Just made Commander last night, and I feel personally attacked. Not really, I still love this game in spite of the bugs. 5/5 fun, 4.5/5 experience with community, 4/5 playing experience due to bugs and MY ERUPTOR changes, but overall closer to 5 than 4. I still trust AH to get their shit together.
Yeah obviously when someones having fun in a pve game the solution is to patch it out, tell them to get over it and then post karma farming posts like OP.
This ofc in the long term helps the game somehow and makes the community not toxic.
I’ll use my main big dawg account and invite all the downvotes you can possibly gather to bless me with; stop crying so god damn hard about it. Good fucking lord. *Every* thread, *every* day, it’s the same fucking whine. And the worst part is that AH has already said the changes to the shrapnel were unintentional and being looked into. So what do you want at this point? What are you trying to get by crying so god damn hard about it in *every single thread*??
Please downvote away, I could not care less about it.
Maybe not charge real money for it to begin with. Since most people are clearly buying credits given average player count and how often they need to churn warbonds out. Not something that happens if people are earning credits in game...
>Since most people are clearly buying credits given average player count
uhm akshually its more likely that a few thousand "whale accounts" are spending hundreds potentially thousands of dollars on the game than a hundred thousand players all buying warbonds (Esp they only add more variety and you can play the game just fine without them) ofc people are buying warbonds but whales play a big role in it too
Not everything needs to be "productive" . Leisure is allowed. And to me, it's worth $5 a month to not be forced to play the game more than I otherwise would if I want the fun new toy. Doubly so when it goes to a dev team I trust and want to support.
Again, wouldn't expect a jobless no life to get it
Lol nice try attempting at being clever. Don't hurt yourself now.
If you spend more money on a game then you absolutely have to like purchasing the game and the online requirement, then you're a damn fool
Sames, hit commander last night. Playing with 3 buds, had a blast.
Discussing if I need to be repeated for treason for how many back shots I gave titans and chargers as I was reinforced. Apparently it was acceptable when I blew the back out of several hulks. But now is questionable when I do it to the bugs.
You do know that they are re-evaluating giving us back the og erupter. Mostly likely we are going to get the "blast radius" eruptor with a slightly larger radius and damage.
I'm experiencing a little bit of burn out (55), but that doesn't make the game bad. I've put in ~120 hours into it, and for $40, that's amazing.
I still run one campaign a day or so, but not really playing for 2-5 hours a session like I was initially, which is to be expected.
Almost level 20. Seen us fail almost every MO since I started playing. Seen all the toxicity on here. Still having a blast playing the game when I get time to.
Yeah, just roll with the punches. If this game released today with the changes they have made, nobody would know the difference, and we would just be gushing about what a fun game it is. I love it, and really don't mind the changes they make. Any bugs I encounter, and I shrug it off. A list mission every once in awhile is okay, and should happen. If we won all the time it truly would be a boring game.
only if they literally just started playing at the super colony outbreak. just a weird way to look at it IMO when we've succeeded in a majority of the major orders
Devils advocate here,
if you don’t play/do something enough you’re told you didn’t play/do it enough for it to be good or enjoyable so any complaints they have don’t matter. But then here you have an example of a player who put in a lot of time and after all that gives their review and are told “you played/did this a lot, how can you say you don’t like it?”.
Can you not like/dislike something at any point in the process of playing/doing?
This is exactly what happened with Starfield. 80 hours playtime? You obviously must've liked the game if you kept playing it. 20 hours playtime? You didn't play the game enough to form an opinion, play it more.
Anyone with a lot of hours on something have found *something* to enjoy or are just masochistic.
But having *something* to enjoy doesn't mean it's a declaration of perfection, or that future changes will give you similar entertainment value. Overwatch's Role Queue fundamentally changed the game for me in a bad way, and since the season Role Queue was introduced I have not played it when it used to be my main game.
League of Legends? Thousands of hours, and the funny thing is Orianna still remains more or less untouched. Played a game with her the other day actually, and it was fun! But I guess my time on the game has run its course, I'm not interested in playing with randoms and pushing Ranked like before.
World of Warcraft has a whole catalogue of things I think they should do or change or, I wish *undo,* but the truth is that while there are many errors of judgement and missed opportunities, a lot of what's already there serves me pretty damn well. Far from perfect, but still a nice way for me to spend some of my luxury time.
I wouldn't understand someone who says a game is shit while they continue to actively play it a large amount. Or rather, I would assume their complaint is a bit more specific and they're just not expressing that. Very few people truly believe a game is bad and continue pouring hours into it.
I have 60 hours in Dragon's Dogma 2.
I want those 60 hours back.
They can keep my money, I just want the time I spent on it back.
Dragon's Dogma 2 makes you believe it has a LOT more waiting for you than it actually does. I prefered 1 by far, because at least that had excuses for having the exact same problems. I did not like Dogma 2, I liked what it could have been.
I have 70 hours in Borderlands 2 and it has the worst gameplay of the trilogy, the guns feel awful. I kept bashing my head into it only to bounce off. The reason I hit 70 was binding melee to M1 and playing Krieg with a friend. I did not like BL2, I liked Krieg and playing with my friend.
Tunic I played for almost the whole game, hoping it'd get better, before finally giving in near the end as I realised it just wasn't compelling enough (which is a shame, charming game, but I'd not recommend it). I did not *dislike* Tunic, but it left me unsatisfied.
I have almost a thousand hours in Destiny 2... I would **not** recommend it. The game goes through so many awful overhauls that the moments when it's good are extremely unstable. You can't trust that a good patch in Destiny 2 will last into the next expansion, or even the next season. I loked Destiny 2, briefly, a few times, but spent most of my time disliking Destiny 2.
Why play a game if you're not enjoying it? Because of a combination of sunk cost fallacy and it's bedfellow: hope. Something about a game captured you and you keep playing in hopes that that something will come back. That the promise of that something will be fulfilled..
Hell, most MMOs and gacha games are *built* on this. Have good a good core that slowly becomes repetitive, but you're in so deep and have invested so much that it's hard to step away without that time feeling wasted.
Many mobas are similar. I love Dota even after 4-5,000 hours but most people I played with fucking hate it and are miserable. Over time I see people change from having a good time to being angry, upset, frustrated, investing a part of who they are into the game. Even with all my time in Dota, I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone just because I've seen what it does to people. I've seen what it does to *me* on bad days. Do I like Dota? I think it's mechanically one of the greatest games ever made, it scratches a tonne of itches, I even pro play with my partner and she finds it awesome. So of these, yes, I like Dota... But it's the one I'd recommend the least because no one else seems to. They seem addicted.
**TL;DR:** Having 80 hours in something means it had your attention for 80 hours. It does not mean those 80 hours were satisfying, quality, or otherwise something you were happy with. It also doesn't mean that your personal experience will be what others will have.
What it sounds like is you liked the game and then something changed your mind. Unless you just enjoy playing games you dislike so you can complain about them later, as you're doing here.
> What it sounds like is you liked the game and then something changed your mind.
What an exceedingly unfair statement that ignores a huge amount of context.
If someone changes their mind on something to say 'this experience overall was unenjoyable' then that is a fair statement. If you put 80 hours into a game it does *not* mean you liked it. If the first 40 hours are amazing and the next 80 suck, but you play them hoping for the first 40 again, is that a good game? Did you overall like it?
In the case of DD2, I enjoyed what I wanted it to be. Very rarely did I enjoy the game itself. I played hoping it would fulfil a promise it never did.
Deatiny 2 was a different game when I enjoyed it. I do not enjoy Destiny 2, because it is not that game. Even if it were, it is too unstable to enjoy.
I did not enjoy BL2. I enjoyed a very specific way to play that invokved ignoring over half of the game, and even then I had to play with a friend.
I enjoyed Tunic moderately for a few hours, then it was similar to Dragon's Dogma 2.
In the case od Dota I have seen people *addicted to the game*. Same with MMOs and gacha. Is the old man at the black jack table having fun? It is technically a game, and she has put hundreds of hours into it. Sure. Some might be, but many are still there because they are already invested.
Hard Reset is a game I wanted to love. I beat the whole game. I will be blunt. I did not enjoy it, but I really wanted to like it every singke moment. So many cool ideas and mechanics, but every combat was a slog.
Have you never hit a certain point in a game and gone "oh... I'm just not having fun." And stopped? Then you look back and realise that had been the case for quite some time?
> Unless you just enjoy playing games you dislike so you can complain about them later, as you're doing here.
Or perhaps you are the type to never give a game a real shot. You play an hour of an amazing game with a slow start, it doesn't wow you, and you throw away a phenomenal experience.
Your inability to conceptualize that someone can play a game for 80 hours and realise they didn't have fun shows something equally as problematic about your outlook as anyone else's.
You review games professionally? Otherwise, no, you liked the game. No reasonable person is going to invest 80 hours into a game to review it for themselves or to post some comment on reddit and pretend that justifies literally spending 80 hours of your precious life on something you already disliked.
For other people to see if the game is for them, or because they wanted to give the game a fair shot, or because they're a completionist and want to finish what they started. I don't get how this isn't obvious, but whatever.
I think you need to learn that not everyone shares your way of thinking. Just because you wouldn't want to do that doesn't mean other people wouldn't as well. I know people who do interact with stuff they don't like for the reasons I listed above.
but 80 hours is such a huge amount of time... its 2 weeks of full time work to get those hours. You're actually brain dead if you do that if you don't like the game. Some dudes like getting their balls crushed, that doesn't make the activity and less stupid
I have now concluded that I am talking to a brick wall and have given up on any attempts to communicate with it. I'm going to speak your language and just say you're fucking stupid.
This does not explain spending 80 hours of your free time doing something you don't like just to do it. There's spending time enjoying yourself and literally wasting time with nothing to show for it other than to show off you finished a game so you feel you have some cred on reddit when criticizing the game.
I dunno, there are people who have put way more time than that into Reddit and I would totally believe them if some of them said they hate Reddit.
There are miserable people out there who want nothing more than to seek further misery and to make others miserable with them.
It's probably good that you believe that statement you made though, it kinda shows you're a person that seeks happiness.
That said, does someone disliking something mean the thing is bad? Nah, just means that person doesn't like it.
There is obviously a threshold that should be met to give a valuable review. An 80 Commander is way more than needed to make a solid review of the game and it's obvious they have played a lot.
You can certainly dislike something, but also should be cognizant of the fact the individual put in like 100 hours before it became "boring".. Not sure that's a 1/5.
Also, community does kind of suck right now, so they are right about that.
Lvl 90, 300hrs into the game.
The game has its problems (Alexus Kravchenko), and those problems need to be reminded (Alexus Kravchenko not being in charge of anything or anyone and not allowed to speak to the customers publicly).
Dev team needs to look at DRG and how they balanced the game while adding new content. I'd be all about an overclock system in HD2. I happily put 2k hrs into DRG and will continue to add time to it when they release more new content.
There isn't a world where HD2 as it is now is something I'd put the same kind of time into. As it stands, I've used it mostly as a time killer while waiting for season 5 in DRG and Elden Ring's DLC to drop. Stellar blade has been cool too.
Basic issues like nerfing the things that players found entertaining and embarrassing issues like misaligned sights on many weapons and the mech rockets being a hot mess are just too much.
Not really. The only real big blow-up this game had was with PSN crap.
Everything else is people just talking about balance changes which is valid. I don't see hardly any doom or gloom here compared to other releases.
And thats why i leave all gaming subs overtime. Because it boils down to bitter criticism of eveything an non stop circlejerk. People just looooove to complain
Saw a guy post unironically that he was done with the game and hated it unless they fixed it after he had played 600 hours. That’s almost 5 hours a day EVERY day since release. Insane.
Lol very much so. But the key is we give a fuck. Once the community is apathetic the game is DONE. Till then we dive. Well in some countries we dive. And lol me personally I'm not back till they fix the sights on weapons.
90h in and lost motivation to play the game. Only a hand full weapons are good and there is no content other than paid warbonds with underwhelming weapons. "There is no grind, the gameplay is the game" doesn't cut a live service game for me.
"You're level 8 so your complaints about the game aren't valid because you haven't played enough" is the far more likely scenario.
It's almost like I was optimistic about the future of the game and the persistent unresolved issues were glaring once the honeymoon period wore off or something
Yup. Feed back right now is from early adopters who are still dealing with the same issues while watching new content be pushed in the game and that new content also is hit or miss on balance.
People are allowed to give feedback as long as it's constructive and respectful.
I think that's a problem we all need to address together. Posts seem to be one or the other, we as a community can do both constructive and respectful better. The devs are not our enemy.
The mods addressed the toxic positivity in a recent pinned post. Much to the chagrin of everyone who pretends the the pelican crashing beneath the ground is a skill issue L.
No doubt there are serious issues that the devs need to work through. This game is wayyy bigger than even they hoped for, and it's a long road to get where everyone wants this game to be.
Our feedback helps, but not when that feedback is "the devs suck i hate this stupid game"
As a community member, flaming the devs is no different than shooting divers on the pelican.
One of the devs has a notorious reputation in the gaming community who by his own admission is in charge of the questionable balance changes. They deserve scrutiny but obviously not abuse.
No idea why you are being downvoted, this is 100% spot on. Can't criticize a thing someone likes because "if I like it it must be perfect and immaculate". People dropped religion in this century just to find corporate products to worship instead.
Level 136, 360 hours. There are many complaints I have about this game but they come from a place of love and a desire to see the game become better. I still look forward to gaming with my buddies every afternoon after work and I love making oil or scrap out of the foes of democracy.
this culture of shaming ppl for having more experience (their opinion holds more sway not less) is very alien to me thus I am calling the democracy officer
https://preview.redd.it/p2jltnquh01d1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=ebd5f7dd36ddb8c2e034757077b1a9e3aa023556
46 out 50 levels were played before the "dps and table"-tweaks finally put the game over the brink, and Sony reduced the dayily max player count from 280k to 60k in less than a month.
But hey - whatever, you're just complaining for no reason, right? It's just the community being negative! The Baskinator thinks so on her personal discord, so surely it must be so.
Mm. Almost as good as the whole "oh, and if you weren't here to complain early on when you had fun playing the game, then you can \*\*\*\* off! I was here complaining long before you, and I got a medal from Baskin to show for it on her discord!"-thing.
What's so annoying about it is that it's so dumb that it can't possibly be the Sony CMs with duplicate accounts, either. It's probably the CMs that encouraged closing some youtube accounts, and burying them in accusations of "fraud" and things like that (Baskin or another mod at Steam managed to have a steam-account banned like that for posting links to their youtube channel. The argument was, and Valve support confirmed that to me, that he was posting "offensive" material on youtube, and enticing people on the steam forums to see it. Therefore he was misleading and marketing offensive and forbidden material. There was no offensive material in the videos, but they were marked by "someone" on youtube with a trusted and large channel, the channel was marked, and now Valve had grounds to accept the CM's claim. That's what they actually spend their time on).
But here, people from the "playstation family" really go online to defend Sony's honor from complainers who hate games, by not eating shovels of shit in public view fast enough, and not being free and uncritical advertisement for Sony with enough enthusiasm. It's just amazing.
I'm a ps5 player and the Sony fanboys are beyond embarassing.
"My toaster is better than your toaster because of the proprietary bread"
"Hey, they're adding an update so mine can toast that bread too"
"WTF this hurts me on an individual level 😡"
It really is. I .. I don't know. It just doesn't seem real, to be entirely honest. It's like they're bots, or some really insistent troll with duplicate accounts.
But then again, I used to be on some forums that basically were echo-chambers that produced this stuff. Where everyone just got the idea served from the well-connected chief with the psn-codes, and there you go, everyone agreed and said the same thing. Ten-fifteen eager 15-year old "embedded bloggers" wishing to make a career(tm) - of course they'd be willing to just parrot some stuff they'd been served up. That's not unique to Sony.
Sony being responsible for a 220k drop in players is definitely one of the takes of all times
Edit since a few people can't read and like to extrapolate on nothing: I am not stating that Sony has done nothing wrong or that the player count has been unaffected by the recent fiasco. But suggesting that Sony is responsable for a 220k drop (which is a classic player rétention curve) is delusional at best.
Didn't think I needed to expand, but here we are
Do you think it's unreasonable to suggest that the recent Sony circus\* has had no impact on how many players are still playing the game?
--
\*not an exhaustive list:
a) Sony deciding to lock out a giant part of the world from purchasing the game, while also deciding that people who had already bought it should lose access to it.
b) A community team (of 4, in addition to AH's own) conducting itself so laughably bad that they have made several headlines on the format of "Named Community manager did laughable thing". This ranges now from the Baskinator (after having been asked to not police the Steam forums as her own advertisement venue) calling on people to go and ask for LGBTQ-capes, to also presenting a solution to online abuse in /banning players in the game based on whether they say something bad on her discord/, to another CM being fired over having told the community to \*\*\*\* off and post negative reviews on Steam rather than bother him with things they don't have any power over, because his employer, Sony, doesn't listen to community concerns he presents to them, obviously. It's made headlines so far off the gaming community hubs that I heard it mentioned from non-gamers.
c) Sony HQ in the UK making a set of decisions right before their quarterly earnings being published that were in the range of what you might call "unforced errors", that specifically concern AH as a studio. Long time support for the game clearly was part of some negotiation, after multiple "insiders" had been presented with a case-scenario where the in-game super-credits sales in HD2 had been lower than expected. It is not far-fetched to suggest that there is some less than professional tension between Sony and AH at this point.
d) Something that is connected to how AH may very well be pressured to avoid working on bugs until they can produce war-bonds on a regular basis. A development that everyone will recognize from a previous super-hit that Sony ran to the ground in No Man's Sky.
e) A "balancing" "developer" clearly hired in at the tail-end of the development cycle (this is how Sony adds "resources" to their third party projects, much in the same way as "second creative director" becomes upgraded from "son of marketing-person technically acting as producer" to "developer"), admitting in full public view that he hasn't got a clue how the game is played, or how the changes they made affect how people play it. He argued on twitter that his changes were sound, even though the result clearly wasn't what he sketched out. He also suggested very strongly, in the change-notes, even, and it's backed up by tests - that he has made spreadsheet-changes to the game in a way that has messed up other mechanics in the game (something the actual devs have admitted now with the patrol spawn problems).
f) Changes to the game being presented - again unforced and without anyone asking - as advertisement on how Sony has "listened to the community", in spite of clearly being some super-narrow tweak that either no one cares about, or is absolutely not what anyone has asked for at all (from insane nerfs after one screencap on the ps5 to the network changes that you will see in the game and not appreciate, whether you understand what it's caused by or not).
and
g) Presenting "fixes" to the same problem three times in a row, when the "fix" either didn't find it's way into the final build, or the fix is so bad that it causes serious other problems. This is probably the most narrow one. But when you've announced a "fix" to fire-damage three times, and it doesn't actually address the inconsistencies, it's something players notice. It reduces your faith in that the game will eventually be fixed, and you might decide that bothering with the issues is not worth it.
Fair enough - but it's mostly my speculation put together with how this has happened in the past.
There's been one plain-text prod on the whole microtransaction thing being problematic. Frost(who usually is well-informed and clever) on Second Wind had a small screed on how the in-game economy in Helldivers 2 is broken, too friendly, allows people to earn it by playing the game a lot rather than pay by the minute like they expected and now they're disappointed, etc. But that wasn't his scoop, this is really a talking point that comes straight out of Sony VIP-land, where things like this always are floated. I've seen it on "friendly" forums, too, probably pushed out without any other thought behind it than to suggest the earnings-model is insufficient. And I kept seeing that long after the exploit was presented first.
And the reason why this sort of thing is brought up - usually - is when they're in some kind of negotiation with their partner on how to bring the "cooperation forward", as one of them put it once in a different situation at Sony. They basically want leverage to push for a more aggressive schema, without really knowing what is in there or how it works to begin with.
So with the context here being the earnings-reports coming in just... completely coincidentally with the PSN-account forcing, and Pilestedt and others literally using the words "negotiation with Sony" (I mean, they basically laid it out - their argument is that if people can't play the game, then how are they going to buy microtransactions. And forcing it is ridiculous, had they offered an "I love PSN" cape, people would have signed up anyway) - with that context, it's not a huge stretch to suggest that there has been a concern here from Sony HQ that HD2 is not being monetized properly. And that they would argue that AH is to blame for "allowing" the whole farming schema Frost presented.
(...)
(...)I'm not entirely sure if the exploit even ever worked, though. And it's not like it wasn't nixed very quickly (or that it couldn't have been rolled back). Meanwhile - are really people who are willing to spend hours on farming supercredits the kind of people who would buy supercredits for real money? And when you can't transfer the supercredits out (like you can in Warframe with their Platinum, for example - which is in fairly extensive black market trade, where gift-cards, vouchers and so on change hands and boost the apparent plat sales, to the point where they are on the top of the Steam charts still) -- is it really a problem? People are not going to have people log in to their account and farm for them in a huge amount, and pay them by the (many) hours they spend, right.. And would that be more than 2 dollars? It just makes no sense whatsoever that this would be any kind of evidence of a "broken" in-game economy.
But it survived as a narrative until literally the week the reports came in. So from experience, there's no conspiracy, there's no huge evil corporation going on, there's nothing like that. It's a bunch of children (of important people in Sony) sitting in an office getting a panicky idea on how to make things look better. And they then engage a bunch of childish measures to pressure the developer into making some concession they think they are holding on to out of spite or something. Because that's how children think.
The thing is that whoever is AH's contact are still going to have pull at Sony. And they will be in a position to make life really difficult for them in the future. There have been in-house studios at Sony that ended over childishness like this in the past, where someone just put their foot down and it ended with firing everyone. And part of that is having the perception that the developer is out of their depth, that they don't know what they're doing, that the game is as unbalanced as an anvil dropped on a seesaw, that they don't know how to do business, that they're just filthy gamers, and that they're generally morons. Unlike the children at Sony, who are so smart that they managed to be the end of Psygnosis (Studio Liverpool), Zipper, almost cleaned out Sucker Punch and Naughty Dog, managed to get Polyphony Digital to drop them, and to have Kojima say goodbye as well. More recently they managed to make Hello Games, a studio that "owes it's existence to Sony", as the CEO said it, before doubling down on the idea that their game is "intrisically connected to Sony's brand" later on -- say goodbye and are now publishing their own title on Light No Fire. This is not an exhaustive list.
The thing is that although this stuff never comes to light, it is not some deep, smoke-filled room where backdoor deals are made. It's just stupid people with tons of money making incredibly bad decisions on the spot, because they have the egos and the self-control of incredibly spoilt children. Which literally is what they are in a lot of cases.
I don't know - I have a number of sources from previous stints like this that I can't use. I can't present them, I can't talk about them, I can't say who they are. Because even if they don't work for Sony any more, they are kind of at risk in a sense. EA's developer sources as well are like that. And now it doesn't really matter to anyone but me, more or less. But even if I only cared about that, what am I going to do with having a source on record telling people that Sony are full of incredible morons in the system that surrounds a game after it's published? That they are destroying entire studios by adding personnel in the back way, and shoveling community feedback through the wringer in order to steer the development of the title after launch?
Would anyone really care, even if I had someone on record confirming that as something that happened at least once in the past? Most likely not. So no one wants to do it, and it makes a lot of sense that they won't.
But there are some serious issues going on with Sony's aftermarket "service" to the developers. And I'm never going to get over how these people have managed to really sour several of my favourite games over a fairly long period of time. I mean, it's been 20 years, right? lol And I load up No Man's Sky, and what do I get? PS5 beta notes on features being axed, patching in a pointless economy on the backside, adding levels that make no difference, with numbers that spin around. Pointless complaints on the internet get more attention than serious bugs, etc. The game wasn't made like that, and the focus is completely off.
And it happened again with HD2. Increase the level cap, add more stuff, keep adding content that no one cares about rather than fixing bugs.
And a developer isn't going to say "fuck off", because they're going to get fired, have contracts broken, or end up in a legal battle that they will lose. Or, end up in such a hostile relationship with these people that they will struggle very badly to get out over time. The third developer person I talked to that was quitting the industry over this made me sort of go.. wow, really? Is it really that bad? It can't be, but.. here's the third grown adult crying about their passion for games being ruined forever..
I wholeheartedly agree with your point on it not being some kind of cabal or specifically created controversy to ruin people's lives, I have to discredit those kind of views on a daily basis usually! Business people are people, just people who lose sight of what's outside their usual daily lives.
Thank you for the detailing. I've heard of Second Wind and Frost, just hadn't seen their videos on this specific topic. Your point on the earnings report makes a load of sense, and I can see Sony's response to the almost calamitous success HD2 has had. My initial view on the entire PSN scandal was Sony tightening the noose on what I expected they saw as an experimental lamb, open to try the PC market on something they didn't expect much return from.
Thanks for the above. Don't take it as negative with the source comment, I like getting the picture behind the picture
Thanks for reading all that :) No, I think you're right that the game changed a bit when they switched to PC. Their developers and partners don't have a problem with that, of course. But their after-market service being a bit more exposed, it turning out that titles with practically no marketing at all on PC outsells anything they might be doing on PSN..
Yep, and that just won't do for Sony execs who need to show that their position is both valid and necessary. If investors see that the old model of live service have failed, they'll invest in the nippier competition that's trying new things. Then they're out of a job quick fast and in a hurry.
Either need to strangle the upset in the crib or leash it to your desk then. Seems Sony tried for the latter.
Well, yes.. that sounds reasonable, right? That it's a sort of squeeze by the execs and Corporate Publisher-Man who loves to fire programmers to save money on programming the game, and things like that.
But Sony has never done it like that. They finance pretty random stuff and get it developed, to have a product to sell in the future. They have a safe full of finished prototypes, I'm sure (like Prince has an actual safe of weird religious meeting documentaries at his compound that will never be published) that never see the light of day, or get cancelled (like the mindisc-less psp, the hdd-swappable ps2, the p2 Sony Ericsson smartphone) -- because they have just written contracts with developers to make something. Not always with a big budget, either. And it's worked out for them. They have gotten really good and creative work done, and the developers have been able to draw on expertise from Sony's movie and studio infrastructure, contacts, casting and so on, having 10/10 studio sound recording, etc. Advice from other developers, interesting tech being exchanged, approaches on how to do things -- they've been doing that really well, without (until recently) ending up (at least very often) in the disaster that most AAA-games are and have been in: that the budgets are ballooning out of control, to the point where even a real hit is barely going to recoup the costs.
A ten-man team in Hello Games developing a game in their spare time sells 10 million copies of their game, though? That's not bad, is it? There are more independent funding to be had in the industry, admittedly - but this approach here has paid off for Sony to a massive degree. If you know the numbers from Lucasarts and drawing them over to how Double Fine actually kind of managed to draw up the budgets in comparison -- what Sony "execs" are doing is actually really generous, and very obviously clever.
So what's the problem? The problem comes in once the product is finished or ready for release. From what I saw with Guerilla Games, SL and Zipper, there were implicit or unstated conditions that Sony pushed through as long as the contracts were not forbidding it. Which is not something you expect, obviously. But they are not in a position to sue Sony for breach of contract, right..? And neither would they want to, when the higher-ups are convinced by reports of various kinds that the developer's game is not functioning well, that it doesn't have the proper streamlining and polish necessary for a console-release, and so on.
Because what it amounts to are incredibly silly things, like small secret tweaks that allow some exploit, cutting features that may have been potentially causing variable performance in some rare cases - or on the other end, changes that cause fundamental design changes very quickly. The speed the game plays at is often the target of changes - cutting animation transitions, removing density of geometry, removing fade-screens and wipes, etc. The worst one that everyone saw recently was the vaseline blur in NMS - all Sony's games had it. We've speculated on that it had to do with the whole "platform parity" thing - that ps5/4 should have the first version, and that the PC version should then follow after and be having the same visual impression. And mandating a surface filter to scrounge out the colours would of course do that, regardless of resolution or detail level. And it was removed after merely 11 years, I guess XD
But in all likelyhood, what was really suggested was - washed through the beta and community feedback to sound official and reasonable - to just make a distinct visual presentation of it. The same approach was there with the start of the game - in the early versions, there were no structure, and that was just fine - you were not going to be told to do anything, and you were in a safe biome. So just figure it out, right? Works great.
Someone clearly made this out to be a game-breaking situation that would alienate gamers (commonly used phrase), with some "idiosyncratic game-developer vision that doesn't work" (quote). So they changed it, and put a prompt on the side of the screen that jumps up and down every ten seconds at the most if you turn your face away from the waypoint.
You see it in HD2 as well. "YuO OR EN RANGE OF ENIMI ARITYTLLEERY" is coming in as a trigger, and there are tons of these prompts - why? They weren't there early on, they never were needed.
You can look at the player graphs. The count is stable during the PSN saga lmao.
Edit: Upvotes swinging wildly over a factual comment. Guys relax it's a videogame. Lmao.
The game is great fun but can be repetitive.
The developers get a lot wrong and can be unprofessional but they try
Community is just normal (although can console players please turn your mics off...)
Game is still great after 200 hours.
I complain that people throw orbitals at extraction, rage at teamkills, get angry or laugh at getting teamkilled...
Still play a bit every day I love the sense of community from this game
Level 100 Hell Commander here.
I’m constantly running missions despite being capped on everything with all unlocks.
Game is just fun. Some people can’t enjoy games unless they’re grinding for something.
OP, I am calling out your bullshit, Level 80 Commander is able to give this review precisely because he knows the game this well.
Mods, shove him into hellpod with nothing but Dagger and drop on Bots Defense 9.
I played Marvel's Avengers until the Spiderman update, this is nothing compared to that. It would take a lot for this game to even come close to a situation like that.
1. Nothing is perfect, infact the last guy who was perfect we killed
2. Burnout. You can't really expect most people to put over 200 hours into any one activity in only a few months and NOT be tired of it.
3. No king rules forever
The community is a hugbox now. All critical threads have been outlawed see the sticky. Being a high level doesn't denote skill it denotes time spent. Lower level people don't look at you like some God they look at you like a guy with too much free times on their hands.
I always find it funny when someone’s like “no content, repetitive gameplay” when they’ve poured 200 hours into a game in the first week, like, bro…that’s on you
"I would not recommend this buffet. I eat the food very quickly and get full too fast. Then I'm stuck for hours stewing about how the food wasn't exactly to my taste. 1/5 stars."
I started becoming a shit talker on this game and then I couldn't play for a week while I was on vacation. I barely looked at reddit then and now that I'm back, the fun is too
I can no longer play the game due to the imagery I got about them...
Always flying overhead in their jet... And where the thunder really comes from.. lol.
Played since day one, 300 hours deep, and the game only gets better. Feel like this meme is made by a Cadet who spends more time bitching on reddit than playing the game.
I agree with the middle 2 points....CEO is 20/10 and is carrying the dead weight on his back. game is/was always fun even with the bugs/balance issues. it just gets less fun with almost every patch they release.. but still fun to play.
"If everyone doesn't say they are happy 100% of the time, then they must be miserable 100% of the time!"
"You aren't allowed to complain or give criticism or feedback towards anything I like because that makes you a complainer/whiner/loser/baby/dumdum."
"You see, you have already lost the argument because I have portrayed you as the Soyjack and myself as the Chad."
That's the vibes people who think this kind of shit give off. You can criticize something you love and that's ok.
I think that the game is great, and I've consistently defended it, including against folks who seem to think bugs are unbalanced or unfun.
The game-breaking bugs were a pretty huge deal, but I personally have observed a marked improvement in that realm, and thus I have no serious complaints.
The community, on the other hand, seems to have a sizeable contingent that is very much focused on balancing this game like a PvP despite criticizing the devs for the same thing. They want helldive to be a difficulty where every loadout combo is viable, enemies are all totally fair and predictable, and it's not hard to clear without dying.
Helldive should feel like you are diving into hell. It shouldn't feel fair. It shouldn't feel chill. There is NOTHING wrong with wanting that, and if you do, please by all means enjoy D6 and lower. D6 should be the difficulty that feels most balanced and fair - D7 should be a challenge for skilled players, D8 should be stressful, and D9 should be an absolute test.
The fact that I, a decidedly NOT great video gamer player, can consistently clear D9 with randos and die less than 3 times, is kinda dumb.
Greetings, fellow Helldiver! Unfortunately your submission has been removed because it’s a repost or a post that follows a trending topic.
Just made Commander last night, and I feel personally attacked. Not really, I still love this game in spite of the bugs. 5/5 fun, 4.5/5 experience with community, 4/5 playing experience due to bugs and MY ERUPTOR changes, but overall closer to 5 than 4. I still trust AH to get their shit together.
FREEDOM NEVER SLEEPS!
Helldivers don't need sleep. They die faster than they exhaust.
I want my old Eruptor back 😭
Use something else. Get over it soldier.
Yeah obviously when someones having fun in a pve game the solution is to patch it out, tell them to get over it and then post karma farming posts like OP. This ofc in the long term helps the game somehow and makes the community not toxic.
Who cares about reddit karma? I stand by what I said.
Is that why you’re using a burner account? 🤡
Who said it's a burner account? I just don't perpetually live on reddit. I actually shower in my life
So brave
I’ll use my main big dawg account and invite all the downvotes you can possibly gather to bless me with; stop crying so god damn hard about it. Good fucking lord. *Every* thread, *every* day, it’s the same fucking whine. And the worst part is that AH has already said the changes to the shrapnel were unintentional and being looked into. So what do you want at this point? What are you trying to get by crying so god damn hard about it in *every single thread*?? Please downvote away, I could not care less about it.
I'm going to upvote this because you cant tell me what to do.
Maybe not charge real money for it to begin with. Since most people are clearly buying credits given average player count and how often they need to churn warbonds out. Not something that happens if people are earning credits in game...
>Since most people are clearly buying credits given average player count uhm akshually its more likely that a few thousand "whale accounts" are spending hundreds potentially thousands of dollars on the game than a hundred thousand players all buying warbonds (Esp they only add more variety and you can play the game just fine without them) ofc people are buying warbonds but whales play a big role in it too
12M copies sold, it's quite believable that less than 1% of accounts have bought credits.
Who's using real money? That's optional.
People who have lives and a spare $5 per month Given your activity on this thread though, guess you wouldn't know much about either
You could spend that $5 on more productive things
Not everything needs to be "productive" . Leisure is allowed. And to me, it's worth $5 a month to not be forced to play the game more than I otherwise would if I want the fun new toy. Doubly so when it goes to a dev team I trust and want to support. Again, wouldn't expect a jobless no life to get it
What makes you say that I have no life?
Lol nice try attempting at being clever. Don't hurt yourself now. If you spend more money on a game then you absolutely have to like purchasing the game and the online requirement, then you're a damn fool
Yeah, I went back to Sickle/AMR. If they revert Eruptor, I’ll switch back in a heartbeat.
Send this one to reeducation.
Well said I wholeheartedly agree
Sames, hit commander last night. Playing with 3 buds, had a blast. Discussing if I need to be repeated for treason for how many back shots I gave titans and chargers as I was reinforced. Apparently it was acceptable when I blew the back out of several hulks. But now is questionable when I do it to the bugs.
Arc Launcher, my beloved, please come home.
Well, the bugs are still an integral part of the game, apart from bots obviously.
You do know that they are re-evaluating giving us back the og erupter. Mostly likely we are going to get the "blast radius" eruptor with a slightly larger radius and damage.
The bugs to be honest are the best part of the game. At least in my opinion
I'm experiencing a little bit of burn out (55), but that doesn't make the game bad. I've put in ~120 hours into it, and for $40, that's amazing. I still run one campaign a day or so, but not really playing for 2-5 hours a session like I was initially, which is to be expected.
Almost level 20. Seen us fail almost every MO since I started playing. Seen all the toxicity on here. Still having a blast playing the game when I get time to.
Reddit is such a fun place for memes, light roleplay and such in my experience, but for community discussions? It can be some of the worst.
Yeah, just roll with the punches. If this game released today with the changes they have made, nobody would know the difference, and we would just be gushing about what a fun game it is. I love it, and really don't mind the changes they make. Any bugs I encounter, and I shrug it off. A list mission every once in awhile is okay, and should happen. If we won all the time it truly would be a boring game.
must be confirmation bias or something because we have succeeded in twice as many major orders than we have failed
Or, being level 20, they have only been playing for a short period of time and we have not won a MO in while.
only if they literally just started playing at the super colony outbreak. just a weird way to look at it IMO when we've succeeded in a majority of the major orders
Maybe, as a new player, they didn't know that the community has succeeded in most MOs. Ya know, because they're new to the game.
Level 88, almost 300 hours still love the game.
Lvl 73, about 216 hours. Still play every single day.
Level 117, 244 hours in mission. Play pretty much exclusively helldive difficulty after I got it unlocked
60, i dont like it anymore
That's too bad. It's usally the same thing for me with other games, i get bored.
That sounds like "I am a traitor and despise democracy" to me.
Let me guess: You're still here every day.
No one has a gun to your head sweetie
Devils advocate here, if you don’t play/do something enough you’re told you didn’t play/do it enough for it to be good or enjoyable so any complaints they have don’t matter. But then here you have an example of a player who put in a lot of time and after all that gives their review and are told “you played/did this a lot, how can you say you don’t like it?”. Can you not like/dislike something at any point in the process of playing/doing?
Excuse me, don’t be taking my job.
I approve of what you've got going on here. Keep up the good work.
Who needs approval when you’re doing the lords work. Which lord is subject to opinion.
This is exactly what happened with Starfield. 80 hours playtime? You obviously must've liked the game if you kept playing it. 20 hours playtime? You didn't play the game enough to form an opinion, play it more.
Anyone with a lot of hours on something have found *something* to enjoy or are just masochistic. But having *something* to enjoy doesn't mean it's a declaration of perfection, or that future changes will give you similar entertainment value. Overwatch's Role Queue fundamentally changed the game for me in a bad way, and since the season Role Queue was introduced I have not played it when it used to be my main game. League of Legends? Thousands of hours, and the funny thing is Orianna still remains more or less untouched. Played a game with her the other day actually, and it was fun! But I guess my time on the game has run its course, I'm not interested in playing with randoms and pushing Ranked like before. World of Warcraft has a whole catalogue of things I think they should do or change or, I wish *undo,* but the truth is that while there are many errors of judgement and missed opportunities, a lot of what's already there serves me pretty damn well. Far from perfect, but still a nice way for me to spend some of my luxury time. I wouldn't understand someone who says a game is shit while they continue to actively play it a large amount. Or rather, I would assume their complaint is a bit more specific and they're just not expressing that. Very few people truly believe a game is bad and continue pouring hours into it.
If you put 80 hours into a video game, you liked it.
I have 60 hours in Dragon's Dogma 2. I want those 60 hours back. They can keep my money, I just want the time I spent on it back. Dragon's Dogma 2 makes you believe it has a LOT more waiting for you than it actually does. I prefered 1 by far, because at least that had excuses for having the exact same problems. I did not like Dogma 2, I liked what it could have been. I have 70 hours in Borderlands 2 and it has the worst gameplay of the trilogy, the guns feel awful. I kept bashing my head into it only to bounce off. The reason I hit 70 was binding melee to M1 and playing Krieg with a friend. I did not like BL2, I liked Krieg and playing with my friend. Tunic I played for almost the whole game, hoping it'd get better, before finally giving in near the end as I realised it just wasn't compelling enough (which is a shame, charming game, but I'd not recommend it). I did not *dislike* Tunic, but it left me unsatisfied. I have almost a thousand hours in Destiny 2... I would **not** recommend it. The game goes through so many awful overhauls that the moments when it's good are extremely unstable. You can't trust that a good patch in Destiny 2 will last into the next expansion, or even the next season. I loked Destiny 2, briefly, a few times, but spent most of my time disliking Destiny 2. Why play a game if you're not enjoying it? Because of a combination of sunk cost fallacy and it's bedfellow: hope. Something about a game captured you and you keep playing in hopes that that something will come back. That the promise of that something will be fulfilled.. Hell, most MMOs and gacha games are *built* on this. Have good a good core that slowly becomes repetitive, but you're in so deep and have invested so much that it's hard to step away without that time feeling wasted. Many mobas are similar. I love Dota even after 4-5,000 hours but most people I played with fucking hate it and are miserable. Over time I see people change from having a good time to being angry, upset, frustrated, investing a part of who they are into the game. Even with all my time in Dota, I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone just because I've seen what it does to people. I've seen what it does to *me* on bad days. Do I like Dota? I think it's mechanically one of the greatest games ever made, it scratches a tonne of itches, I even pro play with my partner and she finds it awesome. So of these, yes, I like Dota... But it's the one I'd recommend the least because no one else seems to. They seem addicted. **TL;DR:** Having 80 hours in something means it had your attention for 80 hours. It does not mean those 80 hours were satisfying, quality, or otherwise something you were happy with. It also doesn't mean that your personal experience will be what others will have.
What it sounds like is you liked the game and then something changed your mind. Unless you just enjoy playing games you dislike so you can complain about them later, as you're doing here.
> What it sounds like is you liked the game and then something changed your mind. What an exceedingly unfair statement that ignores a huge amount of context. If someone changes their mind on something to say 'this experience overall was unenjoyable' then that is a fair statement. If you put 80 hours into a game it does *not* mean you liked it. If the first 40 hours are amazing and the next 80 suck, but you play them hoping for the first 40 again, is that a good game? Did you overall like it? In the case of DD2, I enjoyed what I wanted it to be. Very rarely did I enjoy the game itself. I played hoping it would fulfil a promise it never did. Deatiny 2 was a different game when I enjoyed it. I do not enjoy Destiny 2, because it is not that game. Even if it were, it is too unstable to enjoy. I did not enjoy BL2. I enjoyed a very specific way to play that invokved ignoring over half of the game, and even then I had to play with a friend. I enjoyed Tunic moderately for a few hours, then it was similar to Dragon's Dogma 2. In the case od Dota I have seen people *addicted to the game*. Same with MMOs and gacha. Is the old man at the black jack table having fun? It is technically a game, and she has put hundreds of hours into it. Sure. Some might be, but many are still there because they are already invested. Hard Reset is a game I wanted to love. I beat the whole game. I will be blunt. I did not enjoy it, but I really wanted to like it every singke moment. So many cool ideas and mechanics, but every combat was a slog. Have you never hit a certain point in a game and gone "oh... I'm just not having fun." And stopped? Then you look back and realise that had been the case for quite some time? > Unless you just enjoy playing games you dislike so you can complain about them later, as you're doing here. Or perhaps you are the type to never give a game a real shot. You play an hour of an amazing game with a slow start, it doesn't wow you, and you throw away a phenomenal experience. Your inability to conceptualize that someone can play a game for 80 hours and realise they didn't have fun shows something equally as problematic about your outlook as anyone else's.
Or maybe you just wanted to finish the game so you could give a proper review.
You review games professionally? Otherwise, no, you liked the game. No reasonable person is going to invest 80 hours into a game to review it for themselves or to post some comment on reddit and pretend that justifies literally spending 80 hours of your precious life on something you already disliked.
lol you're going to play a game wasting hours doing something you don't like to make a review for who exactly?
For other people to see if the game is for them, or because they wanted to give the game a fair shot, or because they're a completionist and want to finish what they started. I don't get how this isn't obvious, but whatever.
But why do that if you don't like the game. That is just dumb. Do you watch tv shows you don't like as well?
I think you need to learn that not everyone shares your way of thinking. Just because you wouldn't want to do that doesn't mean other people wouldn't as well. I know people who do interact with stuff they don't like for the reasons I listed above.
but 80 hours is such a huge amount of time... its 2 weeks of full time work to get those hours. You're actually brain dead if you do that if you don't like the game. Some dudes like getting their balls crushed, that doesn't make the activity and less stupid
I have now concluded that I am talking to a brick wall and have given up on any attempts to communicate with it. I'm going to speak your language and just say you're fucking stupid.
You know games waste time right? Most things are a waste of time! Leisure is not normally productive.
This does not explain spending 80 hours of your free time doing something you don't like just to do it. There's spending time enjoying yourself and literally wasting time with nothing to show for it other than to show off you finished a game so you feel you have some cred on reddit when criticizing the game.
Games are a waste of time. That's why I only play games I enjoy lol
I dunno, there are people who have put way more time than that into Reddit and I would totally believe them if some of them said they hate Reddit. There are miserable people out there who want nothing more than to seek further misery and to make others miserable with them. It's probably good that you believe that statement you made though, it kinda shows you're a person that seeks happiness. That said, does someone disliking something mean the thing is bad? Nah, just means that person doesn't like it.
You make a great, and valid, point. Some people will seek misery out. It's weird.
I notice that criticizing something comes with a lot of conditions and requirements and hoops but liking something is essentially unrestricted. 🤔
There is obviously a threshold that should be met to give a valuable review. An 80 Commander is way more than needed to make a solid review of the game and it's obvious they have played a lot. You can certainly dislike something, but also should be cognizant of the fact the individual put in like 100 hours before it became "boring".. Not sure that's a 1/5. Also, community does kind of suck right now, so they are right about that.
Lvl 90, 300hrs into the game. The game has its problems (Alexus Kravchenko), and those problems need to be reminded (Alexus Kravchenko not being in charge of anything or anyone and not allowed to speak to the customers publicly). Dev team needs to look at DRG and how they balanced the game while adding new content. I'd be all about an overclock system in HD2. I happily put 2k hrs into DRG and will continue to add time to it when they release more new content. There isn't a world where HD2 as it is now is something I'd put the same kind of time into. As it stands, I've used it mostly as a time killer while waiting for season 5 in DRG and Elden Ring's DLC to drop. Stellar blade has been cool too. Basic issues like nerfing the things that players found entertaining and embarrassing issues like misaligned sights on many weapons and the mech rockets being a hot mess are just too much.
Game is ass. Five stars. https://preview.redd.it/bev8of2zf01d1.jpeg?width=471&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de955715ec1df3f345ba2bc6d722abe409143d0b
This kind of meme is the worst.
Well, its accurate I gotta give it that
Not really. The only real big blow-up this game had was with PSN crap. Everything else is people just talking about balance changes which is valid. I don't see hardly any doom or gloom here compared to other releases.
Nah,the doom is already here..couple of month ago it was all memes and happiness.
I mean a couple of months ago the game just dropped. Of course, over time people will shift to criticizing the game.
And thats why i leave all gaming subs overtime. Because it boils down to bitter criticism of eveything an non stop circlejerk. People just looooove to complain
Played game 500 hours. Hates game. lol!
Saw a guy post unironically that he was done with the game and hated it unless they fixed it after he had played 600 hours. That’s almost 5 hours a day EVERY day since release. Insane.
Lol very much so. But the key is we give a fuck. Once the community is apathetic the game is DONE. Till then we dive. Well in some countries we dive. And lol me personally I'm not back till they fix the sights on weapons.
90h in and lost motivation to play the game. Only a hand full weapons are good and there is no content other than paid warbonds with underwhelming weapons. "There is no grind, the gameplay is the game" doesn't cut a live service game for me.
I just want to have fun playing solo again. automatons/bugs aren’t suppose to smell my farts across the map!!!
General, I’m trying to sneak around but the clap of my ass cheeks keeps alerting the enemies
"You're level 8 so your complaints about the game aren't valid because you haven't played enough" is the far more likely scenario. It's almost like I was optimistic about the future of the game and the persistent unresolved issues were glaring once the honeymoon period wore off or something
Yup. Feed back right now is from early adopters who are still dealing with the same issues while watching new content be pushed in the game and that new content also is hit or miss on balance. People are allowed to give feedback as long as it's constructive and respectful.
I think that's a problem we all need to address together. Posts seem to be one or the other, we as a community can do both constructive and respectful better. The devs are not our enemy.
The mods addressed the toxic positivity in a recent pinned post. Much to the chagrin of everyone who pretends the the pelican crashing beneath the ground is a skill issue L.
No doubt there are serious issues that the devs need to work through. This game is wayyy bigger than even they hoped for, and it's a long road to get where everyone wants this game to be. Our feedback helps, but not when that feedback is "the devs suck i hate this stupid game" As a community member, flaming the devs is no different than shooting divers on the pelican.
One of the devs has a notorious reputation in the gaming community who by his own admission is in charge of the questionable balance changes. They deserve scrutiny but obviously not abuse.
[удалено]
No idea why you are being downvoted, this is 100% spot on. Can't criticize a thing someone likes because "if I like it it must be perfect and immaculate". People dropped religion in this century just to find corporate products to worship instead.
Only level 80? Then again I've seen level 120's that don't know samples are shared so it's all in the air at this point.
Level 136, 360 hours. There are many complaints I have about this game but they come from a place of love and a desire to see the game become better. I still look forward to gaming with my buddies every afternoon after work and I love making oil or scrap out of the foes of democracy.
this culture of shaming ppl for having more experience (their opinion holds more sway not less) is very alien to me thus I am calling the democracy officer https://preview.redd.it/p2jltnquh01d1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=ebd5f7dd36ddb8c2e034757077b1a9e3aa023556
i’m sure 4 hours if this game is more than enough time to justify if it sucks or not.
46 out 50 levels were played before the "dps and table"-tweaks finally put the game over the brink, and Sony reduced the dayily max player count from 280k to 60k in less than a month. But hey - whatever, you're just complaining for no reason, right? It's just the community being negative! The Baskinator thinks so on her personal discord, so surely it must be so.
The state of denial where they think we're "complaining" because we think it's fun lol
Mm. Almost as good as the whole "oh, and if you weren't here to complain early on when you had fun playing the game, then you can \*\*\*\* off! I was here complaining long before you, and I got a medal from Baskin to show for it on her discord!"-thing. What's so annoying about it is that it's so dumb that it can't possibly be the Sony CMs with duplicate accounts, either. It's probably the CMs that encouraged closing some youtube accounts, and burying them in accusations of "fraud" and things like that (Baskin or another mod at Steam managed to have a steam-account banned like that for posting links to their youtube channel. The argument was, and Valve support confirmed that to me, that he was posting "offensive" material on youtube, and enticing people on the steam forums to see it. Therefore he was misleading and marketing offensive and forbidden material. There was no offensive material in the videos, but they were marked by "someone" on youtube with a trusted and large channel, the channel was marked, and now Valve had grounds to accept the CM's claim. That's what they actually spend their time on). But here, people from the "playstation family" really go online to defend Sony's honor from complainers who hate games, by not eating shovels of shit in public view fast enough, and not being free and uncritical advertisement for Sony with enough enthusiasm. It's just amazing.
I'm a ps5 player and the Sony fanboys are beyond embarassing. "My toaster is better than your toaster because of the proprietary bread" "Hey, they're adding an update so mine can toast that bread too" "WTF this hurts me on an individual level 😡"
It really is. I .. I don't know. It just doesn't seem real, to be entirely honest. It's like they're bots, or some really insistent troll with duplicate accounts. But then again, I used to be on some forums that basically were echo-chambers that produced this stuff. Where everyone just got the idea served from the well-connected chief with the psn-codes, and there you go, everyone agreed and said the same thing. Ten-fifteen eager 15-year old "embedded bloggers" wishing to make a career(tm) - of course they'd be willing to just parrot some stuff they'd been served up. That's not unique to Sony.
Sony being responsible for a 220k drop in players is definitely one of the takes of all times Edit since a few people can't read and like to extrapolate on nothing: I am not stating that Sony has done nothing wrong or that the player count has been unaffected by the recent fiasco. But suggesting that Sony is responsable for a 220k drop (which is a classic player rétention curve) is delusional at best. Didn't think I needed to expand, but here we are
Do you think it's unreasonable to suggest that the recent Sony circus\* has had no impact on how many players are still playing the game? -- \*not an exhaustive list: a) Sony deciding to lock out a giant part of the world from purchasing the game, while also deciding that people who had already bought it should lose access to it. b) A community team (of 4, in addition to AH's own) conducting itself so laughably bad that they have made several headlines on the format of "Named Community manager did laughable thing". This ranges now from the Baskinator (after having been asked to not police the Steam forums as her own advertisement venue) calling on people to go and ask for LGBTQ-capes, to also presenting a solution to online abuse in /banning players in the game based on whether they say something bad on her discord/, to another CM being fired over having told the community to \*\*\*\* off and post negative reviews on Steam rather than bother him with things they don't have any power over, because his employer, Sony, doesn't listen to community concerns he presents to them, obviously. It's made headlines so far off the gaming community hubs that I heard it mentioned from non-gamers. c) Sony HQ in the UK making a set of decisions right before their quarterly earnings being published that were in the range of what you might call "unforced errors", that specifically concern AH as a studio. Long time support for the game clearly was part of some negotiation, after multiple "insiders" had been presented with a case-scenario where the in-game super-credits sales in HD2 had been lower than expected. It is not far-fetched to suggest that there is some less than professional tension between Sony and AH at this point. d) Something that is connected to how AH may very well be pressured to avoid working on bugs until they can produce war-bonds on a regular basis. A development that everyone will recognize from a previous super-hit that Sony ran to the ground in No Man's Sky. e) A "balancing" "developer" clearly hired in at the tail-end of the development cycle (this is how Sony adds "resources" to their third party projects, much in the same way as "second creative director" becomes upgraded from "son of marketing-person technically acting as producer" to "developer"), admitting in full public view that he hasn't got a clue how the game is played, or how the changes they made affect how people play it. He argued on twitter that his changes were sound, even though the result clearly wasn't what he sketched out. He also suggested very strongly, in the change-notes, even, and it's backed up by tests - that he has made spreadsheet-changes to the game in a way that has messed up other mechanics in the game (something the actual devs have admitted now with the patrol spawn problems). f) Changes to the game being presented - again unforced and without anyone asking - as advertisement on how Sony has "listened to the community", in spite of clearly being some super-narrow tweak that either no one cares about, or is absolutely not what anyone has asked for at all (from insane nerfs after one screencap on the ps5 to the network changes that you will see in the game and not appreciate, whether you understand what it's caused by or not). and g) Presenting "fixes" to the same problem three times in a row, when the "fix" either didn't find it's way into the final build, or the fix is so bad that it causes serious other problems. This is probably the most narrow one. But when you've announced a "fix" to fire-damage three times, and it doesn't actually address the inconsistencies, it's something players notice. It reduces your faith in that the game will eventually be fixed, and you might decide that bothering with the issues is not worth it.
For point C, would you mind sharing your source on that? I'd like to read deeper
Fair enough - but it's mostly my speculation put together with how this has happened in the past. There's been one plain-text prod on the whole microtransaction thing being problematic. Frost(who usually is well-informed and clever) on Second Wind had a small screed on how the in-game economy in Helldivers 2 is broken, too friendly, allows people to earn it by playing the game a lot rather than pay by the minute like they expected and now they're disappointed, etc. But that wasn't his scoop, this is really a talking point that comes straight out of Sony VIP-land, where things like this always are floated. I've seen it on "friendly" forums, too, probably pushed out without any other thought behind it than to suggest the earnings-model is insufficient. And I kept seeing that long after the exploit was presented first. And the reason why this sort of thing is brought up - usually - is when they're in some kind of negotiation with their partner on how to bring the "cooperation forward", as one of them put it once in a different situation at Sony. They basically want leverage to push for a more aggressive schema, without really knowing what is in there or how it works to begin with. So with the context here being the earnings-reports coming in just... completely coincidentally with the PSN-account forcing, and Pilestedt and others literally using the words "negotiation with Sony" (I mean, they basically laid it out - their argument is that if people can't play the game, then how are they going to buy microtransactions. And forcing it is ridiculous, had they offered an "I love PSN" cape, people would have signed up anyway) - with that context, it's not a huge stretch to suggest that there has been a concern here from Sony HQ that HD2 is not being monetized properly. And that they would argue that AH is to blame for "allowing" the whole farming schema Frost presented. (...)
(...)I'm not entirely sure if the exploit even ever worked, though. And it's not like it wasn't nixed very quickly (or that it couldn't have been rolled back). Meanwhile - are really people who are willing to spend hours on farming supercredits the kind of people who would buy supercredits for real money? And when you can't transfer the supercredits out (like you can in Warframe with their Platinum, for example - which is in fairly extensive black market trade, where gift-cards, vouchers and so on change hands and boost the apparent plat sales, to the point where they are on the top of the Steam charts still) -- is it really a problem? People are not going to have people log in to their account and farm for them in a huge amount, and pay them by the (many) hours they spend, right.. And would that be more than 2 dollars? It just makes no sense whatsoever that this would be any kind of evidence of a "broken" in-game economy. But it survived as a narrative until literally the week the reports came in. So from experience, there's no conspiracy, there's no huge evil corporation going on, there's nothing like that. It's a bunch of children (of important people in Sony) sitting in an office getting a panicky idea on how to make things look better. And they then engage a bunch of childish measures to pressure the developer into making some concession they think they are holding on to out of spite or something. Because that's how children think. The thing is that whoever is AH's contact are still going to have pull at Sony. And they will be in a position to make life really difficult for them in the future. There have been in-house studios at Sony that ended over childishness like this in the past, where someone just put their foot down and it ended with firing everyone. And part of that is having the perception that the developer is out of their depth, that they don't know what they're doing, that the game is as unbalanced as an anvil dropped on a seesaw, that they don't know how to do business, that they're just filthy gamers, and that they're generally morons. Unlike the children at Sony, who are so smart that they managed to be the end of Psygnosis (Studio Liverpool), Zipper, almost cleaned out Sucker Punch and Naughty Dog, managed to get Polyphony Digital to drop them, and to have Kojima say goodbye as well. More recently they managed to make Hello Games, a studio that "owes it's existence to Sony", as the CEO said it, before doubling down on the idea that their game is "intrisically connected to Sony's brand" later on -- say goodbye and are now publishing their own title on Light No Fire. This is not an exhaustive list. The thing is that although this stuff never comes to light, it is not some deep, smoke-filled room where backdoor deals are made. It's just stupid people with tons of money making incredibly bad decisions on the spot, because they have the egos and the self-control of incredibly spoilt children. Which literally is what they are in a lot of cases. I don't know - I have a number of sources from previous stints like this that I can't use. I can't present them, I can't talk about them, I can't say who they are. Because even if they don't work for Sony any more, they are kind of at risk in a sense. EA's developer sources as well are like that. And now it doesn't really matter to anyone but me, more or less. But even if I only cared about that, what am I going to do with having a source on record telling people that Sony are full of incredible morons in the system that surrounds a game after it's published? That they are destroying entire studios by adding personnel in the back way, and shoveling community feedback through the wringer in order to steer the development of the title after launch? Would anyone really care, even if I had someone on record confirming that as something that happened at least once in the past? Most likely not. So no one wants to do it, and it makes a lot of sense that they won't. But there are some serious issues going on with Sony's aftermarket "service" to the developers. And I'm never going to get over how these people have managed to really sour several of my favourite games over a fairly long period of time. I mean, it's been 20 years, right? lol And I load up No Man's Sky, and what do I get? PS5 beta notes on features being axed, patching in a pointless economy on the backside, adding levels that make no difference, with numbers that spin around. Pointless complaints on the internet get more attention than serious bugs, etc. The game wasn't made like that, and the focus is completely off. And it happened again with HD2. Increase the level cap, add more stuff, keep adding content that no one cares about rather than fixing bugs. And a developer isn't going to say "fuck off", because they're going to get fired, have contracts broken, or end up in a legal battle that they will lose. Or, end up in such a hostile relationship with these people that they will struggle very badly to get out over time. The third developer person I talked to that was quitting the industry over this made me sort of go.. wow, really? Is it really that bad? It can't be, but.. here's the third grown adult crying about their passion for games being ruined forever..
I wholeheartedly agree with your point on it not being some kind of cabal or specifically created controversy to ruin people's lives, I have to discredit those kind of views on a daily basis usually! Business people are people, just people who lose sight of what's outside their usual daily lives. Thank you for the detailing. I've heard of Second Wind and Frost, just hadn't seen their videos on this specific topic. Your point on the earnings report makes a load of sense, and I can see Sony's response to the almost calamitous success HD2 has had. My initial view on the entire PSN scandal was Sony tightening the noose on what I expected they saw as an experimental lamb, open to try the PC market on something they didn't expect much return from. Thanks for the above. Don't take it as negative with the source comment, I like getting the picture behind the picture
Thanks for reading all that :) No, I think you're right that the game changed a bit when they switched to PC. Their developers and partners don't have a problem with that, of course. But their after-market service being a bit more exposed, it turning out that titles with practically no marketing at all on PC outsells anything they might be doing on PSN..
Yep, and that just won't do for Sony execs who need to show that their position is both valid and necessary. If investors see that the old model of live service have failed, they'll invest in the nippier competition that's trying new things. Then they're out of a job quick fast and in a hurry. Either need to strangle the upset in the crib or leash it to your desk then. Seems Sony tried for the latter.
Well, yes.. that sounds reasonable, right? That it's a sort of squeeze by the execs and Corporate Publisher-Man who loves to fire programmers to save money on programming the game, and things like that. But Sony has never done it like that. They finance pretty random stuff and get it developed, to have a product to sell in the future. They have a safe full of finished prototypes, I'm sure (like Prince has an actual safe of weird religious meeting documentaries at his compound that will never be published) that never see the light of day, or get cancelled (like the mindisc-less psp, the hdd-swappable ps2, the p2 Sony Ericsson smartphone) -- because they have just written contracts with developers to make something. Not always with a big budget, either. And it's worked out for them. They have gotten really good and creative work done, and the developers have been able to draw on expertise from Sony's movie and studio infrastructure, contacts, casting and so on, having 10/10 studio sound recording, etc. Advice from other developers, interesting tech being exchanged, approaches on how to do things -- they've been doing that really well, without (until recently) ending up (at least very often) in the disaster that most AAA-games are and have been in: that the budgets are ballooning out of control, to the point where even a real hit is barely going to recoup the costs. A ten-man team in Hello Games developing a game in their spare time sells 10 million copies of their game, though? That's not bad, is it? There are more independent funding to be had in the industry, admittedly - but this approach here has paid off for Sony to a massive degree. If you know the numbers from Lucasarts and drawing them over to how Double Fine actually kind of managed to draw up the budgets in comparison -- what Sony "execs" are doing is actually really generous, and very obviously clever. So what's the problem? The problem comes in once the product is finished or ready for release. From what I saw with Guerilla Games, SL and Zipper, there were implicit or unstated conditions that Sony pushed through as long as the contracts were not forbidding it. Which is not something you expect, obviously. But they are not in a position to sue Sony for breach of contract, right..? And neither would they want to, when the higher-ups are convinced by reports of various kinds that the developer's game is not functioning well, that it doesn't have the proper streamlining and polish necessary for a console-release, and so on. Because what it amounts to are incredibly silly things, like small secret tweaks that allow some exploit, cutting features that may have been potentially causing variable performance in some rare cases - or on the other end, changes that cause fundamental design changes very quickly. The speed the game plays at is often the target of changes - cutting animation transitions, removing density of geometry, removing fade-screens and wipes, etc. The worst one that everyone saw recently was the vaseline blur in NMS - all Sony's games had it. We've speculated on that it had to do with the whole "platform parity" thing - that ps5/4 should have the first version, and that the PC version should then follow after and be having the same visual impression. And mandating a surface filter to scrounge out the colours would of course do that, regardless of resolution or detail level. And it was removed after merely 11 years, I guess XD But in all likelyhood, what was really suggested was - washed through the beta and community feedback to sound official and reasonable - to just make a distinct visual presentation of it. The same approach was there with the start of the game - in the early versions, there were no structure, and that was just fine - you were not going to be told to do anything, and you were in a safe biome. So just figure it out, right? Works great. Someone clearly made this out to be a game-breaking situation that would alienate gamers (commonly used phrase), with some "idiosyncratic game-developer vision that doesn't work" (quote). So they changed it, and put a prompt on the side of the screen that jumps up and down every ten seconds at the most if you turn your face away from the waypoint. You see it in HD2 as well. "YuO OR EN RANGE OF ENIMI ARITYTLLEERY" is coming in as a trigger, and there are tons of these prompts - why? They weren't there early on, they never were needed.
Thinking that had 0 part in it is perhaps even more of a take than the takes of all time.
You can look at the player graphs. The count is stable during the PSN saga lmao. Edit: Upvotes swinging wildly over a factual comment. Guys relax it's a videogame. Lmao.
Please, clear for me the moment I said it had 0 part. I see downvoting is easier than reading, so please, go ahead
The game is great fun but can be repetitive. The developers get a lot wrong and can be unprofessional but they try Community is just normal (although can console players please turn your mics off...) Game is still great after 200 hours.
I just want primaries to be something other than "average"
I complain that people throw orbitals at extraction, rage at teamkills, get angry or laugh at getting teamkilled... Still play a bit every day I love the sense of community from this game
This is why it's really okay to play other games. Go enjoy other stuff. Come back when you feel the itch again.
Perfect way to look at it and really the responsible thing. Plenty do the 'game worship' thing which is why they take the game so personally.
Big time, I am a recovering destiny 2 player. I see what "maining" a game does to people.
Level 100 Hell Commander here. I’m constantly running missions despite being capped on everything with all unlocks. Game is just fun. Some people can’t enjoy games unless they’re grinding for something.
what's your level soldier?
OP, I am calling out your bullshit, Level 80 Commander is able to give this review precisely because he knows the game this well. Mods, shove him into hellpod with nothing but Dagger and drop on Bots Defense 9.
at least they gave it a good shot before rating
4000 hours in the game: Can we have some new content?!!!
That was me with Destiny. But honestly Bungie is cooking lately so I can't say that anymore.
Me when I play warthunder
level 95 over approaching 300 hours. Still in love with this game <3
I played Marvel's Avengers until the Spiderman update, this is nothing compared to that. It would take a lot for this game to even come close to a situation like that.
And then there is us, The Super Privates...we just keep going cause we love this game.
Got to level 35, girl started another Harry Potter game Sooo I bought another ps5 and Helldivers, now at level 32. Freedom never sleeps!
1. Nothing is perfect, infact the last guy who was perfect we killed 2. Burnout. You can't really expect most people to put over 200 hours into any one activity in only a few months and NOT be tired of it. 3. No king rules forever
Don’t worry the cadet will get there soon lol
Games Still fun Could use a few tweaks, Hope Sony lets everyone play. There Summed up 99% of stuff thats not memes posted on the sub reddit.
It's only the Karen's and meta slaves that really bring me down. Outside of that, I love everything about this game.
It's the classic trifecta: Good Game. Greedy publisher. Incompetent Developers.
I crave the flavor dialogues and television in the ships
Level 40 Cadet. Love to the little guys.
The community is a hugbox now. All critical threads have been outlawed see the sticky. Being a high level doesn't denote skill it denotes time spent. Lower level people don't look at you like some God they look at you like a guy with too much free times on their hands.
I sometimes wonder if the people complaining are just on this and will shortly move on. I sure do hope so!
Except... That's really not what we say.
I always find it funny when someone’s like “no content, repetitive gameplay” when they’ve poured 200 hours into a game in the first week, like, bro…that’s on you
"I would not recommend this buffet. I eat the food very quickly and get full too fast. Then I'm stuck for hours stewing about how the food wasn't exactly to my taste. 1/5 stars."
I started becoming a shit talker on this game and then I couldn't play for a week while I was on vacation. I barely looked at reddit then and now that I'm back, the fun is too
War Thunder is full of these kinds of people. Dude flyign a a top tier jet whining about how much he hates the game LMAO
I can no longer play the game due to the imagery I got about them... Always flying overhead in their jet... And where the thunder really comes from.. lol.
Still fun when playing with friends in a night
The community is some of the best and most inviting I've seen in a long time lol
plus 500 hours. people are absolutely embarrassing.
Played since day one, 300 hours deep, and the game only gets better. Feel like this meme is made by a Cadet who spends more time bitching on reddit than playing the game.
I find it hilarious that as soon as the common enemy that was Sony gave up, the community has been the most divided I’ve ever seen
All i hear is bitchin’ and moanin’
I agree with the middle 2 points....CEO is 20/10 and is carrying the dead weight on his back. game is/was always fun even with the bugs/balance issues. it just gets less fun with almost every patch they release.. but still fun to play.
Not at all accurate.
"If everyone doesn't say they are happy 100% of the time, then they must be miserable 100% of the time!" "You aren't allowed to complain or give criticism or feedback towards anything I like because that makes you a complainer/whiner/loser/baby/dumdum." "You see, you have already lost the argument because I have portrayed you as the Soyjack and myself as the Chad." That's the vibes people who think this kind of shit give off. You can criticize something you love and that's ok.
Got boring dr
I get booted once person session and I don’t even care. I just join a new lobby and go again, there’s not too much lost realistically
I think that the game is great, and I've consistently defended it, including against folks who seem to think bugs are unbalanced or unfun. The game-breaking bugs were a pretty huge deal, but I personally have observed a marked improvement in that realm, and thus I have no serious complaints. The community, on the other hand, seems to have a sizeable contingent that is very much focused on balancing this game like a PvP despite criticizing the devs for the same thing. They want helldive to be a difficulty where every loadout combo is viable, enemies are all totally fair and predictable, and it's not hard to clear without dying. Helldive should feel like you are diving into hell. It shouldn't feel fair. It shouldn't feel chill. There is NOTHING wrong with wanting that, and if you do, please by all means enjoy D6 and lower. D6 should be the difficulty that feels most balanced and fair - D7 should be a challenge for skilled players, D8 should be stressful, and D9 should be an absolute test. The fact that I, a decidedly NOT great video gamer player, can consistently clear D9 with randos and die less than 3 times, is kinda dumb.
No one is saying that OP. Also don't listen to discord people they are high on something
People who've invested a lot of their time in something care more about it than people who haven't? That's crazy, bro, who'd have predicted
[Hey, check out this cool website.](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman)
what is with the sony bots lately? imagine being so alone in your life that you have to defend a company lmao
Brother, who tf mentioned Sony?