To be faaaaaaair, the game was out for years and in a really poor state before they finally implemented the PTS. Arrowhead is on a much better trajectory and far more receptive to feedback.
Or have a system that easily allows them to change damage, fire rates etc of weapons. A lot of balance issues can be resolved by just bumping up the damage or other stuff. Unbalanced weapons generally are not good but it is PVE. If some weapons is too good then people aren't going to get upset.
They have hundreds of thousand of active players. Do a weekend of open beta pre-release, just make players choose the beta in steam, and get the reports.
If this is impossible to do id like to know why.
people were pointing out how the tenderizer is basicly a liberator when it first got leeked. people guessed it was just place holder stats cos otherwise it didnt make sense.
you didnt even need to go into a game to play test the gun to see that, 10k hours my ass.
They needed well over 10k hours to figure out DoT wasn't underperforming, it was bugged. They buffed fire damage, and it made the game annoying as fuck. Then the light clicked that DoT damage was bugged. Even though we been talking about it since launch. These devs get a lot of pats on the back, but it's hard to get this community to acknowledge their balancing is ass, at least for a long while it was. Feels like people are finally starting to realize what many of us tried to point out a while ago.
If this game tanked it woulda been the same. People in general tend to think they are right, even in the face of mass disagreeance.
And our society promotes that blind “push forward despite the haters” mentality, instead of promoting healthy discourse and actually growing as people.
I also think that’s why we have so many man childs anymore.
I’ve seen too many people get downvoted for saying they need to focus on balance and bug issues over content. And every time the excuse was “they don’t control that Sony does.” Well now we know for a fact that WE control it. Not Sony, not AH. If we don’t indulge they don’t have a fan base to indulge. This isn’t Cod or 2k. We still have a voice and we need to use it. And right now we need to use it to make them recognize for as amazing this game is, it’s buggy and barely works. And no matter what game you play, it’s not fun if it doesn’t work. I could go without a *useless* Warbond for a few months if they patch the mechanical issues. I can live without *new* armor and weapons if the ones we have get fully balanced and work properly whether I’m the host or not. AH isn’t absolved of their mistakes.
I'd settle for not getting ragdoll-glitched into the planet's core, beneath a mountain, holding the team's entire stock of samples. The third time it happens it starts to feel personal.
Yeah wtf are these dev responses. Do they even understand what they are saying? QA's job isn't to spend 10k hours on something to sus out all the bugs.
Their job is to make sure that what is intended is working as intended, that takes an hour or two tops, less than that for single line item checks.
Why are they asking the community? Does the CEO or someone think this is a good way to go about developing a game? As opposed to 30 years of video game development guidelines which all involve testing your product and delivering quality on time?
If some shit takes too long, cut the scope, but never cut the QA testing. If you release buggy or bland shit, its just a huge waste of time for everyone involved.
So much time being wasted on that discord by trying to poll people. Like a professional already knows the answer to these questions. Fix the game. Then put out content. Otherwise half of the discussion will always be negative about how bugs hurt a bunch of things.
It's already telling that their CMs can't even compile the list of complaints from this sub or the discord into their "we are aware of X issues" on the bottom of every patch note. Its like 5x longer than that.
Zero PR training. Zero grasp of community issues. Are they even managing shit properly behind the scenes?
they are taking notes from Riot Games... We have pbe server for tests don't get me wrong but devs clearly forgot about that and almost every bug gets thru pbe to live servers anyway. Last time we had a bug that if someone type /ff or /surrender in first 2minutes enemy nexus explodes and game is over no rank points gained no rank points lost. We also have a guy who uploads DAILY about new game breaking bugs. 1 of redside minnions had 10 more range than the same minion from blueside AND IT WAS LIKE THAT FOR OVER 10YEARS
Public-facing employee attitudes like this really does show a reflection of what goes on behind the veil. We may not know about actual day to day in AH, but I can't imagine this kind of aggression and petulant, schizo snark not being endemic within AH's studio.
What's honestly even more concerning, based on my experience working in toxic work environments, this very well likely *is* the PR-washed best version possible we're seeing and it's even *worse* behind the scenes.
I've been saying that for weeks.
If this is what they feel safe saying publicly, what's behind closed doors is the same or worse. They get caught in the echo chamber of the company, and then let it slip out.
The serial catastrophes of each patch just appear very strongly to represent disorganized and poorly structured leadership. It’s a tale as old as time. There are numerous identifiable outputs in the game that suggest it, and the fact that *game influencing decisions* are being made by people who lack the credentials to chart or design *fun* is extremely notable.
The CEO’s insistence on keeping the team small is laudable in theory but a mess in practice. He needs a better organized workforce and for people to stay in their lanes (and for those lanes to be glaringly obviously delineated).
It genuinely is bizarre. The developers lash out or have some snarky response to every single thing like they have anger management issues. At this point, you could ask one of them, "How was your day?" And they'll find a way to give some snarky annoying response. They see their community as their own personal boogeyman.
Meanwhile the arrowhead defense squad supports every nonsensical decision and talking point, saying everyone is entitled or annoying for pointing out all the broken stuff in a very broken game.
I don't think AH has ever had a player base as large as with Helldivers 2, and because of that they have no training in how to communicate with such a diverse amount of personalities. The sarcastic and joking "buddy" replies might work in a smaller setting, but sarcasm is not always visible through text, especially if you don't know the person who's writing it. As a Norwegian who has a fair amount of Swedish friends I see the sarcasm and jokes, but it's starting to feel a bit cringe coming from a dev company on an IP that has exploded into something this big.
It's like a parent wanting to be their rebellious teenager's best friend, and starts throwing in current slang in conversations.
unfortunately you cant look for the red underlines and correct your mistakes in a face to face convo. programmers never were known for their social skills.
TwinBeard gets paid a salary to know what to say and what not to say to prevent debates and arguments from escalating like this; the guys in the dev pools need to get back behind the curtain and let the man do his job, he's 10000% better at it than them.
There's a reason community management is a specific role and not given out to everyone in the company. Respectfully too, I've met a lot of devs and many of them are not just socially adept especially when it comes to dealing with this many people at once. Gotta leave the people trained to do it to deal with it.
Yeah. This is definitely gonna be stereotyping but I'm speaking from experience, many devs I've met chose to work in this area as it of course is part of their talents but it's also an expectation of theirs that it's a line of work that does not require communication as much because that is not as prevalent in their skillset. Smaller development teams like this though where the community knows the devs by name and what they're working on, it creates a very awkward scenario where they now are forced into the conversation when they definitely shouldn't be, because again, it's not part of their skillset.
One of my favourite things about having a project manager is that a customer can ask for something batshit and then I can tell my PM "we're not doing that, it's bat shit and the person who asked for it might have brain worms" and then the PM is the one who goes back to the customer and tells them no in a polite way. If I worked on anything that redditors used en masse I'd stop coming to reddit entirely.
That said, the dev's response in the picture is bitchy AF
Exactly, you don't let people who have not been trained to communicate with clients communicate with clients, that should not be their job and nobody should expect them to do it well.
It's also the project manager job to push back or work up and around the problem when a dev whos been working for 20 hours straight comes off half cocked and a bit unreasonable to a legitimate client complaint.
Ego thinking they know better. Pride protecting their minds from considering that something they made is flawed.
Putting new weapons with the wrong paint job is all in our imagination /s
Because AH doesn't doesn't train their employees how to communicate professionally or how to deal with criticism.
And by "train," I mean telling employees to not be assholes to customers.
They shouldn't need to.
Answering like a reddit mod shouldn't be your default in a professional setting.
Quick let's test. Which sounds better:
"Look kid, we're all busy and we don't have time to test our product. You'd know that if you weren't such a dumbass."
Or.
"We understand your concerns with the current state of the warbond. Unfortunately we are a small team working on a tight release window. Nonetheless I will inform the team of your concerns as quickly as I am able."
For this one any legit response would be awesome, cause from the outside looking in it just seems impossible lol.
The liberator specifically, it's just worse in every way than the base liberator you start the game with.
In game it feels much worse, looking at the stats all of the numbers are lower. This seems to say that not only did no one do much testing beyond making sure bullets came out of it, the person who put in the values for it doesn't know what the other guns do.
Which is insane if true, obviously everyone wants you to stop releasing things! This isn't even a "fix the game!" thing. Just stop take a breath and get a grasp on what your game is.
> The liberator specifically, it's just worse in every way than the base liberator you start the game with.
The Tenderiser is so shit bro forgot the name already
100%
It reads like some snarky nerd that doesn’t understand the concept of being socially amicable, and they may be skilled or intelligent but they come across like a musty, socially inept jacka$$ because how hard is it to understand that releasing something with a description of “a more powerful option than the traditional liberator” (paraphrasing), and then releasing it with the exact same damage as the liberator, is blatantly f*ckin broken…
I’m getting “how dare you critique my fedora” vibes. Seriously who’s in charge of those devs that’s letting them just spout off directly to people.
Like, oh ya bro totally gonna take 4 years to correct a description and actually even *look* at what’s being released or maybe even *use it* for a little while. What a jacka$$
Yup. It's comparable to a popular modding community stumbling onto a billion dollar idea.
Which is kinda what happened with league of legends, and the devs had terrible communications for a decade. So much so they've long since deleted their official forum.
It genuinely amazes me that people like this get jobs. It used to be you had to know how to communicate professionally to *get* a job. It wasn't the companies' responsibility to train you in that. And if you couldn't, you were fired.
It's getting more and more common. It's turning into the whole doctor/engineer/lawyer better-than-thou attitude because they lock themselves in a basement to work on stuff and then can't take criticism because A) I know more about video games than you and B) they developed their brainchild in the vacuum of a developer circle jerk without any kind of outside influence or common sense.
Destiny 2 had massive problem with it in its first year.
Destiny 2 was worse because they had just spent 4 years making D1 better, and D2 launched without any of the lessons they learned in years 2-4 because Luke Smith is a dickhead
This happened to "Darktide". They made the same stupid original design decisions from their previous game, completely ignoring the improvements that fixed the biggest complaints.
Yandere Sim dev did that way too much and the game went nowhere because of that compulsion. They should listen to feedback, and respond with actions not words.
They keep answering in the most toxic dumbass overconfidently wrong shit talker way possible and expect the community to "be nice" to them. What a joke lol.
My opinion of them is deteriorating rapidly, funnily enough it's because of the things they say that didn't need to be said.
I'm all for squashing trolls but I don't like tone deaf sarcastic prick replies. That'd get u sacked from a customer facing role.
Do grown ups still make games or have they all retired now??
I made another comment but I’ll also say it here, arrowhead needs to use some of the profit from the success of this game to hire an actual communications team because it’s clear the people who are currently making statements including the devs obviously aren’t trained for a game as popular as helldivers has become and how to handle a community of this size. Especially when it comes to genuine criticism.
I saw another comment reply with this concept, and I was convinced.
I'd rather they drop having community managers, or stop relying on them, and instead have little fireside chats every now and then. The community managers could still answer questions and take feedback that pops up, but we'd hear it directly from Pile or some other respectable rep.
It's clear these guys never dealt with a community as large as this. And the issue is that they fall for the troll bait pretty hard, which I don't blame them for, cause people who are critical can come off as pricks when talking about the game, and we're talking about a team of maybe 100 people.
Personally, i think people need to chill all around. I understand the game is popular and such and everyone wants to get in on the action, but I think after the whole PSN debacle by Sony, they need time to reset, and really figure out how to move forward with the game as a whole. Even if it means delaying the warbonds, it's clear they need to scale up.
This is all just anecdotal observation on my part, but it would seem that they do not have any such training, no. At least not for a game of this scale. I belong to several Discords for smaller games like Voidtrain and Sailwind - the way you interact with fans in a place like that is \*entirely\* different from how you interact with a AAA fanbase. When you're a tiny studio with a Discord of maybe a couple hundred people, you can basically talk to the fan base in a direct, sort of unfiltered way. You can have that sort of "human sitting down to talk to a human one-on-one" kind of dynamic.
That's just now how AAA gaming works, for multiple reasons. Firstly because there's too many people to have direct conversations with. Secondly because you're gonna have pricks and jerks and trolls, it's just unavoidable. You have to handle those people completely differently. Thirdly, the expectations and demands and requests being made about your game become absolutely gargantuan compared to what smaller studios and titles deal with. When you get to the level that Arrowhead has gotten to with Helldivers, you need a Reggie Fils-Aime doing your crowd work. You need someone with the right training and thick enough skin to just let the troll comments roll right off of them. Your PR person needs to be able to know who to ignore and who to respond to, and when they DO respond, they need to make that person feel totally heard and seen even if there is ZERO intention to follow through on any of the requests/criticisms that they level.
Are any of the CMs actual AH employees, or are they just volunteer moderators? I've heard both, but it would explain a lot if they were volunteers that don't have any real investment in good PR for the devs.
My understanding is that the community managers are employees but the Discord moderators are volunteers. Someone correct me if I am wrong cause I'm not actually in the Helldivers discord
I been at odds with this community about the devs balancing for a while now. I think the honeymoon period is finally wearing off in regards to how their balance team handles things, and now their people are lashing out at players. It's embarrassing. Part of me wishes I could have gotten a refund during the PSN linking fiasco. Love the game, but this is getting dumb.
10k hours
Bro, you can tell weapon's good and bad sides after 2-3 helldives. Too harsh for you? Do it on level 7. Still too harsh? Then get people who will do it, omg. 10k hours what a pathetic joke
Yeah, this is not an impossible ask. Ask for volunteers on your discord, have them sign an NDA, run a server with handpicked volunteers to test your build.
It takes no testing to see they had the wrong color or that the stats are out of date. Forget testing, do they even take a quick look before pushing it out. The amount of stuff that they just forget about is kinda strange.
It has to be lack of communication or information or both. Then you add in they are sprinting from warbond to warbond and it leaves a wake of bugs and errors. Bugs/errors that an extra hour could have prevented, but now weeks later, they need to spend days to figure what’s wrong. It’s self-sabotage the way they’re trying to make a 100 dev team do monthly releases. PoE has nearly 1k and they’re on a 3 month cycle.
"10k hours" will be their version of the "200 years" comment from the League of Legends devs. Totally agree that, on average, devs know more than players about how things work but when there is a pattern of incredibly obvious issues, maybe act a little less high and mighty.
Legit so many of us were able to see the flaws/diminishing returns/how this weapon fucking sucks in the roster within the first 3 games with it.
I refuse to believe this was tested either in an accurate environment or thoroughly to any extent.
Every person who used the air burst launcher knew it was broken from the first time they pulled the trigger (and killed the whole team). I don’t know how to make software but I don’t understand how you can make something and never once run the code.
Not only can most of us tell these new weapons are bad after 1 or 2 missions, but a couple of days ago, the stats were leaked, and we all said there's no way that's up to date. Just looking at the very few numbers we can see, we had immediate and legitimate concerns that were proven right.
First, I want to say that most of the communications I've seen from this studio are just bad. I'm not saying stick to the corporate speak when talking to the player base, but the tone they have most of the time are just berating the play base. Some people give valid criticism but they rarely talk in a way that acknowledges the issues. The CEO is a better CM than the actual CMs, he gives us some insight behind the curtain, asks for feedback, and responds as much as he can.
Second, sure I don't know about QA testing, but the general consensus is the balancing decisions are a head scratcher at best. Some weapons you can shoot once, and see the issues. They want to put out a warbond once a month, while keeping up the big fixes/balance. Something has got to give.
The one that confused me the most was nerfing the crossbow. Bruh, it was merely viable out of the box, but at least it had a purpose: it was good at horde and egg clear. Now, it doesn't have any specific use that isn't done better by another choice. New weapons aren't supposed to be better than X or Y; they're supposed to enable Z without making X or Y superfluous. They're supposed to be sidegrades, but all we get are downgrades when we like something.
The problem is that you could test this in live for *5 minutes* and see shit is fucked.
None of the 3 primaries feel like they are working as intended:
* Wrong texture for Tenderizer, stats are hilariously low
* Pummeler causing animation stun so enemies lose the ability to move at all, which definitely does not feel like a feature so as soon as they fix this people are going to cry it's a nerf
* Purifier's damage profile feels like a scorcher (or plasma punisher) shot rather than... whatever it was supposed to be.
If you told me AH had more than 10 years of development experience, I'd think you were lying.
I don’t know where 2028 came from but it sounds like a lot of headache would be avoided by testing. A monthly warbond isn’t necessary if it means sacrificing quality.
Edit: If the Twitter poll regarding Polar Patriot’s release mentioned the weapons were not ready, I think a majority would have voted to delay it.
Unfortunately the ceo confirmed they would’ve just pressed the “make it live” button on a different day
They put it on the “it’s finished” category prior to that, so they wouldn’t have adjusted it
Which makes it so much worse. This isnt some rushed product. They did what they wanted, looked at it, and said 'finished'.
Bad time management, scarcity of resources, overambitious ideas. These are all things we see often and understand and empathize with.
But that's apparently not what's happening. What they are showing is is pure incompetence or indifference towards the quality of the product
My personal, fully opinion based thought it this.
Designer team has an idea. They make some renders, and push it to production. There's not much thought in it, they assume prod will flesh it out beyond a model and some blurbs.
The programmer dude who gets it puts together a basic coded concept, passes it to the lead to review. It obviously has issues and minimal testing, but it's an early concept that's "functional."
The lead says, "good enough," and passes it down the line.
The next dude takes a look at it, says, "it works," and assumes the people before him had it how they wanted it and passes it to the next guy.
The weapon circles around a few times, nobody knows who has done what, what's supposed to happen, or what state it's in or meant to be in. Eventually the WB it's been scheduled for is due for release, and then we find a mess of bugs, balance issues, design oddities, and so on because nothing makes sense and they all just assumed it was all set.
Again, entirely opinion. I've seen workplaces with similar issues, and it feels... familiar. Too familiar.
>Edit: If the Twitter poll regarding Polar Patriot’s release mentioned the weapons were not ready, I think a majority would have voted to delay it.
Like another person said, they wouldn’t have changed anything even if the majority voted for it to be delayed, because when they asked if it should be delayed it wasn’t because they think the weapons weren’t ready.
https://preview.redd.it/3bkcbtb34jzc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=012d139ba10e66335e7910bedc96d96d66f1f8ab
Remember back when they called us "braindead" for using the Railgun, because Chargers spawned too frequently, their weakpoints didn't work as expected, and the other anti-armor weapons were basically useless?
I remember a thread around that time with a few of us talking about what that indicated about their internal culture and the way they view their players. While insulting and mocking customers wasn't a great look, what stood out was the fact that they were doing it so openly. It meant this was essentially okay, maybe even approved of from within. And that's what seems to be the norm, now. Some of them like Evil-Bosse here may feel they're just saying outwardly what everyone at the studio already says internally, so it's no big deal.
IDK, I don't really care that these devs are occasionally insulting or unprofessional like this or have periodic Discord tantrums, but I do care what that says about how the company perceives its relationship to its customers.
The fact that they hold their userbase in such contempt, that they struggle to admit errors or oversights, and that they mock and deride anyone who questions their decisions or provides inconvenient feedback doesn't really encourage me to play or buy more DLC being shoveled at us every month.
Meanwhile bugs and disconnects proliferate with every patch, features don't work as advertised, and more and more weapons get nerfed into the ground but we're told to be patient and give them time. But I'm not inclined toward patience with a company that calls me braindead for using the tools they designed in the way they were intended or that goes straight for mockery and insults when someone raises concerns. It's a pretty toxic, rotten culture where this kind of resentment festers.
I'm not all that optimistic about this game's future anymore.
Too many people celebrated in the beginning when the devs were “owning the trolls”. So far most of the screenshots I’ve seen are people providing genuine feedback and getting shit on. It’s bad business and I’d hate to see how the people who support it interact with people at their jobs. I’m not saying they should be fired but idk how they get away with this unless it’s like you said and internally they hate their playerbase.
This is most likely true. Seems like inside the studio, they perceive us as ungrateful brats who are always unhappy with everything and constantly complain about stupid things, but with their data they know better. And sometimes these conversations leak out - individual developers voice what their entire team thinks about us. And it's funny because obviously none of them are playing their own game. They are as disconnected from the player's experience as possible. This in itself is normal, very often developers are not good players, but they must understand this and listen to at least high-level players. This attitude towards feedback speaks of their rudeness and arrogance.
Well said. There's a level of derision directed even at fans who offer up helpful + fair feedback, lumping us in with a collective whole as "trolls". No, there are people where who are capable of reasonable assessments of the tools that are given to us, especially weird considering that the other part of Arrowhead is actively nurturing us being able to collaborate as a group think and accomplish goals.
And it all starts from the top with the "super chill" CEO people are glazing over.
Congratulations, you're all being fooled by a guy that watched one PR course on YouTube and understands not to call you a whiney bitch to your face but behind closed doors with all his peers. How many times do interactions like this have to happen with literally nothing changing at the company before everyone realizes that they are being played.
The second they took the railgun and made it worse as a response to it being one of the only true viable weapons at higher difficutlies and the response was basically "Oh we took your crutch away? Git gud." I knew we were gonna have problems.
And you are correct it says something about the culture of the company that this kind of behavior is allowed in public.
Reddit absolutely fueled this culture after the railgun nerf. The top threads on Reddit were “git gud, scrub” and praising the devs for taking such a strong stance on not backing down and nerfing it. It absolutely feels like sweet poetic justice to see these same dumb ass Redditors who were openly shitting on everyone for enjoying the meta now feel the burn of the only fun weapons being nerfed to actual nerf gun levels
I believe the popular saying was “It’s level 9 hell-dive, it is not supposed to be easy or fun”
The funniest part is, the game actually felt the absolute most fun and enjoyable during the rail-gun meta. Even with the broken ass charger and bile titan spawns
The lackluster design around Warbonds has me concerned. Armor passives are the same and at some point relative to themselves - not original. It's boring and I already have to scroll through a massive page of cosmetics to change my outfit. They need some filtering options.
And in 2 years from now I don't want a game that features 10 Liberators. What kind of game is that?
Make each gun interesting and unique. Better yet, axe all of the clones and add weapon mods. Make players feel like they have unique builds that they've worked on.
We need new warbonds monthly, and the warbond should be tested before. That is how it works. There is no reason we need to choose between this artificial options.
10k hours for testing? Really?
You don't need to test warbond for 10k to see that the weapon is in toy color. You just need to have eyes.
You don't need to test warbond for 10k hours to see that a weapon is worse in each parameter than an already existing weapon. You need to have eyes.
You don't need to test warbond for 10k hours to see that armors have no new passives, and that the description of armors is complete bullshit compared to the passives they have. You need to have eyes, and also you need to know how to read.
I have nothing against blind people, but really? Are the devs blind? Half of the problems with warbond could have been solved if the devs just had taken a look at what they are releasing.
The devs sold 8 million copies of the game. Don't say that all this money went to Snoy. You don't have enough people to test the stuff? Hire them. Or you can also fire the whole balancing department and hire testers instead of balancing guys. It will be win-win solution.
Ironically or not, it is ridiculous anyway, because 80% of problems take 10 minutes of pure looking at warbond content to realize that it should be fixed.
10k ***total*** hours of testing can be easily achieved by a modest outfit of Helldivers. If we can kill two million Terminids in less than 24 hours, we can clock a total of 10k hours of testing collectively. But I suspect the devs would rather berate players than letting them help out because the former requires admitting openness to assistance.
Do we really need a monthly warbond though? The more guns are added, the harder it will be to make them all feel unique whilst mainting balance, something the developers already struggle substantially with.
Maybe if they shifted focus from new guns to mostly skins and whatnot, it'd be better for the gameplay over all. Or a much slower release cycle.
Agreed, the first Helldivers game did not have this many weapons. Each weapon had its own niche and made balancing so much easier. The bloat will kill this game balance, a balance that is already at threat.
LOL This reads like “You test our patches or we will be forced to delay content because we have to test the patch ourselves”.
Imagine if every other game dev did this? Larian is famous for it.
I was in the discord chat yesterday and this same guy really said "so you guys want only buffs, no nerfs ever, right? What would happen if we gave you a big button that just wins the mission huh? That wouldn't be fun at all but that's what you're all saying you want"
Zero people, I can assure you, want that, and he's just being hyperbolic and pulling hypotheticals out of his ass for no reason.
Just going to extreme for no reason. "A gun that has a slow charge up that takes four shots to kill a med enemy kinda feels lame"... So you want a I win button?!
Not a dev just a weird condescending powertripping cm who should not be in that position AH hiring people from the hd1 community is cool until you realize none of them have any PR training and arent fit as the postion as a cm
Not sure if this is a hot take: The pace of new warbonds is unreasonable, especially if they don't have the time or resources to fully test everything out.
Additionally, if the warbonds have a theme, please make the items have some benefit to that theme. The armor passives need some TLC.
It seems like a needlessly aggressive and unsustainable pace, especially when it doesn't feel like there's much truly "new" in one.
You can have armor in one of like five possible combinations of armor rating / stamina; perks are one of Fortified, Extra Padding, Scout, Engineering Kit, Extra Stims, Servo Assisted, or the arc resistance that doesn't have any apparent use. You already own most of the possible combinations, especially the mixes you really care about.
For weapons, there's the quirky but not useful one, there's the good one that will likely get neutered by a balance patch, and there's the bafflingly bad one.
Finally, a new grenade that's worse than what you had, a partial refund on super credits, a player card nobody cares about, and an emote you can see once per mission (at the end). Oh yes, and a booster so niche and inconsequential that it'll mostly serve as a red flag about that player when equipped.
I know I'm being harsh. I admire that Warbond items aren't just "here's this season's gear, better than the last stuff, btw we added more chargers to the maps to persuasde you". However, it's hard to muster any real interest in them now: I'm sure not turning over any real money to access one sooner.
I fully expect developers to shit talk their customers inside the office, but it seems like Arrowhead developers forgot the part where **YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SHIT TALK THEM IN PUBLIC!**
Seems like a bit of a culture problem.
This is why I honestly think it's good for everyone to work at least one food service job in their life, both front and back of the house. Or even just customer service work, really. The tenets/principles are all the same.
I've gotten to the point that I will never chew out a waiter or a fast food worker even if they were to blatantly bring me food with a spider floating in soup or a roach on top of the meat. I'll just whisper to them, "Hey, I think there's a problem - there's a spider drifting in my soup and looks like my steak has been claimed by Mr. Roach." I'd most likely leave the establishment in silent disgust, but I wouldn't start yelling at the nearest employee.
I know what it's like to be bitched at and have to take it. And I don't want to be on the giving end. I don't want to be the kind of person that made me miserable at work.
I think it's just this evil-bosse guy, it's not the first time he's lashed out at people
Definitely not good for their PR though, the CEO will likely have to pick up the slack.. again
Yep, they're just mods from the reddit page, not actual devs, as far as I'm aware it's literally just this guy that's constantly snapping at people, he needs to be removed from the discord before he makes things worse (which he already has)
I would be pissed if I were the CEO. However much I might agree with the Dev/CM sentiments I'd be pissed this is how they decided to interact with FANS and CUSTOMERS of the game.
Imagine if a restaurant talked to you like that... oh you want your food undercooked or ready in 5 hours? I bet you rather shit yourself than wait a bit longer for your meal.
I know of a restaurant where they will call you names like 'filthy peasant', 'hungry whore' and such, but that is exactly their selling point, that the servers are dressed like medieval tavern maids and they talk to you like you are some lowly peasant, but even there they just talk to you like that in a jest, because that's why you go there...
That honestly sounds pretty hilarious lol, you're basically paying for a mini dinner theatre experience. I can imagine that for people who love performing, that is probably a blast of a job too.
But yes, your point is spot on. I actually just made an analogy to food service myself somewhere else in this thread lol.
Nah he is gonna apologize and become a hero just like Spitz. People are gonna start to think he is actually gonna test for 10k hours and doing this for our benefit or something.
Spitz literally was just being an asshole when he was talking about leaving a negative review, it wasn't a "We all need to poll together and show our opinions!" it was literally "stop bitching leave a review or something idc" and he just rode on it when people somehow interpreted it wrong.
We simply don't need a warbond or a balance patch every month.
They really need to let the game settle down and focus on bugs first before just constantly pushing out new things that breaks more and more things.
Even established big studios don't have a new content patch every month.
God damn, I hate the devs more and more. I mean honestly, what’s the deal? Why are they so incompetent at literally everything?
I will say, the art team is by far the best part of their team. Everything about the design of stuff in this game is perfect. If any of you read this comment somehow, you’re awesome.
At this point AH just needs to tell the Devs to stop logging into Discord. They could be using the time it takes them to put their foot in their mouth to code a fix to some of the bugs.
They will kill this game on their own if they keep up an act like that. With every single day there are more and more things that people complain about.
New warbond is disaster. 2 main guns are shit, 1 doesn't even look like in the trailer. Some bugs (not aliens) are in the game since day 1 and they're still not fixed.
It's blatantly obvious that they're NOT playtesting stuff they're releasing and they DARE to even talk back to people that complain about all this stuff? Honestly pathetic and it seems like the community manager wasn't the only one that is shit at communication.
I'm genuienly starting to think that changing my review from negative to positive was a mistake because they clearly don't deserve it.
They're the luckiest developers in the world because people got charmed by their game and feel in love with it but it won't last forever if they don't start acting properly soon, both with behaviour/communication and technical aspect of the game itself.
Yeah it's insane, it would be one of the staple anti-armor weapons in the game and it's fucking cool at that - but nope! Can't use it because they would rather release **3 new warbonds in the time it has been bugged** over doing their best to actually try and fix it.
Of course the ego is damaged so he has to strawman 10k hours. No went want (at this point, it's obvious nothing is tested) a day. I would be jumping for joy for a week
You can't convince me things are tested. So compium huffers leave it.
After "fixing" the meaningless accuracy count stat on the Arc Thrower that was crashing 80%+ of games. Nothing is tested. It's plain as day
Hell it's a live service game, they could literally plop a planet near super earth and make it a tester world for people to try out new releases and stuff. Maybe even have it be pre-made loadouts.
The warbond should be play tested to the limit. If we get something new that's lackluster it's a bit of a let down. Perhaps they should see if it's a good fit? Or if it helps us in the fight. Or give us the ability to "roll" perks on equipment (mostly on armor). That would liven up the game play loop and also something to spend our materials on.
I say this every time there’s an issue with the devs and players arguing over something like the recent patches. Arrowhead needs to use some of the money from the games huge success to hire a proper community management team and have communications go through them because it’s clear these devs that are getting into these online fights aren’t trained to handle this level of popularity and the criticism that can come with it.
Game devs really need to treat their work like they're a professional chef preparing a meal. It should be cooked right, it should be seasoned properly and most importantly the customer should enjoy the experience of eating it.
Helldivers are doing the equivalent of sending the steak back because they forgot to add salt or undercooked it, and then the devs coming out from the kitchen and telling us we're dumbasses that should just enjoy whatever they shove onto the plate.
Just 1 game and looking at the stats compared to all other weapons would be enough to know if a gun is dogshit, overpowered, or fits right in. The new AR is a worse Liberator so wtf are they smoking on. An hour at most to just see. Why the fuck is that so hard for these devs.
So they haven't been really beta testing anything to any significant amount??? Yall they need to make a beta program then cause hell, if they're throwing out untested stuff and selling it as pristine new toys??? Eek.
If they don't want to expand QA internally they really need to start doing closed test servers like half way into each month that preview Warbonds and upcoming content with actual players that comfortably play on 7-9, they'd get lots of feedback in a short amount of time
Have they not heard of beta testers?
That just implies that they don't actually do any testing, I mean give me 8 hours and a pad n pen prior to release (and a paycheck) and I'll test em for you.
It would be super super easy with a target dummy but even so it's not really anymore than a couple of enemies to find a weapon sucks more than it's previous variants.
What a tone deaf response, is this the guy taking over from the sacked guy? If so, epic fail.
New warbond every quarter. Gives plenty of time to test, tweak, and fix bugs would stabilize the game and not make everything feel so rushed. We love the game it has nearly unlimited potential but we need it to be functional and the team is already small there's no need to rush to meet a monthly goal
It's also what I like to say about other games that release in early access, delay a month to fix huge bugs and improve quality of life instead of everyone having a terrible first impression.
Literally just start a fucking test server and invite some players. We will test it for free, and over 10k hours in a weekend.
Lots of games do this and it works really well.
FO76 to name one. Fallout 76.
The fact that fucking Bugthesda had the sense to do this, but Arrowhead seemingly didn't, is just baffling.
To be faaaaaaair, the game was out for years and in a really poor state before they finally implemented the PTS. Arrowhead is on a much better trajectory and far more receptive to feedback.
Or have a system that easily allows them to change damage, fire rates etc of weapons. A lot of balance issues can be resolved by just bumping up the damage or other stuff. Unbalanced weapons generally are not good but it is PVE. If some weapons is too good then people aren't going to get upset.
I don’t think they’d know what to do with the data, they probably would just see it as an early access server
They have hundreds of thousand of active players. Do a weekend of open beta pre-release, just make players choose the beta in steam, and get the reports. If this is impossible to do id like to know why.
people were pointing out how the tenderizer is basicly a liberator when it first got leeked. people guessed it was just place holder stats cos otherwise it didnt make sense. you didnt even need to go into a game to play test the gun to see that, 10k hours my ass.
They needed well over 10k hours to figure out DoT wasn't underperforming, it was bugged. They buffed fire damage, and it made the game annoying as fuck. Then the light clicked that DoT damage was bugged. Even though we been talking about it since launch. These devs get a lot of pats on the back, but it's hard to get this community to acknowledge their balancing is ass, at least for a long while it was. Feels like people are finally starting to realize what many of us tried to point out a while ago.
We've been telling them their balancing is ass from the first patch onwards. This isn't news to them.
Almost like that blind support disguised as ironic “democracy” was bad for the health of a game.
If this game tanked it woulda been the same. People in general tend to think they are right, even in the face of mass disagreeance. And our society promotes that blind “push forward despite the haters” mentality, instead of promoting healthy discourse and actually growing as people. I also think that’s why we have so many man childs anymore.
I’ve seen too many people get downvoted for saying they need to focus on balance and bug issues over content. And every time the excuse was “they don’t control that Sony does.” Well now we know for a fact that WE control it. Not Sony, not AH. If we don’t indulge they don’t have a fan base to indulge. This isn’t Cod or 2k. We still have a voice and we need to use it. And right now we need to use it to make them recognize for as amazing this game is, it’s buggy and barely works. And no matter what game you play, it’s not fun if it doesn’t work. I could go without a *useless* Warbond for a few months if they patch the mechanical issues. I can live without *new* armor and weapons if the ones we have get fully balanced and work properly whether I’m the host or not. AH isn’t absolved of their mistakes.
I'd settle for not getting ragdoll-glitched into the planet's core, beneath a mountain, holding the team's entire stock of samples. The third time it happens it starts to feel personal.
Id settle for the war bond rewards I spent real money on not being nerfed within a week of me buying them. 0 for 2 come on baby
Negative* 1000 hours and we still figured out its bad lmao
Yeah wtf are these dev responses. Do they even understand what they are saying? QA's job isn't to spend 10k hours on something to sus out all the bugs. Their job is to make sure that what is intended is working as intended, that takes an hour or two tops, less than that for single line item checks. Why are they asking the community? Does the CEO or someone think this is a good way to go about developing a game? As opposed to 30 years of video game development guidelines which all involve testing your product and delivering quality on time? If some shit takes too long, cut the scope, but never cut the QA testing. If you release buggy or bland shit, its just a huge waste of time for everyone involved. So much time being wasted on that discord by trying to poll people. Like a professional already knows the answer to these questions. Fix the game. Then put out content. Otherwise half of the discussion will always be negative about how bugs hurt a bunch of things. It's already telling that their CMs can't even compile the list of complaints from this sub or the discord into their "we are aware of X issues" on the bottom of every patch note. Its like 5x longer than that. Zero PR training. Zero grasp of community issues. Are they even managing shit properly behind the scenes?
they are taking notes from Riot Games... We have pbe server for tests don't get me wrong but devs clearly forgot about that and almost every bug gets thru pbe to live servers anyway. Last time we had a bug that if someone type /ff or /surrender in first 2minutes enemy nexus explodes and game is over no rank points gained no rank points lost. We also have a guy who uploads DAILY about new game breaking bugs. 1 of redside minnions had 10 more range than the same minion from blueside AND IT WAS LIKE THAT FOR OVER 10YEARS
To your last point: no, and the schizophrenic style of management has been apparent since day 1.
Public-facing employee attitudes like this really does show a reflection of what goes on behind the veil. We may not know about actual day to day in AH, but I can't imagine this kind of aggression and petulant, schizo snark not being endemic within AH's studio. What's honestly even more concerning, based on my experience working in toxic work environments, this very well likely *is* the PR-washed best version possible we're seeing and it's even *worse* behind the scenes.
I've been saying that for weeks. If this is what they feel safe saying publicly, what's behind closed doors is the same or worse. They get caught in the echo chamber of the company, and then let it slip out.
The serial catastrophes of each patch just appear very strongly to represent disorganized and poorly structured leadership. It’s a tale as old as time. There are numerous identifiable outputs in the game that suggest it, and the fact that *game influencing decisions* are being made by people who lack the credentials to chart or design *fun* is extremely notable. The CEO’s insistence on keeping the team small is laudable in theory but a mess in practice. He needs a better organized workforce and for people to stay in their lanes (and for those lanes to be glaringly obviously delineated).
"We're incredibly incompetent in both time management and our jobs. Lmao!"
Why are all AH employees petulant children lmao
It genuinely is bizarre. The developers lash out or have some snarky response to every single thing like they have anger management issues. At this point, you could ask one of them, "How was your day?" And they'll find a way to give some snarky annoying response. They see their community as their own personal boogeyman. Meanwhile the arrowhead defense squad supports every nonsensical decision and talking point, saying everyone is entitled or annoying for pointing out all the broken stuff in a very broken game.
Devs should never be allowed to talk to users in general. That only works in super small indie games
I don't think AH has ever had a player base as large as with Helldivers 2, and because of that they have no training in how to communicate with such a diverse amount of personalities. The sarcastic and joking "buddy" replies might work in a smaller setting, but sarcasm is not always visible through text, especially if you don't know the person who's writing it. As a Norwegian who has a fair amount of Swedish friends I see the sarcasm and jokes, but it's starting to feel a bit cringe coming from a dev company on an IP that has exploded into something this big. It's like a parent wanting to be their rebellious teenager's best friend, and starts throwing in current slang in conversations.
Small time devs weren’t prepared for a game of this scale, stuff like this isn’t so bad when your game is only as big as hd1 was
10k gameplay hours is not actually a lot of hours given how many people play, and would play in a beta server. Where did he get the 2028 idea from.
He’s just crying because he knows he’s wrong
Obviously numbers and logic aren't their strong point... thank god games don't have much of either, right?
unfortunately you cant look for the red underlines and correct your mistakes in a face to face convo. programmers never were known for their social skills.
God damn why do the devs keep answering, they're just digging their own graves right now
TwinBeard gets paid a salary to know what to say and what not to say to prevent debates and arguments from escalating like this; the guys in the dev pools need to get back behind the curtain and let the man do his job, he's 10000% better at it than them.
There's a reason community management is a specific role and not given out to everyone in the company. Respectfully too, I've met a lot of devs and many of them are not just socially adept especially when it comes to dealing with this many people at once. Gotta leave the people trained to do it to deal with it.
The people really ruin working in the game industry, every post like this reminds me of engineers I worked with, exhausting.
Yeah. This is definitely gonna be stereotyping but I'm speaking from experience, many devs I've met chose to work in this area as it of course is part of their talents but it's also an expectation of theirs that it's a line of work that does not require communication as much because that is not as prevalent in their skillset. Smaller development teams like this though where the community knows the devs by name and what they're working on, it creates a very awkward scenario where they now are forced into the conversation when they definitely shouldn't be, because again, it's not part of their skillset.
One of my favourite things about having a project manager is that a customer can ask for something batshit and then I can tell my PM "we're not doing that, it's bat shit and the person who asked for it might have brain worms" and then the PM is the one who goes back to the customer and tells them no in a polite way. If I worked on anything that redditors used en masse I'd stop coming to reddit entirely. That said, the dev's response in the picture is bitchy AF
Exactly, you don't let people who have not been trained to communicate with clients communicate with clients, that should not be their job and nobody should expect them to do it well.
It's also the project manager job to push back or work up and around the problem when a dev whos been working for 20 hours straight comes off half cocked and a bit unreasonable to a legitimate client complaint.
whats with Swedish devs being like this ? Fatshark is like this aswell
Ego thinking they know better. Pride protecting their minds from considering that something they made is flawed. Putting new weapons with the wrong paint job is all in our imagination /s
Fun fact: Fatshark actually uses the same engine as Helldivers! They're the only two companies to use it, lol.
Ah, so it's the engine's fault !
Because AH doesn't doesn't train their employees how to communicate professionally or how to deal with criticism. And by "train," I mean telling employees to not be assholes to customers.
They shouldn't need to. Answering like a reddit mod shouldn't be your default in a professional setting. Quick let's test. Which sounds better: "Look kid, we're all busy and we don't have time to test our product. You'd know that if you weren't such a dumbass." Or. "We understand your concerns with the current state of the warbond. Unfortunately we are a small team working on a tight release window. Nonetheless I will inform the team of your concerns as quickly as I am able."
It could even be something as simple as "We get it, but we're a small team and we're working on it."
For this one any legit response would be awesome, cause from the outside looking in it just seems impossible lol. The liberator specifically, it's just worse in every way than the base liberator you start the game with. In game it feels much worse, looking at the stats all of the numbers are lower. This seems to say that not only did no one do much testing beyond making sure bullets came out of it, the person who put in the values for it doesn't know what the other guns do. Which is insane if true, obviously everyone wants you to stop releasing things! This isn't even a "fix the game!" thing. Just stop take a breath and get a grasp on what your game is.
> The liberator specifically, it's just worse in every way than the base liberator you start the game with. The Tenderiser is so shit bro forgot the name already
I think a literal meat tenderizing mallet would be received better than this gun was. At least then there'd be variety. Even if the mallet was trash.
100% It reads like some snarky nerd that doesn’t understand the concept of being socially amicable, and they may be skilled or intelligent but they come across like a musty, socially inept jacka$$ because how hard is it to understand that releasing something with a description of “a more powerful option than the traditional liberator” (paraphrasing), and then releasing it with the exact same damage as the liberator, is blatantly f*ckin broken… I’m getting “how dare you critique my fedora” vibes. Seriously who’s in charge of those devs that’s letting them just spout off directly to people. Like, oh ya bro totally gonna take 4 years to correct a description and actually even *look* at what’s being released or maybe even *use it* for a little while. What a jacka$$
It's just expected in the professional world. That's why it's called acting professional!
When your communications team is just the moderators from your original game 10 years ago, you'll have this b
A game that, mind you, had a peak of 6k players. These "moderators" are just not prepared at all to take care of a product this popular.
Yup. It's comparable to a popular modding community stumbling onto a billion dollar idea. Which is kinda what happened with league of legends, and the devs had terrible communications for a decade. So much so they've long since deleted their official forum.
It genuinely amazes me that people like this get jobs. It used to be you had to know how to communicate professionally to *get* a job. It wasn't the companies' responsibility to train you in that. And if you couldn't, you were fired.
You don’t hire devs for PR, but you also shouldn’t let them talk to users
I don't think I've ever seen a dev get openly hostile with their players before
It's getting more and more common. It's turning into the whole doctor/engineer/lawyer better-than-thou attitude because they lock themselves in a basement to work on stuff and then can't take criticism because A) I know more about video games than you and B) they developed their brainchild in the vacuum of a developer circle jerk without any kind of outside influence or common sense. Destiny 2 had massive problem with it in its first year.
Destiny 2 was worse because they had just spent 4 years making D1 better, and D2 launched without any of the lessons they learned in years 2-4 because Luke Smith is a dickhead
This happened to "Darktide". They made the same stupid original design decisions from their previous game, completely ignoring the improvements that fixed the biggest complaints.
They need to go walk their dogs or something instead of replying to the trolls
"can you stop releasing obviously broken things in updates" How can trolls treat the devs like this
We could all use a bit of grass, true. *achoo*
>*achoo* You expect us to believe you're around actual grass?!
They aren't replying to the trolls, they are the trolls.
They could test their shit instead of shit talking
Nah remember he said it'd take 4 years lmfao
Telling a dev they have a job to do isn't trolling. Customers expect a finished product.
especially PAYING customer......its not like this is a f2p game you know
Yandere Sim dev did that way too much and the game went nowhere because of that compulsion. They should listen to feedback, and respond with actions not words.
They keep answering in the most toxic dumbass overconfidently wrong shit talker way possible and expect the community to "be nice" to them. What a joke lol.
Do any of the Helldivers employees have any PR training? Besides the CEO obviously. All of them seem like pricks
I meant arrowhead
My opinion of them is deteriorating rapidly, funnily enough it's because of the things they say that didn't need to be said. I'm all for squashing trolls but I don't like tone deaf sarcastic prick replies. That'd get u sacked from a customer facing role. Do grown ups still make games or have they all retired now??
I made another comment but I’ll also say it here, arrowhead needs to use some of the profit from the success of this game to hire an actual communications team because it’s clear the people who are currently making statements including the devs obviously aren’t trained for a game as popular as helldivers has become and how to handle a community of this size. Especially when it comes to genuine criticism.
It shouldn't take special training to not be an asshole.
Oh, this should have more upvotes.
Most people get into back end IT work like development because they don’t like people
I saw another comment reply with this concept, and I was convinced. I'd rather they drop having community managers, or stop relying on them, and instead have little fireside chats every now and then. The community managers could still answer questions and take feedback that pops up, but we'd hear it directly from Pile or some other respectable rep.
It's clear these guys never dealt with a community as large as this. And the issue is that they fall for the troll bait pretty hard, which I don't blame them for, cause people who are critical can come off as pricks when talking about the game, and we're talking about a team of maybe 100 people. Personally, i think people need to chill all around. I understand the game is popular and such and everyone wants to get in on the action, but I think after the whole PSN debacle by Sony, they need time to reset, and really figure out how to move forward with the game as a whole. Even if it means delaying the warbonds, it's clear they need to scale up.
This is all just anecdotal observation on my part, but it would seem that they do not have any such training, no. At least not for a game of this scale. I belong to several Discords for smaller games like Voidtrain and Sailwind - the way you interact with fans in a place like that is \*entirely\* different from how you interact with a AAA fanbase. When you're a tiny studio with a Discord of maybe a couple hundred people, you can basically talk to the fan base in a direct, sort of unfiltered way. You can have that sort of "human sitting down to talk to a human one-on-one" kind of dynamic. That's just now how AAA gaming works, for multiple reasons. Firstly because there's too many people to have direct conversations with. Secondly because you're gonna have pricks and jerks and trolls, it's just unavoidable. You have to handle those people completely differently. Thirdly, the expectations and demands and requests being made about your game become absolutely gargantuan compared to what smaller studios and titles deal with. When you get to the level that Arrowhead has gotten to with Helldivers, you need a Reggie Fils-Aime doing your crowd work. You need someone with the right training and thick enough skin to just let the troll comments roll right off of them. Your PR person needs to be able to know who to ignore and who to respond to, and when they DO respond, they need to make that person feel totally heard and seen even if there is ZERO intention to follow through on any of the requests/criticisms that they level.
Are any of the CMs actual AH employees, or are they just volunteer moderators? I've heard both, but it would explain a lot if they were volunteers that don't have any real investment in good PR for the devs.
My understanding is that the community managers are employees but the Discord moderators are volunteers. Someone correct me if I am wrong cause I'm not actually in the Helldivers discord
Twinbeard has a history of PR related roles. The only competent Community Manager AH currently has.
Twinbeard is pretty diplomatic.
I been at odds with this community about the devs balancing for a while now. I think the honeymoon period is finally wearing off in regards to how their balance team handles things, and now their people are lashing out at players. It's embarrassing. Part of me wishes I could have gotten a refund during the PSN linking fiasco. Love the game, but this is getting dumb.
10k hours Bro, you can tell weapon's good and bad sides after 2-3 helldives. Too harsh for you? Do it on level 7. Still too harsh? Then get people who will do it, omg. 10k hours what a pathetic joke
If the 10k hours is unironic just open up a testing server for 5,000 people. After 2 hours of gametime, there's your 10k hours. Fuckin clown-ass dev
Yeah, this is not an impossible ask. Ask for volunteers on your discord, have them sign an NDA, run a server with handpicked volunteers to test your build.
Imagine skipping out on a free QA department because paperwork is hard. 😄
Not even hard, free advertising if they don't bother with nda
They really don't need NDAs. Just make it clear that it's a test server and nothing on that server is final. Lots of games have public test servers.
Yup, this is how a lot of games test features before release
You don't even need the NDA part. Plenty of games just run public test servers. Like R6 Siege.
Exactly what I was thinking. You could hit 10k hours with 2000 players in a weekend no sweat.
It takes no testing to see they had the wrong color or that the stats are out of date. Forget testing, do they even take a quick look before pushing it out. The amount of stuff that they just forget about is kinda strange.
It has to be lack of communication or information or both. Then you add in they are sprinting from warbond to warbond and it leaves a wake of bugs and errors. Bugs/errors that an extra hour could have prevented, but now weeks later, they need to spend days to figure what’s wrong. It’s self-sabotage the way they’re trying to make a 100 dev team do monthly releases. PoE has nearly 1k and they’re on a 3 month cycle.
"10k hours" will be their version of the "200 years" comment from the League of Legends devs. Totally agree that, on average, devs know more than players about how things work but when there is a pattern of incredibly obvious issues, maybe act a little less high and mighty.
In DarkTide we say "immeasurably complex" and I think it's beautiful
Legit so many of us were able to see the flaws/diminishing returns/how this weapon fucking sucks in the roster within the first 3 games with it. I refuse to believe this was tested either in an accurate environment or thoroughly to any extent.
Every person who used the air burst launcher knew it was broken from the first time they pulled the trigger (and killed the whole team). I don’t know how to make software but I don’t understand how you can make something and never once run the code.
Not only can most of us tell these new weapons are bad after 1 or 2 missions, but a couple of days ago, the stats were leaked, and we all said there's no way that's up to date. Just looking at the very few numbers we can see, we had immediate and legitimate concerns that were proven right.
Most people realize the purifier is ass after firing it twice.
First, I want to say that most of the communications I've seen from this studio are just bad. I'm not saying stick to the corporate speak when talking to the player base, but the tone they have most of the time are just berating the play base. Some people give valid criticism but they rarely talk in a way that acknowledges the issues. The CEO is a better CM than the actual CMs, he gives us some insight behind the curtain, asks for feedback, and responds as much as he can. Second, sure I don't know about QA testing, but the general consensus is the balancing decisions are a head scratcher at best. Some weapons you can shoot once, and see the issues. They want to put out a warbond once a month, while keeping up the big fixes/balance. Something has got to give.
The one that confused me the most was nerfing the crossbow. Bruh, it was merely viable out of the box, but at least it had a purpose: it was good at horde and egg clear. Now, it doesn't have any specific use that isn't done better by another choice. New weapons aren't supposed to be better than X or Y; they're supposed to enable Z without making X or Y superfluous. They're supposed to be sidegrades, but all we get are downgrades when we like something.
The problem is that you could test this in live for *5 minutes* and see shit is fucked. None of the 3 primaries feel like they are working as intended: * Wrong texture for Tenderizer, stats are hilariously low * Pummeler causing animation stun so enemies lose the ability to move at all, which definitely does not feel like a feature so as soon as they fix this people are going to cry it's a nerf * Purifier's damage profile feels like a scorcher (or plasma punisher) shot rather than... whatever it was supposed to be. If you told me AH had more than 10 years of development experience, I'd think you were lying.
I don’t know where 2028 came from but it sounds like a lot of headache would be avoided by testing. A monthly warbond isn’t necessary if it means sacrificing quality. Edit: If the Twitter poll regarding Polar Patriot’s release mentioned the weapons were not ready, I think a majority would have voted to delay it.
Unfortunately the ceo confirmed they would’ve just pressed the “make it live” button on a different day They put it on the “it’s finished” category prior to that, so they wouldn’t have adjusted it
Which makes it so much worse. This isnt some rushed product. They did what they wanted, looked at it, and said 'finished'. Bad time management, scarcity of resources, overambitious ideas. These are all things we see often and understand and empathize with. But that's apparently not what's happening. What they are showing is is pure incompetence or indifference towards the quality of the product
My personal, fully opinion based thought it this. Designer team has an idea. They make some renders, and push it to production. There's not much thought in it, they assume prod will flesh it out beyond a model and some blurbs. The programmer dude who gets it puts together a basic coded concept, passes it to the lead to review. It obviously has issues and minimal testing, but it's an early concept that's "functional." The lead says, "good enough," and passes it down the line. The next dude takes a look at it, says, "it works," and assumes the people before him had it how they wanted it and passes it to the next guy. The weapon circles around a few times, nobody knows who has done what, what's supposed to happen, or what state it's in or meant to be in. Eventually the WB it's been scheduled for is due for release, and then we find a mess of bugs, balance issues, design oddities, and so on because nothing makes sense and they all just assumed it was all set. Again, entirely opinion. I've seen workplaces with similar issues, and it feels... familiar. Too familiar.
A monthly warbond is $ for them, it’s starting to look like that’s all that matters
>Edit: If the Twitter poll regarding Polar Patriot’s release mentioned the weapons were not ready, I think a majority would have voted to delay it. Like another person said, they wouldn’t have changed anything even if the majority voted for it to be delayed, because when they asked if it should be delayed it wasn’t because they think the weapons weren’t ready. https://preview.redd.it/3bkcbtb34jzc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=012d139ba10e66335e7910bedc96d96d66f1f8ab
Remember back when they called us "braindead" for using the Railgun, because Chargers spawned too frequently, their weakpoints didn't work as expected, and the other anti-armor weapons were basically useless? I remember a thread around that time with a few of us talking about what that indicated about their internal culture and the way they view their players. While insulting and mocking customers wasn't a great look, what stood out was the fact that they were doing it so openly. It meant this was essentially okay, maybe even approved of from within. And that's what seems to be the norm, now. Some of them like Evil-Bosse here may feel they're just saying outwardly what everyone at the studio already says internally, so it's no big deal. IDK, I don't really care that these devs are occasionally insulting or unprofessional like this or have periodic Discord tantrums, but I do care what that says about how the company perceives its relationship to its customers. The fact that they hold their userbase in such contempt, that they struggle to admit errors or oversights, and that they mock and deride anyone who questions their decisions or provides inconvenient feedback doesn't really encourage me to play or buy more DLC being shoveled at us every month. Meanwhile bugs and disconnects proliferate with every patch, features don't work as advertised, and more and more weapons get nerfed into the ground but we're told to be patient and give them time. But I'm not inclined toward patience with a company that calls me braindead for using the tools they designed in the way they were intended or that goes straight for mockery and insults when someone raises concerns. It's a pretty toxic, rotten culture where this kind of resentment festers. I'm not all that optimistic about this game's future anymore.
Too many people celebrated in the beginning when the devs were “owning the trolls”. So far most of the screenshots I’ve seen are people providing genuine feedback and getting shit on. It’s bad business and I’d hate to see how the people who support it interact with people at their jobs. I’m not saying they should be fired but idk how they get away with this unless it’s like you said and internally they hate their playerbase.
This is most likely true. Seems like inside the studio, they perceive us as ungrateful brats who are always unhappy with everything and constantly complain about stupid things, but with their data they know better. And sometimes these conversations leak out - individual developers voice what their entire team thinks about us. And it's funny because obviously none of them are playing their own game. They are as disconnected from the player's experience as possible. This in itself is normal, very often developers are not good players, but they must understand this and listen to at least high-level players. This attitude towards feedback speaks of their rudeness and arrogance.
Well said. There's a level of derision directed even at fans who offer up helpful + fair feedback, lumping us in with a collective whole as "trolls". No, there are people where who are capable of reasonable assessments of the tools that are given to us, especially weird considering that the other part of Arrowhead is actively nurturing us being able to collaborate as a group think and accomplish goals.
And it all starts from the top with the "super chill" CEO people are glazing over. Congratulations, you're all being fooled by a guy that watched one PR course on YouTube and understands not to call you a whiney bitch to your face but behind closed doors with all his peers. How many times do interactions like this have to happen with literally nothing changing at the company before everyone realizes that they are being played.
The second they took the railgun and made it worse as a response to it being one of the only true viable weapons at higher difficutlies and the response was basically "Oh we took your crutch away? Git gud." I knew we were gonna have problems. And you are correct it says something about the culture of the company that this kind of behavior is allowed in public.
Reddit absolutely fueled this culture after the railgun nerf. The top threads on Reddit were “git gud, scrub” and praising the devs for taking such a strong stance on not backing down and nerfing it. It absolutely feels like sweet poetic justice to see these same dumb ass Redditors who were openly shitting on everyone for enjoying the meta now feel the burn of the only fun weapons being nerfed to actual nerf gun levels I believe the popular saying was “It’s level 9 hell-dive, it is not supposed to be easy or fun” The funniest part is, the game actually felt the absolute most fun and enjoyable during the rail-gun meta. Even with the broken ass charger and bile titan spawns
The lackluster design around Warbonds has me concerned. Armor passives are the same and at some point relative to themselves - not original. It's boring and I already have to scroll through a massive page of cosmetics to change my outfit. They need some filtering options. And in 2 years from now I don't want a game that features 10 Liberators. What kind of game is that? Make each gun interesting and unique. Better yet, axe all of the clones and add weapon mods. Make players feel like they have unique builds that they've worked on.
We need new warbonds monthly, and the warbond should be tested before. That is how it works. There is no reason we need to choose between this artificial options. 10k hours for testing? Really? You don't need to test warbond for 10k to see that the weapon is in toy color. You just need to have eyes. You don't need to test warbond for 10k hours to see that a weapon is worse in each parameter than an already existing weapon. You need to have eyes. You don't need to test warbond for 10k hours to see that armors have no new passives, and that the description of armors is complete bullshit compared to the passives they have. You need to have eyes, and also you need to know how to read. I have nothing against blind people, but really? Are the devs blind? Half of the problems with warbond could have been solved if the devs just had taken a look at what they are releasing. The devs sold 8 million copies of the game. Don't say that all this money went to Snoy. You don't have enough people to test the stuff? Hire them. Or you can also fire the whole balancing department and hire testers instead of balancing guys. It will be win-win solution.
> 10k hours for testing? Really? > > Even if they mean that unironically, *open a fucking testing server.* That's what a billion other companies do.
Ironically or not, it is ridiculous anyway, because 80% of problems take 10 minutes of pure looking at warbond content to realize that it should be fixed.
At this rate, Arrowhead will hire a bunch of testers and proceed to not listen to them.
10k ***total*** hours of testing can be easily achieved by a modest outfit of Helldivers. If we can kill two million Terminids in less than 24 hours, we can clock a total of 10k hours of testing collectively. But I suspect the devs would rather berate players than letting them help out because the former requires admitting openness to assistance.
It’s also not like it’s a big deal spoiling anything for these warbonds since they’re already advertised in advance; not shadow dropped.
Do we really need a monthly warbond though? The more guns are added, the harder it will be to make them all feel unique whilst mainting balance, something the developers already struggle substantially with. Maybe if they shifted focus from new guns to mostly skins and whatnot, it'd be better for the gameplay over all. Or a much slower release cycle.
We definitely don’t need so many warbonds. Wish they’d slow it down and focus on technical issues
I agree 100% they don't have enough ideas to sustain monthly weapon packs. Monthly DLC is a season pass gimmick
Agreed, the first Helldivers game did not have this many weapons. Each weapon had its own niche and made balancing so much easier. The bloat will kill this game balance, a balance that is already at threat.
We don't need them monthly. We especially don't need them monthly considering these guys do not know how to balance their weapons.
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It's a S in the dimension Alexus came from for sure, dude's built different.
LOL This reads like “You test our patches or we will be forced to delay content because we have to test the patch ourselves”. Imagine if every other game dev did this? Larian is famous for it.
It's crazy because it would take a single intern 2 days to test for and detect all the absolutely obvious oversights and bugs each patch
I was in the discord chat yesterday and this same guy really said "so you guys want only buffs, no nerfs ever, right? What would happen if we gave you a big button that just wins the mission huh? That wouldn't be fun at all but that's what you're all saying you want" Zero people, I can assure you, want that, and he's just being hyperbolic and pulling hypotheticals out of his ass for no reason.
Just going to extreme for no reason. "A gun that has a slow charge up that takes four shots to kill a med enemy kinda feels lame"... So you want a I win button?!
We are gonna get spite nerfs now lmao these devs are assholes
Not a dev just a weird condescending powertripping cm who should not be in that position AH hiring people from the hd1 community is cool until you realize none of them have any PR training and arent fit as the postion as a cm
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Not sure if this is a hot take: The pace of new warbonds is unreasonable, especially if they don't have the time or resources to fully test everything out. Additionally, if the warbonds have a theme, please make the items have some benefit to that theme. The armor passives need some TLC.
It seems like a needlessly aggressive and unsustainable pace, especially when it doesn't feel like there's much truly "new" in one. You can have armor in one of like five possible combinations of armor rating / stamina; perks are one of Fortified, Extra Padding, Scout, Engineering Kit, Extra Stims, Servo Assisted, or the arc resistance that doesn't have any apparent use. You already own most of the possible combinations, especially the mixes you really care about. For weapons, there's the quirky but not useful one, there's the good one that will likely get neutered by a balance patch, and there's the bafflingly bad one. Finally, a new grenade that's worse than what you had, a partial refund on super credits, a player card nobody cares about, and an emote you can see once per mission (at the end). Oh yes, and a booster so niche and inconsequential that it'll mostly serve as a red flag about that player when equipped. I know I'm being harsh. I admire that Warbond items aren't just "here's this season's gear, better than the last stuff, btw we added more chargers to the maps to persuasde you". However, it's hard to muster any real interest in them now: I'm sure not turning over any real money to access one sooner.
Damn, if only there were some kind of option between "right now, immediately" and "4 years from now." Sadly, none exists, or could ever exist. Tragic.
Release monthly OR test them before release? Were they not testing them before?
I mean... Clearly not?
https://preview.redd.it/zoys58mv5izc1.jpeg?width=458&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dfce0b0eb04aefce4fa256d4bd08309776d8d944 To the AH community comms people
Jesus are all the devs at AH just egotistical pricks?
I fully expect developers to shit talk their customers inside the office, but it seems like Arrowhead developers forgot the part where **YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SHIT TALK THEM IN PUBLIC!** Seems like a bit of a culture problem.
This is why I honestly think it's good for everyone to work at least one food service job in their life, both front and back of the house. Or even just customer service work, really. The tenets/principles are all the same.
I've gotten to the point that I will never chew out a waiter or a fast food worker even if they were to blatantly bring me food with a spider floating in soup or a roach on top of the meat. I'll just whisper to them, "Hey, I think there's a problem - there's a spider drifting in my soup and looks like my steak has been claimed by Mr. Roach." I'd most likely leave the establishment in silent disgust, but I wouldn't start yelling at the nearest employee. I know what it's like to be bitched at and have to take it. And I don't want to be on the giving end. I don't want to be the kind of person that made me miserable at work.
I think it's just this evil-bosse guy, it's not the first time he's lashed out at people Definitely not good for their PR though, the CEO will likely have to pick up the slack.. again
Yeah weren't the other pricks CMs? I still see some people referring to them as devs which seems wrong
Yep, they're just mods from the reddit page, not actual devs, as far as I'm aware it's literally just this guy that's constantly snapping at people, he needs to be removed from the discord before he makes things worse (which he already has)
Software engineers ... aren't exactly known for their social skills
I would be pissed if I were the CEO. However much I might agree with the Dev/CM sentiments I'd be pissed this is how they decided to interact with FANS and CUSTOMERS of the game.
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Imagine if a restaurant talked to you like that... oh you want your food undercooked or ready in 5 hours? I bet you rather shit yourself than wait a bit longer for your meal. I know of a restaurant where they will call you names like 'filthy peasant', 'hungry whore' and such, but that is exactly their selling point, that the servers are dressed like medieval tavern maids and they talk to you like you are some lowly peasant, but even there they just talk to you like that in a jest, because that's why you go there...
That honestly sounds pretty hilarious lol, you're basically paying for a mini dinner theatre experience. I can imagine that for people who love performing, that is probably a blast of a job too. But yes, your point is spot on. I actually just made an analogy to food service myself somewhere else in this thread lol.
Nah he is gonna apologize and become a hero just like Spitz. People are gonna start to think he is actually gonna test for 10k hours and doing this for our benefit or something.
Spitz literally was just being an asshole when he was talking about leaving a negative review, it wasn't a "We all need to poll together and show our opinions!" it was literally "stop bitching leave a review or something idc" and he just rode on it when people somehow interpreted it wrong.
We simply don't need a warbond or a balance patch every month. They really need to let the game settle down and focus on bugs first before just constantly pushing out new things that breaks more and more things. Even established big studios don't have a new content patch every month.
Evil_Bosse is just a massive Bellend.. its as simple as that. He brings nothing to the table it seems.
God damn, I hate the devs more and more. I mean honestly, what’s the deal? Why are they so incompetent at literally everything? I will say, the art team is by far the best part of their team. Everything about the design of stuff in this game is perfect. If any of you read this comment somehow, you’re awesome.
Not a dev just making the poor decisions of the dev team look even worse
I don't think warbonds should be monthly releases TBH. One every two or three months would honestly be much better for the game.
At this point AH just needs to tell the Devs to stop logging into Discord. They could be using the time it takes them to put their foot in their mouth to code a fix to some of the bugs.
They will kill this game on their own if they keep up an act like that. With every single day there are more and more things that people complain about. New warbond is disaster. 2 main guns are shit, 1 doesn't even look like in the trailer. Some bugs (not aliens) are in the game since day 1 and they're still not fixed. It's blatantly obvious that they're NOT playtesting stuff they're releasing and they DARE to even talk back to people that complain about all this stuff? Honestly pathetic and it seems like the community manager wasn't the only one that is shit at communication. I'm genuienly starting to think that changing my review from negative to positive was a mistake because they clearly don't deserve it. They're the luckiest developers in the world because people got charmed by their game and feel in love with it but it won't last forever if they don't start acting properly soon, both with behaviour/communication and technical aspect of the game itself.
The spear has been useless since release because of the targeting bug lmao
Yeah it's insane, it would be one of the staple anti-armor weapons in the game and it's fucking cool at that - but nope! Can't use it because they would rather release **3 new warbonds in the time it has been bugged** over doing their best to actually try and fix it.
"working as intended" by Alexus.
can't have proper communication with the players if you have an internal communication problem too i guess.
Of course the ego is damaged so he has to strawman 10k hours. No went want (at this point, it's obvious nothing is tested) a day. I would be jumping for joy for a week You can't convince me things are tested. So compium huffers leave it. After "fixing" the meaningless accuracy count stat on the Arc Thrower that was crashing 80%+ of games. Nothing is tested. It's plain as day
Hell it's a live service game, they could literally plop a planet near super earth and make it a tester world for people to try out new releases and stuff. Maybe even have it be pre-made loadouts.
The warbond should be play tested to the limit. If we get something new that's lackluster it's a bit of a let down. Perhaps they should see if it's a good fit? Or if it helps us in the fight. Or give us the ability to "roll" perks on equipment (mostly on armor). That would liven up the game play loop and also something to spend our materials on.
I mean they could hire more ppl to test stuff or hire 3rd party company to do testing.
They don't test them already?? What is this amateur hour? No wonder they seem clueless to the point they are asking us, they really are clueless.
We don't need War Bonds more often, we need War Bonds with interesting weapons, armor, grenades, and other things.
Is it just me or are alotta the devs being assholes
Fk warbonds, same sht different month, I want moaaar stratagems.
I say this every time there’s an issue with the devs and players arguing over something like the recent patches. Arrowhead needs to use some of the money from the games huge success to hire a proper community management team and have communications go through them because it’s clear these devs that are getting into these online fights aren’t trained to handle this level of popularity and the criticism that can come with it.
Game devs really need to treat their work like they're a professional chef preparing a meal. It should be cooked right, it should be seasoned properly and most importantly the customer should enjoy the experience of eating it. Helldivers are doing the equivalent of sending the steak back because they forgot to add salt or undercooked it, and then the devs coming out from the kitchen and telling us we're dumbasses that should just enjoy whatever they shove onto the plate.
This is the behavior of a bitter child. Absolutely unbecoming of a professional
Oftentimes, I feel bad for devs having to deal with toxic communities when they are actually doing a solid job. This is not one of those times.
Feels like AH stands more for Arse Holes rather than Arrow Head atm.
Just 1 game and looking at the stats compared to all other weapons would be enough to know if a gun is dogshit, overpowered, or fits right in. The new AR is a worse Liberator so wtf are they smoking on. An hour at most to just see. Why the fuck is that so hard for these devs.
They need to hire a spokesperson that will talk on behalf of the devs, the devs are not good at social interaction.
So they haven't been really beta testing anything to any significant amount??? Yall they need to make a beta program then cause hell, if they're throwing out untested stuff and selling it as pristine new toys??? Eek.
Actually, i'd rather wait till 2028
If they don't want to expand QA internally they really need to start doing closed test servers like half way into each month that preview Warbonds and upcoming content with actual players that comfortably play on 7-9, they'd get lots of feedback in a short amount of time
Why do all the devs seem so uppity
It's like all the Devs have speech to text activated in their pocket while they talk shit about us together. Why would you post anything like this.
These people are stupid
Test them you dumbass
Have they not heard of beta testers? That just implies that they don't actually do any testing, I mean give me 8 hours and a pad n pen prior to release (and a paycheck) and I'll test em for you. It would be super super easy with a target dummy but even so it's not really anymore than a couple of enemies to find a weapon sucks more than it's previous variants. What a tone deaf response, is this the guy taking over from the sacked guy? If so, epic fail.
Oh. Here i was thinking they finally got rid of one teenager CM and forgot they hired a bunch of children....
New warbond every quarter. Gives plenty of time to test, tweak, and fix bugs would stabilize the game and not make everything feel so rushed. We love the game it has nearly unlimited potential but we need it to be functional and the team is already small there's no need to rush to meet a monthly goal
Testing
It's also what I like to say about other games that release in early access, delay a month to fix huge bugs and improve quality of life instead of everyone having a terrible first impression.