- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
The guy in charge of "balance" hasn't been taking the "get raped by a pack of troons/arabs" stratagem enough so I would suggest he get a new patch dropped on his ass to fix this imbalance.
Helldivers 2 - Hell is more diverse than ever as PlayStation's demographics continue to grow and change.
- Thread starter The Pulverizer
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- Joined
- Mar 24, 2024
I'm gonna give em the benefit of the doubt and say the balance was just to ensure all weapons remain equally viable, not that there's some ulterior motive.
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
The motive isn't ulterior. The person in charge of balance is on record saying that they look at spreadsheets of what gear people are using and he nerfs the most popular shit. I'm not going to outright say that he derives sexual pleasure from preventing people from having fun and he wears programming socks while doing it but I will imply it.
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2014
the idea would be to make sure people don't just use the same three guns and same four strategems. i'm going to assume the helldiver community isn't going to suddenly stop acting like whiny bitches now that sony folded, and it's gone to their heads. assume now anything that gets changed is going to be the worst nerf ever, the stoner in charge of balance needs to be fired, and the game is broken forever. the same way faggots acted in TF2. the stoner in charge of balancing is a fucking dope, yeah, but i doubt people are gonna be happy with anything.
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2020
Yeah but it's resulted in vidya game communism, everything dragged down to the lowest denominator. The way you balance this game is by making every gun feel amazing against at least one of the enemy factions/in one situation and letting it be sub-optimal against the others. Breaker Incendiary/Spray & Pray are great examples of this principal applied well. Great against bugs S-Tier, absolutely abysmal against bots sheer F. It's when you nerf stuff straight out of any niche that's the kind of heavy handed balancing you get in PvP and it starts to make everything feel really homogenized and your choices start feeling less impactful.
The Eruptor is probably the biggest victim here, it was useless at close range/when swamped, fairly clunky, short clipped, super slow firing and had a propensity to kill you on accident... it was by no means overpowered. What it was, was satisfying, it was fun to pop a medium bug from range and score a little collateral while feeling like a badass cowboy huntsman.
This is a game where you can call airstrikes that level 50 bugs at a time, they have to stop being so stingy about TTK with full blown riffles/DMRs.
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- Joined
- May 18, 2020
How bad are things that the CEO has to tardwrangle his team about every little thing? This is one of those cases where everything would have been better off left alone. Helldivers 2 had the perfect niche of being a power fantasy PvE horde shooter while also having enough difficulty to make for some hilarious killcams. After the weapon nerfs, the enemy buffs and the spawn rate modifiers even the lower levels just feel like an endless slog of shooting that is frustrating more than it's fun.
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2023
I'd argue that's their intent but they're actually too retarded to do it properly. A great example would be the fact that they made a game with all negatives modifiers and practically zero positive modifiers (which is pretty much just energy weapons on cold planets). That shit doesn't feel fun or interesting, it's just a different flavor of AIDs each match.
I saw this shit play out in WoW with Mythic+ dungeons where they would have multiple negative modifiers you'd have to deal with and they'd change each week. Someone made a website to track what the affixes were each week and you know what the article title was on the site? "what garbage affixes do i have to deal with this week?"
Having entirely negative modifiers just feels punishing. There's no push or pull in the balance of the modifiers to encourage you to actually try out different stuff. They could have easily played around with a mixture of positive and negatives.
-Cold/Blizzard Planets: Slow heat buildup but lower energy and fire weapon damage while increasing ice damage (imagine if Polar Patriots actually had ice weapons)
-Hot/Firestorm Planets: Faster heat buildup but higher energy and fire weapon damage but decreased ice damage
-Ion Storm Planets: ion storms intermittently disable stratagems but the electricity in the air increases arc damage
-Meteor Storm Planets: Meteors impact occasionally but the low planet gravity makes the jump pack go farther
-Acid Storm Planets: acid storms lower visibility but ballistic weapons gain 1 higher armor penetration because the acid weakens armor
As it stands, the only thought process that goes through the player's mind is, "Hot planet? Fuck that. Cold planet? Hell yeah, I can go crazy with energy weapons."
The galactic conquest also provides no benefits for holding specific planets, it's just "god, please conquer Hellmire, I don't want to go to this shit planet ever again." They could do things like holding this planet makes matches on all planets in the sector or surrounding sectors gain a positive modifier. This planet is labeled as a factory planet and increases your max ammo limit. Maybe you might play around with weapons that have shit ammo economies more. Maybe a cold planet has a mining operation for crystals used in orbital strategems, so holding that planet decreases orbital cooldowns. Maybe even implement supply lines in a way so it affects every planet along the supply line. When players are finally pushing the last sectors, they've got all these benefits and actually feel like they're pushing in the enemy's shit. A match in the last sectors feels no different than a match in the sectors closest to Super Earth.
The whole point I'm making is there's just no creativity in the development to encourage playing around with different shit, it's just nerf the shit that's played the most without considering why it's being used so often. Nerfing good stuff doesn't automatically makes the garbage stuff good, it just makes the game worse to play.
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- Joined
- Nov 11, 2020
I'm not crazy about ice-weapons they are a little too 'high fantasy' and not enough 'military sci-fi' in my opinion. I don't disagree with positive modifiers though. High O2 content worlds that extend sprint/stam or add explosive/fire dps. Stormy worlds where lightening has a shorter CD... Low gravity worlds to just be fun. More environments (urban, different kinds of forest, etc.) would also be nice. Also more missions where the capture isn't the objective so you can play on different worlds or even theaters would nice.
This I agree with, this is totally in with the military campaign theme and would enhance the map/community aspects of the game.
Gondola Enjoyer
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- Joined
- Mar 11, 2022
I love clicking on a planet, seeing Complex Stratagem Targeting, or 3 Stratagem limit and then turning the game off for that day.
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- Mar 2, 2024
It feels like they perhaps fumbled somewhere along the way and confused "Difficult" and "Challenging".
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- Sep 3, 2023
If they really wanted to stick to the military sci-fi aspect for ice weapons, I agree that projectile ice weapons would be too much. They could just make an ice-based flamethrower that's just shooting out liquid nitrogen. It would do less damage than a flamethrower but slows like EMS and maybe even outright stuns if long enough, like Mei's freeze gun from Overwatch.
If players get to Cyberstan and it's still the same shit with no urban aspects, people are going to be so mad.
Yeah, it doesn't even have to be a continuous thing either. Like in For Honor, they had certain tiles with Castles which gave a bonus to resources put on that tile as a defender. Take a line out of the Halo series and have legit fortress planets that are harder to take by default. If the community has trouble taking it, they could end up going all the way around the planet to cut off supplies to that planet so the AI factions generate a much lower amount of HP to the planet's defenses. Or if you take something like Cyberstan, it demoralizes the enemy in all neighboring sectors so they regenerate planet HP slower for a day or two. There's so much they can do that would add to narrative feel of the war but instead all we've seen is: "Grats on finishing the Automatons off but that was a reserve fleet and here's the main fleet up north two days later".
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2022
What is up with these decay rates? Menkhet was like 25+% and after the defend it is back down to single digits.
Come on Joel, we gotta cap some planets or the playerbase is gunna be spread all over and nothing is going to go anywhere.
Come on Joel, we gotta cap some planets or the playerbase is gunna be spread all over and nothing is going to go anywhere.
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2022
I kind of imagine that that's the point they're simply trying to buy time so that they can sort out whatever retard business they're doing in the back
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2022
I think now that it's fixed they're gonna pepper in Kill X Billion enemy orders whenever they can because that would buy them the most time. Not only does it push the playerbase off the faction they're buying time for, in this case the Terminids since Meridia is now a supercolony and that's the "cool I wonder what that's going to be" thing, making it a kill count and not a specific planet makes players choose the biome they want, so not acid and not fire tornadoes because fuck both.
This spreads the players out more and thus the progress seems extremely slow without needing to fix numbers (they still do). For added measure I'm sure because it only cares about kill count a lot of people are grinding out eradicate missions and not even completing operations since that's the quickest way to kill a lot of bots.
This spreads the players out more and thus the progress seems extremely slow without needing to fix numbers (they still do). For added measure I'm sure because it only cares about kill count a lot of people are grinding out eradicate missions and not even completing operations since that's the quickest way to kill a lot of bots.
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
Gotta love how the "Known Issues" section of the patch notes is continuously the longest.
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2024
I'm right there with you. They dropped a half-baked warbond that everyone realized they released the wrong version of, and the first patch is literally:
Also judging from steamcharts, it seems a large chunk of the playerbase has been feeling similarly.
Seems like the past month in general has been rough. I can't recall anything specific that happened around 15-Apr but that kind of drop off doesn't look normal.
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2022
I think that's steamcharts doing some rounding. That's not explaining the drop, just the difference in detail. I can replicate the same phenomena with the Darktide numbers.
Mid April was the other warbond and the big nerfs hadn't dropped. Real head scratcher there.
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2024
I didn't know steamcharts did that, thanks for clarifying!
As for the "why", I'm just tossing out a theory. Cause I do agree, the timing makes it kind of a head scratcher.
I think the timing is just a coincidence, and the overall issue is just a lot of factors coming to a head.
I think a lot of it is stuff Edgy But Dull said earlier, combined with the Warbond being kinda lackluster. Then on top of that the bugs that go unfixed/get fixed seem to have a pattern of making things harder for us, and making things easier on the enemy.
Damage over time only got fixed last week, and they also implemented some very crucial fixes to stop us from landing on tall rocks cause that was gamebreaking I suppose. Whereas gunship factories can become unmanageable messes, you can have 8 tanks spawn back to back to back, chargers can still ice-skate iirc, and there's likely more I'm forgetting, I haven't played solidly in a couple of weeks.
Patch notes are also very easy to see if you're in the server or on steam. So all someone has to do is check steam or discord, see some glaring bugs still aren't fixed.
So the hard drop off might just be a collective bubble bursting of people checking the notes, seeing stuff is still unfixed, then just shrugging and not playing.
Only other thought I can really offer is maybe people are getting tired of these major orders? I mean our current one is pretty easy, I think we blew the bug one out of the water in record time. But even easy orders like this have people shrugging when your weapons get weaker and the enemies stay stronger. But order wise we've just kind of had back to back losses. We don't need to be handed wins, but constant losses also can demoralize people into thinking "Oh another defend planets order? Nah we're losing that one anyways".
I think a lot of it is stuff Edgy But Dull said earlier, combined with the Warbond being kinda lackluster. Then on top of that the bugs that go unfixed/get fixed seem to have a pattern of making things harder for us, and making things easier on the enemy.
Damage over time only got fixed last week, and they also implemented some very crucial fixes to stop us from landing on tall rocks cause that was gamebreaking I suppose. Whereas gunship factories can become unmanageable messes, you can have 8 tanks spawn back to back to back, chargers can still ice-skate iirc, and there's likely more I'm forgetting, I haven't played solidly in a couple of weeks.
Patch notes are also very easy to see if you're in the server or on steam. So all someone has to do is check steam or discord, see some glaring bugs still aren't fixed.
So the hard drop off might just be a collective bubble bursting of people checking the notes, seeing stuff is still unfixed, then just shrugging and not playing.
Only other thought I can really offer is maybe people are getting tired of these major orders? I mean our current one is pretty easy, I think we blew the bug one out of the water in record time. But even easy orders like this have people shrugging when your weapons get weaker and the enemies stay stronger. But order wise we've just kind of had back to back losses. We don't need to be handed wins, but constant losses also can demoralize people into thinking "Oh another defend planets order? Nah we're losing that one anyways".
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2020
If you guys want the uncomfortable truth, the game is falling off because the skinner-box is broken. The maps are repetitive and there are no longer worthwhile goals to grind toward. When a new bond releases if you have been banking points you unlock everything in like 2-3 days and you are left bored again (especially if the guns don't shake up the meta at all). The galactic progress map is supposed to aid in retention (you want to see where things are going right?) but it progresses approximately twice a week and doesn't happen as a direct result immediately following your actions. Therefore it simply does not deliver enough dopamine.
Furthermore even if they fix the game and magically deliver a ton of content the routine is now broken, the treat dispenser has been dry too long and there isn't a force of habit driving people to log in day after day. The Sony thing also broke habit for a lot of people myself included.
Going forward the audience is sycophants and people who have formed social habits/connections around the game and even those people will start to get bored eventually. I'm having less and less fun but I still get an itch to play, just not nearly as consistently... maybe I will go back to Enshrouded or progress my Hardcore Henry playthrough of Kingdom Come.
Furthermore even if they fix the game and magically deliver a ton of content the routine is now broken, the treat dispenser has been dry too long and there isn't a force of habit driving people to log in day after day. The Sony thing also broke habit for a lot of people myself included.
Going forward the audience is sycophants and people who have formed social habits/connections around the game and even those people will start to get bored eventually. I'm having less and less fun but I still get an itch to play, just not nearly as consistently... maybe I will go back to Enshrouded or progress my Hardcore Henry playthrough of Kingdom Come.
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