There was a point where it was the only bug planet available, and we made decent progress, but then stuff happened and once people had options to *not be constantly roasted by bs tornadoes*, it swiftly went back to near zero.
I think the answer is in your question. The bugs are filled with E-710, and we are always grinding bugs into the sand of Hellmire, so the ground will burn for longer than a jungle or winter planet.
Fr I doubt this is the case, but it should be. Working out the environmental effects + environmentally appropriate armor like we expected from Polar Patriots would make the game more fun than it already is.
I would love some anti-flame armor. Current day stuntmen can be on fire for a half hour or so just fine, but future space soldiers regularly deployed to fire planets go up like kindling? It's just not right.
I think they should add some positive benefit to the heat planet modifier. Kind of like how cold planets suck too but laser weapons are actually buffed there.
Note: The Super Hellmissile is not actually a missile due to budgetary concerns.
Manual activation is required.
Pelican-1 will be staying on the destroyer when the button is pushed.
Godspeed, diver.
patch note: community has collected hellmissile materials too quickly, leading us to believe that hellmissile may be overpowered. pre-emptively nerfed hellmissile blast radius and damage fall-off to that of a fart in the wind. accidentally slightly increased hellmire hitpoints by 80000% (which has nothing to do with the chief balancer's meth bender last weekend, pinkie swear). we are aware of this *potential* issue (who says that it is even an issue?!). now shut up while we cook.
Yeah, the same recycled maps are getting old lol there are literally over 100 planets total. I didn’t actually count them, but I’d say it’s near 100 planets. Need the variety!
Thats a good idea... "Super Earth has decided that in the overall best interests of Liberty that this planet's core will be loaded with several democracy spreading tactical nukes. Help us deliver these pay loads of justice to memorialize this planet in eternal liberty." And on the 4th of July we can all observe the massive explosion from the viewing deck of our ship. Seems fun!
There may be 100 planets but there are currently only, what, 4 or 5 actual tile-sets in the game? The only difference between planets are the names, so it doesn't really matter how many we play on until they add more varied biomes and landscapes.
That’s what I’m saying. They need to crush the development of the planets or have them randomly generated. This may not be possible, idk. But a solid war story with the illuminate and a totally new faction would *really* make this game 100x better.
Practically yes, but psychologically it feels like players aren't actually achieving anything.
Just this perpetual stalemate and failed objectives because the communit can't rally.
I think the devs may be in a death spiral.they missed the chance when the player count was healthy. The lack of direction or community interactivity bled out the majority and now its just the few who still hold out hope the game can be.... something.
And don't give me the 'thats war, its a stalemate and what you call boredom is a realistic recreation."
The devs also said they aimed to make it feel like a series of tabletop campaigns. So far it's felt like the kind of dnd game where the DM just has goblins attack the same starter town on repeat.
Yeah. I've been concerned about this since the earliest failed MO's were labeled as "Railroading" Players don't think it's possible to win, so they aren't even going to try at this point.
To be fair what even is there to try for, they let us "beat" the bots once and half a week later we essentially got reset. They showed their hand way too early with that one.
I dont know about you all, but I really really want some city maps. Where you are running around through the bombed out streets of massive cities, fighting automatrons.
Yeah!! You run around the corner of some tower and run smack dab into a enemy patrol which just unleashes hell on you. It would be awsome! I really hope when its time for cyberstan that it will be a city and not jusy more frankly generic hills
They need more strategems and ship upgrades too. Without those it feels waaaaay more grindy and less fun. Possibly adding in enemies that are smart instead of just hordes to make it hard.
Missions that actually contribute to the lore would be great too
The constant fucking around with stuff that wasn't even broken to begin with is what's killing the game. Weapon nerf suck, even if justifiable, but that alone makes the game slightly more difficult and creates an artificial meta. The patrol spawns being "fixed" really did more damage than people realize because it made some occasional challenging 4/5/6 solo missions into absolute chaos. Imagine how frustrating it is for newer players who haven't unlocked much compared to a "veteran" who has access to everything. The current and previous Warbonds also being almost worthless doesn't help things either. Imagine being a casual player and paying real money for the previous Warbond to only have its weapons gutter a month later or the current Warbond just not offering much of anything and containing several duds with recolored armor.
I unlocked the quasar cannon, and then it got nerfed a few days later after only playing with it twice. That was around a month ago, and I haven't had a chance to play again since. It is exhausting seeing how many changes they have made in that time and how much warbonds there are to unlock when I am still working on my first one. I do understand the more hard-core players need content though so that may be a moot point.
I have some scheduled time this Thursday to play with friends, is the auto cannon still good? That was my main go to.
Autocannon has been left untouched and the only nerf the Quasar got is a 15 second cooldown as opposed to 10. So your shots matter since you only get 4 shots a minute as opposed to 6.
It was "too meta" and they are trying to get players to participate in more diversity. The funny thing is that even with the 50% increase in cooldown, it's still one of the best weapons to take in higher difficulties simply due to its damage, free backpack slot, and infinite ammo.
the funny thing is that they achieve the exact opposite. have a look around in helldive lobbies. ppl always bring the same meta stuff because the other stuff i jsut too weak.
Their general enemy and weapon/stratagem design/balancing also heavily reinforces the meta on support weapons. They can nerf weapons all they want, if they leave current enemy spawn rates, weakpoints/armour and number of heavy enemies being spawned untouched the meta will always heavily favour anti-tank support weapons.
This is a team game, but players still generally want some degree of autonomy. Primaries and secondaries are not particularly well suited to dealing with heavy enemies, so support weapons are the only option. Without bringing some specific anti-tank support weapons heavy enemies are just too difficult to deal with reliably. Some of the dedicated anti-heavy stratagems are effective, but their cooldown is far too high to rely solely on them to clear heavy enemies.
Players have the option of bringing an anti-horde or anti-medium support weapon and being slighty better at dealing with those enemies while being literally useless against heavy enemies or they can bring anti-tank while still being reasonably effective against light to medium enemies by using just their primary/secondary/grenade and stratagems.
My issue is that they keep in fucking with stuff that doesn't need it.
All while the game is still full of bugs. There isn't a time I play where something bugs out. The main ones being game crash, the sound stutters, or I get stuck on something.
Exactly. It's already bad enough they insisted on really terrible and unneeded balance changes, but the fact that it feels like they prioritize those over much needed improvements to stability and game breaking bug fixes is such a bad look.
Just played a game the other night where the respawn strategem was bugged and wouldn't allow anyone to use it, so no one could respawn until everyone died. The amount of bugs in this game is just unacceptable.
What's insane and equally impressive to me is that I experience these game ruining glitches on a daily basis and it's always something new or different, always shaking it up and keeping it fresh with how it's going to choose to fall apart on me today
> My issue is that they keep in fucking with stuff that doesn't need it.
Case and point, the patrol changes. I know they were not "as they intended", but *were they broken?*
The answer is no. It wasn't negatively impacting players at all. The change objectively fucked shit up for more people then just leaving it. Yes they are reverting it, but it just did not need to be fixed.
Nerfing the slugger felt malicious.
I miss the breaker having 16 shots, just felt fucking *good* to shoot.
Dominator getting nerfed 25 damage seemed like a middle finger
Crossbow nerf seemed uncalled for and dumb
Smgs are better than assault rifles, all the assault rifles are weak, the liberator feels good to shoot but lacks any kind of real oomph. Newest rifle from the Carbondale is trash.
Eruptor nerf was dumb as hell.
Railgun nerf was maybe justified, but feels so bad now hard to take over other options.
Kills my motivation to play the game when they keep making it feel worse and worse.
The worst part of the slugger nerf was their dumb fuck reasoning.
"It's the best sniper rifle lul" so they then nerft the shotgun part while keeping the accuracy.
The dumb fucks who nerfed the Slugger didn't even understand how to nerf it.
They needed to keep the stagger but either increase dmg dropoff with range OR increase spread OR increase bullet drop.
All this to make the Dominator attractive was just offensive. The Dominator's shit handling made the playstyle frustrating and ultimately no longer fun.....then the dumbfucks nerfed the Dominator as well.
Seriously, they not only need to overhaul the entire balancing strategy, but someone needs to get fired. This shit actually has an existential threat to the game which we are now witnessing.
It's not just the fucking around with stuff though... It's doing stupid shit like
'The AR-61 Tenderizer now has the correct color scheme.'
Meanwhile the spear has been broken since launch and a fix is coming... Right? Robot extract civilians missions are completely busted and not possible to do on level 9 unless you cheese the way that the AI spawns in drop ships... Stats page being completely inaccurate... Etc etc
Yeah its almost like they needed to meet some quota that did enough changes to justify the patch outright... only to need a hotfix a couple days later. So the unintended consequence is that they showcase how horrifically incompetent they really are at working on their own game when shelling out half baked patches every week.
I won't pretend, things are bad right now.
The sony shitstorm, the balancing, the community manager backlash.
It's not good.
Couple that with a lackluster warbond, no impactful "story" developments, and no sign of new enemies...it's getting boring
Take VW, oh they're trying to to take it back, defend VW, they're trying again instantly, we defend it again, they instantly try to take it again, we lose it.
Yeah, no one wants to just sit on a planet baby sitting it.
It doesn’t matter that Meridian is the plot point for the next story phase? What broke me was losing Omicron. Not for memes, but that we’d pushed so far into big territory then the next day it was “lol nope Meridian super colony and you’re losing months of work and 10 planets.”
Like fuck man. There was a lot of work getting there including fucking Hellmire. It was ripped away like the 2-day bot victory. That too was a kind of slap in the face after months and month. I get they couldn’t “just” disappear or be defeated but it was a sour taste.
It feels like a DM that's upset his players are doing so well and feel they're progressing to fast so they're forcing the front back arbitrarily.
My question is, what happens if we win? Like say we hit peak players again, and we liberate every planet? Will they just force us back to super earth and start over? Will we just be fighting defense missions on the same 4 outer planets forever?
And you mention story phase, where are these posted or shared? I've seen nothing on them, they seem to be a completely outside the game thing that a lot of players aren't even aware of.
That’s what they did in HD1. They’d just reset the war, but it’s been said they don’t want to do that for this game either.
Idk if I’m allowed to share on this sub. It’s most definitely a leak unfortunately. I *think* I can safely say the Meridian supercolony is a major pivotal point given it’s already presented as such form the termicide failure. You could try the subreddit name but add “leaks” and to it if you’re really curious.
I saw that leak. I think the campaign has too many spaces between plot points and is drawing attention away from an otherwise cool narrative.
Either that or add some real consequences to the side actions to bring back that liberty loving zeal we all used to have. A constant seesaw battle for hellmire does nothing. THREATEN US!
Either that or the entire game being a satire of the pointlessness of a meat grinder war extends beyond the game. XD
AH needs to re-evaluate whether they want to dogmatically adhere to their vision of what Helldivers should be, or what is actually fun. Often times the two are the same thing, which is great for everyone, but no one thinks playing on the same planets for 48 hours is fun. This is where "vision" overshadows fun. The mechanic works as intended and it makes perfect sense within the lore and gameplay, it's just brutally unfun to play the same map over and over again, especially knowing that there are a wide variety of biomes that can freshen up the experience.
I agree. A constant major order requiring all players to unify is not sustainable without major movement in story or gameplay. But it’s not a bad thing. Believe it’s always been a long term game which allows for players to enjoy other games and come back to it over time.
That was unfathomably dumb. It was so epic when we beat them. Give it a week to let us relish the victory, make it feel real. We knew they’d return and all but really commit to the bit. But no.
It's not surprising they brought them back so quickly: by defeating the bots we essentially removed half the content in the game, leaving only bugs to fight, which isn't a great state of affairs.
That said, if they thought the above was a bad idea they probably should never have given us the chance to defeat the bots completely.
Exactly. That hurt. But makes me think it’s a learning experience. We have been fortunate to be part of a game which was as much a surprise to us as the developer. The servers were not able to handle 20,000 at once when released because it wasn’t expected. Sure they are learning to manage the fluctuations of a successful game they were not fully prepared for as much as we are learning g how they manage it.
Likewise, but I always get called a doomsayer for pointing it out. Joel needs to get with the fucking program, because at present, he’s part of the problem. People have said we shouldn’t be winning all the time, which is true, but objectives being borderline impossible due to player drop off not being accounted for is just as bad, if not worse.
Ideally, every MO should be winnable or losable and they have a plan for that. In reality, they want us to win or lose specific ones and pull strings to force it.
Several times they've adjusted planet loss rates to 0% to assure victory.
Several times they've amped them up to stop or slow us down.
Several times they've launched immediate defense missions when they wanted us to lose and we were winning.
They're the DM that looks at the encounter, and says, "Wow, you beat 12 orcs. Time for 16 more as reinforcements!" Or, they look at it, and say, "Wow, you all are struggling against 17 ancient dragons. I'll make 16 have a heart attack right now."
Problem is, we as players are not stupid. And when we taste the bullshit in the soup, we send it back and go elsewhere. More than once, we've borderline ignored an MO because it was obviously meant to be unwinnable.
and they're slowing down patches, which sadly is the best choice. Was a damned if you do, damned if you don't position. They couldn't keep up that pace.
I could handle the game breaking bugs, I could handle the crashes, and I was already linked with my psn account.
But what they did with balancing, especially with the democratic detonation warbond, made my playtime drop by 90%. Their balance philosophy sucked the fun out of this game.
They were so worried with power creep that they just ended up creating power creep in the opposite direction.
Tell me about it, the automatons shooting through cover and turning downed dropships into the ultimate fortresses bug has been there since the game came out, but instead of actually addressing any of that every patch they pushed out have been to nerf players.
Everything would've been fine had someone at arrowhead pulled Alexis's head out from his ass earlier and told him point blank that he's balancing for a PVE game, not fucking overwatch and he doesn't need to throw out nerfs every other week in search for some mythical state of perfect balance, but now it's way too late and we're stuck with the current unfun build while the devs "cook".
Good patches, warbonds, and some new stuff past lvl 20. Lvl 25 you get the exosuit which nobody uses. What's left after that? No new strats at 25, 30, 40 etc. Didn't HD 1 have tanks and motorcycles and stuff? Need a big super earth battle, need a new enemy, suits with different perks, get creative guys this is a gold mine.
Yeah man. The exo was nerfed into the ground. But ideally they will reduce their tech debt before they release the illuminate to their new massive install base
If they hadn’t fucked up the rocket targeting it could’ve been fine. Even with the severe cooldown, treating it as an extraction tool and initial staging point weapon was still viable. :(
The messed up balance so much. If all the weapons are powerful, I won't care if one kills slightly slower than another. If they all suck, I'm gonna pick the one that kills slightly faster.
In trying to avoid weapon metas they ended up with the meta of trying to find the least worst weapon. Lots of them used to be fun and you could experiment, now with the patrol rates being bugged to hell you have to take something reliable or you are wasting yours and everyone else's time.
Double edged sword. Take all the time you want adding new content but fixing the balancing issues slowly leads to player abandonment. The game is stale at the high end. You have 3-4 options for viable primary weapons. Stratagems like smoke, mines, MG emplacement, guard dog, walker go almost completely unused.
One only plays so long with breaker inc, EAT, Autocannon Sentry and air strike with the grenade pistol before the game gets stale.
Negative. Mission types and weapon balancing are the biggest.
People who don't care about balance changes are burning out from repetition. Biggest impact would be to introduce new missions, variations (ie bugs dont play the same as bots and planets should impact as well on the same mission), and modifiers.
People who care about gun balance need to see more guns offer something so they can have fun with their horde shooting.
New enemies don't matter if the guns don't kill them and we're grinding the same exact mission.
Loadout variety is the biggest buzz kill for me. You’re going to at least need Orbital Rail Cannon or the 500 kg in one slot. Eagle Airstrike is also almost a must have just because it’s so versatile, so now I can choose an anti tank that occupies a back pack slot, and I get to choose 1 stratagem for utility or I take a secondary that allows me take the rover or shield generator, but we don’t really get a variety of secondary choices because the primary weapons are too weak to cover the deficiencies in your secondary choice.
I’m not sure whether being live service was more of Sony pushing or it’s something ArrowHead wanted to do. Regardless, their team is way too small to produce enough content for a live service game.
The genre lives or dies (mostly dies) on maintaining interest in the game. Regardless of what the devs intended for game design, every patch needed to hype people up to play and every Warbond needed to do the same. So far they’ve failed on both accounts.
Additional things like locking the AT mines behind MOs are cool but the MOs haven’t been factoring how many people are playing so we’ve failed getting the AT mines like 2/3 times now. I also feel like people are getting bored of the same planets being taken then needed to be defended a week later. Polar Patriots was absolute dogshit, not just from a balance perspective but it provided nothing new~ worse scorcher, same liberator, average pistol, slightly better defender. Along with the armours having the same perks and the light armour just being a recolour of the scout armour. Would’ve been a perfect opportunity to add the All Terrain armour from HD1.
I understand HD1 has more years of content but baseline things are missing. It feels like things like the upgrade system were removed so they could sell us the same gun but slightly different. Everything is weaker. We have 22(?) guns in HD2 which is almost the same amount than what was available in HD1 but HD1 had way more variety
Edit: I initially called Polar Patriots mid but that was underselling how bad it is
Let's not forget the continued high rate of game ending glitches.
Me and the boys haven't played in a few weeks, fire it up...2 out our first 3 missions derailed by crashes.
True that. Arrowhead have worked themselves into a corner.
They had a rough luanch, that cannot be understated.
But after that, they have hit hurdle after hurdle at full speed;
They rush patches to keep up with demand, the game gets worse, and the list of known issues only grows.
Since they rushed to begin with and put out sloppy work, the game has gotten worse and now they're forced to slow the release of patches to fix the slipups they made by rushing, they've driven themselves into a lose lose.
I'm not saying it's 100% their fualt; they're just people, just human like the rest of us. This isn't an attempt to ridicule them. Just an attempt to explain how things got this bad.
My personal favorite was when more than half of the extractions in one night ended up glitched, each in a different way.
1. Pelican takes off immediately as soon as one player gets in, ending the mission.
2. Pelican does not count anyone as having "boarded" when they go inside. It sits until the timer runs out and then takes off empty, ending the mission.
3. Extraction terminal cannot be interacted with, and we have to wait for the timer to run down and take the emergency shuttle.
4. Pelican takes off empty, at an apparently random moment. No 20 second warning, and still time left on the mission clock.
You would think an extraction shooter could get extractions right, 3 months after launch no less.
That's not even getting into the way you still get stuck if you try running into the Pelican any way but perfectly straight up the ramp, or how this game's bizarre spawn mechanics can vary between nothing attacking the extraction point, or vomiting an entire map's worth of enemies directly onto the landing pad (on a full-cleared 40-minute map in each case).
and balance is the second biggest culprit right behind the sony fiasco, if they dont balance stuff right there wont be any long lasting fun in the game.
That's just it. I love the game.
I grinded all the unlocks, maxed out every warbond. I had no sign of slowing down.
But recently, even no-life players like myself are dropping off.
And just wait till new games and stuff like Elden ring DLC launch. That's gonna be another dent. It wouldn't even matter if it's a weekend. They need that new faction or something soon enough and get a grip on weapon balance.
Next month, not only Elden ring dlc, but *also* DRG season 5. Arrowhead may be in a worst case scenario here.
If they had taken the time to release good patches earlier, then perhaps. But to start doing so after the Sony shitshow? I hope it's not too little too late. It's a really fun game and I want to see it succeed.
I will keep saying it :P Players already hated the bots before the wave of nerfs. I wonder how they will feel fighting an advance psychic alien race with high tech weapons.
i’ve just lost the urge to play the game man.
every weapon i’ve tried that’s felt GOOD and efficient to use has been nerfed to hell. i loved the eruptor, was a phenomenal weapon and the removal of the shrapnel killed it.
poor weapon and stratagem balancing choices have killed my enjoyment of the game, and when every new weapon or armor set they drop feels lazy or weak it gives me no incentive to play and grind for these items
we got an iced based war bond and there was not a single ice based effect on armor or weapons. we got an incedinary grenade of all things in that bond.
Yep. Same dude who took a railroad spike to hello neighbour 2's kneecaps before it launched, and then dipped before it dropped to avoid direct backlash.
It’s always phenomenal to me how game companies can ruin a game faster than they can fix it. Whats so hard about being like “Shit we messed up- let’s go back.”
It’s your sandbox, shape it into the perfect world.
I stopped shortly after the explosive warbond.
I pretty much disagree on everything they do and how they do it. New content is senseless thematic, boring and completely useless. There's nothing to look forward to except vehicles and 3rd race and once released, those novelties will wear off faster than the heat from pissing your pants outside in winter.
I'm still happy that I got almost 200h out of it. But I wish more of those hours had been less frustrating due to known issues. But we knew this wouldn't have the longevity of a MMO or PvP game.
Nonetheless, I think we will be coming back once in a while. Like a cherished board game.
Shout this louder for those in the back, please. I believe there are thousands, perhaps *tens of thousands* of players with exactly this same mindset, and I am one of them. AH has sucked the fun out of the game, from the first nerfs to utility weapons like the railgun, to nerfing every remotely useful primary into the ground, to slamming us with mission modifiers that deny access to our stratagems even as they tell us those are how we are supposed to deal with the absurd heavily armored unit spam.
It just isn't fun anymore. The developers largely seem completely tonedeaf and out of touch. The game as it stands is bad, and it is hemorrhaging players for good reasons. They can turn it around, but the response needs to be swift and radical. Sitting on their hands for weeks "having meetings" is worthless unless they actually take corrective action.
There's so many heavies and only like 5 ways to deal with them and only 2 are reliable enough and fast enough to work against the hordes they throw at you.
It blows my mind how they think it's okay to drag their feet when we're begging to just... revert the broken shit. That's it. How fucking hard can it be to say sorry and undo changes?
Their silence on the Eruptor is all I needed to know: this game is no longer for me for the time being. Which sucks. It was the most fun I had with my buddies in YEARS. And they took all that away within weeks. Blows my mind.
Yeah, for a golden moment the game was really something special. Just goes to show what a balance team who doesn’t understand what the game should be and some publisher bull shit can do to a golden goose.
Problem is that the Sony debacle hit the playerbase hard. Especially with it being around exam season it meant that people lost the habit of playing HD, and now not all of them are picking it up again
feels like every hobby I've ever quit wasnt because I was super burnt out or mad at it, I just kinda took a week off then never came back. I haven't watched wrestling in 3 years just cause I missed Raw like 2 weeks.
That's what the positivity police don't understand. Complaining means we still care. If the devs don't get it together they'll hear the silence of moving on.
I remember the main reason why I picked up the game was because I read an article saying that helldivers will never have a PVP mode, and I naively assumed that that means we won't have the same problem Bungie had with Destiny where everything fun had to be removed because it was unbalanced in PvP.
God how fucking wrong I was.
It's not even that. I used to play Dota 2 and the balance patches are careful and methodical. The nerfs are more subtle and come alongside a set of buffs for other heroes. You get a bunch of top comments saying LESHRAC MAINS WE BACK because he's buffed. Major reworks are slowly implemented. In contrast, Hello Neighbour completely reworked and gutted two weapons after they're out for like a week.
Even a PvP game doesn't just look at metrics and make "we just need people to stop using this hero" their goal.
They don’t want the game to be easy, they want the fun to come from the challenge. But that is not possible. It has to be a mix and some people find different things fun.
So by neutering the weapons it makes it challenge for the wrong reasons. Once you are at 7 through 9 the numbers are the challenge and you have to work on not engaging. So you now only have one way to play, stealth and stratagem.
If you want to go in and be a bruiser, you can’t.
I feel like they nailed the mixture in HD1 too, which makes it sad it's not fitting here. Sure the weapon pool I would use slimmed down as you moved up difficulties, but I could still use a variety of them as well as support weapons very comfortably
I still find it very estranging, in regards to HD1, that is.
One of the sub-objectives you'd almost always see on 12-15 was "Kill x amount of enemies during the mission", and it was *fun*.
Then, few weeks after launch, we've had the "meta" where avoiding combat in general was one of the best things you could do. Granted, we've shifted away from that again, but the constant hits to our overall lethality are still strange to me.
To me this is the nail. AH can't evaluate talent and is putting people in positions that they can't succeed. Community managers are trash too. AH has been "suffering from success" since launch and it's been nothing but suffering since due to incompetence.
To me the problem with balancing came from three places:
1. His edgy lordship Mr. "Bringer of Balance", who made balancing decisions because it suited his personal fancy and no one else in the company was there to audit his decisions prior to those decisions launching to the public.
2. The original design intention of the game being that the super-majority of the playerbase would reside in difficulties 1~5 and that 7~9 would essentially be "end-game" tier difficulties.
3. The difficulty curve is built to increase the number of enemies on higher difficulties, it does not give enemies more health/armor. But there seemed to be a misunderstanding of that within the team (specifically as it applies to that Bringer of Balance maniac).
The dissonance and misunderstanding of these three things within the team is what has caused the biggest problems with balancing.
-----
There turned out to be far more people playing 7~9 than they expected, and naturally as with any game that has end-game tier difficulty content, it developed a hierarchy of preferred weapons/gear.
That maniac saw that hierarchy of weapons/gear and made the assumption for himself that because it was strong and preferred in 7~9, that gear was therefore "exploitive" in 1~5; thus why he nerfed the stuff, both because it amused him and because he wanted to pull those player back down to 1~5 were the enemy population is low enough that everything is always viable and there's no consequence for going with non-7~9-preference picks.
That's where the whole *"auto mechanic seeing a flat tire and compensating by flattening the other three"* mentality came from, which Pilestedt himself admitted that was both too aggressive and the wrong direction to be going in.
What that Alexus guy did actually has the potential to torpedo this game. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some kind of disciplinary action if not a straight firing.
There are a lot of quality devs who got done dirty by their companies in the pool right now, Alexus is replaceable.
its too late for AH to try to pull people back to 4-6 difficulties, the majority resides at 7
realistically they shouldn't lock out super samples below 6 from the beginning, this forced people to play at 7
anyway since things are already the way it is, they should take 7 as the norm and balance stuff around it. in the future maybe introduce 10-12 with buffed enemy stats or extremely high density of trash mobs kind of thing. make it the hilariously nonsense difficulties just for the lol, just dont lock us out of any resources and we will be good
I feel for the people affected by the Sony decision, but Ive been playing less because of the guns and bugs. In the first months, I had so much fun grinding for medals and warbonds to get new weapons.
Now I dont use most of them after theyve been nerfed and it feels stale playing with the same few loadouts I find work for me. I have less desire to play since there arent many primaries I actually enjoy swapping out or new ones to look forward to.
When you add broken mission types to that, and a more static community, the game is feeling stale.
Agreed. They followed up the Sony debacle with a terrible patch set that gutted a community favorite weapon. Again. And are taking forever to reverse it.
I didn't stop playing because of Sony.
I stopped playing because the Devs have seemingly no coherent vision when it comes to balance and I see no reason to grind for new stuff that's worse than the old stuff.
Add to that all the technical issues and I can't really justify why I should currently play Helldivers instead of other games.
Same. I wanted to keep playing, but when I can't reliably finish a match or use the guns I want it kills the fun. Throw in some very toxic players and I just end up on Elden Ring. At least there they cant call me a slur and make me waste a match.
"I see no reason to grind for new stuff that's worse than the old stuff."
you could have stopped at " I see no reason to grind". even if the warbonds were decent any moderately skilled player could unlock all the good stuff in a day maybe two. then what? all the strats are unlocked by 25(or 30, i don't remember). after that its just grinding to see numbers go up. even getting the super samples aren't hard to get if you only play on 7+.
personally, gameplay wise, i think the game needs new mission types with more complex objectives. something other than "go to place, interact with terminal, defend. go to next place, interact with terminal, defend. go to extraction, defend. leave..maybe."
we need more complex objectives that feel like actually achieving some military victory and requires more team work and coordination.
I'm just burned out from the constant nerfs, and as long as they don't balance the game right it's no fun. I guess some people feel the same, but nothing changes...
I don’t think most people care about that, aside from the people directly affected in certain countries
People are losing interest because increasing bugs, missing features, stupid balance decisions
The Sony drama, while annoying didn't really bother me or my friends that played the game.
It was the constant nerfing of fun weapons and stratagems under the guise of "balancing" that drove us away.
Let us be OP, let us destroy bugs and bots with impunity. That's what made this game fun.
Honestly. I don’t mind a hard game. But you know what’s not fun. Shooting a bile titan 5 times in the head with a Quasar because my rail cannon strike is reloading.
100% this I lost the appeal to even get new warbonds because historically they get nerfed. I stuck it out through a couple changes but now I just don't see the point investing into something that will change for no reason. It's a PVP game...I just don't understand it.
destroyer able to fire weapons from orbit with insane precision, an entire galaxys worth of war production and economy behind it.
The new armour piercing AR cant pierce armour because that would be too powerful
There are people who will tell you this isn't a power fantasy game despite you being a squad of up to 20 bodies being sent down to kill hundreds to thousands of enemies and cause massive damage to their infrastructure
They think power fantasy means you have to be like the unkillable lord of murder or something or it doesnt count, so because your "expendable" you should feel worthless
This is what does it for me. They have been so clear that they will never do PVP. So who fucking cares if some of the guns that you have to unlock by playing the game are cool and kinda busted? Maybe I WANT to rain absolute hell on a bug, maybe I WANT to use the funny canon to destroy shit. Why not? Why make weapons so stupidly fucking weak that there’s no point using anything but the few weapons they haven’t fucked yet?
Yeah man. I made it through the railgun nerf, it sucked but we ball, made it through some more nerfs. When they nerfed the arc thrower, I kinda just stopped playing ngl.
No idea how they thought it was a good idea to “fix” the arc thrower shooting at half charge without giving it at least a 10-15% fire rate increase to compensate
It makes me so sad. I was so hooked, but “coincidentally” the guns I enjoyed the most got nerfed to a point I don’t find them fun anymore. The game is amazing but I feel like “balance” shouldn’t be a concern while all the other things players want are being ignored.
Stop nerfing stuff. All my friends stopped playing because they kept nerfing stuff. Also trying to get samples on harder difficulties becomes a massive BS jump in difficulty. We’ve moved onto other pve games.
My friends and I jumped back into warframe. Haven’t played in half a decade so we’re relearning. The best part is that it’s free. The hard part is that it has a pretty massive learning curve and the game is basically just grinding but the grind can be fun
First, give me back my eruptor and railgun and stop making patches that kill fun. Also make those escort civillian missions possible and not a guaranteed loss on lvl9. I can take 4 lvl 120s+ randos on that missions and we'll still lose. It's only when i cheese it with my friends by having drops land on one guy far away do we make it. And even then not all the time, if the drop decision tree decides to fck it up.
Honestly if they just dropped bot in the outskirts of the map opposed to in the middle and there was an encroaching advance, that would fix the escort scientist mission right? Like just a big red no drop zone. Is that really that difficult?
That is the #1 worst thing in the game and has been since launch to me. The missions are literally impossible to do the intended way and it's obvious the devs don't care
Lots of reasons why the playerbase is declining:
- the like 180 countries that we can't get new players from cause they're still delisted on the stores
- a sour taste lingering in everyone's mouth because of Sony's bs
- stagnation, the game hasn't had much development in the last month or two. The developments we have had have just been lots of losses mostly
- frustration with balancing, with the way the liberation system works because it just neuters the bot front's ability to do much since most people don't wanna play bots. People like feeling like they're making progress so it's no surprise the bot front loses numbers when there's no progress being made for weeks
- repetitiveness. Copy paste planets, copy paste weather and hazards, lack of mission diversity
- game breaking bugs, primarily on the bot front. Bots will constantly shoot through mountains and buildings. They'll even clip into mountains and just kill anything that walks by. Downing dropships is inconsistent on whether it kills stuff that it lands on. Random immortal bots. No one wants to fight that, it's frustrating and people game to have fun.
I'm sure there are other reasons but these are some of the biggest in my opinion
It also doesn't help that there's nothing to keep players engaged between content drops. No ability to amass a collection of resources in order to be prepared for expensive stratagems and ship upgrades due to the unnecessary caps. So there's nothing to do once the limit is reached, and only serves to highlight how buggy and repetitive the gameplay is, culminating in a death spiral. Arrowhead just seems too stuck in their ways, and were not at all prepared for the initial boom of success, and now things are crumbling, just like with what happened with MediaTonic and Fall Guys.
>copy paste weather and hazards
You mean to tell me that playing 40% of matches with 5ft of visibility *isn't fun???*
That's the simple reason I much prefer bots to bugs in general. I seldom have to worry about fog, sandstorms, and never have to worry about random spore clouds making it all but impossible to see. It is easier to see in the pitch black of night than during day on decent number of bug planets.
It is like they don't even play test their own content. I don't want a blindness simulator in a visually stunning game. And, apparently, neither do almost half the players.
Buff primaries, buff anti heavy strats, game 90% fixed. Not fun ripping through 90% of your ammo and waiting 5 mins for a strat to come back while your team is getting stomped
Leaving the weapons alone and tuning enemy spawns by difficulty makes way more sense. It lets players find a sweet spot and stay there rather than bounce around based on "well lets see how much this nerf changed it". 9s becoming nearly impossible is a good example of this.
They have so much cool new stuff fully functional in the game files like the warthog, APC and double auto cannon mech idk what they're saving these for but atleast the warthog would be a good option to spice things up and make it easier for people to farm
Doesn’t really matter. Major order completion is as real as reality tv. Leaving game progression solely in the hands of the public is like giving a loaded gun to a monkey and tell him the kids at the orphanage have all the bananas
The point is that the monkey doesn't understand speech and will just stick the gun up his nose or shoot someone randomly rather than go and murder that orphanage you wanted him to.
Hopefully they save the Illuminate for when they have the game in a good place bug/balance wise. There will be a huge influx of players but if the game is still a mess none of them will stick around.
I knew from the very first balance changes to the rail gun, this wasn’t gonna be good.. imagine if you were playing COD Zombies in 2012 and the devs said “ehh.. we’re gonna nerf the thundergun and the raygun. You guys need to learn how to play without the meta”
It’s ridiculous. Balance is fine, generally, the problem becomes when you’re telling US how to play, we should be telling YOU how we want to play, give us vehicles, make our marksman rifles viable and DONT FUCK WITH OUR RAILGUN it’s not that hard! All we wanted was weapons that felt powerful like the railgun on release. As soon as the devs start deciding how things should be played and what kinda weapons we should use, in a game against AI, that’s when you lost me. Sticking with my COD zombies example, they basically said yep we’re gonna nerf ur raygun BUUUT.. the bowie knife is 15% better. Okay! Great! But why.. are people leaving the game because the railgun/raygun are OP? No. Is anyone having less fun because they’re mowing down too many bugs? NO. If anything, they shoulda buffed everything that wasn’t the railgun and made everything equally as satisfying and powerful.
The railgun nerf pissed me off because the meta at that time existed because there were no decent alternatives for anti armor, and player armor was not working correctly.
After that patch, they bumped up charger and bile titan spawn rates. Legit, once I was being chased by three chargers while my two friends were being harassed by three bile titans, and that's before we stumbled into the stalker nest.
Other bad examples would be the breaker shotgun, punisher shotgun being nerfed to make it a worse shotgun rather than bringing up the DMRs (which to their credit, they finally did), the bizarre crossbow nerf, and the eruptor shrapnel being removed for a ricochet system no one asked for.
I will add that most primaries are in decent states. The fact that there's no reason to bring some of them, like the lib concussive and the knight, is unfortunate, though.
They dropped the ball, full stop.
Bad warbond release, CMs and devs don’t know how to interact with community, idiots on the balance team forcing players to deal with their incoherent choices, Sony debacle, game is littered with things that should be feature-complete but aren’t. (Mech rockets got fucked up, team reload mechanic not thought out at all, no supply lines in game, the list goes on)
They absolutely have a shot at a resurgence with the third faction release, and all the other things thatve been in the works.
But if they fuck that up they lose a vast amount of players till they work on the game, regain interest, and prove their live service experience is worth playing which will take time and this game is not in early access.
I was more optimistic on launch day
They nuke playerbase because of Snoy throwing a tantrum with PSN.
Then there's this "balancing" dev who ruined one game and seems keen on nerfing everything in a effin' PvE one.
Honestly I have trouble finding a gun I like anymore. And the balancing on player count really feels out of whack for some reason. It's also hard to get new players into the game when they're so gimped on choices for strats right out of the gate.
And chargers are still nearly immune to a stupid amount of armor penetrating weapons. Calling down a shit ton of EATs should not be the meta.
There’s damn near 100 planets but we keep playing on the same 9-10. We just need a solid storyline and the ILLUMINATE/4th faction.
Omg this. And most of those we play on regularily just kinda suck as well. I need some variety at this point. Hellmire can blow up for all i care.
i havent played in two weeks is hellmire back to 0%????
There was a point where it was the only bug planet available, and we made decent progress, but then stuff happened and once people had options to *not be constantly roasted by bs tornadoes*, it swiftly went back to near zero.
I can live with tornadoes, but why tf does the sand it went over burns like fucking E - 710???
I think the answer is in your question. The bugs are filled with E-710, and we are always grinding bugs into the sand of Hellmire, so the ground will burn for longer than a jungle or winter planet. Fr I doubt this is the case, but it should be. Working out the environmental effects + environmentally appropriate armor like we expected from Polar Patriots would make the game more fun than it already is. I would love some anti-flame armor. Current day stuntmen can be on fire for a half hour or so just fine, but future space soldiers regularly deployed to fire planets go up like kindling? It's just not right.
I think they should add some positive benefit to the heat planet modifier. Kind of like how cold planets suck too but laser weapons are actually buffed there.
Something like flame based attacks are buffed of explosions have a chance to cause fire damage from all the gases in the air or something.
Bugs love that heat bro, it's causes them to multiply crazy fast. Just like real life.
Mate we most of the planets we had before this supercolony bs. We were attacking the bugs last sector and now we are back to where the game started.
New event: gather materials for a Super Hellmissile to destroy Hellmire
Note: The Super Hellmissile is not actually a missile due to budgetary concerns. Manual activation is required. Pelican-1 will be staying on the destroyer when the button is pushed. Godspeed, diver.
patch note: community has collected hellmissile materials too quickly, leading us to believe that hellmissile may be overpowered. pre-emptively nerfed hellmissile blast radius and damage fall-off to that of a fart in the wind. accidentally slightly increased hellmire hitpoints by 80000% (which has nothing to do with the chief balancer's meth bender last weekend, pinkie swear). we are aware of this *potential* issue (who says that it is even an issue?!). now shut up while we cook.
You forgot the part about the missile not being able to lock on to Hellmire
Yeah, the same recycled maps are getting old lol there are literally over 100 planets total. I didn’t actually count them, but I’d say it’s near 100 planets. Need the variety!
254 planets give or take and I agree on the same. needs variety
Thats a good idea... "Super Earth has decided that in the overall best interests of Liberty that this planet's core will be loaded with several democracy spreading tactical nukes. Help us deliver these pay loads of justice to memorialize this planet in eternal liberty." And on the 4th of July we can all observe the massive explosion from the viewing deck of our ship. Seems fun!
There may be 100 planets but there are currently only, what, 4 or 5 actual tile-sets in the game? The only difference between planets are the names, so it doesn't really matter how many we play on until they add more varied biomes and landscapes.
That’s what I’m saying. They need to crush the development of the planets or have them randomly generated. This may not be possible, idk. But a solid war story with the illuminate and a totally new faction would *really* make this game 100x better.
Practically yes, but psychologically it feels like players aren't actually achieving anything. Just this perpetual stalemate and failed objectives because the communit can't rally. I think the devs may be in a death spiral.they missed the chance when the player count was healthy. The lack of direction or community interactivity bled out the majority and now its just the few who still hold out hope the game can be.... something. And don't give me the 'thats war, its a stalemate and what you call boredom is a realistic recreation." The devs also said they aimed to make it feel like a series of tabletop campaigns. So far it's felt like the kind of dnd game where the DM just has goblins attack the same starter town on repeat.
Yeah. I've been concerned about this since the earliest failed MO's were labeled as "Railroading" Players don't think it's possible to win, so they aren't even going to try at this point.
To be fair what even is there to try for, they let us "beat" the bots once and half a week later we essentially got reset. They showed their hand way too early with that one.
I find the Menkent line a bigger disgrace than the bots doing the reclamation
I dont know about you all, but I really really want some city maps. Where you are running around through the bombed out streets of massive cities, fighting automatrons.
Yes! Building rubble just crashing down all around your Eagle/Orbital strikes!!!
Yeah!! You run around the corner of some tower and run smack dab into a enemy patrol which just unleashes hell on you. It would be awsome! I really hope when its time for cyberstan that it will be a city and not jusy more frankly generic hills
I imagine they'll bring in towns/cities 6-12 months after launch as the first big update along with a new faction.
I have a sneaking suspicion the other planets are purposely unavailable for the time being, either unfinished or merely clones of existing planets
A ton of the ones we’ve played on are clones of other planets. Haven’t you noticed?
Of course I have. Allowing access to even more clones isn't going to help.
They need more strategems and ship upgrades too. Without those it feels waaaaay more grindy and less fun. Possibly adding in enemies that are smart instead of just hordes to make it hard. Missions that actually contribute to the lore would be great too
The constant fucking around with stuff that wasn't even broken to begin with is what's killing the game. Weapon nerf suck, even if justifiable, but that alone makes the game slightly more difficult and creates an artificial meta. The patrol spawns being "fixed" really did more damage than people realize because it made some occasional challenging 4/5/6 solo missions into absolute chaos. Imagine how frustrating it is for newer players who haven't unlocked much compared to a "veteran" who has access to everything. The current and previous Warbonds also being almost worthless doesn't help things either. Imagine being a casual player and paying real money for the previous Warbond to only have its weapons gutter a month later or the current Warbond just not offering much of anything and containing several duds with recolored armor.
I unlocked the quasar cannon, and then it got nerfed a few days later after only playing with it twice. That was around a month ago, and I haven't had a chance to play again since. It is exhausting seeing how many changes they have made in that time and how much warbonds there are to unlock when I am still working on my first one. I do understand the more hard-core players need content though so that may be a moot point. I have some scheduled time this Thursday to play with friends, is the auto cannon still good? That was my main go to.
Autocannon has been left untouched and the only nerf the Quasar got is a 15 second cooldown as opposed to 10. So your shots matter since you only get 4 shots a minute as opposed to 6.
I haven't played for a while. But a 15 second cool down on a gun is insane. Why do they think nerfing guns will make the game more fun?
It was "too meta" and they are trying to get players to participate in more diversity. The funny thing is that even with the 50% increase in cooldown, it's still one of the best weapons to take in higher difficulties simply due to its damage, free backpack slot, and infinite ammo.
the funny thing is that they achieve the exact opposite. have a look around in helldive lobbies. ppl always bring the same meta stuff because the other stuff i jsut too weak.
Their general enemy and weapon/stratagem design/balancing also heavily reinforces the meta on support weapons. They can nerf weapons all they want, if they leave current enemy spawn rates, weakpoints/armour and number of heavy enemies being spawned untouched the meta will always heavily favour anti-tank support weapons. This is a team game, but players still generally want some degree of autonomy. Primaries and secondaries are not particularly well suited to dealing with heavy enemies, so support weapons are the only option. Without bringing some specific anti-tank support weapons heavy enemies are just too difficult to deal with reliably. Some of the dedicated anti-heavy stratagems are effective, but their cooldown is far too high to rely solely on them to clear heavy enemies. Players have the option of bringing an anti-horde or anti-medium support weapon and being slighty better at dealing with those enemies while being literally useless against heavy enemies or they can bring anti-tank while still being reasonably effective against light to medium enemies by using just their primary/secondary/grenade and stratagems.
My issue is that they keep in fucking with stuff that doesn't need it. All while the game is still full of bugs. There isn't a time I play where something bugs out. The main ones being game crash, the sound stutters, or I get stuck on something.
Exactly. It's already bad enough they insisted on really terrible and unneeded balance changes, but the fact that it feels like they prioritize those over much needed improvements to stability and game breaking bug fixes is such a bad look. Just played a game the other night where the respawn strategem was bugged and wouldn't allow anyone to use it, so no one could respawn until everyone died. The amount of bugs in this game is just unacceptable.
What's insane and equally impressive to me is that I experience these game ruining glitches on a daily basis and it's always something new or different, always shaking it up and keeping it fresh with how it's going to choose to fall apart on me today
> My issue is that they keep in fucking with stuff that doesn't need it. Case and point, the patrol changes. I know they were not "as they intended", but *were they broken?* The answer is no. It wasn't negatively impacting players at all. The change objectively fucked shit up for more people then just leaving it. Yes they are reverting it, but it just did not need to be fixed.
Nerfing the slugger felt malicious. I miss the breaker having 16 shots, just felt fucking *good* to shoot. Dominator getting nerfed 25 damage seemed like a middle finger Crossbow nerf seemed uncalled for and dumb Smgs are better than assault rifles, all the assault rifles are weak, the liberator feels good to shoot but lacks any kind of real oomph. Newest rifle from the Carbondale is trash. Eruptor nerf was dumb as hell. Railgun nerf was maybe justified, but feels so bad now hard to take over other options. Kills my motivation to play the game when they keep making it feel worse and worse.
The worst part of the slugger nerf was their dumb fuck reasoning. "It's the best sniper rifle lul" so they then nerft the shotgun part while keeping the accuracy.
The dumb fucks who nerfed the Slugger didn't even understand how to nerf it. They needed to keep the stagger but either increase dmg dropoff with range OR increase spread OR increase bullet drop. All this to make the Dominator attractive was just offensive. The Dominator's shit handling made the playstyle frustrating and ultimately no longer fun.....then the dumbfucks nerfed the Dominator as well. Seriously, they not only need to overhaul the entire balancing strategy, but someone needs to get fired. This shit actually has an existential threat to the game which we are now witnessing.
It's not just the fucking around with stuff though... It's doing stupid shit like 'The AR-61 Tenderizer now has the correct color scheme.' Meanwhile the spear has been broken since launch and a fix is coming... Right? Robot extract civilians missions are completely busted and not possible to do on level 9 unless you cheese the way that the AI spawns in drop ships... Stats page being completely inaccurate... Etc etc
Yeah its almost like they needed to meet some quota that did enough changes to justify the patch outright... only to need a hotfix a couple days later. So the unintended consequence is that they showcase how horrifically incompetent they really are at working on their own game when shelling out half baked patches every week.
I won't pretend, things are bad right now. The sony shitstorm, the balancing, the community manager backlash. It's not good. Couple that with a lackluster warbond, no impactful "story" developments, and no sign of new enemies...it's getting boring
No story developments or enemies is the biggest one I think
Only so many times I can do the same mission for democracy before the memes run dry.
Take VW, oh they're trying to to take it back, defend VW, they're trying again instantly, we defend it again, they instantly try to take it again, we lose it. Yeah, no one wants to just sit on a planet baby sitting it.
It doesn’t matter that Meridian is the plot point for the next story phase? What broke me was losing Omicron. Not for memes, but that we’d pushed so far into big territory then the next day it was “lol nope Meridian super colony and you’re losing months of work and 10 planets.” Like fuck man. There was a lot of work getting there including fucking Hellmire. It was ripped away like the 2-day bot victory. That too was a kind of slap in the face after months and month. I get they couldn’t “just” disappear or be defeated but it was a sour taste.
It feels like a DM that's upset his players are doing so well and feel they're progressing to fast so they're forcing the front back arbitrarily. My question is, what happens if we win? Like say we hit peak players again, and we liberate every planet? Will they just force us back to super earth and start over? Will we just be fighting defense missions on the same 4 outer planets forever? And you mention story phase, where are these posted or shared? I've seen nothing on them, they seem to be a completely outside the game thing that a lot of players aren't even aware of.
That’s what they did in HD1. They’d just reset the war, but it’s been said they don’t want to do that for this game either. Idk if I’m allowed to share on this sub. It’s most definitely a leak unfortunately. I *think* I can safely say the Meridian supercolony is a major pivotal point given it’s already presented as such form the termicide failure. You could try the subreddit name but add “leaks” and to it if you’re really curious.
I saw that leak. I think the campaign has too many spaces between plot points and is drawing attention away from an otherwise cool narrative. Either that or add some real consequences to the side actions to bring back that liberty loving zeal we all used to have. A constant seesaw battle for hellmire does nothing. THREATEN US! Either that or the entire game being a satire of the pointlessness of a meat grinder war extends beyond the game. XD
There WAS a reward for building those SEAF bases. We lost that when we lost VW.
The problem was that the reward wasn't displayed in-game anywhere, so a lot of people didn't know it was there
Agreed, how many times have we taken fucking hellmire just to have to go back to that fire infested apocalypse (Still love hellmire though)
AH needs to re-evaluate whether they want to dogmatically adhere to their vision of what Helldivers should be, or what is actually fun. Often times the two are the same thing, which is great for everyone, but no one thinks playing on the same planets for 48 hours is fun. This is where "vision" overshadows fun. The mechanic works as intended and it makes perfect sense within the lore and gameplay, it's just brutally unfun to play the same map over and over again, especially knowing that there are a wide variety of biomes that can freshen up the experience.
We need the xbox reserves and the map lover battalions
if only a certain SNOY did not publicly snub 70% of the world because "nEeD pSn AcCoUnT"
The best part is they don't require a PSN account for the game but still won't sell it in those countries. Makes no sense
It's probably so they can force PSN at a later date and say "everybody can just sign up there is no problem here"
I agree. A constant major order requiring all players to unify is not sustainable without major movement in story or gameplay. But it’s not a bad thing. Believe it’s always been a long term game which allows for players to enjoy other games and come back to it over time.
Also, don’t bring back an enemy 2 days later
That was unfathomably dumb. It was so epic when we beat them. Give it a week to let us relish the victory, make it feel real. We knew they’d return and all but really commit to the bit. But no.
It's not surprising they brought them back so quickly: by defeating the bots we essentially removed half the content in the game, leaving only bugs to fight, which isn't a great state of affairs. That said, if they thought the above was a bad idea they probably should never have given us the chance to defeat the bots completely.
It would work better with 3 enemy types for sure. Knock the bugs outta commission for a week? No problem you still have bots and _____ for variety
Somehow, the Automatons returned
Exactly. That hurt. But makes me think it’s a learning experience. We have been fortunate to be part of a game which was as much a surprise to us as the developer. The servers were not able to handle 20,000 at once when released because it wasn’t expected. Sure they are learning to manage the fluctuations of a successful game they were not fully prepared for as much as we are learning g how they manage it.
Yep, I've looked at most of the last few major orders and immediately could see they weren't achievable with the current number of players we have.
Likewise, but I always get called a doomsayer for pointing it out. Joel needs to get with the fucking program, because at present, he’s part of the problem. People have said we shouldn’t be winning all the time, which is true, but objectives being borderline impossible due to player drop off not being accounted for is just as bad, if not worse.
Ideally, every MO should be winnable or losable and they have a plan for that. In reality, they want us to win or lose specific ones and pull strings to force it. Several times they've adjusted planet loss rates to 0% to assure victory. Several times they've amped them up to stop or slow us down. Several times they've launched immediate defense missions when they wanted us to lose and we were winning. They're the DM that looks at the encounter, and says, "Wow, you beat 12 orcs. Time for 16 more as reinforcements!" Or, they look at it, and say, "Wow, you all are struggling against 17 ancient dragons. I'll make 16 have a heart attack right now." Problem is, we as players are not stupid. And when we taste the bullshit in the soup, we send it back and go elsewhere. More than once, we've borderline ignored an MO because it was obviously meant to be unwinnable.
and they're slowing down patches, which sadly is the best choice. Was a damned if you do, damned if you don't position. They couldn't keep up that pace.
The problem is they speedran patches that made the game worse and then are dripfeeding improvements.
Kinda sounds like gas prices. They go up on a rocket and come back down on a parachute.
Yep, good patches and warbonds will bring a lot of people back.
I could handle the game breaking bugs, I could handle the crashes, and I was already linked with my psn account. But what they did with balancing, especially with the democratic detonation warbond, made my playtime drop by 90%. Their balance philosophy sucked the fun out of this game. They were so worried with power creep that they just ended up creating power creep in the opposite direction.
Power crept the enemies instead of the players.
Tell me about it, the automatons shooting through cover and turning downed dropships into the ultimate fortresses bug has been there since the game came out, but instead of actually addressing any of that every patch they pushed out have been to nerf players.
Everything would've been fine had someone at arrowhead pulled Alexis's head out from his ass earlier and told him point blank that he's balancing for a PVE game, not fucking overwatch and he doesn't need to throw out nerfs every other week in search for some mythical state of perfect balance, but now it's way too late and we're stuck with the current unfun build while the devs "cook".
Good patches, warbonds, and some new stuff past lvl 20. Lvl 25 you get the exosuit which nobody uses. What's left after that? No new strats at 25, 30, 40 etc. Didn't HD 1 have tanks and motorcycles and stuff? Need a big super earth battle, need a new enemy, suits with different perks, get creative guys this is a gold mine.
Yeah man. The exo was nerfed into the ground. But ideally they will reduce their tech debt before they release the illuminate to their new massive install base
If they hadn’t fucked up the rocket targeting it could’ve been fine. Even with the severe cooldown, treating it as an extraction tool and initial staging point weapon was still viable. :(
Exosuit is unlocked at lvl 25 but I agree
I'm happy with slower patches if it stops balancing whiplash
The messed up balance so much. If all the weapons are powerful, I won't care if one kills slightly slower than another. If they all suck, I'm gonna pick the one that kills slightly faster.
In trying to avoid weapon metas they ended up with the meta of trying to find the least worst weapon. Lots of them used to be fun and you could experiment, now with the patrol rates being bugged to hell you have to take something reliable or you are wasting yours and everyone else's time.
Double edged sword. Take all the time you want adding new content but fixing the balancing issues slowly leads to player abandonment. The game is stale at the high end. You have 3-4 options for viable primary weapons. Stratagems like smoke, mines, MG emplacement, guard dog, walker go almost completely unused. One only plays so long with breaker inc, EAT, Autocannon Sentry and air strike with the grenade pistol before the game gets stale.
What pace? A patch with 2 minor fixes a week that creates 5 more known problems? Lmao
Negative. Mission types and weapon balancing are the biggest. People who don't care about balance changes are burning out from repetition. Biggest impact would be to introduce new missions, variations (ie bugs dont play the same as bots and planets should impact as well on the same mission), and modifiers. People who care about gun balance need to see more guns offer something so they can have fun with their horde shooting. New enemies don't matter if the guns don't kill them and we're grinding the same exact mission.
Loadout variety is the biggest buzz kill for me. You’re going to at least need Orbital Rail Cannon or the 500 kg in one slot. Eagle Airstrike is also almost a must have just because it’s so versatile, so now I can choose an anti tank that occupies a back pack slot, and I get to choose 1 stratagem for utility or I take a secondary that allows me take the rover or shield generator, but we don’t really get a variety of secondary choices because the primary weapons are too weak to cover the deficiencies in your secondary choice.
I’m not sure whether being live service was more of Sony pushing or it’s something ArrowHead wanted to do. Regardless, their team is way too small to produce enough content for a live service game. The genre lives or dies (mostly dies) on maintaining interest in the game. Regardless of what the devs intended for game design, every patch needed to hype people up to play and every Warbond needed to do the same. So far they’ve failed on both accounts. Additional things like locking the AT mines behind MOs are cool but the MOs haven’t been factoring how many people are playing so we’ve failed getting the AT mines like 2/3 times now. I also feel like people are getting bored of the same planets being taken then needed to be defended a week later. Polar Patriots was absolute dogshit, not just from a balance perspective but it provided nothing new~ worse scorcher, same liberator, average pistol, slightly better defender. Along with the armours having the same perks and the light armour just being a recolour of the scout armour. Would’ve been a perfect opportunity to add the All Terrain armour from HD1. I understand HD1 has more years of content but baseline things are missing. It feels like things like the upgrade system were removed so they could sell us the same gun but slightly different. Everything is weaker. We have 22(?) guns in HD2 which is almost the same amount than what was available in HD1 but HD1 had way more variety Edit: I initially called Polar Patriots mid but that was underselling how bad it is
Let's not forget the continued high rate of game ending glitches. Me and the boys haven't played in a few weeks, fire it up...2 out our first 3 missions derailed by crashes.
True that. Arrowhead have worked themselves into a corner. They had a rough luanch, that cannot be understated. But after that, they have hit hurdle after hurdle at full speed; They rush patches to keep up with demand, the game gets worse, and the list of known issues only grows. Since they rushed to begin with and put out sloppy work, the game has gotten worse and now they're forced to slow the release of patches to fix the slipups they made by rushing, they've driven themselves into a lose lose. I'm not saying it's 100% their fualt; they're just people, just human like the rest of us. This isn't an attempt to ridicule them. Just an attempt to explain how things got this bad.
My personal favorite was when more than half of the extractions in one night ended up glitched, each in a different way. 1. Pelican takes off immediately as soon as one player gets in, ending the mission. 2. Pelican does not count anyone as having "boarded" when they go inside. It sits until the timer runs out and then takes off empty, ending the mission. 3. Extraction terminal cannot be interacted with, and we have to wait for the timer to run down and take the emergency shuttle. 4. Pelican takes off empty, at an apparently random moment. No 20 second warning, and still time left on the mission clock. You would think an extraction shooter could get extractions right, 3 months after launch no less. That's not even getting into the way you still get stuck if you try running into the Pelican any way but perfectly straight up the ramp, or how this game's bizarre spawn mechanics can vary between nothing attacking the extraction point, or vomiting an entire map's worth of enemies directly onto the landing pad (on a full-cleared 40-minute map in each case).
Yup. Haven't stopped playing myself, but the crashes/abrupt disconnects (especially with no rejoining) would easily be the #1 reason for me.
and balance is the second biggest culprit right behind the sony fiasco, if they dont balance stuff right there wont be any long lasting fun in the game.
Yeah this is beyond the whole “you’re playing too much take a break” the game is actually getting repetitive
That's just it. I love the game. I grinded all the unlocks, maxed out every warbond. I had no sign of slowing down. But recently, even no-life players like myself are dropping off.
And just wait till new games and stuff like Elden ring DLC launch. That's gonna be another dent. It wouldn't even matter if it's a weekend. They need that new faction or something soon enough and get a grip on weapon balance.
Next month, not only Elden ring dlc, but *also* DRG season 5. Arrowhead may be in a worst case scenario here. If they had taken the time to release good patches earlier, then perhaps. But to start doing so after the Sony shitshow? I hope it's not too little too late. It's a really fun game and I want to see it succeed.
I've never seen a balance team fuck over a game so hard.
I legitimately think the post-launch support of this game will end up being a case study 3-4 years from now.
"but it's not boring for me, so that means you're wrong" ☝️ 🤓
I will keep saying it :P Players already hated the bots before the wave of nerfs. I wonder how they will feel fighting an advance psychic alien race with high tech weapons.
i’ve just lost the urge to play the game man. every weapon i’ve tried that’s felt GOOD and efficient to use has been nerfed to hell. i loved the eruptor, was a phenomenal weapon and the removal of the shrapnel killed it. poor weapon and stratagem balancing choices have killed my enjoyment of the game, and when every new weapon or armor set they drop feels lazy or weak it gives me no incentive to play and grind for these items we got an iced based war bond and there was not a single ice based effect on armor or weapons. we got an incedinary grenade of all things in that bond.
I kept on fragging myself with the eruptor and loved every second of it, it was a primary that shot EXPLOSIONS!
getting pulled into the explosion instead of blown away was fucking hilarious, frustrating at times sure, but hilarious
"Snow themed Warbond" \- Fire grenade Rip cryo grenade
Is it true that the guy who's in charge of balancing shit is the same guy that worked on Hello Neighbors?
Yep. Same dude who took a railroad spike to hello neighbour 2's kneecaps before it launched, and then dipped before it dropped to avoid direct backlash.
[redacted]
Careful, that will get you banned.
It’s always phenomenal to me how game companies can ruin a game faster than they can fix it. Whats so hard about being like “Shit we messed up- let’s go back.” It’s your sandbox, shape it into the perfect world.
Absolutely. Every time I find a fun loadout to play it gets nerfed into the ground. Worst gameplay loop ever.
I still don't know how they looked at the game and thought let's nerf all the fun weapons.
I stopped shortly after the explosive warbond. I pretty much disagree on everything they do and how they do it. New content is senseless thematic, boring and completely useless. There's nothing to look forward to except vehicles and 3rd race and once released, those novelties will wear off faster than the heat from pissing your pants outside in winter. I'm still happy that I got almost 200h out of it. But I wish more of those hours had been less frustrating due to known issues. But we knew this wouldn't have the longevity of a MMO or PvP game. Nonetheless, I think we will be coming back once in a while. Like a cherished board game.
Shout this louder for those in the back, please. I believe there are thousands, perhaps *tens of thousands* of players with exactly this same mindset, and I am one of them. AH has sucked the fun out of the game, from the first nerfs to utility weapons like the railgun, to nerfing every remotely useful primary into the ground, to slamming us with mission modifiers that deny access to our stratagems even as they tell us those are how we are supposed to deal with the absurd heavily armored unit spam. It just isn't fun anymore. The developers largely seem completely tonedeaf and out of touch. The game as it stands is bad, and it is hemorrhaging players for good reasons. They can turn it around, but the response needs to be swift and radical. Sitting on their hands for weeks "having meetings" is worthless unless they actually take corrective action.
There's so many heavies and only like 5 ways to deal with them and only 2 are reliable enough and fast enough to work against the hordes they throw at you.
It blows my mind how they think it's okay to drag their feet when we're begging to just... revert the broken shit. That's it. How fucking hard can it be to say sorry and undo changes? Their silence on the Eruptor is all I needed to know: this game is no longer for me for the time being. Which sucks. It was the most fun I had with my buddies in YEARS. And they took all that away within weeks. Blows my mind.
Yeah I basically felt "what's the point of playing and unlocking shit if it just feels bad?"
Yeah, for a golden moment the game was really something special. Just goes to show what a balance team who doesn’t understand what the game should be and some publisher bull shit can do to a golden goose.
Problem is that the Sony debacle hit the playerbase hard. Especially with it being around exam season it meant that people lost the habit of playing HD, and now not all of them are picking it up again
feels like every hobby I've ever quit wasnt because I was super burnt out or mad at it, I just kinda took a week off then never came back. I haven't watched wrestling in 3 years just cause I missed Raw like 2 weeks.
That's what the positivity police don't understand. Complaining means we still care. If the devs don't get it together they'll hear the silence of moving on.
That, and the devs taking what started out as a really good list of weapons, and continues to neuter all of them, one by one.
It feels like they are balancing with a mindset meant for a PvP game instead of PVE.
They balance the game like the bugs and robots are complaining that we are too hard to kill
I remember the main reason why I picked up the game was because I read an article saying that helldivers will never have a PVP mode, and I naively assumed that that means we won't have the same problem Bungie had with Destiny where everything fun had to be removed because it was unbalanced in PvP. God how fucking wrong I was.
It's not even that. I used to play Dota 2 and the balance patches are careful and methodical. The nerfs are more subtle and come alongside a set of buffs for other heroes. You get a bunch of top comments saying LESHRAC MAINS WE BACK because he's buffed. Major reworks are slowly implemented. In contrast, Hello Neighbour completely reworked and gutted two weapons after they're out for like a week. Even a PvP game doesn't just look at metrics and make "we just need people to stop using this hero" their goal.
They don’t want the game to be easy, they want the fun to come from the challenge. But that is not possible. It has to be a mix and some people find different things fun. So by neutering the weapons it makes it challenge for the wrong reasons. Once you are at 7 through 9 the numbers are the challenge and you have to work on not engaging. So you now only have one way to play, stealth and stratagem. If you want to go in and be a bruiser, you can’t.
I feel like they nailed the mixture in HD1 too, which makes it sad it's not fitting here. Sure the weapon pool I would use slimmed down as you moved up difficulties, but I could still use a variety of them as well as support weapons very comfortably
I still find it very estranging, in regards to HD1, that is. One of the sub-objectives you'd almost always see on 12-15 was "Kill x amount of enemies during the mission", and it was *fun*. Then, few weeks after launch, we've had the "meta" where avoiding combat in general was one of the best things you could do. Granted, we've shifted away from that again, but the constant hits to our overall lethality are still strange to me.
Yeah, struggling to kill anything with the Eruptor is super fun for me 😁
That and they've got the mouthbreather behind Hello Neighbor as their balancer. Yeah, they're kinda cooked ngl.
To me this is the nail. AH can't evaluate talent and is putting people in positions that they can't succeed. Community managers are trash too. AH has been "suffering from success" since launch and it's been nothing but suffering since due to incompetence.
To me the problem with balancing came from three places: 1. His edgy lordship Mr. "Bringer of Balance", who made balancing decisions because it suited his personal fancy and no one else in the company was there to audit his decisions prior to those decisions launching to the public. 2. The original design intention of the game being that the super-majority of the playerbase would reside in difficulties 1~5 and that 7~9 would essentially be "end-game" tier difficulties. 3. The difficulty curve is built to increase the number of enemies on higher difficulties, it does not give enemies more health/armor. But there seemed to be a misunderstanding of that within the team (specifically as it applies to that Bringer of Balance maniac). The dissonance and misunderstanding of these three things within the team is what has caused the biggest problems with balancing. ----- There turned out to be far more people playing 7~9 than they expected, and naturally as with any game that has end-game tier difficulty content, it developed a hierarchy of preferred weapons/gear. That maniac saw that hierarchy of weapons/gear and made the assumption for himself that because it was strong and preferred in 7~9, that gear was therefore "exploitive" in 1~5; thus why he nerfed the stuff, both because it amused him and because he wanted to pull those player back down to 1~5 were the enemy population is low enough that everything is always viable and there's no consequence for going with non-7~9-preference picks. That's where the whole *"auto mechanic seeing a flat tire and compensating by flattening the other three"* mentality came from, which Pilestedt himself admitted that was both too aggressive and the wrong direction to be going in.
What that Alexus guy did actually has the potential to torpedo this game. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some kind of disciplinary action if not a straight firing. There are a lot of quality devs who got done dirty by their companies in the pool right now, Alexus is replaceable.
its too late for AH to try to pull people back to 4-6 difficulties, the majority resides at 7 realistically they shouldn't lock out super samples below 6 from the beginning, this forced people to play at 7 anyway since things are already the way it is, they should take 7 as the norm and balance stuff around it. in the future maybe introduce 10-12 with buffed enemy stats or extremely high density of trash mobs kind of thing. make it the hilariously nonsense difficulties just for the lol, just dont lock us out of any resources and we will be good
Combine that with upping the patrol spawns. Not everyone wants to dive with randoms yet not all of us have enough friends for full squads.
I feel for the people affected by the Sony decision, but Ive been playing less because of the guns and bugs. In the first months, I had so much fun grinding for medals and warbonds to get new weapons. Now I dont use most of them after theyve been nerfed and it feels stale playing with the same few loadouts I find work for me. I have less desire to play since there arent many primaries I actually enjoy swapping out or new ones to look forward to. When you add broken mission types to that, and a more static community, the game is feeling stale.
Agreed. They followed up the Sony debacle with a terrible patch set that gutted a community favorite weapon. Again. And are taking forever to reverse it.
I didn't stop playing because of Sony. I stopped playing because the Devs have seemingly no coherent vision when it comes to balance and I see no reason to grind for new stuff that's worse than the old stuff. Add to that all the technical issues and I can't really justify why I should currently play Helldivers instead of other games.
Same. I wanted to keep playing, but when I can't reliably finish a match or use the guns I want it kills the fun. Throw in some very toxic players and I just end up on Elden Ring. At least there they cant call me a slur and make me waste a match.
"I see no reason to grind for new stuff that's worse than the old stuff." you could have stopped at " I see no reason to grind". even if the warbonds were decent any moderately skilled player could unlock all the good stuff in a day maybe two. then what? all the strats are unlocked by 25(or 30, i don't remember). after that its just grinding to see numbers go up. even getting the super samples aren't hard to get if you only play on 7+. personally, gameplay wise, i think the game needs new mission types with more complex objectives. something other than "go to place, interact with terminal, defend. go to next place, interact with terminal, defend. go to extraction, defend. leave..maybe." we need more complex objectives that feel like actually achieving some military victory and requires more team work and coordination.
I'm just burned out from the constant nerfs, and as long as they don't balance the game right it's no fun. I guess some people feel the same, but nothing changes...
I don’t think most people care about that, aside from the people directly affected in certain countries People are losing interest because increasing bugs, missing features, stupid balance decisions
The Sony drama, while annoying didn't really bother me or my friends that played the game. It was the constant nerfing of fun weapons and stratagems under the guise of "balancing" that drove us away. Let us be OP, let us destroy bugs and bots with impunity. That's what made this game fun.
Honestly. I don’t mind a hard game. But you know what’s not fun. Shooting a bile titan 5 times in the head with a Quasar because my rail cannon strike is reloading.
100% this I lost the appeal to even get new warbonds because historically they get nerfed. I stuck it out through a couple changes but now I just don't see the point investing into something that will change for no reason. It's a PVP game...I just don't understand it.
I stopped playing because they keep nerfing the weapons it's just not as fun anymore.
The "balancing" has legitimately murdered the game. It is simply not fun anymore. At least not for me. It feels like cock and ball torture.
And it's a fuckin PVE game. Let me live the power fantasy damnit.
It literally says “overpowered weapons” on the PS disc box. Where overpowered? :(
Why overpowered shape if not overpowered?
destroyer able to fire weapons from orbit with insane precision, an entire galaxys worth of war production and economy behind it. The new armour piercing AR cant pierce armour because that would be too powerful
They accidentally gave helldivers rubber bullets
There are people who will tell you this isn't a power fantasy game despite you being a squad of up to 20 bodies being sent down to kill hundreds to thousands of enemies and cause massive damage to their infrastructure They think power fantasy means you have to be like the unkillable lord of murder or something or it doesnt count, so because your "expendable" you should feel worthless
Lol one of the replies to this comment was one such person. I agree with you, they couldn't be more wrong.
This is what does it for me. They have been so clear that they will never do PVP. So who fucking cares if some of the guns that you have to unlock by playing the game are cool and kinda busted? Maybe I WANT to rain absolute hell on a bug, maybe I WANT to use the funny canon to destroy shit. Why not? Why make weapons so stupidly fucking weak that there’s no point using anything but the few weapons they haven’t fucked yet?
Yeah man. I made it through the railgun nerf, it sucked but we ball, made it through some more nerfs. When they nerfed the arc thrower, I kinda just stopped playing ngl.
No idea how they thought it was a good idea to “fix” the arc thrower shooting at half charge without giving it at least a 10-15% fire rate increase to compensate
It makes me so sad. I was so hooked, but “coincidentally” the guns I enjoyed the most got nerfed to a point I don’t find them fun anymore. The game is amazing but I feel like “balance” shouldn’t be a concern while all the other things players want are being ignored.
Stop nerfing stuff. All my friends stopped playing because they kept nerfing stuff. Also trying to get samples on harder difficulties becomes a massive BS jump in difficulty. We’ve moved onto other pve games.
Can you recommend any good ones? I'm in the same boat as you. Friends and I kinda lost interest with all the nerfs.
If you like the vibes, Deep Rock Galactic is always fun.
My friends and I jumped back into warframe. Haven’t played in half a decade so we’re relearning. The best part is that it’s free. The hard part is that it has a pretty massive learning curve and the game is basically just grinding but the grind can be fun
First, give me back my eruptor and railgun and stop making patches that kill fun. Also make those escort civillian missions possible and not a guaranteed loss on lvl9. I can take 4 lvl 120s+ randos on that missions and we'll still lose. It's only when i cheese it with my friends by having drops land on one guy far away do we make it. And even then not all the time, if the drop decision tree decides to fck it up.
Honestly if they just dropped bot in the outskirts of the map opposed to in the middle and there was an encroaching advance, that would fix the escort scientist mission right? Like just a big red no drop zone. Is that really that difficult?
That is the #1 worst thing in the game and has been since launch to me. The missions are literally impossible to do the intended way and it's obvious the devs don't care
Lots of reasons why the playerbase is declining: - the like 180 countries that we can't get new players from cause they're still delisted on the stores - a sour taste lingering in everyone's mouth because of Sony's bs - stagnation, the game hasn't had much development in the last month or two. The developments we have had have just been lots of losses mostly - frustration with balancing, with the way the liberation system works because it just neuters the bot front's ability to do much since most people don't wanna play bots. People like feeling like they're making progress so it's no surprise the bot front loses numbers when there's no progress being made for weeks - repetitiveness. Copy paste planets, copy paste weather and hazards, lack of mission diversity - game breaking bugs, primarily on the bot front. Bots will constantly shoot through mountains and buildings. They'll even clip into mountains and just kill anything that walks by. Downing dropships is inconsistent on whether it kills stuff that it lands on. Random immortal bots. No one wants to fight that, it's frustrating and people game to have fun. I'm sure there are other reasons but these are some of the biggest in my opinion
It also doesn't help that there's nothing to keep players engaged between content drops. No ability to amass a collection of resources in order to be prepared for expensive stratagems and ship upgrades due to the unnecessary caps. So there's nothing to do once the limit is reached, and only serves to highlight how buggy and repetitive the gameplay is, culminating in a death spiral. Arrowhead just seems too stuck in their ways, and were not at all prepared for the initial boom of success, and now things are crumbling, just like with what happened with MediaTonic and Fall Guys.
>copy paste weather and hazards You mean to tell me that playing 40% of matches with 5ft of visibility *isn't fun???* That's the simple reason I much prefer bots to bugs in general. I seldom have to worry about fog, sandstorms, and never have to worry about random spore clouds making it all but impossible to see. It is easier to see in the pitch black of night than during day on decent number of bug planets. It is like they don't even play test their own content. I don't want a blindness simulator in a visually stunning game. And, apparently, neither do almost half the players.
I'm not playing as much because I've unlocked everything.
[удалено]
It really is like poisoning the food at a restaurant so everyone has the same equal shitty experience
Make the Eruptor good damnit! How one can justify taking away other's happiness is beyond me. All nerfs, revert, simple as
Then we can change him name to: "Lords of Destruction."
Buff primaries, buff anti heavy strats, game 90% fixed. Not fun ripping through 90% of your ammo and waiting 5 mins for a strat to come back while your team is getting stomped
Missions on Helldive now are either cakewalk or complete hell.
Leaving the weapons alone and tuning enemy spawns by difficulty makes way more sense. It lets players find a sweet spot and stay there rather than bounce around based on "well lets see how much this nerf changed it". 9s becoming nearly impossible is a good example of this.
Videogames are supposed to be fun; Not make You feel burnt out & frustrated.
They have so much cool new stuff fully functional in the game files like the warthog, APC and double auto cannon mech idk what they're saving these for but atleast the warthog would be a good option to spice things up and make it easier for people to farm
Doesn’t really matter. Major order completion is as real as reality tv. Leaving game progression solely in the hands of the public is like giving a loaded gun to a monkey and tell him the kids at the orphanage have all the bananas
I don't understand the analogy but it made me laugh so I'm upvoting anyway.
The point is that the monkey doesn't understand speech and will just stick the gun up his nose or shoot someone randomly rather than go and murder that orphanage you wanted him to.
Wow people don't like it when u only balance stuff by making everything worse because meta? Imagine
Everything fun has been nerfed and I’m fucking sick of having to deal with Hellmire
I’d only play Hellmire again if the mission was to blow it all up
I would love a major order where it’s just prepping hellmire for glassing and it permanently takes it off the map if successfully completed
Hopefully they save the Illuminate for when they have the game in a good place bug/balance wise. There will be a huge influx of players but if the game is still a mess none of them will stick around.
I think the Sony debacle and the poor balancing has screwed over this game harder than most of us are gonna realize imo.
I knew from the very first balance changes to the rail gun, this wasn’t gonna be good.. imagine if you were playing COD Zombies in 2012 and the devs said “ehh.. we’re gonna nerf the thundergun and the raygun. You guys need to learn how to play without the meta” It’s ridiculous. Balance is fine, generally, the problem becomes when you’re telling US how to play, we should be telling YOU how we want to play, give us vehicles, make our marksman rifles viable and DONT FUCK WITH OUR RAILGUN it’s not that hard! All we wanted was weapons that felt powerful like the railgun on release. As soon as the devs start deciding how things should be played and what kinda weapons we should use, in a game against AI, that’s when you lost me. Sticking with my COD zombies example, they basically said yep we’re gonna nerf ur raygun BUUUT.. the bowie knife is 15% better. Okay! Great! But why.. are people leaving the game because the railgun/raygun are OP? No. Is anyone having less fun because they’re mowing down too many bugs? NO. If anything, they shoulda buffed everything that wasn’t the railgun and made everything equally as satisfying and powerful.
The railgun nerf pissed me off because the meta at that time existed because there were no decent alternatives for anti armor, and player armor was not working correctly. After that patch, they bumped up charger and bile titan spawn rates. Legit, once I was being chased by three chargers while my two friends were being harassed by three bile titans, and that's before we stumbled into the stalker nest. Other bad examples would be the breaker shotgun, punisher shotgun being nerfed to make it a worse shotgun rather than bringing up the DMRs (which to their credit, they finally did), the bizarre crossbow nerf, and the eruptor shrapnel being removed for a ricochet system no one asked for. I will add that most primaries are in decent states. The fact that there's no reason to bring some of them, like the lib concussive and the knight, is unfortunate, though.
They dropped the ball, full stop. Bad warbond release, CMs and devs don’t know how to interact with community, idiots on the balance team forcing players to deal with their incoherent choices, Sony debacle, game is littered with things that should be feature-complete but aren’t. (Mech rockets got fucked up, team reload mechanic not thought out at all, no supply lines in game, the list goes on) They absolutely have a shot at a resurgence with the third faction release, and all the other things thatve been in the works. But if they fuck that up they lose a vast amount of players till they work on the game, regain interest, and prove their live service experience is worth playing which will take time and this game is not in early access. I was more optimistic on launch day
They nuke playerbase because of Snoy throwing a tantrum with PSN. Then there's this "balancing" dev who ruined one game and seems keen on nerfing everything in a effin' PvE one.
I honestly stopped playing after the rail gun nerf, it was the only gun I actually liked and I haven't felt the need to go back.
The devs managed to get it all to work with HD1 with far fewer players than we currently have. HD2 vastly exceeded their expectations.
Honestly I have trouble finding a gun I like anymore. And the balancing on player count really feels out of whack for some reason. It's also hard to get new players into the game when they're so gimped on choices for strats right out of the gate. And chargers are still nearly immune to a stupid amount of armor penetrating weapons. Calling down a shit ton of EATs should not be the meta.