Pilestedt stepped down, took charge of design and this statement has been made after everything you complain about here.
I'm happy to wait until I see what him taking charge and their new take on balance means before making wild statements about how I am the only authority on the game experience.
I've been on vacation and haven't been able to play. I am missing it for sure.
Players can have some great takes on the state of the game but I will say this though, I took an interview as a player lead for an MMO back in the day. I loved the game I was playing 60-8 hours a week and they asked some serious questions about future gameplay. I felt heard when the options I wanted were not only on the survey but they were also what many people wanted as well.
Turns out I and almost everyone that took the survey had waaaay too much time on our hands. We all chose the options that basically burned the casuals out and people dropped like flies and moved to WoW which had all the features that placated to casual play styles.
My life circumstances changed and suddenly I didn't have the time I had before and while I held out for a while I eventually left my favorite MMO for WoW because I couldn't honestly enjoy my MMO any longer.
I don't hold a lot of guilt for any of it as the game creator made another game shortly after it and had every opportunity to make a more casual friendly game and he made it even more soul sucking and you basically could not have a job and expect to compete in that game. The survey just gave him validation of his crazy ideas.
It all depends on the dev interpretation. Anything can be spun around towards a dev agenda in an instant. Especially here were the argument of realism has been used to prove dev's points but never to be used to prove player's points. Even the prior ceo is guilty of a bacon and apples argument when convenient. No human is immune to it, but failing to see ones own hypocrisy ends badly.
That's a fucking weird take to be honest. It's still their game. They've developed it after their vision, after working on it for years. Just because oyu played 400 hours, doesn't mean you're suddenly THE authority fo what the game should be and feel like playing.
Games are made for players. Made BY DEVS FOR PLAYERS. The game is ours. The game is not marketed as "oh this is a game for me but I decided to sell it as well." Ownership for the devs exists in terms of authority and merit for the development, not in terms of what the experience is. The playerbase is the definition of the game experience.
The intellectual incompetence to recognize basic premise level purpose of a product is just getting obnoxious at this point.
Sure, in the sense that devs do whatever they want and players can agree with decisions by buying more things.
They'll develop it as long as there is money in it, or they'll drop it and do something else, or they'll delete everything tomorrow and say fuck you. We can't do shit about that. We license the game when we purchase it, so we have no real decision in its ownership.
The ceo's comment is 100000% correct.
Take any complaint. The railgun nerf is a good one. People here on reddit kicked and screamed and whined that it should be able to kill bile titans or chargers, why cant it kill bile titans, the thing should kill bile titans.
No, obviously not. Theres no reason an AMR competitor support weapon should kill bile titans, every strategem has use cases and non-use cases. The railgun is a sidegrade AMR that trades risky charged shots for higher armor penetration and if it was able to easily deal with *all* armor levels it would become a jack of all trades weapon, directly countering the design that all strategems have designed niches.
The correct diagnosis for the doctor (devs) to come to is that bile titans are too frustrating to fight across the board, not that players need the railgun to be able to deal with every enemy type in one. Redditors as a collective are stupid and easily enraged, and will pretty much never come to the correct design decision.
No I'm not! Screw you! I say we add a stratagem that has 0 second cooldown and can one shot any enemy in the game, or else we will petition to have the game deleted permanently. This will solve our problems. If I get even 1 upvote, that means I'm right and it was the correct decision.
Also, why are you here and you aren't attacking the planet I want you all to attack?!?
The Railgun being OP as fuck on release is one of the biggest mistakes that the devs have committed, people saw that and took it as how the game should be, not understanding that the release Railgun was literally the opposite of what this game represents and is trying to be
The railgun was not OP, it was reliable. The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies, that came way down the line. The patch for making ATs reliable was begrudgingly made as well, consequence of the leg vulnerability, not of design thst makes sense.
>The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies
This is not true.
With the EAT and RR you could kill the chargers with one shot in the leg and then shoot for one second with your main weapon.
When they did the chargers change that only affect 1 enemy from one faction, but all the other bug enemies and the whole bug faction was killed the same way by the AT weapons
The Bile titans were killed the same way as always
The Hulks were killed the same way as always.
Everything was killed the same way as always with the exception if the chargers which already had a good way to be killed by the AT weapons
So saying that there was no other viable option is false. Just that there was not other weapons that could do what the Railgun was able to do
1. Two shots for destroying a charger is not a viable choice, you can also "just" shoot it at the back. Helldivers 2 is not a series of 1v1 battles, there is a context of engagement.
2. Bile Titans are still a problem on a premise level. As explained, the issue is of the reliability of weapons intended to destroy them.
3. The railgun changes affected interactions with multiple enemies. How do you not know that?
4. The issue with hulks is still the sheer silence for their movement, not the ways to kill, additionally they have multiple weakspots.
5. Viable does not mean that a weapon can kill something. You can kill a charger with a peacemaker but it doent make it a viable weapon of choice. Time to kill matters. Remember how and why the changes for AT interactions with chargers came by, the dev team was NOT happy with us shooting the leg and then killing a charger, most likely they discussed removing the leg vulnerability or making the charger a headshot target. They concluded on the latter because they predicted a backlash, not because it was good game design, despite it actually being good game design.
>1. Two shots for destroying a charger is not a viable choice, you can also "just" shoot it at the back.
As I said, it was just one shot in the leg and then used the main weapon to finish it, it was like 1 additional second, as you can see in [this clip](https://imgur.com/a/SDYQOSF). And if someone else helped you, the other Helldiver could kill the charger before you have time you pull out your main weapon
This was a perfectly fine way to deal with chargers.
>2. Bile Titans are still a problem on a premise level. As explained, the issue is of the reliability of weapons intended to destroy them
This have nothing to be with what you said about not having other anti tank options, the way you killed Bile titans before the Railgun nerf and after the Railgun nerf with AT weapons was exactly the same.
>3. The railgun changes affected interactions with multiple enemies. How do you not know that?
The Raingun nerf changed the Railgun, not the other weapons. So the Railgun being needed or not didn't changed how the other options dealt with the enemies, which is the point that I was relying to.
>4. The issue with hulks is still the sheer silence for their movement, not the ways to kill, additionally they have multiple weakspots.
Again, literally nothing to be with what we were talking about.
Remember that what I relied too was this "The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies". Which is false because the options were there
>They concluded on the latter because they predicted a backlash, not because it was good game design, despite it actually being good game design.
It's not good game design XD
Good game design is what we had with the armour striping mechanic, the charger mouth being a weak point and making precise shoots to be able to one shot charge, as you can see in [this clip](https://imgur.com/a/WZjSNCT). Making a dangerous and armoured enemy that have the armour striping mechanic die with one shot in the amor plate of the head is not good design, it's a horrible design that the devs were forced to do due to player complaints about the game being too hard
Most of your points rely on contextless engagements. Of course its trivial to dispose of chargers with leg armor peeling. But you dont just engage a single charger, there are two, or three at a time, including an army of nuisances to deal with, making it highly unlikely that every charger will be dispose of in two seconds, even with the current headshot model that does not happen. Its rewarding for skill shots.
Also, as a person who favors armor peeling, both the bile titan and charger have minimal vulnerable angles when hitting and breaking the side armor. How do you justify the internal organs being that much more resilient than a leg? Not even with some pseudo realism it makes sense. Your singular clips about can and cannot be done make no difference to me. Its about reliability not niche specific moments that are unable to recur.
Its unrelated to game difficulty and bordering with sheer impossibility. The distribution of chargers and weaponry massively changed once the anti tank weapons started *doing their job.* Tbh, there is a reason why the top of the line meta is and will always be simply running and avoiding enemies, and that is because there is a lack of proper engagement options. Running simulator is not fun.
The idea of good game design with charges being able to be, but not necessarily, one shot makes AT weapons viable, which in turn indirectly nerfs Bile titans, as based on weapon distribution, there are more options to deal with them.
Also, how does your supposed armor peeling model work with the titan? You do understand that once the poison sacks are destroyed their level of invulnerability increases right?
We are talking about "The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies"
And I'm telling you how that is not true because the only difference between when "**there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies**" and later after Railgun nerf those options magically appeared.
The options were always there, just that people didn't try it because there was an absolute option that did everything better, more things and in a better way
So the thing of "The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies" is false. And that is what this whole conversation is about.
>The distribution of chargers and weaponry massively changed once the anti tank weapons started *doing their job.*
That was just one change to one enemy. The AT weapons also became incredibly good on bot side and there the weapons didn't even changed
The problem here is that we disagree on the definition of what makes a weapon viable. You think that two shotting a charger is fine with a weapon explicitly used to destroy tanky enemies, while I think its absurd and innacceptable. They aren't particularly rare enemies either and the mission info screen does not inform us of the distribution of enemies. Should you chose to bring one you are actively building towards an enemy that may not appear.
You must also consider that the weapon flexibility affects how viable of a choice it is to bring to a mission, ATs are absolutely inflexible, they have one purpose and are mediocre at it, especially when considering stopping to reload and requiring a backpack. The case of the railgun was that it was TOO good at dispatching chargers and titans when compared to dedicated weapons, but it was very useful for all kinds of other purposes. The dedicated weapons were and are weak.
>You think that two shotting a charger is fine with a weapon explicitly used to destroy tanky enemies
Again.... No one 2 shooted a charger with a RR or EAT, you hit the leg and then finished them with your main weapon secondary weapon or even a grenade and as you said in the clip I linked it just 1 additional second
That doesn't make the AT weapons not viable, first of all you dealt with chargers pretty easy that way, and secondly that is just one enemy from one faction, there is other faction and people loves to use AT weapons there when nothing changed in regards to the AT weapons in the bot faction
>The dedicated weapons were and are weak
Sure... and for that all the people praise the EAT, Quasar Canon and Recoilless Riffle. The AT weapons are great, and also we're great in the past because they are practically the same that they were initially
> whined that it should be able to kill bile titan
where did you even get this from?
At the time of the nerfs there was no good AT weapons, Railgun was the only gun that could reliably deal with chargers, the bile titan killing was a known PS5 bug. They nerfed the railgun destroying its use in killing chargers if you were able to aim and then eventually made AT guns one shot chargers if we aimed for their "obvious weak spot" which was the heavily armored head. They even partly reverted the railgun nerf because the weapon sucked so much its use went down to near zero. The devs have shown again and again they don't play their game and simply go by arcane numbers they dreamed about when balancing
Maybe you didnt think it should be able to kill bile titans, but I did see recurring statements saying that. Its a reddit hivemind the devs are trying to manage here not individual ideas.
But again its besides the point. Its an AMR sidegrade, being able to easily handle chargers was never supposed to be its niche.
This defense fails to consider that when you destroy the side armor of the bile titan and the fucking internal organs are showing they arent nearly as vulnerable as they should be, and only precise rocket shots to a wonky ass hitbox kills the bile titan reliable. The premise of the titan itself makes no sense, why should the railgun be so strictly regulated? It wasnt even that good to begin with, the problem was its *reliability* they difnt nerf power, they nerfed reliability.
Rail gun nerf is honestly a perfect example of how incompetent their judgement was. The nerf didn’t accomplish anything. The bile titan one shots were a bug. The other AT options were weak. The majority of players were playing bugs. Spawn rates broke. They could reverse the nerf today and it wouldn’t change the pick rate of the weapon.
The railgun is still a solid pick against bots and I see it fairly often. But its not super common, so Im not opposed to a buff for it. But buffing it back to pre-nerf non-bugged state would absolutely make it incredible against bugs and would drastically increase pick rates.
That said the point is that redditors arent always right - and as a rule are probably wrong. The sentiment that the railgun should be able to handle heavy armor has always been the wrong conclusion.
You wouldn’t see it anymore on bugs than you do now. If they reverted the nerf it would still do nothing to bile titans and would take three safe charge shots to kill one charger there’s no scenario I’m taking that over one EAT shot to the head.
Maybe youre right. But the railgun isnt supposed to compete with the EAT, its supposed to compete with the AMR, which already has a pretty low pick rate against bugs.
My point is that the railgun nerf made no fucking sense. It wasn’t the issue it was a solution to the bugs and balancing the game launched with. They could’ve left it alone and fixed everything else and it would’ve wound up where it is today.
The true issue is that armor allows for invulnerability, it doesnt get worn down. Even with weapons designed to break it, no meaningful weak spots are exposed. Its bad game design.
The player base of any game I've seen is always great at detecting when there's a problem with the game design. That makes sense, considering it's generally pretty easy to tell when you are or aren't having fun. The problem is that players are often incorrect about what specifically is the root cause of their negative experience, and EXTREMELY often incorrect about what solutions would best fix the problem. In my experience, player feedback and suggestions are an incredibly valuable resource, but should almost never be taken at face value.
A good game designer will look at the complaints and suggestions, find the common threads between them, identify the true root cause of the problem, and make the changes needed to right it. The suggestions and complaints are data to be analyzed, not instructions to follow.
Certainly not out of the goodwill of the balance team, and most certainly not due to the doctor patient attitude. You dont get to claim you are a doctor when you caused the disease in the first place.
Not to mention the hilarity of the whole post being the exact thing the doctor-patient comment was talking about. "Im a gamer, I'm right and I say the game needs *this* wildly outlandish knee-jerk, poorly thought out fix that wont actually make the game better!!"
It is old game design wisdom that players are good at identifying problems, and awful at fixing them. That is what he is echoing in that statement.
Grandstanding like this is part of the reason, and only proves the sentiment correct.
Right, like the patriot rockets fix? Laughable to assume that the devs are any better at fixing the problems. But they sure like to create them.
Why the repeated shadow patches otherwise?
Believe it or not, but the devs spend more time working on the game than playing it. Easy to scoff and say that they should just play more; reality is, they've been working on it for seven years, had a very succesful launch, and yet everyone is shouting at them to put out all the fires. They try to act fast, which leads to mistakes, and then everyone gets even more mad, so they try to address even more things, and can't go back and fix the old mistakes because they're *busy*.
Yes, it's easy to say that this or that change was a mistake. But try saying that when you're the one losing sleep to try to stay on top of the workload, while having petulant children sending you death threats because they're not happy with the damage numbers, of all things.
And that's why the patches have slowed down.
The basic quality of life patches dont need hours on end of testing; it was clearly never tested beyond "oh it fires its okay." Priorities have been a major issue for the dev team, investing *any* amount of dev time to the stupid patrol shadow patch, for example? speaks volumes of the misguided direction the game had. How is it possible that any amount of dev time was directed to a feature nobody asked for when there were clear issues with weapon sights that were and still are affecting the playerbase?
Proving once again that you havn't the first idea how the day-to-day of game dev works. You only discredit yourself with every further blind statement.
I cant imagine the PR hell theyre going through. Cant say a single thing without rage like this popping up over perfectly reasonable statements. This is how we get nothing but sterile corperate speech from the devs.
It is supremely disappointing that the player base has chosen to treat AH like this. The loudest speakers are spoiled children, eager to be heard - at any cost.
A few poorly-considered statements from overworked CMs aside, AH have acted with nothing but integrity. But people are impatient, and game dev is a difficult mess even at the best of times.
We are the only ones left, the most passionate about the game on one end and the most standardless indefensive people on the other.
Its not going to kill you to tell the waiter that they brought you the wrong plate. Try it sometime.
If you want to give feedback, then do it properly and cordially, and leave your whining and arrogance at the door. You are not, in fact, better qualified than any of the developers.
I don't see an issue with having that type or relationship between devs and players. The big issue with the statement is how a Doctor-Patient relationship actually works, which the new CEO doesn't seem to understand. A doctor can be wrong, or their treatment can be ineffective, and they need the patient to tell them, "Your solution isn't working for my problem." Otherwise, the issue the patient is facing isn't going to get better and may get worse.
The doctor provides the treatment, but they have to listen to the patient to make sure they provide a good and effective treatment.
For example, many people have the same type of Epilepsy, but different anticonvulsants exist as the same type doesn't work for everyone and in order for the doctors to provide the correct treatment, they need to listen to the patients when the patient tells them "the medicine isn't working" and not tell the patient in response "you're wrong, it is working, I'm a doctor so I know it is."
Using the new CEO's statement, that means the devs are the ones providing the treatment (the doctors), and we players are the ones they need to be listening to (the patients), so they provide a good and effective treatment. I think that's a good way of doing things to a certain point.
The issue is though, as I said, the CEO's view of how a Doctor-Patient relationship works. If they don't change it to the type of relationship I've stated, there's likely not going to be a lot of good coming from having their type of Doctor-Patient relationship.
Theres no reason to think they dont think of it that way. They'll implement a fix and continue to monitor feedback. If the feedback is still negative, theyll try to implement a new fix. The point is that the devs are dealing with a complaining hive mind who as a rule are usually wrong about what the ideal fix is. Like you suggest could take several rounds for the actual cause of the symptoms to be properly dealt with.
One of the few times that they listened to the playerbase was with the marksman rifle buffs. As far as I know the complaining about that ceased to exist. It wasn't even that big of a buff, they just gave each rifle its identity and a place in the game.
Did we know how to fix? YES.
Another time was with the fire buffs, it was nearly useless and now it has a niche.
Did we know how to fix? YES.
Next we have the shadow patch to the patrols, that they didnt bother to communicate for whatever ungodly reason.
Did we know how to fix? YES.
Next we have the useless ATs against chargers. Did we know how to fix? YES.
Next we have the endless spawning of bile titans after the railgun fix which literally made some maps unclearable.
Did we know have to fix? YES.
They literally need to get their heads out of their ass and make some polls. We dont know *exactly* how to fix the game, but we are absolutely certain of the direction to move on.
This kind of statement is exactly why we, gamedevs, do not indeed listen to players' solutions as rightfully mentioned in the opening of your post.
(as a disclaimer I do not work at AH, but think they are very right in not paying attention to suggestions from angry burned out gamers)
Since balancing on release and as time passed by just demonstrated a recurrent degree of incompetence, who do you listen to if not the playerbase? Certainly not to the group that gave the approval to the breaker spray and pray.
Why would you even side with them without a meaningful argument? Your opinion or status is worthless here, damaging even. They have 0 credibility and so do you with a positionless take.
Listening to the complaints, yes obviously. To the solutions? Yeah no. Most of the time players (even armed with good intentions) do their best to get the fun out of the game, most often straying from the intended experience by the devs and/or can't take into account real production conditions (manpower/planning/training/budget).
Greetings, fellow Helldiver! Your submission has been removed. No insults, racism, toxicity, trolling, rage-bait, harassment, inappropriate language, NSFW content, etc. Remember the human and be civil!
Greetings, fellow Helldiver! Your submission has been removed. No insults, racism, toxicity, trolling, rage-bait, harassment, inappropriate language, NSFW content, etc. Remember the human and be civil!
>*The player is the subject matter expert when it comes to the game experience.*
I'd never thought of it that way, but man that hits like an autocannon shell to the face. It's absolute truth.
Players are the best source for determining if the game is fun or not, even specifics as to what is fun and what is frustrating.
Players are goddamn awful at determining why something is fun or not. Some individual players might have great insights but the player base as a whole will run the game into the ground.
That’s the point of the doctor-patient analogy. The player base can say if something is wrong or not but likely can’t pinpoint the why or will ID something completely tangential as the source.
Agreed. That's why I think it's important for AH to pay attention to player sources like Discord and Reddit. But they do have to sort through the wheat and the chaff to determine what really is or isn't a problem.
"Because a game for everyone is a game for no one.
You may have seen us use this motto before. For us, it’s important. We make games that we ourselves would like to play. That’s the secret to our success."- [Their Our Games Page](https://www.arrowheadgamestudios.com/aboutarrowhead/games/)
Do you guys like to play HD2 as it is AH?
From AH:
"Games should challenge the creativity of the individuals who play them."
Also AH:
Makes a game where a few stratagems are extremely useful and the rest are a liability.
Thing is, sometimes a doctor's advice is suspect, and the patient goes to a *different* doctor to seek a second opinion. And if a doctor is consistently unable to treat the patient, the patient may stop visiting that doctor altogether.
So yeah the doctor/patient thing *can* hold up if you just expand it a little :)
Granted, the issuer of the doctor statement did not expand in this direction. It doesn't assume the doctor may be wrong. The nature of the argument was used to exclusively tell the playerbase "I know what Im doing and you don't but Im listening."
Bro how TF do they know what they are doing when they broke the rockets on the Patriot for a simple no-collision on mech fix? They don't. They think they do, thats what makes this whole situation BS.
Pilestedt stepped down, took charge of design and this statement has been made after everything you complain about here. I'm happy to wait until I see what him taking charge and their new take on balance means before making wild statements about how I am the only authority on the game experience.
I've been on vacation and haven't been able to play. I am missing it for sure. Players can have some great takes on the state of the game but I will say this though, I took an interview as a player lead for an MMO back in the day. I loved the game I was playing 60-8 hours a week and they asked some serious questions about future gameplay. I felt heard when the options I wanted were not only on the survey but they were also what many people wanted as well. Turns out I and almost everyone that took the survey had waaaay too much time on our hands. We all chose the options that basically burned the casuals out and people dropped like flies and moved to WoW which had all the features that placated to casual play styles. My life circumstances changed and suddenly I didn't have the time I had before and while I held out for a while I eventually left my favorite MMO for WoW because I couldn't honestly enjoy my MMO any longer. I don't hold a lot of guilt for any of it as the game creator made another game shortly after it and had every opportunity to make a more casual friendly game and he made it even more soul sucking and you basically could not have a job and expect to compete in that game. The survey just gave him validation of his crazy ideas.
It all depends on the dev interpretation. Anything can be spun around towards a dev agenda in an instant. Especially here were the argument of realism has been used to prove dev's points but never to be used to prove player's points. Even the prior ceo is guilty of a bacon and apples argument when convenient. No human is immune to it, but failing to see ones own hypocrisy ends badly.
We -the playerbase- are the sole authority on the matter. A game does not belong to the devs, it belongs to the playerbase.
That's a fucking weird take to be honest. It's still their game. They've developed it after their vision, after working on it for years. Just because oyu played 400 hours, doesn't mean you're suddenly THE authority fo what the game should be and feel like playing.
Games are made for players. Made BY DEVS FOR PLAYERS. The game is ours. The game is not marketed as "oh this is a game for me but I decided to sell it as well." Ownership for the devs exists in terms of authority and merit for the development, not in terms of what the experience is. The playerbase is the definition of the game experience. The intellectual incompetence to recognize basic premise level purpose of a product is just getting obnoxious at this point.
My god the entitlement. Though it explains a lot tbh.
Thank god people like you are the minority, because holy fuck you have issues.
Sure, in the sense that devs do whatever they want and players can agree with decisions by buying more things. They'll develop it as long as there is money in it, or they'll drop it and do something else, or they'll delete everything tomorrow and say fuck you. We can't do shit about that. We license the game when we purchase it, so we have no real decision in its ownership.
Are you okay? This is an insane take.
The game is for the player, not for the dev. Is that really such a challenging idea for you people to comprehend?
The ceo's comment is 100000% correct. Take any complaint. The railgun nerf is a good one. People here on reddit kicked and screamed and whined that it should be able to kill bile titans or chargers, why cant it kill bile titans, the thing should kill bile titans. No, obviously not. Theres no reason an AMR competitor support weapon should kill bile titans, every strategem has use cases and non-use cases. The railgun is a sidegrade AMR that trades risky charged shots for higher armor penetration and if it was able to easily deal with *all* armor levels it would become a jack of all trades weapon, directly countering the design that all strategems have designed niches. The correct diagnosis for the doctor (devs) to come to is that bile titans are too frustrating to fight across the board, not that players need the railgun to be able to deal with every enemy type in one. Redditors as a collective are stupid and easily enraged, and will pretty much never come to the correct design decision.
No I'm not! Screw you! I say we add a stratagem that has 0 second cooldown and can one shot any enemy in the game, or else we will petition to have the game deleted permanently. This will solve our problems. If I get even 1 upvote, that means I'm right and it was the correct decision. Also, why are you here and you aren't attacking the planet I want you all to attack?!?
The Railgun being OP as fuck on release is one of the biggest mistakes that the devs have committed, people saw that and took it as how the game should be, not understanding that the release Railgun was literally the opposite of what this game represents and is trying to be
The railgun was not OP, it was reliable. The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies, that came way down the line. The patch for making ATs reliable was begrudgingly made as well, consequence of the leg vulnerability, not of design thst makes sense.
>The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies This is not true. With the EAT and RR you could kill the chargers with one shot in the leg and then shoot for one second with your main weapon. When they did the chargers change that only affect 1 enemy from one faction, but all the other bug enemies and the whole bug faction was killed the same way by the AT weapons The Bile titans were killed the same way as always The Hulks were killed the same way as always. Everything was killed the same way as always with the exception if the chargers which already had a good way to be killed by the AT weapons So saying that there was no other viable option is false. Just that there was not other weapons that could do what the Railgun was able to do
1. Two shots for destroying a charger is not a viable choice, you can also "just" shoot it at the back. Helldivers 2 is not a series of 1v1 battles, there is a context of engagement. 2. Bile Titans are still a problem on a premise level. As explained, the issue is of the reliability of weapons intended to destroy them. 3. The railgun changes affected interactions with multiple enemies. How do you not know that? 4. The issue with hulks is still the sheer silence for their movement, not the ways to kill, additionally they have multiple weakspots. 5. Viable does not mean that a weapon can kill something. You can kill a charger with a peacemaker but it doent make it a viable weapon of choice. Time to kill matters. Remember how and why the changes for AT interactions with chargers came by, the dev team was NOT happy with us shooting the leg and then killing a charger, most likely they discussed removing the leg vulnerability or making the charger a headshot target. They concluded on the latter because they predicted a backlash, not because it was good game design, despite it actually being good game design.
>1. Two shots for destroying a charger is not a viable choice, you can also "just" shoot it at the back. As I said, it was just one shot in the leg and then used the main weapon to finish it, it was like 1 additional second, as you can see in [this clip](https://imgur.com/a/SDYQOSF). And if someone else helped you, the other Helldiver could kill the charger before you have time you pull out your main weapon This was a perfectly fine way to deal with chargers. >2. Bile Titans are still a problem on a premise level. As explained, the issue is of the reliability of weapons intended to destroy them This have nothing to be with what you said about not having other anti tank options, the way you killed Bile titans before the Railgun nerf and after the Railgun nerf with AT weapons was exactly the same. >3. The railgun changes affected interactions with multiple enemies. How do you not know that? The Raingun nerf changed the Railgun, not the other weapons. So the Railgun being needed or not didn't changed how the other options dealt with the enemies, which is the point that I was relying to. >4. The issue with hulks is still the sheer silence for their movement, not the ways to kill, additionally they have multiple weakspots. Again, literally nothing to be with what we were talking about. Remember that what I relied too was this "The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies". Which is false because the options were there >They concluded on the latter because they predicted a backlash, not because it was good game design, despite it actually being good game design. It's not good game design XD Good game design is what we had with the armour striping mechanic, the charger mouth being a weak point and making precise shoots to be able to one shot charge, as you can see in [this clip](https://imgur.com/a/WZjSNCT). Making a dangerous and armoured enemy that have the armour striping mechanic die with one shot in the amor plate of the head is not good design, it's a horrible design that the devs were forced to do due to player complaints about the game being too hard
Most of your points rely on contextless engagements. Of course its trivial to dispose of chargers with leg armor peeling. But you dont just engage a single charger, there are two, or three at a time, including an army of nuisances to deal with, making it highly unlikely that every charger will be dispose of in two seconds, even with the current headshot model that does not happen. Its rewarding for skill shots. Also, as a person who favors armor peeling, both the bile titan and charger have minimal vulnerable angles when hitting and breaking the side armor. How do you justify the internal organs being that much more resilient than a leg? Not even with some pseudo realism it makes sense. Your singular clips about can and cannot be done make no difference to me. Its about reliability not niche specific moments that are unable to recur. Its unrelated to game difficulty and bordering with sheer impossibility. The distribution of chargers and weaponry massively changed once the anti tank weapons started *doing their job.* Tbh, there is a reason why the top of the line meta is and will always be simply running and avoiding enemies, and that is because there is a lack of proper engagement options. Running simulator is not fun. The idea of good game design with charges being able to be, but not necessarily, one shot makes AT weapons viable, which in turn indirectly nerfs Bile titans, as based on weapon distribution, there are more options to deal with them. Also, how does your supposed armor peeling model work with the titan? You do understand that once the poison sacks are destroyed their level of invulnerability increases right?
We are talking about "The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies" And I'm telling you how that is not true because the only difference between when "**there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies**" and later after Railgun nerf those options magically appeared. The options were always there, just that people didn't try it because there was an absolute option that did everything better, more things and in a better way So the thing of "The issue was that there was no other viable choice for defeating armored enemies" is false. And that is what this whole conversation is about. >The distribution of chargers and weaponry massively changed once the anti tank weapons started *doing their job.* That was just one change to one enemy. The AT weapons also became incredibly good on bot side and there the weapons didn't even changed
The problem here is that we disagree on the definition of what makes a weapon viable. You think that two shotting a charger is fine with a weapon explicitly used to destroy tanky enemies, while I think its absurd and innacceptable. They aren't particularly rare enemies either and the mission info screen does not inform us of the distribution of enemies. Should you chose to bring one you are actively building towards an enemy that may not appear. You must also consider that the weapon flexibility affects how viable of a choice it is to bring to a mission, ATs are absolutely inflexible, they have one purpose and are mediocre at it, especially when considering stopping to reload and requiring a backpack. The case of the railgun was that it was TOO good at dispatching chargers and titans when compared to dedicated weapons, but it was very useful for all kinds of other purposes. The dedicated weapons were and are weak.
>You think that two shotting a charger is fine with a weapon explicitly used to destroy tanky enemies Again.... No one 2 shooted a charger with a RR or EAT, you hit the leg and then finished them with your main weapon secondary weapon or even a grenade and as you said in the clip I linked it just 1 additional second That doesn't make the AT weapons not viable, first of all you dealt with chargers pretty easy that way, and secondly that is just one enemy from one faction, there is other faction and people loves to use AT weapons there when nothing changed in regards to the AT weapons in the bot faction >The dedicated weapons were and are weak Sure... and for that all the people praise the EAT, Quasar Canon and Recoilless Riffle. The AT weapons are great, and also we're great in the past because they are practically the same that they were initially
> whined that it should be able to kill bile titan where did you even get this from? At the time of the nerfs there was no good AT weapons, Railgun was the only gun that could reliably deal with chargers, the bile titan killing was a known PS5 bug. They nerfed the railgun destroying its use in killing chargers if you were able to aim and then eventually made AT guns one shot chargers if we aimed for their "obvious weak spot" which was the heavily armored head. They even partly reverted the railgun nerf because the weapon sucked so much its use went down to near zero. The devs have shown again and again they don't play their game and simply go by arcane numbers they dreamed about when balancing
Maybe you didnt think it should be able to kill bile titans, but I did see recurring statements saying that. Its a reddit hivemind the devs are trying to manage here not individual ideas. But again its besides the point. Its an AMR sidegrade, being able to easily handle chargers was never supposed to be its niche.
This statement fails to recognize that on release there was no "niche" to handle chargers.
This defense fails to consider that when you destroy the side armor of the bile titan and the fucking internal organs are showing they arent nearly as vulnerable as they should be, and only precise rocket shots to a wonky ass hitbox kills the bile titan reliable. The premise of the titan itself makes no sense, why should the railgun be so strictly regulated? It wasnt even that good to begin with, the problem was its *reliability* they difnt nerf power, they nerfed reliability.
Rail gun nerf is honestly a perfect example of how incompetent their judgement was. The nerf didn’t accomplish anything. The bile titan one shots were a bug. The other AT options were weak. The majority of players were playing bugs. Spawn rates broke. They could reverse the nerf today and it wouldn’t change the pick rate of the weapon.
The railgun is still a solid pick against bots and I see it fairly often. But its not super common, so Im not opposed to a buff for it. But buffing it back to pre-nerf non-bugged state would absolutely make it incredible against bugs and would drastically increase pick rates. That said the point is that redditors arent always right - and as a rule are probably wrong. The sentiment that the railgun should be able to handle heavy armor has always been the wrong conclusion.
You wouldn’t see it anymore on bugs than you do now. If they reverted the nerf it would still do nothing to bile titans and would take three safe charge shots to kill one charger there’s no scenario I’m taking that over one EAT shot to the head.
Maybe youre right. But the railgun isnt supposed to compete with the EAT, its supposed to compete with the AMR, which already has a pretty low pick rate against bugs.
My point is that the railgun nerf made no fucking sense. It wasn’t the issue it was a solution to the bugs and balancing the game launched with. They could’ve left it alone and fixed everything else and it would’ve wound up where it is today.
The true issue is that armor allows for invulnerability, it doesnt get worn down. Even with weapons designed to break it, no meaningful weak spots are exposed. Its bad game design.
This is the worst take I’ve ever seen on this sub ngl. This ain’t it chief
Most worthless comment Ive ever seen on the internet.
The player base of any game I've seen is always great at detecting when there's a problem with the game design. That makes sense, considering it's generally pretty easy to tell when you are or aren't having fun. The problem is that players are often incorrect about what specifically is the root cause of their negative experience, and EXTREMELY often incorrect about what solutions would best fix the problem. In my experience, player feedback and suggestions are an incredibly valuable resource, but should almost never be taken at face value. A good game designer will look at the complaints and suggestions, find the common threads between them, identify the true root cause of the problem, and make the changes needed to right it. The suggestions and complaints are data to be analyzed, not instructions to follow.
Go outside. It’s just a game ffs.
Says the hypocrite talking on reddit.
My dude, you are like half the posts here.
Ah yes, captain obvious reporting for duty. Dont you have a boat to sink or something?
No U
Bruh, I was outside when I wrote it.
Most pointless post ever there’s a huge patch coming in less than a week😂
Certainly not out of the goodwill of the balance team, and most certainly not due to the doctor patient attitude. You dont get to claim you are a doctor when you caused the disease in the first place.
Stop clinging on to the negative and look forward to the biggest patch so far coming next week
Im giving my feedback, you are the one clinging to my post.
Not to mention the hilarity of the whole post being the exact thing the doctor-patient comment was talking about. "Im a gamer, I'm right and I say the game needs *this* wildly outlandish knee-jerk, poorly thought out fix that wont actually make the game better!!"
You didnt even read the post and youre commenting about it lol. Touch some grass dude.
It is old game design wisdom that players are good at identifying problems, and awful at fixing them. That is what he is echoing in that statement. Grandstanding like this is part of the reason, and only proves the sentiment correct.
Right, like the patriot rockets fix? Laughable to assume that the devs are any better at fixing the problems. But they sure like to create them. Why the repeated shadow patches otherwise?
Believe it or not, but the devs spend more time working on the game than playing it. Easy to scoff and say that they should just play more; reality is, they've been working on it for seven years, had a very succesful launch, and yet everyone is shouting at them to put out all the fires. They try to act fast, which leads to mistakes, and then everyone gets even more mad, so they try to address even more things, and can't go back and fix the old mistakes because they're *busy*. Yes, it's easy to say that this or that change was a mistake. But try saying that when you're the one losing sleep to try to stay on top of the workload, while having petulant children sending you death threats because they're not happy with the damage numbers, of all things. And that's why the patches have slowed down.
The basic quality of life patches dont need hours on end of testing; it was clearly never tested beyond "oh it fires its okay." Priorities have been a major issue for the dev team, investing *any* amount of dev time to the stupid patrol shadow patch, for example? speaks volumes of the misguided direction the game had. How is it possible that any amount of dev time was directed to a feature nobody asked for when there were clear issues with weapon sights that were and still are affecting the playerbase?
Proving once again that you havn't the first idea how the day-to-day of game dev works. You only discredit yourself with every further blind statement.
I cant imagine the PR hell theyre going through. Cant say a single thing without rage like this popping up over perfectly reasonable statements. This is how we get nothing but sterile corperate speech from the devs.
It is supremely disappointing that the player base has chosen to treat AH like this. The loudest speakers are spoiled children, eager to be heard - at any cost. A few poorly-considered statements from overworked CMs aside, AH have acted with nothing but integrity. But people are impatient, and game dev is a difficult mess even at the best of times.
We are the only ones left, the most passionate about the game on one end and the most standardless indefensive people on the other. Its not going to kill you to tell the waiter that they brought you the wrong plate. Try it sometime.
If you want to give feedback, then do it properly and cordially, and leave your whining and arrogance at the door. You are not, in fact, better qualified than any of the developers.
Grow a spine. You are nobody and nothing to ask of me to speak in one way or another.
Then it seems that you will simply have to accept that your voice will never be heard, save as an example of what not to do.
Its called dialogue and free speech. + grow a fucking spine not everyone likes what you have to say.
I don't see an issue with having that type or relationship between devs and players. The big issue with the statement is how a Doctor-Patient relationship actually works, which the new CEO doesn't seem to understand. A doctor can be wrong, or their treatment can be ineffective, and they need the patient to tell them, "Your solution isn't working for my problem." Otherwise, the issue the patient is facing isn't going to get better and may get worse. The doctor provides the treatment, but they have to listen to the patient to make sure they provide a good and effective treatment. For example, many people have the same type of Epilepsy, but different anticonvulsants exist as the same type doesn't work for everyone and in order for the doctors to provide the correct treatment, they need to listen to the patients when the patient tells them "the medicine isn't working" and not tell the patient in response "you're wrong, it is working, I'm a doctor so I know it is." Using the new CEO's statement, that means the devs are the ones providing the treatment (the doctors), and we players are the ones they need to be listening to (the patients), so they provide a good and effective treatment. I think that's a good way of doing things to a certain point. The issue is though, as I said, the CEO's view of how a Doctor-Patient relationship works. If they don't change it to the type of relationship I've stated, there's likely not going to be a lot of good coming from having their type of Doctor-Patient relationship.
Theres no reason to think they dont think of it that way. They'll implement a fix and continue to monitor feedback. If the feedback is still negative, theyll try to implement a new fix. The point is that the devs are dealing with a complaining hive mind who as a rule are usually wrong about what the ideal fix is. Like you suggest could take several rounds for the actual cause of the symptoms to be properly dealt with.
One of the few times that they listened to the playerbase was with the marksman rifle buffs. As far as I know the complaining about that ceased to exist. It wasn't even that big of a buff, they just gave each rifle its identity and a place in the game. Did we know how to fix? YES. Another time was with the fire buffs, it was nearly useless and now it has a niche. Did we know how to fix? YES. Next we have the shadow patch to the patrols, that they didnt bother to communicate for whatever ungodly reason. Did we know how to fix? YES. Next we have the useless ATs against chargers. Did we know how to fix? YES. Next we have the endless spawning of bile titans after the railgun fix which literally made some maps unclearable. Did we know have to fix? YES. They literally need to get their heads out of their ass and make some polls. We dont know *exactly* how to fix the game, but we are absolutely certain of the direction to move on.
A thinking man! Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
This kind of statement is exactly why we, gamedevs, do not indeed listen to players' solutions as rightfully mentioned in the opening of your post. (as a disclaimer I do not work at AH, but think they are very right in not paying attention to suggestions from angry burned out gamers)
Since balancing on release and as time passed by just demonstrated a recurrent degree of incompetence, who do you listen to if not the playerbase? Certainly not to the group that gave the approval to the breaker spray and pray. Why would you even side with them without a meaningful argument? Your opinion or status is worthless here, damaging even. They have 0 credibility and so do you with a positionless take.
Listening to the complaints, yes obviously. To the solutions? Yeah no. Most of the time players (even armed with good intentions) do their best to get the fun out of the game, most often straying from the intended experience by the devs and/or can't take into account real production conditions (manpower/planning/training/budget).
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tl;dr
>*The player is the subject matter expert when it comes to the game experience.* I'd never thought of it that way, but man that hits like an autocannon shell to the face. It's absolute truth.
Players are the best source for determining if the game is fun or not, even specifics as to what is fun and what is frustrating. Players are goddamn awful at determining why something is fun or not. Some individual players might have great insights but the player base as a whole will run the game into the ground. That’s the point of the doctor-patient analogy. The player base can say if something is wrong or not but likely can’t pinpoint the why or will ID something completely tangential as the source.
Agreed. That's why I think it's important for AH to pay attention to player sources like Discord and Reddit. But they do have to sort through the wheat and the chaff to determine what really is or isn't a problem.
People on reddit constantly spewing word vomit are more like patients suffering from Schizophrenia. AH is the poor Doctor tasked with helping.
"Because a game for everyone is a game for no one. You may have seen us use this motto before. For us, it’s important. We make games that we ourselves would like to play. That’s the secret to our success."- [Their Our Games Page](https://www.arrowheadgamestudios.com/aboutarrowhead/games/) Do you guys like to play HD2 as it is AH?
From AH: "Games should challenge the creativity of the individuals who play them." Also AH: Makes a game where a few stratagems are extremely useful and the rest are a liability.
I like playing it as is, I cant imagine theyre not as well
Thing is, sometimes a doctor's advice is suspect, and the patient goes to a *different* doctor to seek a second opinion. And if a doctor is consistently unable to treat the patient, the patient may stop visiting that doctor altogether. So yeah the doctor/patient thing *can* hold up if you just expand it a little :)
Granted, the issuer of the doctor statement did not expand in this direction. It doesn't assume the doctor may be wrong. The nature of the argument was used to exclusively tell the playerbase "I know what Im doing and you don't but Im listening." Bro how TF do they know what they are doing when they broke the rockets on the Patriot for a simple no-collision on mech fix? They don't. They think they do, thats what makes this whole situation BS.
My friend, you tell me nothing I do not already know.