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Back in the day we used this ancient invention called mp3 gain to level output on digital audio clips.. You might want to look for something similiar so you wont bucher headphone users when clips change.
No matter how you feel about nerfs and buffs... That was an absolutely braindead marketting move, I'd actually fire the CEO over this. What the heck were they expecting???
@@TheVeryHungrySingularity yeah makes you wonder why they chose to make all their time buffing fire a complete and total waste of time and decided to nerf fire into the ground.
Seriously, are players supposed to get hyped over two of the 3 weapons being nerfed before they're even released? LMAO, no wonder AH have so many issues, they don't have just Alexis sabotaging them, they must have an entire deptartment dedicated to brainstorming the stupidest fucking ideas!
whats even worse is the fire nerf was listed as a "misc fix". a single dedicated line in the middle of a huge list at the bottom of the patch notes "fire now works more realistically" meanwhile the fire animation is different and now works less realistically than it did at launch.
I'd be... somewhat okay with slight nerfs to some weapons if all weapons were viable in some way, but that's not what Arrowhead gave us. As I've seen one person say, "If Arrowhead ran an automotive repair shop and a car came in with three flat tires, they'd deflate the one good tire so they're all flat." When the first round of weapon nerfs came, my example at the time was "Arrowhead is a kingdom that asked us to slay a dragon, and they gave us the choice of a sword and shield or a pile of sticks and stones. Arrowhead then got so mad about people only choosing the sword and shield that they blunted our blades and shattered our shields."
Like I’d be okay with a auto canon nerf done correctly as it’s literal only OP weapon, it can literal do every situation easily, destroy bases ✅, destroy common heavies ✅, and I can go on, the only real downside is backpack but then you get a extra stratagem. Like if arrowhead wants to go by it’s “it was a bit to reliable” then auto canon should be on the chopping block but they won’t nerf it
@@enriqueperezarce5485ironically the Arrowhead team has pointed to the Autocannon as the perfectly balanced weapon gold standard. According to them it is the standard they are looking to have all weapons balanced against lmao
AH: "Our game was so unexpectedly big it's tough to figure out what the playerbase wants." Players: "Stop nerfing the guns." AH: "It's really new territory for us, we need to discover how to make the players happy." Players: "We just told you, stop nerfing the guns." AH: "It really is a big unknown how to cater to these different groups of players." Casual and blaster players in unison: "Stop. Nerfing. The. Guns." AH: "Yeah, it's a mystery but we promise we're listening."
literally like they are so far up their own asses its insane. If the Helldivers 2 developers made Warframe they would 100% have completely removed all those initially unintended movement mechanics that would go on to become a core part of the Warframes identity. If they managed Warframe like how they've handled Helldivers 2, there is no way Warframe or Digital Extremes would still exist today.
Hearing Shams do corporate speak was so eye-rolling. "CEO SPEAKS! ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS!". "MESSAGE FROM OUR DIRECTOR TO PLAYER BASE - WE WILL TRY TO DO SOMETHING GOOD IN NEXT 60 DAYS."
Players: "You aren't listening, we're done playing. Arrowhead: "That's your fault for complaining" Sometimes, things to deserve to go up in flaming failure. Certainly hope Arrowhead does.
This is the main reason I stopped playing the game. From like 20+ weapons, only 1-2 were fun to use, then you see patches where they nerf those weapons. Sometimes they did buff 1 weapon, and I started playing with it, felt great just to see them nerf it next patch. It's such a shame, fun game, but they fumbled so bad.
@@SuperZura91 Problem that they "buff" while nerfing at the same time plus buffing enemies making those buffs kind of pointless, taking more than giving.
Exactly this. I don't want to run a Breaker Incendiary on every drop to a bug planet, I'd rather use a Liberator or a Diligence, that's how I like to play. But if I don't bring a Breaker, I can't kill bugs fast enough. Don't nerf the Breaker, give me something else I can use instead.
17:27 You forgot one thing here. They buffed the enemies multiple times while nerfing the players. Nothing really changed on our end and things were being done well enough when suddenly they started nerfing guns off of usage rate alone. The CEO has gone on record to say that one of the guns nerfed was balanced pretty well and they nerfed it just cause it was being used too much.
I don't want to jinx it, but it looks like they're on their way to introduce gameplay changing mtx, like a powerful loadout that overshadow all of the other weapons
Dont forget all people crying in discord and subreddit about "meta" where most players used Breakers, and were constantly telling people to play anything else they like. Meanwhile alternative was gun locked in last tier of basic pass or pisswater ARs that needed whole clip to kill anything bigger than basic grunt. So instead of bringing ARs up to the par to be competitive options to Breakers, they decided to kneecap shotguns. And then you had Eruptor situation, where people were using gun pointblank and crying the explosion/shrapnels killed them and demanded nerf to the power of weapon, which resulted in gun being completely gutted and performing much much worse than before, even not accounting handling that felt like you were holding tank turret in your arms instead of gun, or miniscule ammo size - which after the nerf barely lasted for more two encounters.
when u spend 50 bullets on a small enemy and it wont die... devs: lets fucking nerf the gun again. players: wait what why??? devs: you are right. our bad. players: o thank go- devs: we threw in a new gun. same shit. just behind a battlepass. and we also nerfed it day1. bruh... devs are fucking regarded.
The problem with the nerfs isn't that weapons are melting enemies. AH are looking at user statistics rather than game feel. So people congregate around certain weapons because they're better than most other weapons. And then AH nerfs the popular weapons, leaving people with even fewer choices. The devs are essentially on the wrong end of survivorship bias, killing the things that survive but not counting the weapons that weren't even picked.
Ontop of that, weapons which have been touched just don't do what they should, I enjoy the recoiless despite it being suboptimal and even though it's not been directly nerfed it doesn't do what it feels like it should, a shoulder rocket weapons should be killing Turrets and buildings in one hit and not relying on hitting the vents especially on the bot fabricators, it should 1 hit gunships and kill Hulks with 1 center mass hit, it never has and then they removed the dropship fall damage so the one trick it was really good for now doesn't get the impact it should
Pick rates dont even give good data on balancing, simply because some weapons are cooler than others. I didnt pick flamethrower over other weapons because it was better (it wasnt, it had lots of drawbacks), I picked flamethrower because using it felt cool!
@@2MeterLPI loved the old flamethrower. It felt great it melted a bunch of little bugs and gave a you a way to reliable kill chargers in your kit. It's great all comers weapon with some serious drawbacks that you had to deal with. It was a in a great spot. I heard it was kill chargers really fast because of bug buy I only ran into that a couple of times but they should've just fixed that bug. They made the same mistake with the railgun. It was a way to reliably kill chargers but it had a bug that let kill bile titans way to easy. Instead of fixing the bug they nerfed it into the dirt. The devs just don't know what's going on in their game.
The funny this is I was afraid this would happen when people figured out Joel was orchestrating the galactic war behind the scenes, I though the players would become antagonistic against the devs... Instead, yes, it became players vs developers, but it's because the developers seem keen on antagonizing their playerbase and doing everything in their power to drive them away.
@@araonthedrake4049 right? it was supposed to be a pvd type game, but the devs somehow found a way to make it a possitive experience. Then they made mistake after mistake since launch and lost their goodwill from a majority of the playerbase.
The problem is Arrowhead's balance devs seem to have no clue what they're doing. It's like they're trying to balance an Excel spreadsheet instead of a game. They see a weapon with an abnormally high pick rate and immediately assume that weapon must be OP, when in reality every other weapon feels like a peashooter. Like, there is a reason why the term "bulletsponge" is considered a negative descriptor. Not to even mention the completely absurd reasonings they've given to justify some of their changes. Oh no the slug shotgun is outperforming snipers? Better nerf its damage and stagger power, instead of doing the sensible thing of ramping up the damage dropoff. And don't get me started on the "realism" argument.
They really don't have any clue. Arrowhead's (or their balance team's) principle of balancing is flawed. For example: 1) The developers allegedly do not typically play beyond Difficulty 5. Therefore, they would theoretically be balancing weapons based on that difficulty and/or below. This means they're not dealing with 5+ Chargers/Behemoths and multiple Bile Titans at any given time in missions. 2) They have a tendency to 'spreadsheet nerf' and act based on numbers they see on a spreadsheet. For instance, the incendiary breaker was nerfed because "it's too reliable" and it was chosen in "30% of bug missions." They made a gun that's good at what it does (even though Damage over Time for fire had not been working properly since release of the game...) for bugs (it's a bit less useful for bots) and they decided that because it was being used too much, it should be nerfed. They nerf weapons that have a higher use rate (because they're reliable) but never bother buffing any of the other useless guns (i.e. Purifier, Liberator Penetrator, etc.) 3) The developers seldom test the patches/updates before they release them. For instance, when the Tenderizer was released, it came with this generic green camo color instead of the black/gray color as was shown in the specific warbond trailer it originated from. In addition, even with the ship module upgrade, a yellow re-supply box did not fully ressuply the Tenderizer's ammo. Its damage was also pretty terrible and there was literally no other reason to choose it over the original Liberator except for a tiny improvement in recoil. How can Arrowhead make any appropriate determination about how good/bad each weapon is if they're too busy looking at spreadsheet numbers and how frequently certain weapons are being used instead of testing the actual weapons themselves? Let's not forget that Shams Jorjani also mentioned that 'every hour of testing is less hour for game development.' I'm sorry as I'm not a game developer but not testing your own product before you release it is just poor practice. There's really no mincing words here with that statement. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens within the next 60 days.
Let's not be overly verbose here: > They literally advertised an "overpowered" arsenal. > They say that weapons need a nerf when they have a pick rate, rather than buffing weapons with no pick rate. > I fail to see how a hoard shooter is ever anything but a power fantasy. > The cherry on top: "oh no a bug is killing itself, give it DR!" Nerfed weapons/buffed enemies in response to bugs/unintended behavior is a real shitty thing to do, fix the damn bug.
This, this right here is my problem with the game. And individuals who say 'you're just bad' are the same people who don't run level 9 or 10 missions as their primary experience in the game. High level play has devolved into a mess with underperforming equipment in what is supposed to be a sci-fi horde shooter. Also game breaking bugs have never been patched such as constantly ragdolling, Automatons shooting through canyon walls and high stones, Terminid charger spam, and illogical game decisions like crashed dropships not killing Automaton's who are downed within them or certain movements on geometry sending you mach 10 across the map out of bounds.
Not true. It's the devs who are managing the patches. If there wasn't a problem with the game the CMs wouldn't be an issue. The CMs seem to consistently put their finger on the problem and seem to be able to acknowledge the problems. The Devs seem completely unable to learn their lesson
HD2 could have been a great game with staying power but they fumbled the ball too many times. The psn account issue. The blocking of 180+ countries. The constant balanace screw ups. They had a golden opportunity and the just didnt follow through.
In their defense, the PSN shite was not Arrowhead's fault. Nor the country blocking, probably. (They probably were told to do it, or else, perhaps so that Sony can attempt to try it again later, or something.) Everything else though? Yeah, that's on them. Super Credits getting a secret tweak on how much they spawn on maps is what really took the cake for me, and it has yet to be fixed.
Yeah, the PSN and blocking of the 180+ countries thing is Sony's fault not Arrowhead's. Still, they did screw up in balancing and doing nerfs when they weren't needed. It also didn't help that most of the weapons that were released felt pretty weak and pathetic as well.
The PSN stuff was way overblown. If that was the biggest issue the game had at the time; people would have sucked it up and moved on. None of these people actually care when another country is blocked because of some NATO sanctions or something. It was just a good convergence point for every frustration up to that point and people feel it gives them more legitimacy than just balance or implementation woes.
The problem is that Arrowhead has said the exact same thing multiple times, promised to do better multiple times and their actions have never been in line with their promises. Now they’ve replied with “DM me” to a tweet from a company that deals in AI to understand feedback. What is there to understand when they don’t listen and make the game just frustrating?
It's undeniably frusterating to them and tense that people keep weaponizing review bombing if they make a change people don't want, it's literally like holding a gun to their head and threatening to destroy the studio by review bombing it because they nerfed something. It would make me give up completely.
@@ExarchGaming I agree with you about the review bombing. I think it’s disgusting in general, but especially for the things Sony is responsible for. I personally think it’s not the nerfs at this point in time. It’s more about breaking promises every time and managing player expectations, which they are extremely bad at.
What's even more annoying is that they prioritize "balancing" the player weapons above all else, instead of, you know, fixing the bugs first? This weird obsession of theirs is what led to the unnecessary railgun nerf even though the real issue behind the railgun's OPness was a bug in the first place.
@@VinceOliver04yeah, it's pretty obvious that game stability comes second to whatever sort of weird hard on they have for "balancing" weapons. And that is not what you want. Im pretty sure weve gotten 10 times the number of weapon changes vs game fixes. And no, fixing stuff that people can't access anymore doesn't count.
@@ExarchGaming Sorry but um, isn't the purpose of reviews to give feedback and inform others of what your opinion on the game is? And people are collectively hating the changes being made, so they give the game a negative review due to their experience becoming negative. How is this a review bomb if the reviews are concerning the content inside the game, that includes the Sony shit as well, why shouldn't people leave a negative review on a game that was straight up taken away from them if they lived in a certain country? Should they leave a positive review that says that "oh they're turning the game into an unfun mess but I still support the devs!!!!" or "They took away to play the game I spent money on, but it was fun when they ALLOWED me to play it so it's alright". Review bombs are by definition a mass coming together to leave negative reviews on a product while not even paying attention to the actual content of the product, Helldivers being angry that the game is being run into the ground isn't review bombing. It's feedback to a team that seems to be deaf
Tell me especially the community managers should stop trying to antagonize the player base and how do you balance a PVE game and say it's not competitive?
Counterpoint, I don't want another soy corpa CM. I'd rather they speak their mind. These guys are vets. They are gonna tell people to fk off every once in a while, and that's ok.
So the first part 100% agree with you. The 2nd part, its a little more nuanced than PvP balancing, but its def a concern. However, the theory should remain the same. There should be multiple choices that all "feel good" (be it either through sheer fun, or through usefulness) at any given difficulty. So when there's relatively limited effective choices, everyone gets shoehorned into using them. After all, no one wants to be that person just taking up space in the mission and not having any visible impact on the team's success. Thus, you could say that the PvE game is "unbalanced".
Complaining about the CMs are missing the forest for the trees. Their job is to try to blow smoke. Problem is that no amount of that smoke is going to cover up such clear development issues.
@@Darksoul9669 They aren't just blowing smoke though. They actively antagonize people in the community, start witch hunts against specific emoji's because their furry fetish they were forcing down the throats of HD2 community wasn't well received. AH's community managers that still have their job and have not been fired, are reason enough not to play, let alone everything else.
I stopped playing a while back because the nerfs took the fun away. After each nerf I’d grow to love a certain gun or loadout, and then I’d have to revise everything after the next nerf. Also, the new guns in each new pack didn’t seem to really wow me. Disappointing nerfs, disappointing new additions, I’m tired of playing.
Same for me, I loved the Slugger and how with skills that thing was a monster, but they nerfed it so hard it's not even usable. They rebuffed it but still, I'm waiting for more.
This is what made me quit Warframe a couple years ago, old players that have realised that and got tired of it goes away, and new fresh players come in and so the cycle goes on.
No weapon was overpowered, so the nerfs where uncalled-for. The game has much bigger issues. They really need to work on the old bugs and the annoying ragdolling. I cannot understand what makes them think that excessive ragdolling is a fun game mechanic.
What they're chasing is short term money gains from warbonds and just balancing the game around level 5 as that's all they can play at. These devs are just scumbags.
At the time, I do believe the railgun was overtuned (but only if we're talking about the multiplatform glitch), but since then the amount of enemies spawning has almost quadrupled. Nerfs were never the correct answer to anything AH had problems with
@@nilskuttkat4757 the devs only nerfed for short term money gains instead of long term playability. That's why every buff was basically miniscule while every nerf was devastating.
@@orangejuice9396 I'm not so sure about that. Devs shown they prefer to nerf hard, so sooner or later rail would be ruined anyways. But if not for that bug, I genuinely feel like they would touch EAT first.
HD2 has never once had a weapon that was overpowered to the point it needed nerfs. Railgun had a PS5 bug, as did the arc thrower, Eruptor had multiple bugs that compounded to give it its staggering power. However, those weapons weren't running bulldozing the game even at their highest power. Many of their nerfs hit guns because they didn't like their flavor. AH also became excessively heavy-handed with their nerfs to the point that the guns are functionally USELESS, and any buffs are either small or paired with multiple nerfs. As a "buff first" advocate, I want he developers to look first as to why a weapon is used other than its power. Railgun was used because of the massive heavy spawns and ineffectiveness of the other AT options. Fire breaker was used because of the increased chaff spawns and the anemic performance of the ARs and other chaff clear weapons. The devs keep trying to get us to use the bullet drone, but it is always going to be a downgrade to the laser drone unless the laser drone is nerfed into uselessness or the bullet drone offers a different service. I don't need the spray and pray to one-shot Bile Titans across the map, I want it to clear away a hunter patrol that is jumping on me! I want weapons to do the job they are built to do!
Regarding the comment about player numbers commonly decreasing to about 10 percent of their height I don't doubt its normal for that to happen over time, but i do doubt that's normal for a Live service to crater their player base month over month. Also regarding your points on the fact that nerfs are important. Yes they are, if something actually needs a nerf. The unfortunate truth is almost none of the options in the game are actually viable choices, but they choose to nerf the usable stuff *BEFORE* making the other stuff viable.
The concerning part is that the last big update did very little to bring players back. Interest in live service games usually is cyclical. If the updates don’t bring numbers at least temporarily up again, you’re slowly bleeding out.
the whole point of a nerf in a pve game would be that you want players to use more different gear and be able to go out and have fun with different stuff and different tactics rather than having a meta. They seem to be missing the point that they should just buff up some things, and give more varied options for freedom dispensing. Id be fine with the guns and ordnance getting stronger if maybe, they made the enemies a bit tougher, spawn more, do a bit more damage to you
The meme at 14:28 is actually not really accurate. The game released as what players wanted. But in any case the game was advertised as having "overpowered weapons". If they didn't want to create a power fantasy, they shouldn't have advertised it as one.
"They haven't communicated the value of nerfs." The issue is that their nerfs never have any value because their nerfs are solely rooted in weapon and stratagem popularity. There is no further thought put into than that, and it causes them to miss the fact that said popularity is due to most of the stuff they've put in the game being straight up bad. Difficulty due to weapons and stratagems feeling bad to use is not good difficulty and for some reason they refuse to accept that fact.
The problem is Helldivers 2 has become a shooter where you don't shoot at things. At low levels the maps are mostly empty and you just run from one place to another. At high levels engaging enemies is pointless and discouraged as you are way outmatched, so you just flee and again just keep running from one place to another. Weapons nerfs and enemies buffs have just increased the breach between this two extremes. And the thin middle ground where there were enough enemies to have a good and fun fight is now almost nonexistent.
Well said. Of course you're going to piss people off if you punish them for shooting in a shooter game. The nerfs are just a symptom, the core issue is that Arrowhead is failing at the very basics of gamedesign with their updates. Never make a player resent his own toolkit!
You're wrong about nerfs. Of the non-stratagem weapons, there are only like 4 that are usable at a difficulty above 6. ESPECIALLY after quadrupling the amount of chargers in each match. 4 usable weapons out of 33 is NOT reasonable. "We want to prevent a meta from forming." Really now?
Don't forget the devs are only clearing difficulty 5.. Also theres a reason why people say dont nerf only buffs.. Its because none of the weapons have been OP they've only been good and then got nerfed because they we're the only viable weapon (not OP viable..) at the time..
And the fact that when nerfs occur they buff the enemies at the same time. So enemies are stronger and the guns we like don't do much against them anymore
Many of us have been saying since the beginning, bring the low performing weapons up to par with the top performing ones, instead of nerfing the top performing ones to be in line with the low performing ones. We were met with calls of "That will kill the longevity of the game!" from both devs, mods and some players. Well, that remaining 1-ish% of the player base and the devs can enjoy the company of each other then, the rest of us will and have moved on to the next games.
hell, even if they were going to nerf the overperforming ones, at least do it in the same update as bringing up some underperforming ones. Then at least the players who don't want to use the nerfed weapon could try the recently buffed ones instead.
I called this a LONG time ago. Its the same problem with D&D DM's. Mostly the new ones. They get into this weird space where they forget to the story is a combined effort, making it some abstract form of them vs I mentality.
The thing that you're not understanding, is that people playing on higher difficulties aren't actually asking for Doomslayer levels of power, but rather just for: Running away shouldn't be a more reliable strategy than using your weaponry, as this both takes away the viability of heavy armor, and also isn't very fun. Nerfing our weaponry further cements 'running away' as the most viable strategy, whereas buffing our weaponry supports those who want to fight rather than run away. To add on to why Arrowhead's nerfs are bad and people never want their nerfs: Arrowhead has shown time and time again that they are completely disconnected from those who play on higher difficulties, and their reasons for nerfing various weapons aren't based on experience with weapons being too powerful, but rather that many people use them. We call this "spreadsheet nerfs". To even further add to why Arrowhead should only buff, never nerf: The Flam-40 flamethrower and the current state that it is in, is completely unjustified. It is a support weapon that is only viable, and used against the bugs because of it's requirements. You have to spend a stratagem slot on it (meaning it competes for viability with the likes of the autocannon), you have to get within 20 meters of your target, this adds significant potential for danger against the wielder, it's a flamethrower and so adds potential danger to not only the wielder but also any nearby teammates. The Flam-40 flamethrower is a weapon with a VERY specific niche, and the recent nerf it got completely removed it's viability within that niche, and then to top it off; AH also switched out its previous HIGLY REALISTIC fire-spewing animation, for something that can only be described as dogshit. The new animation isn't only unrealistic, but it's also ugly, and adds EVEN MORE potential danger to the wielder by blocking their view of the battlefield. This situation with the flamethrower is a MASSIVE fuck-up, that they justified by saying "the flamethrower couldn't shoot through fences, because of its animation, and so we changed it". Not only did NO ONE complain about the problem with the fences, but later after massive backlash did the devs come out and say that this change is irreversible. THIS IS WHY PEOPLE DON'T WANT THEIR NERFS! They make changes that aren't wanted, and sometimes when they screw up can't even reverse the unwanted changes. I'm mad at AH, just like a lot of other players, however, unlike many others I'm still playing, because somehow I'm still having fun, and I still have a sliver of hope that their design philosophy will change for the better, and Pilestedt does seem to understand the playerbase. Maybe Pilestedt can lead the charge towards change. Rant over I hope someone listens
@@HAL-9OOO This is my biggest issue with the nerfs. With these gameplay changes that worsen the game with each update, immersion is one of the few things Helldivers 2 still has going for it. And now the flamethrower nerf is affecting even THAT. The flamethrower looked really realistic at launch, it was fine as it was, and now they say that outright reverting the visual change would „break other things.“ Even if the flamethrower is buffed in a later update, the lack of immersive visuals will forever stain the many flamethrower weapons the game has to offer. I remember some of the most common positive feedback during the first month where Helldivers 2 was still well received being that the game feels like a movie to play; that any confrontation in-game can become a cinematic experience. And now they‘re even messing *that* up.
This is an issue that could have been completely avoided. In fact, the main reason the old CEO stepped down was because of this issue, an issue they promised to avoid by avoiding NERFS. They broke their promise. That's the biggest problem. They nerfed things again when they promised they wouldn't.
They have precisely one chance to save the game. And it's so easy: Listen to the playerbase. They can choose whether the continued survival of their game is more important or their ego's, which is the only explanation I can think of why they won't just do the former. Not wanting to admit they were wrong.
Space Marine is more akin to Gears of War as far as gameplay is concerned. If Focus/GamesWorkshop ever pull their heads out of their asses and make a Helldivers-esque game with a 40k skin, Helldivers 2 will surely perish.
Both are third-person shooters Both provide a PVE experience Each has you controlling their version of a super soldier. Both will have you facing down hordes & multiple enemy factions. Graphics & art style are similar. Based on my surface level observations, they would be in competition would they not?
People fundamentally misunderstand the Helldivers IP. Space Marine is the game they were expecting. Just a big, stupid horde shooter (I love Space Marine by the way). Helldivers isn't that type of game and I'll be glad when those that don't understand that move on to Space Marine 2 because they're slowly killing Helldivers 2 because they don't understand it.
They keep asking for feedback and the player base they have left is telling them no more nerfs but yet they do the opposite. Then they wonder why this shit is dying
LOL. Nobody cares about the damn CM if the game is good. Literally nobody. Setting that as the first priority means you actually do not care about the game at all, you just have a weird hangup about the CM. The first priority needs to be to buff the weapons nobody uses. To look at damage breakpoints and adjust primaries so they hit those breakpoints in a way that feels more satisfying. To have Assault Rifles be useful above difficulty 5. To make sure every single gun in the game doesn't just have a niche, but a reason to bring it instead of a shotgun. ...or, yunno, looking into ragdolling and maybe changing things so you don't spend half of combat on 8+ as a pinball... But sure. Delude yourself into thinking that firing the community manager will save the game. What are you smoking, man?
@@zerg0s "Nobody cares about the damn CM if the game is good. Literally nobody. Setting that as the first priority means you actually do not care about the game at all, you just have a weird hangup about the CM." Cue Battlefield 5, ASC Japan, The Day Before, ARK, PUBG,..
I feel like the devs dont understand that, if you as a player chose to pick a gun/stratagems because they believe it'll be fun and accomplish the mission/goal. Said loadout gets nerfed, but still out of all the other options, it is still in their mind the best way to deal with the enemies. Heavily armored enemies require specific things to be able to kill them from a gameplay perspective. If you don't have those or you are on cooldown, then you either have to wait for the cooldown to be even able to deal with them or run away because the fights not worth it. Arbitrarily increasing players downtime like that and putting them in situations where not only is it harder but you also are weaker in a literal sense, is not fun. Horde shooter game but gameplay is tuned into, just run away, you're better off. I also don't understand the CEO's point in long lead times being an issue. It's like okay, community we heard you, you dislike nerfs. At this point in time, are they not looking at what they are currently cooking and didn't think, hey this directly contradicts the new information we just learned. Let's tell the community that the next major patch will be delayed so that they could better implement and course correct. It's like you ask your partner what gift they'd like for their birthday they say x, while you already decided what you were going to get them y gift. Their birthday comes around and then you give them y gift, and you act all surprised they hate/dont like it. Why wasn't there a "oh sh!t, what I have planned is exactly what they don't want, I need to not do y and get them x"
I'm not sure why the developers are disappointed. Is it because they thought the community would be excited about the new warbond and it kinda fell flat because people were fixated on the fire mechanics nerf? It was bad decision-making to nerf fire mechanics while simultaneously releasing a fire-based warbond. I just don't think that can be stressed enough. Earlier this year (April/May) through statements and actions, Arrowhead and their former CEO led the playerbase to believe that they were going in a different direction and were done with nerfs. Then they go on their Swedish summer vacation and come back with more nerfs to weapons which they said they wouldn't do. I'm surprised that they're surprised about the playerbase reaction.
Former fair weather player here. I connect, get ragdolled, my gun is useless, I run in circles waiting for my stratagems to refresh. I disconect, play Once Human instead. No time for that BS, I got a life.
@@arcanisdivinitis You're right, I don't keep up with the meta nor do I seek to cheese the game's mechanics. I just play the game when I got the time. If Arrowhead doesn't want me as a player that's fine, plenty of better ways to pass the time. Soooooo, how often do you use the LAS-7 again? The electric shotgun? DMR's? Assault Rifles?
@@TheStephaneAdam game has plenty of issues, most of those guns are fine, don't feel great or have other issues. Arc Blitzer I stopped using because it has issues hitting point blank hunters. Hell I stick to lvl 7 because higher lvl are to much work/stress. Anyways try it with voice or not, I'm not your dad.
Players like arcanis are the reason why they game is becoming stupid. He probably cheeses the high difficulties and then claims there's no challenge and DEMANDS that people play the way he wants. Keeps telling people that it's ALWAYS a SkILl IsSUe when it's bad programming, if not broken entirely, and makes excuses left and right for AH and all they're horrible decisions. Makes me wish people like him would go off and sweat in PvP competitive shit holes and leave PvE games alone since they're supposed to BE power fantasies and not some try-hard sweat mine for people who no-life games.
Recently for me, the only ones playing Super Helldive are people good at the game. Dropped back down to difficulty 9 for a game and "had that one guy" dropping a cluster bomb on the rest of his team, draining all of the remaining lives. Failed more difficulty 9s than 10s this week.
I've heard that from the start, since the railgun nerf, when everyting was overperforming, before all of the nerfs, meanwhile the people with more than 80IQ were already clearing all the content in the game with nearly every other weapon the bad players were calling bad even back then. You should watch Takibo's solo runs.
@@pnb328 Just because people can clear missions doesn't mean it's fun to do so. All the weapons and stratagems feel like total dogshit to operate so why even play the game if it's not fun? I'm not interested in being in a dick measuring contest with like a dozen tryhards who are showing off to no one.
@@pnb328 Yeah because solo players are known for their diverse loadouts, am I right? Let's balance the game for like, 1% of the playerbase. That's an amazing idea.
You are missing the point to people saying "dont nerf just buff".. There hasnt been many OP weapons at all, and the ones that are have already been knocked down. but they arent nerfing OP weapons they are just nerfing OK weapons that are always being used because of how bad the rest of the weapons are instead of making bad weapons good. They are punishing us for people using the best weapons currently. and they arent even that good. Its far different to nerf a weapon that clearly broken in some regard. But they havent nerfed a single weapon recently that was OP, They need to stop nerfing weapons that over perform and buff weapons under performing.
I just don't see how buffing the off-meta guns to make them more fun and rewarding to use at the high end will make the game less fun for the gamer dads who play 3 hours a week on maybe difficulty 3. If anything they'll be happy when they notice that they can now take on difficulty 4 and find success if difficulty 3 becomes too easy.
@@TheSuperappelflap I disagree. Getting used to a weapon on a lower difficulty, moving up to a higher difficulty only to be holding essentially an entirely different weapon would feel horrible!
@@2MeterLP I don't understand why anyone would want to move to a different difficulty. You want to play a hard game, you pick hard from the start and figure it out. You want to play an easy game, pick easy. It's not like playing a game on easy mode teaches you anything about playing on hard, you jus learn a bunch of bad habits.
@@TheSuperappelflap What kind of nonsense opinion is that? You start low to build mechanical and tactical skill, then increase difficulty to fit your increasing skill. Do you ask children why they start out with training wheels on their bikes? And sometimes I like to switch to a lower difficulty to have a more relaxed experience or to a higher one to challenge myself.
@@2MeterLP yeah but you're not a kid. Unless this is the first game you've ever played I don't see the reason to start at a low difficulty if you want to play on a harder one. You won't develop any mechanical or tactical skill playing in the little kiddie pool, just like riding a bike with side wheels won't teach you how to maintain your balance. That's why your dad took the side wheels off when you were 3 years old.
I just love when youtuber talk out the asses about games and there community's that they themselves have clearly never taken part in then upload a 20 min long video talking absolute nonsense because the topics trendy...
I have a hard time finding sympathy for a team that said months ago: "hey were going to tone down and do less nerfs" only to then do another slew of unneeded nerfs. This most recent update didnt need to be more nerfs, those could have been taken out once they knew they were in hot water for nerfs, but they did them anyway. If that means delaying or halting updates for a few months, that would have been preferable to them going back on what they said their plan was moving forward. Pipeline be damned. If you know you're in hot water for something, pushing out an update with more of that something, is not going to net you any new fans.
For me I stopped playing because it just felt so incredibly grindy. It's like 40 hours boring sample grinding for a 1% buff to something. That and the fact they lock certain kinds of missions behind whether a planet is being actively attacked or defended meaning I can't always even play the game mode I'm in the mood for.
The funny thing idiots at first wanted the nerfs. Think back man this all started with the railgun. But they messed up soooo bad that the people who enjoyed the slop now are starting to get annoyed lmao
@Ngw8888 Umm no we didn't want that nerfed. Three people did and they listened to those three people. In a game where there is no competition there is no reason to nerf.
So you don't want a balanced game then? At times in a game certain guns can overperform or underperform, which for instance this happens with every single CoD game. At the end of the day this is a PvE game not a PvP game and they're continuously bringing out free content.
The problem with Helldivers 2 is that primary weapons won't change the difficulty of missions on the higher tiers much, yet they are still horribly underpowered. primary weapons, no matter how powerful they are, only contribute to maybe half the kills you get, if that. The rest comes from strategems and support weapons. Improving primary weapons will still mean you have to rely on strategems for all the heavy armor enemies that flood the map at those difficulty levels, and it would just make it less frustrating to deal with the chaff that you would otherwise rely on strategems for.
Just seems to me stats on gear would help increase damage on weapon as a player progresses. Making weapons that have a grind associated with them stronger would definitely help, too.
I don't think Bellular gets that virtually all the weapons in the game are worthless against the enemies. So the few that actually let you succeed, they nerf and then turn around and buff the enemies. So no in this game, nerfs are not good. And for the entirety from what I play, the game can just instant kill you whenever it feels like it. There's challenge, and then there's just no point in trying.
As someone who is lv112 The problem I have, is that if everything is equally strong or weak, nothing is particularly fun/special, every weapon should have unique areas where they perform exceptionally well, shotguns and flame throwers should be unmatched on close range, even against heavy targets. Machine guns and automatic weapons should be consistent, and universally effective, rifles/sniper/ect are your ranged heavy hitters, they should be exceptionally lethal but slow and risky at close range. But ultimately, nothing rly feels particularly strong, flamethrowers are more of a hazard than a group clearing tool, high risk and no reward Shotguns don’t pack a strong enough punch even against medium targets. Assault rifles chew through ammo and are incredibly limited in what they can engage with. And rifles/snipers are just outright pointless in my experience, you got “shotguns” that can outperform them in close, medium, and long range. And their damage is just suboptimal, the best weapon you had for that particular class of weapon got nerfed into oblivion when it’s explosive damage got dragged through the dirt, so you ended up with a worse dominator. This same sentiment is with all special weapons also, the only special that felt like it actually mattered for 99% of encounters, was EAT’s and the quasar (since its just an infinite EAT) Yea you had some notable specials that could shred enemies when used in tandem. But at every opportunity AH goes ahead and makes them feel not so special. And don’t even get me started on the stratagems. Some are just outright useless (looks at anything smoke related) Some are just underwhelming (the mechs) And some are just outright worse than others which simply do the exact same thing but better (orbital EMS VS EMS mortar, 500kg VS orbital strike, GAS….) Yes. A defined meta should and shouldn’t rly exist in HD2, fire should be fantastic against bugs, but bad against bots. Tesla weapons like the blitzer and tower should be more effective against bots VS bugs. Matchups for situations should determine what you pick as the best tool for the job, Since you can’t use a screwdriver to tighten a bolt.
Problem is they aren't using their tools right. They nerf the only good weapons without buffing the utter garbage ones so we end up with no decent equipment across the board
I don't think you've done the necessary research to get an idea of the history of the nerfs. The game devs say they don't want to establish a meta, yet at the same time they nerf things until they force a meta. The autocannon is viable, reliable and useful in every and all contexts. It is the one solution to every problem in the game and has avoided being nerfed because the CCO has it as their favourite. The balance team does not dare touch it, but this just creates a meta where everyone should run the auto-cannon. And that's what the dwindling player base are doing. Using the one thing that hasn't been nerfed into the ground yet.
Arrowhead: Here's some nerfs Everyone: STOP Arrowhead: We hear your feedback, here's some nerfs Everyone: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP Arrowhead: Nerfs :) Arrowhead: Damn, we're disappointed with how we are handling balancing
Please don't forget they are adding stronger enemies while you are using weaker weapons while having 0 ammo when surrounded by enemies. Death is fine, dying because you have to spend full clips of ammo on an elite and there are 20 more nearby with more spawning in isn't as fine. Stratagems? you already used them on two titans and two more just spawned
The players are significantly more disappointed in the developers Also, the only buff argument at the end of the vid is stupid. This is a scenario that hasn't happened with hd2 and is irrelevant. The devs spend more time nerfing us while buffing the enemies instead of fixing bugs. Each new patch brings a mountain of new problems.
Have you seen the patch notes (like in general, not just the most recent one)? There's more buffs than nerfs, and not just the little ammo buffs or durability damage buffs. Go on the GG wiki site (not the other one) and look up guns, they have the changes at the bottom of the page. Especially if it's guns that you consider nerfed, and you'll see they buff them back within a couple of months if they need it. There is a significant negative reinforcement bias when it comes to nerfs, but even this patch, the flamethrower and the breaker incendiary were only as good as they were because of significant buffs in the previous patches.
@googlygoink No I'm blind...yeah I've seen it, more than just reading and watching it... I've played it. Being in denial at any point of how bad the bugs and experience currently is, is wild. Keep the blinders on bud.
TL;DR: The devs wanted to make a Grunt-fantasy military-sim game where your lives are cheap and you will die a lot. They accidentally made a horde shooter that was really good. They realized that was not what they wanted to make and started to nerf and change everything to make it more in line with what they wanted. Players hated it and left in droves. Devs are busy doing the surprise-pikachu face while still nerfing everything even as their playerbase dwindles more and more. For 6 months straight we kept telling them to stop making bad changes and they kept making it. They deserve every bit of failure they get for being completely incompetent at listening to their community.
Im sorta sick of Arrowhead constantly going "We fucked up, we promise, we'll make it better" only to do the same shit next time after fixing things. Its mentally exhausting. I've not been able to get myself to play the game, because I just dont wanna deal with it.
It's baffling to me that every single developer refuses to learn a lesson that has been established like a decade ago. Don't do nerfs in PvE when players are having fun unless something actually breaks the game. GGG had to learn it a few years ago, Blizzard learned it (again) with D4, Bungie learned it. It's not that hard devs...
They had a great game...they had a great community response. They squandered and ruined it...I don't care if you're a casual or a hardcore player, shooting and blowing stuff up is the fun part of the game, the devs have done everything they can to prevent it.
I don’t think players at the high end are against nerfs. The problem is the developers have no idea about their game and nerf on popularity based on an excel spreadsheet and how fast a weapon can deal with chargers.
I'm tired of AH's corporate pr statements. It's the 5th time we've heard "we're listening, we'll do better." This game's been out for months with tons of community feedback, yet they ask for another 60 days to reevaluate their plans again. What a joke. AH needs to take a page on Deep Rock Galactic.
I just keep bouncing between DRG and WWZ: Aftermath tbh. Helldivers 2 just isn't doing much. Honestly I might try playing the first one to see how it compares to this.
"A game for everyone is a game for no-one". This might be the coolest and most empty statement ever. It can literally mean anything. I'll bet Johant Pilestedt thought of it. He is very good at saying a lot of shite and doing next to nothing at all.
Here’s all I’ll say as a former helldive player; so many enemies that require either boatloads of ammo to kill or actual anti-tank weapons to kill spawn on the highest difficulties that you can’t afford to take “cool and/or fun” weapons. If it’s not efficient or optimal, you’ll run out of ammo, all your strats will be on cooldown, and you’ll be left with no other option than to die. The problem with nerfing “overturned” weapons in HD2 is that it makes playing at those difficulties a chore at best, or monotonous at worst as everyone playing is crowded into an even smaller meta.
I hope the 'Doom Marine' fantasy comparison is just an exaggeration. While I want my equipment to feel effective and that it's doing its job, I enjoy that Helldivers 2 never feels 'mindless'. Every shot, every movement and every positioning feels like a deliberate choice of the player instead of 'holding down a button'. That's a big part of the fun for me.
They didn't have to buff anything. Just do not nerf everything people found fun. I know that by the lore you are supposed to feel like shit as a Helldiver, but it doesn't mean i can't also have fun while playing. It's the fun they took away, that pissed me off.
They have to revert the nerfs they’ve already done. We could have multiple loadout and options by now. But they consistently nerf the good weapons right before new weapons drop.
They nerfed too close to the sun and buffed the bugs. The start of the game had the best balance where experienced players succeeded at least 30% of the end game matches. They should have raised the tide for the rest of the weapons and added enemy variety not changed existing enemies unless they had a bug. 5:32 the game fell when Malevelon did
Some of your points clearly tells me that you have not played Helldivers 2 much if at all and for sure not played it lately as you do not seem to understand the main problems and the well founded frustrations by many players. The reality is that the Helldivers 2 devs have been nerfing weapons to force the players to play the game the way they want the players to play it. They want to force the players to depend on their stratagems and not use their weapons as much. But the reality is that the cooldowns on the stratagems and how many uses you have with them are forcing you to depend on your weapons or to run around like an idiot instead of having fun fighting. There is no weapon that has been overpowered for a long time in Helldivers 2, but the devs have not liked that some weapons have made it possible to mainly rely on them instead of the stratagems. The reality is that most weapons in Helldivers 2 are close to useless, forcing most/all to use the few weapons that are good. People have not used those weapons because they have been overpowered, but because they were the only ones that worked. There has in reality not been any players that have complained about weapons being overpowered and needed nerfing. This is just something the devs have cooked up in their own damaged brains and that in a purely PVE game... And was it a coincidence that Arrowhead nerfed the few good weapons a very short time before that they offered new and strong weapons in the new battle pass that you can buy for real money? There is also clearly a disgusting elitist thinking among many if not all of the devs where they clearly think you suck at playing the game if you don't think it is fun to totally rely on your stratagems all the time and that you are an idiot if you don't think it is fun to die nonstop during the 30-120 minutes most players have available to play the game now and then. Last time I checked, was the main reason for playing games to have fun, but the devs at Arrowhead clearly do not want most of their players to have fun. They want the game to be hard and frustrating for most and they clearly do not understand the reality of how it is for the average gamer. If Arrowhead do not soon understand that most gamers just want to have lots of fun alone, with friends or with randoms instead of hours of frustration and dying, then Helldivers 2 will soon be another dead live service game.
I don’t think I have ever played a game with so many nerfs than Helldivers. The community reaction is not only more than justified, it’s not loud enough.
Arrowhead have a talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. On your point of nerfs being good because of one or two weapons being too good, the problem is that nearly every single weapon is utterly useless in higher difficulties. That is what’s forcing people to one or two guns.
The nerfs, really only 2 of them, wouldn't have been recieved quite so badly if there weren't a long list of bugs and crash issues or if it had come alongside interesting content to distract people. Releasing content in the trailer instead of letting players stumble acorss it in the game like they did with the shriekers meant that I felt like I had burned through the new content after a session or two of playing. The update was a little disappointing and then the IC breaker nerf on top of that felt like AH was taking our toys away (and some players acted exactly like toddlers when you take their toys away). There was just no real fun in this update.
Helldivers 2's actual business model seems to be to put high powered stuff in the game then nerf it just before the next battlepass thing with new high powered stuff in it to encourage super credit sales. I don't think they'll ever reach a good level of proper balance because it doesn't make money.
If that's the business model. Then they are terrible at it. The last battlepass was fire themed with several flamethrowers. Arrowhead literally nerfed fire damage, physics and graphics just a couple of days before the battlepass was launched.
They complain that the "rest of the content" they made is overshadowed by everyone talking about the nerfs and how the game doesnt feel fun to play when the "content" they added is so incredibly minimal and could be ignored
The damage is already done. I run and own a Helldivers 2 LFG server on discord, and it went from a thriving, active server, to a ghost town. Most people moved on and won't return.
AH only has themselves to blame if their new content is underwhelming. I mean, what did we get? 1. Super ragdoll rockets on bots. 2. ragdoll artillery on bots 3. Harder to kill scout striders with ragdoll rockets. 4. Impaler, THE ultimate stunlock machine that doesn't even need line of sight to kill you. 5. Reskins of two bug enemies that are slightly tougher. 6. A reskin of a planet so that we can't see on it (IOW, nothing new. It's just different flavor like the 5-6 other no sight modifers) 7. Massive nerfs to weapons including the majority of their new warbond/battle pass. 8. super bases only on the highest difficulty. What are we, the players, supposed to be excited about?
7:13 LMAO maybe cater to the casual players that became instant fans instead of catering to the small group of try-hard gamers… this is why CoD, Fortnite and other games keep such a big player base, they don’t focus on the try hards, they focus on casual gamers preferences. Edit: They struck gold while looking for silver and decided to discard the gold to continue the search for silver 🤦♂️
People also aren't really talking about the good stuff because a lot of it is weighed down by being incredibly buggy. The new Impaler, the most interesting and unique new enemy being added? Has infinite range, no need for line of sight, and can instantly kill you or even very easily launch you out of the map such that you lose all your held items. The new Barrager Tank has no visible weak spot, clips into itself to shoot you point blank, and continues firing after being destroyed. The Rocket Strider will continue shooting its rockets after you blow them up. Both of those new bot enemies' rockets also launch you so damn far it's ridiculous. Performance has also continued to worsen, such that many people that were able to play at launch have literally been patched out of playability. This has only been exacerbated by the useless anticheat they force players to use which has been incredibly publicly shown to be utterly incompetent last night. Last night they started a Major Order to collect a total of like 75,000,000 samples. It was at about 1.5% completion after 6 or so hours when suddenly hackers spawned all the samples and completed the major order within literal minutes. There's no worse way of showing the entire community how useless your anticheat is than that.
This coverage is a massive reach and so heavily biased it’s kind of unreal. It’s really not complicated. Don’t release patches that do things like taking a flamethrower from a solid choice to being one of the worst and with worse visuals to boot. Don’t add enemies that are so clearly overpowered and buggy like the impalers. The patch that preceded this one was not nearly as scrutinized because it actually made steps towards a more stable a fun experience. Who is the current Impaler for? This game has been a development mess but I guess we can’t expect that level of scrutiny from you guys. Kinda disappointing really. Not sure why things like differing opinions on feedback is being discussed when they have more often than not failed to implement their own designs properly and that’s kind of the bigger story no?
Impalers are easy to take down and not overpowered at all, melting in mere seconds and usually 1 shot by a lot of the heavy damage stratagems and they rarely ever actually hit you if you aren't standing still. That being said, they are annoying I'll give you that. You'll already be fighting 3 dozen bugs and this fella will just start shaking the ground around you to get you to focus on them, before another one comes 3 seconds after you killed the last and you have to manoeuvre around the still alive swarm of bugs you deviated from to go kill this new guy, then rinse and repeat a few times depending on difficulty. Though I usually find them annoying when I'm by myself, with most terminid things, sticking together is a much much better option due to 4 times the firepower.
It’s not about how quickly a stratagem can kill them. Their logical telegraph is that their exposed head when tendrils are out should be a pretty vulnerable spot and it really isn’t. Even then their real OP nature is tendrils spanning over 100m and those tendrils are pretty damn tanky when it should just be a quick priority target to shoot and move on with range and ragdoll capabilities like that. Not mention the very “fun” ability to fling you 1000s of meters which should have been caught and roll out of them delayed until fixed. I expect a better experience with more polish from a supposed finished live service than a Star Citizen alpha patch lol
@@Darksoul9669 Their exposed head is a weakspot for some weapons, my friend tears it apart in little time using the machine gun for example. But yeah the ragdoll bugs are stupid, with a lot of things in this game, its so buggy, thats honestly the biggest problem in my eyes, content gets released in broken states and bugs persist for months, invisible landmines for example have been a bug since day 1. I do hope they go through with the beta stuff so if they dont have time to test it we can at least preferably before they put it in game...
It's what happens when you don't actually play the games you are talking about for a RUclips video. And instead just read notes off of a script someone else made, and then pretend to speak with authority on a game you know next to nothing about, while also letting your extreme pro developer bias cause you to carry water for an extremely out of touch CEO. All the while doing ridiculous mental gymnastics to justify the CEOs blatant lack of awareness to a near universal consumer sentiment on his studios own game. As he tries to hide his ignorance behind empty nothing statements like that "letter to the community"
I understand the player frustration. After the last update I was playing a running away sim for first few rounds. And it baffles me that they don’t buff less fun weapons instead of nerfing fun weapons. But I also get the dev perspective. It does seem like they wanted to create a “balanced” milsim (grounded in reality except when it don’t) but players find the power fantasy more compelling. The game was more successful than they expected so the design philosophy was challenged and they weren’t prepared. And they are right that what one person wants isn’t what everyone wants. However, nerfing fun weapon is probably something no one wants except someone trying to create “balance” on spreadsheet.
Problem is they keep making the game harder , keep fking with the balancing and it’s pissing people off again and again, there stripping away more and more of what majority of the players like and enjoy. So the new expansion update literally does nothing but adds more bull shit , the game suffers from awful progression with 0 rewards , they keep adding in bull shit but no new weapons new gear new rewards etc they just make it harder and nerf the players and add in the occasional warband that usually have trash.
"Arrowhead is a small team." It doesn't take a large team to change damage numbers on a weapon. You're literally changing a simple input. If they gave me the dev tools I could have half the game's weapons stats changed AND tested in a week by myself. I used to do it all the time when I modded other games; all you need is the tools and the dedication.
It's really not this complicated. The game that was advertised and that we got at launch was, as you say, more like Doom 2016 or Space Marine. The game the devs somehow thought they were making and wanted to make was a starship troopers game. Thus a lot of people that bought the game they actually made and marketed are going to get pissed off by every step they take towards the game they thought they were making and failed to make. And it seems pretty clear that they failed to make their game the way they wanted because they've made the internals so ridiculously complex that they can no longer understand the ramifications of turning any of the knobs and dials they have. Something like _fifty_ individual stats for every gun is _absurd_ and should have been rejected as a design all those years ago when they were doing the initial planning.
The argument of "3h dadgamers want something different from the game than 9-10 difficulty helldivers" kinda shows the developers still do not understand the issue. This issue was solved at launch, namely the nine (now 10) difficulties. The problem at its core is the crumbling of fun mechanics and powerful weapons in a PvE game. People find a tool they like, and 1 month later it gets nerfed while useless weapons remain untouched. 3h a week dadgamers would never care about 1 or 2 overpowered weapons, high difficulty helldivers neither. We all want the same thing; fun weapons and having our way of playing the game be left undisturbed or catered too. That's the blessing of helldivers 2 being a PvE game, if the players are brokenly overpowered all those who suffer are npcs. The only meta you have to be aware of isn't balance, its to avoid only a *single* gamestyle becoming effective. Having all weapons being capable in their designated role should be the only concern, not some weapons being a tad too capable.
At this point I now assume that the state of the game at launch (a chaotic satire, horde shooter that wanted you to push forward though waves of enemies) was a mistake. A result of the devs just being so terrible at implementing their intended vision that something completely different came about. And now the changes that were meant to fix that inital error are pushing away 90% of the player base, those that liked what they accidentally made. They nerf guns. Jack up the spawn rate to the point where all you can do is run away. Add more and more enemies that half + of the guns are useless against. Add more enemies that rag-doll you into oblivion. They want you to avoid combat, throw down bombs and run between their terrible map objectives. They want players to focus on the absolute worst aspects of the game, while they make the good aspects worse and worse. Baffling. Just baffling.
When the majority of guns are useless, a few guns are meh, and a couple are slightly OP your target should be to massively buff the useless guns, slightly buff the meh guns and slightly nerf the op guns. It appears they opted to go with slightly buffing a few of the useless guns, leaving the meh guns alone, and massively nerfing the slightly op guns.
Honestly they haven't learned anything since week 1 with railgun, they just got away with it, and now community is just fed up... Ultra nerfing is never the answer, how many different studio have to go through the same scenario is mind blowing! They were sitting on a golden goose and just had to fuck it up, I don't get it! I guess if they're not cornering themselves they wont learn
"They haven't comminuted the value of nerfs" When they've done nothing but nerf the players while buffing the enemies, I think they've comminuted their stance well enough.
The CEO was super disingenious. All types of players, be it the 3hrs a week crowd or the 30hrs a week crowd were saying the exact same thing: stop nerfing the okay guns and start buffing the bad guns. They were ALL saying it. All feedback was identical. The crowd the CEO was refering to which was giving them feedback to nerf things were devs themselves, and only them.
What are they on about? The 3 hour a week casual dads are not the ones complaining online. They can feel it’s not fun anymore and they leave. Most of them lose interest. Most of the people that I’ve talked to say it’s not fun the way it used to be.
I also find the community’s diegetic response to the pandemonium entertaining! A new faction within the playerbase, called the “Chaosdivers,” literally consists of Helldivers who grief and teamkill to express their disdain towards Super Earth-or in reality, the devs.
@@JohnLeBoeufLittle At first, on multiple social media outlets, displeased players wanting to continue their roleplay within the universe of Helldivers were jokingly trying to break Super Earth's status quo by making posts and comments about the true nature of their position. The wider playerbase gave them the "Chaosdivers" label, but later, some "edgy" players decided to take this further and begin team killing their mates while spamming the chat with messages akin to that of Chaosdivers messages. While these instances are rare in reality, they've been blown out of proportion such that chaosdivers are now associated with these griefers
Yeah, how entertaining. Players who just wanna have a few hours of fun getting griefed. So nice. Just stop playing the game if you don't like it, you know. Idk what these people's life is like that they wanna ruin other people's fun like that
@@gabernment I think that's the wrong thing to keep relaying. I don't see anything good coming from that without evidence. Just focus on the fun part, the memes and the roleplay within the community. I don't think the community has much to gain with associating the entire fun aspect of this with griefing. Look at the comment above as an example. Maybe stop spreading the actions of a few as if it represents the entire element.
i feel like their was few weapons that were fun and powerful in higher difficulties now theirs just the weapons that are just powerful enough for higher difficulties
Here is the thing about the flamer nerf. when you use the flamer type flame weapons you have to get close enough to the bugs or bots to get killed by a big enough group that is one of the costs. If the weapon dose not make that worth it then its not worth using.
Helldivers situation is creazy. Arrow Head broken their promises and player's trust, to the point where playerbase is in open rebelion against devs. Not only are majority of players refusing to fight off one faction, allowing it to take player homeworld effectivelly ending war effort. But more and more people turn to actually griefing other players by team-killing and sabotaging others efforts. Ah done gone Blizzard, catering to small loud % of players and now majority is up in arms to boycot them.
This really does seem to be a case of developers not listening to their customer. I want to feel powerful when I play a game. I don’t want to feel like the prey.
I like your Doom2016/Doom Eternal analogue. It also visited my head after all of this patches, how from awesome shooter game went to conceptual garbage, where every weapon is not a weapon but a puzzle piece with exact numbers which you must match with another puzzle piece which is the enemy. Absolutely disgusting and tedious.
Jesus its not that helldivers devs only want their game played by esports pros, its just that they dont know what they are doing. The audience is bigger and has more noobs yes, but the audience sees this as a challenged and are rising to it, just for the devs to nerf popular gear so the harder missions have a smaller clear rate. Thats all that is happing, the devs have in mind how their audience should do things, and they think they should lose more, and are doing nerfs to gear that aren't even doing their job well. If they want players to use the other guns they will buff them, but right now the majority of primaries and secondaries cannot fight a majority of enemies types let alone clear a horde of them. Now the reason why they are pivoting these nerfs is that players found a way to that makes the harder difficulty's easier. Don't shoot, kite, yes the helldivers dev have nerf every gun into the ground so much that its better to not call in gear at spawn. If you dont know all pods that are not helldivers spawn pods makes noise and every patrol goes to them, so if you spawn and call in your true gear or the real guns then a near by patrol will gank you, So run up to a obj, orb it or bomb it then run and call gear IF you have to. Only shoot to get out of the obj and run all the time. So devs dont like that many chose stealth in their horde shooter, because shooting is now suboptimal. Best part is that this will cut your mission time up to 15 minuets. The devs see us complaining and say skill issue on reddit and twitter and now are mad that they made a game that so easy on hardest mission that we dont even have to shoot. The people who are truly unskilled and now bending their knee and looking up at us with spite. Muttering how low we are but they know if they get rid of the stealth system without buffing the guns their live service would be dead, so they have to leave it for now. Then reverse every nerf with their tail between their legs. This has never been about skill, always about fun, and the most fun you can have on helldivers is the novelty of it for the first 20 hours and when the new race comes out it will be bumped up to 30 hours. After that its repetitive disappointment of unlocking new guns, call ins, and gear, that are either bad or will get worse in the next update. Like how do you have a "heavy" Mech that dies to one rocket from a basic enemy, (literally the robot with a rocket launcher.) Helldivers is rainbow six siege all over again, but its funny, rainbow devs wanted people to pick other operators so they nerfed the most picked gear but then turned their tactical game into a run and gun shooter now helldivers devs wanted more people to lose in their higher difficulties but turned it into a very easy splinter cell/metal gear.
@@Cord64_o7 Yeah, I did read the whole thing, cant disagree with what you wrote, just a tip to try to make it a bit easier to read next time you pen an essay
Doesn’t matter what the devs think/feel. What they DO is directly against community stated preferences again and human and again, their own -anti fun league- “balance” and discord mod teams are CONSTANTLY at war with the player base and anything “reliable”/fed-back and are actively undermining the generally decent actions of the former CEO, the new content teams and are effing with the enemy spawn system every 2-3 weeks for the worse almost every time for months Now. In any other company I’d says it’s a rogue employee and they need to be disciplined. With AH being a co-op I’d say it’s 2-3 people actively working against the company/decided-upon goals so they need to be put in a room and beaten soundly until they leave or start to behave.
I disagree with you. They shouldn’t be balancing the game to the top players anyway because they can always just spawn more enemies. The top players are just cheesing the game anyway and running away constantly. They need to balance for levels 5-7 because I’m confident that’s where most players are playing. They have made all the guns weaker while adding more and more armored enemies. This is not rocket science. Buff the weapons that suck that no one wants to use before needing anything then you can find out if the weapons you think are Op really are. And give us new tools to destroy things when you add new enemies.
I don't think buff everything is the solution, and I think nerfs CAN be good. The issue is it seems like ALL they do is nerf with MINIMAL buffs to things that suck (making them STILL suck, just a bit less.) You have a dozen turds and 3 sausages, the solution isn't to polish 2 of the turds and make the 3 sausages shit...
yea... when players feel like they dont have a viable option after you nerf a couple weapons, your issue isnt the 1-3 weapons that were nerfed. its the 20 other fucking weapons that nobody wants to use.
![Gucci Mane & Sexyy Red - You Don't Love Me [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/j7IBqyFKT4c/mqdefault.jpg)
Catch the story of how Activision nuked a popular MW2 mod & support our team: bellular.games/epics-billion-dollar-store-victory-and-activision-profits-from-cancelled-mod/
Back in the day we used this ancient invention called mp3 gain to level output on digital audio clips.. You might want to look for something similiar so you wont bucher headphone users when clips change.
youre defending these devs way too much
To be frank the defence of the developer came across as lacking understanding of past events and the actual state of the game since the latest patch.
Ooh boohoo, plenty enough youtubers jump on the hate train for views, go to them@@dougwhaley3974
That randomly placed acoustic foam with giant holes in it.
I find it hilarious that they nerfed everything fire based on the fire based content patch.
No matter how you feel about nerfs and buffs... That was an absolutely braindead marketting move, I'd actually fire the CEO over this.
What the heck were they expecting???
they've buffed fire several times before the nerf though
@@TheVeryHungrySingularity yeah makes you wonder why they chose to make all their time buffing fire a complete and total waste of time and decided to nerf fire into the ground.
Seriously, are players supposed to get hyped over two of the 3 weapons being nerfed before they're even released? LMAO, no wonder AH have so many issues, they don't have just Alexis sabotaging them, they must have an entire deptartment dedicated to brainstorming the stupidest fucking ideas!
whats even worse is the fire nerf was listed as a "misc fix". a single dedicated line in the middle of a huge list at the bottom of the patch notes
"fire now works more realistically"
meanwhile the fire animation is different and now works less realistically than it did at launch.
I'd be... somewhat okay with slight nerfs to some weapons if all weapons were viable in some way, but that's not what Arrowhead gave us. As I've seen one person say, "If Arrowhead ran an automotive repair shop and a car came in with three flat tires, they'd deflate the one good tire so they're all flat."
When the first round of weapon nerfs came, my example at the time was "Arrowhead is a kingdom that asked us to slay a dragon, and they gave us the choice of a sword and shield or a pile of sticks and stones. Arrowhead then got so mad about people only choosing the sword and shield that they blunted our blades and shattered our shields."
Like I’d be okay with a auto canon nerf done correctly as it’s literal only OP weapon, it can literal do every situation easily, destroy bases ✅, destroy common heavies ✅, and I can go on, the only real downside is backpack but then you get a extra stratagem. Like if arrowhead wants to go by it’s “it was a bit to reliable” then auto canon should be on the chopping block but they won’t nerf it
@@enriqueperezarce5485 It is the former ceo's favorite.
@@enriqueperezarce5485Nerfing the auto cannon in the current state of things will kill high difficulty lobbies
@@enriqueperezarce5485The fun part is this only applies to the bots. Against bugs it is good until you run into one singular charger.
@@enriqueperezarce5485ironically the Arrowhead team has pointed to the Autocannon as the perfectly balanced weapon gold standard. According to them it is the standard they are looking to have all weapons balanced against lmao
AH: "Our game was so unexpectedly big it's tough to figure out what the playerbase wants."
Players: "Stop nerfing the guns."
AH: "It's really new territory for us, we need to discover how to make the players happy."
Players: "We just told you, stop nerfing the guns."
AH: "It really is a big unknown how to cater to these different groups of players."
Casual and blaster players in unison: "Stop. Nerfing. The. Guns."
AH: "Yeah, it's a mystery but we promise we're listening."
literally like they are so far up their own asses its insane.
If the Helldivers 2 developers made Warframe they would 100% have completely removed all those initially unintended movement mechanics that would go on to become a core part of the Warframes identity.
If they managed Warframe like how they've handled Helldivers 2, there is no way Warframe or Digital Extremes would still exist today.
Hearing Shams do corporate speak was so eye-rolling. "CEO SPEAKS! ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS!".
"MESSAGE FROM OUR DIRECTOR TO PLAYER BASE - WE WILL TRY TO DO SOMETHING GOOD IN NEXT 60 DAYS."
@@e2rqey exactly, I think Rebecca or whole DE could give them some tips and tricks on how to NOT fuck up.
It's so much this and everyone knows at this point they 1. Don't understand. 2. Aren't listening. 3. Can't play their own game at a competent level.
Players: "You aren't listening, we're done playing.
Arrowhead: "That's your fault for complaining"
Sometimes, things to deserve to go up in flaming failure. Certainly hope Arrowhead does.
You can maybe thinking about nerfing when most of your weapons are well balanced. The problem with HD2 is that most of the guns are worthless.
Agreed, also stats just don't seem to matter either.
This is the main reason I stopped playing the game. From like 20+ weapons, only 1-2 were fun to use, then you see patches where they nerf those weapons. Sometimes they did buff 1 weapon, and I started playing with it, felt great just to see them nerf it next patch. It's such a shame, fun game, but they fumbled so bad.
This is exactly the main problem and something the one that made this video do not understand at all.
@@SuperZura91 Problem that they "buff" while nerfing at the same time plus buffing enemies making those buffs kind of pointless, taking more than giving.
Exactly this. I don't want to run a Breaker Incendiary on every drop to a bug planet, I'd rather use a Liberator or a Diligence, that's how I like to play. But if I don't bring a Breaker, I can't kill bugs fast enough. Don't nerf the Breaker, give me something else I can use instead.
17:27 You forgot one thing here. They buffed the enemies multiple times while nerfing the players. Nothing really changed on our end and things were being done well enough when suddenly they started nerfing guns off of usage rate alone. The CEO has gone on record to say that one of the guns nerfed was balanced pretty well and they nerfed it just cause it was being used too much.
I don't want to jinx it, but it looks like they're on their way to introduce gameplay changing mtx, like a powerful loadout that overshadow all of the other weapons
Dont forget all people crying in discord and subreddit about "meta" where most players used Breakers, and were constantly telling people to play anything else they like. Meanwhile alternative was gun locked in last tier of basic pass or pisswater ARs that needed whole clip to kill anything bigger than basic grunt. So instead of bringing ARs up to the par to be competitive options to Breakers, they decided to kneecap shotguns.
And then you had Eruptor situation, where people were using gun pointblank and crying the explosion/shrapnels killed them and demanded nerf to the power of weapon, which resulted in gun being completely gutted and performing much much worse than before, even not accounting handling that felt like you were holding tank turret in your arms instead of gun, or miniscule ammo size - which after the nerf barely lasted for more two encounters.
@@lo53n whoa whoa whoa, they buffed the hell out of the Slugger. And then they nerfed that into the ground too 😂
@@tatersalad76 and then buffed it again... for now
when u spend 50 bullets on a small enemy and it wont die...
devs: lets fucking nerf the gun again.
players: wait what why???
devs: you are right. our bad.
players: o thank go-
devs: we threw in a new gun. same shit. just behind a battlepass. and we also nerfed it day1.
bruh... devs are fucking regarded.
The problem with the nerfs isn't that weapons are melting enemies. AH are looking at user statistics rather than game feel. So people congregate around certain weapons because they're better than most other weapons. And then AH nerfs the popular weapons, leaving people with even fewer choices. The devs are essentially on the wrong end of survivorship bias, killing the things that survive but not counting the weapons that weren't even picked.
Ontop of that, weapons which have been touched just don't do what they should, I enjoy the recoiless despite it being suboptimal and even though it's not been directly nerfed it doesn't do what it feels like it should, a shoulder rocket weapons should be killing Turrets and buildings in one hit and not relying on hitting the vents especially on the bot fabricators, it should 1 hit gunships and kill Hulks with 1 center mass hit, it never has and then they removed the dropship fall damage so the one trick it was really good for now doesn't get the impact it should
Pick rates dont even give good data on balancing, simply because some weapons are cooler than others. I didnt pick flamethrower over other weapons because it was better (it wasnt, it had lots of drawbacks), I picked flamethrower because using it felt cool!
@@2MeterLPI loved the old flamethrower. It felt great it melted a bunch of little bugs and gave a you a way to reliable kill chargers in your kit. It's great all comers weapon with some serious drawbacks that you had to deal with. It was a in a great spot. I heard it was kill chargers really fast because of bug buy I only ran into that a couple of times but they should've just fixed that bug. They made the same mistake with the railgun. It was a way to reliably kill chargers but it had a bug that let kill bile titans way to easy. Instead of fixing the bug they nerfed it into the dirt. The devs just don't know what's going on in their game.
Exactly. Great assessment.
Helldivers 2 is quickly becoming the first ever PvD game (players vs developers)
lmaoo
The funny this is I was afraid this would happen when people figured out Joel was orchestrating the galactic war behind the scenes, I though the players would become antagonistic against the devs...
Instead, yes, it became players vs developers, but it's because the developers seem keen on antagonizing their playerbase and doing everything in their power to drive them away.
@@araonthedrake4049 right? it was supposed to be a pvd type game, but the devs somehow found a way to make it a possitive experience. Then they made mistake after mistake since launch and lost their goodwill from a majority of the playerbase.
Hardly the first. We've all been on this ride before.
Lord Britain spins in his grave.
The problem is Arrowhead's balance devs seem to have no clue what they're doing. It's like they're trying to balance an Excel spreadsheet instead of a game.
They see a weapon with an abnormally high pick rate and immediately assume that weapon must be OP, when in reality every other weapon feels like a peashooter. Like, there is a reason why the term "bulletsponge" is considered a negative descriptor.
Not to even mention the completely absurd reasonings they've given to justify some of their changes. Oh no the slug shotgun is outperforming snipers? Better nerf its damage and stagger power, instead of doing the sensible thing of ramping up the damage dropoff. And don't get me started on the "realism" argument.
They really don't have any clue.
Arrowhead's (or their balance team's) principle of balancing is flawed. For example:
1) The developers allegedly do not typically play beyond Difficulty 5. Therefore, they would theoretically be balancing weapons based on that difficulty and/or below. This means they're not dealing with 5+ Chargers/Behemoths and multiple Bile Titans at any given time in missions.
2) They have a tendency to 'spreadsheet nerf' and act based on numbers they see on a spreadsheet. For instance, the incendiary breaker was nerfed because "it's too reliable" and it was chosen in "30% of bug missions." They made a gun that's good at what it does (even though Damage over Time for fire had not been working properly since release of the game...) for bugs (it's a bit less useful for bots) and they decided that because it was being used too much, it should be nerfed. They nerf weapons that have a higher use rate (because they're reliable) but never bother buffing any of the other useless guns (i.e. Purifier, Liberator Penetrator, etc.)
3) The developers seldom test the patches/updates before they release them. For instance, when the Tenderizer was released, it came with this generic green camo color instead of the black/gray color as was shown in the specific warbond trailer it originated from. In addition, even with the ship module upgrade, a yellow re-supply box did not fully ressuply the Tenderizer's ammo. Its damage was also pretty terrible and there was literally no other reason to choose it over the original Liberator except for a tiny improvement in recoil. How can Arrowhead make any appropriate determination about how good/bad each weapon is if they're too busy looking at spreadsheet numbers and how frequently certain weapons are being used instead of testing the actual weapons themselves?
Let's not forget that Shams Jorjani also mentioned that 'every hour of testing is less hour for game development.' I'm sorry as I'm not a game developer but not testing your own product before you release it is just poor practice. There's really no mincing words here with that statement.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens within the next 60 days.
I will never forgive them for the eruptor.
90% sure it is the balance guy who killed hello neighbour as well back then somehow got into this game, we got an idiot who’s trying to kill this game
@@coppergreensubmarine pretty sure "testing" is part of "game development" but sure whatever Mr. CEO says I guess :D
It really upsets me how dogshit the anti material sniper has been since launch
Let's not be overly verbose here:
> They literally advertised an "overpowered" arsenal.
> They say that weapons need a nerf when they have a pick rate, rather than buffing weapons with no pick rate.
> I fail to see how a hoard shooter is ever anything but a power fantasy.
> The cherry on top: "oh no a bug is killing itself, give it DR!" Nerfed weapons/buffed enemies in response to bugs/unintended behavior is a real shitty thing to do, fix the damn bug.
Totally agree.
This, this right here is my problem with the game. And individuals who say 'you're just bad' are the same people who don't run level 9 or 10 missions as their primary experience in the game. High level play has devolved into a mess with underperforming equipment in what is supposed to be a sci-fi horde shooter. Also game breaking bugs have never been patched such as constantly ragdolling, Automatons shooting through canyon walls and high stones, Terminid charger spam, and illogical game decisions like crashed dropships not killing Automaton's who are downed within them or certain movements on geometry sending you mach 10 across the map out of bounds.
@@darius3566 Armour wasn't even functional on launch. What did we really expect?
It's easier to bring a few high performers down than a ton of low performers up
@@Aves_1 It's even easier to leave the "high performers" alone.
Makes their intent pretty obvious now doesn't it?
Their community management team is killing their company. The bad communication between players and developers is just one facet of it.
Lol what? You only ever encounter the community managers if you sit around whining on discord.
Not true. It's the devs who are managing the patches. If there wasn't a problem with the game the CMs wouldn't be an issue. The CMs seem to consistently put their finger on the problem and seem to be able to acknowledge the problems. The Devs seem completely unable to learn their lesson
They do what they are told from the top.
HD2 could have been a great game with staying power but they fumbled the ball too many times. The psn account issue. The blocking of 180+ countries. The constant balanace screw ups. They had a golden opportunity and the just didnt follow through.
In their defense, the PSN shite was not Arrowhead's fault. Nor the country blocking, probably. (They probably were told to do it, or else, perhaps so that Sony can attempt to try it again later, or something.)
Everything else though? Yeah, that's on them. Super Credits getting a secret tweak on how much they spawn on maps is what really took the cake for me, and it has yet to be fixed.
@@ogre7699 Not their fault, but they're the ones who take the hit, regardless.
@@Arclite02 sadly, yeah. but still, worth mentioning.
Yeah, the PSN and blocking of the 180+ countries thing is Sony's fault not Arrowhead's. Still, they did screw up in balancing and doing nerfs when they weren't needed. It also didn't help that most of the weapons that were released felt pretty weak and pathetic as well.
The PSN stuff was way overblown. If that was the biggest issue the game had at the time; people would have sucked it up and moved on. None of these people actually care when another country is blocked because of some NATO sanctions or something. It was just a good convergence point for every frustration up to that point and people feel it gives them more legitimacy than just balance or implementation woes.
The problem is that Arrowhead has said the exact same thing multiple times, promised to do better multiple times and their actions have never been in line with their promises.
Now they’ve replied with “DM me” to a tweet from a company that deals in AI to understand feedback. What is there to understand when they don’t listen and make the game just frustrating?
It's undeniably frusterating to them and tense that people keep weaponizing review bombing if they make a change people don't want, it's literally like holding a gun to their head and threatening to destroy the studio by review bombing it because they nerfed something.
It would make me give up completely.
@@ExarchGaming I agree with you about the review bombing. I think it’s disgusting in general, but especially for the things Sony is responsible for.
I personally think it’s not the nerfs at this point in time. It’s more about breaking promises every time and managing player expectations, which they are extremely bad at.
What's even more annoying is that they prioritize "balancing" the player weapons above all else, instead of, you know, fixing the bugs first? This weird obsession of theirs is what led to the unnecessary railgun nerf even though the real issue behind the railgun's OPness was a bug in the first place.
@@VinceOliver04yeah, it's pretty obvious that game stability comes second to whatever sort of weird hard on they have for "balancing" weapons. And that is not what you want. Im pretty sure weve gotten 10 times the number of weapon changes vs game fixes. And no, fixing stuff that people can't access anymore doesn't count.
@@ExarchGaming Sorry but um, isn't the purpose of reviews to give feedback and inform others of what your opinion on the game is? And people are collectively hating the changes being made, so they give the game a negative review due to their experience becoming negative. How is this a review bomb if the reviews are concerning the content inside the game, that includes the Sony shit as well, why shouldn't people leave a negative review on a game that was straight up taken away from them if they lived in a certain country? Should they leave a positive review that says that "oh they're turning the game into an unfun mess but I still support the devs!!!!" or "They took away to play the game I spent money on, but it was fun when they ALLOWED me to play it so it's alright".
Review bombs are by definition a mass coming together to leave negative reviews on a product while not even paying attention to the actual content of the product, Helldivers being angry that the game is being run into the ground isn't review bombing. It's feedback to a team that seems to be deaf
Tell me especially the community managers should stop trying to antagonize the player base and how do you balance a PVE game and say it's not competitive?
Counterpoint, I don't want another soy corpa CM. I'd rather they speak their mind. These guys are vets. They are gonna tell people to fk off every once in a while, and that's ok.
Why the fuck must a PvE game be competitive.
So the first part 100% agree with you. The 2nd part, its a little more nuanced than PvP balancing, but its def a concern. However, the theory should remain the same. There should be multiple choices that all "feel good" (be it either through sheer fun, or through usefulness) at any given difficulty. So when there's relatively limited effective choices, everyone gets shoehorned into using them. After all, no one wants to be that person just taking up space in the mission and not having any visible impact on the team's success. Thus, you could say that the PvE game is "unbalanced".
Complaining about the CMs are missing the forest for the trees. Their job is to try to blow smoke. Problem is that no amount of that smoke is going to cover up such clear development issues.
@@Darksoul9669 They aren't just blowing smoke though. They actively antagonize people in the community, start witch hunts against specific emoji's because their furry fetish they were forcing down the throats of HD2 community wasn't well received.
AH's community managers that still have their job and have not been fired, are reason enough not to play, let alone everything else.
I stopped playing a while back because the nerfs took the fun away. After each nerf I’d grow to love a certain gun or loadout, and then I’d have to revise everything after the next nerf. Also, the new guns in each new pack didn’t seem to really wow me. Disappointing nerfs, disappointing new additions, I’m tired of playing.
And it didn't help that the nerfs were for weapons that really weren't OP.
Same for me, I loved the Slugger and how with skills that thing was a monster, but they nerfed it so hard it's not even usable. They rebuffed it but still, I'm waiting for more.
This is what made me quit Warframe a couple years ago, old players that have realised that and got tired of it goes away, and new fresh players come in and so the cycle goes on.
No weapon was overpowered, so the nerfs where uncalled-for. The game has much bigger issues. They really need to work on the old bugs and the annoying ragdolling. I cannot understand what makes them think that excessive ragdolling is a fun game mechanic.
What they're chasing is short term money gains from warbonds and just balancing the game around level 5 as that's all they can play at.
These devs are just scumbags.
At the time, I do believe the railgun was overtuned (but only if we're talking about the multiplatform glitch), but since then the amount of enemies spawning has almost quadrupled.
Nerfs were never the correct answer to anything AH had problems with
@@nilskuttkat4757 the devs only nerfed for short term money gains instead of long term playability.
That's why every buff was basically miniscule while every nerf was devastating.
@@nihili4196 i firmly believe that if the ps5 bug didn't exist the railgun wouldn't have been hit as hard as it was.
@@orangejuice9396 I'm not so sure about that.
Devs shown they prefer to nerf hard, so sooner or later rail would be ruined anyways.
But if not for that bug, I genuinely feel like they would touch EAT first.
HD2 has never once had a weapon that was overpowered to the point it needed nerfs. Railgun had a PS5 bug, as did the arc thrower, Eruptor had multiple bugs that compounded to give it its staggering power. However, those weapons weren't running bulldozing the game even at their highest power. Many of their nerfs hit guns because they didn't like their flavor. AH also became excessively heavy-handed with their nerfs to the point that the guns are functionally USELESS, and any buffs are either small or paired with multiple nerfs. As a "buff first" advocate, I want he developers to look first as to why a weapon is used other than its power. Railgun was used because of the massive heavy spawns and ineffectiveness of the other AT options. Fire breaker was used because of the increased chaff spawns and the anemic performance of the ARs and other chaff clear weapons. The devs keep trying to get us to use the bullet drone, but it is always going to be a downgrade to the laser drone unless the laser drone is nerfed into uselessness or the bullet drone offers a different service. I don't need the spray and pray to one-shot Bile Titans across the map, I want it to clear away a hunter patrol that is jumping on me! I want weapons to do the job they are built to do!
Regarding the comment about player numbers commonly decreasing to about 10 percent of their height
I don't doubt its normal for that to happen over time, but i do doubt that's normal for a Live service to crater their player base month over month.
Also regarding your points on the fact that nerfs are important. Yes they are, if something actually needs a nerf. The unfortunate truth is almost none of the options in the game are actually viable choices, but they choose to nerf the usable stuff *BEFORE* making the other stuff viable.
The concerning part is that the last big update did very little to bring players back. Interest in live service games usually is cyclical. If the updates don’t bring numbers at least temporarily up again, you’re slowly bleeding out.
It also doesn't help that a lot of the new weapons they released were really just reskins of old weapons with very little difference in them.
Friendly reminder that people switched to the flamethrower largely in part because they nerfed the railgun which used to be the anti-Charger gun.
the whole point of a nerf in a pve game would be that you want players to use more different gear and be able to go out and have fun with different stuff and different tactics rather than having a meta. They seem to be missing the point that they should just buff up some things, and give more varied options for freedom dispensing. Id be fine with the guns and ordnance getting stronger if maybe, they made the enemies a bit tougher, spawn more, do a bit more damage to you
It's not a PVP game nerfing was never needed, making underperforming weapons better is what's needed, because it's fun.
The meme at 14:28 is actually not really accurate. The game released as what players wanted. But in any case the game was advertised as having "overpowered weapons". If they didn't want to create a power fantasy, they shouldn't have advertised it as one.
This game is still really easy at the hardest difficulty people are just bad at the game I clear these things with ease
The game is easy and also boring because few weapons are viable to bring in higher tiers
So you just play with the same weapons over and over again
@@klayn5611 i agree
@@Granox Hope you enjoy singleplayer then.
@@fus132 i do enjoy singleplayer and get more shit done with random PS players
"They haven't communicated the value of nerfs."
The issue is that their nerfs never have any value because their nerfs are solely rooted in weapon and stratagem popularity. There is no further thought put into than that, and it causes them to miss the fact that said popularity is due to most of the stuff they've put in the game being straight up bad. Difficulty due to weapons and stratagems feeling bad to use is not good difficulty and for some reason they refuse to accept that fact.
The problem is Helldivers 2 has become a shooter where you don't shoot at things. At low levels the maps are mostly empty and you just run from one place to another. At high levels engaging enemies is pointless and discouraged as you are way outmatched, so you just flee and again just keep running from one place to another.
Weapons nerfs and enemies buffs have just increased the breach between this two extremes. And the thin middle ground where there were enough enemies to have a good and fun fight is now almost nonexistent.
Well said. Of course you're going to piss people off if you punish them for shooting in a shooter game.
The nerfs are just a symptom, the core issue is that Arrowhead is failing at the very basics of gamedesign with their updates. Never make a player resent his own toolkit!
You're wrong about nerfs. Of the non-stratagem weapons, there are only like 4 that are usable at a difficulty above 6. ESPECIALLY after quadrupling the amount of chargers in each match. 4 usable weapons out of 33 is NOT reasonable. "We want to prevent a meta from forming." Really now?
Don't forget the devs are only clearing difficulty 5.. Also theres a reason why people say dont nerf only buffs.. Its because none of the weapons have been OP they've only been good and then got nerfed because they we're the only viable weapon (not OP viable..) at the time..
And the fact that when nerfs occur they buff the enemies at the same time. So enemies are stronger and the guns we like don't do much against them anymore
Many of us have been saying since the beginning, bring the low performing weapons up to par with the top performing ones, instead of nerfing the top performing ones to be in line with the low performing ones. We were met with calls of "That will kill the longevity of the game!" from both devs, mods and some players.
Well, that remaining 1-ish% of the player base and the devs can enjoy the company of each other then, the rest of us will and have moved on to the next games.
But our devs are working too hard for that, they don't want to work harder so we will continue "listening" but won't actually do anything about it.
hell, even if they were going to nerf the overperforming ones, at least do it in the same update as bringing up some underperforming ones. Then at least the players who don't want to use the nerfed weapon could try the recently buffed ones instead.
The right answer is to slightly nerf the over-performing weapons and buff the under-performing weapons to be relative
@@tatersalad76 Very much this. The ideal solution is bringing everything to a balanced middle line.
I called this a LONG time ago. Its the same problem with D&D DM's. Mostly the new ones. They get into this weird space where they forget to the story is a combined effort, making it some abstract form of them vs I mentality.
The thing that you're not understanding, is that people playing on higher difficulties aren't actually asking for Doomslayer levels of power, but rather just for:
Running away shouldn't be a more reliable strategy than using your weaponry, as this both takes away the viability of heavy armor, and also isn't very fun.
Nerfing our weaponry further cements 'running away' as the most viable strategy, whereas buffing our weaponry supports those who want to fight rather than run away.
To add on to why Arrowhead's nerfs are bad and people never want their nerfs:
Arrowhead has shown time and time again that they are completely disconnected from those who play on higher difficulties, and their reasons for nerfing various weapons aren't based on experience with weapons being too powerful, but rather that many people use them.
We call this "spreadsheet nerfs".
To even further add to why Arrowhead should only buff, never nerf:
The Flam-40 flamethrower and the current state that it is in, is completely unjustified.
It is a support weapon that is only viable, and used against the bugs because of it's requirements. You have to spend a stratagem slot on it (meaning it competes for viability with the likes of the autocannon), you have to get within 20 meters of your target, this adds significant potential for danger against the wielder, it's a flamethrower and so adds potential danger to not only the wielder but also any nearby teammates.
The Flam-40 flamethrower is a weapon with a VERY specific niche, and the recent nerf it got completely removed it's viability within that niche, and then to top it off; AH also switched out its previous HIGLY REALISTIC fire-spewing animation, for something that can only be described as dogshit. The new animation isn't only unrealistic, but it's also ugly, and adds EVEN MORE potential danger to the wielder by blocking their view of the battlefield.
This situation with the flamethrower is a MASSIVE fuck-up, that they justified by saying "the flamethrower couldn't shoot through fences, because of its animation, and so we changed it". Not only did NO ONE complain about the problem with the fences, but later after massive backlash did the devs come out and say that this change is irreversible.
THIS IS WHY PEOPLE DON'T WANT THEIR NERFS! They make changes that aren't wanted, and sometimes when they screw up can't even reverse the unwanted changes.
I'm mad at AH, just like a lot of other players, however, unlike many others I'm still playing, because somehow I'm still having fun, and I still have a sliver of hope that their design philosophy will change for the better, and Pilestedt does seem to understand the playerbase. Maybe Pilestedt can lead the charge towards change.
Rant over
I hope someone listens
@@HAL-9OOO This is my biggest issue with the nerfs. With these gameplay changes that worsen the game with each update, immersion is one of the few things Helldivers 2 still has going for it. And now the flamethrower nerf is affecting even THAT.
The flamethrower looked really realistic at launch, it was fine as it was, and now they say that outright reverting the visual change would „break other things.“ Even if the flamethrower is buffed in a later update, the lack of immersive visuals will forever stain the many flamethrower weapons the game has to offer.
I remember some of the most common positive feedback during the first month where Helldivers 2 was still well received being that the game feels like a movie to play; that any confrontation in-game can become a cinematic experience. And now they‘re even messing *that* up.
This is an issue that could have been completely avoided. In fact, the main reason the old CEO stepped down was because of this issue, an issue they promised to avoid by avoiding NERFS.
They broke their promise. That's the biggest problem. They nerfed things again when they promised they wouldn't.
I feel like Space Marine 2 is going to absorb most of the Helldivers 2 playerbase, especially if Arrowhead continue fucking up.
Absorb for one week and then it's dead.
I love Helldivers play everyday but yea I’m gone once SM2 is out
@kratosatreus5085 not likely. It has PvP.
They have precisely one chance to save the game. And it's so easy: Listen to the playerbase. They can choose whether the continued survival of their game is more important or their ego's, which is the only explanation I can think of why they won't just do the former. Not wanting to admit they were wrong.
Space Marine is more akin to Gears of War as far as gameplay is concerned. If Focus/GamesWorkshop ever pull their heads out of their asses and make a Helldivers-esque game with a 40k skin, Helldivers 2 will surely perish.
they only have themselves to blame.
They have a month because space marine 2 is going to punch helldivers 2 in the mouth
That's not even close to being in the same genre
Both are third-person shooters
Both provide a PVE experience
Each has you controlling their version of a super soldier.
Both will have you facing down hordes & multiple enemy factions.
Graphics & art style are similar.
Based on my surface level observations, they would be in competition would they not?
@@pnb328 You are clownishly wrong. Space Marine 2 has a full blown helldivers-esque PvE mode.
People fundamentally misunderstand the Helldivers IP. Space Marine is the game they were expecting. Just a big, stupid horde shooter (I love Space Marine by the way). Helldivers isn't that type of game and I'll be glad when those that don't understand that move on to Space Marine 2 because they're slowly killing Helldivers 2 because they don't understand it.
@@DroosterHdoesn't the back of the box for the physical version say something like 'kill hordes of bugs with overpowered weapons?'
They keep asking for feedback and the player base they have left is telling them no more nerfs but yet they do the opposite.
Then they wonder why this shit is dying
Arrowhead's first priority: Fire their community manager. They're doing more damage to your reputation
do that and say goodbye to and PR
the discord CMs have to go
LOL.
Nobody cares about the damn CM if the game is good. Literally nobody. Setting that as the first priority means you actually do not care about the game at all, you just have a weird hangup about the CM.
The first priority needs to be to buff the weapons nobody uses. To look at damage breakpoints and adjust primaries so they hit those breakpoints in a way that feels more satisfying. To have Assault Rifles be useful above difficulty 5. To make sure every single gun in the game doesn't just have a niche, but a reason to bring it instead of a shotgun.
...or, yunno, looking into ragdolling and maybe changing things so you don't spend half of combat on 8+ as a pinball...
But sure. Delude yourself into thinking that firing the community manager will save the game. What are you smoking, man?
The irony is thats the only thing they won’t nerf
@@zerg0s "Nobody cares about the damn CM if the game is good. Literally nobody. Setting that as the first priority means you actually do not care about the game at all, you just have a weird hangup about the CM."
Cue Battlefield 5, ASC Japan, The Day Before, ARK, PUBG,..
I feel like the devs dont understand that, if you as a player chose to pick a gun/stratagems because they believe it'll be fun and accomplish the mission/goal. Said loadout gets nerfed, but still out of all the other options, it is still in their mind the best way to deal with the enemies. Heavily armored enemies require specific things to be able to kill them from a gameplay perspective. If you don't have those or you are on cooldown, then you either have to wait for the cooldown to be even able to deal with them or run away because the fights not worth it.
Arbitrarily increasing players downtime like that and putting them in situations where not only is it harder but you also are weaker in a literal sense, is not fun. Horde shooter game but gameplay is tuned into, just run away, you're better off.
I also don't understand the CEO's point in long lead times being an issue. It's like okay, community we heard you, you dislike nerfs. At this point in time, are they not looking at what they are currently cooking and didn't think, hey this directly contradicts the new information we just learned. Let's tell the community that the next major patch will be delayed so that they could better implement and course correct. It's like you ask your partner what gift they'd like for their birthday they say x, while you already decided what you were going to get them y gift. Their birthday comes around and then you give them y gift, and you act all surprised they hate/dont like it. Why wasn't there a "oh sh!t, what I have planned is exactly what they don't want, I need to not do y and get them x"
I'm not sure why the developers are disappointed. Is it because they thought the community would be excited about the new warbond and it kinda fell flat because people were fixated on the fire mechanics nerf?
It was bad decision-making to nerf fire mechanics while simultaneously releasing a fire-based warbond. I just don't think that can be stressed enough.
Earlier this year (April/May) through statements and actions, Arrowhead and their former CEO led the playerbase to believe that they were going in a different direction and were done with nerfs. Then they go on their Swedish summer vacation and come back with more nerfs to weapons which they said they wouldn't do. I'm surprised that they're surprised about the playerbase reaction.
Former fair weather player here. I connect, get ragdolled, my gun is useless, I run in circles waiting for my stratagems to refresh. I disconect, play Once Human instead.
No time for that BS, I got a life.
Sounds like a skill issue.
@@arcanisdivinitis You're right, I don't keep up with the meta nor do I seek to cheese the game's mechanics. I just play the game when I got the time.
If Arrowhead doesn't want me as a player that's fine, plenty of better ways to pass the time.
Soooooo, how often do you use the LAS-7 again? The electric shotgun? DMR's? Assault Rifles?
@@TheStephaneAdam game has plenty of issues, most of those guns are fine, don't feel great or have other issues. Arc Blitzer I stopped using because it has issues hitting point blank hunters. Hell I stick to lvl 7 because higher lvl are to much work/stress. Anyways try it with voice or not, I'm not your dad.
@@arcanisdivinitis The only skill issue here is yours. You had no idea how to actually respond to that, did ya, fanboy?
Players like arcanis are the reason why they game is becoming stupid. He probably cheeses the high difficulties and then claims there's no challenge and DEMANDS that people play the way he wants. Keeps telling people that it's ALWAYS a SkILl IsSUe when it's bad programming, if not broken entirely, and makes excuses left and right for AH and all they're horrible decisions. Makes me wish people like him would go off and sweat in PvP competitive shit holes and leave PvE games alone since they're supposed to BE power fantasies and not some try-hard sweat mine for people who no-life games.
They've nerfed so many weapons, that only a handful of games that are worth realistically bringing in to the higher level matches.
Recently for me, the only ones playing Super Helldive are people good at the game.
Dropped back down to difficulty 9 for a game and "had that one guy" dropping a cluster bomb on the rest of his team, draining all of the remaining lives.
Failed more difficulty 9s than 10s this week.
I've heard that from the start, since the railgun nerf, when everyting was overperforming, before all of the nerfs, meanwhile the people with more than 80IQ were already clearing all the content in the game with nearly every other weapon the bad players were calling bad even back then.
You should watch Takibo's solo runs.
@@pnb328 Just because people can clear missions doesn't mean it's fun to do so. All the weapons and stratagems feel like total dogshit to operate so why even play the game if it's not fun? I'm not interested in being in a dick measuring contest with like a dozen tryhards who are showing off to no one.
@@pnb328 Yeah because solo players are known for their diverse loadouts, am I right?
Let's balance the game for like, 1% of the playerbase. That's an amazing idea.
You are missing the point to people saying "dont nerf just buff".. There hasnt been many OP weapons at all, and the ones that are have already been knocked down. but they arent nerfing OP weapons they are just nerfing OK weapons that are always being used because of how bad the rest of the weapons are instead of making bad weapons good. They are punishing us for people using the best weapons currently. and they arent even that good. Its far different to nerf a weapon that clearly broken in some regard. But they havent nerfed a single weapon recently that was OP, They need to stop nerfing weapons that over perform and buff weapons under performing.
I just don't see how buffing the off-meta guns to make them more fun and rewarding to use at the high end will make the game less fun for the gamer dads who play 3 hours a week on maybe difficulty 3.
If anything they'll be happy when they notice that they can now take on difficulty 4 and find success if difficulty 3 becomes too easy.
Heres an idea; if you make a game with multiple difficulties, balance them seperately.
@@TheSuperappelflap I disagree. Getting used to a weapon on a lower difficulty, moving up to a higher difficulty only to be holding essentially an entirely different weapon would feel horrible!
@@2MeterLP I don't understand why anyone would want to move to a different difficulty. You want to play a hard game, you pick hard from the start and figure it out. You want to play an easy game, pick easy. It's not like playing a game on easy mode teaches you anything about playing on hard, you jus learn a bunch of bad habits.
@@TheSuperappelflap What kind of nonsense opinion is that? You start low to build mechanical and tactical skill, then increase difficulty to fit your increasing skill. Do you ask children why they start out with training wheels on their bikes?
And sometimes I like to switch to a lower difficulty to have a more relaxed experience or to a higher one to challenge myself.
@@2MeterLP yeah but you're not a kid. Unless this is the first game you've ever played I don't see the reason to start at a low difficulty if you want to play on a harder one. You won't develop any mechanical or tactical skill playing in the little kiddie pool, just like riding a bike with side wheels won't teach you how to maintain your balance. That's why your dad took the side wheels off when you were 3 years old.
I just love when youtuber talk out the asses about games and there community's that they themselves have clearly never taken part in then upload a 20 min long video talking absolute nonsense because the topics trendy...
I have a hard time finding sympathy for a team that said months ago: "hey were going to tone down and do less nerfs" only to then do another slew of unneeded nerfs. This most recent update didnt need to be more nerfs, those could have been taken out once they knew they were in hot water for nerfs, but they did them anyway.
If that means delaying or halting updates for a few months, that would have been preferable to them going back on what they said their plan was moving forward. Pipeline be damned.
If you know you're in hot water for something, pushing out an update with more of that something, is not going to net you any new fans.
For me I stopped playing because it just felt so incredibly grindy. It's like 40 hours boring sample grinding for a 1% buff to something. That and the fact they lock certain kinds of missions behind whether a planet is being actively attacked or defended meaning I can't always even play the game mode I'm in the mood for.
Thats how live service games work. They make it grindy so people play for longer.
Just stop nerfing. No one is asking for it. No one. If AH wants other things to be talked about stop doing the things EVERYONE says stop doing
The funny thing idiots at first wanted the nerfs. Think back man this all started with the railgun. But they messed up soooo bad that the people who enjoyed the slop now are starting to get annoyed lmao
So a game made for everyone is what you want?
@Ngw8888 Umm no we didn't want that nerfed. Three people did and they listened to those three people. In a game where there is no competition there is no reason to nerf.
So you don't want a balanced game then? At times in a game certain guns can overperform or underperform, which for instance this happens with every single CoD game. At the end of the day this is a PvE game not a PvP game and they're continuously bringing out free content.
@@Nick-cs4oc What?
The problem with Helldivers 2 is that primary weapons won't change the difficulty of missions on the higher tiers much, yet they are still horribly underpowered. primary weapons, no matter how powerful they are, only contribute to maybe half the kills you get, if that. The rest comes from strategems and support weapons. Improving primary weapons will still mean you have to rely on strategems for all the heavy armor enemies that flood the map at those difficulty levels, and it would just make it less frustrating to deal with the chaff that you would otherwise rely on strategems for.
Just seems to me stats on gear would help increase damage on weapon as a player progresses. Making weapons that have a grind associated with them stronger would definitely help, too.
@@robertp457 please. do not make us grind gearscore. that's the worse option between all the avalaible ones.
@@robertp457this is a horrible idea, please keep your MMO grind mechanics out of this
@@robertp457 🤮
I don't think Bellular gets that virtually all the weapons in the game are worthless against the enemies. So the few that actually let you succeed, they nerf and then turn around and buff the enemies. So no in this game, nerfs are not good. And for the entirety from what I play, the game can just instant kill you whenever it feels like it. There's challenge, and then there's just no point in trying.
As someone who is lv112 The problem I have, is that if everything is equally strong or weak, nothing is particularly fun/special, every weapon should have unique areas where they perform exceptionally well, shotguns and flame throwers should be unmatched on close range, even against heavy targets.
Machine guns and automatic weapons should be consistent, and universally effective, rifles/sniper/ect are your ranged heavy hitters, they should be exceptionally lethal but slow and risky at close range.
But ultimately, nothing rly feels particularly strong, flamethrowers are more of a hazard than a group clearing tool, high risk and no reward
Shotguns don’t pack a strong enough punch even against medium targets.
Assault rifles chew through ammo and are incredibly limited in what they can engage with.
And rifles/snipers are just outright pointless in my experience, you got “shotguns” that can outperform them in close, medium, and long range. And their damage is just suboptimal, the best weapon you had for that particular class of weapon got nerfed into oblivion when it’s explosive damage got dragged through the dirt, so you ended up with a worse dominator.
This same sentiment is with all special weapons also, the only special that felt like it actually mattered for 99% of encounters, was EAT’s and the quasar (since its just an infinite EAT)
Yea you had some notable specials that could shred enemies when used in tandem. But at every opportunity AH goes ahead and makes them feel not so special.
And don’t even get me started on the stratagems.
Some are just outright useless (looks at anything smoke related)
Some are just underwhelming (the mechs)
And some are just outright worse than others which simply do the exact same thing but better (orbital EMS VS EMS mortar, 500kg VS orbital strike, GAS….)
Yes. A defined meta should and shouldn’t rly exist in HD2, fire should be fantastic against bugs, but bad against bots.
Tesla weapons like the blitzer and tower should be more effective against bots VS bugs. Matchups for situations should determine what you pick as the best tool for the job, Since you can’t use a screwdriver to tighten a bolt.
Problem is they aren't using their tools right. They nerf the only good weapons without buffing the utter garbage ones so we end up with no decent equipment across the board
A game for no one is also a game for no one
AH really done said "you will enjoy our slop"
I don't think you've done the necessary research to get an idea of the history of the nerfs. The game devs say they don't want to establish a meta, yet at the same time they nerf things until they force a meta. The autocannon is viable, reliable and useful in every and all contexts. It is the one solution to every problem in the game and has avoided being nerfed because the CCO has it as their favourite. The balance team does not dare touch it, but this just creates a meta where everyone should run the auto-cannon. And that's what the dwindling player base are doing. Using the one thing that hasn't been nerfed into the ground yet.
Arrowhead: Here's some nerfs
Everyone: STOP
Arrowhead: We hear your feedback, here's some nerfs
Everyone: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP
Arrowhead: Nerfs :)
Arrowhead: Damn, we're disappointed with how we are handling balancing
Please don't forget they are adding stronger enemies while you are using weaker weapons while having 0 ammo when surrounded by enemies. Death is fine, dying because you have to spend full clips of ammo on an elite and there are 20 more nearby with more spawning in isn't as fine.
Stratagems? you already used them on two titans and two more just spawned
The players are significantly more disappointed in the developers
Also, the only buff argument at the end of the vid is stupid. This is a scenario that hasn't happened with hd2 and is irrelevant. The devs spend more time nerfing us while buffing the enemies instead of fixing bugs. Each new patch brings a mountain of new problems.
Have you seen the patch notes (like in general, not just the most recent one)? There's more buffs than nerfs, and not just the little ammo buffs or durability damage buffs.
Go on the GG wiki site (not the other one) and look up guns, they have the changes at the bottom of the page. Especially if it's guns that you consider nerfed, and you'll see they buff them back within a couple of months if they need it.
There is a significant negative reinforcement bias when it comes to nerfs, but even this patch, the flamethrower and the breaker incendiary were only as good as they were because of significant buffs in the previous patches.
@googlygoink No I'm blind...yeah I've seen it, more than just reading and watching it... I've played it. Being in denial at any point of how bad the bugs and experience currently is, is wild. Keep the blinders on bud.
TL;DR: The devs wanted to make a Grunt-fantasy military-sim game where your lives are cheap and you will die a lot. They accidentally made a horde shooter that was really good. They realized that was not what they wanted to make and started to nerf and change everything to make it more in line with what they wanted. Players hated it and left in droves. Devs are busy doing the surprise-pikachu face while still nerfing everything even as their playerbase dwindles more and more. For 6 months straight we kept telling them to stop making bad changes and they kept making it. They deserve every bit of failure they get for being completely incompetent at listening to their community.
Im sorta sick of Arrowhead constantly going "We fucked up, we promise, we'll make it better" only to do the same shit next time after fixing things. Its mentally exhausting. I've not been able to get myself to play the game, because I just dont wanna deal with it.
It's baffling to me that every single developer refuses to learn a lesson that has been established like a decade ago. Don't do nerfs in PvE when players are having fun unless something actually breaks the game. GGG had to learn it a few years ago, Blizzard learned it (again) with D4, Bungie learned it. It's not that hard devs...
They had a great game...they had a great community response.
They squandered and ruined it...I don't care if you're a casual or a hardcore player, shooting and blowing stuff up is the fun part of the game, the devs have done everything they can to prevent it.
I don’t think players at the high end are against nerfs. The problem is the developers have no idea about their game and nerf on popularity based on an excel spreadsheet and how fast a weapon can deal with chargers.
I'm tired of AH's corporate pr statements. It's the 5th time we've heard "we're listening, we'll do better." This game's been out for months with tons of community feedback, yet they ask for another 60 days to reevaluate their plans again. What a joke. AH needs to take a page on Deep Rock Galactic.
I just keep bouncing between DRG and WWZ: Aftermath tbh. Helldivers 2 just isn't doing much. Honestly I might try playing the first one to see how it compares to this.
"A game for everyone is a game for no-one". This might be the coolest and most empty statement ever. It can literally mean anything. I'll bet Johant Pilestedt thought of it. He is very good at saying a lot of shite and doing next to nothing at all.
turns out a game for nobody is also a game for nobody
@@e2rqey just as cool and way less empty than Johan.
Here’s all I’ll say as a former helldive player; so many enemies that require either boatloads of ammo to kill or actual anti-tank weapons to kill spawn on the highest difficulties that you can’t afford to take “cool and/or fun” weapons. If it’s not efficient or optimal, you’ll run out of ammo, all your strats will be on cooldown, and you’ll be left with no other option than to die. The problem with nerfing “overturned” weapons in HD2 is that it makes playing at those difficulties a chore at best, or monotonous at worst as everyone playing is crowded into an even smaller meta.
I hope the 'Doom Marine' fantasy comparison is just an exaggeration. While I want my equipment to feel effective and that it's doing its job, I enjoy that Helldivers 2 never feels 'mindless'. Every shot, every movement and every positioning feels like a deliberate choice of the player instead of 'holding down a button'. That's a big part of the fun for me.
They didn't have to buff anything.
Just do not nerf everything people found fun.
I know that by the lore you are supposed to feel like shit as a Helldiver, but it doesn't mean i can't also have fun while playing.
It's the fun they took away, that pissed me off.
They have to revert the nerfs they’ve already done. We could have multiple loadout and options by now. But they consistently nerf the good weapons right before new weapons drop.
They nerfed too close to the sun and buffed the bugs. The start of the game had the best balance where experienced players succeeded at least 30% of the end game matches. They should have raised the tide for the rest of the weapons and added enemy variety not changed existing enemies unless they had a bug. 5:32 the game fell when Malevelon did
Some of your points clearly tells me that you have not played Helldivers 2 much if at all and for sure not played it lately as you do not seem to understand the main problems and the well founded frustrations by many players.
The reality is that the Helldivers 2 devs have been nerfing weapons to force the players to play the game the way they want the players to play it.
They want to force the players to depend on their stratagems and not use their weapons as much.
But the reality is that the cooldowns on the stratagems and how many uses you have with them are forcing you to depend on your weapons or to run around like an idiot instead of having fun fighting.
There is no weapon that has been overpowered for a long time in Helldivers 2, but the devs have not liked that some weapons have made it possible to mainly rely on them instead of the stratagems.
The reality is that most weapons in Helldivers 2 are close to useless, forcing most/all to use the few weapons that are good.
People have not used those weapons because they have been overpowered, but because they were the only ones that worked.
There has in reality not been any players that have complained about weapons being overpowered and needed nerfing.
This is just something the devs have cooked up in their own damaged brains and that in a purely PVE game...
And was it a coincidence that Arrowhead nerfed the few good weapons a very short time before that they offered new and strong weapons in the new battle pass that you can buy for real money?
There is also clearly a disgusting elitist thinking among many if not all of the devs where they clearly think you suck at playing the game if you don't think it is fun to totally rely on your stratagems all the time and that you are an idiot if you don't think it is fun to die nonstop during the 30-120 minutes most players have available to play the game now and then.
Last time I checked, was the main reason for playing games to have fun, but the devs at Arrowhead clearly do not want most of their players to have fun.
They want the game to be hard and frustrating for most and they clearly do not understand the reality of how it is for the average gamer.
If Arrowhead do not soon understand that most gamers just want to have lots of fun alone, with friends or with randoms instead of hours of frustration and dying, then Helldivers 2 will soon be another dead live service game.
He's defaulting to his Dev mindset rather than his player mindset for this one.
I don’t think I have ever played a game with so many nerfs than Helldivers. The community reaction is not only more than justified, it’s not loud enough.
Arrowhead have a talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
On your point of nerfs being good because of one or two weapons being too good, the problem is that nearly every single weapon is utterly useless in higher difficulties. That is what’s forcing people to one or two guns.
The nerfs, really only 2 of them, wouldn't have been recieved quite so badly if there weren't a long list of bugs and crash issues or if it had come alongside interesting content to distract people. Releasing content in the trailer instead of letting players stumble acorss it in the game like they did with the shriekers meant that I felt like I had burned through the new content after a session or two of playing. The update was a little disappointing and then the IC breaker nerf on top of that felt like AH was taking our toys away (and some players acted exactly like toddlers when you take their toys away). There was just no real fun in this update.
Helldivers 2's actual business model seems to be to put high powered stuff in the game then nerf it just before the next battlepass thing with new high powered stuff in it to encourage super credit sales. I don't think they'll ever reach a good level of proper balance because it doesn't make money.
If that's the business model. Then they are terrible at it. The last battlepass was fire themed with several flamethrowers. Arrowhead literally nerfed fire damage, physics and graphics just a couple of days before the battlepass was launched.
@@juan0808 That's probably why the backlash has been so much bigger this time 🤣🤣
They complain that the "rest of the content" they made is overshadowed by everyone talking about the nerfs and how the game doesnt feel fun to play when the "content" they added is so incredibly minimal and could be ignored
They didnt even NEED competition or haters trying to take them down...they just did it themselves...
The damage is already done. I run and own a Helldivers 2 LFG server on discord, and it went from a thriving, active server, to a ghost town. Most people moved on and won't return.
16:53 nothing in this game has actually ever been that powerfull that wasnt the fault of some bug or glitch. Eruptor, bug. Railgun, bug
AH only has themselves to blame if their new content is underwhelming. I mean, what did we get?
1. Super ragdoll rockets on bots.
2. ragdoll artillery on bots
3. Harder to kill scout striders with ragdoll rockets.
4. Impaler, THE ultimate stunlock machine that doesn't even need line of sight to kill you.
5. Reskins of two bug enemies that are slightly tougher.
6. A reskin of a planet so that we can't see on it (IOW, nothing new. It's just different flavor like the 5-6 other no sight modifers)
7. Massive nerfs to weapons including the majority of their new warbond/battle pass.
8. super bases only on the highest difficulty.
What are we, the players, supposed to be excited about?
7:13 LMAO maybe cater to the casual players that became instant fans instead of catering to the small group of try-hard gamers… this is why CoD, Fortnite and other games keep such a big player base, they don’t focus on the try hards, they focus on casual gamers preferences.
Edit: They struck gold while looking for silver and decided to discard the gold to continue the search for silver 🤦♂️
People also aren't really talking about the good stuff because a lot of it is weighed down by being incredibly buggy. The new Impaler, the most interesting and unique new enemy being added? Has infinite range, no need for line of sight, and can instantly kill you or even very easily launch you out of the map such that you lose all your held items. The new Barrager Tank has no visible weak spot, clips into itself to shoot you point blank, and continues firing after being destroyed. The Rocket Strider will continue shooting its rockets after you blow them up. Both of those new bot enemies' rockets also launch you so damn far it's ridiculous.
Performance has also continued to worsen, such that many people that were able to play at launch have literally been patched out of playability. This has only been exacerbated by the useless anticheat they force players to use which has been incredibly publicly shown to be utterly incompetent last night. Last night they started a Major Order to collect a total of like 75,000,000 samples. It was at about 1.5% completion after 6 or so hours when suddenly hackers spawned all the samples and completed the major order within literal minutes. There's no worse way of showing the entire community how useless your anticheat is than that.
This coverage is a massive reach and so heavily biased it’s kind of unreal. It’s really not complicated. Don’t release patches that do things like taking a flamethrower from a solid choice to being one of the worst and with worse visuals to boot. Don’t add enemies that are so clearly overpowered and buggy like the impalers. The patch that preceded this one was not nearly as scrutinized because it actually made steps towards a more stable a fun experience. Who is the current Impaler for? This game has been a development mess but I guess we can’t expect that level of scrutiny from you guys. Kinda disappointing really. Not sure why things like differing opinions on feedback is being discussed when they have more often than not failed to implement their own designs properly and that’s kind of the bigger story no?
Well said
Impalers are easy to take down and not overpowered at all, melting in mere seconds and usually 1 shot by a lot of the heavy damage stratagems and they rarely ever actually hit you if you aren't standing still.
That being said, they are annoying I'll give you that. You'll already be fighting 3 dozen bugs and this fella will just start shaking the ground around you to get you to focus on them, before another one comes 3 seconds after you killed the last and you have to manoeuvre around the still alive swarm of bugs you deviated from to go kill this new guy, then rinse and repeat a few times depending on difficulty.
Though I usually find them annoying when I'm by myself, with most terminid things, sticking together is a much much better option due to 4 times the firepower.
It’s not about how quickly a stratagem can kill them. Their logical telegraph is that their exposed head when tendrils are out should be a pretty vulnerable spot and it really isn’t. Even then their real OP nature is tendrils spanning over 100m and those tendrils are pretty damn tanky when it should just be a quick priority target to shoot and move on with range and ragdoll capabilities like that. Not mention the very “fun” ability to fling you 1000s of meters which should have been caught and roll out of them delayed until fixed. I expect a better experience with more polish from a supposed finished live service than a Star Citizen alpha patch lol
@@Darksoul9669 Their exposed head is a weakspot for some weapons, my friend tears it apart in little time using the machine gun for example. But yeah the ragdoll bugs are stupid, with a lot of things in this game, its so buggy, thats honestly the biggest problem in my eyes, content gets released in broken states and bugs persist for months, invisible landmines for example have been a bug since day 1. I do hope they go through with the beta stuff so if they dont have time to test it we can at least preferably before they put it in game...
It's what happens when you don't actually play the games you are talking about for a RUclips video.
And instead just read notes off of a script someone else made, and then pretend to speak with authority on a game you know next to nothing about, while also letting your extreme pro developer bias cause you to carry water for an extremely out of touch CEO. All the while doing ridiculous mental gymnastics to justify the CEOs blatant lack of awareness to a near universal consumer sentiment on his studios own game. As he tries to hide his ignorance behind empty nothing statements like that "letter to the community"
I understand the player frustration. After the last update I was playing a running away sim for first few rounds. And it baffles me that they don’t buff less fun weapons instead of nerfing fun weapons.
But I also get the dev perspective. It does seem like they wanted to create a “balanced” milsim (grounded in reality except when it don’t) but players find the power fantasy more compelling. The game was more successful than they expected so the design philosophy was challenged and they weren’t prepared.
And they are right that what one person wants isn’t what everyone wants. However, nerfing fun weapon is probably something no one wants except someone trying to create “balance” on spreadsheet.
Problem is they keep making the game harder , keep fking with the balancing and it’s pissing people off again and again, there stripping away more and more of what majority of the players like and enjoy.
So the new expansion update literally does nothing but adds more bull shit , the game suffers from awful progression with 0 rewards , they keep adding in bull shit but no new weapons new gear new rewards etc they just make it harder and nerf the players and add in the occasional warband that usually have trash.
"Arrowhead is a small team."
It doesn't take a large team to change damage numbers on a weapon. You're literally changing a simple input. If they gave me the dev tools I could have half the game's weapons stats changed AND tested in a week by myself. I used to do it all the time when I modded other games; all you need is the tools and the dedication.
They should be disappointed, in themselves.
Who wrote the online? Who balanced the weapons? Who hired the CMs?
It's really not this complicated. The game that was advertised and that we got at launch was, as you say, more like Doom 2016 or Space Marine. The game the devs somehow thought they were making and wanted to make was a starship troopers game. Thus a lot of people that bought the game they actually made and marketed are going to get pissed off by every step they take towards the game they thought they were making and failed to make. And it seems pretty clear that they failed to make their game the way they wanted because they've made the internals so ridiculously complex that they can no longer understand the ramifications of turning any of the knobs and dials they have. Something like _fifty_ individual stats for every gun is _absurd_ and should have been rejected as a design all those years ago when they were doing the initial planning.
The argument of "3h dadgamers want something different from the game than 9-10 difficulty helldivers" kinda shows the developers still do not understand the issue. This issue was solved at launch, namely the nine (now 10) difficulties. The problem at its core is the crumbling of fun mechanics and powerful weapons in a PvE game. People find a tool they like, and 1 month later it gets nerfed while useless weapons remain untouched. 3h a week dadgamers would never care about 1 or 2 overpowered weapons, high difficulty helldivers neither. We all want the same thing; fun weapons and having our way of playing the game be left undisturbed or catered too.
That's the blessing of helldivers 2 being a PvE game, if the players are brokenly overpowered all those who suffer are npcs. The only meta you have to be aware of isn't balance, its to avoid only a *single* gamestyle becoming effective. Having all weapons being capable in their designated role should be the only concern, not some weapons being a tad too capable.
At this point I now assume that the state of the game at launch (a chaotic satire, horde shooter that wanted you to push forward though waves of enemies) was a mistake. A result of the devs just being so terrible at implementing their intended vision that something completely different came about. And now the changes that were meant to fix that inital error are pushing away 90% of the player base, those that liked what they accidentally made.
They nerf guns. Jack up the spawn rate to the point where all you can do is run away. Add more and more enemies that half + of the guns are useless against. Add more enemies that rag-doll you into oblivion. They want you to avoid combat, throw down bombs and run between their terrible map objectives. They want players to focus on the absolute worst aspects of the game, while they make the good aspects worse and worse. Baffling. Just baffling.
When the majority of guns are useless, a few guns are meh, and a couple are slightly OP your target should be to massively buff the useless guns, slightly buff the meh guns and slightly nerf the op guns.
It appears they opted to go with slightly buffing a few of the useless guns, leaving the meh guns alone, and massively nerfing the slightly op guns.
Honestly they haven't learned anything since week 1 with railgun, they just got away with it, and now community is just fed up... Ultra nerfing is never the answer, how many different studio have to go through the same scenario is mind blowing!
They were sitting on a golden goose and just had to fuck it up, I don't get it!
I guess if they're not cornering themselves they wont learn
Most of the basic weapons feel awful and there is no reason to pick them, ever.
"They haven't comminuted the value of nerfs"
When they've done nothing but nerf the players while buffing the enemies, I think they've comminuted their stance well enough.
I have been unable to complete a game for nearly a week. The crashes and disconnects are bad enough but the nerfs are insult to injury.
The CEO was super disingenious. All types of players, be it the 3hrs a week crowd or the 30hrs a week crowd were saying the exact same thing: stop nerfing the okay guns and start buffing the bad guns. They were ALL saying it. All feedback was identical. The crowd the CEO was refering to which was giving them feedback to nerf things were devs themselves, and only them.
What are they on about? The 3 hour a week casual dads are not the ones complaining online. They can feel it’s not fun anymore and they leave. Most of them lose interest. Most of the people that I’ve talked to say it’s not fun the way it used to be.
I also find the community’s diegetic response to the pandemonium entertaining! A new faction within the playerbase, called the “Chaosdivers,” literally consists of Helldivers who grief and teamkill to express their disdain towards Super Earth-or in reality, the devs.
Chaosdivers expressly do not team kill or grief players.
@@JohnLeBoeufLittle At first, on multiple social media outlets, displeased players wanting to continue their roleplay within the universe of Helldivers were jokingly trying to break Super Earth's status quo by making posts and comments about the true nature of their position.
The wider playerbase gave them the "Chaosdivers" label, but later, some "edgy" players decided to take this further and begin team killing their mates while spamming the chat with messages akin to that of Chaosdivers messages. While these instances are rare in reality, they've been blown out of proportion such that chaosdivers are now associated with these griefers
Yeah, how entertaining. Players who just wanna have a few hours of fun getting griefed. So nice.
Just stop playing the game if you don't like it, you know. Idk what these people's life is like that they wanna ruin other people's fun like that
Game griefing is bad
@@gabernment I think that's the wrong thing to keep relaying. I don't see anything good coming from that without evidence. Just focus on the fun part, the memes and the roleplay within the community. I don't think the community has much to gain with associating the entire fun aspect of this with griefing. Look at the comment above as an example. Maybe stop spreading the actions of a few as if it represents the entire element.
i feel like their was few weapons that were fun and powerful in higher difficulties now theirs just the weapons that are just powerful enough for higher difficulties
Here is the thing about the flamer nerf. when you use the flamer type flame weapons you have to get close enough to the bugs or bots to get killed by a big enough group that is one of the costs. If the weapon dose not make that worth it then its not worth using.
Helldivers situation is creazy. Arrow Head broken their promises and player's trust, to the point where playerbase is in open rebelion against devs.
Not only are majority of players refusing to fight off one faction, allowing it to take player homeworld effectivelly ending war effort.
But more and more people turn to actually griefing other players by team-killing and sabotaging others efforts.
Ah done gone Blizzard, catering to small loud % of players and now majority is up in arms to boycot them.
This really does seem to be a case of developers not listening to their customer. I want to feel powerful when I play a game. I don’t want to feel like the prey.
Helldivers 2 is my current Live Service game of the year and i love it. I just want to see it succeed and have also get faster vehicles already
I like your Doom2016/Doom Eternal analogue. It also visited my head after all of this patches, how from awesome shooter game went to conceptual garbage, where every weapon is not a weapon but a puzzle piece with exact numbers which you must match with another puzzle piece which is the enemy. Absolutely disgusting and tedious.
Jesus its not that helldivers devs only want their game played by esports pros, its just that they dont know what they are doing. The audience is bigger and has more noobs yes, but the audience sees this as a challenged and are rising to it, just for the devs to nerf popular gear so the harder missions have a smaller clear rate. Thats all that is happing, the devs have in mind how their audience should do things, and they think they should lose more, and are doing nerfs to gear that aren't even doing their job well. If they want players to use the other guns they will buff them, but right now the majority of primaries and secondaries cannot fight a majority of enemies types let alone clear a horde of them. Now the reason why they are pivoting these nerfs is that players found a way to that makes the harder difficulty's easier. Don't shoot, kite, yes the helldivers dev have nerf every gun into the ground so much that its better to not call in gear at spawn. If you dont know all pods that are not helldivers spawn pods makes noise and every patrol goes to them, so if you spawn and call in your true gear or the real guns then a near by patrol will gank you, So run up to a obj, orb it or bomb it then run and call gear IF you have to. Only shoot to get out of the obj and run all the time. So devs dont like that many chose stealth in their horde shooter, because shooting is now suboptimal. Best part is that this will cut your mission time up to 15 minuets. The devs see us complaining and say skill issue on reddit and twitter and now are mad that they made a game that so easy on hardest mission that we dont even have to shoot. The people who are truly unskilled and now bending their knee and looking up at us with spite. Muttering how low we are but they know if they get rid of the stealth system without buffing the guns their live service would be dead, so they have to leave it for now. Then reverse every nerf with their tail between their legs. This has never been about skill, always about fun, and the most fun you can have on helldivers is the novelty of it for the first 20 hours and when the new race comes out it will be bumped up to 30 hours. After that its repetitive disappointment of unlocking new guns, call ins, and gear, that are either bad or will get worse in the next update. Like how do you have a "heavy" Mech that dies to one rocket from a basic enemy, (literally the robot with a rocket launcher.) Helldivers is rainbow six siege all over again, but its funny, rainbow devs wanted people to pick other operators so they nerfed the most picked gear but then turned their tactical game into a run and gun shooter now helldivers devs wanted more people to lose in their higher difficulties but turned it into a very easy splinter cell/metal gear.
Kind of hard to read that massive paragraph, put some line breaks in it.
@@TheSuperappelflap funny i put more work into that then the devs to balance change patches.
@@Cord64_o7 Yeah, I did read the whole thing, cant disagree with what you wrote, just a tip to try to make it a bit easier to read next time you pen an essay
Doesn’t matter what the devs think/feel. What they DO is directly against community stated preferences again and human and again, their own -anti fun league- “balance” and discord mod teams are CONSTANTLY at war with the player base and anything “reliable”/fed-back and are actively undermining the generally decent actions of the former CEO, the new content teams and are effing with the enemy spawn system every 2-3 weeks for the worse almost every time for months Now.
In any other company I’d says it’s a rogue employee and they need to be disciplined. With AH being a co-op I’d say it’s 2-3 people actively working against the company/decided-upon goals so they need to be put in a room and beaten soundly until they leave or start to behave.
I disagree with you. They shouldn’t be balancing the game to the top players anyway because they can always just spawn more enemies. The top players are just cheesing the game anyway and running away constantly. They need to balance for levels 5-7 because I’m confident that’s where most players are playing. They have made all the guns weaker while adding more and more armored enemies. This is not rocket science. Buff the weapons that suck that no one wants to use before needing anything then you can find out if the weapons you think are Op really are. And give us new tools to destroy things when you add new enemies.
I don't think buff everything is the solution, and I think nerfs CAN be good. The issue is it seems like ALL they do is nerf with MINIMAL buffs to things that suck (making them STILL suck, just a bit less.) You have a dozen turds and 3 sausages, the solution isn't to polish 2 of the turds and make the 3 sausages shit...
yea... when players feel like they dont have a viable option after you nerf a couple weapons, your issue isnt the 1-3 weapons that were nerfed. its the 20 other fucking weapons that nobody wants to use.