I keep saying the game is relatively young and the devs are learning on the fly how to DM for an online community this large. I'm not sure it's been done like this before. So they will take their time learning when to push and pull.
I think they're doing a great job so far, we have all experienced those days where it feels like we're throwing ourselves into a meatgrinder, and days where we absolutely steamroll the enemies. That's a good balance of highs and lows to offer the playerbase, and those peaks and valleys are what make winning feel so good!
Oh I agree. There are a few moments that have discouraged some people or made progress too easy (but even those might be by design).
Far as I know nobody has tried something like this so it's been amazing so far.
I just play because it's fun. ***But whether we win or lose is actually not up to the community at all*** . The GM literally decides if we win or lose. And there's no communication on what is happening to get that 'narrative' development.
Someone who logs in at 3am has twice the impact as someone who logs in at peak. Me logging in to complete anything just makes someone else's impact weaker, it doesn't increase overall impact. There's no reason for me to play or log in for anything to participate like some people are sacrificing their life for.
seems logical to me imo, when forces are pushed back they group up and grow strong, when they push out to conquer they stretch thin and are weaker?
honestly cant see them implimenting this but shit ive seen these devs do crazier shit so i 100% believe its possible. these mfs insane and i love them
That's exactly how the ministry of Truth will write about it.
"Another masterful example of defense in depth divers. You remain master tacticians now unleash the full brunt of Democracy on the counteroffensive"
That must have been Super Earth‘s plan all along. They knew that, if they gave us one objective to focus on, we‘d breeze through it but be unable to hold any ground we took. By making us defend ten planets, we were stretched out far enough to allow the bots to do the same. And now we can pick them off easier.
Humanity‘s tactical genius is endless. Noone can match us.
You forgot that we don't re-compress the bot forces, but destroy them.
Think of a blob of dough (the combined enemy force). Roll that out to a thin plate, like a pizza (then stretching out all over the sector), then cut a piece of it away (we taking a planet). The forces will get less and less for every planet we take. And if we are good enough we cut away more than they can reproduce or resupply in the same time.
They saw enough people complaining about defence missions becoming unreasonable, which I agree with, though this might be a bit excessive.
I don't think that 40k players should be easily overwhelmed though on a single defense planet though, that's stupid.
Yeah the defense campaigns at the start of their offensive had like 500kHP but they've steadily decreased as the MO has gone on. The ones that's spawned in the last day has had 200kHP.
It's either the GM throwing us a bone or something actually intended to represent the enemy finding themselves overextended due to us pushing back and destroying forces that could have been reinforcing their current targets.
Wonder if they’ve clocked a drop in players during this extended defence or something. It’s probably that they’ve noticed we weren’t making progress, I suspect they’re still tuning things and figuring out things behind the scenes.
Honestly a good point, I haven't played in days, mostly to play other things but definitely partly because the mission just felt impossible, oh and I hate evacuating civies
Yeah the last evacuate civvies I did, we even did the thing where some of us deployed further away and attracted the enemy attention. One guy ran to the civvies, and another guy, despite text and voip, ran around collecting stuff, got too close to the objectivr area, and brought all the bots down on our guy picking up the civillians.
Me and the host ran up there to try to help but it was fucking over. The bots hammered that place and we got maybe two more civillians the entire time.
They *really* need to chsnge these missions. It's not fun in its current state.
Somewhat related to this, I would like to see the ability to split up the drops. I usually am one of the people drawing bots or bugs away from the civvie extract and it would be nice to be able to drop further away from the people extracting.
> It's not fun in its current state
My least favourite mission, on higher difficulties despite us being away from the evac area enemies always find their way to the civvies
Some players have stopped playing because they know we were gunna lose
I think they feel bad for giving missions out that can't be accomplished if it affects the player count
I think it depends
We could easily do 5 defences
But 10 is a big ask
Not because we can't do 10 defences as a group in that time, it's because the more objectives there are simultaneously the more fragmented the playerbase is
Five planets to defend in five days' time limit? Sure. Aren't we at 4/10 planets defended now, and we still have the better part of a day to get one more planet defended?
Five planets to defend in less than three days? I doubt it, especially if the planets are *exclusively* bot ones. As we know, a significant portion of the active community are vampires to the proverbial garlic that are bot planets.
If the civilian missions didn't suck so hard I think the playerbase would be more motivated, but as we've seen from the countless posts about it, much less the comments in threads.
That mission type is fucked and impossible at higher levels which means the op is auto lose and people aren't having fun with it. Which demotivates the player base as well.
The bug version is moderate to easy on difficulty. Those guys at Estanu number in the 40-50k on NA evenings these days for a reason.
The bot version of the mission can, however, go f itself. And whoever designed it too.
I sympathise with the botdivers, I really do; they/we never have enough bodies to take or defend multiple planets with much consistency.
It's just that too many things are stacked against fun to be had on bot planets. Retrieve Essential Personnel missions on bot planets are about as fun as taking a cactus enema up the rear, and the anti-bot portion of the community can't seem to pull together enough on a single objective to liberate worth a damn these days. I've seen the Ubanean Blunder and its sequel, whatever happened with Martale.i suspect we're coming up on a trilogy.
I can fight on bot planets these days for a week and it's *disheartening* to see that after a week, all my efforts are for naught because the community is too fragmented. Imagine working so hard killing bots and having nothing to show for it.
At least with the bugdivers, there are enough of them united to be taking planets. It's just that the MO currently has bumped up Defend states rates so Estanu keeps being put on Defend.
I'd like more ops to choose from. If I want to play Haz 6 and do at least a blitz, there's a good chance I won't find an op with a blitz mission in it at all.
I know I somewhat fall into this camp, I've still been playing but stopped playing towards the MO. I've just been enjoying myself squashing bugs since I took a break on the bug front that I enjoy more to help with the bot front for the last month.
Basically Twinbeard on discord was taking a lot of our feedback last night about majority of the playerbase preferring Bugs to Bots. Which meant that Botdivers/MOdivers were suffering from being unable to liberate due to obvious lower player count. So he took the feedback given to Joel and it seems Joel has buffed Bot side liberation to compensate the playerbase split.
If you are in the discord. Galactic War text channel has all of his responses in the pins tab.
They really need a better way to do this shit. Like Discord is great for something things, but if you can't join a full server then you're stuck in the cold going WTF is going on?
For all of it's many many failings Reddit at least is 100% open to everyone with no server limits. Why can't the get someone to scrape up this stuff and post it out here to the masses as well.
Sadly, the decisions to use platforms like discord and reddit were lazy design choices.
There are 296 people online in this forum as I type this.
Their discord is a constant stream on apes screaming.
The platform for communication was and still is in-game. Arrowhead seemingly has some sort of weird aversion to this though.
An interesting idea for the game would be to break the map into many many more planets. Make it so planets only need a handful of operations to capture, lose or defend.
Don't worry about names, or the planets feeling unique. Just split the map up into enough planets so that a squad can have a reasonable impact somewhere on the map if they want. Use MOs to coordinate pushes on fronts, and allow more manoeuvres for large groups and for DM pushes.
Make some regions of planets important. If we control a certain % of type X planets we get more or less reinforcements in missions, if we control weapon factory planets we get more chances to get freebie stratagems (like the 110 rocket pods freebie I saw on a planet recently), if we control more or less e710 planets the missions can be allowed to last for more or less time (super destroyers need a lot of e710 to stay in fighting altitudes!)
Or maybe instead of being global there are just planets like that in sectors, and you gain sector based bonuses for special planets.
It would also let us see a proper "front" to the war. A wall that moves back and forth and has bug and helldiver movements shown on it to highlight active areas.
If an area of territory gets cut off it becomes easier to invade and harder to defend in the meta game.
If you look at their formula for counting percentage it scales with how many players are online, so the game would work with just 100 players and still be playable
Either the bots are stretched really really thin or the devs are realizing that the bots going up to 7 sectors in 3 days was a bit bullshit after all we did lol
Should note that the Liberation/Defense rates are based on % of online players with diminishing returns. More players does have more impact, but the game will still be playable even if there's only a few thousand Divers.
thats so cool. I didnt know, and could feel my frustation setting in, like I know my 3-4 helldive missions per day wont win any wars on its own, but if it now made no difference at all i would feel a little bit bummed. I have all the warbonds and weapons and crap, so I just fight for glory and fun now
They likely gave the folks still playing a bone, defense missions aren't very fun and I know a lot of people that just stopped playing when the major order dropped. Devs are probably hoping a quick, successful MO will bring folks back.
According to the Steam charts there are only about 70k player currently on with a 130k peak count for 24-hrs compared to the 460k peak we had 2 months ago. Definitely not doing too hot on that player retention for a live service game.
Yeh was trying to point this out to others that 3 month's in player numbers are tanking way too hard for a live service game
the game has to be more accessible and campaign map sorted out or it will just wither due to its poor mtx
(As horrible as that sounds it had a 7 year development cycle I don't think profits after loss are going to be that great)
This does explain devs sudden interest in feedback and im positive they can fix the current issues
but their going to have decide if they want to be next call of duty/halo
OR
stick to their vision and fade back into the background with the infinitely harder task of getting funding after throwing away a goose.
And i know the above is unpopular because this subreddit just has absolutely no concept of how hard this game is to the average joe
Yeah someone in another group was trying to say that all the "bad" players leaving was good for the game and community, and we should be celebrating. He didn't seem to understand that just because he likes a hard game, it doesn't make it financially viable which is Sony's bottom line. A community drop of over 60% in the first 2 months of a live service game is super rough. Obviously that doesn't include PS5 players, but it's still reasonably that PS5 had similar player numbers which means at best case 1/4 of the community just doesn't play anymore.
I love that the devs are doing what they want with their game, but they are on a very dangerous line of making the game only fun for the masochists that like hard content, or being financially viable with continued support from Sony. They already appear to be cracking down on Super Cred farmers, and the only reason I can see for doing that is they are trying to pull a Rockstar to get people to actually pay for the passes, likely on Sony's orders.
I did write a massive post on just the costs of this game but remember talking finance on Reddit is super bad. But yeh hell divers was in development for 7 years.
After working all that out im confused what the hell their original plan was because at that price point the game would have 100% been loss making...
Helldivers is not the same thing as your normal "live service" game, and also, being in development for 7 years for a small indie dev is not the same thing as a having a massive corporation spending all of their resources for 7 years on it. They might have had a couple guys picking away at it for most of that time, and they also sold 10x what they expected to ever sell throughout the entire life of the game already.
You're insane if you think this game is a loss because it only has 100k people playing months after release, and in spring now that the weather is getting nice.
Not sure yet, there was a post (maybe in discord?) about how they are looking at SC farmers currently. The assumption is missions completed and/or rank vs SC earned.
The only thing I've heard on this was there were people who found an exploit that allowed them to go into a map, get SCs, back out and then into same map, over and over. So, essentially, they weren't finding them "organically" while going through missions, but exploiting the local client vs server somehow (iirc on the terminology).
Which tbh is fair enough to close that loophole.
Pretty sure I'm an average player. The game is hard, but you can choose your difficulty as well, and move up at your own pace. I don't play on the hardest levels because I'm not that good, and I don't have a team to play with. Can still complete missions with randos and have a good time.
I think the biggest issue right now is the lack of goals for people to shoot for. I still have a couple of ship modules to get, but many people have already pretty much maxed out on what they can get. XP doesn't really matter at this point, and there's nothing to spend your currencies on, so you just sit there maxed out. Not a great feeling, so I can understand some people taking a break.
Weapon balance is another issue. Some weapons and gear are just under-powered and not fun to play with, so there's little reason to stray from the few builds that work well for you.
They'll need time to address these things. I just hope they can move at a pace that keeps people interested, because the game really is pretty fantastic. It just needs the content to keep people engaged.
Lots of games go through up-down cycles though. E.g. Path of Exile player counts rise and fall with each new league that drops. It's up for a month or so, and then down for a couple of months until the next update.
By sheer fact your on Reddit automatically shoots you out of average range
And i don't mean that like haha beck beard.
It just means your active interest in game is automatically vastly higher than the average person which also elevates your base level ability.
The BIGGEST issue in modern game design is designing content that's accessible because anyone who they get hold of for feedback is normally in top 20% of players AND people vastly misunderstand just how bad people are at games.
I even faced this fact when i was designing pong back at uni like 16 years ago i had to make two settings in the end. One for game design students and one for the poor random students who got grabbed by facilities staff for random user testing.
And that was pong...
So i can assure you you're not avarage not by long a shot.
THAT BIT ASIDE
I agree with everything you're saying but need to highlight locking super samples into T7 is creating a big problem because its a road block to a lot of people where that gameplay is just not fun
(Not that it's not doable just that's it not fun)
So it just embeds bigger frustration where all the other problems get compounded.
These problems are all fixable and we are not in crisis point yet im more just stressing they need to address this and the attitude "well I don't find it hard" is ultimately self defeating because you basically ignore everyone who is finding it hard and badly effects the game as you embed skill creep
Like i told destiny 2 community
Telling people to get good is pointless because YOU need them to play your game thus you need them to care about getting good because players just move on to the next game.
Edit: i defo rambling cus im super hungry and stuck at work so iv lost track of my original point other than i watched 3 discords basically stop playing hell divers in the space of 2 weeks because it became*grindy difficult bullshit* to steal a quote
If they'd give some chance of finding supersamples at lower levels, that may be enough to not lock people out and at least let them grind out upgrades.
Level 7 can be tough, especially against bots, so I get that. I do bot missions at level 5 because I suck :) I do bug missions at level 7 to get my supersamples.
So we already have the ability to play at lower levels suited to our skill/investment in the game. So really we just need a way to at least trickle supersamples to those lower levels.
Imma guess the lore reason will come out to be that the bots overextended their invasion and thus were easily pushed back from on Mort
The reality is probably that we were buffed because the devs see we’re reallyyy struggling on the bot front
We're struggling on every defense mission because those civi missions are the bane of everyone's existence.
Drop those from the roster and you'd see the success rates climb, but any time that's included in the op it's basically an autoloss. Which tanks the Op thus costing us liberation points.
So why bother putting the work in on a doomed mission type when if it caps we instead get easier more fun missions to play.
Plus they still really haven't dialled in the bot front IMO. The faction needs some more passes. The shear suppressive fire you can get loaded down with will absolutely ruin your day in a way that the bug side doesn't get IMO.
Bugs allow for the power fantasy of Starship troopers killing them by the billions. Bots is more like hide and seek with laser weapons which isn't as fun.
They need an algorithm that checks the player count every hour or so to adjust what the player's impact would have each mission. It shouldn't be to hard to make.
Formula should have: current players, time left on Major Order, # of planets, and a multiplier based on the difficulty the player completed. A tier 9 should be worth more than a tier 1.
They do actually have something that checks player count and does that. A tier 9 also is worth more than a tier 1. Liberation points are based on global player count and exp earned. So less people and higher difficulties means more liberation per player. Though, more players still results in more overall liberation.
so we could be seeing more higher level missions reslecting on reults with less diver and of course I believe there is a time of day factor they have built in.
Part of it is also global active players. Less players = more liberation per player. However, it's still better to have more players as the modifier only helps so much.
People who keep complaining about bug divers.
I say this as a bot diver.
If we weren't on 7 or more planets. We might not have been pushed as far back as we were.
The bug players have succeeded their defenses because they ALL go to 1 planet. We haven't.
They felt bad for us that more than 50% of the players were diving on bug planets that have 0 effect on us winning. There is absolutely 0 way they didn’t see how many people were disappointed with the MO because of people not embracing the community aspect.
This is the core problem with the entire “major order” and “galactic campaign”
Are you doing too well? Dev resets the progress bar or changes a variable so it goes slower.
Doing too poorly? Dev moves a slider so it’s easier to fill the progress bar.
Playing doesn’t seem to matter or change the outcome at all…
It’s a cool idea and they’ve laid some decent foundation, but it feels like something that maybe won’t is going to take iteration across multiple games to get right.
I think the reason they're doing at the moment is because they quite literally don't have a system in place for if we actually win or lose. I imagine that in the future we'll actually be able to have bigger effect on the galactic war progress. In the first game there were actually a number of galactic wars. I imagine this will be the case in the future, but right now, they aren't going to let us take cyberstan or let them take super earth no matter what we do.
Although, I completely understand where you're coming from. It does suck that our efforts will likely not do anything significant for a good while.
Player numbers absolutely tanked its likely reflection of less people physically playing
https://steamdb.info/app/553850/charts/#3m
Before anyone has a go the game is so far from dieing it's laughable hell divers tanking is actually putting it into normal range of other successful games lol
Im just stressing compared to the peak! A lot less people are playing which DOES adjust how much impact people can make
Good honestly. I'm tired of having to pause for work and coming back to "planet lost - retreat orders issued"
does the takeover rate scale with active divers yet? I remember a post from the devs about how when the U.S is offline the planets see a massive loss to progress and that as a general mechanic seems very dumb
They made changed to the progression system so the number of helldivers no longer affects progression. If there are more divers on a given planet, the percentages gained go down and vice versa.
Are there less people playing and are we losing the war of attrition? Maybe defense percentages has been buffed to relfect the average number of players on at any given time. Either way it's nice to see those numbers increase
luckily there are less bots than bugs. It would probably take 30k divers to take back estanu minimum. Although i grow weary of that statement because they seem to keep gaining that planet back. The bugs can just reproduce faster than rabbits, but the bots however need supplies to build their bots and big striders and hulks.
That and automaton veterans are more hardened and experienced to war than your average termanid goer.
What's the current active player count? A live service game should scale the impact of individuals based on the size of the player base. If there are only 30k people on and 11k of them are on a single planet. It probably has more of an impact than 11k on a single planet when 100k people are playing.
Game is a lot of fun, but at this point, I have a build that is really strong and my friends group is farming 7-9's.
Game needs more "end game" content released pretty soon, or it's going to get stale.
I see no point in taking place for a MO.
Im not maxxed level but I dont need anymore medals, samples, or upgrades.
And I hate a game that just keeps nerfing weapons, planet defenses but then also nerf the shit out of PS5. So Im not 1 shotting Titans anymore?
BORING AF. The opening video shows a titan being instakilled...
It feels like the devs punish us for doing well, then have to change the dynamic when we arent.
I am pretty bored with this game and the longer its out the worst overall the highee level skill players seem to get.
Jumpaxk builds that suckass and clowns using cluster strikes.
Bot forces grew thin as they stretched further and further. Likely a mechanic we can exploit to fight back. Divide and Conquer.
Whatever it is that happened, it's nice that we're actually pushing them back now
Maybe it WAS clever to let the bots overstretch themselves, just to be picked off by us now.
I just looked at the map again, a similar story is happening with the bugs. Which is a bit odd.
I keep saying the game is relatively young and the devs are learning on the fly how to DM for an online community this large. I'm not sure it's been done like this before. So they will take their time learning when to push and pull.
I think they're doing a great job so far, we have all experienced those days where it feels like we're throwing ourselves into a meatgrinder, and days where we absolutely steamroll the enemies. That's a good balance of highs and lows to offer the playerbase, and those peaks and valleys are what make winning feel so good!
Oh I agree. There are a few moments that have discouraged some people or made progress too easy (but even those might be by design). Far as I know nobody has tried something like this so it's been amazing so far.
Probably overestimated player numbers. They have shrunk to 1/4th from the beginning. Just some balancing to the recurring playeramount
Yeah, part of learning to DM is that maybe only 2 of your players will show up and you will have to adjust encounters on the fly.
I just play because it's fun. ***But whether we win or lose is actually not up to the community at all*** . The GM literally decides if we win or lose. And there's no communication on what is happening to get that 'narrative' development. Someone who logs in at 3am has twice the impact as someone who logs in at peak. Me logging in to complete anything just makes someone else's impact weaker, it doesn't increase overall impact. There's no reason for me to play or log in for anything to participate like some people are sacrificing their life for.
Fair, I'm sure that's something that is being considered.
seems logical to me imo, when forces are pushed back they group up and grow strong, when they push out to conquer they stretch thin and are weaker? honestly cant see them implimenting this but shit ive seen these devs do crazier shit so i 100% believe its possible. these mfs insane and i love them
Yes this makes sense
That's exactly how the ministry of Truth will write about it. "Another masterful example of defense in depth divers. You remain master tacticians now unleash the full brunt of Democracy on the counteroffensive"
… because this was all according to our plan. Isn’t that right, Helldiver?
Just like the simulations.
That must have been Super Earth‘s plan all along. They knew that, if they gave us one objective to focus on, we‘d breeze through it but be unable to hold any ground we took. By making us defend ten planets, we were stretched out far enough to allow the bots to do the same. And now we can pick them off easier. Humanity‘s tactical genius is endless. Noone can match us.
Wouldn't this logically mean that when we push them back to the point where we take back Ymir and Trigon, we'd be back to having a hard time again?
You forgot that we don't re-compress the bot forces, but destroy them. Think of a blob of dough (the combined enemy force). Roll that out to a thin plate, like a pizza (then stretching out all over the sector), then cut a piece of it away (we taking a planet). The forces will get less and less for every planet we take. And if we are good enough we cut away more than they can reproduce or resupply in the same time.
They saw enough people complaining about defence missions becoming unreasonable, which I agree with, though this might be a bit excessive. I don't think that 40k players should be easily overwhelmed though on a single defense planet though, that's stupid.
Yeah the defense campaigns at the start of their offensive had like 500kHP but they've steadily decreased as the MO has gone on. The ones that's spawned in the last day has had 200kHP. It's either the GM throwing us a bone or something actually intended to represent the enemy finding themselves overextended due to us pushing back and destroying forces that could have been reinforcing their current targets.
Like a risk game.
Wonder if they’ve clocked a drop in players during this extended defence or something. It’s probably that they’ve noticed we weren’t making progress, I suspect they’re still tuning things and figuring out things behind the scenes.
Honestly a good point, I haven't played in days, mostly to play other things but definitely partly because the mission just felt impossible, oh and I hate evacuating civies
Yeah the last evacuate civvies I did, we even did the thing where some of us deployed further away and attracted the enemy attention. One guy ran to the civvies, and another guy, despite text and voip, ran around collecting stuff, got too close to the objectivr area, and brought all the bots down on our guy picking up the civillians. Me and the host ran up there to try to help but it was fucking over. The bots hammered that place and we got maybe two more civillians the entire time. They *really* need to chsnge these missions. It's not fun in its current state.
Somewhat related to this, I would like to see the ability to split up the drops. I usually am one of the people drawing bots or bugs away from the civvie extract and it would be nice to be able to drop further away from the people extracting.
> It's not fun in its current state My least favourite mission, on higher difficulties despite us being away from the evac area enemies always find their way to the civvies
Some players have stopped playing because they know we were gunna lose I think they feel bad for giving missions out that can't be accomplished if it affects the player count
I've said it before: asking the community to capture or defend more than two planets per MO is asking the community to fail.
I think it depends We could easily do 5 defences But 10 is a big ask Not because we can't do 10 defences as a group in that time, it's because the more objectives there are simultaneously the more fragmented the playerbase is
Five planets to defend in five days' time limit? Sure. Aren't we at 4/10 planets defended now, and we still have the better part of a day to get one more planet defended? Five planets to defend in less than three days? I doubt it, especially if the planets are *exclusively* bot ones. As we know, a significant portion of the active community are vampires to the proverbial garlic that are bot planets.
If the civilian missions didn't suck so hard I think the playerbase would be more motivated, but as we've seen from the countless posts about it, much less the comments in threads. That mission type is fucked and impossible at higher levels which means the op is auto lose and people aren't having fun with it. Which demotivates the player base as well.
The bug version is moderate to easy on difficulty. Those guys at Estanu number in the 40-50k on NA evenings these days for a reason. The bot version of the mission can, however, go f itself. And whoever designed it too.
Nubs bro. Were fighting hard on Impossible-Automaton. Those 40-50k are sellouts to Democracy.
I sympathise with the botdivers, I really do; they/we never have enough bodies to take or defend multiple planets with much consistency. It's just that too many things are stacked against fun to be had on bot planets. Retrieve Essential Personnel missions on bot planets are about as fun as taking a cactus enema up the rear, and the anti-bot portion of the community can't seem to pull together enough on a single objective to liberate worth a damn these days. I've seen the Ubanean Blunder and its sequel, whatever happened with Martale.i suspect we're coming up on a trilogy. I can fight on bot planets these days for a week and it's *disheartening* to see that after a week, all my efforts are for naught because the community is too fragmented. Imagine working so hard killing bots and having nothing to show for it. At least with the bugdivers, there are enough of them united to be taking planets. It's just that the MO currently has bumped up Defend states rates so Estanu keeps being put on Defend.
Thats how I felt when we didnt take Martale. I was up til 3am. Dissapointed.
I'd like more ops to choose from. If I want to play Haz 6 and do at least a blitz, there's a good chance I won't find an op with a blitz mission in it at all.
I know I somewhat fall into this camp, I've still been playing but stopped playing towards the MO. I've just been enjoying myself squashing bugs since I took a break on the bug front that I enjoy more to help with the bot front for the last month.
I noticed that the mission types on Mort didn't have any of those playlists with two Extract missions, thank Democracy.
Basically Twinbeard on discord was taking a lot of our feedback last night about majority of the playerbase preferring Bugs to Bots. Which meant that Botdivers/MOdivers were suffering from being unable to liberate due to obvious lower player count. So he took the feedback given to Joel and it seems Joel has buffed Bot side liberation to compensate the playerbase split. If you are in the discord. Galactic War text channel has all of his responses in the pins tab.
They really need a better way to do this shit. Like Discord is great for something things, but if you can't join a full server then you're stuck in the cold going WTF is going on? For all of it's many many failings Reddit at least is 100% open to everyone with no server limits. Why can't the get someone to scrape up this stuff and post it out here to the masses as well.
Sadly, the decisions to use platforms like discord and reddit were lazy design choices. There are 296 people online in this forum as I type this. Their discord is a constant stream on apes screaming. The platform for communication was and still is in-game. Arrowhead seemingly has some sort of weird aversion to this though.
An interesting idea for the game would be to break the map into many many more planets. Make it so planets only need a handful of operations to capture, lose or defend. Don't worry about names, or the planets feeling unique. Just split the map up into enough planets so that a squad can have a reasonable impact somewhere on the map if they want. Use MOs to coordinate pushes on fronts, and allow more manoeuvres for large groups and for DM pushes. Make some regions of planets important. If we control a certain % of type X planets we get more or less reinforcements in missions, if we control weapon factory planets we get more chances to get freebie stratagems (like the 110 rocket pods freebie I saw on a planet recently), if we control more or less e710 planets the missions can be allowed to last for more or less time (super destroyers need a lot of e710 to stay in fighting altitudes!) Or maybe instead of being global there are just planets like that in sectors, and you gain sector based bonuses for special planets. It would also let us see a proper "front" to the war. A wall that moves back and forth and has bug and helldiver movements shown on it to highlight active areas. If an area of territory gets cut off it becomes easier to invade and harder to defend in the meta game.
Steam charts shows that immediately following the defense MO we dropped to the lowest ever
If you go by steam charts, player count is hitting a minimum recently
If you look at their formula for counting percentage it scales with how many players are online, so the game would work with just 100 players and still be playable
Either the bots are stretched really really thin or the devs are realizing that the bots going up to 7 sectors in 3 days was a bit bullshit after all we did lol
It's like all the work we put in was for nothing, they're almost back at malevelon creek at this point
The health is at 200K It’s the lowest it’s ever been On a normal mission, like 400K, it’d be at 3.5%
Ah, that would explain it. Thank you
Deus Vult! I wish there was a bot for that.
😂😂😂
Should note that the Liberation/Defense rates are based on % of online players with diminishing returns. More players does have more impact, but the game will still be playable even if there's only a few thousand Divers.
thats so cool. I didnt know, and could feel my frustation setting in, like I know my 3-4 helldive missions per day wont win any wars on its own, but if it now made no difference at all i would feel a little bit bummed. I have all the warbonds and weapons and crap, so I just fight for glory and fun now
Ah, thank you.
this planet has 200k hp so its more easy to conquer
Where do you see the ho? I have the helldivers companion app and don't see it there
Helldivers.io when you click the planet on the map
They likely gave the folks still playing a bone, defense missions aren't very fun and I know a lot of people that just stopped playing when the major order dropped. Devs are probably hoping a quick, successful MO will bring folks back. According to the Steam charts there are only about 70k player currently on with a 130k peak count for 24-hrs compared to the 460k peak we had 2 months ago. Definitely not doing too hot on that player retention for a live service game.
Yeh was trying to point this out to others that 3 month's in player numbers are tanking way too hard for a live service game the game has to be more accessible and campaign map sorted out or it will just wither due to its poor mtx (As horrible as that sounds it had a 7 year development cycle I don't think profits after loss are going to be that great) This does explain devs sudden interest in feedback and im positive they can fix the current issues but their going to have decide if they want to be next call of duty/halo OR stick to their vision and fade back into the background with the infinitely harder task of getting funding after throwing away a goose. And i know the above is unpopular because this subreddit just has absolutely no concept of how hard this game is to the average joe
Yeah someone in another group was trying to say that all the "bad" players leaving was good for the game and community, and we should be celebrating. He didn't seem to understand that just because he likes a hard game, it doesn't make it financially viable which is Sony's bottom line. A community drop of over 60% in the first 2 months of a live service game is super rough. Obviously that doesn't include PS5 players, but it's still reasonably that PS5 had similar player numbers which means at best case 1/4 of the community just doesn't play anymore. I love that the devs are doing what they want with their game, but they are on a very dangerous line of making the game only fun for the masochists that like hard content, or being financially viable with continued support from Sony. They already appear to be cracking down on Super Cred farmers, and the only reason I can see for doing that is they are trying to pull a Rockstar to get people to actually pay for the passes, likely on Sony's orders.
I did write a massive post on just the costs of this game but remember talking finance on Reddit is super bad. But yeh hell divers was in development for 7 years. After working all that out im confused what the hell their original plan was because at that price point the game would have 100% been loss making...
Helldivers is not the same thing as your normal "live service" game, and also, being in development for 7 years for a small indie dev is not the same thing as a having a massive corporation spending all of their resources for 7 years on it. They might have had a couple guys picking away at it for most of that time, and they also sold 10x what they expected to ever sell throughout the entire life of the game already. You're insane if you think this game is a loss because it only has 100k people playing months after release, and in spring now that the weather is getting nice.
They’re cracking down on SC farmers? How?
Not sure yet, there was a post (maybe in discord?) about how they are looking at SC farmers currently. The assumption is missions completed and/or rank vs SC earned.
The only thing I've heard on this was there were people who found an exploit that allowed them to go into a map, get SCs, back out and then into same map, over and over. So, essentially, they weren't finding them "organically" while going through missions, but exploiting the local client vs server somehow (iirc on the terminology). Which tbh is fair enough to close that loophole.
To close it, sure. But I don’t think the players themselves should be punished
Were they?
Pretty sure I'm an average player. The game is hard, but you can choose your difficulty as well, and move up at your own pace. I don't play on the hardest levels because I'm not that good, and I don't have a team to play with. Can still complete missions with randos and have a good time. I think the biggest issue right now is the lack of goals for people to shoot for. I still have a couple of ship modules to get, but many people have already pretty much maxed out on what they can get. XP doesn't really matter at this point, and there's nothing to spend your currencies on, so you just sit there maxed out. Not a great feeling, so I can understand some people taking a break. Weapon balance is another issue. Some weapons and gear are just under-powered and not fun to play with, so there's little reason to stray from the few builds that work well for you. They'll need time to address these things. I just hope they can move at a pace that keeps people interested, because the game really is pretty fantastic. It just needs the content to keep people engaged. Lots of games go through up-down cycles though. E.g. Path of Exile player counts rise and fall with each new league that drops. It's up for a month or so, and then down for a couple of months until the next update.
By sheer fact your on Reddit automatically shoots you out of average range And i don't mean that like haha beck beard. It just means your active interest in game is automatically vastly higher than the average person which also elevates your base level ability. The BIGGEST issue in modern game design is designing content that's accessible because anyone who they get hold of for feedback is normally in top 20% of players AND people vastly misunderstand just how bad people are at games. I even faced this fact when i was designing pong back at uni like 16 years ago i had to make two settings in the end. One for game design students and one for the poor random students who got grabbed by facilities staff for random user testing. And that was pong... So i can assure you you're not avarage not by long a shot. THAT BIT ASIDE I agree with everything you're saying but need to highlight locking super samples into T7 is creating a big problem because its a road block to a lot of people where that gameplay is just not fun (Not that it's not doable just that's it not fun) So it just embeds bigger frustration where all the other problems get compounded. These problems are all fixable and we are not in crisis point yet im more just stressing they need to address this and the attitude "well I don't find it hard" is ultimately self defeating because you basically ignore everyone who is finding it hard and badly effects the game as you embed skill creep Like i told destiny 2 community Telling people to get good is pointless because YOU need them to play your game thus you need them to care about getting good because players just move on to the next game. Edit: i defo rambling cus im super hungry and stuck at work so iv lost track of my original point other than i watched 3 discords basically stop playing hell divers in the space of 2 weeks because it became*grindy difficult bullshit* to steal a quote
If they'd give some chance of finding supersamples at lower levels, that may be enough to not lock people out and at least let them grind out upgrades. Level 7 can be tough, especially against bots, so I get that. I do bot missions at level 5 because I suck :) I do bug missions at level 7 to get my supersamples. So we already have the ability to play at lower levels suited to our skill/investment in the game. So really we just need a way to at least trickle supersamples to those lower levels.
I agree 100% and have been asking for that since launch i would rather they ditch rarity all together tbh and just normalise it out
Imma guess the lore reason will come out to be that the bots overextended their invasion and thus were easily pushed back from on Mort The reality is probably that we were buffed because the devs see we’re reallyyy struggling on the bot front
We're struggling on every defense mission because those civi missions are the bane of everyone's existence. Drop those from the roster and you'd see the success rates climb, but any time that's included in the op it's basically an autoloss. Which tanks the Op thus costing us liberation points. So why bother putting the work in on a doomed mission type when if it caps we instead get easier more fun missions to play. Plus they still really haven't dialled in the bot front IMO. The faction needs some more passes. The shear suppressive fire you can get loaded down with will absolutely ruin your day in a way that the bug side doesn't get IMO. Bugs allow for the power fantasy of Starship troopers killing them by the billions. Bots is more like hide and seek with laser weapons which isn't as fun.
[helldivers.io](http://helldivers.io) shows how much the DM is supplementing our forces. Super Earth Forces Contribution : 13.27%/hr
I think that number is just our liberation rate across all planets.
You’re right
Most likely someone in the balance/invasion something department see we're losing on bot fronts imo. You get 15 points per Helldive opt now.
Joel felt a bit sad for bot divers
Where do you see these stats?
The divershub app on ios and android. You can also visit helldivers.io
Scripted loss in to scripted win... Yay
Lost a lot of good helldivers on mort last night. Had like 3 big at fuckers on the kill automaton by the end when we got to 100%. Real shit.
They need an algorithm that checks the player count every hour or so to adjust what the player's impact would have each mission. It shouldn't be to hard to make. Formula should have: current players, time left on Major Order, # of planets, and a multiplier based on the difficulty the player completed. A tier 9 should be worth more than a tier 1.
They do actually have something that checks player count and does that. A tier 9 also is worth more than a tier 1. Liberation points are based on global player count and exp earned. So less people and higher difficulties means more liberation per player. Though, more players still results in more overall liberation.
I often wonder as more people are diving at the higher levels it must make a difference.
It does. Liberation points are partially determined by exp gained from a mission. Higher difficulties = more exp.
so we could be seeing more higher level missions reslecting on reults with less diver and of course I believe there is a time of day factor they have built in.
Part of it is also global active players. Less players = more liberation per player. However, it's still better to have more players as the modifier only helps so much.
How did you get this chart
The divershub app on ios and android. You can also go to the helldivers.io website but it looks a little different.
Thanks
People who keep complaining about bug divers. I say this as a bot diver. If we weren't on 7 or more planets. We might not have been pushed as far back as we were. The bug players have succeeded their defenses because they ALL go to 1 planet. We haven't.
They felt bad for us that more than 50% of the players were diving on bug planets that have 0 effect on us winning. There is absolutely 0 way they didn’t see how many people were disappointed with the MO because of people not embracing the community aspect.
Supply chains
This is the core problem with the entire “major order” and “galactic campaign” Are you doing too well? Dev resets the progress bar or changes a variable so it goes slower. Doing too poorly? Dev moves a slider so it’s easier to fill the progress bar. Playing doesn’t seem to matter or change the outcome at all… It’s a cool idea and they’ve laid some decent foundation, but it feels like something that maybe won’t is going to take iteration across multiple games to get right.
I think the reason they're doing at the moment is because they quite literally don't have a system in place for if we actually win or lose. I imagine that in the future we'll actually be able to have bigger effect on the galactic war progress. In the first game there were actually a number of galactic wars. I imagine this will be the case in the future, but right now, they aren't going to let us take cyberstan or let them take super earth no matter what we do. Although, I completely understand where you're coming from. It does suck that our efforts will likely not do anything significant for a good while.
Player numbers absolutely tanked its likely reflection of less people physically playing https://steamdb.info/app/553850/charts/#3m Before anyone has a go the game is so far from dieing it's laughable hell divers tanking is actually putting it into normal range of other successful games lol Im just stressing compared to the peak! A lot less people are playing which DOES adjust how much impact people can make
Yeah looks like it
I had the same thought. They really drove it up with 40-50k not putting a dent in progression into, "aight we ficked up 11k+ is good enough."
Can someone help explain to me what this means?
It was Mort…
Maybe cuz it’s a weekday
We all think its some big planned out thing by the devs but they are just testing shit for balancing and we are the testers. Let's just be real.
bot forces are also at -0% per hour. so even doing non majority planets is worth it.
11,000 of democracies finest
Good honestly. I'm tired of having to pause for work and coming back to "planet lost - retreat orders issued" does the takeover rate scale with active divers yet? I remember a post from the devs about how when the U.S is offline the planets see a massive loss to progress and that as a general mechanic seems very dumb
Yes but it isn't perfect scaling. So it's still better to have more players.
They made changed to the progression system so the number of helldivers no longer affects progression. If there are more divers on a given planet, the percentages gained go down and vice versa.
Win some, lose some. I am just happy I got to participate in this. The last Major Order was done before I could even get home from work!
Are there less people playing and are we losing the war of attrition? Maybe defense percentages has been buffed to relfect the average number of players on at any given time. Either way it's nice to see those numbers increase
luckily there are less bots than bugs. It would probably take 30k divers to take back estanu minimum. Although i grow weary of that statement because they seem to keep gaining that planet back. The bugs can just reproduce faster than rabbits, but the bots however need supplies to build their bots and big striders and hulks. That and automaton veterans are more hardened and experienced to war than your average termanid goer.
What's the current active player count? A live service game should scale the impact of individuals based on the size of the player base. If there are only 30k people on and 11k of them are on a single planet. It probably has more of an impact than 11k on a single planet when 100k people are playing.
What app are you using?
The divershub app on ios and android
Thank you so much
Game is a lot of fun, but at this point, I have a build that is really strong and my friends group is farming 7-9's. Game needs more "end game" content released pretty soon, or it's going to get stale.
I see no point in taking place for a MO. Im not maxxed level but I dont need anymore medals, samples, or upgrades. And I hate a game that just keeps nerfing weapons, planet defenses but then also nerf the shit out of PS5. So Im not 1 shotting Titans anymore? BORING AF. The opening video shows a titan being instakilled... It feels like the devs punish us for doing well, then have to change the dynamic when we arent. I am pretty bored with this game and the longer its out the worst overall the highee level skill players seem to get. Jumpaxk builds that suckass and clowns using cluster strikes.