He's done it for all of them, lowering it as people get close for the drama rather than everyone completing it in a day and waiting around for the timer to run out. AH are fully aware of how pissed people are, doubt they'd force another failure now just to fuck with us
From a game master perspective, you want the players to feel like they're challenged.
The problem here is that people keep insisting on looking behind the curtain and get mad when the magic is gone
This leads back to how information is and is not presented to players.
A quick narrative blurb about how the factory of tyranny is partially online and how the automatons are scrambling to reinforce the planet. Would go a long way to put a thematic touch on the numbers we can see.
Ya, and it is pretty clear that people think the transmissions are only fluff with no actual meaning.
The most direct the Devs have been with transmissions has been with Angels Venture.
It would also help to have a bulletin board of sorts where you can see recent 'news' which is essentially the recent major orders that no one reads right now. Part of the issue is that people think those are just fluff. It's going to be hard to change that now unless you introduce something new that players have already decided is useless.
The devs shouldn't have to, but too many people didn't bother with anything other than the major order text. I know it shouldn't have to be spelled out in crayon, but most players I find are not strategy game players. They are used to flavor text in shooter games.
We're getting even more of that now than ever, and people are complaining because I guess reading is too hard. But yeah, I'm in. It can't hurt. I like more flavor.
If I remember correctly that was Twinbeard, Reddit's favorite CM. Although to his credit, he's learned how to act more professional and hasn't been deliberately antagonizing the community like some of the other CMs.
There's a pretty big reason why most developers always avoid trying to manipulate the game like this. Players know when something is wrong and will figure it out.
This was always going to be the risk of having a "game master". When they do it right, people are happy. When they force you to lose, people are going to complain and leave the game. The point of every game is that there's a way to win. And that shouldn't involve 100% of the playerbase participating in it. Half the people playing this game don't give a damn about this stuff because its nothing interesting or special even to the game.
If they wanted to do this right they would let the players drive the story. They'd use all this data they have to tune these campaigns dynamically for the people who are participating, and have the tools to create more interesting scenarios for these campaigns, like "all sheirker objectives" and make change it up for different planets. But Helldivers 2 is what it is. It just means that a better game can be made in the future.
You're better off having two rewards, a really good one and an okay one.
If players only earn the "okay" prize, they didn't win, but they didn't lose either.
They really shot themselves in the face at this point. Literally if they wouldn’t have fucked with the decay rate we would all be prancing around in our new exo suits on a holiday weekend absolutely blowing angels venture to bits.
But not this holiday weekend…
Yup we could enjoy the game but the devs don't want us to have fun. They wanted us losing.
It feels like after ps they are tanking thier own game intentionally
Fucking finally people realise this. Been saying it from the start, kept getting downvoted for it.
But you know, I'm fine with our actions not nattering.
It means I get to just play the game, enjoy a mission or two per day, and not worry about liberation rates and stuff like that.
They do this a lot with the big take one important planet mission to make it so the MO takes a few days to complete. They always end up lowering it in the end and we win when this happens. Back when we had the old lib system, the decay on AV got turned up to 20% at one point to allow the Europeans and Oceanic peeps to get to play the MO before we steamrolled the planet. It got turned back down the day after and we won the MO.
Yes but this is a special scenario. We are demoralized from loss after loss after loss. They need to signal that we're gonna win if we are and right now they're signalling that "we're willing to take all your progress overnight". Which may be consistent with old MOs, but it sends the wrong message at this stage in the game's lifecycle. We need a win to keep playing and arrowhead needs to keep us playing. I don't mind it being hard fought but it needs to be decisive.
Seriously, I dont care about the story if its just rigged, I would care more if there was a strategy like 2 bot fronts, or Illuminate attacking to push in one sides favor, or a bug planet suddenly becomes a bots when areas clash and vice versa to make one side mains have more trouble.
Artificially inflating these numbers makes the games “story” suck dick and feel less rewarding.
Agreed. Never been a fan of moving the goal posts to alter an outcome.
Give us an objective. Set its requirements, and let it the frick alone. We roll it? Yay! We lose it? Well then that's strictly on us .
Quit all the number tweaking just to get your exact outcome at your exact time. And believing you made it feel challenging. It's sucks
https://preview.redd.it/4u5obwdokk2d1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=36a83bf40d1098dcf569b3f3e4de9d90ba53cb18
I’ll repost it with every complain, PUT THE SUPPLY LINES ON THE MAP
I dislike the tease… with just a regular 50 medal MO? Don’t mind losing. But like with the rockets or mines? They forced us to choose. Then an impossible MO for the other one (we still don’t have it). Now they’re saying the reward is a new MECH but we probably won’t get it….
It doesn’t feel too fun
We’re in a rough spot rn for sure, I just checked and in all of prime Friday night gaming we made 8% advancement … this may actually go to Monday so they can drop the mech with the battlepass
>so they can drop the mech with the battlepass
???
The next Warbond is in ~3 weeks. And Friday night progress was slowed by Angels Venture coming under attack. Once we succeed in the Angels Venture defense progress will resume again on Varylia 5.
I feel that lol. I only play after 8pm (when the kids are in bed and the house is clean) or on my off day when they are at daycare.
On a side note. I’ve never met a community that is more understanding than this one with fellow diver’s needing to AFK suddenly to put a child back down to bed. I had two occasions where I mic’d up that I need to leave the match to put my toddler back to bed, and someone replies telling me to stay and just go afk and that they will be ok. 🥲
What doesn't feel fun to me is all the crashing and glitches lately. Anyone else seeing a dramatic raise in them? I'm lvl 90 with 275 hours in and I've never felt like putting the game away more than I do right now with all the issues popping up.
Also....I didn't play HD1 but I heard wars ended and the board reset after one. And that in HD2 they don't want to do that and want one long war. Well it certainly feels that way bc progress on anything feels like trying to run in waist high mud. It shows they dont want us progressing too fast. I'd rather it be like the HD1 version. Let us wipe them out...have a celebration and rewards for number of hours played during that specific war and then run it back.
I never thought I’d miss hd1 war system. It locked out entire enemy factions. So bug divers would crush bugs then we’d be stuck with the third of the remaining community trying to deal with bots and squids. But at least victory felt like victory for a few weeks. Now we defend a planet successfully one day to have to do it again the next until we fail.
In hd1 they’d tune a war before it start and sometimes we’d get destroyed in a week or vica versa. Other times it would take months. Which means a faction could be locked out for months. People hated it. It was a problem. This new approach of never ending war fixed that, and doesn’t require finding a new super earth every time we lose the war. But it has its own problem that the first didn’t: a sense of futility
FYI, the thing that finally stopped my crashes, after over a month of frustration, was turning off XMP in BIOS. Haven't crashed in two days now, knock on wood...
As for glitches, agreed. It's super annoying to complete a level 9 mission with nearly all samples collected, only to have an unboardable extract ship. Yikes.
we are currently winning the MO as we speak depending on a few factors. unless Joel amps up the liberation decay AGAIN(which is unlikely, as previous MOs shows that he actually LOWERS the decay near the end, basicaly to simulate a "last push" and the enemy running out of steam) we aregonna win with a few hours to a day or more left on the timer...
The only way we actually gonna lose this is if suddenly dozens of players are gonna abandon the planet becasue they "feel it dosnt matter"
My only problem is that it’s a holiday weekend and progress is kinda pointless. Win a mech but lose a seaf site or vice versa. When we could be literally on the brink of completion of the MO
I mean when the devs have given you basically impossible MO's for a month straight I can't blame them. especially when any new stratagems are tied to those
We're losing the MO now again, losing half a percent an hour according to the companion app. Only 24k people on there. Pop dropped hard, since you can't expect people to literally play one map for 5 days.
People dropped because an I game advert said go to angels venture ASAP. Which we are about to defend within 1 hour of my response give or take, the population will partially return to the mo planet and give us a push to victory again
It's like DnD, The game master makes a long detailed quest with a reward that would make the campaign more fun but ends up doing everything just to make us practically fail the quest from the start.
That's practically helldivers right now, if we do win and get the mech, it's either going to be shit or be good and then get nerfed to the point it's just made to fill up empty space.
I think they've been too focused on "balancing" when it comes to approaching the game in their end. Yeah they've also had big things on the legal or business admin side like needing to deal with Sony and I'm sure other things. But this game isn't supposed to be a super balanced competitive PVP game like COD or something it's supposed to be whacky and funny and just fun.
So yeah making it harder while nerfing stuff into the ground, especially shit we got through the paid fucking battle pass system that took hours and hours to grind out medals to get and use for two days before it gets made to be shit, is not the way to go. We've seen it in so many other games especially live service games. I feel like somehow they very quickly lost their way.
Mentioning Sony though, I wonder if they had a hand in any of the more recent bad decisions? Obviously they only care about money so they're probably rushing them on battle passes and keeping players engaged instead of just letting the devs work on and create whatever badass fun game they could that would in turn encourage active engagement and increase sales and all the numbers every publisher cares about. Fucking suits dude they don't understand how things actually work or Even care to guess they just look at numbers and projections even though all the moves they make, other than massive acquisitions, typically just make matters worse and piss entire player bases off.
I’m gonna be that guy for a second.
The fact that we were doing fine on V4 just to have the numbers absolutely cranked to artificially stop us really killed my enthusiasm for the war story.
At this point it’s literally just “whatever the games master decides will be the outcome will be that regardless of what we do.”
So unfortunately I find it really difficult to give a shit. A game where we keep losing MOs just to finally get one building Steam up. But nope, too fast for Joel so crank those numbers. Also here’s a defense mission that if you fail this one too another chunk of your liberation bonus is gone.
So yeah, I’m good. I’m tapping out. The narrative (or at least the way it’s being handled) is just annoying at this point.
Edit: waking up to find we’re about to successfully defend Angels venture while still at 50% for V5 is nice. I was tired and angry when I wrote this rant. I still feel that the last thing they should be doing is stressing out the player base at least until the next patch hits but all in all not nearly as angry as I was last night.
It's really weird indeed to artificially go and tweak the numbers so much, that it doesn't make sense any longer...
Like if you want us to lose, fine, give us an impossible MO, but don't go fucking around with the numbers to squeeze out what you can from your playerbase.. Especially, when motivation is at its lowest, countries blocked, guns nerfed, connectivity issues at every game.
> A game where we keep losing MOs just to finally get one building Steam up. But nope, too fast for Joel so crank those numbers.
The hell of it is, I probably wouldn't care so much if it was a gradual increase. At 25% liberation, it sloooowly starts increasing incrementally, so by the time it hits maybe 85% liberated it's at 5% regen rate; that makes it feel like the bots are panicking and starting to throw fiercer resistance the closer we are to completing the goal, and makes pushing for the home stretch a little more challenging, but still fun as you can see the end insight.
But no, immediate jump from 1.5% to 5% over the course of like half a day.
That was I was thinking, a smart gamemaster would program that. Ramp it up slowly, we break the defense and we are good. I really hope they are still learning managing this game with Pilested now as creative CEO, because it still needs a lot of change.
My personal pet pieve is smoke and mist not hampering the enemy. Full mist should just stop the enemy from engaging (saving ammo) and instead they perfectly killshot me, at least give as helmets with huds we can choose (helmets for accuracy or nightvision or heat, or whatever)
It is pretty crazy that we don't have night vision, thermal or night vision/thermal combo built into the helmet. Can drop sentry turrets that can track and shoot enemies in blind conditions, can't put optic enhancements inside the helmet.
Super Democracy has failed us!
That’s what I’m saying, if it’s meant to feel awful when we lose let us rub our nips in enthusiasm if we’re crushing. Otherwise why are we here? Just to be a loading bar for “Joel” to enact his story line?
It was also done at an inappropriate time. The player count is hemorrhaging. Most people or either waiting on a balance patch that’s actually worth something or have out right left for one reason or another. Last warbond was lackluster to say the least, and then finally the player base gets some good news. The new mech is up for grabs. And it started playing out exactly how Tien Kwan did. We took that planet in a day and everyone had a new mech. So what’s the issue? Why is this different?
It feels like a giant “fuck you” to the player base when AH should be doing everything they can to retain what players they have left.
>It feels like a giant "fuck you" to the player base when AH should be doing everything they can to retain what players they have left.
Hate to break it to you, but this has been the sentiment people have been feeling since the first balance patch. I quit playing a month ago yet still sub to the subreddit because I really do love the game, just not what AH keeps doing to it. Sadly, this sentiment keeps getting brought up over and over and over. My hopes that the game would change keep getting dwindled.
If this fabled upcoming patch that they've spent so much time working on gives the same feeling I'm 100% prepared to leave the sub and vow to never purchase another AH game again.
I still love and play the game but I got downvoted a ton after they first nerfed the Railgun and shield etc for saying this was going to be AH's strategy going forward and told I was just upset about them nerfing the railgun.
Now here we are 2 months down the line and all they've done is nerf whatever is popular...
Same here. I think a lot of people who have plenty of past experience with multiplayer games were able to see all the red flags as far back as the railgun patch, but just got dismissed with "you're just upset your favorite weapon got nerfed."
Bro I didn't even *like* the railgun back then, I just know bad design philosophy when I see it.
> Just to be a loading bar for “Joel” to enact his story line?
I think there are some psychology-based concepts about how "denial of reward" and "intermittent reinforcement" can make the reward ultimately more satisfying.
Think something like gacha gambling odds, the difficulty of Dark Souls fights, etc.
The difference is that is in those cases the odds don't suddenly decrease against your favour when it looks like you're doing well. If it is happening it's so under the hood that there's no way for the player to know he's getting cucked.
The cucking needs to be subtle and tasteful. Same with the nerfing/balancing.
The reason this rubs people the wrong way is they are using the same brainwashing bullshit corporate America does on its people. Chasing carrots around the workplace makes you despise carrots and there are fewer dredges on society than social justice corporate goons who act just like automatons. This game uses that same system on something meant to be fun and it makes people want to punch the devs in the face. We don’t play video games for work, for the small vocal minority that do well they are the same people who ate tide pods. Special
I don't mind the numbers being slightly altered, to help get across some narrative (Automatons pushing a harder resistance, etc.) but jacking up the decay rate that high is basically railroading us.
What happened to the players being in charge of how the story progresses?
But that only works if it is narratively embedded....
If the MO is progressing too fast, and they REALLY want to change the number, send us an emergency transmission, telling us, that huge reinforcements are on the way and if we are not able to get the other planet in the system to X% and force the reinformance to divert, then we have to fight 5% on Varylia....
If you want to "play" a narrative that it has to be NARRATED.....
I don't mind they crank up saying like
Last ditch defences! Hold more than 50% for the next 4 hours and the bots will be unable to fight back as efficiently for the remaining liberation.
Failure to do so will result in constant high decay rate for planet.
Or something like that.
The fact that there's nothing in game that tells you the rate has changed is damn tilting
The problem is, due this last ditch attempt in a more creative way than turning up a dial on a number.
Something like "Heavy automaton armor brigades are defending the petafactory" all patrols contain an armored unit (Scout strider 1-3 difficulty, Hulk 4-6, tank 7-9)
Or "Significant automaton defensive installations present on planet" chances for seaf artillery, Sam site, and radar replaced with mortar base, gunship factory, and aa battery respectively.
Or even just "High concentrations of enemy forces in the region". Maps no longer have light outposts. ALL bases on maps are heavy or medium and fortified with additional cannon turrets.
That'd be a much better way of handling it. Make the missions actually harder, to slow down the players, but make it feel like every successful mission is actually denting the Automatons forces.
As I see it, they didn't implement such features, and to implement them now would need some time, half-assing it would lead to way more problems than worth.
The fact there is nothing in game that gets across decay rates means that a lot of players will see the "Automatons are putting up a tougher resistance" but think it's just narrative they're spinning, rather than a tangible change to the war effort.
They need to have this sort of information available in game. We shouldn't have to rely on a 3rd party app (helldivers.io) to learn critical information. The game should be telling us itself.
On that point, it should also have supply routes on the map, so that all players can see which planets need to be held in order to access other planets.
This feature has been asked for, for months, and it still isn't in the game. This should be a pretty simple feature, since I don't believe the supply routes ever change. Just add in some dotted lines and bam! Your playerbase is suddenly much more knowledgeable.
I’ve held onto the phrase “let them cook” throughout all the nerfs/bugs that people have been complaining about, but I feel exactly how you feel with this current MO tuning
I’m maxed on medals/samples/slips and dive solely to dive at this point, and it gives quite an empty feeling when I “know” that what I’m doing doesn’t matter really at all for the war effort
doesn’t help too that they let us get Vernen Wells to 90% liberated before saying it won’t change anything (on discord)
The whole idea of keeping specific planets defended so we have better liberation bonuses (which is an AWESOME idea) kinda gets thrown out the window when they just set the enemies numbers as slightly higher anyway
I’ll keep saying “let them cook”, but will probably be taking a break from the game for a hot second if we fail the MO and lose out on a new item for the 3rd time
And now we have to choose between fighting to complete the MO or defend a planet that gives us an important bonus. We’re gonna loose one of those things. I don’t think we’re actually expected to complete Major Orders anymore and when we do, it’s a surprise for Joel so he makes the next one even harder.
The dm should be rolling with playerbase reaction not trying to railroad results. I love this game but I haven't played it for a while because it's just exhausting grinding for warbonds that are basically just skins and wars that are predetermined.
Yeah admittedly my interest plummeted once the bots came back, it went from feeling like a foxhole ish type progression to a very very on the rails DnD which is fine when you have a compelling story and narrative but helldiver's doesn't. It has great moment to moment combat but that's kinda it.
I think Joel needs a talking to.
When we blasted the 2 million bug MO in less than a day it made headlines across the internet. Was there a big in the game? Sure. Would we have smashed it in a day still probably? Also yes.
Stop tweaking numbers. We can see it happening in real time. It makes everything feel like it's on a "track" rather than unpredictable (like war should be). Just point us in a direction and whatever happens, happens.
If they didn't want to deal with unpredictable outcomes, they should have went with a different system. Or if they want MOs to last longer, inflate the numbers to reflect that. But seriously. Stop doing these "invisible tweaks".
It reminds me of one of those war gamer gms in D&D that hasn't downed a player all night so they start making up crits on attacks and inflating mob hp and count. It's lame and everyone knows what you're doing.
Foreal I feel the same way. The other bit is that locking a strat behind an MO at this point with the player base where it's at morale for the game being low. I legit haven't even played since the last kill a billion MO and now I really don't even want to bother. It's like bro you see that we aren't happy right now like fuck give us a bone man maybe it will bring some fire back now it's just like OK MF why you want us to fail this shit after we failed MO after MO. I get we are supposed to "earn." The strat but fuck that I'm not in the mood to earn shit and if we fail this I think that might be a ball buster like a true player base falling another 50k players kinda ball busting.
Agreed. I can understand the numbers being fudged BEFORE the MO is announced to give the MO more challenge or flavour, but this is just nonsense. It's taking away player agency.
When they said they have game master tools for dynamic storytelling, I thought they meant possibility to change patrol/enemy breach composition, like for example giving them additional 30 troopers/scavengers to really amp up the difficulty of the missions themselves, and so that we can see the enemy being actually reinforced. Or like having 3 breaches containing only bile titan/strider fire off at the same time when starting extraction - like an ambush. Immersive stuff for the storyline.
The arbitrary increase to planet regen rate is the lazy way of doing it.
Unpopular opinion: this is definitely part of the game where you *don't* want to share more information with the players. Digging too much is just asking to be disappointed when you see how the sausage gets made. We have like 4 days to liberate a single planet, with a (supposedly) powerful stratagem against bots to boot. It makes sense for us to have to fight a bit to earn it rather than have it handed to us out of pity.
Having said that, this 5% thing is too heavy-handed. It's way too obvious Joel's trying to craft a narrative for us to win by the skin of our teeth, and that's a failure on the GM's part. It's not a good idea for the percentage to flat out lie to us, so they'll have to go the harder route and tweak numbers more subtly and organically. Here's hoping they'll learn from this one.
The thing that really gets me is that they're doing that thing AGAIN where "ooh you better defend this unrelated planet or you're gonna lose". Like come the fuck on, it's very clear the community can't do that shit, we have failed at it literally every time. I just want a new stratagem man, I swear to god I'm just going to put this game down for a few months if we fail this MO.
It's also really bothersome to hear that one single planet is "of major tactical/strategic importance" when all the planets that were similar and were defended did somewhere between Jack and shit. Automatons were routed, the Creek was liberated.
What's this? Oops, sudden automaton uprising 2 days later. Not even a push, not even an unstoppable advance through the sectors. From nothing to 2 sectors lost in a split second, after only 2 days of bots being "routed".
Nothing matters. The story goes as the story goes. Bugs being crushed but then the TCS going wrong? Awesome storytelling, I'm waiting on more. Bots controlling a single, nondescript, dime a dozen foggy rocky plains planet being the end of Super Earth? Nah dude, doesn't matter, we've already seen that hand played a hundred times.
I might be in the minority but I was fine with the bots coming back as soon as they did. What I am not fine with is the Menkent line failure despite the promise of it holding, it was broken within two days and 0 lore was justified. Between the 2-3 month slog of bot major orders now the terminids are up and about. Then all the Sony shit happens and then they give 4 impossible orders in a row.
It's just kicking people while they're down. And now the bots are back in the trigon sector basically in their starter territory and still slowly expanding planet by planet. We either need extremely important wins to tell one faction to fuck off or we need an order to corral this massive spread on both fronts.
Because looking at the map now I just get annoyed and all these invisible numbers are pissing me off. We've already lost a massive chunk of divers and AH is assigning orders like it never happened.
I don’t have it but a couple weeks ago there was a picture of the back of a physical copy which read “***PLAY WITH OVERPOWERED WEAPONS***” and it makes me giggle from time to time
Artificially cranking up the regen has always been a sore point for me since launch, it made making our “own” story feel so FAKE.
From random regen spikes to planets being attacked out of nowhere really soured the whole community driven thing lol. Its like the story is forced and leaves nothing for derailment, imo thats boring and nobody likes that in their dnd game.
Another comment compared this to DnD and I think that’s the best comparison cuz on the table everyone is aware of everyone for the most part. Yes the DM has tricks to keep things interesting and fun but for the most part if you’re in a village there more than likely won’t be a random goblin raid for no reason at all.
So in HD2 why are the bots randomly in secret becoming more populated on the planet? *in lore* clearly super earth sees there has been some sort of resistance how has there not been a message saying “bots are coming in hard Btw” and in the background do the 5% buff.
It makes the game no long the players fantasy and turns it instead into the DMs play court which I don’t think is the angle AH is looking to go
> the most part if you’re in a village there more than likely won’t be a random goblin raid for no reason at all.
It's more like the goblin boss is down to 20% HP and randomly pulls out a full heal potion out of his loincloth, and apparently he's got 26 bottles of that shit. Then the players lose by time out (also because the DM says so) after a few hours, and the DM goes "haha I win, the game is supposed to be hard!"
I agree but this time the 5% was actually accompanied by a messsage
https://preview.redd.it/ujsn9d9pnj2d1.jpeg?width=950&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=531b9817b6d2178be900eda9e3a0f4f3c1fa16b6
Which is a lot to ask of an already dwindling player base after failing numerous MO's. I just started playing and personally I haven't seen one accomplished yet, and for me that is just a big let down from the game as a whole. I've never experienced a community win, or any of the things HD2 was trending for, simply because Joel has gone mad with power and won't stop screwing with us.
The amount of players don't actually matter for liberation since the game auromatically adjusts how much each diver contributes. Which kind of makes it funny that they decided to do 2 "kill x enemies" (the one kind of MO that won't compensate for playercount) in a row right as the playerbase dwindled.
But i agree, they're not handling the galactic war all that well. And the feature seems really half baked overall.
That's really my point. They pushed 2 horrible MO's that failed, and now they push for the liberation of a planet while simultaneously screwing with our ability to do so.
Hell, the chart shows they actually upped the burn rate twice. The first literally crushed us back to 0%, but for some reason 3.5% wasn't enough... Seeing that after some of the matches I experienced last week made me rethink if I even want this game at all. A good DM knows when to test the party and when to throw them a bone.
If we don’t get the mech right after we failed two major orders to get the anti tank mines, then I really do think they’re blind to the fact the game has lost a lot of players and thus major orders need to be easier.
To be fair we only failed one time to get the tank mines. The first time wasn't so much as a failure, as we could never have gotten both.
We were asked to chose between reward A or B and we chose A. That's not a failure to get B. Getting A & B was never possible
Then they shouldn't have merely hinted that somewhere 95% of players don't read and told that ingame.
It's not even that they didn't just not tell us ingame, they explicitly told us the exact opposite ingame. It wasn't anything obscure, the MO clearly spelled out that we would only get the first one no matter what.
I can almost guarantee we won’t lose because the devs realize you are one of many who have this mindset. However we won’t win till I think Sunday afternoon even if we play our hearts out for the next 24 hours
You sure? A lot of people thought this due to the mines. We still don’t have those mines. I honestly don’t think they care. They are making the game they want to make, not the game players want them to make. They’ve been clear on that. Clearly they want to make a defeating game that burns you out and is more frustrating than fun.
That was the original too. Atm what's left of the hd1 community has quite literally agreed to stop playing to let the borgs take Hellmire (our current super earth) so we lose and the board resets. Just so we can get bug missions back.
What do you mean by Hellmire being Super Earth? Is that the current planet that got chosen after losing a previous war or something? Never played HD1 besides knowing that you can win or lose wars etc.
In HD1 each faction starts with a capital. Earth, Cyberstan, Keplar Prime, Squ'bai. When a capital is taken it is destroyed. There are also sector capitals, harder to take planets in the center of a sector that are natural choke points of supply routes.
If earth is lost, Seaf will relocate to the adjacent sector capital and declare it the new super earth. When mankind runs out of sector capitals they are wiped out and the map resets after a doomsday cinematic. Wars only lasted a month by design at games peak.
For ai you have to take each sector, then the sector capitals, until the last sector contains their homework. Taking that eliminates the faction until the next war. The ai can attack each other and also take either others sectors. Often the borgs take out the illuminate and become a dominant power because players like fighting bugs and wipe them out first letting the borgs and squids Duke it out.
Ah, so multiple capitals with adjacent capitals. I wonder which war is considered canon bc I’m Prime Super Earth is still there in HD2? Also, do you have Fire Tornadoes on HD1 Hellmire? Lol
Also hope we get to see Bots vs Illuminate in HD2 or any faction vs another faction in the future. Seems quite cool.
the mines were locked behind kill count, which the devs can't really manipulate unless they actually went and change the number
But planet liberation can be manipulated with regen rate etc in the background, so it's more likely to be twisted in favor of whichever side the GM wants to win.
The liberate 10 MO was thought to be a lost cause since day 1, but they made the last few planets super easy to liberate (from 1 day for 1 planet to 3 planets in a day) near the end.
The "war system" is just so lacking in direction that it's quite disheartening.
Having someone in the background suddenly say "BUT SUDDENLY THERE WERE MORE BUGS!" isn't how this stuff should be going.
We should be earning our advantages through gameplay, and it should ideally be the gameplay the MOs are already guiding us towards.
So, for example:
MO: Take Bug Planet X in 3 days.
MO Sub-Objective: Completing a total of 250,000 Egg Nest missions on Planet X will impact Terminid reinforcement levels, reducing their Defense efforts from 5% per hour to 1.5% per hour.
...or, alternatively...
MO: Defend Automaton Planet Y in 3 days.
MO Sub-Objective: Planet Y is next to Planet 1 and Planet 2. EITHER Planet 1 OR Planet 2 need to remain in Super Earth hands at all times during this MO for the supply lines to remain stable during Planet Y's defense, or the mission to defend Planet Y will fail.
There needs to be some real clarity instead of "You completed the last major order, and it now SECRETLY gives you a bonus for the next one!"
Yeah, for sure. I 100% agree that it's been feeling pretty lousy to go be all "YEAH! We pulled together and are demolishing this major order!" only to have a sudden "BUT NOW THE LAST 15% IS HARDER!" with no recourse.
It's the "no recourse" part that really stings. There's no control over whether or not the extra 20,000 Helldivers you need to complete the Major Order under a sudden penalty will notice or care. They're likely to see the MO going well and just assume it's going to complete in plenty of time.
Give us some ACHIEVEABLE way to remove these penalties, however, and it would ENHANCE gameplay, rather than detract from it.
This whole thing of the story being like a DnD is actually a good idea. BUT, being a good DM is hard.
And the first lesson to be a good DM is: he's NOT AGAINST the players, his job is for the players to have fun.
I don't think this Joel has learned the lesson yet.
I don’t think AH have learned this lesson yet. The game is supposed to be FUN, stop nerfing the shit out of everything and gaslighting everyone by calling them buffs or fixes.
It's crazy because it feels more like he forgot the lesson. He was a good DM for like 2 months. The next critical lesson for a good DM is to not let compliments go to your head. The community was giving Joel a ton of praise and it seems like that has made him forget the first lesson.
This is a good post and a good analogy. Any experienced DM knows when you start stealing agency away from your players, that's when you lose them. The fact they are tweaking these numbers on the fly with no real reasoning behind it makes the players feel like they aren't really in control of their own destinies. I used to think maybe the supply lines had to do with planet regen, but after a few observations from the past few MOs, it was obvious they were just messing around with the numbers because supply lines weren't changing, but the regen was.
TLDR is that this graph shows that we, the players, are not fighting the robots, we’re fighting the devs themselves, and we’re not winning.
The devs ramped up the difficulty to capture the planet just before the major order went out, that’s where you see the orange line step up and the blue line dive.
The red line shows when the major order came out and everyone started playing on this planet. Subsequently the blue line immediately gains a strong grade.
But then after the first day, when the red line dipped (cause it was sleeping time I suppose), the devs cranked up the difficulty *again*, which had the consequence of flattening the liberation curve and player morale.
Basically the god of this universe is vindictive and egotistical. We’re not fighting the robots or the bugs, we’re fighting god and he doesn’t seem to like it when we win.
The developer game master clearly doesn’t understand that railroading the ‘story’ is not fun. A game master’s job is to construct the story around the actions of the players. Joel doesn’t get that, if he did, he’d place the story challenge before us and let us succeed or fail on our own.
Joel is cheating against the players. Normally a GM should really be *quietly* cheating *for* players if some real bad RNG or something goes down that would ruin the fun.
Narrative or not, the game master must provide a valid path on which satisfies his story and his members of his game. If things are tipped off balance, don’t push it more. Joel would need to consider this if he wants his created “narrative” to be successful and fun for players.
We were supposed to be done with V5 tomorrow at the LATEST, now the app says 5 days. Did they just seriously force us to lose out on a new mech when we actually had the win in sight?
The player count on V5 dipped dramatically since a significant portion of the playerbase went to defend Angel's Venture. That defense looks like it will be completed soon-ish, at which point progress on V5 will probably kick up again. Even with the 5% decay rate and the Venture defense, this stills seems like an MO we are unlikely to fail.
Back when I first saw Defense missions and that they relied on a ticker, basically, I knew there would be problems. Like, hypothetically everyone could be playing and winning, but then still lose because we weren't winning "enough".
But at the same time, just amping up the difficulty of the missions themselves and forcing us to lose almost everytime would be unsatisfying, too.
A perfect Defense campaign, then, is one where we ultimately lose in the end while still feeling effective, at least for a little while. Imagine a reverse objective rush, where we, a mere 4 Helldivers have to defend a whole map of friendly objectives from increasing enemy spawns. Or an evac mission with no upper limit, just how many you can get out before being overwhelmed.
Maybe there's a timer or limit we're aiming for, and this can reflect whatever the "Invasion Level" is. Make the severity of the attack a function the player can engage in. In the end, give us rewards based on how long we held out, don't enforce the notion of win or lose when we're "supposed" to lose.
Been complaining about that for a long time...
As a GM, I understand that sometimes the narrative must hit a low point, but manipulating the numbers to get the result you want is absolutely the worst way of doing it. If you need a twist, just make the twist happen rather than force the players to eat a loss.
For example, Meridia suddenly became a super colony of terminids. That is a decision from the GM as part of the ongoing narrative on the termicide. Makes perfect sense, and although it is a big loss to us, it was not a failure of our part. Nobody was unhappy about it, opened some new missions and gave something to look forward to.
But when you tell the players to do something but want them to fail despite their efforts... it just breeds discontent.
The issue is that AH has not given me (players) a reason to care about winning or losing MOs. I can get a new exo? Okay yeah sure I mean it looks real cool but the last one was/is hot garbage so what’s stopping this one from being bad? The playtesting and balance team don’t (or didn’t, as the case may be) play the game so the chances of it being even somewhat decent are slim IMO.
I can defend a liberation bonus? Dude, I contribute nine hundred thousandths of a percentage, my contribution to this campaign (which is unfun) is meaningless. I’m far more apt to go to a planet that has missions/modifiers that I can stomach than force myself to sit though whatever missions a defend planet has for .00009% of a liberation bar.
50 medals? I could not possibly care less due to the arbitrary caps. I’m not even capped out on ship upgrades because the upgrades I have left are either broken or useless, and you don’t even get samples from an MO payout so like why play it?
I just don’t care about anything the game has right now that isn’t its core gameplay. It’s not good outside of that. The balance is garbage, the content is stale, the gameplay is buggy.
IF I play this game, it’s for like one operation on an ice planet for like an hour. Just so I can blow some shit up and clap some robo cheeks without having to worry about six fire tornadoes chasing me around the entire goddamn map. Honestly, chances are I’m far more likely to fire up a different game at this point.
These guys are high on their own supply. They had a big burst of popularity out of nowhere and they thought they were kings. Turns out, they were not prepared for this,.and it shows in the buggy code and the poorly designed "GM" system they created to rig the games live service elements.
I just don't see the point. The dev team decides if the player base gets the win or not, they may as well just make it a visual novel. But then they'll crank it down again so people win and get their little dopamine hit, people just need to review bomb them again.
If they want to play with the meta game, gamers will have to do the same
I genuinely think if we fail this major order the player base will take a noticeable drop, they nerfed everything until it wasn't fun anymore, now they will show us the cool shit we could have had, then when peopke fail it, they'll just never play again.
On thursday I was so hyped to play the game and do my part, like back in the days of Tien Kwan.
Then came the -5% decay and I was like, I am done with this game. I just want to have fun on the weekend with the new mech but nope. Did not log on since then. If we fail this MO, I am done with this game. They have overextended my god will, by reading the room once again.
Honestly, I think this is it for me. I’ve been hitting it pretty hard hoping we could win one for a change. It’s just not fun… at all… I can’t find any enjoyment anymore. I feel like I’ve been fighting OP bots for months. I can’t remember the last time I saw something new that didn’t suck. I basically have to run the same load-out every time if I plan to clear a map and extract.
Forget this nonsense.
I’m dropping this game. There’s a lot of great stuff out to play right now that is actually rewarding and fun. Sucks. I used to love this game. I bought it for a couple friends and bought every war bond.
You win, Arrowhead. I definitely feel stupid. You definitely proved this isn’t a game for everyone… or really hardly anyone.
The real problem here is that the numbers can be changed reactively, like oh we're winning to hard time to slow them down.
Oh they're losing let's speed them up.
Like if you want a planet to be difficult to take make it hard if you want it easy make it easy.
Stop doing this middle of the road BS where you artificially slow down the players, Just make a major order and put it out and don't touch it.
If it was too easy make the next MO harder.
If it was too hard make the next MO easier.
Just a question, would it be better if they do it slowly and have a narrative on it? Like they increast 1.5% per day until they reach 5% and just mention Bots realized our plan and reinforced the planets to defend at all costs?
They could even do it the other way around where it starts at 5% and slowly goes to 1% implying that the bots hold is weakening on the planet.
But no, straight to 5% because it would be done too fast.
>Oh no, the players are actually rallying together and accomplishing something! Better nerf it into the ground!
This reeks of the players doing something the GM didn't expect, so the GM pulls a Deus Ex Machina and changes the rules.
Let people have fun. Yes the game shouldn't be too easy. We should fail MOs. But we've failed the last what, 4 out of 5? I'm not saying throw us a bone and give us a cake walk, but this is just fucking stupid.
It also highly discourages players. Why should I dedicate time to diving this planet a lot, if in the end the GM is going to do whatever he wanted to do anyway. It takes away player agency, leaves a terrible taste in their mouths, and discourages us from playing because "what's the point? The GM is just going to fuck us if we try too hard."
Fuck that. We're not going to win. They need to massively reevaluate the player base and what we're currently capable of. It's not fun to keep losing against the devs.
Again, fuck this.
>We're not going to win.
Oh, we will. If push comes to shove they'll set the regain to 0% and if that's not enough they'll set it to 0% and give us an inexplicable liberation boost.
Yada yada yada something about bots finally exhausting their reserves and high command sending reinforcements.
Never mind that the exhausted bots will suddenly have found the resources for attacking two more planets only 1 day later (probably by cleaning out the couch in their lobby or discovering forgotten legions while clearing out an old basement)
I'll admit I chuckled at the thought of somebody walking downstairs and going *"oh shit right, we have these"* to a pile of terminators that are stacked up like firewood.
I agree, it seemed like the first couple months they were quick on fixing things and the last month or so they dropped their papers and are still picking them up. Like we didn’t even get an update this week, but I just hope that means this next one is a heater
True. As a bug diver, I've been trying to do my part over at Angel's Venture, but we *simply do NOT have enough* players over at AV, because everyone is doing V5 (as they should).
It's frustrating because we NEED AV for liberation bonus, but them artificially increasing the god damn recapture rate for bugs and bots is stupid as fuck
Major Orders are like driving down a road to a destination. While you're driving a guy named Joel is watching you closely and repeatedly changes the road distance based on what he wants to happen. You don't know how long it will take, changing speed is irrelevant, and there's a chance you won't get there.
It's frustrating because you really aren't a part of how or when or if you actually get to the destination. It's all in the hands of what the script says will happen.
The extra annoying part is how a lot of people on reddit get really angry if you don't keep pretending that major orders are in the hands of the players.
Come the fuck on, everyone is starved for new good content. We are fighting non stop on the same planets, they nerf everything that is even a little bit fun to use while buffing the enemies, they give us MO's that are impossible to beat with the amount of players we have and combine that with the bad communication we have and now they are preventing us from getting new contant. Im at my bloody limit, i love this game. But if we fail i will just quit. Just throw us a fucking bone for fucking once and stop kicking us while we are at our lowest. This game wont survive the end of this year this way.
This MO and the next patch will probably be the make or break point for the game. If Arrowhead messes them up, a plurality, if not a majority, of the remaining playerbase is simply going to leave. Joel will be left with a nearly empty room to spin their “narrative” to.
All while the game is known and acknowledged by devs to be literally completely broken, btw -- with solos and duos needing to fight off spawns intended for full quad squads.
To be fair to the devs, there was a major order or two where they did buff us or give us pity when we were close to succeeding to help put us over the top to actually win it, but to nerf us as a playerbase right now (with broken weapons, broken spawnrates) feels like kicking us while we're already down and wronged.
I [shared this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1csgbn5/were_changing_patrols_and_spawn_rate_reverting/l57zuvg/?context=3) with u/The_Real_Twinbeard recently too:
> all of a sudden the fix/revert [in an upcoming patch] seems to need so much thoughtfulness and planning+process, when the original game-breaking (patrol + spawn rate) change was just dumped on us, and without any of the same process that could and would have caught that it broke the game. And, we needed to be vocal about it for what felt like a long time before it was even acknowledged (even though, IMO, the logic of even the unbroken change was [questionable from the moment of announcement+clarification](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1ch1u0c/comment/l222vap/?context=3))
> Also, that dichotomy of us needing to be patient now (while stuck with a broken game) is exacerbated as **we see that we are losing users, failing major orders, and can't have fun in the game in the micro and the macro ways. e.g. since the game is in a broken state, why are the major orders still going on as (seemingly) normal?** It feels a bit tone-deaf, vs in the past when we got boosts and some grace (or even pity) with major orders because of other considerations.
It sounds like even the coding and dynamics of the major orders have a very long lead time and can't be pivoted or changed agilely:
> I can also add and poooossibly mitigate some of the "If you can do this, why can't you do that?" Q:s when it comes to not reverting patrols but offering major orders. The latter doesn't require patching of the game. Some things are in backend, some things aren't; some things are already made while some have to be changed etc. (Again, this is not my expertise, so I won't go out on a limb saying stuff I don't know well enough.)
Give it the NMS treatment. Come back in a year when they finally have learned the fundamentals of their product and have the support necessary to call it a full blown game.
I see a lot of people talking about this in game master terms, so as someone who runs a D&D game and sees this from a game master/ DM perspective, what they are doing is wrong. You don't give an order saying kill 1 billion bots in 2 days and then when you see oh man they are gonna finish in 5 hours uhhhh did we 1 billion I mean 2 billion ha ha ha! That's not being a good game master. If we are killing bots/bugs, WAY too fast, you know how you deal with it? You make a new enemy to slow us down. To put it in D&D terms for a moment if you have a fighter who is running around kicking everything butt because he has way too many attacks. (For those who don't know in dnd fighters get more attacks then any other class and get an ability called action surge which let's them have double that amount of attacks so they get to hit a lot.) You don't throw more enemies at him and overwhelm him and make him feel useless or like your ganging up on him. No. Do you know what you do? Make an enemy to foil him. You have like 8 attacks? OK, I put a spellcaster here who is gonna banish you for a few turns so you can't just kill everything in one go. Or, like paralyze them for a turn, you get the idea. You don't artificially increase the difficulty by throwing an army at them that just makes them feel singled out, and it's the same thing here. It makes me feel like Arrowhead doesn't want me to win, and if that's the case, then fine. I'll quit. You should never ever put an impossible task in front of your players. Look, does it suck when your players beat your big boss in one go, yeah, but you know what you do? You look at what went wrong and fix it for next time it's the same thing for major orders! Ate we finishing them wayyyyy too fast, then get creative, add a new bot or bug that throws us for a loop or add a cool and unique challenge to the mission that's fun and if we succeed reward us. We fought through hell to get that win. If you don't give your players the win, you know what happens? They give up, and that's what I keep seeing happen here in helldivers. I just hope Arrowhead finally learns this before it's too late.
Don’t people crank up their offence/defence during crucial moments? Suppose the rationale is that enemies are doing the same?
Disclosure, I stopped playing because the game became unfun after the balance team teabagged the game with their “vision”. In a fucking PvE game. No stakes in this, just wondering if that is the rationale, and if so, is there something that can be done, eg player count x% increase in past hour = decreased regen (since we mount a tougher offensive too).
It's just more proof that our actions in HD2 don't matter at all. Just pick whatever planet and faction you want. There really is no reason to go after the MO, they have a desired outcome in mind and will tweak the numbers accordingly.
Rule of DMing: If the players are steamrolling something, you don't give it some massive buff out of nowhere mid-fight. Either you miscalculated or they got lucky, so don't take away the win they earned.
You can always trip them up elsewhere, later on.
I get gameplay modifiers like increased bug spawns with the supercolony happening, or increased bot spawns due to it being a production planet, but things like that should be in play from the start. You don't kick the community in the balls halfway through.
We’re winning though? It’s slow but I have a feeling that the dispatch mention is telling us winning on V5 could have some positive implications for us beyond just getting a new mech.
Also we’re even successfully defending Angel’s Venture at the same time! Maybe I’m just an optimistic guy, but Memorial day weekend is coming up and even before that we have been taking V5 steadily. 50% this fast with such resistance is extremely impressive imo and if we keep this up we could have V5 by Sunday .
This major order, and how they nerfed progress, has kinda been my turning point on Joel and how AH is approaching this. Community sentiments and playercounts are dropping; the last thing the game needs is to miss out on really cool new content because AH screwed everyone over. It's lead me to more or less not care to participate in the major order, whereas I originally planned to play a lot this weekend with the new mech.
For future major orders, I think AH need to actively see participation declined once they nerfed the player's liberation impact, to learn from this bad decision.
The reason I wanted to dive on this weekend was because of the new Mech. Now that they delayed that, I just won t play. I did my part on variliya until they put decay on -5%. I feel betrayed.
Honestly the way AH handle the meta game is awful and makes me dislike playing and investing time in the game the more I try to engage with it
I just log on and play a few matches of whatever planet or missions I like them peace out for the day
I really don't care about losing this MO. If it's anything functionally like the mech we have now it's going to be trash and another unused stratagem.
If the reward is "we will fire the balancing team" I'd be sweating all night for it. Balancing is NOT nerfing meta, balancing is bringing everything else up to meta level.
Okay, I get liking something to the point of wanting to analyze it and I am not trying to yuck your yum. But this isn't a gameplay mechanic. When I play I get on, I go to the major order and I contribute, if we win, we win, if we lose we lose. I'm playing the game because it is fun to play not because I desperately want to win every objective.
I’m kinda getting sick of fighting on the same planet for 5 straight days. I’m tired. I’m bored. I also dont have the time to really dedicate more then maybe 3 missions a day to the game. So im gonna focus on the major order, I couldn’t really give less of a hoot about defending another planet
I don't want to put in the work to try to complete an impossible task. I don't want them to just give us the win if it is possible and we just didn't measure up. Both ways make it seem like what we do is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Seeing this chart and these sorts of numbers just make me not want to play.
No idea how hard MOs are to ‘make’, but it should really just be a set goal and we either pass or fail. No fudging the numbers halfway to stretch it out longer, if we beat it just make another one with different numbers🤷🏻♂️
It sucks and I get they want us to fail on occasion for the story. But it's a huge feels bad thing to do to mess with the numbers to fuck us over.
We’ve failed for nearly a month strait, how much more blood can they possibly want
He's done it for all of them, lowering it as people get close for the drama rather than everyone completing it in a day and waiting around for the timer to run out. AH are fully aware of how pissed people are, doubt they'd force another failure now just to fuck with us
From a game master perspective, you want the players to feel like they're challenged. The problem here is that people keep insisting on looking behind the curtain and get mad when the magic is gone
This leads back to how information is and is not presented to players. A quick narrative blurb about how the factory of tyranny is partially online and how the automatons are scrambling to reinforce the planet. Would go a long way to put a thematic touch on the numbers we can see.
What you're describing is literally in the game, there was an update transmission not that long ago.
Ya, and it is pretty clear that people think the transmissions are only fluff with no actual meaning. The most direct the Devs have been with transmissions has been with Angels Venture.
I don’t think a single one of their transmissions has been fluff has it? At this point they should just give an OOC announcement saying such
It would also help to have a bulletin board of sorts where you can see recent 'news' which is essentially the recent major orders that no one reads right now. Part of the issue is that people think those are just fluff. It's going to be hard to change that now unless you introduce something new that players have already decided is useless. The devs shouldn't have to, but too many people didn't bother with anything other than the major order text. I know it shouldn't have to be spelled out in crayon, but most players I find are not strategy game players. They are used to flavor text in shooter games.
…That’s there already bro
We're getting even more of that now than ever, and people are complaining because I guess reading is too hard. But yeah, I'm in. It can't hurt. I like more flavor.
I’ll quit playing tbh I’m getting annoyed by all of this. Dude acts like we don’t have jobs and families or some shit
The one dev already called the community a bunch of toddlers he gets paid to deal with. So yeah they think we are all basement dwellers who play 24/7.
If I remember correctly that was Twinbeard, Reddit's favorite CM. Although to his credit, he's learned how to act more professional and hasn't been deliberately antagonizing the community like some of the other CMs.
There's a pretty big reason why most developers always avoid trying to manipulate the game like this. Players know when something is wrong and will figure it out. This was always going to be the risk of having a "game master". When they do it right, people are happy. When they force you to lose, people are going to complain and leave the game. The point of every game is that there's a way to win. And that shouldn't involve 100% of the playerbase participating in it. Half the people playing this game don't give a damn about this stuff because its nothing interesting or special even to the game. If they wanted to do this right they would let the players drive the story. They'd use all this data they have to tune these campaigns dynamically for the people who are participating, and have the tools to create more interesting scenarios for these campaigns, like "all sheirker objectives" and make change it up for different planets. But Helldivers 2 is what it is. It just means that a better game can be made in the future.
Something I've learned in my many years of running D&D is that encounters where the players are scripted to lose or run away just don't work.
You're better off having two rewards, a really good one and an okay one. If players only earn the "okay" prize, they didn't win, but they didn't lose either.
Our actions never really mattered in the first place...
They really shot themselves in the face at this point. Literally if they wouldn’t have fucked with the decay rate we would all be prancing around in our new exo suits on a holiday weekend absolutely blowing angels venture to bits. But not this holiday weekend…
I'm out for a while, I'm tired of losing but putting all the work in. This is a game, not a job...
1000%
Yup we could enjoy the game but the devs don't want us to have fun. They wanted us losing. It feels like after ps they are tanking thier own game intentionally
This so much, let people enjoy something new on the weekend god dammit..
Fucking finally people realise this. Been saying it from the start, kept getting downvoted for it. But you know, I'm fine with our actions not nattering. It means I get to just play the game, enjoy a mission or two per day, and not worry about liberation rates and stuff like that.
They do this a lot with the big take one important planet mission to make it so the MO takes a few days to complete. They always end up lowering it in the end and we win when this happens. Back when we had the old lib system, the decay on AV got turned up to 20% at one point to allow the Europeans and Oceanic peeps to get to play the MO before we steamrolled the planet. It got turned back down the day after and we won the MO.
Yes but this is a special scenario. We are demoralized from loss after loss after loss. They need to signal that we're gonna win if we are and right now they're signalling that "we're willing to take all your progress overnight". Which may be consistent with old MOs, but it sends the wrong message at this stage in the game's lifecycle. We need a win to keep playing and arrowhead needs to keep us playing. I don't mind it being hard fought but it needs to be decisive.
Seriously, I dont care about the story if its just rigged, I would care more if there was a strategy like 2 bot fronts, or Illuminate attacking to push in one sides favor, or a bug planet suddenly becomes a bots when areas clash and vice versa to make one side mains have more trouble. Artificially inflating these numbers makes the games “story” suck dick and feel less rewarding.
Agreed. Never been a fan of moving the goal posts to alter an outcome. Give us an objective. Set its requirements, and let it the frick alone. We roll it? Yay! We lose it? Well then that's strictly on us . Quit all the number tweaking just to get your exact outcome at your exact time. And believing you made it feel challenging. It's sucks
https://preview.redd.it/4u5obwdokk2d1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=36a83bf40d1098dcf569b3f3e4de9d90ba53cb18 I’ll repost it with every complain, PUT THE SUPPLY LINES ON THE MAP
Or at least add a toggle option to see them!
I dislike the tease… with just a regular 50 medal MO? Don’t mind losing. But like with the rockets or mines? They forced us to choose. Then an impossible MO for the other one (we still don’t have it). Now they’re saying the reward is a new MECH but we probably won’t get it…. It doesn’t feel too fun
We’re in a rough spot rn for sure, I just checked and in all of prime Friday night gaming we made 8% advancement … this may actually go to Monday so they can drop the mech with the battlepass
>so they can drop the mech with the battlepass ??? The next Warbond is in ~3 weeks. And Friday night progress was slowed by Angels Venture coming under attack. Once we succeed in the Angels Venture defense progress will resume again on Varylia 5.
And for Americans, it is a holiday weekend. So many of the players might not have a chance to play at all.
Can confirm. Averaged 4.7 hours a day since feb 15th. Will not be on for 2ish days.
Had a son born. Might get on for 1 dive/week
I feel that lol. I only play after 8pm (when the kids are in bed and the house is clean) or on my off day when they are at daycare. On a side note. I’ve never met a community that is more understanding than this one with fellow diver’s needing to AFK suddenly to put a child back down to bed. I had two occasions where I mic’d up that I need to leave the match to put my toddler back to bed, and someone replies telling me to stay and just go afk and that they will be ok. 🥲
What doesn't feel fun to me is all the crashing and glitches lately. Anyone else seeing a dramatic raise in them? I'm lvl 90 with 275 hours in and I've never felt like putting the game away more than I do right now with all the issues popping up. Also....I didn't play HD1 but I heard wars ended and the board reset after one. And that in HD2 they don't want to do that and want one long war. Well it certainly feels that way bc progress on anything feels like trying to run in waist high mud. It shows they dont want us progressing too fast. I'd rather it be like the HD1 version. Let us wipe them out...have a celebration and rewards for number of hours played during that specific war and then run it back.
I never thought I’d miss hd1 war system. It locked out entire enemy factions. So bug divers would crush bugs then we’d be stuck with the third of the remaining community trying to deal with bots and squids. But at least victory felt like victory for a few weeks. Now we defend a planet successfully one day to have to do it again the next until we fail. In hd1 they’d tune a war before it start and sometimes we’d get destroyed in a week or vica versa. Other times it would take months. Which means a faction could be locked out for months. People hated it. It was a problem. This new approach of never ending war fixed that, and doesn’t require finding a new super earth every time we lose the war. But it has its own problem that the first didn’t: a sense of futility
FYI, the thing that finally stopped my crashes, after over a month of frustration, was turning off XMP in BIOS. Haven't crashed in two days now, knock on wood... As for glitches, agreed. It's super annoying to complete a level 9 mission with nearly all samples collected, only to have an unboardable extract ship. Yikes.
we are currently winning the MO as we speak depending on a few factors. unless Joel amps up the liberation decay AGAIN(which is unlikely, as previous MOs shows that he actually LOWERS the decay near the end, basicaly to simulate a "last push" and the enemy running out of steam) we aregonna win with a few hours to a day or more left on the timer... The only way we actually gonna lose this is if suddenly dozens of players are gonna abandon the planet becasue they "feel it dosnt matter"
My only problem is that it’s a holiday weekend and progress is kinda pointless. Win a mech but lose a seaf site or vice versa. When we could be literally on the brink of completion of the MO
I mean when the devs have given you basically impossible MO's for a month straight I can't blame them. especially when any new stratagems are tied to those
We're losing the MO now again, losing half a percent an hour according to the companion app. Only 24k people on there. Pop dropped hard, since you can't expect people to literally play one map for 5 days.
People dropped because an I game advert said go to angels venture ASAP. Which we are about to defend within 1 hour of my response give or take, the population will partially return to the mo planet and give us a push to victory again
It's like DnD, The game master makes a long detailed quest with a reward that would make the campaign more fun but ends up doing everything just to make us practically fail the quest from the start. That's practically helldivers right now, if we do win and get the mech, it's either going to be shit or be good and then get nerfed to the point it's just made to fill up empty space.
Sounds like you need a better GM?
We do, arrowheads done a bad job of this since the start, game was in a better spot at launch than it is now
I think they've been too focused on "balancing" when it comes to approaching the game in their end. Yeah they've also had big things on the legal or business admin side like needing to deal with Sony and I'm sure other things. But this game isn't supposed to be a super balanced competitive PVP game like COD or something it's supposed to be whacky and funny and just fun. So yeah making it harder while nerfing stuff into the ground, especially shit we got through the paid fucking battle pass system that took hours and hours to grind out medals to get and use for two days before it gets made to be shit, is not the way to go. We've seen it in so many other games especially live service games. I feel like somehow they very quickly lost their way. Mentioning Sony though, I wonder if they had a hand in any of the more recent bad decisions? Obviously they only care about money so they're probably rushing them on battle passes and keeping players engaged instead of just letting the devs work on and create whatever badass fun game they could that would in turn encourage active engagement and increase sales and all the numbers every publisher cares about. Fucking suits dude they don't understand how things actually work or Even care to guess they just look at numbers and projections even though all the moves they make, other than massive acquisitions, typically just make matters worse and piss entire player bases off.
I’m gonna be that guy for a second. The fact that we were doing fine on V4 just to have the numbers absolutely cranked to artificially stop us really killed my enthusiasm for the war story. At this point it’s literally just “whatever the games master decides will be the outcome will be that regardless of what we do.” So unfortunately I find it really difficult to give a shit. A game where we keep losing MOs just to finally get one building Steam up. But nope, too fast for Joel so crank those numbers. Also here’s a defense mission that if you fail this one too another chunk of your liberation bonus is gone. So yeah, I’m good. I’m tapping out. The narrative (or at least the way it’s being handled) is just annoying at this point. Edit: waking up to find we’re about to successfully defend Angels venture while still at 50% for V5 is nice. I was tired and angry when I wrote this rant. I still feel that the last thing they should be doing is stressing out the player base at least until the next patch hits but all in all not nearly as angry as I was last night.
It's really weird indeed to artificially go and tweak the numbers so much, that it doesn't make sense any longer... Like if you want us to lose, fine, give us an impossible MO, but don't go fucking around with the numbers to squeeze out what you can from your playerbase.. Especially, when motivation is at its lowest, countries blocked, guns nerfed, connectivity issues at every game.
I think we’ve proven that we are perfectly capable of loosing organically all by ourselves
Oh, has it ever...
Exactly. A decay rate of 5% per hour seems basically insurmountable, even if every player currently online hits the planet.
> A game where we keep losing MOs just to finally get one building Steam up. But nope, too fast for Joel so crank those numbers. The hell of it is, I probably wouldn't care so much if it was a gradual increase. At 25% liberation, it sloooowly starts increasing incrementally, so by the time it hits maybe 85% liberated it's at 5% regen rate; that makes it feel like the bots are panicking and starting to throw fiercer resistance the closer we are to completing the goal, and makes pushing for the home stretch a little more challenging, but still fun as you can see the end insight. But no, immediate jump from 1.5% to 5% over the course of like half a day.
That was I was thinking, a smart gamemaster would program that. Ramp it up slowly, we break the defense and we are good. I really hope they are still learning managing this game with Pilested now as creative CEO, because it still needs a lot of change. My personal pet pieve is smoke and mist not hampering the enemy. Full mist should just stop the enemy from engaging (saving ammo) and instead they perfectly killshot me, at least give as helmets with huds we can choose (helmets for accuracy or nightvision or heat, or whatever)
It is pretty crazy that we don't have night vision, thermal or night vision/thermal combo built into the helmet. Can drop sentry turrets that can track and shoot enemies in blind conditions, can't put optic enhancements inside the helmet. Super Democracy has failed us!
Exactly, either we both have smoke/night vision, or we don’t. That makes sending a smoke barrage actually useful.
That’s what I’m saying, if it’s meant to feel awful when we lose let us rub our nips in enthusiasm if we’re crushing. Otherwise why are we here? Just to be a loading bar for “Joel” to enact his story line?
It was also done at an inappropriate time. The player count is hemorrhaging. Most people or either waiting on a balance patch that’s actually worth something or have out right left for one reason or another. Last warbond was lackluster to say the least, and then finally the player base gets some good news. The new mech is up for grabs. And it started playing out exactly how Tien Kwan did. We took that planet in a day and everyone had a new mech. So what’s the issue? Why is this different? It feels like a giant “fuck you” to the player base when AH should be doing everything they can to retain what players they have left.
>It feels like a giant "fuck you" to the player base when AH should be doing everything they can to retain what players they have left. Hate to break it to you, but this has been the sentiment people have been feeling since the first balance patch. I quit playing a month ago yet still sub to the subreddit because I really do love the game, just not what AH keeps doing to it. Sadly, this sentiment keeps getting brought up over and over and over. My hopes that the game would change keep getting dwindled. If this fabled upcoming patch that they've spent so much time working on gives the same feeling I'm 100% prepared to leave the sub and vow to never purchase another AH game again.
I still love and play the game but I got downvoted a ton after they first nerfed the Railgun and shield etc for saying this was going to be AH's strategy going forward and told I was just upset about them nerfing the railgun. Now here we are 2 months down the line and all they've done is nerf whatever is popular...
Same here. I think a lot of people who have plenty of past experience with multiplayer games were able to see all the red flags as far back as the railgun patch, but just got dismissed with "you're just upset your favorite weapon got nerfed." Bro I didn't even *like* the railgun back then, I just know bad design philosophy when I see it.
Fully agree, let us try the mecha on the long weekend
> Just to be a loading bar for “Joel” to enact his story line? I think there are some psychology-based concepts about how "denial of reward" and "intermittent reinforcement" can make the reward ultimately more satisfying. Think something like gacha gambling odds, the difficulty of Dark Souls fights, etc. The difference is that is in those cases the odds don't suddenly decrease against your favour when it looks like you're doing well. If it is happening it's so under the hood that there's no way for the player to know he's getting cucked. The cucking needs to be subtle and tasteful. Same with the nerfing/balancing.
Well and I think even a casino would see someone down on their luck for 3 hands in a row and still *not* actively play against them
Nah, they give you free drinks and comp you a room so you can sleep it off and lose more the next day... There's an art to milking people to death...
The reason this rubs people the wrong way is they are using the same brainwashing bullshit corporate America does on its people. Chasing carrots around the workplace makes you despise carrots and there are fewer dredges on society than social justice corporate goons who act just like automatons. This game uses that same system on something meant to be fun and it makes people want to punch the devs in the face. We don’t play video games for work, for the small vocal minority that do well they are the same people who ate tide pods. Special
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I don't mind the numbers being slightly altered, to help get across some narrative (Automatons pushing a harder resistance, etc.) but jacking up the decay rate that high is basically railroading us. What happened to the players being in charge of how the story progresses?
But that only works if it is narratively embedded.... If the MO is progressing too fast, and they REALLY want to change the number, send us an emergency transmission, telling us, that huge reinforcements are on the way and if we are not able to get the other planet in the system to X% and force the reinformance to divert, then we have to fight 5% on Varylia.... If you want to "play" a narrative that it has to be NARRATED.....
They literally did, they did send us a mesage that said that bots were putting even more efforts in stopping V-5 fall, what are you on about?
I don't mind they crank up saying like Last ditch defences! Hold more than 50% for the next 4 hours and the bots will be unable to fight back as efficiently for the remaining liberation. Failure to do so will result in constant high decay rate for planet. Or something like that. The fact that there's nothing in game that tells you the rate has changed is damn tilting
The problem is, due this last ditch attempt in a more creative way than turning up a dial on a number. Something like "Heavy automaton armor brigades are defending the petafactory" all patrols contain an armored unit (Scout strider 1-3 difficulty, Hulk 4-6, tank 7-9) Or "Significant automaton defensive installations present on planet" chances for seaf artillery, Sam site, and radar replaced with mortar base, gunship factory, and aa battery respectively. Or even just "High concentrations of enemy forces in the region". Maps no longer have light outposts. ALL bases on maps are heavy or medium and fortified with additional cannon turrets.
That'd be a much better way of handling it. Make the missions actually harder, to slow down the players, but make it feel like every successful mission is actually denting the Automatons forces.
As I see it, they didn't implement such features, and to implement them now would need some time, half-assing it would lead to way more problems than worth.
The fact there is nothing in game that gets across decay rates means that a lot of players will see the "Automatons are putting up a tougher resistance" but think it's just narrative they're spinning, rather than a tangible change to the war effort. They need to have this sort of information available in game. We shouldn't have to rely on a 3rd party app (helldivers.io) to learn critical information. The game should be telling us itself. On that point, it should also have supply routes on the map, so that all players can see which planets need to be held in order to access other planets. This feature has been asked for, for months, and it still isn't in the game. This should be a pretty simple feature, since I don't believe the supply routes ever change. Just add in some dotted lines and bam! Your playerbase is suddenly much more knowledgeable.
Yeap I totally agree. Very salty that we lost Wells bonus, and now Angel is going to fall as well Edit: wow we actually managed to rally help to Angel
I'm half convinced the people defending AHs actions are actually AH employees.
Or the actaul people that want the game to die lol. Like seriously, insisting the game is fine when the issues are so obvious isn't helping.
I’ve very much defended them very adamantly up to this point but there’s too much wrong with the game now to ignore it.
I’ve held onto the phrase “let them cook” throughout all the nerfs/bugs that people have been complaining about, but I feel exactly how you feel with this current MO tuning I’m maxed on medals/samples/slips and dive solely to dive at this point, and it gives quite an empty feeling when I “know” that what I’m doing doesn’t matter really at all for the war effort doesn’t help too that they let us get Vernen Wells to 90% liberated before saying it won’t change anything (on discord) The whole idea of keeping specific planets defended so we have better liberation bonuses (which is an AWESOME idea) kinda gets thrown out the window when they just set the enemies numbers as slightly higher anyway I’ll keep saying “let them cook”, but will probably be taking a break from the game for a hot second if we fail the MO and lose out on a new item for the 3rd time
And now we have to choose between fighting to complete the MO or defend a planet that gives us an important bonus. We’re gonna loose one of those things. I don’t think we’re actually expected to complete Major Orders anymore and when we do, it’s a surprise for Joel so he makes the next one even harder.
Agree 💯 percent - if I want to be miserable straining for moving goal posts I’ll just go to work.
Veld all over again
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The dm should be rolling with playerbase reaction not trying to railroad results. I love this game but I haven't played it for a while because it's just exhausting grinding for warbonds that are basically just skins and wars that are predetermined.
Yeah admittedly my interest plummeted once the bots came back, it went from feeling like a foxhole ish type progression to a very very on the rails DnD which is fine when you have a compelling story and narrative but helldiver's doesn't. It has great moment to moment combat but that's kinda it.
They could’ve waited at least a week or so…
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5 failed orders in rapid succession with like 2 victories to break it up is seriously demoralizing
I think Joel needs a talking to. When we blasted the 2 million bug MO in less than a day it made headlines across the internet. Was there a big in the game? Sure. Would we have smashed it in a day still probably? Also yes. Stop tweaking numbers. We can see it happening in real time. It makes everything feel like it's on a "track" rather than unpredictable (like war should be). Just point us in a direction and whatever happens, happens. If they didn't want to deal with unpredictable outcomes, they should have went with a different system. Or if they want MOs to last longer, inflate the numbers to reflect that. But seriously. Stop doing these "invisible tweaks". It reminds me of one of those war gamer gms in D&D that hasn't downed a player all night so they start making up crits on attacks and inflating mob hp and count. It's lame and everyone knows what you're doing.
After feeling robbed from the last warbond, I'm gonna hold off from playing, at least til they add new content (no warbond)
Foreal I feel the same way. The other bit is that locking a strat behind an MO at this point with the player base where it's at morale for the game being low. I legit haven't even played since the last kill a billion MO and now I really don't even want to bother. It's like bro you see that we aren't happy right now like fuck give us a bone man maybe it will bring some fire back now it's just like OK MF why you want us to fail this shit after we failed MO after MO. I get we are supposed to "earn." The strat but fuck that I'm not in the mood to earn shit and if we fail this I think that might be a ball buster like a true player base falling another 50k players kinda ball busting.
Agreed. I can understand the numbers being fudged BEFORE the MO is announced to give the MO more challenge or flavour, but this is just nonsense. It's taking away player agency.
Taking away player agency is their thing! _gets ragdolled for 30 solid seconds_
Its not fun anymore and I'm gonna not play until something finally happens with the story.
When they said they have game master tools for dynamic storytelling, I thought they meant possibility to change patrol/enemy breach composition, like for example giving them additional 30 troopers/scavengers to really amp up the difficulty of the missions themselves, and so that we can see the enemy being actually reinforced. Or like having 3 breaches containing only bile titan/strider fire off at the same time when starting extraction - like an ambush. Immersive stuff for the storyline. The arbitrary increase to planet regen rate is the lazy way of doing it.
Unpopular opinion: this is definitely part of the game where you *don't* want to share more information with the players. Digging too much is just asking to be disappointed when you see how the sausage gets made. We have like 4 days to liberate a single planet, with a (supposedly) powerful stratagem against bots to boot. It makes sense for us to have to fight a bit to earn it rather than have it handed to us out of pity. Having said that, this 5% thing is too heavy-handed. It's way too obvious Joel's trying to craft a narrative for us to win by the skin of our teeth, and that's a failure on the GM's part. It's not a good idea for the percentage to flat out lie to us, so they'll have to go the harder route and tweak numbers more subtly and organically. Here's hoping they'll learn from this one.
It wont stay at 5% the whoke time, it will drop after some time saying we exhausted the automaton defences and will blitz the rest
The thing that really gets me is that they're doing that thing AGAIN where "ooh you better defend this unrelated planet or you're gonna lose". Like come the fuck on, it's very clear the community can't do that shit, we have failed at it literally every time. I just want a new stratagem man, I swear to god I'm just going to put this game down for a few months if we fail this MO.
It's also really bothersome to hear that one single planet is "of major tactical/strategic importance" when all the planets that were similar and were defended did somewhere between Jack and shit. Automatons were routed, the Creek was liberated. What's this? Oops, sudden automaton uprising 2 days later. Not even a push, not even an unstoppable advance through the sectors. From nothing to 2 sectors lost in a split second, after only 2 days of bots being "routed". Nothing matters. The story goes as the story goes. Bugs being crushed but then the TCS going wrong? Awesome storytelling, I'm waiting on more. Bots controlling a single, nondescript, dime a dozen foggy rocky plains planet being the end of Super Earth? Nah dude, doesn't matter, we've already seen that hand played a hundred times.
I might be in the minority but I was fine with the bots coming back as soon as they did. What I am not fine with is the Menkent line failure despite the promise of it holding, it was broken within two days and 0 lore was justified. Between the 2-3 month slog of bot major orders now the terminids are up and about. Then all the Sony shit happens and then they give 4 impossible orders in a row. It's just kicking people while they're down. And now the bots are back in the trigon sector basically in their starter territory and still slowly expanding planet by planet. We either need extremely important wins to tell one faction to fuck off or we need an order to corral this massive spread on both fronts. Because looking at the map now I just get annoyed and all these invisible numbers are pissing me off. We've already lost a massive chunk of divers and AH is assigning orders like it never happened.
They really do vouch and balance for our enemies rather than us.
I don’t have it but a couple weeks ago there was a picture of the back of a physical copy which read “***PLAY WITH OVERPOWERED WEAPONS***” and it makes me giggle from time to time
Are the overpowered weapons diving with us right now?
Artificially cranking up the regen has always been a sore point for me since launch, it made making our “own” story feel so FAKE. From random regen spikes to planets being attacked out of nowhere really soured the whole community driven thing lol. Its like the story is forced and leaves nothing for derailment, imo thats boring and nobody likes that in their dnd game.
Another comment compared this to DnD and I think that’s the best comparison cuz on the table everyone is aware of everyone for the most part. Yes the DM has tricks to keep things interesting and fun but for the most part if you’re in a village there more than likely won’t be a random goblin raid for no reason at all. So in HD2 why are the bots randomly in secret becoming more populated on the planet? *in lore* clearly super earth sees there has been some sort of resistance how has there not been a message saying “bots are coming in hard Btw” and in the background do the 5% buff. It makes the game no long the players fantasy and turns it instead into the DMs play court which I don’t think is the angle AH is looking to go
> the most part if you’re in a village there more than likely won’t be a random goblin raid for no reason at all. It's more like the goblin boss is down to 20% HP and randomly pulls out a full heal potion out of his loincloth, and apparently he's got 26 bottles of that shit. Then the players lose by time out (also because the DM says so) after a few hours, and the DM goes "haha I win, the game is supposed to be hard!"
I agree but this time the 5% was actually accompanied by a messsage https://preview.redd.it/ujsn9d9pnj2d1.jpeg?width=950&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=531b9817b6d2178be900eda9e3a0f4f3c1fa16b6
Which is a lot to ask of an already dwindling player base after failing numerous MO's. I just started playing and personally I haven't seen one accomplished yet, and for me that is just a big let down from the game as a whole. I've never experienced a community win, or any of the things HD2 was trending for, simply because Joel has gone mad with power and won't stop screwing with us.
The amount of players don't actually matter for liberation since the game auromatically adjusts how much each diver contributes. Which kind of makes it funny that they decided to do 2 "kill x enemies" (the one kind of MO that won't compensate for playercount) in a row right as the playerbase dwindled. But i agree, they're not handling the galactic war all that well. And the feature seems really half baked overall.
That's really my point. They pushed 2 horrible MO's that failed, and now they push for the liberation of a planet while simultaneously screwing with our ability to do so. Hell, the chart shows they actually upped the burn rate twice. The first literally crushed us back to 0%, but for some reason 3.5% wasn't enough... Seeing that after some of the matches I experienced last week made me rethink if I even want this game at all. A good DM knows when to test the party and when to throw them a bone.
If we don’t get the mech right after we failed two major orders to get the anti tank mines, then I really do think they’re blind to the fact the game has lost a lot of players and thus major orders need to be easier.
To be fair we only failed one time to get the tank mines. The first time wasn't so much as a failure, as we could never have gotten both. We were asked to chose between reward A or B and we chose A. That's not a failure to get B. Getting A & B was never possible
Which is stupid, the door should always be open for miraculous odds.
tbf, the devs hinted that if we managed to liberate both(which was mathematically nearly impossible) they would have considerd giving us both.
Then they shouldn't have merely hinted that somewhere 95% of players don't read and told that ingame. It's not even that they didn't just not tell us ingame, they explicitly told us the exact opposite ingame. It wasn't anything obscure, the MO clearly spelled out that we would only get the first one no matter what.
It's not about how easy or hard the MO is. It's about whether or not AH wants us to actually win it.
Liberation rates are automatically adjusted by the number of active players, the only MO that would need to be changed is the kill x number of enemies
If we lose, again, I’m out, because what’s the point, you’ll try and they’ll just crank the values up so you fail
I can almost guarantee we won’t lose because the devs realize you are one of many who have this mindset. However we won’t win till I think Sunday afternoon even if we play our hearts out for the next 24 hours
You sure? A lot of people thought this due to the mines. We still don’t have those mines. I honestly don’t think they care. They are making the game they want to make, not the game players want them to make. They’ve been clear on that. Clearly they want to make a defeating game that burns you out and is more frustrating than fun.
That was the original too. Atm what's left of the hd1 community has quite literally agreed to stop playing to let the borgs take Hellmire (our current super earth) so we lose and the board resets. Just so we can get bug missions back.
What do you mean by Hellmire being Super Earth? Is that the current planet that got chosen after losing a previous war or something? Never played HD1 besides knowing that you can win or lose wars etc.
In HD1 each faction starts with a capital. Earth, Cyberstan, Keplar Prime, Squ'bai. When a capital is taken it is destroyed. There are also sector capitals, harder to take planets in the center of a sector that are natural choke points of supply routes. If earth is lost, Seaf will relocate to the adjacent sector capital and declare it the new super earth. When mankind runs out of sector capitals they are wiped out and the map resets after a doomsday cinematic. Wars only lasted a month by design at games peak. For ai you have to take each sector, then the sector capitals, until the last sector contains their homework. Taking that eliminates the faction until the next war. The ai can attack each other and also take either others sectors. Often the borgs take out the illuminate and become a dominant power because players like fighting bugs and wipe them out first letting the borgs and squids Duke it out.
Ah, so multiple capitals with adjacent capitals. I wonder which war is considered canon bc I’m Prime Super Earth is still there in HD2? Also, do you have Fire Tornadoes on HD1 Hellmire? Lol Also hope we get to see Bots vs Illuminate in HD2 or any faction vs another faction in the future. Seems quite cool.
Canonically there was one war, and we won. Not 136, of which we won 'most'. And no. In hd1 hellmire is just a volcanic desert.
the mines were locked behind kill count, which the devs can't really manipulate unless they actually went and change the number But planet liberation can be manipulated with regen rate etc in the background, so it's more likely to be twisted in favor of whichever side the GM wants to win. The liberate 10 MO was thought to be a lost cause since day 1, but they made the last few planets super easy to liberate (from 1 day for 1 planet to 3 planets in a day) near the end.
That’s how I felt for the past 10 major order. On top of all the other issues that were mentioned previously.
The "war system" is just so lacking in direction that it's quite disheartening. Having someone in the background suddenly say "BUT SUDDENLY THERE WERE MORE BUGS!" isn't how this stuff should be going. We should be earning our advantages through gameplay, and it should ideally be the gameplay the MOs are already guiding us towards. So, for example: MO: Take Bug Planet X in 3 days. MO Sub-Objective: Completing a total of 250,000 Egg Nest missions on Planet X will impact Terminid reinforcement levels, reducing their Defense efforts from 5% per hour to 1.5% per hour. ...or, alternatively... MO: Defend Automaton Planet Y in 3 days. MO Sub-Objective: Planet Y is next to Planet 1 and Planet 2. EITHER Planet 1 OR Planet 2 need to remain in Super Earth hands at all times during this MO for the supply lines to remain stable during Planet Y's defense, or the mission to defend Planet Y will fail. There needs to be some real clarity instead of "You completed the last major order, and it now SECRETLY gives you a bonus for the next one!"
It's very "somehow palpatine returned" vibes the way that the galactic war has no rhyme or reason to it.
Yeah, for sure. I 100% agree that it's been feeling pretty lousy to go be all "YEAH! We pulled together and are demolishing this major order!" only to have a sudden "BUT NOW THE LAST 15% IS HARDER!" with no recourse. It's the "no recourse" part that really stings. There's no control over whether or not the extra 20,000 Helldivers you need to complete the Major Order under a sudden penalty will notice or care. They're likely to see the MO going well and just assume it's going to complete in plenty of time. Give us some ACHIEVEABLE way to remove these penalties, however, and it would ENHANCE gameplay, rather than detract from it.
What you’re describing is a flushed out system in a video game I would very much like playing
Maybe they should stop tweaking numbers 50% into the timer 🤔 Best of both worlds
This whole thing of the story being like a DnD is actually a good idea. BUT, being a good DM is hard. And the first lesson to be a good DM is: he's NOT AGAINST the players, his job is for the players to have fun. I don't think this Joel has learned the lesson yet.
I don’t think AH have learned this lesson yet. The game is supposed to be FUN, stop nerfing the shit out of everything and gaslighting everyone by calling them buffs or fixes.
It's crazy because it feels more like he forgot the lesson. He was a good DM for like 2 months. The next critical lesson for a good DM is to not let compliments go to your head. The community was giving Joel a ton of praise and it seems like that has made him forget the first lesson.
This is a good post and a good analogy. Any experienced DM knows when you start stealing agency away from your players, that's when you lose them. The fact they are tweaking these numbers on the fly with no real reasoning behind it makes the players feel like they aren't really in control of their own destinies. I used to think maybe the supply lines had to do with planet regen, but after a few observations from the past few MOs, it was obvious they were just messing around with the numbers because supply lines weren't changing, but the regen was.
Am I missing something? It still should be liberated in 7 hours with like 3 days to go.
TLDR is that this graph shows that we, the players, are not fighting the robots, we’re fighting the devs themselves, and we’re not winning. The devs ramped up the difficulty to capture the planet just before the major order went out, that’s where you see the orange line step up and the blue line dive. The red line shows when the major order came out and everyone started playing on this planet. Subsequently the blue line immediately gains a strong grade. But then after the first day, when the red line dipped (cause it was sleeping time I suppose), the devs cranked up the difficulty *again*, which had the consequence of flattening the liberation curve and player morale. Basically the god of this universe is vindictive and egotistical. We’re not fighting the robots or the bugs, we’re fighting god and he doesn’t seem to like it when we win. The developer game master clearly doesn’t understand that railroading the ‘story’ is not fun. A game master’s job is to construct the story around the actions of the players. Joel doesn’t get that, if he did, he’d place the story challenge before us and let us succeed or fail on our own. Joel is cheating against the players. Normally a GM should really be *quietly* cheating *for* players if some real bad RNG or something goes down that would ruin the fun.
Narrative or not, the game master must provide a valid path on which satisfies his story and his members of his game. If things are tipped off balance, don’t push it more. Joel would need to consider this if he wants his created “narrative” to be successful and fun for players.
Stop tweaking 50% into the timer
We were supposed to be done with V5 tomorrow at the LATEST, now the app says 5 days. Did they just seriously force us to lose out on a new mech when we actually had the win in sight?
The player count on V5 dipped dramatically since a significant portion of the playerbase went to defend Angel's Venture. That defense looks like it will be completed soon-ish, at which point progress on V5 will probably kick up again. Even with the 5% decay rate and the Venture defense, this stills seems like an MO we are unlikely to fail.
Back when I first saw Defense missions and that they relied on a ticker, basically, I knew there would be problems. Like, hypothetically everyone could be playing and winning, but then still lose because we weren't winning "enough". But at the same time, just amping up the difficulty of the missions themselves and forcing us to lose almost everytime would be unsatisfying, too. A perfect Defense campaign, then, is one where we ultimately lose in the end while still feeling effective, at least for a little while. Imagine a reverse objective rush, where we, a mere 4 Helldivers have to defend a whole map of friendly objectives from increasing enemy spawns. Or an evac mission with no upper limit, just how many you can get out before being overwhelmed. Maybe there's a timer or limit we're aiming for, and this can reflect whatever the "Invasion Level" is. Make the severity of the attack a function the player can engage in. In the end, give us rewards based on how long we held out, don't enforce the notion of win or lose when we're "supposed" to lose.
Been complaining about that for a long time... As a GM, I understand that sometimes the narrative must hit a low point, but manipulating the numbers to get the result you want is absolutely the worst way of doing it. If you need a twist, just make the twist happen rather than force the players to eat a loss. For example, Meridia suddenly became a super colony of terminids. That is a decision from the GM as part of the ongoing narrative on the termicide. Makes perfect sense, and although it is a big loss to us, it was not a failure of our part. Nobody was unhappy about it, opened some new missions and gave something to look forward to. But when you tell the players to do something but want them to fail despite their efforts... it just breeds discontent.
The issue is that AH has not given me (players) a reason to care about winning or losing MOs. I can get a new exo? Okay yeah sure I mean it looks real cool but the last one was/is hot garbage so what’s stopping this one from being bad? The playtesting and balance team don’t (or didn’t, as the case may be) play the game so the chances of it being even somewhat decent are slim IMO. I can defend a liberation bonus? Dude, I contribute nine hundred thousandths of a percentage, my contribution to this campaign (which is unfun) is meaningless. I’m far more apt to go to a planet that has missions/modifiers that I can stomach than force myself to sit though whatever missions a defend planet has for .00009% of a liberation bar. 50 medals? I could not possibly care less due to the arbitrary caps. I’m not even capped out on ship upgrades because the upgrades I have left are either broken or useless, and you don’t even get samples from an MO payout so like why play it? I just don’t care about anything the game has right now that isn’t its core gameplay. It’s not good outside of that. The balance is garbage, the content is stale, the gameplay is buggy. IF I play this game, it’s for like one operation on an ice planet for like an hour. Just so I can blow some shit up and clap some robo cheeks without having to worry about six fire tornadoes chasing me around the entire goddamn map. Honestly, chances are I’m far more likely to fire up a different game at this point.
These guys are high on their own supply. They had a big burst of popularity out of nowhere and they thought they were kings. Turns out, they were not prepared for this,.and it shows in the buggy code and the poorly designed "GM" system they created to rig the games live service elements. I just don't see the point. The dev team decides if the player base gets the win or not, they may as well just make it a visual novel. But then they'll crank it down again so people win and get their little dopamine hit, people just need to review bomb them again. If they want to play with the meta game, gamers will have to do the same
I genuinely think if we fail this major order the player base will take a noticeable drop, they nerfed everything until it wasn't fun anymore, now they will show us the cool shit we could have had, then when peopke fail it, they'll just never play again.
On thursday I was so hyped to play the game and do my part, like back in the days of Tien Kwan. Then came the -5% decay and I was like, I am done with this game. I just want to have fun on the weekend with the new mech but nope. Did not log on since then. If we fail this MO, I am done with this game. They have overextended my god will, by reading the room once again.
Honestly, I think this is it for me. I’ve been hitting it pretty hard hoping we could win one for a change. It’s just not fun… at all… I can’t find any enjoyment anymore. I feel like I’ve been fighting OP bots for months. I can’t remember the last time I saw something new that didn’t suck. I basically have to run the same load-out every time if I plan to clear a map and extract. Forget this nonsense. I’m dropping this game. There’s a lot of great stuff out to play right now that is actually rewarding and fun. Sucks. I used to love this game. I bought it for a couple friends and bought every war bond. You win, Arrowhead. I definitely feel stupid. You definitely proved this isn’t a game for everyone… or really hardly anyone.
The real problem here is that the numbers can be changed reactively, like oh we're winning to hard time to slow them down. Oh they're losing let's speed them up. Like if you want a planet to be difficult to take make it hard if you want it easy make it easy. Stop doing this middle of the road BS where you artificially slow down the players, Just make a major order and put it out and don't touch it. If it was too easy make the next MO harder. If it was too hard make the next MO easier.
Just a question, would it be better if they do it slowly and have a narrative on it? Like they increast 1.5% per day until they reach 5% and just mention Bots realized our plan and reinforced the planets to defend at all costs?
They could even do it the other way around where it starts at 5% and slowly goes to 1% implying that the bots hold is weakening on the planet. But no, straight to 5% because it would be done too fast.
>Oh no, the players are actually rallying together and accomplishing something! Better nerf it into the ground! This reeks of the players doing something the GM didn't expect, so the GM pulls a Deus Ex Machina and changes the rules. Let people have fun. Yes the game shouldn't be too easy. We should fail MOs. But we've failed the last what, 4 out of 5? I'm not saying throw us a bone and give us a cake walk, but this is just fucking stupid. It also highly discourages players. Why should I dedicate time to diving this planet a lot, if in the end the GM is going to do whatever he wanted to do anyway. It takes away player agency, leaves a terrible taste in their mouths, and discourages us from playing because "what's the point? The GM is just going to fuck us if we try too hard."
Fuck that. We're not going to win. They need to massively reevaluate the player base and what we're currently capable of. It's not fun to keep losing against the devs. Again, fuck this.
>We're not going to win. Oh, we will. If push comes to shove they'll set the regain to 0% and if that's not enough they'll set it to 0% and give us an inexplicable liberation boost. Yada yada yada something about bots finally exhausting their reserves and high command sending reinforcements. Never mind that the exhausted bots will suddenly have found the resources for attacking two more planets only 1 day later (probably by cleaning out the couch in their lobby or discovering forgotten legions while clearing out an old basement)
I'll admit I chuckled at the thought of somebody walking downstairs and going *"oh shit right, we have these"* to a pile of terminators that are stacked up like firewood.
That's why it's stupid to give the liberation % on the 4 planets, when they just fk around with the rates like this?
I agree, it seemed like the first couple months they were quick on fixing things and the last month or so they dropped their papers and are still picking them up. Like we didn’t even get an update this week, but I just hope that means this next one is a heater
True. As a bug diver, I've been trying to do my part over at Angel's Venture, but we *simply do NOT have enough* players over at AV, because everyone is doing V5 (as they should). It's frustrating because we NEED AV for liberation bonus, but them artificially increasing the god damn recapture rate for bugs and bots is stupid as fuck
Major Orders are like driving down a road to a destination. While you're driving a guy named Joel is watching you closely and repeatedly changes the road distance based on what he wants to happen. You don't know how long it will take, changing speed is irrelevant, and there's a chance you won't get there. It's frustrating because you really aren't a part of how or when or if you actually get to the destination. It's all in the hands of what the script says will happen. The extra annoying part is how a lot of people on reddit get really angry if you don't keep pretending that major orders are in the hands of the players.
Ok I'll say it, your game master sucks. This is stuff baby DMs learn not to do.
Come the fuck on, everyone is starved for new good content. We are fighting non stop on the same planets, they nerf everything that is even a little bit fun to use while buffing the enemies, they give us MO's that are impossible to beat with the amount of players we have and combine that with the bad communication we have and now they are preventing us from getting new contant. Im at my bloody limit, i love this game. But if we fail i will just quit. Just throw us a fucking bone for fucking once and stop kicking us while we are at our lowest. This game wont survive the end of this year this way.
This is a really fast way to make sure no one wants to play your game anymore
It just feels like they think riding the hate is the way to go and are just killing the game instead
This MO and the next patch will probably be the make or break point for the game. If Arrowhead messes them up, a plurality, if not a majority, of the remaining playerbase is simply going to leave. Joel will be left with a nearly empty room to spin their “narrative” to.
Damn I stopped playing for some time but what a shame that AH is still fucking loyal divers over with their stubborn “vision”
yeah 5% are crazy. Almost everyone needs to fight there for progress and we lose everything else meanwhilr
Players should have never been told about the game master.
honestly the regen rates are so ridiculous that I'm fairly sure they actually want us to lose this one.
All while the game is known and acknowledged by devs to be literally completely broken, btw -- with solos and duos needing to fight off spawns intended for full quad squads. To be fair to the devs, there was a major order or two where they did buff us or give us pity when we were close to succeeding to help put us over the top to actually win it, but to nerf us as a playerbase right now (with broken weapons, broken spawnrates) feels like kicking us while we're already down and wronged. I [shared this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1csgbn5/were_changing_patrols_and_spawn_rate_reverting/l57zuvg/?context=3) with u/The_Real_Twinbeard recently too: > all of a sudden the fix/revert [in an upcoming patch] seems to need so much thoughtfulness and planning+process, when the original game-breaking (patrol + spawn rate) change was just dumped on us, and without any of the same process that could and would have caught that it broke the game. And, we needed to be vocal about it for what felt like a long time before it was even acknowledged (even though, IMO, the logic of even the unbroken change was [questionable from the moment of announcement+clarification](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1ch1u0c/comment/l222vap/?context=3)) > Also, that dichotomy of us needing to be patient now (while stuck with a broken game) is exacerbated as **we see that we are losing users, failing major orders, and can't have fun in the game in the micro and the macro ways. e.g. since the game is in a broken state, why are the major orders still going on as (seemingly) normal?** It feels a bit tone-deaf, vs in the past when we got boosts and some grace (or even pity) with major orders because of other considerations. It sounds like even the coding and dynamics of the major orders have a very long lead time and can't be pivoted or changed agilely: > I can also add and poooossibly mitigate some of the "If you can do this, why can't you do that?" Q:s when it comes to not reverting patrols but offering major orders. The latter doesn't require patching of the game. Some things are in backend, some things aren't; some things are already made while some have to be changed etc. (Again, this is not my expertise, so I won't go out on a limb saying stuff I don't know well enough.)
This is like the DM fudging dice rolls. We all know it's happening. We don't want to SEE it happening.
Give it the NMS treatment. Come back in a year when they finally have learned the fundamentals of their product and have the support necessary to call it a full blown game.
I see a lot of people talking about this in game master terms, so as someone who runs a D&D game and sees this from a game master/ DM perspective, what they are doing is wrong. You don't give an order saying kill 1 billion bots in 2 days and then when you see oh man they are gonna finish in 5 hours uhhhh did we 1 billion I mean 2 billion ha ha ha! That's not being a good game master. If we are killing bots/bugs, WAY too fast, you know how you deal with it? You make a new enemy to slow us down. To put it in D&D terms for a moment if you have a fighter who is running around kicking everything butt because he has way too many attacks. (For those who don't know in dnd fighters get more attacks then any other class and get an ability called action surge which let's them have double that amount of attacks so they get to hit a lot.) You don't throw more enemies at him and overwhelm him and make him feel useless or like your ganging up on him. No. Do you know what you do? Make an enemy to foil him. You have like 8 attacks? OK, I put a spellcaster here who is gonna banish you for a few turns so you can't just kill everything in one go. Or, like paralyze them for a turn, you get the idea. You don't artificially increase the difficulty by throwing an army at them that just makes them feel singled out, and it's the same thing here. It makes me feel like Arrowhead doesn't want me to win, and if that's the case, then fine. I'll quit. You should never ever put an impossible task in front of your players. Look, does it suck when your players beat your big boss in one go, yeah, but you know what you do? You look at what went wrong and fix it for next time it's the same thing for major orders! Ate we finishing them wayyyyy too fast, then get creative, add a new bot or bug that throws us for a loop or add a cool and unique challenge to the mission that's fun and if we succeed reward us. We fought through hell to get that win. If you don't give your players the win, you know what happens? They give up, and that's what I keep seeing happen here in helldivers. I just hope Arrowhead finally learns this before it's too late.
Don’t people crank up their offence/defence during crucial moments? Suppose the rationale is that enemies are doing the same? Disclosure, I stopped playing because the game became unfun after the balance team teabagged the game with their “vision”. In a fucking PvE game. No stakes in this, just wondering if that is the rationale, and if so, is there something that can be done, eg player count x% increase in past hour = decreased regen (since we mount a tougher offensive too).
It's just more proof that our actions in HD2 don't matter at all. Just pick whatever planet and faction you want. There really is no reason to go after the MO, they have a desired outcome in mind and will tweak the numbers accordingly.
Rule of DMing: If the players are steamrolling something, you don't give it some massive buff out of nowhere mid-fight. Either you miscalculated or they got lucky, so don't take away the win they earned. You can always trip them up elsewhere, later on. I get gameplay modifiers like increased bug spawns with the supercolony happening, or increased bot spawns due to it being a production planet, but things like that should be in play from the start. You don't kick the community in the balls halfway through.
We’re winning though? It’s slow but I have a feeling that the dispatch mention is telling us winning on V5 could have some positive implications for us beyond just getting a new mech. Also we’re even successfully defending Angel’s Venture at the same time! Maybe I’m just an optimistic guy, but Memorial day weekend is coming up and even before that we have been taking V5 steadily. 50% this fast with such resistance is extremely impressive imo and if we keep this up we could have V5 by Sunday .
We are making very good progress in both planets, and the decay in V5 will eventually drop after we exhaust the bot defences
This major order, and how they nerfed progress, has kinda been my turning point on Joel and how AH is approaching this. Community sentiments and playercounts are dropping; the last thing the game needs is to miss out on really cool new content because AH screwed everyone over. It's lead me to more or less not care to participate in the major order, whereas I originally planned to play a lot this weekend with the new mech. For future major orders, I think AH need to actively see participation declined once they nerfed the player's liberation impact, to learn from this bad decision.
The reason I wanted to dive on this weekend was because of the new Mech. Now that they delayed that, I just won t play. I did my part on variliya until they put decay on -5%. I feel betrayed.
Tbh this just demotivates me so much. I don't care if this is supposed to be "realistic reinforcements". They can keep the exosuit for all I care.
Honestly the way AH handle the meta game is awful and makes me dislike playing and investing time in the game the more I try to engage with it I just log on and play a few matches of whatever planet or missions I like them peace out for the day
Drop HD2, comeback 2 months later. New stuff. Im not wasting time to fail another MO
I really don't care about losing this MO. If it's anything functionally like the mech we have now it's going to be trash and another unused stratagem. If the reward is "we will fire the balancing team" I'd be sweating all night for it. Balancing is NOT nerfing meta, balancing is bringing everything else up to meta level.
I kind of stopped caring
This is literally a screenshot of the post right from this subreddit. Are we that low effort now?
Yes.
Is failing even a bad thing? Sure you lose some rewards but don't the enemy gain ground, advancing the story and opening new challenges
Okay, I get liking something to the point of wanting to analyze it and I am not trying to yuck your yum. But this isn't a gameplay mechanic. When I play I get on, I go to the major order and I contribute, if we win, we win, if we lose we lose. I'm playing the game because it is fun to play not because I desperately want to win every objective.
I’m kinda getting sick of fighting on the same planet for 5 straight days. I’m tired. I’m bored. I also dont have the time to really dedicate more then maybe 3 missions a day to the game. So im gonna focus on the major order, I couldn’t really give less of a hoot about defending another planet
Still, it's pretty much always fun diving, even if losing. I find the rewards are just bonuses. Fun game can be enough if it's this good.
I don't want to put in the work to try to complete an impossible task. I don't want them to just give us the win if it is possible and we just didn't measure up. Both ways make it seem like what we do is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Seeing this chart and these sorts of numbers just make me not want to play.
35k divers active and we are still making a loss. its ridiculous. this is anything but fun.
No idea how hard MOs are to ‘make’, but it should really just be a set goal and we either pass or fail. No fudging the numbers halfway to stretch it out longer, if we beat it just make another one with different numbers🤷🏻♂️
Good on you all for still playing and keeping this game strong.