11mo ago

As Helldivers 2 struggles after the new update, Arrowhead's CEO promises fixes while also expressing disappointment in how it's performed.

www.pcgamesn.com Players hate the new Helldivers 2 update, and Arrowhead's CEO says he's "disappointed"

PC Gaming @lemmy.ca

As Helldivers 2 struggles after the new update, Arrowhead's CEO promises fixes while also expressing disappointment in how it's performed.

www.pcgamesn.com /helldivers-2/ceo-disappointment

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46 comments

Nerfing flame weapons then releasing a war bond with only flame weapons has to be the worst marketing move ever.
Even if the nerfing is totally fine, the messaging is awful, hey we just made this stuff worse come buy it from us now.
- It's not marketing that they fail, it's communication. They should tell ahead of time which weapons are on their watch list, so it doesn't seem like it falls from nowhere.
- I'm convinced the conversation went something like this:
  "Hey we made these primary and secondary weapons that are mini flamethrowers, they don't shoot as far but they're still pretty cool, right?!"
  "Cool, so you can kill a Charger with your pistol now?"
  "Oh shit... Guess we'll just nerf all fire damage then and say we're doing it for 'realisim'."
  "Sounds good, Chief."
  
  Yeah, i think thats exactly what happened.
  Let us kill chargers for gods sake, its not like they don't put 12 of them out at the same time now.... they are not exactly rare

Perhaps they need to stop nerfing stuff nobody asked to get nerfed. The flamethrower was fun to use, but it was also necessary because of the broken amount of charger spawns that made it a vital weapon in battling these.
It's not a competitive game, there should be no need to nerf stuff unless it's broken beyond comprehension. In this case the charger spawns were utterly broken in many difficulties and missions, but instead they chose to "fix" the weapon instead of the spawns.
- It's not a competitive game, so why do people feel the need to play the highest difficulty if they can't deal with an enemy you learn in d4 mission?
  There is no broken amount of chargers. There are people incapable of dealing with them, which makes situations degenerate into chaos, which is exactly the point of this kind of enemy.
  
  This is not a difficulty level thing, it's a broken feature thing.
  It also wasn't consistent every mission. I did level 9 all the time and sometimes it was easy as fuck with next to no spawns, and other missions we had 10+ chargers (I'm not kidding) and bile titans on top at the same time during extraction.
  It was physically not possible that the four of us could spawn in enough anti-heavy weapons to deal with all of them while trying to stick around the extraction area. Even despite the fact that we were all equipped to deal with these enemy types.
  Which is when it stops being a skill issue and just becomes a broken game issue. Devs have already changed how enemy spawns work in this game multiple times, and admitted that it hasn't worked as it should've before.

Large swings of the nerf bat will always be met with equivalent backlash and negative feedback tends to overshadow the positive.
They acknowledged that they should not nerf the fun stuff and proceed carefully with balance going forward, and then deliver this update. On the one hand the nerf to the incendiary breaker is small enough and feels fair, on the other the complete neutering of the flamethrower feels like taking away our toy entirely.
- I have to respectfully disagree. I think that the breaker nerf was massive. I don't find it fair at all. They should have nerfed the outgoing damage rather than make it impossible to actually use as a primary. 4 mags is functionally nothing. My friends run supply backpacks pretty often and I just kept hearing a chorus of "damn, you're out of ammo again?"
  I switched to the Slugger and it's just a better weapon all-around, even with the changes. The recoil is heavy but the armor pen is choice against everything. Mag size is fine, single reload is great because you can't fuck that up, and when it hits you feel the punch.
  Flamethrower nerf is a huge travesty. Makes me really upset overall. It was the only tool consistently good at clearing chargers.
  
  It was the only tool consistently good at clearing chargers.
  I feel like this is maybe the root cause issue more than anything else
  
  Same. I'm finding myself constantly out of ammo having to use my secondary a lot and running out of ammo there too, as I wait for a resupply.
  They mentioned they mostly do their testing at difficulty 5, which is nothing.
  
  I enjoy the slugger again, adding back the punchy stun was all I wanted for it, and adjusting the falloff and accuracy to match is a fair compromise to their initial issues with it.
  Now you get a real choice of the punisher for light pen damage, and the slugger for medium pen stun but lower damage overall. It makes both of them useful.
- I've been happy with the update, but I also rarely use the flamethrower or incendiary breaker. I normally play on 7s and my friends that use the incendiary said they are mostly fine in groups, but soloing objectives is harder.
  The flamethrower change made chargers harder... But I prefer rocket pods for them anyway.

The nerfs don't bother me at all, and I like all the things they added.
It seems clear to me though that they need some sort of community beta testing group to vet their changes, and they need to space those changes out better.
The flamethrower nerf is what people are actually mad about, and that ruined a huge release of new enemies and then also the release of the new war bond with fire weapons.
Those all should have been released one a week or something to keep momentum up.
- They mentioned they might be making community testing servers. I think that would make all the difference.
  It also doesn't help that they apparently test on level 5 and a lot of us are playing 6-10.
- The flamethrower is still bonkers good, even against chargers. The community (really just the main subreddit) is just toxic af, reactive, misinformed, and educated only by what someone else on YT or Twitch tells them.
  The takes over there have me legitimately questioning if any of them actually play the game and at what difficulty.
  
  I do agree that the main sub on Reddit is pretty toxic.
  It’s okay to be upset, but I think people want to be upset about something, and have been stewing in this too much that they’ve least perspective that this is v a small studio game they paid half the price of a AAA for.

This patch is weird. The nerfs don't bother me as I will drop the difficulty down or change my loadout depending on how much fun a team of 2 divers wants. I never did hard in Vermintide 2 because of the friendly fire and lack of skill.
What raises an eyebrow are the mission ending bugs. Bug breaches not spawning in the high value asset mission and rockets not launching. Weird disconnects and crashes that were not there pre-patch. I hope we get more stability patches until the next content patch.

Good grief they need to sort out their QA issues.
I'm still playing at least a few dives each day because I'm having fun overall, but the constant surprises with stuff not working as intended makes for a lot of confusion and a reluctance to try things out. Whenever I take a flamethrower there are a ton of spitters who don't miss, and they seem to be all or nothing.
They really have the feel of the game down, and I actually love the new warbond thematically, but actually using the stuff in game is lackluster.
- Commando has been out for a month and it still doesn't operate like the EAT with how it's disposable.
- The cookout though is stellar. Knockbacks the choppy chop, commie devs, and shieldy boys.

I generally play on difficulty 6. It felt the right balance of difficulty, sample rewards, and enjoyment, for me.
I've been playing since release, so I'm a pretty high level now, and difficulty 6 was just starting to feel a bit too easy, and I was considering bumping up to level 7 as my standard difficulty.
Then this update came out, and I'm lucky to make it out of a level 6 alive! It's very teammate dependent and I find the quality of teammates has significantly degraded. That could be due to a higher percentage of school kids playing vs adults I guess, as it's the summer holidays, but it doesn't make it any less annoying.
Basically, people need to communicate more and remember it's a coop game. Ping the Bile Titans, Chargers, Impalers, there's others on the team that can help. Tagging where you're going on the map helps everyone coordinate. Microphones are not required, I use mine only when an in-game communication method isn't available or I'm being swarmed but still need to say something, probably about once every two games.
I don't enjoy the missions as much as I did before the update, and I think a lot of the blame rests on Arrowhead's shoulders but the user-base also needs to step up and learn to cooperate more in this cooperative game. Don't one-man-army a bile titan, don't ignore teammates that have found a bunker door, work together to increase your odds of survival, success, super credits, samples, and ultimately, fun.
Old man rant over
- I don't play much public games, I play with some friends, and I felt the opposite. Usually playing lvl6 against bots, lvl7 against bugs. Lvl7 bugs felt like a cakewalk since the new patch.
  But it depends on the planet too. Some planets are hells. Either because of the climate or because of enemy distribution.

The further out my perspective is, the harder for me it is to see this as a "long-term" game, or GAAS. The game play loop is very shallow, as it's a repetitive grind to unlock just weapons, abilities, or "unseen" buffs with timers or health or ammo. The meat of the game is the narratives within missions which the community can create. Nerfing effective weapons makes it harder to create these narratives. We're supposed to be bumbling, idiot, expendable soldiers that prevail against the odds, but the odds continue getting harder for us arbitrarily based on %s the devs see in usage and kill counters. If a weapon overperforms, give us more enemies, don't decrease its effectiveness. The whole point of the game is to kill en masse. Give us more masse, then tune the underperforming weapons and call-ins as needed.
The community had wild storylines going and carried so much of the launch hype based solely on diving with your friends, blowing each other up, and doing cool shit. If you take away what allows us to do cool shit, then there isn't much else left to play with.

Well, I think the performance issues were definitely understated. I know the patch notes said "we have stability issues in difficulty 10" but we went for it anyway, and it feels like not a single match goes by without at least one person disconnecting or crashing.
Additionally it makes zero sense to have nerfed fire and then put out an all fire-based battle pass. That was going to lose them points. It's not like the flamethrower was particularly good at anything besides burning bugs to a crisp, and now none of it is good for anything.

Have they got rid of the rootkit yet?
- Play it on Linux and you don't have to deal with that part.
  https://www.protondb.com/app/553850/
  (Easy Anti Cheat is also a kernel level anticheat, but disables those bits when used on Linux.)

I haven't played since the PSN fiasco...what's going on now?
- Bruh, the article your commenting on is an explanation of what's going on since the PSN fiasco, you could just read it, since you opened the post anyways.
  However, with that being said, new patch hit and added a bunch of content and balance changes. Discussion of the new content has largely been sidelined by people complaining about the balance changes. Players are frustrated that a meta develops, and then the devs nerf that meta into oblivion because they are trying to prevent "one-size-fits-all" solutions. Another complaint is that it takes far too long to kill enemies unless you are using the exact tool the devs intend you to use. Devs publicly agree that time to kill is excessive at the moment, but don't believe the solution is just to buff all weapons. They promise to continue working on the balancing to find a happy medium.
  That's the gist of it based on OPs post at any rate.
  
  Thanks lol
  I wasn't sure about the longer term background issues simmering under the surface

The nerfs suck, but damn had the update been so buggy.
Mission objectives fail to work correctly pretty regularly now.
- I've played maybe 15 rounds since the update, but only found one mission-related bug. We completed both sub-objectives for an ICBM, and it told us that we could extract without launching the missile. And given we had 2 reinforcements left, we sure weren't looking a gift horse in the mouth.
  
  I've had a few that were just wack. One wouldn't let us drop the soil survey strategem.
  On another, we were supposed to activate a pump, but the controls wouldn't let you interact with them. Then later during that mission, the game freaked out and instantly teleported us from the middle of a battle with bugs back onto the destroyer. We were just stuck up there. The hellpods were dark.

I've been casually enjoying the update. The nerf to the incindiary breaker was unexpected, but as a guy with an ammo pack, it didn't matter much.
Mega hives and difficulty 10 in general are hectic and hilarious. Honestly it feels like it's been awhile since the reinforcement stock dropped below 10 for me. Actually having a challenge after players have gotten good is refreshing.
The flame nerf is understandable considering they released a primary and secondary flame launcher. Imagine a secondary just melting charger in seconds. That's what would have happened had they not changed the flames to glance off heavier armors.
One of my friends who got back into the game specifically for this update has gone straight into being a fire elemental. Believe me when I say that he doesn't care even a little about flames only burn soft bits. Being near him is hard though as the floor is always lava.

The most common complaint is that the co-op game is going around in circles, as Arrowhead nerfs the current meta into the dirt while making the game much harder for longtime players.
I have a solution for that :
GIT.GOOD.

46 comments