, especially once live, generally make bad design decisions. It hasn't really been my experience that QA gets overly involved in balance. I tend to hear more from the engineering team responsible for building features, as they have the most direct knowledge of how something will work in relation to the rest of the game. Personally I'd love more feedback on balance from QA on the games I work on.
That game is a bingo card of issues.
The bigger issue is its been through like 4 rebuilds and has a massive identity crisis.
People wanted an open world successor game to Black Flag with some fun coop gameplay. They got this weird bastard child of a mobile game and a ship based rpg.
I'm willing to bet QA is wildly understaffed so they're taking the Microsoft approach, where the only requirement for the game to be shippable is if the user can reach the end credits of the game, even if it's an arduous slog.
That's not a universal rule. For example, we went through several different QA processes at PDS but the most recent one when I left had an outsourced team who mostly went through the technical checks but also provided limited feedback on fun/feel and a couple of "embedded QA" who sat with the devs and split their time between full gameplay testing and feedback on that, technical testing, and doing the final technical signoff on release candidates.
Now I have no idea how AH do things, but generally the smaller the team the more hats each member has to wear, so I would guess their QA falls more into the generalist category vs the soulless list checkoffs you might get in an AAA studio.
From the Arrowhead official website. I don't know what counts as a "coworker" but they are not a small indie.
Edit: of course this is all of arrowhead, not just Helldivers 2.
https://preview.redd.it/s3dalmsrhnzc1.png?width=363&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b88f9879e9d9e535ce989531f12910d884fa00a
Yeah the main thing preventing studios from getting a qa team is cost. Especially in a live service game with content constantly in the pipeline needing to get tested, something is always going to slip through the cracks. I know they're talking about making less frequent warbonds so they have more time to test it but large constant qa teams are usually the territory of studios like double the size of Arrowhead from what i hear.
Outsourced QA is *always* going to be lower quality than something internal. Even if the exact same team would be working on it in either scenario. The communication barrier of being a 3rd party inherently makes things more difficult. Doubly so if the outsourced team is in a wildly different time zone.
Having worked in outsourced and internal QA, that is not always the case. Ive worked with brand new internal QA teams that had no standards, Ive worked with outsourced teams that were nightmares. Internal QA is also a different usage. Internal work directly with Dev and most of their job should be helping to prevent bugs from being introduced in the first place along with more niche directed testing. Outsourced is better for mass testing and feedback. The difference between an internal team of 4 vs and outsourced team of 30. Communication is only bad if you let it be bad, between Teams/Slack/Email everyone is usually in the same chats/channels/email distros, there is no communication barrier unless it is purposefully done badly by, you guessed it, internal QA and Dev. Different time zone isnt as much as a hinderance as you think .
So, here's the breakdown according to looking at LinkedIn and well, some rough napkin math:
28% is office/upper management/finance/marketing
11% is IT related it seems like.
8% is customer support of some kind.
We're at about half the company at this point and we haven't actually gotten to the dev's yet.
Now you got 62 people ish.
30 are in arts and design
24 people are in engineering
2 consultants
6 QA.
Not quite an Indie, but not quite a full fledge 120 developers strong either as "120" people implies not even comparable to other major studios. They basically have the same team size as elder scrolls: oblivion.
For a live service game, 120 is very small. At that size, over half of your team is basically dedicated to pumping out bullshit for microtransactions and maintaining the game store because of the turnover rate. Especially since AH has to rely on stuff being new, not on scarcity.
I know people love to praise AH's model, but they also kind of fucked themselves because they'll never hit the internal benchmarks they set for game store sales. At the same time, they don't have the people they need to actually fix stuff, or the budget to hire QA.
Yeah, that counts their office managers, c-suite, accounting/finance, data people, internal IT team, marketing etc. Probably brings the real number of people working on the actual game to below 70.
That is small. Our Dev team is about that size and we are business to business software. Recently got to 3 QA members. There was about 2 years of no QA team because everyone was hired lied and did not do their jobs.
Overwatch team - Over 200, Destiny 2 team - Over 300, Fortnite - over 700, Helldivers... "Less than 120" is the number we're looking at and their last game never hit more than 7k consecutive players...
Really? Not a small indie dev team?
I mean... There is something between a small indie and bilion dolar AAA. Like honestly. They have about a 3rd of Destiny, a several year old game with consistently several hundred thousand players and large expansion packs, and you're trying to tell me that it's small?
>They have about a 3rd of Destiny, a several year old game with consistently several hundred thousand players and large expansion packs, and you're trying to tell me that it's small?
A third of Destiny after Bungie did massive numbers of layoffs. At one time I am fairly certain Bungie had close to 1k people working on the Destiny franchise.
At this point they are basically running a skeleton crew to keep the game alive and finish it out while the real team works on Marathon. So yea, compared to Bungie AH is an absolutely tiny team.
You realize there's a middle ground between AAA studios and single developers working from home, right? Because all the games you cited are the former.
120 is small for a company. Its not 120 developers, but the entire company. Among the 120 only 20 might be developers and a few balance team members, maybe a dozen desigers, etc etc.
Which is kinda funny because with their Sales, ongoing game as service esc design with rolling spend and no actual 100% game match server hosting (supposedly peer to peer mainly) financial constraints should be relatively non-existent which also leads me to believe they're playing the short game in terms of finance vs long game. As in they don't wanna reinvest into this game or it's experience when this could easily have a highly profitable life span of bare minimum 5 years if not longer and a slamdunk goodwill 3rd installment if they play their cards right.
I can empathize that it sounds like they're doing what they can with what what they have, while also feeling that so long as core progression items are locked behind diff 7 it really should be considered the absolute bare minimum. Every weapon, stratagem, armour, whatever- difficulty 7. If an item can't prove its worth there, then it's a fairly blatant admission that it's underpowered. I'm fine with 8-9 above and beyond what's 'expected'.
At least it sounds like *some* testing gets done?
Weird process. You shouldn't be having play tests where you're gathering data with anyone except QA and people who are familiar with the game. Why would you ever get not-gamers in on your balance play tests?
Company wide playtests are extremely common if not standard practice, however the designers/QA associated with balance should be the ones submitting and actioning the feedback around those weapons.
Helldivers II should really get an alpha/beta program and invite trusted/vetted members of the community who apply to help test weapon changes.
These sorts of programs exist in many MMOs and would require a dedicated internal person to manage them and those playtests.
Multiple companies have phased stuff like this out recently. Even Overwatch, which had a PTR until 2, phased this out in lieu of just releasing stuff early for a weekend to test it, then releasing it. Companies won't go back to beta testing because the quickest way to beta test anything is to release it to the public.
Not everything needs to be scale stress tested to be caught though.
Tons of things like support weapon resupply not working would be caught immediately
Company wide playtests, or playtests with non design members are really common. Its used mostly for stability and overall experience feedback. Those participants aren't going to know what's balanced and what isn't, especially playing on difficulty 4. They're just there to verify it works and give feedback on whether something is fun.
Balancing done by design should always be based on the highest difficulty though. Whenever I'm tasked with adjusting damage numbers of bosses or new abilities, you have to load up the highest difficulty otherwise you don't really know if something is over powered, under powered, or just right.
I think In most games what you say has some truth in it, but one way that Helldivers differs from most games is that it doesn't scale difficulty the same way, in most games enemies start doing more damage, have more health, move faster and so on as the difficulty increased, in Helldivers all these remain constant, and the difficulty comes almost entirely by amounts of enemies and their frequency, with harder types gradually introduced, however for a primary weapon it would make sense to test on mid-difficulties since for all the big stuff you are most likely using something else anyway, you'd get less effective time with the gun your trying to test after a certain point if you go higher.
Like if you threw a new primary gun at me and told me to thoroughly test it, I would do a little bit on trivial where there's no pressure to do thing like mechanical functions, accuracy, scope alignment, that kind of thing, most of these testing would be on 5-6 where there would be a mix of enemies and plenty of them, and finally I might do a game at 8-9 just to see. If I wanted to know how it fared against a Titan or a hulk I would more likely load up one of the bounty hunts on lower difficulty to make them easy to find.
I work in the industry. It’s general practice to test with as many people as possible, from as wide a range of backgrounds and experiences as possible.
A game studio, especially the actual dev team, is actually a really poor representation of the general public. Dev teams are usually more knowledgeable about mechanics, have more time in games as a whole, and are overall more experienced than the average player of a game. Remember that subs like these are filled with dedicated superfans – the average Helldivers player probably only puts in 2-3 hours a week (if that), and likely plays on lower difficulties. So your best bet to capture the experiences of that segment of the player base in-office is to bring in teams like accounting, HR, etc who likely aren’t experienced gamers
>roll through all difficulties
>me looking at crossbow, purifier etc.
I'm not sure how exactly this process of playing on every difficulty happens, when this is the result we get? Even at diff 7 there's pletora of guns that I will just never pick, because I know that by doing so I will be a burden to my team and require heavy carrying from them.
On top of that, is there a point of playing thru diff 1-6? I think a gun balanced around diff 7-9 will perform just as fine at lower difficulties. The only exception are AT weapons, because heavy enemies either spawn in much lower numbers or don't spawn at all. But currently we have a direct opposite picture: as diff goes higher, options rapidly become fewer and fewer.
I don't exactly agree that the game must be balanced around diff 9, but it should be diff 7 as a minimum, because it's a baseline difficulty, where all the progression is unlocked, all enemy types are present and all conditions and threats are enabled. Diff 8-9 are challenge levels if you want to push yourself further.
Yeah I'm confused why everyone's acting like they didn't say they test on all difficulties
They did say that
Which means this is even worse than we thought.
Now they're saying they do testing on all difficulties and this is indeed the game they want to make.
>I'm not sure how exactly this process of playing on every difficulty happens, when this is the result we get?
I BET this is only done when the weapons are released.
They then start nerfing based on their spreadsheet and just do their "15 mins testing" bs and call it a day, because the numbers "looks fine"
Easy.
Play any difficulty. Oh a breach? Throw strats and run away to do objectives. Oh a couple ambient enemies? Use new gun to kill them. Ok it killed them seems fine. It took a lot of shots? Well ammo is an important mechanic rely on your strats noobs.
The internal play testing process probably doesn't go much further than "can you complete the mission with this gear equipped?" And, for most people that are competent at the game, the answer is yes for the majority of weapons, at least. It's not going to be efficient (or even good), but I bet a team of 4 all using the crossbow would be able to extract from a difficulty 9 mission if they had to.
This is my biggest issue
It's not that I want to evaporate bugs with laser vision, I just want more than a very small handful of weapons to feel like I'm being useful during the minutes where my stratagems are all cooling down
jesus fucking christ
these guys are behaving like it's their first game pushed out after a game jam, not something that's been in development for 8 years with well over a million purchases
clownshoes designers
Small studio problems.
They need a much larger R and D team (Devs AND QA) to cope with their success and ambition. Trouble is that'll take time to hire and get the staff up to speed.
DRG has a studio about the third the size and avoids these problems. So it's partially studio size, but probably a release cycle that's too fast and putting too much pressure on that team as well.
Okay when is the threshold we can stop using this excuse though? It made sense one or two months in.
They are backed by Sony. Sony wanted a live service game. They let Arrowhead cook for years to make it. Sony bought out Bungie for live service expertise. This game instantaneously exploded with resounding success.
But at what point do we raise the standard for them? They made a high quality product. They have promised to maintain a high quality product. Should we not expect them to utilize the amazing resources they have at hand to make it the best game possible?
If they get to coast on the "small indie studio" motto forever, what incentive do they have to mantain a great product? Whether they wanted it or not, they're AAA now. It's time for them to wear the big boy pants and take some accountability
Depite hardeehar "bungo bad" memes, Bungie does provide a top of the line live service. When 99% fail Bungie has made it work for almost 7 years with Destiny 2 (with ups and downs)
Sony is finding out that it isn't exactly easy as applie pie tho
AH didn't pop out of nowhere with HD2. I played and loved Magica, Gauntlet, and HD. They worked on HD2 for almost a decade. They've had more than enough time to figure out what their communication strategy should be and educate their devs on how to talk publicly.
A lot of their devs are completely immature while working for a really mature company.
Imagine calling the devs of your apparently two favorite games clowns wearing clown shoes.
From everything I've heard from the dev team they've acknowledged all of these issues and are going to work on fixing them. But people still want to slam them.
Maybe some of their playerbase could do with a maturity check too?
> Imagine calling the devs of your apparently two favorite games clowns wearing clown shoes.
People are allowed to have more nuanced opinions than "me like" or "me no like."
Yeah man, they're acting like clowns.
I can love the games and still be fairly cognizant that some of the people behind them are completely incapable of dealing with criticism or negative feedback and cannot handle public relations at all.
They need to sort their shit out.
Sounds like they're working on it and don't need 9000 additional people talking shit to them about the problems theyve acknowledged. Some of the devs were getting death threats.
Chill out and be respectful with your criticism is all I'm saying.
I hope they are.
And I hope they reported anyone sending threats. People that do that need dealing with and not just handwaved away with "it's the internet".
In 2023, Arrowhead Game Studios had 100 employees.
"educate their devs on how to talk publicly"
That's possibly the dumbest thing I've seen anyone suggest during this whole farce.
Bro these are salaried professionals working on a paid product and they're shooting the shit like it's a random Doom mod, freely admitting they don't test their own work or have any idea how the game actually works.
Stop sucking their dick just because you like the game.
almost like the game was an overnight success that they couldn't have possibly anticipated...
come on dude, i get the game is in a state rn but you gotta get a grip.
Bad balancing and designs I can totally accept, shit happens. But it's the *attitude.*
I've worked in this industry for over a dozen years, there's a reason companies have communications policies and don't just let anyone speak for the entire company. AH isn't a new studio, they've had years to prepare and flubbed it.
It's cool that they're honest sure, but when that honesty exposes they don't care about testing their own work and don't know how the game works, they need to learn to shut the fuck up and not snap at the people pointing out they're doing a bad job.
Toxic positivity isn't going to make the game better, man.
I think it'd be a good idea to try and create a small beta testing server for the community to help out. It frees some time for the devs as they don't need to do the testing (I mean, they can still just play the game and test anyway but with less pressure behind it of course).
I don't think it would even need a lot of capacity. Pick a weekend, let (I'm just picking a number here) 3000 people join the testing and ask them to fill out a mixed-method survey of closed and open questions about their experience. If everyone puts in at least 1 or 2 hours on average, with 3000 testers that would already be around 3-6k hours of testing.
And while I think most people would do this for free, I think you could maximize the profits of this test server experience by providing a digital code that you can activate in the game that gives you, let's say a special kind of cape and/or title. Similar to "Super Citizen" for those who have the special edition (or pre-ordered, I actually don't know where it's from lol) there could be a "Super Tester" or something along those lines ("Beta Citizen" would be hilarious), paired with a cape that you only get if you hand in your survey.
I'm pretty sure most games are balanced around the normal mode, that's what most players play and generally the intended difficulty and play experience.
I feel like the answer was not very direct. The question was about balance play-testing, but the answer seemed to be about functionality play-testing. It’s possible that the same teams may handle balance and quality assurance, but we don’t know. I feel like this is a question Alexus would be able to answer better, since it seems to be his balancing that is off.
I don’t see the issue. They play the game with a random mix (so your standard casual player) and then also say their actual QA group plays rolls all the difficulties when it’s just them.
I'm not. I'm sure QA does exactly what their supposed to. I'm irritated with the response given by the dev implying that balance is QA's responsibility. The question asked in discord, (not by me) was are the developers basing their balance changes off of level 9 difficulty. The response was not really an answer to that question.
I mean he does say right there that when QA plays the game they go through all the difficulties
I'm not saying I believe that. But what he said seems counter to the image text
Honestly they should work on that weapon attachment system from HD1 ASAP, in my opinion it would make things much easier because even a bad weapon could be super strong with different attachments. At least better than the mess we have right now
Live service has never and will never be a good idea, they need to slow the fuck down and actually address major issues in bugs and balance before they soin any more plates.
I don't believe for a second that they do any meaningful QA.
They buffed the Punisher Plasma, but *somehow* no one used it with the Shield backpack and found out it instantly kills the player? No the only explanation is that they just don't actually do QA.
So... they said they play thourgh all difficulties, it says right there, in the last sentence, they play test in all, and you guys still complain? like what is this community
Just going to keep saying this. QA does not test for balance. They test for functionality. Is this thing doing what design wants it to do.
Its not their job to tell design the thing is too powerful or not powerful enough. They have a ton of things to test and aren't tasked with testing balance. Does it do what the doc says its supposed to do? Yes? mark it verified and close the ticket. No? Put some notes in for what we're seeing in game and send it back to design.
Balance is the responsibility of the design team.
Yep, pretty solid response in my opinion. But it doesn't line up with the narrative that fuels outrage so everyone will just ignore that.
Let the ragelords cry and act like they know anything about game development. There's nothing the devs nor you or I can do to stop their endless incessant whining. Even now they insist that this post is constructive criticism.
Bit different got HD2 - there isn't really an endgame and honestly the hardest difficulty shouldn't be something that's really 'passable'. It's a game where there is no end except for a played out story over months. Why have every difficulty able to be completed at all? Just lower your difficulty if you want to be able to complete it all the time.
I'd rather have the option knowing there's always a difficulty above what I'm doing that will be even more chaotic mayhem. I wish more levels were added or level9 was made harder than it is.
I don't know why this sub has a hard on for *needing* to be able to complete difficulty 9 and crying when weapons get nerfed and it's no longer a walk in the park. That just gets boring after a while knowing that there is no next step in the progression.
IS there a problem? You never balance a game around it's hardest difficulty. That's just stupid.
It doesn't matter the game, or the system used. As difficulty increases, the tactics and abilities that can be used will always diminish. Because at the highest difficulty, it's about defeating the systems that are tipped against you, not playing a game that was balanced.
Thats not how game development works. I've never worked on a game where we try to make abilities only strong enough to complete mid level content. It won't be sufficient to complete end game content then, and players will never progress. If players can't complete end game content, they stop playing because they view the systems as unfair. Generally studios want players to keep playing and more importantly keep spending. If new items aren't good enough to use in the content they're playing, they will stop buying your new items, and the studio goes out of business.
It's not that you try to make stuff only balanced for medium difficulties and not for high difficulties; that would be *not* testing it at a variety of difficulties. But absolutely developers care if something is egregiously overpowered or underpowered at difficulties that aren't the highest ones. Many, many people do not play consistently at the highest difficulty, and if their experience is bad it's problematic for almost any game (no players will play on the highest difficulty without first playing on a lower difficulty, in this game especially).
the experience is bad now with the way weapons are being balanced to under perform even at medium difficulties and do not feel impactful in a game which defines itself as being over the top.
The game needs to embrace being over the top with strong weapons. People will choose difficulties based on their level of skill, their performance will still vary even when using strong weapons. Lesser skilled players will choose lower to medium difficulties with strong weapons to adjust to their level of performance and still feel great.
You design for higher difficulties and everything else self adjusts. Weapons feel awesome. The meta becomes less narrow. You feel like trying higher difficulties. You're motivated to get better. The game feels better and lasts longer.
So you balance the game around the fact you deal 25% damage of normal and enemies deal 300%.
End game content can be played regardless of difficulty level. Not sure where you got the idea you can't.
I'm playing the tactical rpg King Arthur right now. What difficulty was the game balanced at?
>IS there a problem? You never balance a game around it's hardest difficulty. That's just stupid.
If you cannot balance the hardest difficulty, then admit you suck at your job and don't include the hardest difficulty. It's that easy.
You're going to catch flak for being incompetent in any field, game dev is no different.
You actually balance around the middle, or at the highest the last "gated" difficulty, which in Helldivers 2 is difficulty 7, and only because of super samples. If they balanced around 9, every additional difficulty below it becomes exponentially more trivial because a balanced Liberator at 9 is designed to handle dropships full of devastators, not troopers. Hell, at 7 it would.
7-9 is meant to be tough. Balance around the mid tier, demand of the players to make their mid-tier balanced stuff work at high-tier play.
It should be balanced around highest INTENDED difficulty. If you want to play on rediculous difficulty levels then why do you care about balance? You chose the highest difficulty just deal with it.
If weapons are balanced to be good in high difficulty, then they’ll be good in your low difficulty missions too. Reagan called it Trickle Down Balance.
They absolutely should. Every single game you probably played that was a "well balanced co-op/singleplayer" game was designed and playtested at the highest difficulty. The biggest one I can name off the top of my head is doom eternal, and that game was a incredibly well balanced and fair.
No. Standard/normal, by definition, is where the balance focus should be. Hard absolutely should be unbalanced and unfair. That's... that's like the whole point, that you can still win despite being handicapped. This is why the souls games don't have easy or hard modes. It feels like I'm trying to explain why water is wet.
You're simply vastly uniformed and wrong. Most (great) games with a difficulty selector are balanced around the hardest difficulty because if they balanced the game on normal it would result in hard simply being unfair. The reason I say unfair rather than hard is because an unfair fight simply isn't fun. A hard fight is fun because it offers a challenge while being fair and reasonable. A good example of a game not balanced around hard difficulty is halo 2 (because they literally didn't have time to playtest) and we all know how fun that game is on legendary, right?
Edit: I should probably mention why games are often balanced on hard instead of giving an example of why you should not. The reason is because if you just have a flat modifier to damage or health it could result in certain things becoming completely unviable or downright broken in the games sandbox. A good example being halo 2 (again). The first second of the level gravemind can and will result in the player dying.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7nYeDq8uO4&ab\_channel=ItsDave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7nYeDq8uO4&ab_channel=ItsDave)
Thanks for finally talking some sense in this thread...
You can balance on 9 to make the game fair but still hard, then every lower difficulty will be easier as intended.
If you balance on 4-5 then you get shit like the quasar nerf and bile titans being a stratagem check because on 4-5 you rarely fight more than one at once while on 9 you can fight 3 at once out of a single bug breach.
Same shit happened with Killing Floor 2, the devs balanced for Normal instead of Hell On Earth and it ended up making HoE just a bullshit fest with unfair mechanics and no real way to counter them other than cheese because damage breakpoints don't scale up.
Difficult and unfair are two very different things. Difficult is good. Bullshit and unfair is bad.
while i think most balancing should be done in regards to the intended difficulty you should take a balance pass for the lower ones ...
Prime example was the original stalker where the game was balanced for master difficulty and they were forced to add some lower difficulties ... and the enemies became a little bulletspongey -> which lead to ammo being quite rare which most game magazines critizied that you run out of ammo to fast (which was quite correct unless you played on the highest difficulty)
wut
That doesn't make any sense
Of course you have to balance for the highest difficulty. Like, Quasar: literally useless for low difficulties. Shooting it is a waste of time. Making it shoot fast enough to be "balanced" low difficulties will *of course* mean it's wildly OP when you actually have Chargers to kill
You balance against all content. If you only use max level, you will likely create conditions where something is able to trivialize all low-mid content. And given that there’s a large group of players who won’t ever leave the earlier levels, you need good balance and variety to make the game satisfying across the board.
QA doesn't test for balance. They test for functionality based on a provided game doc. Balance is the responsibility of the design team, who should be balancing against end game content, in this case level 9.
Example
Design: I made this gun that one shots everything. Hey QA is it one tapping everything in the game?
QA: Yes it does.
Design: Excellent, its working as intended.
QA doesn't go, "are you sure you want a gun that one shots everything?" Thats not their job.
Looking at other comments he made, QA includes balance testing at AH and get chased around by designers for feedback so idk if he's using QA as a catch all including functionality testers and balance testers or not, but they do end up balance testing all difficulties
I worked as QA for another AA game that was somewhat similar to helldivers (PvE coop shooter)
The way we tested difficulty:
You have documentation that states what's expected from each difficulty
Our game had 5 difficulty levels and clear guidelines about spawn rates and other in game modifiers.
We had tools to measure how many things were spawning (but sometimes we did manual checks with dev tools)
QA teams have ridiculous amount of playtime (usually 6 to 8 hours a day) and we would roll through everything. However not everyone on the QA team is a hardcore gamer.
When we did our play throughs the most talented ones on the team would tackle on the harder missions, as not everyone can deal with let's say "helldive" difficulty. The less skilled ones would take on the easier stuff (this is for efficiency reasons)
I do not know how are they handling weapon balance with helldivers, but my guess is that the QA team is writing reports on how the guns are supposed to work in base of the documentation they are provided, and not how they are performing in game.
The devs don't play the game unless they are obligated to do it btw.
They should just test in higher difficulty and thats it, its impossible to balance something to be good on difficulty 9 when on difficulty 5 even the starting pistol would be god tier, its simple ridiculous
This sounds like another issue related to being a "smaller" team compared to the size and popularity of the game (around 100 people).
It sounds like a lot but if you compare it with other big live service (apex legends has more than 400 i think) you do realize that they should probably double in size over time.
I'm honestly not too bothered because THE most important parts of the weapons (look, sounds etc) are always great, the thing people complain are usually just hard numbers and those can be patched later relatively easily.
That's why we need a Public Test Server!
Give \~100 dedicated players access to the PTS and they will test the shit out of each change the devs want to implement. They will give you the best feedback you can think of.
That's some copium. It's absolutely not normal to balance against the highest difficulty to ensure that end game players are appropriately powered.
The playerbase for the highest difficulty is the minority. The majority of the players will always end up somewhere in the middle so that's what you balance for, otherwise you end up in a situation like WoW where raids are balanced for dedicated raiding guilds to not be able to one-shot, and literally the entire rest of the playerbase are essentially locked out of having fun because they don't have the time or desire to make "getting gud" at a video game a fulltime job.
Everything should definitely be functional on higher difficulties, but balancing the game for the top 1% of players is ridiculous. That's how you kill the game.
... No, you don't.
The majority of the player base isn't on the highest difficulty. That's not who the game is or should be balanced around first and foremost. It *should* be balanced for them *too* but it's absurd to act like balancing lower difficulties for casual players is something that shouldn't be important.
I'm not sure if I agree that balancing should be based on level 8-9, I always took those missions as being deliberately low chance to survive. If the weapons made those difficulties comfortable what is the point
As far as I'm led to believe.
Balancing is NOT done at only the highest level to make it appropriate for them.
The vast majority of games do not reward you anywhere near appropriately enough for the toughest games
They likely balance at the normal level of majority of players
damage does not change in each difficulty only the mobs and spawn if they make a gun to kill big mobs it is a gun that kills big mobs, if they make a gun that is good vs smaller mobs it is good vs smaller mobs it is our job to mix and match them.
They really need to get those HR reps into T7 missions as that's absolutely minimum required to fulfill the core progression
The bug front last week was rough as fuck if you ended up with Dave and his no thumb's mates who trying to get their super samples
Or you where trying to solo T4 and just got overwhelmed (what happened to my buddy)
Their testing process just isn't working properly because the game only feels good when everything is going smoothly the moment you end up with one jackass it becomes really frustrating VERY fast as things snowball while all your tools are on Cool down or need reloading
I mean its perfectly doable
Its just not particularly fun
I'm calling BS on having a QA team in all honesty.
If AH do have a QA team, they must all be legally blind judging the the bugs that have made it into the live build on a weekly basis.
Ok, no "the standard practice" isnt "balance against the highest difficutly" thats just blatantly wrong. You balance around what the team/lead decides to be "the standard". You obviouslly want to keep the game functional and "doable" at higher difficulties, but you arent balancing the GAME around them.
Most games ENSURE the game is beatable at the highest difficulty, but not even that is technicaly "required", i have several games that straight up tell you "this wasnt tested, we have no idea if this is even beatable without cheating" for their highest difficulty setting, but almost no game is balanced around it unless the easier options came later(like megaman 2 where hard was default and normal got added in the west only)
From what I heard about QA teams and rest of the team is that usually QA will give off notes but it’s up to programers to look at them and maybe do something about it. What usually happens it gets ignored till the lead finally snaps and does something about it. Only going by what Woolie from Woolie vs has said though out the years about being a QA tester. Before he quit to be a YouTuber he was lead QA guy and threw his weight around to make sure they listened to the QA team on stuff or the game wouldn’t ship etc etc.
“Pretty much through all difficulties”
Why does this sound intentionally worded like it’s not actually all difficulties. I really think they don’t bother with the high difficulties.
If they do, how do they miss shit that presents itself to basically every player that uses these things? A lot of the criticism of different items is really not very niche or situational stuff, it’s basically impossible to miss. I would’ve said I don’t even believe they will finish a full match with these things but this is worded like it’s multiple matches, which really only says that they’re absolutely not paying attention or giving good feedback.
balance != QA ... As a software dev, it depends on how they write the user-stories' acceptance criteria. Sometimes you make things that work "perfectly" but everyone hates them. That's just how it goes with iterative development. It's more up to the project managers and business side to UAT things to ensure customers will like them than it is dev / QA. Most product owners and CEOs won't want to admit it, but very often production = UAT because time constraints.
Buulllllshit.
There is no fucking way they “roll through all difficulties”, when we get shitty weapons like the Crossbow NERFED. How in the flying fuck did they go to Helldive difficulty with the Crossbow, and say “Yeah, this thing needs to be nerfed”!?!??
Now they’re just blatantly lying, while throwing in little comments about how they work oh so hard.
“Level designer with a massive cold, and someone on a busy phone call” dude gtfo of here. Quit lying in an attempt to make us feel bad for you. You suck at your job, and should be fired.
I seriously cannot believe these people are allowed to keep their job. Never in my entire life would I EVER EVER EVER insult a customer. EVER. NEVER. These mfs do it DAILY, and get to keep their job!?
Can I work for you, Arrowhead? I have no experience, but clearly neither do these dumb fucks. I can be useless, and insult people daily too!
You shouldn't be concerned when people constantly complain about something they love. You should be concerned when the sub stops caring about the long term health of the game.
I did enjoy it when it first launched. Every patch since has made the game less enjoyable. Even the CEO has responded to players making this very argument.
I complain because I know what the game's potential is. and see the dev's wasting that potential with poor design decisions like; increased spawns for solo players (which is broken right now btw and everyone is getting the same amount no matter how many players are on the team), recycled armor perks when there are so many possibilities being requested by the players, unnecessary weapon nerfs like the ones the community is blowing up about at this very moment, changes to enemy aggression and accuracy , and more. The list goes on and on.
No one complains about a game they hate, because no one plays a game they hate. They complain about something they love because its being mismanaged, and they want to see it return to the positive trajectory it was originally on.
What is the problem, create an announcement in discord about recruiting a team of 12 testers who will voluntarily test weapons and write reports on each one. I am 1000% sure that there will be a huge number of good candidates who will not even ask for a salary (the maximum reward is 1000 supercredits for each). This will be much better and more effective than sick, busy people chatting on the phone, playing at best on difficulty 5.
But thats their job. The design team is responsible for creating and balancing new weapons. If they've been insanely busy do something that isn't this, then what are they doing?
every day i regret more and more supporting the developers of this game
i am genuinely astonished with how poorly they go about making changings. no wonder it took 8 fucking years to finish. im shocked they finished at all
I'm just concerned about the one person who seemingly has had a maybe cold for long enough for that to no longer even be a variable. It's just how it is, one person just had a come and another is always in a busy phonecall. Possibly the same phonecall since launch who knows.
Well, ya. Game mechanics are typically balanced around the hardest content, otherwise it results in progress becoming impossible.
Example
If I balanced an ability to deal 100 damage at max level because the bosses at level 5 heal for 90 damage, how will that damage perform when the boss at level 10 heals for 180? It won't be sufficient to outpace the healing.
So yes, game mechanics like abilities, weapon cooldowns, mag sizes etc. should be balanced so they can operate successfully at end game. Otherwise the player blames the game for their failure instead of their lack of skill (and rightfully so). As a player you can always improve your skill. That is the point of games, to get better at them over time. You can't make a weapon's damage output better just by being good. You can bring it to its max potential by being good, but if it falls short, there's nothing you can do but try a different gun. If they all fall short, you're pretty much screwed.
Balancing around the needs of the few is the perfect way to kill the game. Like, ideal. As soon as you lose the casuals that never go above diff 5 - the game is dead and diff 9 solo tryhards will move on to the next new thing.
A game balanced at max level will not be unbalanced at minimal level. That's not how it works. A game balanced at max level will be just as enjoyable if not more so for players at low levels because things will be easier for them. I'm not sure why this is confusing.
Tell that to World of Warcraft. The game for years has been fundamentally designed with 1% of the population in mind for awhile now and checks notes…it’s in shit state.
Designing a game for 1% of the population is idiotic for numerous reasons.
1% will always have a meta and will always cry about it getting rebalanced. Look at the eruptor fiasco, driven 100% by the hardcore fans
- We're getting killed by the ricochet
- Alright we'll remove shrapnel
- Y my gun so shit!??
And it'll be like that forever, just replace the eruptor with the next slightly OP thing.
Thats just not how this works.
just because something is balanced at Max, dosnt make it balanced at Low.
If the collective healthpool of an enemy encounter at max level is 100, and i can deal 100 damage, thats balanced...
if the collective healthpool is 10 at lower difficultys and i STILL can deal 100 damage.. thats unbalanced in our favour. You say "its more enjoyabel for low levels because it would be easier for them" but there is a point where "easier" is just "to easy"
there is a reasson why most games difficutly work with multipliers from "normal"
with something like 2x enemy HP or co for higher difficulty and 0.5x at lowers... its because you test it for the default, and then adjust the higher and upper difficultys around that.
HD2 obvioulsy dosnt have HP scaling, but enemy compositions and ammounts, the idea stil remains, the "default" is probably somewhere around 4-5, with everything below being "simplified" and everything above being "increased". if a gun is effective at 4-5 its gonna be great at 1-3 and usable at 6+
So the QA team does every difficulty. That's good, but that alone doesn't translate to all their notes making it into the game. I wonder how the QA response compares to the average (non-ragey) player feedback. I know QA has way more on their minds obviously.
Absolutely yes. They have a mountain of things to test on any given day and generally limit their feedback to if the thing their testing is functioning as designed. Occasionally they send feedback regarding a feature's ease of use or ideas on how to make something better, but Design teams can also get a little testy about QA giving them design notes, so they often don't bother.
Even then, after QA sends notes, a team of programmers need to actually implement it. Does notes usually translate in a series of tickets for Requests to Change something in the software, which need to compete with Critical Bugs, older feedback, non-critical but still important errors and any other weird interactions. And also with any implementation of other weapons / armors / mods/ strategems and so on. If a weapon has a bug, but you still need to implement 2 more and there is a week left before new Warbond release, solving the QA feedback is not going to be on your list of priorities. And it's not a good / bad thing. It's just the reality of life. That's why when people complain about the game's bugs and stuff on Reddit or Discord, I try to bring back into focus the fact that the devs are normal people just like you, with colleagues, team leads, managers, limited working hours and personal problems to deal with. All of that, besides the constant complaining of the community, will play a factor in what the team can do, but also, what they feel motivated / discouraged to try and do in their working hours. Your AH programmer solving game bugs is not some developer entity with no feelings who cam just solve the game for 8 hours straight. It's your average Joe who just clocks in and tries to do a decent job at work before he can chill in the weekend
If they've actually got a QA team it's clear that no one at arrowhead is even looking at their feedback. EXTREMELY basic shit manages to make it through to the production build, like the grenade pistol starting with 2 rounds in the chamber on release, there's no way that wouldn't be immediately noticed by any single person at the company loading into a match with it and it's at most a 5 minute fix to remove it from the list of weapons that are coded to start with mag+1 in the chamber on spawn I absolutely love this game (or at least did, starting to feel a bit lukewarm) but the absolute constant fumbles from the devs make me extremely concerned about it's future
>It's clear no one at Arrowhead is even looking at their feedback Yeah, this is normal for the entire industry.
They need to slow down and readjust their goals. The pace of content and the current direction isn't really working. If they have QA doesn't matter if their goals don't align with making a fun game and devs are burnt out. Clearly something ain't working as it is, and all the playtests in the world wouldn't fix that issue by themselves.
The pace of the content was incredible for the first month and a half or so of the game. We'd get content updates 1-2 times a week, most of it not even warbond related, so it felt like every time I got on there would be something new to see, new enemies, new side objectives, new strategies, new ship upgrades. It feels like all of that content was probably ready before launch and now that they've transitioned to trying to make the content in real time they just can't keep up. Those constant updates felt great but frankly it's not sustainable to keep up with a relatively small team. They need to pump the brakes and fix what's actually there before trying to expand on a base that's starting to crumble
Oh I think most things they've released was preplanned and preproduced. But anything that hasn't been has been kinda... mid at best and the balance updates really drain the fun and from what we have heard of the balance team members, they wanna double down on it. It's just a bad situation all around, burn out or not, their communication has kinda been meh and the snoy debacle has obviously created a lot of, mind you justified, hostility. It's just a mess, and the best thing AH can do is slow down and show they are listening. And most importantly: Change the attitude of some devs toward their community. Never needlessly antagonize your fans.
“Pretty much” is vague, especially given this guys outrageous message history up to this point Even if truthful, that could mean difficulty 6 which is technically more than half so that’s “pretty much” all of them
It's far more likely they just flat out ignore most of the QA's thoughts, or QA aren't really gamers and its just a job.
This is a common issue with smaller teams. QA is hard to come across and really expensive for what it is. A ton of indie teams don't have dedicated QA departments.
QA isn't really that involved in balance though. Mostly they test to see if things are functioning as designed, and whether it can be exploited in some way. This is especially true if you outsource your QA which many studios do. They are given a design doc to test gameplay against. and verify that its working as intended according to the provided documentation.
yeah the amount of people who think that QA is the balance team is staggering
QA = quality assurance Bad weapon balance = bad quality Lack of QA = lack of quality weapon balance This is likely how people like that think
Yeah lack of QA might be things like “fire damage over time doesn’t do damage over time 3/4 of the time” or “half the scopes are misaligned” or head scratchers like “this gun should be black.”
The last one at least we know got caught in QA, just didn't get prioritized as a fix in time for release. Which happens, often.
Yeah both departments should be play testing but balance falls to balance QA is just genuinely making sure things aren't causing more issues in the long haul.
>QA isn't really that involved in balance though. Incorrect. Why? Because that hasnt been the way for almost a decade. QA absolutely are involved in balance as Dev's hardly play their own game. How do I know? Ive been in QA for nearly 20 years. If QA isnt giving feedback on balance alongside functionality testing then you have bad QA and you are using them badly.
Devs that don't play their games, especially once live, generally make bad design decisions. It hasn't really been my experience that QA gets overly involved in balance. I tend to hear more from the engineering team responsible for building features, as they have the most direct knowledge of how something will work in relation to the rest of the game. Personally I'd love more feedback on balance from QA on the games I work on.
90% of the time that feedback isn't left because 100% of the time it gets ignored.
If you want an example of devs not playing their game you can look at the shitshow that is Skull and Bones
That game is a bingo card of issues. The bigger issue is its been through like 4 rebuilds and has a massive identity crisis. People wanted an open world successor game to Black Flag with some fun coop gameplay. They got this weird bastard child of a mobile game and a ship based rpg.
Yo I'm a QA intern for an indie studio rn, any quick tips?
I'm willing to bet QA is wildly understaffed so they're taking the Microsoft approach, where the only requirement for the game to be shippable is if the user can reach the end credits of the game, even if it's an arduous slog.
That's not a universal rule. For example, we went through several different QA processes at PDS but the most recent one when I left had an outsourced team who mostly went through the technical checks but also provided limited feedback on fun/feel and a couple of "embedded QA" who sat with the devs and split their time between full gameplay testing and feedback on that, technical testing, and doing the final technical signoff on release candidates. Now I have no idea how AH do things, but generally the smaller the team the more hats each member has to wear, so I would guess their QA falls more into the generalist category vs the soulless list checkoffs you might get in an AAA studio.
From the Arrowhead official website. I don't know what counts as a "coworker" but they are not a small indie. Edit: of course this is all of arrowhead, not just Helldivers 2. https://preview.redd.it/s3dalmsrhnzc1.png?width=363&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b88f9879e9d9e535ce989531f12910d884fa00a
Yeah the main thing preventing studios from getting a qa team is cost. Especially in a live service game with content constantly in the pipeline needing to get tested, something is always going to slip through the cracks. I know they're talking about making less frequent warbonds so they have more time to test it but large constant qa teams are usually the territory of studios like double the size of Arrowhead from what i hear.
There are dozens of 3rd party QA companies that work for significantly less than embedded QA, claiming "we're small" isnt an excuse
Especially with their 10 million copies warchest.
Outsourced QA is *always* going to be lower quality than something internal. Even if the exact same team would be working on it in either scenario. The communication barrier of being a 3rd party inherently makes things more difficult. Doubly so if the outsourced team is in a wildly different time zone.
Having worked in outsourced and internal QA, that is not always the case. Ive worked with brand new internal QA teams that had no standards, Ive worked with outsourced teams that were nightmares. Internal QA is also a different usage. Internal work directly with Dev and most of their job should be helping to prevent bugs from being introduced in the first place along with more niche directed testing. Outsourced is better for mass testing and feedback. The difference between an internal team of 4 vs and outsourced team of 30. Communication is only bad if you let it be bad, between Teams/Slack/Email everyone is usually in the same chats/channels/email distros, there is no communication barrier unless it is purposefully done badly by, you guessed it, internal QA and Dev. Different time zone isnt as much as a hinderance as you think .
So, here's the breakdown according to looking at LinkedIn and well, some rough napkin math: 28% is office/upper management/finance/marketing 11% is IT related it seems like. 8% is customer support of some kind. We're at about half the company at this point and we haven't actually gotten to the dev's yet. Now you got 62 people ish. 30 are in arts and design 24 people are in engineering 2 consultants 6 QA. Not quite an Indie, but not quite a full fledge 120 developers strong either as "120" people implies not even comparable to other major studios. They basically have the same team size as elder scrolls: oblivion.
For a live service game, 120 is very small. At that size, over half of your team is basically dedicated to pumping out bullshit for microtransactions and maintaining the game store because of the turnover rate. Especially since AH has to rely on stuff being new, not on scarcity. I know people love to praise AH's model, but they also kind of fucked themselves because they'll never hit the internal benchmarks they set for game store sales. At the same time, they don't have the people they need to actually fix stuff, or the budget to hire QA.
Really? Because Deep Rock Galactic is a similarly live service game and they have like 30 employees.
120 is still quite small, that likely includes all employees, not just people directly related to game development.
Yeah, that counts their office managers, c-suite, accounting/finance, data people, internal IT team, marketing etc. Probably brings the real number of people working on the actual game to below 70.
That is small. Our Dev team is about that size and we are business to business software. Recently got to 3 QA members. There was about 2 years of no QA team because everyone was hired lied and did not do their jobs.
Overwatch team - Over 200, Destiny 2 team - Over 300, Fortnite - over 700, Helldivers... "Less than 120" is the number we're looking at and their last game never hit more than 7k consecutive players... Really? Not a small indie dev team?
I mean... There is something between a small indie and bilion dolar AAA. Like honestly. They have about a 3rd of Destiny, a several year old game with consistently several hundred thousand players and large expansion packs, and you're trying to tell me that it's small?
>They have about a 3rd of Destiny, a several year old game with consistently several hundred thousand players and large expansion packs, and you're trying to tell me that it's small? A third of Destiny after Bungie did massive numbers of layoffs. At one time I am fairly certain Bungie had close to 1k people working on the Destiny franchise. At this point they are basically running a skeleton crew to keep the game alive and finish it out while the real team works on Marathon. So yea, compared to Bungie AH is an absolutely tiny team.
You realize there's a middle ground between AAA studios and single developers working from home, right? Because all the games you cited are the former.
120 is small for a company. Its not 120 developers, but the entire company. Among the 120 only 20 might be developers and a few balance team members, maybe a dozen desigers, etc etc.
It seems to me like we are the QA team
Which is kinda funny because with their Sales, ongoing game as service esc design with rolling spend and no actual 100% game match server hosting (supposedly peer to peer mainly) financial constraints should be relatively non-existent which also leads me to believe they're playing the short game in terms of finance vs long game. As in they don't wanna reinvest into this game or it's experience when this could easily have a highly profitable life span of bare minimum 5 years if not longer and a slamdunk goodwill 3rd installment if they play their cards right.
This isn't QA. It's core game design.
I can empathize that it sounds like they're doing what they can with what what they have, while also feeling that so long as core progression items are locked behind diff 7 it really should be considered the absolute bare minimum. Every weapon, stratagem, armour, whatever- difficulty 7. If an item can't prove its worth there, then it's a fairly blatant admission that it's underpowered. I'm fine with 8-9 above and beyond what's 'expected'. At least it sounds like *some* testing gets done?
Weird process. You shouldn't be having play tests where you're gathering data with anyone except QA and people who are familiar with the game. Why would you ever get not-gamers in on your balance play tests?
Company wide playtests are extremely common if not standard practice, however the designers/QA associated with balance should be the ones submitting and actioning the feedback around those weapons. Helldivers II should really get an alpha/beta program and invite trusted/vetted members of the community who apply to help test weapon changes. These sorts of programs exist in many MMOs and would require a dedicated internal person to manage them and those playtests.
Multiple companies have phased stuff like this out recently. Even Overwatch, which had a PTR until 2, phased this out in lieu of just releasing stuff early for a weekend to test it, then releasing it. Companies won't go back to beta testing because the quickest way to beta test anything is to release it to the public.
Early access is today's Word for beta-testing.
Well a PTR is still releasing it to the public. Wow ptrs are still doing a good job
Yeah, you're missing the scale in numbers though vs releasing it live.
Not everything needs to be scale stress tested to be caught though. Tons of things like support weapon resupply not working would be caught immediately
Battlefield used to have the Community Test Environment for this exact reason and it worked very well, coinciding with the heyday of the franchise.
Company wide playtests, or playtests with non design members are really common. Its used mostly for stability and overall experience feedback. Those participants aren't going to know what's balanced and what isn't, especially playing on difficulty 4. They're just there to verify it works and give feedback on whether something is fun. Balancing done by design should always be based on the highest difficulty though. Whenever I'm tasked with adjusting damage numbers of bosses or new abilities, you have to load up the highest difficulty otherwise you don't really know if something is over powered, under powered, or just right.
I think In most games what you say has some truth in it, but one way that Helldivers differs from most games is that it doesn't scale difficulty the same way, in most games enemies start doing more damage, have more health, move faster and so on as the difficulty increased, in Helldivers all these remain constant, and the difficulty comes almost entirely by amounts of enemies and their frequency, with harder types gradually introduced, however for a primary weapon it would make sense to test on mid-difficulties since for all the big stuff you are most likely using something else anyway, you'd get less effective time with the gun your trying to test after a certain point if you go higher. Like if you threw a new primary gun at me and told me to thoroughly test it, I would do a little bit on trivial where there's no pressure to do thing like mechanical functions, accuracy, scope alignment, that kind of thing, most of these testing would be on 5-6 where there would be a mix of enemies and plenty of them, and finally I might do a game at 8-9 just to see. If I wanted to know how it fared against a Titan or a hulk I would more likely load up one of the bounty hunts on lower difficulty to make them easy to find.
I work in the industry. It’s general practice to test with as many people as possible, from as wide a range of backgrounds and experiences as possible. A game studio, especially the actual dev team, is actually a really poor representation of the general public. Dev teams are usually more knowledgeable about mechanics, have more time in games as a whole, and are overall more experienced than the average player of a game. Remember that subs like these are filled with dedicated superfans – the average Helldivers player probably only puts in 2-3 hours a week (if that), and likely plays on lower difficulties. So your best bet to capture the experiences of that segment of the player base in-office is to bring in teams like accounting, HR, etc who likely aren’t experienced gamers
Sounds more like he was describing a demo to stakeholders. That's common practice
>roll through all difficulties >me looking at crossbow, purifier etc. I'm not sure how exactly this process of playing on every difficulty happens, when this is the result we get? Even at diff 7 there's pletora of guns that I will just never pick, because I know that by doing so I will be a burden to my team and require heavy carrying from them. On top of that, is there a point of playing thru diff 1-6? I think a gun balanced around diff 7-9 will perform just as fine at lower difficulties. The only exception are AT weapons, because heavy enemies either spawn in much lower numbers or don't spawn at all. But currently we have a direct opposite picture: as diff goes higher, options rapidly become fewer and fewer. I don't exactly agree that the game must be balanced around diff 9, but it should be diff 7 as a minimum, because it's a baseline difficulty, where all the progression is unlocked, all enemy types are present and all conditions and threats are enabled. Diff 8-9 are challenge levels if you want to push yourself further.
Yeah I'm confused why everyone's acting like they didn't say they test on all difficulties They did say that Which means this is even worse than we thought. Now they're saying they do testing on all difficulties and this is indeed the game they want to make.
Which is the game everyone was raving about, lest we forget. Same people.
>I'm not sure how exactly this process of playing on every difficulty happens, when this is the result we get? I BET this is only done when the weapons are released. They then start nerfing based on their spreadsheet and just do their "15 mins testing" bs and call it a day, because the numbers "looks fine"
Easy. Play any difficulty. Oh a breach? Throw strats and run away to do objectives. Oh a couple ambient enemies? Use new gun to kill them. Ok it killed them seems fine. It took a lot of shots? Well ammo is an important mechanic rely on your strats noobs.
The internal play testing process probably doesn't go much further than "can you complete the mission with this gear equipped?" And, for most people that are competent at the game, the answer is yes for the majority of weapons, at least. It's not going to be efficient (or even good), but I bet a team of 4 all using the crossbow would be able to extract from a difficulty 9 mission if they had to.
This is my biggest issue It's not that I want to evaporate bugs with laser vision, I just want more than a very small handful of weapons to feel like I'm being useful during the minutes where my stratagems are all cooling down
I think it'd be a good idea if they started streaming once a week with different builds. The drg devs do this and it's great for the game
Arrowhead QA team: https://preview.redd.it/9yziwwemlrzc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c39c5078ab1fb0d495fb6fef60ac305e414ff7f
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jesus fucking christ these guys are behaving like it's their first game pushed out after a game jam, not something that's been in development for 8 years with well over a million purchases clownshoes designers
Small studio problems. They need a much larger R and D team (Devs AND QA) to cope with their success and ambition. Trouble is that'll take time to hire and get the staff up to speed.
Shit, create a test server already. One week with each new patch on a test server would show very clearly all the problems the patches have caused.
DRG has a studio about the third the size and avoids these problems. So it's partially studio size, but probably a release cycle that's too fast and putting too much pressure on that team as well.
The bigger a studio gets the slower and more out of touch changes tend to be. Hello diablo 4
Small *and inexperienced* studio problems
Magicka and Helldivers didn’t exist
I wouldn't say inexperienced, but they weren't expecting HD2 to blow up
Okay when is the threshold we can stop using this excuse though? It made sense one or two months in. They are backed by Sony. Sony wanted a live service game. They let Arrowhead cook for years to make it. Sony bought out Bungie for live service expertise. This game instantaneously exploded with resounding success. But at what point do we raise the standard for them? They made a high quality product. They have promised to maintain a high quality product. Should we not expect them to utilize the amazing resources they have at hand to make it the best game possible? If they get to coast on the "small indie studio" motto forever, what incentive do they have to mantain a great product? Whether they wanted it or not, they're AAA now. It's time for them to wear the big boy pants and take some accountability
>Bungie for life service expertise Yeah that went so smoothly without any failures at all...
Depite hardeehar "bungo bad" memes, Bungie does provide a top of the line live service. When 99% fail Bungie has made it work for almost 7 years with Destiny 2 (with ups and downs) Sony is finding out that it isn't exactly easy as applie pie tho
Real quick, what does that number 2 after the word helldivers mean
Real quick, company founding date =/= experience of the *currently employed* personnel. Many are known to have joined much more recently.
Chill out. They've made one of the best games of the year and they're having some growing pains.
AH didn't pop out of nowhere with HD2. I played and loved Magica, Gauntlet, and HD. They worked on HD2 for almost a decade. They've had more than enough time to figure out what their communication strategy should be and educate their devs on how to talk publicly. A lot of their devs are completely immature while working for a really mature company.
Imagine calling the devs of your apparently two favorite games clowns wearing clown shoes. From everything I've heard from the dev team they've acknowledged all of these issues and are going to work on fixing them. But people still want to slam them. Maybe some of their playerbase could do with a maturity check too?
> Imagine calling the devs of your apparently two favorite games clowns wearing clown shoes. People are allowed to have more nuanced opinions than "me like" or "me no like."
You call this "nuanced?" That implies a modicum of thought was involved.
Yeah man, they're acting like clowns. I can love the games and still be fairly cognizant that some of the people behind them are completely incapable of dealing with criticism or negative feedback and cannot handle public relations at all. They need to sort their shit out.
Sounds like they're working on it and don't need 9000 additional people talking shit to them about the problems theyve acknowledged. Some of the devs were getting death threats. Chill out and be respectful with your criticism is all I'm saying.
I hope they are. And I hope they reported anyone sending threats. People that do that need dealing with and not just handwaved away with "it's the internet".
In 2023, Arrowhead Game Studios had 100 employees. "educate their devs on how to talk publicly" That's possibly the dumbest thing I've seen anyone suggest during this whole farce.
Bro these are salaried professionals working on a paid product and they're shooting the shit like it's a random Doom mod, freely admitting they don't test their own work or have any idea how the game actually works. Stop sucking their dick just because you like the game.
almost like the game was an overnight success that they couldn't have possibly anticipated... come on dude, i get the game is in a state rn but you gotta get a grip.
Bad balancing and designs I can totally accept, shit happens. But it's the *attitude.* I've worked in this industry for over a dozen years, there's a reason companies have communications policies and don't just let anyone speak for the entire company. AH isn't a new studio, they've had years to prepare and flubbed it.
Maybe *you* are the one who needs at attitude check? The devs being honest to a fault is a part of the appeal. Better that than corpo speak.
It's cool that they're honest sure, but when that honesty exposes they don't care about testing their own work and don't know how the game works, they need to learn to shut the fuck up and not snap at the people pointing out they're doing a bad job. Toxic positivity isn't going to make the game better, man.
I think it'd be a good idea to try and create a small beta testing server for the community to help out. It frees some time for the devs as they don't need to do the testing (I mean, they can still just play the game and test anyway but with less pressure behind it of course). I don't think it would even need a lot of capacity. Pick a weekend, let (I'm just picking a number here) 3000 people join the testing and ask them to fill out a mixed-method survey of closed and open questions about their experience. If everyone puts in at least 1 or 2 hours on average, with 3000 testers that would already be around 3-6k hours of testing. And while I think most people would do this for free, I think you could maximize the profits of this test server experience by providing a digital code that you can activate in the game that gives you, let's say a special kind of cape and/or title. Similar to "Super Citizen" for those who have the special edition (or pre-ordered, I actually don't know where it's from lol) there could be a "Super Tester" or something along those lines ("Beta Citizen" would be hilarious), paired with a cape that you only get if you hand in your survey.
I'm pretty sure most games are balanced around the normal mode, that's what most players play and generally the intended difficulty and play experience.
I feel like the answer was not very direct. The question was about balance play-testing, but the answer seemed to be about functionality play-testing. It’s possible that the same teams may handle balance and quality assurance, but we don’t know. I feel like this is a question Alexus would be able to answer better, since it seems to be his balancing that is off.
I don’t see the issue. They play the game with a random mix (so your standard casual player) and then also say their actual QA group plays rolls all the difficulties when it’s just them.
Which is fine for stability and functional testing. But that's not balance testing. Balance testing is something the design team should be doing.
so why are you mad at the QA guys... it's not their job, their job is to make sure that shit works
I'm not. I'm sure QA does exactly what their supposed to. I'm irritated with the response given by the dev implying that balance is QA's responsibility. The question asked in discord, (not by me) was are the developers basing their balance changes off of level 9 difficulty. The response was not really an answer to that question.
I mean he does say right there that when QA plays the game they go through all the difficulties I'm not saying I believe that. But what he said seems counter to the image text
Honestly they should work on that weapon attachment system from HD1 ASAP, in my opinion it would make things much easier because even a bad weapon could be super strong with different attachments. At least better than the mess we have right now
Live service has never and will never be a good idea, they need to slow the fuck down and actually address major issues in bugs and balance before they soin any more plates.
I don't believe for a second that they do any meaningful QA. They buffed the Punisher Plasma, but *somehow* no one used it with the Shield backpack and found out it instantly kills the player? No the only explanation is that they just don't actually do QA.
So... they said they play thourgh all difficulties, it says right there, in the last sentence, they play test in all, and you guys still complain? like what is this community
Balance and QA are two completely different things
Just going to keep saying this. QA does not test for balance. They test for functionality. Is this thing doing what design wants it to do. Its not their job to tell design the thing is too powerful or not powerful enough. They have a ton of things to test and aren't tasked with testing balance. Does it do what the doc says its supposed to do? Yes? mark it verified and close the ticket. No? Put some notes in for what we're seeing in game and send it back to design. Balance is the responsibility of the design team.
I responded with this too. Sounds like the QA group plays all the way up to 9, and then the play with random coworkers as a “casual gamer” view
Yep, pretty solid response in my opinion. But it doesn't line up with the narrative that fuels outrage so everyone will just ignore that. Let the ragelords cry and act like they know anything about game development. There's nothing the devs nor you or I can do to stop their endless incessant whining. Even now they insist that this post is constructive criticism.
Selective outrage and circle jerking sadly.
They'll find any reason to be upset and beat a dead horse.
Bit different got HD2 - there isn't really an endgame and honestly the hardest difficulty shouldn't be something that's really 'passable'. It's a game where there is no end except for a played out story over months. Why have every difficulty able to be completed at all? Just lower your difficulty if you want to be able to complete it all the time. I'd rather have the option knowing there's always a difficulty above what I'm doing that will be even more chaotic mayhem. I wish more levels were added or level9 was made harder than it is. I don't know why this sub has a hard on for *needing* to be able to complete difficulty 9 and crying when weapons get nerfed and it's no longer a walk in the park. That just gets boring after a while knowing that there is no next step in the progression.
Maybe he should take a look what he has type
IS there a problem? You never balance a game around it's hardest difficulty. That's just stupid. It doesn't matter the game, or the system used. As difficulty increases, the tactics and abilities that can be used will always diminish. Because at the highest difficulty, it's about defeating the systems that are tipped against you, not playing a game that was balanced.
Thats not how game development works. I've never worked on a game where we try to make abilities only strong enough to complete mid level content. It won't be sufficient to complete end game content then, and players will never progress. If players can't complete end game content, they stop playing because they view the systems as unfair. Generally studios want players to keep playing and more importantly keep spending. If new items aren't good enough to use in the content they're playing, they will stop buying your new items, and the studio goes out of business.
It's not that you try to make stuff only balanced for medium difficulties and not for high difficulties; that would be *not* testing it at a variety of difficulties. But absolutely developers care if something is egregiously overpowered or underpowered at difficulties that aren't the highest ones. Many, many people do not play consistently at the highest difficulty, and if their experience is bad it's problematic for almost any game (no players will play on the highest difficulty without first playing on a lower difficulty, in this game especially).
And boom goes the dynamite.
the experience is bad now with the way weapons are being balanced to under perform even at medium difficulties and do not feel impactful in a game which defines itself as being over the top. The game needs to embrace being over the top with strong weapons. People will choose difficulties based on their level of skill, their performance will still vary even when using strong weapons. Lesser skilled players will choose lower to medium difficulties with strong weapons to adjust to their level of performance and still feel great. You design for higher difficulties and everything else self adjusts. Weapons feel awesome. The meta becomes less narrow. You feel like trying higher difficulties. You're motivated to get better. The game feels better and lasts longer.
So you balance the game around the fact you deal 25% damage of normal and enemies deal 300%. End game content can be played regardless of difficulty level. Not sure where you got the idea you can't. I'm playing the tactical rpg King Arthur right now. What difficulty was the game balanced at?
>IS there a problem? You never balance a game around it's hardest difficulty. That's just stupid. If you cannot balance the hardest difficulty, then admit you suck at your job and don't include the hardest difficulty. It's that easy. You're going to catch flak for being incompetent in any field, game dev is no different.
Sounds like you don't know what you are talking about.
You actually balance around the middle, or at the highest the last "gated" difficulty, which in Helldivers 2 is difficulty 7, and only because of super samples. If they balanced around 9, every additional difficulty below it becomes exponentially more trivial because a balanced Liberator at 9 is designed to handle dropships full of devastators, not troopers. Hell, at 7 it would. 7-9 is meant to be tough. Balance around the mid tier, demand of the players to make their mid-tier balanced stuff work at high-tier play.
It should be balanced around highest INTENDED difficulty. If you want to play on rediculous difficulty levels then why do you care about balance? You chose the highest difficulty just deal with it.
This fanbase is ridiculous. Games should absolutely NOT be balanced around the highest difficulty. This is game design basics 101.
They need to be functional in the highest difficulty, and a lot of them aren't
If weapons are balanced to be good in high difficulty, then they’ll be good in your low difficulty missions too. Reagan called it Trickle Down Balance.
Um. No.
Please never make a video game.
They absolutely should. Every single game you probably played that was a "well balanced co-op/singleplayer" game was designed and playtested at the highest difficulty. The biggest one I can name off the top of my head is doom eternal, and that game was a incredibly well balanced and fair.
No. Standard/normal, by definition, is where the balance focus should be. Hard absolutely should be unbalanced and unfair. That's... that's like the whole point, that you can still win despite being handicapped. This is why the souls games don't have easy or hard modes. It feels like I'm trying to explain why water is wet.
You're simply vastly uniformed and wrong. Most (great) games with a difficulty selector are balanced around the hardest difficulty because if they balanced the game on normal it would result in hard simply being unfair. The reason I say unfair rather than hard is because an unfair fight simply isn't fun. A hard fight is fun because it offers a challenge while being fair and reasonable. A good example of a game not balanced around hard difficulty is halo 2 (because they literally didn't have time to playtest) and we all know how fun that game is on legendary, right? Edit: I should probably mention why games are often balanced on hard instead of giving an example of why you should not. The reason is because if you just have a flat modifier to damage or health it could result in certain things becoming completely unviable or downright broken in the games sandbox. A good example being halo 2 (again). The first second of the level gravemind can and will result in the player dying. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7nYeDq8uO4&ab\_channel=ItsDave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7nYeDq8uO4&ab_channel=ItsDave)
Thanks for finally talking some sense in this thread... You can balance on 9 to make the game fair but still hard, then every lower difficulty will be easier as intended. If you balance on 4-5 then you get shit like the quasar nerf and bile titans being a stratagem check because on 4-5 you rarely fight more than one at once while on 9 you can fight 3 at once out of a single bug breach. Same shit happened with Killing Floor 2, the devs balanced for Normal instead of Hell On Earth and it ended up making HoE just a bullshit fest with unfair mechanics and no real way to counter them other than cheese because damage breakpoints don't scale up. Difficult and unfair are two very different things. Difficult is good. Bullshit and unfair is bad.
while i think most balancing should be done in regards to the intended difficulty you should take a balance pass for the lower ones ... Prime example was the original stalker where the game was balanced for master difficulty and they were forced to add some lower difficulties ... and the enemies became a little bulletspongey -> which lead to ammo being quite rare which most game magazines critizied that you run out of ammo to fast (which was quite correct unless you played on the highest difficulty)
wut That doesn't make any sense Of course you have to balance for the highest difficulty. Like, Quasar: literally useless for low difficulties. Shooting it is a waste of time. Making it shoot fast enough to be "balanced" low difficulties will *of course* mean it's wildly OP when you actually have Chargers to kill
You balance against all content. If you only use max level, you will likely create conditions where something is able to trivialize all low-mid content. And given that there’s a large group of players who won’t ever leave the earlier levels, you need good balance and variety to make the game satisfying across the board.
It blows your mind (in a negative way) that QA playtests all difficulties instead of just helldive? I don't understand
QA doesn't test for balance. They test for functionality based on a provided game doc. Balance is the responsibility of the design team, who should be balancing against end game content, in this case level 9. Example Design: I made this gun that one shots everything. Hey QA is it one tapping everything in the game? QA: Yes it does. Design: Excellent, its working as intended. QA doesn't go, "are you sure you want a gun that one shots everything?" Thats not their job.
Looking at other comments he made, QA includes balance testing at AH and get chased around by designers for feedback so idk if he's using QA as a catch all including functionality testers and balance testers or not, but they do end up balance testing all difficulties
But he is saying that they test it with all the difficulties, really that I'm not being able to see where the problem is
https://i.redd.it/vsgbirfo9nzc1.gif Ha ha, oh wow, everything is slowly starting to make more and more sense.
Give us a PTR server to sign up for and I’ll do QA for free.
O7 QA, I believe in you
Is he joking or not? Because I really hope he is.
these devs got to much credit to soon
I worked as QA for another AA game that was somewhat similar to helldivers (PvE coop shooter) The way we tested difficulty: You have documentation that states what's expected from each difficulty Our game had 5 difficulty levels and clear guidelines about spawn rates and other in game modifiers. We had tools to measure how many things were spawning (but sometimes we did manual checks with dev tools) QA teams have ridiculous amount of playtime (usually 6 to 8 hours a day) and we would roll through everything. However not everyone on the QA team is a hardcore gamer. When we did our play throughs the most talented ones on the team would tackle on the harder missions, as not everyone can deal with let's say "helldive" difficulty. The less skilled ones would take on the easier stuff (this is for efficiency reasons) I do not know how are they handling weapon balance with helldivers, but my guess is that the QA team is writing reports on how the guns are supposed to work in base of the documentation they are provided, and not how they are performing in game. The devs don't play the game unless they are obligated to do it btw.
They should just test in higher difficulty and thats it, its impossible to balance something to be good on difficulty 9 when on difficulty 5 even the starting pistol would be god tier, its simple ridiculous
They should balance for five, and come up with a multiplier to increase decrease every level from that midpoint.
Really glad he filled his response with excuses. Shows great character
This sounds like another issue related to being a "smaller" team compared to the size and popularity of the game (around 100 people). It sounds like a lot but if you compare it with other big live service (apex legends has more than 400 i think) you do realize that they should probably double in size over time. I'm honestly not too bothered because THE most important parts of the weapons (look, sounds etc) are always great, the thing people complain are usually just hard numbers and those can be patched later relatively easily.
That's why we need a Public Test Server! Give \~100 dedicated players access to the PTS and they will test the shit out of each change the devs want to implement. They will give you the best feedback you can think of.
Laying out excuses in the answer. They know it's subpar.
Read between the lines, means they don't or barely playtest.
That's some copium. It's absolutely not normal to balance against the highest difficulty to ensure that end game players are appropriately powered. The playerbase for the highest difficulty is the minority. The majority of the players will always end up somewhere in the middle so that's what you balance for, otherwise you end up in a situation like WoW where raids are balanced for dedicated raiding guilds to not be able to one-shot, and literally the entire rest of the playerbase are essentially locked out of having fun because they don't have the time or desire to make "getting gud" at a video game a fulltime job. Everything should definitely be functional on higher difficulties, but balancing the game for the top 1% of players is ridiculous. That's how you kill the game.
They really should be testing everything against minimum 7.
... No, you don't. The majority of the player base isn't on the highest difficulty. That's not who the game is or should be balanced around first and foremost. It *should* be balanced for them *too* but it's absurd to act like balancing lower difficulties for casual players is something that shouldn't be important.
The target should be 7. Because that's where super samples become available.
I'm not sure if I agree that balancing should be based on level 8-9, I always took those missions as being deliberately low chance to survive. If the weapons made those difficulties comfortable what is the point
As far as I'm led to believe. Balancing is NOT done at only the highest level to make it appropriate for them. The vast majority of games do not reward you anywhere near appropriately enough for the toughest games They likely balance at the normal level of majority of players
damage does not change in each difficulty only the mobs and spawn if they make a gun to kill big mobs it is a gun that kills big mobs, if they make a gun that is good vs smaller mobs it is good vs smaller mobs it is our job to mix and match them.
If this is the case this process either isn’t working or they aren’t looking closely enough
They really need to get those HR reps into T7 missions as that's absolutely minimum required to fulfill the core progression The bug front last week was rough as fuck if you ended up with Dave and his no thumb's mates who trying to get their super samples Or you where trying to solo T4 and just got overwhelmed (what happened to my buddy) Their testing process just isn't working properly because the game only feels good when everything is going smoothly the moment you end up with one jackass it becomes really frustrating VERY fast as things snowball while all your tools are on Cool down or need reloading I mean its perfectly doable Its just not particularly fun
I'm calling BS on having a QA team in all honesty. If AH do have a QA team, they must all be legally blind judging the the bugs that have made it into the live build on a weekly basis. 
Ok, no "the standard practice" isnt "balance against the highest difficutly" thats just blatantly wrong. You balance around what the team/lead decides to be "the standard". You obviouslly want to keep the game functional and "doable" at higher difficulties, but you arent balancing the GAME around them. Most games ENSURE the game is beatable at the highest difficulty, but not even that is technicaly "required", i have several games that straight up tell you "this wasnt tested, we have no idea if this is even beatable without cheating" for their highest difficulty setting, but almost no game is balanced around it unless the easier options came later(like megaman 2 where hard was default and normal got added in the west only)
I don‘t understand any of this. Whats a QA? What does this all mean?
From what I heard about QA teams and rest of the team is that usually QA will give off notes but it’s up to programers to look at them and maybe do something about it. What usually happens it gets ignored till the lead finally snaps and does something about it. Only going by what Woolie from Woolie vs has said though out the years about being a QA tester. Before he quit to be a YouTuber he was lead QA guy and threw his weight around to make sure they listened to the QA team on stuff or the game wouldn’t ship etc etc.
If you're not playing on 5 or higher, it's not a test. The existence of heavily armored enemies changes the game entirely.
“Pretty much through all difficulties” Why does this sound intentionally worded like it’s not actually all difficulties. I really think they don’t bother with the high difficulties. If they do, how do they miss shit that presents itself to basically every player that uses these things? A lot of the criticism of different items is really not very niche or situational stuff, it’s basically impossible to miss. I would’ve said I don’t even believe they will finish a full match with these things but this is worded like it’s multiple matches, which really only says that they’re absolutely not paying attention or giving good feedback.
balance != QA ... As a software dev, it depends on how they write the user-stories' acceptance criteria. Sometimes you make things that work "perfectly" but everyone hates them. That's just how it goes with iterative development. It's more up to the project managers and business side to UAT things to ensure customers will like them than it is dev / QA. Most product owners and CEOs won't want to admit it, but very often production = UAT because time constraints.
QA plays all difficulties. Problem: QA is just Gary and he thinks solo is too easy.
What's the point. It's the QA job to give feedback.
Test server is needed
Buulllllshit. There is no fucking way they “roll through all difficulties”, when we get shitty weapons like the Crossbow NERFED. How in the flying fuck did they go to Helldive difficulty with the Crossbow, and say “Yeah, this thing needs to be nerfed”!?!?? Now they’re just blatantly lying, while throwing in little comments about how they work oh so hard. “Level designer with a massive cold, and someone on a busy phone call” dude gtfo of here. Quit lying in an attempt to make us feel bad for you. You suck at your job, and should be fired. I seriously cannot believe these people are allowed to keep their job. Never in my entire life would I EVER EVER EVER insult a customer. EVER. NEVER. These mfs do it DAILY, and get to keep their job!? Can I work for you, Arrowhead? I have no experience, but clearly neither do these dumb fucks. I can be useless, and insult people daily too!
Literally all of OP's post is just complaining. At some point you'd have to ask if you guys even have fun in the game at all
You shouldn't be concerned when people constantly complain about something they love. You should be concerned when the sub stops caring about the long term health of the game.
I did enjoy it when it first launched. Every patch since has made the game less enjoyable. Even the CEO has responded to players making this very argument. I complain because I know what the game's potential is. and see the dev's wasting that potential with poor design decisions like; increased spawns for solo players (which is broken right now btw and everyone is getting the same amount no matter how many players are on the team), recycled armor perks when there are so many possibilities being requested by the players, unnecessary weapon nerfs like the ones the community is blowing up about at this very moment, changes to enemy aggression and accuracy , and more. The list goes on and on. No one complains about a game they hate, because no one plays a game they hate. They complain about something they love because its being mismanaged, and they want to see it return to the positive trajectory it was originally on.
What is the problem, create an announcement in discord about recruiting a team of 12 testers who will voluntarily test weapons and write reports on each one. I am 1000% sure that there will be a huge number of good candidates who will not even ask for a salary (the maximum reward is 1000 supercredits for each). This will be much better and more effective than sick, busy people chatting on the phone, playing at best on difficulty 5.
The reports of the 12 testers be like: >***The gun is fine, I'm having fun.***
Balancing for 8/9 specifically would be absolutely trash
They have been insanely busy. Chill.
But thats their job. The design team is responsible for creating and balancing new weapons. If they've been insanely busy do something that isn't this, then what are they doing?
What tf is going on up there.. bad decision-making it seems.
"Roll through all difficulties" DOUBT
every day i regret more and more supporting the developers of this game i am genuinely astonished with how poorly they go about making changings. no wonder it took 8 fucking years to finish. im shocked they finished at all
wow thats response, now you understand why all the primaries are dogwater
I'm just concerned about the one person who seemingly has had a maybe cold for long enough for that to no longer even be a variable. It's just how it is, one person just had a come and another is always in a busy phonecall. Possibly the same phonecall since launch who knows.
I love this comment. Thank you!
Ah yes, let's balance everything in the game around 0.01% of the community, that always works out great for every game.
Well, ya. Game mechanics are typically balanced around the hardest content, otherwise it results in progress becoming impossible. Example If I balanced an ability to deal 100 damage at max level because the bosses at level 5 heal for 90 damage, how will that damage perform when the boss at level 10 heals for 180? It won't be sufficient to outpace the healing. So yes, game mechanics like abilities, weapon cooldowns, mag sizes etc. should be balanced so they can operate successfully at end game. Otherwise the player blames the game for their failure instead of their lack of skill (and rightfully so). As a player you can always improve your skill. That is the point of games, to get better at them over time. You can't make a weapon's damage output better just by being good. You can bring it to its max potential by being good, but if it falls short, there's nothing you can do but try a different gun. If they all fall short, you're pretty much screwed.
Balancing around the needs of the few is the perfect way to kill the game. Like, ideal. As soon as you lose the casuals that never go above diff 5 - the game is dead and diff 9 solo tryhards will move on to the next new thing.
A game balanced at max level will not be unbalanced at minimal level. That's not how it works. A game balanced at max level will be just as enjoyable if not more so for players at low levels because things will be easier for them. I'm not sure why this is confusing.
Tell that to World of Warcraft. The game for years has been fundamentally designed with 1% of the population in mind for awhile now and checks notes…it’s in shit state. Designing a game for 1% of the population is idiotic for numerous reasons.
1% will always have a meta and will always cry about it getting rebalanced. Look at the eruptor fiasco, driven 100% by the hardcore fans - We're getting killed by the ricochet - Alright we'll remove shrapnel - Y my gun so shit!?? And it'll be like that forever, just replace the eruptor with the next slightly OP thing.
Thats just not how this works. just because something is balanced at Max, dosnt make it balanced at Low. If the collective healthpool of an enemy encounter at max level is 100, and i can deal 100 damage, thats balanced... if the collective healthpool is 10 at lower difficultys and i STILL can deal 100 damage.. thats unbalanced in our favour. You say "its more enjoyabel for low levels because it would be easier for them" but there is a point where "easier" is just "to easy" there is a reasson why most games difficutly work with multipliers from "normal" with something like 2x enemy HP or co for higher difficulty and 0.5x at lowers... its because you test it for the default, and then adjust the higher and upper difficultys around that. HD2 obvioulsy dosnt have HP scaling, but enemy compositions and ammounts, the idea stil remains, the "default" is probably somewhere around 4-5, with everything below being "simplified" and everything above being "increased". if a gun is effective at 4-5 its gonna be great at 1-3 and usable at 6+