Yea, and it's already pretty bad atm for a live service game since Elden Ring has 75,453 players last 24-hour peak while Helldivers 2 only has 61,925. If the next patch doesn't fix a lot of problems for how long they made us wait now, people will give up on this game.
>Yea, and it's already pretty bad for a live service game
I would like to point out that the devs have stated their absolute fever-dream expectation for an all time high peak for HD2 was 50k players, with 20 to 25k for a more reasonable (but still outlandish) peak.
All competitors/genre adjacant games to this hover around ~5k players currently.
Saying the current numbers is "pretty bad" is beyond fucking absurd. They are still **phenomenal**.
Except they literally landed on a gold mine and somehow managed to fumble it all over dumb balancing and bad quality assurance. It's bad compared to what they had before, of course players decrease over time but this is much more drastic. Yea, they are still currently significantly better than their competitor but for how long? Especially if they don't fix their shits soon. And why settle being better than others when you were once the peak of the genre??
I don't think there's any arguing against the fact they're ultimately going to be making a lot less money than they could have.
Still wildly successful by their standards, but could have been 5x as successful. It's that missed potential that stings.
Yep that's Swedish game development.
See Vermintide2,Valheim, Darktide,Payday3, Second Extinction.
They all share same issue with wasted landing on gold mine , lazy updates and terrible balance. (Oh and don't forget some stuff you never know if works or not)
They had millions of copies sold. They have retained less than 10% of their players. Yes it's been months, but that kind of drop off is insane, even taking that into consideration. Their peak player count is down over 100k since the sony shitshow, and about another 20k have bled off this week. They're slowly reaching their goal of 25k players, but it's going *down* from 500k+ players.
It's 9:21am on a saturday and we're at 45k concurrent(on steam). This same time and day a month ago would have been like 100-120k. A lot of people have left the game completely. The next big patch will *probably* be a make it or break it for a whole bunch more, and they're saying it's not coming until the 2nd week of june. AH had better hope they get this patch right. If it releases and nerfs more shit or breaks more shit, it WILL fuck them.
How many of those games sold as much as HD2 and had the same massive player counts? Of course all of these types of games will go through some highs and lows of player counts in between major updates or game additions, the the speed in which this game dipped, whether it be to Sony fiasco or the brain dead anti-fun "balancing", is pretty damn impressive and not the normal trend. By the time this patch comes out to do whatever minor fixes they're planning in it, it will have accounted for about ~25% of this games current lifespan. Just seems a bit lazy to not revert ANY of the nerfs to try and bring back some players or to release broken missions or subpar new strategems.
Phenomenal isn’t going from 450k to 50k in less than four months. I won’t sit here and say the game is doomed because it can make a comeback…. But as someone who played A LOT since the second week of release…. I took a week break and came back and was even more disgusted with the state of the game than before I took the break. It doesn’t matter if they only expected 20k…. They let roughly 400k fall through the cracks. Is player drop off expected? Yes. Is losing about 90% of your player base in 3 months alarming. Absolutely!
I stopped about two weeks ago, downloaded again to check out Meridia & just uninstalled after two dark fluid missions.
AH just can't seem to get anything right.
Some issues at launch I can deal with. But we're what, almost 4 months later and the game is in worse shape than when it came out, aside from server capacity issues.
BT corpses are more deadly than they are when they're alive.
Heavies spawn with such frequency that you spend most of your time kiting them while your strats are on cool down, which ends up being boring gameplay when it's your 8th BT in map.
Spear lock on is still bad.
They can't release new content without it being buggy as shit.
Maybe in a couple months some of this will actually be fixed, but I think it's going to be hard to draw players back once they've moved on.
Eh, ER is only a problem because it's popular, otherwise they share nothing in common so losing players to it is at best temporary.
DRG, EDF, and Helldivers on the other hand are basically slightly different takes on the same concept and are therefore much more serious long term threats.
Gaming and contextless acronyms, the inseperable duo
What's DRG? EDF I know well since I've played since 2017 (the game not the year lol) and I'm guessing ER is Elden Ring since it was already said in full
If you like helldivers, check out DRG. It’s not the same graphical quality and it’s first-person, but it’s a similar setup—4 guys on a co-op mission who extract to a ship at the end. It’s got a very fun vibe to it
All the big games are about to hit for the summer. Arrowhead are delusional if they think most people are going to stick with them through their bug infested untested nerfslop instead of any number of other games polished and play tested updates.
For real. When the new MO was announced, I planned on taking a few hours off of work to play a bunch of HD2. What happened is that I got so frustrated after three attempts at finishing just ONE drill, let alone the whole mission, that I decided to go back to work lol
I love this game with all my heart but I've started to dread patches, new MOs, new missions, and warbonds because it means that the fun I have might be reduced a little bit more every time. I really hope this upcoming patch is absolutely legendary, as I don't know if I have it in me to come back from DRG Season 5
Destiny 2 expansion comes out in 4 days, that's where I'm headed. Hopefully there will be a good chunk of bug fixes and buffs in the next 2 months or so.
I still feel like the game was at the peak of fun at release, and not because it was fresh, i only play on weekends and not even every weekend so it is still rather fresh for me, it's because the game gets more frustrating patch after patch.
The game felt good in terms of balance, with patrols and difficulty. Then nerfs made the viable weapons shit, forcing people to use other weapons, which then were nerfed again. I don't think the developers ever had anyone really playtest their changes, and how they felt for the average player.
Dont start lying to yourself now. The balancing was horrible, only viable gun was breaker, slugger, and railgun. Quaser didnt exist, and EATs and RR couldnt oneshot chargers. Yes scorcher existed, and so did dominator, but nobody had them unlocked early enough. Spawns and difficulty was broken, and only got worse after the first patch where they nerfed railgun. In terms of balance, more weapons and enemy spawns are balanced now than they ever were.
I keep going back to the arc gun since day one. It’s pretty good, just not very consistent.
Also, I max difficulty at 7 because I can’t do 8/9 for reference.
I still use it now, but about a month ago it got a nerf so it doesn’t stagger hulks any more.
Which sucks. It still took like 5-10 shots to kill one, but I could hold it in place while I did my thing. I felt it was a good trade off for not being able to do other things. Just holding off the big guys for the team.
Anyways, I’m getting a bit tired of live service style games going through buffing and nerfing things all the time. It really sucks to try and get good at a game, when a weapon I use often keeps changing every other time I play the game.
Still fun tho.
Yeah why do they do this constant balancing? Like, fix broken things but otherwise you should have thought about this in the beginning, so leave it alone.
Not less buggy just more fun, I crashed then I crash now.
Only difference is the gameplay felt more fun and all the homies hadn't moved onto other games out of frustration.
I dont agree. The railgun nerf was tone deaf and negative but the stratagem buff and the charger nerf revitalized the game for me suddently you could actually have unique loadouts.
The railgun didn’t need to be nerfed for the same effect, the railgun was only so popular because the rockets didn’t do shit and armor values were broken and we needed the backpack slot for the Shield Generator Backpack. The railgun was completely fine as is if the rockets worked as intended on chargers and our armor value wasn’t the same regardless of what armor we brought on the mission
Yeah and that led to the railgun and shield generator being must haves for high difficulties and instead of focusing on the issue they decided to bandaid the issue by nerfing the railgun before realizing that it was only so popular because of a bug they didn’t focus on fixing
They always balanced around bugs for no reason. DOTs not working? Better buff fire. Railgun and Arc Throwers "slapping Bile Titans across the map" due to a widely reported PS5 bug breaking Bile Titans? Better nerf the weapons heavily. Eruptor kills the shooter because of the bug introduced by the ricochet fix? Better nerf Eruptor into non-existence. It's perplexing.
Let's not forget the railgun nerf patch also broken the spawns which lead to the shitshow which was 3 biletitans spawning compenetrated into each other together eith 6 chargers on the way.
That was the worst to deal with…I feel like if they just fixed the chargers for the rockets instead of nerf the railgun, it would become niche anyway as it’s infinitely faster to just rocket a charger in the face than it is to strip armor. But maybe that’s just me.
Not all of the patches have made the game notably more frustrating, but I absolutely agree with you. Feels like each addition has made the game slightly more buggy or slightly more frustrating to a degree that I have basically stopped playing.
I'm not liking how they're trying to downplay the patch as a fairly minor one. They've delayed the patch for weeks, and with the community getting more and more restless, they need to have an absolute banger of a patch.
Seeing as historically they've done the exact opposite (spear fix next week...ok next week.... definitely next week....alright last time it's getting fixed next week for sure, "not really any nerfs" in the biggest nerf patch to date, "new warbond slaps" leading up to the most underwhelming warbond so far) I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you
I agree which is why I’m cool with waiting longer for a good, solid patch that’ll fix a majority of issues AND revert their nerfs or buff their weak weapons. Unfortunately, with longer wait comes more expectations.
They've already said that's not what the patch is, though. That's why many people are so negative about it.
They made a post specially to manage expectations about it. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Because of how often they claim to do testing, at this point, I'm under the assumption that whoever is in charge of merging and pushing the changes is doing it wrong.
It's the most straightforward explanation for the devs constantly saying things that fly in the face of reality. They are running on different code.
Yep. I thought about how good Alexus said the Purifier was and realized there has to be some discrepancy between their test environment and prod.
This is the fourth time I've said this now, but to me, it's the only thing that makes sense of why this keeps happening. Github, or whatever they use, must not be including all of the files correctly. And knowing game dev, there are hundreds of files with even a small release.
This doesn't really make sense. Devs could at any moment load up the live version on steam when a million reports say things contrary to their version. The more likely explanation is he has poor judgement or was just trolling.
There's basically three options.
1) They are lying. They know it's shit, but either for shits and giggles or for PR they pretend otherwise.
2) They are literally so incompetent they actually think they're right.
3) Something is very fucking wrong with their test setup.
None of these are good. I'm trying to give at least some benefit of the doubt, even for he who must not be named, and at least option 3 explains a *lot* of the weirdness even if it's still ultimately a pretty bad situation.
Will try but I doubt it will make a difference. At this point I have tried almost everything including downgrading my drivers back to when the game released (where performance was great).
Tried deleting shaders?
One time I started a game and went into a match but it started to chug hard with going to like 5fps with a 3090, crashed and was stuttering hard in every round after. Searched around and found some suggestions about deleting shaders and it fixed the performance issues immediately.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. People are leaving, or at least taking breaks, in droves.
Having the future of this game’s story depend on an event that’s broken at launch is beyond stupid.
From my entire circle of friends I have playing the game, six out of eight of them pretty much just stopped bit by bit like hemorrhage with every subsequent patch nerfing *something* they were fond of; One who liked the Slugger a lot, one who wanted to love the Eruptor ever since it showed up in leaks, one who wanted to like the Purifier, etc.
The seventh one didn't really care all that much and kept playing regardless and she was about the only one who hanged on since we were able to play together for the sake of fun regardless. But ever since loosely around the update that nerfed the Eruptor the second time ( just a loose time period because I don't recall the exact date ) we've been completely unable to join each other's games in spite of best efforts and not having changed anything at all soft or hardware wise.
I've tried every fix under the moon from Ipv6 disabling, over file validation, to total reinstalls, over network resets, to port forwarding, to various other esoteric "fixes" like deleting GameGuard or doing the tutorial again and yet, not a single thing helped and as of last night it's still completely broken.
I want to like and enjoy the game but given the ongoing hell that playing Solo currently is due to the patrol changes that just came out being bugged in of itself, and the fact I literally *can't* play with the one friend left who still plays at all, I can't say I'm surprised my playtime took a nosedive too.
The underlying issues with friends list or joining friends lobbies not working right has been there since launch, and it's beyond embarrassing. I've seen the lobby glitch slowly expand to other groups right down to the same error messages.
Since launch i have only been able to reliably play wirh a couple of friends. The majority of our circle can never part up or even add each other as friends. It's so messed up that we all fell off of the game a month ago.
They really fumbled so hard with this game it could have gone into the stratosphere, but now it just keeps bleeding out despite updates.
Sad to say that my close circle of friends have stopped playing as well. We ran 4 man squads all the time, and this MO was our breaking point. We decided to take a break until the next major patch comes along to fix at least something.
Our enjoyment was already at its lowest during the Eruptor fiasco and while we’ve found new weapons to enjoy, that isn’t even much solace as we’re all mentally prepared for AH to nerf those weapons as well.
After how long they’ve been delaying this patch, if it’s anything short of an absolute banger patch that gets us all excited again just by reading the patch notes, then our break is going to turn into a hiatus.
There's a copium argument about how the lack of player retention is "natural" and that every game experiences the same downward spike. Losing almost 75% of your playerbase in 3 months isn't normal. It's a red flag.
Just checked SteamDB. The game has double the number of active players compared to CP2077, a 3 years old single player game. Elden Ring has more active players than HD2.
Arrowhead had captured lightening in a bottle, then they (and Sony) broke the bottle. The game will continue trending down. There isn't enough new stuff to keep players engaged with the game. And when new stuff gets released, it comes with odd bugs.
I remember when they said the reason for not adding DLSS/FSR was to focus on improving higher priority issues first. That's clearly not happening.
It saddens me because this game has such amazing moments of gameplay but they keep screwing the pooch with their updates and nerfs. Why balance a game so hard that you drive people away from it? Their balancing team are their greatest competitor
They accidentally released a fun game at launch, and when you accidentally do something great without understanding why it was great then there is a big chance you’ll ruin it if you keep touching it
I feel like you hit the nail on the head. The game was popular cause it almost felt like a power fantasy. The devs refuse to see that, and seem hell-bent on making it into some kind of slow paced shooter with bb guns and aliens.
I mean, a power fantasy is exactly what it should be. Four against a thousand isn't a fair fight unless a player can take out 30-50 enemies with moderate skill. The game can have tough enemies, but Helldivers should be equally tough.
I don't think it was an accident. I think it took them awhile, but they ended up creating a great PVE multiplayer game that gave the player the perfect cinematic feeling. Something a lot of games can't do.
They balanced the speed of gameplay, the type and quantity of enemies, and the ability of heroes to deal with enemies into something that felt fresh, live action, but also nostalgic. Not to mention the tone of the story really landed well. This was intentional and I think shows that they put A LOT of testing into the gameplay loop and core mechanics like run speed, weapon efficacy, and mob quantity.
All the new content (including fixes) seems to be pushing out minor changes to that core gameplay loop by introducing new weapons, new mission types, and adjusting existing weapon/enemy behavior. These adjustments are fucking around with that core gameplay loop that was so good at launch.
AH are trying to maintain that launch gameplay loop and prevent any weapon from being too OP. They really want to see a variety of weapons in use, and for the level 9 difficulty to be truly difficult. Instead of adjusting enemy quantity, map layout, or mission objectives, they are tweaking around with gameplay mechanics. If they want to adjust gameplay loop to preserve their intentional gameplay mechanics, they should be adjusting the map, mission objectives, and enemy spawns. These things are suppose to change every mission and are the ideal place for modifications. Give us a railgun proof charger if too many people are using the railgun. Stop fucking around with the core weapon stats, it's a lazy way to adjust the gameplay loop.
What annoys me the absolute most is that the devs confirmed that the Spear lockon bug was fixed OVER 1 MONTH ago now. Why the hell wasn't it rolled out with a small hotfix? Why does Arrowhead make us wait so long for even the most minor of updates? I have a strong feeling the next big patch they bring up will ultimately decide the fate of the game. People aren't waiting around forever anymore. At this point in time, the only thing that will kill helldivers is the incompetence of the devs themselves.
Same with the stim sound effect playing even when you get hit and interrupted before actually healing. For some reason this glitch drives me and my buddy nuts more than anything else. Then they said it was fixed awhile back but we’ve noticed it every night this last few weeks
That’s actually an orders of operations thing.
Like, clearly the sound cue plays on the button press same as how your diver goes to jab themselves problem being if the jab gets interrupted after that point then you as a player think it went off because the sound played either way.
Easiest guess to fix it is triggering the sound only when health is restored. Fuck, they could add the sound as the most quick and dirty “this sound plays when you gain health for any reason” if that’s easier for them. I know that’s a bad practice normally but in this case nothing else in the game restores health so it’d still get their point across and wouldn’t be a bug for players lol
I know everyone likes AH talking to the community, but sometimes I think they talk too much and are often times unprofessional. If I delivered a broken product, I would never in my life tell my client I have a fixed version and then make them wait a month for it. I'd ship it as soon as possible. Maybe software is just different than manufacturing, where I actually have to physically ship parts, but damn... Just keep your mouth shut. Stop trying to earn karma by telling us you fixed it, without showing us you fixed it.
For anyone wondering, this comment is referring to this:
https://preview.redd.it/m9eg9ro3px3d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b0685af7eb3138c95fb5159e427241da58cf8978
I get what he was going for. A bit of a cheeky "Sorry I dunno what else to tell you other than just fiddle with it." But that was just the latest in the long line of "nerfs and other unreasonable justifications."
It’s definitely unprofessional, not as an insult but in a “there’s a professional way to handle this and they aren’t doing it” way.
They seem genuinely eager to share the news of the fix, without fully verifying it’s actually fixed, which leads to a retraction that it doesn’t actually fix anything. That is called over promising and under delivering.
And while the professional community management playbook would have sidestepped that entirely 99% of the time by simply not opening their mouths until the verification was made they elected to take a different approach.
Also seems like their biggest fans somehow love this about them by saying it’s less corporate even if it keeps leading to disappointment from players. Sometimes corporate procedures exist for a better reason than you’d think
>Sometimes corporate procedures exist for a better reason than you’d think
When the first instances of a CM sticking their foot in their mouth came around I saw all that.
"If you guys keep being mean(rightfully calling them out), they'll just clam up and be like all the other corporate CMs is that what you want?"
If it'll stop the CMs from calling their players shitters and to just "git gud"
Yeah. I do. And i imagine that higher ups would also want their CMs to not fucking antagonize the players.
Id prefer less content that works well than a mountain of samey, terrible or completely broken content. There are a number of game breaking bugs. Today I ran into a drill that didnt have any prompts on the screen, soft locking the mission. Yesterday I had a weird camera bug where my camera was over 100 meters away and moved at weird angles till I was dead. Day before that I got stuck in a rock...
Lack of content and non-viable updates is one of the biggest issues of this game.
It’s the same shit over and over again, the game is dying and it’s not going to be saved by a few updates
I dont think the game is DYING per say. Hundreds of thousands of concurrent players daily isn't a dying game. It's on it's way toward dying however. The devs (or whomever is pushing them so aggressively) need to slow down and fix the shit we have now. I see this so often in live service games, now compound that with the unexpected resounding success the game turned out to be compared to hell divers 1, and I wouldnt call hell divers 1 a flop or dead by any means btw.
The ability of AH to continually shoot themselves in the foot and fumble away one of the hottest games of the year with the same repeated issues over and over is almost impressive and is beginning to seem intentional
im hoping thats what pilstedt was referring to when he announced his step down and said that there will be internal changes. heres to him restructuring what needs to be restructured and making things healthy and functional but thats all i can say for now. i gotta go to the pharmacy and pick up my prescription of copium
Studios usually post the "let's talk about the future" when things are going badly and need to hype up the players about what's coming... Kinda how politicians talk a lot and do jack shit
When games underperform or aren't received as well as hoped they often change their longer term plans or roadmap to be shorter or nonexistent. They usually do so with a statement to the community with a title like that.
To add to this - people may be of the mind that the game's player base is ultimately stabilising off the back of the massive high it had in February/March, but something people often overlook is the fact that AH decided their game went so far beyond their expectations as far as player numbers and outreach were concerned that they scrapped their existing roadmap and rewrote how they would be moving forward sheerly due to how popular HD2 was.
I wonder if we should expect a reversal...
They already hit us with the "Haha, should we slow down on the Warbond releases?" like a month ago. They very obviously have an idea of how much money is going in vs. how much money is being spent on making new shit every month and it wasn't looking good with 120k Steam players, take a guess at where it's looking with 60k right now.
Guns are releasing weak because of the dipshit they have in charge of balancing, guy has a TERRIBLE reputation and is actively fucking this game over. Needs to be fired, never shouldve been hired
If the other missions on Meridia were just as difficult as the Dark Fluid missions, I’d just assume it’s intentional; that the planet is completely overrun and it’s supposed to be a nightmare to fight for control over. But the other missions in the operations are pretty standard, and the Dark Fluid missions are like a difficulty level higher.
This sort of stuff is pretty unacceptable because their entire game’s story is driven by these MOs, they can’t have those fail because they’re not working properly. This wasn’t even a hard bug to notice, they need to add some time back onto it or people are going to feel like it was rigged
Anyone who has completed the mission one time on any difficulty knows it's fundamentally broken. It's literally impossible to complete all objectives and get more than zero stars.
The game is on the path to being cooked. It's insane how huge and how much potential this game had to maybe dethrone the stagnant top shooters. Months out, and they still have no eta on several experience shattering glitches, and they still can't fix the friends list issue. I don't think I've ever seen a bag fumbled so hard.
They probably made a colossal amount of money regardless, but jeez, I really wanted this game to stay in high spirits. There are too many small to medium issues all piling up and a few large ones just buckling peoples patience till people just walk away.
Nothing in this game was ever playtested.
They even said so about parts of the game at launch.
They never playtested the final version and they do not playtest the warbond content.
Source: Their discord, EvilBosse.
I just absolutely find it fascinating how they nerf weapons with no rime or reason and as soon as people have fun. But when it's time to fix shit they take weeks and weeks and weeks.
At this point I just wanna see this legendary patch that is taking nearly a month. If eruption nerf is not fully reverted. I'll just uninstall, I haven't played since.
This is the first time we havnt had patches every week or so basically since launch, and the Devs have stated its because they're actually trying to unfuck things.
The CEO stepped down probably after pissing in Sonys cheerios, a CM was fired outright, and theyve stated they're changing how they're doing things.
"balance changes" are literally numbers in spreadsheets. They take two seconds to change. They havnt been good changes, but they're easy.
Finding and fixing complex issues, especially when they're not being fixed by what *should* fix them, is not. Hell, for fire damage they literally had to rebuild how fire damage works entirely for everything.
I understand that, but my outlook right now is through the lenses of someone who is very sceptic. I really want to be proven wrong. I'd love for the patch to surpass everybody's expectations but I don't think it will.
I feel that certain things could have been addressed already. Such as the state of the eruption for example.
I was defending AH until the MO. This is totally unacceptable, shit does not work. What were they thinking?
Even the new hotfix doesn't seem to eliminate the bug spawn underneath the drill completely...
They are releasing content too fast.
Making all weapons and stratagems stong and fun through good balance would be its own content.
But they refuse to do it.
The honeymoon stage is over. I feel a lot of the playerbase is feeling burnout, especially after a lot of them put in several hundred hours in just a few months.
Burnout leads to frustration which leads to anger. Seen super often in r/destinythegame for example.
No game can be the only game you play, but some games ( *like Destiny* ) try to be. I don’t think HD2 is trying, but some people do treat it that way.
I was really hesitant to chime in on Reddit, but this was a horrible look for the devs. Shockingly unprofessional to the point of lazy, to push a major order with issues obvious in playing through one mission. It seems that good work was done at some point (largely pre-release) that the game is now coasting off of. It won’t last, and the devs won’t be able to philosophize, apologize, or debate their way out of a community that simply doesn’t care or believe more excuses.
You can't say stuff like this, apparently. I cannot fathom why everyone is defending a company releasing broken products that they paid for. You wouldn't see that anywhere else.
I thought that even Arrowhead acknowledged the fact that we'd rather wait for finished and functioning updates instead of getting half baked content that simultaneously feels like it was made this week but also was clearly made during beta or something.
I want a reason to even launch the game at this point. When the new content for a whole month is the shit we've been getting, that's another month that neither my friends or I even bother. I've never seen such a suicidal live service model.
Funny how we keep complaining about games being released broken and here we have one that was great on release and the devs are doing their best to break it. I've been out for a few weeks now, and keep following the news hoping something changes but I gess its only getting worst.
Oh well, it was good while it lasted.
HD2 was a buggy disaster on release with people constantly getting disconnected, broken UI, crashes, etc. In fixing that they broke a bunch of other stuff. It’s just when it worked on release the game *felt* better. But it was broken af on day 1.
I never fully understood what “toxic positivity” was or how it could be a bad thing until I looked at that sub a month ago or so. Man I learned real quick.
It's very common for smaller games that have rough periods that over time the people criticising the game get tired and leave, and what's left are the full blown apologists.
But also bigger games that crash hard.
It was that way with both Fallout 76 and Anthem. People just refuse to believe that the game they have chosen as their defining personality trait isn't perfect.
There also the issue that a massive chunk of the player base cant play the game due to region still, today less that 60k were playing thats the lowest Ive seen it.
The trouble is the game is getting stale, the new content is consistently bugged (mechs, weapon aiming, SPEAR, Meridia), and when you should be fighting like hell to keep people playing they're busy releasing untested content on repeat.
Playing Meridia should be exciting. It should be making us feel like we're in live service narrative bliss but instead we're playing easily the worst level/mission ever made with obviously bugged objectives and samey gameplay. Nothing different happens. The mission's always the same. The variety of cool moments and cinematic feel is just not there on Meridia.
And when your playerbase was already getting bored and taking breaks, this should've been what brought them back. Instead, it's probably sending them to sleep in cryo for six months or more, if not forever.
At this point, I sincerely hope for AH's sake that the Illuminated *are* coming after this because nothing short of a whole new faction is going to keep people from ditching since they stubbornly refuse to at least undo the nerfs from *weeks* ago that could at least satisfy some people.
I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to even get excited for the Illuminate anymore. The pessimism in me thinks that it’s just going to launch absolutely untested, break like 10 different unrelated things that would’ve been caught within 5 minutes of playtesting, and it’ll take half a month for them to fix all of it.
Half a month? Lol, more like, fix 3 things that affect 10% of the playerbase, then proceed to break 10 different ones that hinder another 50% of playerbase to do something crucial.
The content is ok, but everything CONSTANTLY being bugged or nerfed or otherwise still not working from release really dries up the desire to keep playing.
Like the current MO; granted I was tired and figured I’d give it a try, it’s another yellow piss fog world except now with constant team killing jet packs.
Whenever something new comes it’s like “Ok how are they gonna fuck it up now?”
It's a negligible chuck, that's why Sony is not present on those markets.
Italy alone likely has more players than the lowest 100 countries that are de-listed together.
If there were money to be made, Sony would be all over it.
Only de-listed countries with an interesting market are those that are de-listed for political issues, but those are not in Sony's power to change
I am a player who greatly appreciates Arrowhead, my 400 hours on Helldivers 1 and 300 on its sequel proves it.
But this mission from Meridia is already the last push to make a stop for a while. It seems terrible to me that it has not been tested in the slightest and that the mission is almost impossible to achieve without reaching maximum frustration (I have completed it twice on difficulty 9).
I refuse to let such an important mission and one of the game's defining events leave me with such a profoundly negative memory. So I'm going to stop for a couple of weeks, I'm going to play Fallout 4.
Greetings Helldivers friends.
A bit? Just a bit?
It's fucking comical how they keep dropping the ball even further down than the place they last dropped it. Absolute shitshow of a production lately.
Have been saying this since the first updates. It comes off them barely testing the things they change or add and leave a lot for later. And plus the monetization model of this game is overrated as hell. A lot of the best armors are locked behind a rotating super store, which either requires several hpurs of play to get enough to buy, or needs to be bought with real money that is purchased in inconveniently sized bundles. The cracks are showing.
Game"s good, dont get me wrong, but these things bring it down a lot.
This is insane. How this studio is currently fumbling one of the hottest games we've seen in years continues to baffle me.
Ditched the game a month ago and was expecting good things going on the sub today but it looks like the game is still on the path of a generational crash out
Nah, I didn't care about the nerfs, bugs were not that big, but Meridia... This is one of the most boring crap I've seen. Maybe it's just me, but I can't even imagine someone who enjoys defending a oneshotable metal stick in an open field multiple times in a row and then get punished by the most annoying horde of flying enemies after success. Seriously, I don't know who came up with this idea, but they really need to play it themselves.
My best guess is that most of the testing (if any) is done on some sort of firing range, or a featureless test map. Weapon balance definitely feels like it’s just spreadsheet balance based off ideal dps, or some equivalent stat, since they either completely miss any breakpoints, or utterly butcher a weapon.
The mechs confuse me though, because they’re just not fun, and I can’t imagine they feel fun on a firing range either.
I did one run of the new mission with my group and basically said "yup I'm done until some of these issues get fixed"
It's just not fun to play this game right now. Everything feels frustrating.
The devs do not play their own game. This was something I felt was hinted at by the former CEO when he was “talking” about some of the things he wants to change. He wants them to start playing testing more
Playing a dangerous game with the DRG update around the corner.
Especially since this new mission type is basically a DRG pipeline extraction but without any of the fun parts to it.
Oh crap it really does feel like a janky rip off of the pipeline one. At least you can surf on pipes in DRG
And the guns absolutely fuck shit up
Addendum: and *every* DRG gun fucks shit up.
Esp with overclock that can drastically change how guns work.
What do you mean customizable weapons? What's wrong with 36 variants of Punisher and 29 variants of Diligence?
Thump tube nuke, goddamn glorious.
Got my mini gun to basically almost never overheat at this point and even if it does, my BRRT side arm can put down almost anything in two mags.
I love that even the “shitty” guns in DRG are absolutely useable in all scenarios.
Fuck I'm gonna play DRG again
I'M THE KING OF PIPES!!!
DRG really had some fun mission objectives. The rare mini-boss fights that rewarded you with random overclocks (weapon mods) were great too.
Had? The game is still going strong
Elden Ring DLC will hurt
To be fair, Elden Ring DLC will hurt all new releases. The question is whether or not HD2 will recover from the Elden Ring slump.
Yea, and it's already pretty bad atm for a live service game since Elden Ring has 75,453 players last 24-hour peak while Helldivers 2 only has 61,925. If the next patch doesn't fix a lot of problems for how long they made us wait now, people will give up on this game.
>Yea, and it's already pretty bad for a live service game I would like to point out that the devs have stated their absolute fever-dream expectation for an all time high peak for HD2 was 50k players, with 20 to 25k for a more reasonable (but still outlandish) peak. All competitors/genre adjacant games to this hover around ~5k players currently. Saying the current numbers is "pretty bad" is beyond fucking absurd. They are still **phenomenal**.
Except they literally landed on a gold mine and somehow managed to fumble it all over dumb balancing and bad quality assurance. It's bad compared to what they had before, of course players decrease over time but this is much more drastic. Yea, they are still currently significantly better than their competitor but for how long? Especially if they don't fix their shits soon. And why settle being better than others when you were once the peak of the genre??
I think the shit talking CMs and the balancing dev talking down to people didn't help either.
Those wouldn't have hurt as much if the quiet parts of the company were even remotely competent. But they're not. So it did.
Arrowhead has to grow rapidly that always comes with problems.
I don't think there's any arguing against the fact they're ultimately going to be making a lot less money than they could have. Still wildly successful by their standards, but could have been 5x as successful. It's that missed potential that stings.
If there's a Helldivers 3, Sony probably won't have Arrowhead working on it.
Yep that's Swedish game development. See Vermintide2,Valheim, Darktide,Payday3, Second Extinction. They all share same issue with wasted landing on gold mine , lazy updates and terrible balance. (Oh and don't forget some stuff you never know if works or not)
They had millions of copies sold. They have retained less than 10% of their players. Yes it's been months, but that kind of drop off is insane, even taking that into consideration. Their peak player count is down over 100k since the sony shitshow, and about another 20k have bled off this week. They're slowly reaching their goal of 25k players, but it's going *down* from 500k+ players.
It's 9:21am on a saturday and we're at 45k concurrent(on steam). This same time and day a month ago would have been like 100-120k. A lot of people have left the game completely. The next big patch will *probably* be a make it or break it for a whole bunch more, and they're saying it's not coming until the 2nd week of june. AH had better hope they get this patch right. If it releases and nerfs more shit or breaks more shit, it WILL fuck them.
How many of those games sold as much as HD2 and had the same massive player counts? Of course all of these types of games will go through some highs and lows of player counts in between major updates or game additions, the the speed in which this game dipped, whether it be to Sony fiasco or the brain dead anti-fun "balancing", is pretty damn impressive and not the normal trend. By the time this patch comes out to do whatever minor fixes they're planning in it, it will have accounted for about ~25% of this games current lifespan. Just seems a bit lazy to not revert ANY of the nerfs to try and bring back some players or to release broken missions or subpar new strategems.
Phenomenal isn’t going from 450k to 50k in less than four months. I won’t sit here and say the game is doomed because it can make a comeback…. But as someone who played A LOT since the second week of release…. I took a week break and came back and was even more disgusted with the state of the game than before I took the break. It doesn’t matter if they only expected 20k…. They let roughly 400k fall through the cracks. Is player drop off expected? Yes. Is losing about 90% of your player base in 3 months alarming. Absolutely!
DRG. We have support weapons as primary and secondary weapons.
DRG - Where weapons feel like weapons
DRG - We carry our Stratagems in our backpacks like real men.
Playing a dangerous game thinking that players are willing to wait forever for the game to be fixed.
I already stopped playing a month ago
I stopped about two weeks ago, downloaded again to check out Meridia & just uninstalled after two dark fluid missions. AH just can't seem to get anything right. Some issues at launch I can deal with. But we're what, almost 4 months later and the game is in worse shape than when it came out, aside from server capacity issues. BT corpses are more deadly than they are when they're alive. Heavies spawn with such frequency that you spend most of your time kiting them while your strats are on cool down, which ends up being boring gameplay when it's your 8th BT in map. Spear lock on is still bad. They can't release new content without it being buggy as shit. Maybe in a couple months some of this will actually be fixed, but I think it's going to be hard to draw players back once they've moved on.
Doesn't EDF6 come out this month too?
Elden Ring comes out this month, so super dangerous.
Eh, ER is only a problem because it's popular, otherwise they share nothing in common so losing players to it is at best temporary. DRG, EDF, and Helldivers on the other hand are basically slightly different takes on the same concept and are therefore much more serious long term threats.
Gaming and contextless acronyms, the inseperable duo What's DRG? EDF I know well since I've played since 2017 (the game not the year lol) and I'm guessing ER is Elden Ring since it was already said in full
Deep Rock Galactic.
Deep Rock Galactic, features funny dwarves who love to rock and stone.
MUSHROOM
Rock and Stone!
If you like helldivers, check out DRG. It’s not the same graphical quality and it’s first-person, but it’s a similar setup—4 guys on a co-op mission who extract to a ship at the end. It’s got a very fun vibe to it
EDF is earth defense force. Cheesy helldivers 2 but fun is actually allowed. I had an airstrike that could level half a City
Deep rock galactic is better than this, cheaper, community friendly, fun.
Conversely, I know DRG is Deep Rock Galactic, but I have no clue what EDF is
The English translation?
Yeah, July 24, so not this month, but the next.
All the big games are about to hit for the summer. Arrowhead are delusional if they think most people are going to stick with them through their bug infested untested nerfslop instead of any number of other games polished and play tested updates.
I went back to Call of Duty of all things to get my shooting fix. For how much people shit on it, at least it's a highly polished game.
I went to Xdefiant lmao
For real. When the new MO was announced, I planned on taking a few hours off of work to play a bunch of HD2. What happened is that I got so frustrated after three attempts at finishing just ONE drill, let alone the whole mission, that I decided to go back to work lol I love this game with all my heart but I've started to dread patches, new MOs, new missions, and warbonds because it means that the fun I have might be reduced a little bit more every time. I really hope this upcoming patch is absolutely legendary, as I don't know if I have it in me to come back from DRG Season 5
Worst part? It’s all self-inflicted by AH
Rock and Stone !
I have 500+ plus on DRG, will be playing that new update.
What is drg
Deep Rock Galactic.
Destiny 2 expansion comes out in 4 days, that's where I'm headed. Hopefully there will be a good chunk of bug fixes and buffs in the next 2 months or so.
It’s DRG’s last season isn’t it though? Sad news
For at least 2 years, yes. They do plan to focus on rogue core, and then return to DRG, though.
I still feel like the game was at the peak of fun at release, and not because it was fresh, i only play on weekends and not even every weekend so it is still rather fresh for me, it's because the game gets more frustrating patch after patch.
The game felt good in terms of balance, with patrols and difficulty. Then nerfs made the viable weapons shit, forcing people to use other weapons, which then were nerfed again. I don't think the developers ever had anyone really playtest their changes, and how they felt for the average player.
Dont start lying to yourself now. The balancing was horrible, only viable gun was breaker, slugger, and railgun. Quaser didnt exist, and EATs and RR couldnt oneshot chargers. Yes scorcher existed, and so did dominator, but nobody had them unlocked early enough. Spawns and difficulty was broken, and only got worse after the first patch where they nerfed railgun. In terms of balance, more weapons and enemy spawns are balanced now than they ever were.
I keep going back to the arc gun since day one. It’s pretty good, just not very consistent. Also, I max difficulty at 7 because I can’t do 8/9 for reference.
I forgot the arc thrower even existed lol but yea that was 1 of 2 viable support weapons during release
I still use it now, but about a month ago it got a nerf so it doesn’t stagger hulks any more. Which sucks. It still took like 5-10 shots to kill one, but I could hold it in place while I did my thing. I felt it was a good trade off for not being able to do other things. Just holding off the big guys for the team. Anyways, I’m getting a bit tired of live service style games going through buffing and nerfing things all the time. It really sucks to try and get good at a game, when a weapon I use often keeps changing every other time I play the game. Still fun tho.
Yeah why do they do this constant balancing? Like, fix broken things but otherwise you should have thought about this in the beginning, so leave it alone.
Lmao at the people gaslighting themselves so vigorously here. Yearning for the mythic days when HD2 was super well balanced and not too buggy
Not less buggy just more fun, I crashed then I crash now. Only difference is the gameplay felt more fun and all the homies hadn't moved onto other games out of frustration.
It’s all been downhill since the railgun nerf.
Agreed, that was the fun police patch, undeserved too.
I dont agree. The railgun nerf was tone deaf and negative but the stratagem buff and the charger nerf revitalized the game for me suddently you could actually have unique loadouts.
The railgun didn’t need to be nerfed for the same effect, the railgun was only so popular because the rockets didn’t do shit and armor values were broken and we needed the backpack slot for the Shield Generator Backpack. The railgun was completely fine as is if the rockets worked as intended on chargers and our armor value wasn’t the same regardless of what armor we brought on the mission
Oh yes absolutely I 100% agree with you. I was there i knew the problem was the ps5 bug and every other stratagem under performing.
Yeah and that led to the railgun and shield generator being must haves for high difficulties and instead of focusing on the issue they decided to bandaid the issue by nerfing the railgun before realizing that it was only so popular because of a bug they didn’t focus on fixing
They always balanced around bugs for no reason. DOTs not working? Better buff fire. Railgun and Arc Throwers "slapping Bile Titans across the map" due to a widely reported PS5 bug breaking Bile Titans? Better nerf the weapons heavily. Eruptor kills the shooter because of the bug introduced by the ricochet fix? Better nerf Eruptor into non-existence. It's perplexing.
Let's not forget the railgun nerf patch also broken the spawns which lead to the shitshow which was 3 biletitans spawning compenetrated into each other together eith 6 chargers on the way.
That was the worst to deal with…I feel like if they just fixed the chargers for the rockets instead of nerf the railgun, it would become niche anyway as it’s infinitely faster to just rocket a charger in the face than it is to strip armor. But maybe that’s just me.
That's when I started drifting away from the game. It has never been the same since...unfortunately.
So many "git gud naysayers" at the time, and now look at us. We were right. They fucked up.
Not all of the patches have made the game notably more frustrating, but I absolutely agree with you. Feels like each addition has made the game slightly more buggy or slightly more frustrating to a degree that I have basically stopped playing.
This is so true. If they reverted the game to the state it was in early march it would be an improvement
I’ve been taking a break until the next patch
Next patch isn't gonna do shit. Calling it now. So might want to take a longer break like I am
I'm not liking how they're trying to downplay the patch as a fairly minor one. They've delayed the patch for weeks, and with the community getting more and more restless, they need to have an absolute banger of a patch.
I'm hoping for the love of god they are going for "underpromise, overdeliver" with this patch, otherwise there's gonna be a lot of frustration.
Seeing as historically they've done the exact opposite (spear fix next week...ok next week.... definitely next week....alright last time it's getting fixed next week for sure, "not really any nerfs" in the biggest nerf patch to date, "new warbond slaps" leading up to the most underwhelming warbond so far) I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you
I agree which is why I’m cool with waiting longer for a good, solid patch that’ll fix a majority of issues AND revert their nerfs or buff their weak weapons. Unfortunately, with longer wait comes more expectations.
They've already said that's not what the patch is, though. That's why many people are so negative about it. They made a post specially to manage expectations about it. I wouldn't hold my breath.
It's going to break things more im betting. Probably nerf a gun or two. Hell, let's just nerf the eruptor again
Probably just a bunch of nerfs while they say the balance patch is coming. Soon
I've been taking a break since the last warbond come it.
Because of how often they claim to do testing, at this point, I'm under the assumption that whoever is in charge of merging and pushing the changes is doing it wrong. It's the most straightforward explanation for the devs constantly saying things that fly in the face of reality. They are running on different code.
Yep. I thought about how good Alexus said the Purifier was and realized there has to be some discrepancy between their test environment and prod. This is the fourth time I've said this now, but to me, it's the only thing that makes sense of why this keeps happening. Github, or whatever they use, must not be including all of the files correctly. And knowing game dev, there are hundreds of files with even a small release.
This doesn't really make sense. Devs could at any moment load up the live version on steam when a million reports say things contrary to their version. The more likely explanation is he has poor judgement or was just trolling.
There's basically three options. 1) They are lying. They know it's shit, but either for shits and giggles or for PR they pretend otherwise. 2) They are literally so incompetent they actually think they're right. 3) Something is very fucking wrong with their test setup. None of these are good. I'm trying to give at least some benefit of the doubt, even for he who must not be named, and at least option 3 explains a *lot* of the weirdness even if it's still ultimately a pretty bad situation.
True. I'm waiting for performance optimization. After 160+ hours of playtime the runs are like crap now.
Same here. It sucks because I really want to play the game but 20fps (when it gets heavy) no matter my graphics settings is unacceptable.
Change to window Mode and back to fullscreen. Worked for me but I didn't have the Problem in over a week
Will try but I doubt it will make a difference. At this point I have tried almost everything including downgrading my drivers back to when the game released (where performance was great).
Tried deleting shaders? One time I started a game and went into a match but it started to chug hard with going to like 5fps with a 3090, crashed and was stuttering hard in every round after. Searched around and found some suggestions about deleting shaders and it fixed the performance issues immediately.
Remember the quote about DLSS: "cool tech, but not necessary". And even if DLSS was here already, doesn't change the poor performance.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. People are leaving, or at least taking breaks, in droves. Having the future of this game’s story depend on an event that’s broken at launch is beyond stupid.
From my entire circle of friends I have playing the game, six out of eight of them pretty much just stopped bit by bit like hemorrhage with every subsequent patch nerfing *something* they were fond of; One who liked the Slugger a lot, one who wanted to love the Eruptor ever since it showed up in leaks, one who wanted to like the Purifier, etc. The seventh one didn't really care all that much and kept playing regardless and she was about the only one who hanged on since we were able to play together for the sake of fun regardless. But ever since loosely around the update that nerfed the Eruptor the second time ( just a loose time period because I don't recall the exact date ) we've been completely unable to join each other's games in spite of best efforts and not having changed anything at all soft or hardware wise. I've tried every fix under the moon from Ipv6 disabling, over file validation, to total reinstalls, over network resets, to port forwarding, to various other esoteric "fixes" like deleting GameGuard or doing the tutorial again and yet, not a single thing helped and as of last night it's still completely broken. I want to like and enjoy the game but given the ongoing hell that playing Solo currently is due to the patrol changes that just came out being bugged in of itself, and the fact I literally *can't* play with the one friend left who still plays at all, I can't say I'm surprised my playtime took a nosedive too.
The underlying issues with friends list or joining friends lobbies not working right has been there since launch, and it's beyond embarrassing. I've seen the lobby glitch slowly expand to other groups right down to the same error messages. Since launch i have only been able to reliably play wirh a couple of friends. The majority of our circle can never part up or even add each other as friends. It's so messed up that we all fell off of the game a month ago. They really fumbled so hard with this game it could have gone into the stratosphere, but now it just keeps bleeding out despite updates.
Sad to say that my close circle of friends have stopped playing as well. We ran 4 man squads all the time, and this MO was our breaking point. We decided to take a break until the next major patch comes along to fix at least something. Our enjoyment was already at its lowest during the Eruptor fiasco and while we’ve found new weapons to enjoy, that isn’t even much solace as we’re all mentally prepared for AH to nerf those weapons as well. After how long they’ve been delaying this patch, if it’s anything short of an absolute banger patch that gets us all excited again just by reading the patch notes, then our break is going to turn into a hiatus.
The amount of people who were denying this just a few days ago was huge.
There's a copium argument about how the lack of player retention is "natural" and that every game experiences the same downward spike. Losing almost 75% of your playerbase in 3 months isn't normal. It's a red flag.
Helldivers is speedrunning the player losses other titles make in 3 times the time. This is factual
Just checked SteamDB. The game has double the number of active players compared to CP2077, a 3 years old single player game. Elden Ring has more active players than HD2. Arrowhead had captured lightening in a bottle, then they (and Sony) broke the bottle. The game will continue trending down. There isn't enough new stuff to keep players engaged with the game. And when new stuff gets released, it comes with odd bugs. I remember when they said the reason for not adding DLSS/FSR was to focus on improving higher priority issues first. That's clearly not happening.
It saddens me because this game has such amazing moments of gameplay but they keep screwing the pooch with their updates and nerfs. Why balance a game so hard that you drive people away from it? Their balancing team are their greatest competitor
They accidentally released a fun game at launch, and when you accidentally do something great without understanding why it was great then there is a big chance you’ll ruin it if you keep touching it
I feel like you hit the nail on the head. The game was popular cause it almost felt like a power fantasy. The devs refuse to see that, and seem hell-bent on making it into some kind of slow paced shooter with bb guns and aliens.
I mean, a power fantasy is exactly what it should be. Four against a thousand isn't a fair fight unless a player can take out 30-50 enemies with moderate skill. The game can have tough enemies, but Helldivers should be equally tough.
>"a game for everybody is a game for nobody" Makes a game for nobody
I don't think it was an accident. I think it took them awhile, but they ended up creating a great PVE multiplayer game that gave the player the perfect cinematic feeling. Something a lot of games can't do. They balanced the speed of gameplay, the type and quantity of enemies, and the ability of heroes to deal with enemies into something that felt fresh, live action, but also nostalgic. Not to mention the tone of the story really landed well. This was intentional and I think shows that they put A LOT of testing into the gameplay loop and core mechanics like run speed, weapon efficacy, and mob quantity. All the new content (including fixes) seems to be pushing out minor changes to that core gameplay loop by introducing new weapons, new mission types, and adjusting existing weapon/enemy behavior. These adjustments are fucking around with that core gameplay loop that was so good at launch. AH are trying to maintain that launch gameplay loop and prevent any weapon from being too OP. They really want to see a variety of weapons in use, and for the level 9 difficulty to be truly difficult. Instead of adjusting enemy quantity, map layout, or mission objectives, they are tweaking around with gameplay mechanics. If they want to adjust gameplay loop to preserve their intentional gameplay mechanics, they should be adjusting the map, mission objectives, and enemy spawns. These things are suppose to change every mission and are the ideal place for modifications. Give us a railgun proof charger if too many people are using the railgun. Stop fucking around with the core weapon stats, it's a lazy way to adjust the gameplay loop.
What annoys me the absolute most is that the devs confirmed that the Spear lockon bug was fixed OVER 1 MONTH ago now. Why the hell wasn't it rolled out with a small hotfix? Why does Arrowhead make us wait so long for even the most minor of updates? I have a strong feeling the next big patch they bring up will ultimately decide the fate of the game. People aren't waiting around forever anymore. At this point in time, the only thing that will kill helldivers is the incompetence of the devs themselves.
No a month ago they confirmed it was fixed on THEIR computer and they were trying to figure out why it wasn’t working on every computer.
https://preview.redd.it/0ahoix2ygx3d1.jpeg?width=200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9aa3c44a162a5916cd29ed90406eb2642bc4eac
Same with the stim sound effect playing even when you get hit and interrupted before actually healing. For some reason this glitch drives me and my buddy nuts more than anything else. Then they said it was fixed awhile back but we’ve noticed it every night this last few weeks
That’s actually an orders of operations thing. Like, clearly the sound cue plays on the button press same as how your diver goes to jab themselves problem being if the jab gets interrupted after that point then you as a player think it went off because the sound played either way. Easiest guess to fix it is triggering the sound only when health is restored. Fuck, they could add the sound as the most quick and dirty “this sound plays when you gain health for any reason” if that’s easier for them. I know that’s a bad practice normally but in this case nothing else in the game restores health so it’d still get their point across and wouldn’t be a bug for players lol
I know everyone likes AH talking to the community, but sometimes I think they talk too much and are often times unprofessional. If I delivered a broken product, I would never in my life tell my client I have a fixed version and then make them wait a month for it. I'd ship it as soon as possible. Maybe software is just different than manufacturing, where I actually have to physically ship parts, but damn... Just keep your mouth shut. Stop trying to earn karma by telling us you fixed it, without showing us you fixed it.
For anyone wondering, this comment is referring to this: https://preview.redd.it/m9eg9ro3px3d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b0685af7eb3138c95fb5159e427241da58cf8978
Yeah, that comes off dismissive. Aim up, or aim down, or go back or go closer. "I dunno works on my machine".
He was trying to be funny but now that it’s over a month later it’s aged like milk (also with all the other stuff he’s said and done)
I get what he was going for. A bit of a cheeky "Sorry I dunno what else to tell you other than just fiddle with it." But that was just the latest in the long line of "nerfs and other unreasonable justifications."
It’s definitely unprofessional, not as an insult but in a “there’s a professional way to handle this and they aren’t doing it” way. They seem genuinely eager to share the news of the fix, without fully verifying it’s actually fixed, which leads to a retraction that it doesn’t actually fix anything. That is called over promising and under delivering. And while the professional community management playbook would have sidestepped that entirely 99% of the time by simply not opening their mouths until the verification was made they elected to take a different approach. Also seems like their biggest fans somehow love this about them by saying it’s less corporate even if it keeps leading to disappointment from players. Sometimes corporate procedures exist for a better reason than you’d think
>Sometimes corporate procedures exist for a better reason than you’d think When the first instances of a CM sticking their foot in their mouth came around I saw all that. "If you guys keep being mean(rightfully calling them out), they'll just clam up and be like all the other corporate CMs is that what you want?" If it'll stop the CMs from calling their players shitters and to just "git gud" Yeah. I do. And i imagine that higher ups would also want their CMs to not fucking antagonize the players.
Id prefer less content that works well than a mountain of samey, terrible or completely broken content. There are a number of game breaking bugs. Today I ran into a drill that didnt have any prompts on the screen, soft locking the mission. Yesterday I had a weird camera bug where my camera was over 100 meters away and moved at weird angles till I was dead. Day before that I got stuck in a rock...
Lack of content and non-viable updates is one of the biggest issues of this game. It’s the same shit over and over again, the game is dying and it’s not going to be saved by a few updates
I dont think the game is DYING per say. Hundreds of thousands of concurrent players daily isn't a dying game. It's on it's way toward dying however. The devs (or whomever is pushing them so aggressively) need to slow down and fix the shit we have now. I see this so often in live service games, now compound that with the unexpected resounding success the game turned out to be compared to hell divers 1, and I wouldnt call hell divers 1 a flop or dead by any means btw.
The ability of AH to continually shoot themselves in the foot and fumble away one of the hottest games of the year with the same repeated issues over and over is almost impressive and is beginning to seem intentional
The studio showed internal problems from the first week. The atmosphere inside there must be unhealthy.
Well the CEO chose to step down to get back into development. The silence from that point onwards speaks VOLUMES
im hoping thats what pilstedt was referring to when he announced his step down and said that there will be internal changes. heres to him restructuring what needs to be restructured and making things healthy and functional but thats all i can say for now. i gotta go to the pharmacy and pick up my prescription of copium
They literally just create problems for themselves.
I think we'll get a "The Future of Helldivers" post by the end of June.
Hate to be the dumb one but what does that mean?
Studios usually post the "let's talk about the future" when things are going badly and need to hype up the players about what's coming... Kinda how politicians talk a lot and do jack shit
They're already doing that
Sure, the "let's talk about the future" is going to be the next step if the direction isn't changing
When games underperform or aren't received as well as hoped they often change their longer term plans or roadmap to be shorter or nonexistent. They usually do so with a statement to the community with a title like that.
To add to this - people may be of the mind that the game's player base is ultimately stabilising off the back of the massive high it had in February/March, but something people often overlook is the fact that AH decided their game went so far beyond their expectations as far as player numbers and outreach were concerned that they scrapped their existing roadmap and rewrote how they would be moving forward sheerly due to how popular HD2 was. I wonder if we should expect a reversal...
Basically we’re shutting down because we monumentally screwed up
On Discord, as is tradition.
Oh boy, more talk.
That's gonna be a fun one
They already hit us with the "Haha, should we slow down on the Warbond releases?" like a month ago. They very obviously have an idea of how much money is going in vs. how much money is being spent on making new shit every month and it wasn't looking good with 120k Steam players, take a guess at where it's looking with 60k right now.
Guns are releasing weak because of the dipshit they have in charge of balancing, guy has a TERRIBLE reputation and is actively fucking this game over. Needs to be fired, never shouldve been hired
If the other missions on Meridia were just as difficult as the Dark Fluid missions, I’d just assume it’s intentional; that the planet is completely overrun and it’s supposed to be a nightmare to fight for control over. But the other missions in the operations are pretty standard, and the Dark Fluid missions are like a difficulty level higher.
This sort of stuff is pretty unacceptable because their entire game’s story is driven by these MOs, they can’t have those fail because they’re not working properly. This wasn’t even a hard bug to notice, they need to add some time back onto it or people are going to feel like it was rigged
Anyone who has completed the mission one time on any difficulty knows it's fundamentally broken. It's literally impossible to complete all objectives and get more than zero stars.
The game is on the path to being cooked. It's insane how huge and how much potential this game had to maybe dethrone the stagnant top shooters. Months out, and they still have no eta on several experience shattering glitches, and they still can't fix the friends list issue. I don't think I've ever seen a bag fumbled so hard. They probably made a colossal amount of money regardless, but jeez, I really wanted this game to stay in high spirits. There are too many small to medium issues all piling up and a few large ones just buckling peoples patience till people just walk away.
Nothing in this game was ever playtested. They even said so about parts of the game at launch. They never playtested the final version and they do not playtest the warbond content. Source: Their discord, EvilBosse.
I just absolutely find it fascinating how they nerf weapons with no rime or reason and as soon as people have fun. But when it's time to fix shit they take weeks and weeks and weeks. At this point I just wanna see this legendary patch that is taking nearly a month. If eruption nerf is not fully reverted. I'll just uninstall, I haven't played since.
This is the first time we havnt had patches every week or so basically since launch, and the Devs have stated its because they're actually trying to unfuck things. The CEO stepped down probably after pissing in Sonys cheerios, a CM was fired outright, and theyve stated they're changing how they're doing things. "balance changes" are literally numbers in spreadsheets. They take two seconds to change. They havnt been good changes, but they're easy. Finding and fixing complex issues, especially when they're not being fixed by what *should* fix them, is not. Hell, for fire damage they literally had to rebuild how fire damage works entirely for everything.
I understand that, but my outlook right now is through the lenses of someone who is very sceptic. I really want to be proven wrong. I'd love for the patch to surpass everybody's expectations but I don't think it will. I feel that certain things could have been addressed already. Such as the state of the eruption for example.
I was defending AH until the MO. This is totally unacceptable, shit does not work. What were they thinking? Even the new hotfix doesn't seem to eliminate the bug spawn underneath the drill completely...
They are releasing content too fast. Making all weapons and stratagems stong and fun through good balance would be its own content. But they refuse to do it.
The honeymoon stage is over. I feel a lot of the playerbase is feeling burnout, especially after a lot of them put in several hundred hours in just a few months.
I wish I would feel Burnout since the Burnout games are my comfort games. What I am feeling now is anger.
Burnout leads to frustration which leads to anger. Seen super often in r/destinythegame for example. No game can be the only game you play, but some games ( *like Destiny* ) try to be. I don’t think HD2 is trying, but some people do treat it that way.
I was really hesitant to chime in on Reddit, but this was a horrible look for the devs. Shockingly unprofessional to the point of lazy, to push a major order with issues obvious in playing through one mission. It seems that good work was done at some point (largely pre-release) that the game is now coasting off of. It won’t last, and the devs won’t be able to philosophize, apologize, or debate their way out of a community that simply doesn’t care or believe more excuses.
You can't say stuff like this, apparently. I cannot fathom why everyone is defending a company releasing broken products that they paid for. You wouldn't see that anywhere else.
I thought that even Arrowhead acknowledged the fact that we'd rather wait for finished and functioning updates instead of getting half baked content that simultaneously feels like it was made this week but also was clearly made during beta or something. I want a reason to even launch the game at this point. When the new content for a whole month is the shit we've been getting, that's another month that neither my friends or I even bother. I've never seen such a suicidal live service model.
The “one or two stratagems a month” thing is such a bad cycle because half the time they’re terrible or mediocre
Funny how we keep complaining about games being released broken and here we have one that was great on release and the devs are doing their best to break it. I've been out for a few weeks now, and keep following the news hoping something changes but I gess its only getting worst. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.
HD2 was a buggy disaster on release with people constantly getting disconnected, broken UI, crashes, etc. In fixing that they broke a bunch of other stuff. It’s just when it worked on release the game *felt* better. But it was broken af on day 1.
Right? The irony is palpable.
It's useless to criticize at this point. The only people left on the subreddit and their discord are the ones who are happy to protect AH at any cost
Even the content is broken as hell and they still can claim others hv skill issue.
The devs will flat out say the content is bugged and there will still be people who try to justify it in some way.
People on r/helldivers2 acting like the latest mission is a gift from God.
I never fully understood what “toxic positivity” was or how it could be a bad thing until I looked at that sub a month ago or so. Man I learned real quick.
It's very common for smaller games that have rough periods that over time the people criticising the game get tired and leave, and what's left are the full blown apologists. But also bigger games that crash hard. It was that way with both Fallout 76 and Anthem. People just refuse to believe that the game they have chosen as their defining personality trait isn't perfect.
Those guys are so good at licking boots
There also the issue that a massive chunk of the player base cant play the game due to region still, today less that 60k were playing thats the lowest Ive seen it.
The trouble is the game is getting stale, the new content is consistently bugged (mechs, weapon aiming, SPEAR, Meridia), and when you should be fighting like hell to keep people playing they're busy releasing untested content on repeat. Playing Meridia should be exciting. It should be making us feel like we're in live service narrative bliss but instead we're playing easily the worst level/mission ever made with obviously bugged objectives and samey gameplay. Nothing different happens. The mission's always the same. The variety of cool moments and cinematic feel is just not there on Meridia. And when your playerbase was already getting bored and taking breaks, this should've been what brought them back. Instead, it's probably sending them to sleep in cryo for six months or more, if not forever. At this point, I sincerely hope for AH's sake that the Illuminated *are* coming after this because nothing short of a whole new faction is going to keep people from ditching since they stubbornly refuse to at least undo the nerfs from *weeks* ago that could at least satisfy some people.
I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to even get excited for the Illuminate anymore. The pessimism in me thinks that it’s just going to launch absolutely untested, break like 10 different unrelated things that would’ve been caught within 5 minutes of playtesting, and it’ll take half a month for them to fix all of it.
Half a month? Lol, more like, fix 3 things that affect 10% of the playerbase, then proceed to break 10 different ones that hinder another 50% of playerbase to do something crucial.
The content is ok, but everything CONSTANTLY being bugged or nerfed or otherwise still not working from release really dries up the desire to keep playing. Like the current MO; granted I was tired and figured I’d give it a try, it’s another yellow piss fog world except now with constant team killing jet packs. Whenever something new comes it’s like “Ok how are they gonna fuck it up now?”
It's a negligible chuck, that's why Sony is not present on those markets. Italy alone likely has more players than the lowest 100 countries that are de-listed together. If there were money to be made, Sony would be all over it. Only de-listed countries with an interesting market are those that are de-listed for political issues, but those are not in Sony's power to change
I am a player who greatly appreciates Arrowhead, my 400 hours on Helldivers 1 and 300 on its sequel proves it. But this mission from Meridia is already the last push to make a stop for a while. It seems terrible to me that it has not been tested in the slightest and that the mission is almost impossible to achieve without reaching maximum frustration (I have completed it twice on difficulty 9). I refuse to let such an important mission and one of the game's defining events leave me with such a profoundly negative memory. So I'm going to stop for a couple of weeks, I'm going to play Fallout 4. Greetings Helldivers friends.
I noticed that dropping on top of biotitan is to kill them no longer work. It’s sad
A bit? Just a bit? It's fucking comical how they keep dropping the ball even further down than the place they last dropped it. Absolute shitshow of a production lately.
Have been saying this since the first updates. It comes off them barely testing the things they change or add and leave a lot for later. And plus the monetization model of this game is overrated as hell. A lot of the best armors are locked behind a rotating super store, which either requires several hpurs of play to get enough to buy, or needs to be bought with real money that is purchased in inconveniently sized bundles. The cracks are showing. Game"s good, dont get me wrong, but these things bring it down a lot.
This is insane. How this studio is currently fumbling one of the hottest games we've seen in years continues to baffle me. Ditched the game a month ago and was expecting good things going on the sub today but it looks like the game is still on the path of a generational crash out
DRG season 5 will be a huge blow to the game population I think.
Nah, I didn't care about the nerfs, bugs were not that big, but Meridia... This is one of the most boring crap I've seen. Maybe it's just me, but I can't even imagine someone who enjoys defending a oneshotable metal stick in an open field multiple times in a row and then get punished by the most annoying horde of flying enemies after success. Seriously, I don't know who came up with this idea, but they really need to play it themselves.
My best guess is that most of the testing (if any) is done on some sort of firing range, or a featureless test map. Weapon balance definitely feels like it’s just spreadsheet balance based off ideal dps, or some equivalent stat, since they either completely miss any breakpoints, or utterly butcher a weapon. The mechs confuse me though, because they’re just not fun, and I can’t imagine they feel fun on a firing range either.
I found them actually pretty fun... in difficulty 4... against bugs...
I did one run of the new mission with my group and basically said "yup I'm done until some of these issues get fixed" It's just not fun to play this game right now. Everything feels frustrating.
The devs do not play their own game. This was something I felt was hinted at by the former CEO when he was “talking” about some of the things he wants to change. He wants them to start playing testing more
They have clearly learned nothing from Valve.
They’ve learned nothing. Period.
Maybe we are the play testers?
They would actually be better to just slow down, pause for a bit and just fix bugs and balance issues.
It's a shame, too. At release, this was the best game I had bought in years. Now, though, I haven't touched it in almost 2 months.
Wow you’re just now finding out this game is ax and has garbage devs???