>Arrowhead CEO says Helldivers 2 balancing patches have 'gone too far' recently: 'It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/arrowhead-ceo-says-helldivers-2-balancing-patches-have-gone-too-far-recently-it-feels-like-every-time-someone-finds-something-fun-the-fun-is-removed/
I don't understand, I thought they knew what they were doing and the nerfs were good?!?!?!?!
Oh my god, shut up. Can one of you freaks actually make a sincere thread, instead of constantly having to be disingenuous about games that have somehow offended.
I like how whenever consumers are proven right shills always go
>OH WOW OMG WHO CARES ITS NOT ACTUALLY IMPORTANT AND WE DIDNT CARE IN THE FIRST PLACE SO YOU STILL LOSE SO THERE!!!!!!111111
This thread has NOTHING to do with the "consumer rights" campaign that succeeded
>b-but it's the same game
So? The OP clearly doesn't like Helldivers for some nebulous reason so why would he care about them backtracking on PSN accounts?
Shut up, homosexual.
Not an argument, moron.
bot reply
Sincere threads get 10 posts and eventually 404
Disingenuous bait threads get 500+ posts and auto archive.
I fricking hate that this site works as such, but alas here we are.
Already dropped this game for that very reason. Gotta get someone competent in charge of balance, and get rid of the shit CMs too.
Shit CMs are a requirement for Swedish devs, they can't function without them.
this is NOT okay we can't capitulate to the latent hate movement that is gamers! if we don't make them unhappy then they win!
Buffing and nerfing weapons every other week for a coop shooter is absolutely moronic. Now people are dropping it because the guns they enjoy feel like shit.
One of the dumbest dev teams of all time lucked into a best seller.
>game run by community
>kills itself
Many, many such cases
Ironic that the "fascist" game is led in the most communistic way possible
So this game is dying already? Wow that was quick.
we know what we're doing. The fricking gamers just won't stop complaining. They should learn to do what they're told.
They should have realized this when the railgun was nerfed and didn't even buff the others to compensate
You moronic?
Literally all the other anti-armor weapons got buffs after the railgun was nerfed
>PajeetDEIvers shills are still posting on Ganker
Cope. We've made the most popular, well-balanced, and engaging multiplayer experience of all time.
Frick off to /vg/ already
>be moronic dev
>only play on console
>see arc thrower and railgun 2 shotting bile titans
>nerf them with bullshit reasoning
>turns out a bug was causing them to do massive damage to bile titans
>double down and gaslilght the community telling them they're wrong
They only recently rolled back most of the nerf for the railgun after being exposed as morons.
its so funny to see all these morono devs act like internet tough guys about how teh gamers don't understand balance, and then they have to eat crow because they fricked their own game up
>Players complain about fire damage not working for non-hosts
>Buff fire damage 3 (THREE) times
>Flamethrower now deletes chargers while the incendiary breaker melts everything
>Flame hulks now killing players that enter anywhere near the same zipcode instantly
>Non-hosts still do frick all fire damage
>Finally fix fire damage bug
>nerf fire
I like he exposed he didn't even play his own fricking game to sprout this bullshit
I did not see a single person use the railgun in probably a hundred+ dives after the first railgun nerf. The guy is is either flat out lying or just delusional.
Especially now with the new enemies like the factory strider/gunships basically being immune to railgun damage. Tanks seem to take even MORE shots to kill now after they reverted part of the nerf. I think they lowered the overall damage.
Was reading about how this is the same guy that fricked up the balance of another game. Can they just not hire morons.
what gaeem
Hello Neighbor 2
https://hello-neighbor.fandom.com/wiki/Alexus_Kravchenko
hello neighbor 1 was also fricking awful by the end so im hesitant to blame this one dude for a bad series being bad
From what I understand, he was also extremely vocal on discord while working on that game, so he's not blamed for the game wholly being bad but specifically for gutting major systems and mechanics because he directly claimed responsibility.
In general, it looks like this guy has only a few years of experience so he's in the stage where he thinks he's hot shit and knows everything when he barely knows some things.
why are these morons incapable of manually stepping or tracing or even printing random strings with debug info so they can figure this shit out in a more evidence based manner instead of just guessing and hitting build right before the weekly patch deadline?
it's pretty disappointing tbh.
Shooter games have one job: make shooting fun. If you take the guns people have fun shooting and make them not fun to shoot, then the game will become a bad game.
It's really that simple.
Not to the swedecucks, they think there is this neutral baseline where everything should be at. Look at this moron dev
.
Are weapons sold on the ingame store? I havent played the game so just curious.
There is the base weapons where you collect in-game resources to unlock.
There is "passes" called warbounds that you buy with the in-game currency (super credits) and you can either farm it within the game or spend real money to get super credits, and these warbounds have weapons in them that can be purchased with the same in-game resources I mentioned before.
This is all in game nothing outside of the game.
however acquiring the currency for wartbounts takes a really long time if you aren't playing at least 2-3 hours a day so real money purchases are heavily encouraged in this game
Some nerfs actually were necessary, like the railgun nerf. 9 times out of 10 the Black personhomosexuals screeching "no nerf, only buff!" were the same metatrannies kicking people for bringing anything other than the Railgun/Shield combo in difficulty 6/7, never mind Helldive.
How is the dev supposed to control how people will play their games with regards to kicking people, the option is there and people will abuse it for their own reasons, bs or otherwise.
With regards to RG needing to be nerfed as it was killing medium to large enemies "effortlessly", there was no other weapons capable of taking out the larger enemies and in this case it was the Charger and Bile Titan that they (devs) thought the RG was too OP against when in reality none of the other guns including EAT could take out these enemies because they had no weakness until they nerfed the Charger's and Bile Titan's face/head as the weakpoint to aim the EAT at and this was during the same patch to the RG nerf.
Why does a PvE game need constant balance patches?
Same reason websites keep deploying brand new awful UI's that nobody likes. They need to justify why they still have a job.
The devs thinks the game will be stale too quickly with players using the same weapon/loadout.
So instead they want to kill the game quicker by making every weapon suck.
Can't let you have TOO much fun in a live service game.
Helldivers 2 does zero content for anything they release, so everything ranges from "stronger than we intended" to "useless trash" and in between.
From a broader perspective they want the entire weapon roster to be about on equal footing and come down to player preference and whatever situation is going on, like fighting bots vs. bugs, or fighting on a hot planet vs. a cold planet, or some other modifier, etc.
>Helldivers 2 does zero content for anything they release,
Bah, meant to say testing. They do zero testing because they are constantly crunching to release the next bit of content because it's 1 warbond per month, but also occasional drops of new enemies and new missions/maps, so they might be release 2 - 3 new things in a month which their small team 100% cannot handle.
the big thing I’m curious about is how the frick are they going to balance the inevitable upgrade system for both weapons and stratagems??? we’re playing with the base models of the gear atm, what about when they all have branching research paths with different results?
I doubt they'll even add the upgrade system
Yeah, the fact that we're getting so many weapon variants that would normally just be choices in an upgrade system makes me think that such a system is never coming.
The weapon design is so bad. More than 80% of the weapons are either not fun to use or not effective.
The new assault rifle they put out that's supposed to have higher damage than the liberator has less damage since they didn't think of buffing it after they revised all the damage numbers on other things. It's crazy how even after the buffs none of the weapons feel good to use.
>nerfing the strong weapons instead of buffing the weak ones
>it's a fricking PvE game
Realistically, how do you balance a game where intend for everything to be in an equally usable and viable state? I can't see aonther way other than gauging initial power levels and then buffing things and releasing new gear intentionally underpowered and buffing them. This way it feels like you slowly give players more options and toys to play with rather than taking things (things they really enjoyed and the reason they were still playing mind you) away, which is a massive feels bad. Surely balancing the game is more about how things feel on an emotional level than a logical one?
>Surely balancing the game is more about how things feel on an emotional level than a logical one?
It's both. Weapons need to have a certain level of performance before someone can enjoy how they feel, because you won't be having fun if you can't handle the basic situations you find yourself on.
The simple fact is they could do this if they had time to really sit down and internally test so weapons so that the release versions didn't need to get changed so drastically.
The one positive note is that the oldest warbonds and most of the vanilla weapons are in a good spot, so generally things trend upward to a good place. (notable exceptions being the slugger and liberator concussive).
It's pretty damn hard. Most singleplayer games are totally unbalanced but it doesnt matter when levels are trailored to specific weapons, or the more OP weapons just aren't spawned in as often
I have no idea what this game is but if it's a singleplayer game, I don't care how busted shit is, let me have my fun. Surely removing the fun players are having for some weird weapon balance autism in a singleplayer game is not the way to go in engendering positive feedback.
Wait, aren't they releasing new DLC or content in the game? What reason do they have to keep new weapon balanced (or fun) when you can make new ones feel better to play with (by paying them for it)?
You might be right but I know I'd be a little upset having my favourite toys (crutches for some) taken away. I don't know what the difficulty options are like but why not let players find their fun rather than being so hands on? What a strange approach to game development.
>You might be right but I know I'd be a little upset having my favorite toys
I mean yeah, that's why it's a poor approach. If they worked out the big kinks ahead of time, then they wouldn't be fighting players as much who of course are upset when their stuff gets kicked in the teeth.
And some of their nerfing approaches have simply been moronic, no getting around that.
Like withe slugger, that's a shotgun that shoots slugs. It was super good because it had amazing damage at all ranges and you could snipe enemy weak points well, AND it also staggered the medium heavies.
So it was basically an amazing high damage marksman rifle with the crowd control of a shotgun.
So they said "this is too strong" because it does both jobs, but their response was to nerf the damage a bit, and then completely gut the stagger, so now it doesn't feel like a shotgun at all but the damage doesn't justify losing the stagger.
They said they didn't intend for it to perform well at range even though it had great range and even has a small scope, so that's just baffling.
Swedes are mysterious creatures.
They are releasing new content, but you can get it both by paying money or getting the currency in game, so it's assumed players will have access to every weapon, but that would take alot of time. As such it's important to keep the 1st set of weapons good and they don't want old weapons being overshadowed by new weapons, and they also need to balanced out the tier 4 - 9 difficulties, so they would be fricked if they allowed powercreep because then you need to balance around the powercreeped weapons, but then that means peoples favorite guns start underperforming and you will always be behind if you aren't constantly getting the newest release (warbond).
So they didn't just lower numbers, they made a weapon feel less responsive? Nice! There should really be some testing for these weapons before public release. Broken usually also mean fun so you need to make sure things aren't too broken or functioning in any other manner than intended to avoid the example you've given. I'd say being a game dev is hard but you're also creating/extending your job if you perform it poorly.
Its not an easy task and its very difficult.
But one way to do this is by splitting up weapons into having different roles (different strengths and weaknesses).
Then you let the gameplay have a variety of scenarios so that there exists a situation in which every weapon excels more than others.
You can partly see this in HD2 where some guns/stratagems excel against bugs but not others against bots.
Or excel in certain missions.
HD2 has two issues that prevent it reaching this point imo.
>The game has some weapons that excel in no field or are just outclassed by other weapons.
>The game doesn't give players enough information for situations that would create these differences.
The first is rather simple.
Look at the slugger, pre-nerf it did the role of the punisher, close range stagger to hold back bugs, and the role of precision weapons.
After the nerf it lost the capability to do both roles and now it doesn't really have one.
It lacks spread and stagger so you don't want to use it as a close range anti-bug tool.
But there are now more precise, faster and consistent precision weapons.
AH saw that the slugger did the roles of several weapons and 'fixed' it by removing all the roles it had.
The second is that there are factors in the game that would incentivize me to use one weapon over another but that I have no way of knowing before hand.
For example if you do a bug mission you have no idea if it will have stalkers, bile spewers or shrieks.
Stalkers promote weapons with stagger.
Bile spewers promote explosive or armor pen weapons.
Shrieks promote high firerates/spread weapons.
If I knew about their inclusion in a mission beforehand I would be more incentivized to pick different weapons more frequently.
>Shrieks + Stalkers I would tend to go punisher, but Stalkers + Bile Spewers would make me pick the blitzer instead
But because I don't know this, I tend to stick to the blitz over the punisher as Bile spewers are bigger priority.
>Surely balancing the game is more about how things feel on an emotional level than a logical one?
Ideally you should do both. The modern problem is that it has become standard practice to balance almost purely through player analytics which, while useful, are inherently incapable of telling the full story and naturally lead to the most popular weapons being nerfed for the crime of being popular.
>I'm feeding the rage a little for my own entertainment here
All they have to do is the exact opposite of what Bungie does when balancing D2 and Helldivers will always feel fun.
What were the two most brainless playstyles referred to in this post?
The 1st is 100% railgun + shieldpack.
I think the second was... honestly I'm not sure, I would need to go back and see exactly when this post was made but I don't want to bother searching reddit.
I love how on release this was the best game ever and I still see people enjoy it but these posts about how everything is just shitting itself are hilarious too
obvious example is the psn linking, but I've seen plenty of ''devs are moronic'' or ''shitty balancing'' posts too
never buy a game on launch!
The game is still great, but the balance is ass every time they try to "fix" things
>we have to keep rebalancing weapons because people keep finding a combo that's sort of effective
>meanwhile I've been running with the same strategem combo for every map that isn't eradicate or defend since the games launch
>everyone uses the same 3 weapons because everything else feels like shit to use
>so we will nerf the 3 weapons
>now everyone just picked the next 3 weapons that feel the least like shit
>obviously we have to nerf those weapons
Ganker doesn't actually play games so they don't realize this is always what happened. We watched it happen in real time with Fallout 76, where the meta was repeatedly cut down until every gun takes 1000 shots to kill anything. It's a PVE game. They want you taking longer and longer periods of time, ever so gradually, to "accomplish" anything and kill enemies. They have a little cash cow with potential, so they'll accrue some whales and slowly nerf everything over time so that those few dedicated losers will simply grin and bear it forever. This goes on until Helldivers 3 is ready and they make a ton of money to repeat it all over again. Video games are a business.
>We watched it happen in real time with Fallout 76,
No we didn't. Nobody gave a shit about 76 beyond how much of a disaster it's launch was.
fricking fallout 76, what a joke of a game, you're 100% correct about needing 1000 shots
me and my friend were flabbergasted when we realised the HUMBLE FLAMER is the most fricking broken weapon simply due to it's efficiency
>kills fast
>doesn't use a billion ammo
>only downside is range but that doesn't matter because the problem isn't survival, just time wasted beating up meatshields with 100000 hp
also i'm getting pissed off they won't let me hoard 1000 of every resource and i get wiener blocked by a weight limit
Do they really plan on introducing new guns every single month? What's the point?
the CEO hates cosmetic skins so this is the only type of microtransaction they can push
Contractual obligation.
The worst part isn't that the gun is a downgrade, it's that the description explicitly states that the gun is a higher-caliber with more stopping power yet it has the exact same damage.
The descriptions are completely fricked. The Liberator Concussive's description still talks about it having lower damage than the regular Liberator despite the buff giving it more damage, and the Eruptor's description still mentions the destructive shrapnel.
adding 3+ guns every month is a fricking terrible idea. Not even psuedo MMOs like Warframe have that much weapon bloat. Game will be absolutely unplayable in 2-3 years
The grind one year from now will make the game unable to grab new players in. Imagine a new player trying the game out some time next year and finding out that 80% of the guns are all locked behind a paywall/grindwall and a second grindwall.
95% of the guns are fricking shit so it doesn't really matter. They specifically said they dont want good primaries to exist and all your power is in strategems.
The liberator, punisher, plasma punisher, sickle, blitzer, dominator, breaker, incendiary breaker, scorcher, are all good primaries.
I haven't tried the DMRs in a while, but those are buffed as well.
The marksman rifles are good too.
The CS is my go too for bots with it one shotting devastators.
I also occasionally run ballistic shield with smg and a laser canon whenever there's a mission about carrying the data packages.
I think all smg's need to be more viable is a one-handed stratagem that is good against bugs.
Yeah I haven't been testing them because I've been to busy slapping bugs, but I intend to get around to it. The new smg might be replacing the defender.
Balancing weapons for a PvE didn't make sense to me. This sole reason made me lose interest in this game. I already saw OW2 and The Finals die because this stupid ''muh we have to balance'' and I'm not bothering
This is why I dropped the game, every time I found a fun loadout it ended up getting nerfed
I stopped playing when they nerfed the Quasar a few weeks ago. Then the devs told me to leave a bad review if I didn’t like something. They thought it’d be about PSN. No, it was about their shit nerfs that only make the PvE game less fun.
Stupid fricking homosexual devs that do balance changes of any kind in PvE and single player games. Especially the latter when there is mod support for players so they can balance them on their own.
Subhuman apes just want to live out a power fantasy in a game where you're not even given a name. All the guns should be shit and you should feel accomplished if you manage to extract at all on level 7. Game right now is fricking easy mode bullshit thanks to all the outrageous power creep. Brand new warbond releases and nothing is even good because of all the buffs that get handed out and yet people still crying and whining wanting MORE AND MORE buffs.
Absolutely disgusting. This has to be the worst gaming community of all time.
They have been making the game harder though at least for solo players but yeah not sure why they want it to be baby mode in a group that makes no sense to me either
lol
literally just make the weapons have a role and not be dogshit with minimal differences
that's all you have to do bro
>blah blah blah [continued dev dicksucking]
Just save everyone all those words outright next time.
>just want to live out a power fantasy in a game
That’s literally the point of video games.
It was already hard before 1.000.300. That patch made the most needless nerfs ever for what? To make sure things were “balanced” against computer bugs and bots?
Frick off and have a nice day, strugglegay.
its not fair to the CPUs
>game is easy mode
elitists are so moronic, do they not realize that most people don't even play above difficulty 5 or 6?
it's the same shit as DRG where you have a bunch of vocal Black folk screaming at the devs for not banning casuals and demanding challenge when barely anyone plays above haz 3
these dumb Black folk who are so good at the game, instead of realizing that no matter how good the AI is it's still a fricking robot with patterns, what they want is the difficulty and chaos of players but without actually getting dabbed on by those players
so instead they sit here in PVE games where they insult everyone for wanting to enjoy their weapons 'because it's too easy'
go play CoD or some other game where you actually play against players, stop trying to get nerfs done in a fricking PVE game, no matter how many nerfs happen you dumb 'SUPRIOR APES' will still be able to play max difficulty, just go play against players if you want a challenge
>months after game launch
>Spear still doesn't work
damage dots finally fixed, spear still broken, misaligned scope still broken. 2/3 of the "been here since release" bugs remain now.
I hate the Black folk at balanced and the same morons that pretend helldive is difficult
>vs bugs you can use one of the 3 working primaries that don't feel like shit since most enemies can take DoT from fire and have 3 layers of armor but don't you dare to not bring Anti armor stratagems or support weapon
>vs bots you use the autocannon that can competly make primaries or other support weapons look like a joke but won't neve get touched since its the example of """balance""" even though outshines the other options for being clunkier or weaker to use
>at the end doesn't matter what you use as long you have a quick clear button for objectives like the 500kg or precision strike for stuff that needs hellbombs or laser and eagle strikes for bots to nuke outpost and outrun their assses
Stealth light armor makes things even more easy if you understand how patrols work
>balancing a PVE game
>terrible idea
No shit. The only correct way to "balance" a PVE game is buffs. You don't nerf shit.