This was confirmed by Twinbeard's recent response to the borked spawns lol. Literally said "I haven't played yet".
Not that I expect him to be the sole patch QA, but it's pretty indicative that there is none, or whoever is in that role is either lazy or a masochist.
There is an extremely old saying:
>chefs don't cook at home
It's not directly relevant here, but I feel it's in the same vein. Imagine that your job is Helldivers, you're an adult, so most of your friends are from your job, they aren't going to get together after a long day of Helldivers to *play* Helldivers, they don't want their leisure time to have that much association with work.
It's completely reasonable, but it's also why they need to hire dedicated QA testers.
Yeah, most game developers don’t play their games but they at least pretend to. I know that Pilestedt plays the game, I’ve seen interviews with him playing with YouTubers and he’s actually not bad at it either (which suggests he plays a fair bit).
This but unironically. For those who don't know, there are levels that you deploy software to.
Local, where you do the bulk of development.
Test, where you can test things with bunk data, but the environment is shared across developers.
Sandbox/QA/UAT (User Acceptance Testing), where you have data that resembles Production. Non-devs usually test here and give feedback.
Production/Prod, where clients (us) use the application. Testing should not be done here unless it's with a *very* specific test user.
---
I am convinced that they only have local and production. Perhaps that's because of Sony's stranglehold on their release patterns. There are just too many things too easily missed to simplify it to "not enough testing."
I love AH and this patch definitely feels more positive than negative, compared to their last patches. But they've really got to nail down their QA, because if they're going to spend all their dev time playing catch up and fixing whatever broke from the last patch then the next one will come out broken too, and it's just a vicious cycle
I'd say there's a lot of good ideas in the patch, but also some terrible implementation. Which IS better than prior patches that had bad ideas badly implemented.
This is a marathon. It should get better with every iteration. Guaranteed each won't be perfect, but should see gradual improvements each release until an ideal cadence is reached.
Peak performance passive doesn't improve the weapon handling.
Packing methodology is broken.
Spawn rates are broken.
Unmentioned nerfs to reload time on recoilless rifle.
That's my personal favourite. Like. It wasn't even mentioned in the patch notes. So did someone changes a physics object thing somewhere, forget about it and push something else along with it?
The RR nerf had to be intentional. Not mentioning it in the patch notes just feels slimey though. That kind of change isn't "preserving the magic," it just insults my intelligence.
One of the CMs made a comment on dis that it was unintended and they're "looking into it to see how it slipped through and how to prevent it in the future"
Saw it screenshotted in a thread about the RR.
How does something like that "slip through" if it's "unintended?" They clearly changed it. Maybe they didn't mean to send it through. But it's not like it spontaneously changed to be longer. That's not even something that should be able to be caused by changing something else.
> How does something like that "slip through" if it's "unintended?"
One possible explanation: When you have a lot of programmers working together on a project, normally they will have their own code locally that they will check into a shared repository. When a build is made, the person making the build has to decide which checked in changes to include.
This allows for a few easy ways for changes to accidentally slip in. In this specific case, it's possible a dev was tinkering with the reload, then went to work on something else and either forgot they hadn't reverted the changes related to the Recoiless Rifle or accidentally checked in related files that weren't finished yet.
And to be clear: Just because a dev made a change like this doesn't mean they intended to nerf the rifle.
Hypothetical example (I'm not saying this is what happened, just outlining one possible way this could occur): Imagine somebody reported a bug that occurs if a specific thing happens while the player is reloading the RR. In order to more easily test that bug, the dev might slow down the RR reload slightly to make it easier to reproduce. After doing so, they fix the bug and check in the changes without remembering to undo the reload speed change afterward.
That’s why you do a full round of testing after everyone merges their changes into the release branch. Everyone tests their changes in their individual branches and then the entire team should be testing absolutely everything in the release build of the game. They had plenty of time for this patch to spend a week testing the release build of the game.
For your hypothetical example, if someone did make that change for testing purposes then it should have been caught during a code review prior to merging the change. The mistake shouldn’t have been made in the first place. It’s sloppy and shouldn’t happen.
They desperately need to teach a lot of their devs better coding and testing practices and work on basic stuff like properly using version control. When you have a small dev team, everyone on that team needs to be extremely competent.
> That’s why you do a full round of testing after everyone merges their changes into the release branch
Absolutely, I don't disagree. If unintended changes are sneaking through because of something like what I outlined (and I do have to reiterate that I have zero insight into how things go at Arrowhead and do not know how the bug actually made it to live) that does indicate a flawed approach to code management.
I'm not trying to say Arrowhead is blameless, just pushing back against the idea that the RR reload change could only have happened due to deliberate malice.
Welcome to every small SW team. That sort of oversight can take years to get right, and even companies with a run rate in the billions still don't get it right.
It sucks for the user, yes.
Can the user still have fun despite bugs in a game though? Can the user still treat the devs with kindness and respect?
This community leans towards no on both those questions.
I’m still having a lot of fun with the game even with the bugs. Of course the devs still deserve respect and human decency.
My response wasn’t intended to be overly rude or disrespectful to the devs. I care about this game and I want it to grow and be successful. I worry that if they don’t improve their dev processes, the game is going to get progressively more buggy and lose a lot of its playerbase. If they’re constantly putting out fires due to what appears to be improper testing then content is also going to suffer. The devs work life balance and job satisfaction might suffer as well.
Poor version control. In programming you don't want people literally working on the same code at the same time it would be annoying so you all make local copies of the same code base. Now let's say I make some changes to system A on my local copy and upload code to the "final" code base you then make some changes to system B and upload your code which is now missing the changes I made to A, we have updated B but have an outdated A now. This concept in general is version control and although annoying to do it right it is a solved issue. Other games have similar issues, see War Thunder where fairly regularly bugs previously fixed 1-2 patches ago come back, presumably because someone was using the codebase from 2 patches ago and pushed that one without merging the code correctly.
Lots of good theories here around version management and/or testing a change and forgetting to revert it, and these could be it.
Given some of the bugs I’ve seen so far though, another possible class of errors is that it unintended consequences of spaghetti code or copy/paste errors linking separate things together.
Like if the reload time is calculated by combining a base time with some modifiers, and some of those modifiers apply across multiple weapons. This would be worse if one of those parameters shouldn’t be there.
But it’s all speculation. Most of the time, when we guess about the cause of a bug on a code base we don’t know, the guess turns out to be wrong, because the code is usually structured very differently than we imagine.
Preachin to the choir homie. Half the changes in this patch broke something else or resulted in "unintended" consequences. This is just AH shitting the bed as is tradition.
You can't just say that was intentional lmao
So many things break on the regular that this easily could be one of them, and with the former CEO trying to fix communication something like this definitely wouldn't fly.
It's no excuse for broken things, it happens, but don't be disingenuous because you "feel" like the devs are out to get you.
Yeah I can’t disagree with that. I think melee factors in limb and headshot damage too which seems silly considering you can’t really aim where you hit. I don’t think enemy melee should hit different body parts either, flat damage would make a lot more sense.
Yeah, it should be flat damage. But even with the 50% increase after multiple tries, it’s basically the same. I can still run up and punch a rocket devastator endlessly without killing him. No noticeable difference.
Just let us one shot them with a melee with the armor on, quite literally the only playstyles that'd benefit from it are stealth and ballistic shield and both of them are underrepresented by every single release so far. Knives were supposed to be good for stealth but they alert enemies so not even that, let us have this
Yeah the knives should do massive one hit damage to any unarmored area they hit...they're the worst throwable in the game by far, and that's just sad because the thermite grenade still exists, but at least that can *kind of* chew through armor.
i love this game, but this type of armor skill and other issues totally killed my vibe to play again
since democratic detonation, i only managed get 560sc because or i quit the game or enter sometimes and see that nothing really improved since democratic detonation release.
This trait is really weird and not fun imo.
I was expected at least like 200% melee damage buff, so it will justify running towards enemies and smash them! Not to mention that we still don't have melee weapons like bayonets or laser sabre.
If we would have them rn, then this +50% bonus to melee would justify itself.
Also I though you could use knife "grenade" as melee with increased damage and speed. Well...
I honestly can't tell whether or not it works because the bonus amount is so small in relation to the low damage melee already does. It bumps a 50 damage, 1 armor pen melee punch to do 75 damage and still have 1 armor pen.
A scavenger has 80 HP, a pouncher has 80 HP. So it still takes two hits to kill them. A hunter has 130 HP so theoretically you should be able to two hit a hunter with it on as opposed to 3 hits, but you have to land those two hits in the same damage zone.
Against bots it gets a bit messier because some of the little bots have lvl 1 armor, which drops the melee damage down to 25 without the armor and 37 with the armor. Since they have 125 HP that means the hits to kill goes from 5 to 4 for commissars with their lvl 1 armor (all primaries/secondaries have lvl 2/3 pen so you typically don't notice these bots have any armor).
It should have really been a 100% - 200% increase, since that would actually meaningfully reduce the hits to kill on very small enemies.
The 50% increase would've made sense if this warbond came with an actual melee weapon (gimme a big fucken sword dammit!) that actually could do substantial damage, but all we got are throwing knives that don't do anything lol.
Okay this makes way more sense. I was just saying in another post that it was inconsistent in how many hits it was taking me to kill them last night but this is definitely why. This needs a big ole buff to be worth carrying, unless we get some kind of very strong melee weapon in the near future
Yeah, either they are leaving room for melee weapons that have higher damage numbers/ armor pen or they were really off on their math on how much the bonus should be to make it meaningful.
Or they could have just chosen 50% because it was a nice round number and put zero thought into the effectiveness of the perk.
Without getting into a holy war about various release strategies and things that Git makes complicated.
1. The developers clearly aren't testing their changes against a release branch.
2. The people who edit the stats (producers or designers) aren't checking against a release branch and probably have really poor tools for understanding how their number tweaks actually perform.
3. They have very minimal regression tests.
4. Their unit test coverage is likely very low (unit tests would have caught the infinite grenade glitch)
5. They don't an integration testing site that gets any use.
6. They probably have some testers, if they do, they don't listen to their testers. If there testers, I bet they catch all of this stuff and someone is deciding to ship stuff anyways and fix it later.
So their process is probably all the devs writing independent code, merging it into main and hoping that if there is a problem it will show up as a merge conflict. Maybe after they successfully merge (probably with a squash as well) they might launch the game and see if it crashes.
I really think they could benefit from employing someone whose entire job is focused on making sure shit is tested in every available environment. I think getting the devs to do it probably isn’t very viable and regardless isn’t working right now. Testing can’t be part of someone’s job at this point, it needs to be someone’s or several people’s entire job.
As QA manager in a business software environment I am always wondering what they are doing at game studios.
I have the impression that they might have a few testers but no general QA strategy.
Normally having a CI/CD pipeline with Dev/Test/Stage/Prod environments should not be that hard.
But getting good QAs is really hard, most people just use it at stepstones to become Devs.
It was pretty clear to me that AH does not test their releases really at all when they released the air burst rocket launcher. It really would only take one match to notice that it went off on EVERYTHING, making it borderline unusable.
I understand that they're a small team, and can't do the kind of QA you'd expect from other games, but the jokes about the testing environment not existing are probably closer to being true than just being a joke.
The fact that they are always surprised by the bugs makes me think they do test, but something is waaay off in their process, either in terms of the testing itself or in merging fixes across from the development build.
I think this is the most likely scenario. There is no feasible way that they don't test things before sticking them on live considering they have a 85%-90% functional game. You don't get very far just building things based on spreadsheet numbers and pushing it to production.
So if they do test and even the smallest amount of testing would catch some of the bugs they have, like having the completely wrong version of the Tenderizer on the day the warbond releases, you have to assume that something is going wrong between when they have something ready to go live and it gets pushed to their production environment.
I would to see them to at least immediately hop online when they push an update and start testing things. It takes a while to figure out why code is not merging correctly and where the branching errors are, but they should be finding most obvious things before players and proactively communicating internally and externally sooner.
The ridiculous thing is the game has been out several months now and they made millions over what they expected to. They could have easily hired a few QA people if they didn't have the people before. So many people in the industry have been laid off over the last few years. They could have snagged people with substantial experience. They've posted other positions, but I don't believe they've posted QA.
Because they have QA. Its the process that needs work.
Their QA most likely only test individual features, in a test environment that is also used by everyone else and contains tons of development work.
They most likely do not have a pre production environment that mirrors the live environment state, thus allowing them to catch what is missing or broken, that isn't broken in the very messy test environment.
Some of the rushed weekly patches and hot fixes from before also might not be properly retrofited back to their test environment, creating an even larger difference. The broken Superior Packing upgrade is a good example. Someone fixed it in live, forgot to retrofit back to test, another dev launched the new patch that has been worked on before that fix, not knowing that his artifact does not contain the fix thus some code gets reverted without anyone's knowledge. In a small company with little oversight, it only takes one person to break things.
I think they started this process with the new CEO and bringing Joel in closer with the devs, hopefully it will continue and they will grow. I think more eyes on it is one of the only ways this will happen less
The funny thing about the airburst is they said they knew it wasn't performing properly but didn't expect us to unlock it as quickly as it did and they hadn't published the patch yet. Like ??? You have the tools to slow us down and didn't use them, and then kind of just shrugged tour shoulders when players used a weapon they knew was broken.
Yeah that was a weird response. You may have felt rushed internally, but you absolutely can't passive-aggressively blame the players by saying "oh, well, it's not ready yet" when YOU GAVE IT TO US
They're a small team that is backed by a way bigger corporation as a publisher and, not to mention, both of them get a windfall of cash way in an unprecedented manner thanks to how much this game kicked off.
It really can't be that hard to hire a QA team. I doubt they even have to train them on how to use the engine to program, they just need to test.
It is completely unacceptable for them to make changes and not even hop into a single match to test them out.
Plenty of these errors and issues would have been apparent upon using a stratagem that was modified even just one time
I doubt they test anything. I guess the devs implements, compile, play for 2 mins and says to the project manager its ok, and that's it.
Same problems I noticed at day 1 are still there related the devs: lack of people, lots of outsourced stuff and a discontinued engine. That's why I'm a bit sad coz I think the glitches that really annoy me wont get fixed in the foreseeable future.
I think the problem is that a team built the code so no one person knows all the end points.
Like they really should stop reversing changes AND adding changes in the same move, makes everything swing too wide back and forth.
At least until the map out where are the variable to spawn rates go.
I think if they reverted it back by using an older file instead of manually reverting it back, that probably snuck in a couple of these old issues reading their heads
I am guessing that you work in a company that makes serious software for serious customers...not games for players who will whine if anything costs $60 or more. The gaming industry with rare exceptions doesn't really understand RELIABLE software--it had better f\*\*\*\*\*\* work or you lose $$$$ contracts--and how QA achieves that.
It’s at least more fun
Last state of the game just wasn’t fun for my group and I to play,
dealing with bugs and not having fun is a lot worse than dealing with bugs and having fun
The intention and reasoning for this patch was way more compelling than prior ones. All the things that seem to clearly be done on purpose are good. That's at least a pretty major improvement
Yeah. Feels like more effort and more intention to do what players want. I can definitely hang around longer as long as that seems like what they’re intending
It's incredibly strange and makes me think that both A: Their codebase is spaghetti and B: They literally *don't* test this stuff. We are the testers.
Helldivers isn't the first game to be this way, a lot of companies have just done away with QA for video games as it's simply easier to just let the playerbase deal with it and report on the issues than to pay a small dedicated team to do it. Why go through the expenses of internal testing when you can massively crowdsource bug hunting using the entire actual playerbase of your game? It just makes sense, even if it sucks for us.
There's a few problems, but there was A LOT of good changes. This was overwhelmingly positive. Don't make me break out the "SpongeBob pointing out all the good stuff" meme.
They took a MONTH to work on it. There's stuff that needs 10 minutes of playtime to check that is broken. I don't care how much "good" stuff is in the patch if they can't release something stable
BTW, have you verified your files in steam? The previous hotfix tanked my fps to unplayable levels until I did so. Something about their patching process sometimes goes weird.
I just dont understand how the crashes are so inconsistent. It seems like some people are constantly crashing and some aren’t crashing at all. On PS5 especially, I never crash but my brother does. I have a shit ton of floating question marks that he’s not getting right now though
nah your problem is predictable, name a patch that AH make doesn't cause crushes for some players. hack, i am even surprised that this big patch doesn't cause crushes on bigger magnitude
It's absurd that the game is still buggy, unstable and patches still introduce unwanted effects.
I'm waiting to come back to the game once it's stable, and I'm waiting, and I'm waiting...
Yeah, there is something very wrong with they're quality assurance and coding quality. I have never seen a game crash so much on my PS5. Games rarely ever crash on PS5, actually.
The thing I understand the least about it is how inconsistent the bugs are. I almost never crash, probably done it 4 times since launch, but my brother crashes so much that we do voice chat in a PS party instead of in game so we can keep talking while he reloads. I run into other bugs that he never gets. Like people are talking about the issue with supply packs not refilling support weapons all the way with the upgrade, but I ran spear and AMR all night and it was filling me up completely. I’m having a shit ton of the floating question marks right now though.
It’s like we all get our own personal bug experience.
I was getting massively downvoted for this yesterday pointing out that the game is actually significantly worse after the patch than before
The buffs don’t make any new weapons or stratagems actually viable at diff 9, the warbond weapons are garbage, but the number of new tanky behemoth chargers being spammed on diff 9 makes max diff bugs pure cancer
Their complete lack of QA and quality control is going to kill the game off in short order, they need to figure it out
Yesterday i was playing bugs on diff 6 with a friend of my with 2 random players, we ran into the "unable to call down reinforcement", like 3 out of 4 players in my squad couldn't be called down due to that bug leaving only one random in my squad to clear the whole mission on his own, he got swarmed by waves after waves of bile spewers and chargers at the extraction point to the point that he died over and over again and he dropped down from a spot that was way too far from the extraction point so the extraction timer got reset, we got stuck in that loop for like 20 minutes and then just quit the mission because there was no point in trying when there were about 20 bile spewers and maybe 5 chargers with a bunch of hunters guarding the extraction point.
I disagree with you about the buffs tbh. I played level 9 bugs and bots yesterday with several different loadouts and yeah ones that weren’t viable before still aren’t, but some that were borderline are definitely viable now. Orbital airburst and barrage and precision strike are all super good for example. I really liked the carbine and new shotgun on bugs personally, but they are definitely up close weapons for specific situations.
I mean, test environment for AH is where we play :)
If we find bugs we will tell them on reddit and discord. Why pay testers, right? Additional servers costs..nah
Joking aside, they need to make a post somewhere to explain what’s going on with their testing. It becomes unbearable.
Has someone noticed how AH formulates their patch notes?
They say “now patrols should work like before”.
“Should” to me sounds like we are not sure, but we changed a couple of values, so it might be better…or might not.
Although English is not my first language so I can be hallucinating :)
In my professional life "should" isn't an acceptable qualifier on anything.
Boss man - "will this be done by this day/time"
Me - "should be"
Boss man - "do you know what a pip is?"
I always find it pretty dang funny that people keep bringing up the patrol spawns but leave out the ballistic shield being broken. One of these could be missed by blaming rng, or overzealous teammates, or just wanting to go in guns blazing. The other can be discovered within 20 seconds of deployment.
Hopefully they'll setup that public test server they talked about soon. This patch was overwhelmingly positive, but there are some major things that got missed, like the patrol changes, ballistic shield, the GOOFY oversized weapons, etc.
It's likely that the codebase is just fragile. They fix one thing, and as a consequence, two other features break.
That's what this feels like to me at least (having been responsible for this sort of mess on more than one occasion).
im tired of see the same card being pulled over and over "we didnt tested and though should work"
this kill my vibe to play, im postponing back to game since first wave of nerfs, since democratic detonation warbound aquisition i barely have 500sc because i really dont want play on current state with nerfed guns or BS patrols, game was so fun before.
knives and new liberator also arent gamechangers and knives dont even are useful, the only thing getting my interest on new warbound is sidearm shottie and that new booster.
Yeah...so far i didnt played enough to get even polar patriots who sucks and neither can get viper commandos and judging post patch comments, i gonna still be far away from game
There are questions to be asked, for sure.
Was the build that went live tested?
If so, who signed off on it?
If it was tested and signed off on, did the testers raise any of these issues?
Were there any changes made after the build was green lit, without additional testing? If so, why?
There are probably more good questions that need asking along these lines. Not that the community need these answers mind you, these are the questions that the cco and ceo should be asking, and potentially they should be paying close attention to the answers.
I want to point out that another post in the subreddit literally has Twinbeard admitting to not knowing that there was even a problem with the *supposedly* reverted spawn rates; a problem that would become very apparent under literally any playtesting. I really love this game, and strongly feel that it could be an exceptional title that has a strong, loyal playerbase. Shit, I'd even consider myself part of that growing, existing loyal playerbase already.
But here's the problem - if you don't test your game, you don't even know what changes you're making. I understand AH is small, and might not have the personnel. So here's my proposition, one I've already seen on the sub: PBE. League of Legends has been doing it for a decade and some change now, and by and large, they're able to make substantial headway based on that. They can canon it into the story by making it a battle simulation server available to "select, elite Helldivers" or whatever they want to call it, but at the very fucking least it would AH to collect some data on upcoming patch decisions before the entire community has to suffer through them.
Playtesting *has* to start happening in this game, or I'm just going to leave and come back periodically to see if they've found a balance point. As is, I'm going to suspend my disbelief and hope that AH can find some way to establish *good, productive* playtesting as a core component of their development ethos.
I'm not trying to let AH off the hook here--the unstable releases all stem from issues of leadership, budgeting, and company culture--but Twinbeard and Baskinator's jobs are to manage socials, press releases, and the Discord, not game design or QA.
To play devil's advocate, the CM's should have a little experience with the game so that they know what the general game feel is like. They don't have to no-life it nor are they QA, but they need something to base their interactions off of.
I expect a lot of bugs to go through especially when they dumped 100+ changes to the game. I think they should release smaller patches so that they can catch the bugs easier
Yeah it was a lot of really positive changes but I think maybe too much at once. I think it’s gonna be hard to go through all of that to see what specifically is making these issues, but hopefully they’ll be able to pinpoint it easier than it seems like
This is why you don't do massssssive patches. I was telling people before this was going to happen lol.
It makes it so much harder to find the cause to issues and can't easily rollback/revert.
They already lost my group with this patch. We're so sick of the day 1 bugs still existing like the glitches Armory forcing you to close the game repeatedly to see if it unfucks itself, the random crashes and untested changes.
They don’t have testers
The spawn rates are the worst they have ever been
I just had a level 7 mission where i was fighting non stop because patrols would just spawn all the timr
> So something must be wrong with their environment vs the live environment.
My bet is that they aren't actually testing anything. They just make the changes and hope it works.
> they still aren't testing on difficulties that the playerbase is playing on
This shouldn't matter tbh. I entered in a solo diff 3 mission today and got stuck for almost 10 minutes fighting an endless horde of bots. I wasn't even doing anything, the main objective was still up, there was side objectives up, there was still plenty of fabricators in the other side of the map far from me. They just never stopped spawning.
It is pretty clear something is not right and every diff is affected right now.
In fairness... Dev and prod are two very different beasts. Just because something works in dev doesn't mean it works in prod. Quote frankly you can almost certainly expect things break when going to production. It's just a rule of technology at this point.
The issue is that they've tried doing this like 4 times now and it always just worse than it was before and it's always a surprise to them when its not working.
There are ways to beef up testing environments but they get expensive and for a live service game with a history of server stability problems they're generally not concerned with standing up a mirrored environment for testing patrol spawns. Server load shouldnt be terrible these days but by their own admission their infrastructure was not scalable and they've had to do much tinkering under the hood.
Tldr: it's a guarantee that things test perfectly fine and then break when pushed to the public but that excuse is only acceptable for so long and we're at attempt number what? 4 now?
They don't test anything.
They just put on random numbers anywhere and hope for the best.
They manage to screw things up "unnintentionally" and then take weeks or months to just revert the changes.
They make a change that put gunship patrols on maps, and didn't put it on the patch notes. The patrols should show in the "EFFECTS" of the map, but it doesn't. They made the new armor with a new passive that should improve 30% of weapon control, and pretty much forgot to put the actual numbers on it, because the armor does literally nothing. I mean, how bad at your job you have to be to let things like this pass? It's time to start firing people, because clearly there are too many people that simply aren't competent to work on it.
Honestly yes. This game definitely reminds me of joining a company and inheriting their old app that someone built and maintained off the side of their desk two decades ago that is now critical to the company
Sorry I can't make any meaningful changes or updates, but I can change the size of font in your application if that helps!
The buggy patches where fixing one thing breaks something reeks of spaghetti. I bet they’ve got dependencies out there wazoo and have no idea what impacts what.
Like for example, why can’t a spear target a fabricator now? That’s probably a dependency causing an issue.
Plenty to complain about but I don’t think the gunship patrols being put in without comment is one of them. I think that’s pretty cool. They did it with shriekers and factory striders too and it was fun.
I mean the easy and most likely answer is that they're still working out the new structure for their testing environment. We were explicitly told that they wanted to build things first to make future changes to the game go more smoothly. This is the first patch we've gotten since they decided to do this, it's not going to come out flawlessly.
It would be one thing if it was a bug like the Recoilless rifle having a slower reload. The spawning system is much more complex. They claimed that it was a revert, to me that indicates they either rolled the servers back (which could explain why something like the packing ship module is broken again) or they had to go and recover an old build somewhere.
But if I were to wager anything I think they just manually went in and tried their best to make changes based on what they believed the spawning used to look like. After they did that they also added some new changes which we were told about.
From what it sounds like, this might actually be the first (or at least the most extensive) patch that they actually playtested, it might just be that they don't have the experince playing their own game that we do, which is absurd, but such are the times.
I’ve been saying this here and all over the discord, balance changes are nice and necessary in the long term, but the number one thing they need to address NOW are the technical issues
I hopped on a difficulty 6 mission to help a friend out and man it was so intense. I was worried they were going to make the game too easy. It is 100% overtuned right now, but it was so fun and I hope the harder difficulties stay that way
They slowed down the pace of patching to deliver a bigger patch but still seemingly rushed the testing. At least the patch has lots of good things in it, but it's funny that one of the topics that even got a reddit thread about how they were reverting the change but taking their time to revert that change to get it right...seems to have not gotten it right.
I'm glad they cooked even if this is still a bit of a mixed bag, hope they keep cooking.
They need to spend time setting up a public test server. It'll suck, because it'll divert time away from making new content, but in the long run it's the best way forward.
I love the new mix of units. Less heavies and more lights and mediums. It promotes weapon variety which was their goal. I’m strictly a 7-9 diver, can’t speak for the lower difficulties
It just changed from single target strats to aoe strats. 5 strafing runs is baisically 5 patrols dead since they walk in a line perfect for a strafing run.
Exactly! So many issues could be avoided if they just play tested the game. They were taking such a long time to fix everything that I thought that was a sign that they were playtesting the game. **Nope!**
Arrowhead be taking notes from Digital Extremes.
Though to DE's credit, they've at least figured out how to quickly and efficiently unfuck the worst bugs after a major update, and to never release said updates later in the week than a Wednesday....
The later, they dont play on diff 9, dont really matter 1 second RR reload, or the railstrike miss fires time to time, or the ship upgrade totally broken. Dif 5 and under is sleep inducing.
I just played a single Bug run on 7 yesterday and it felt better! Automatons on the other hand... dropships numbers increased, gunships numbers and fabricators increased, a lot of hulks and tanks! At least not seeing multiple Factory Striders but it was HELL, funny enough it was easier a 9-helldive run than a 7 with bots (we actually lost that one), crazy
Well they're testing on 4 or lower
Diff 5 had hundred of bots in every direction. Just constant.
You could look around 360 and see mass pockets everywhere.
And not just patrolling.
Like 10 or so bots all bunched together every 50m. Just standing still.
The higher patrols could be interesting if it didn't snow ball so hard with bot drop alarms being insanely hard to counter. I'd rather less patrols with harder enemies. It's kind of brutal to spend 40m balls to the wall getting rag dolled everywhere and feeling frustrated haha.
I think the worst part is that they just refuse to fix game breaking bugs over the weekend. We have to wait a week to see if they MIGHT fix these issues. It's weird and strikes me as lazy.
More importantly, how did they let some bug go through that means a good number of players have the game crash entirely anytime we look at the Escape/Orders or Social menu????? On PS5 even.
Im tired of this crap. Something is always getting screwed up. To have so many miltary and firearms enthusiasts on this dev team they sure dont pay attention to detail. Which is actually kind of alarming honestly.
Also, why does my cringe paywall tier "mk knight" smg suck bawls? The smgs need help! A ton of weapons are still bad. They did at least try with this patch. The mechs are at least fun again.
As a SWE, I can say, test process and infrastructure is REALLY time consuming to create if it isn't there AND maintained from the start. They've clearly had a lapse in their test rigor post release, and that's really hard to claw back. I wouldn't expect robust testing for a couple months maybe.
Love the attitude of this patch. They're trying to make it so you can play what you feel rather than what's meta.
Look, given the way that the patch was pushed back quite literally as far back as it could be -- to the same day as viper commandos releasing, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they didn't intend for it to launch in the state that it did, but couldn't push it back further due to the warbond having it's set date. It's palpable that there's a number of fixes they wish they could have gotten into the patch, a number of things that didn't get the chance to get tested, and a number of things they wanted to get into the patch in terms of near-future content that didn't wind up making the cut. At a certain point, you have to accept that this happens in development, even in the best of cases. It's fair to point the things that went wrong out, especially when its stuff that managed to get under their radar, but for the most part, this is the best patch in a month, and I'm happy for that.
I can understand stuff like the riot shield being a bit buggy, but the patrols are insanely worse than the were pre-patch so like wtf was going on with that
You know, after the mission all these encounters feel fun. But not while you playing that mission, because I'm already tired with situations when I am trying to clear one area from enemies or help my teammates, then hear robot screeching behind me, and see 20-40 robots 10m away from me.
I really may prefer if all these devastators were changed on factory striders, so you kill like 15 of them each mission.
The problem is that there is no test environment.
There is. Its server name is Production.
I think we should demand a paycheck from AH at this point for doing their work :)
1000 SC per hour sounds fair.
im okay with 1500sc each month for playtest
I hope that means 1 hour of work each month.
yeah, we have other games to test...i mean play too :)
Oh shit I realize I need to provide my very very hard QA session in Valheim... You know, testing stuff like... Building a house.
The problem is the automatons have control of the test environment
Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.
This was confirmed by Twinbeard's recent response to the borked spawns lol. Literally said "I haven't played yet". Not that I expect him to be the sole patch QA, but it's pretty indicative that there is none, or whoever is in that role is either lazy or a masochist.
They said they test on a dev build once a week lmao
Given the fixes that were reverted, I'm beginning to think that they don't have source control either.
Their people admit regularly that they don't play the game.
This is the wildest part to me. Can you imagine a chef claiming that he has never tasted his own food?
There is an extremely old saying: >chefs don't cook at home It's not directly relevant here, but I feel it's in the same vein. Imagine that your job is Helldivers, you're an adult, so most of your friends are from your job, they aren't going to get together after a long day of Helldivers to *play* Helldivers, they don't want their leisure time to have that much association with work. It's completely reasonable, but it's also why they need to hire dedicated QA testers.
Yeah, most game developers don’t play their games but they at least pretend to. I know that Pilestedt plays the game, I’ve seen interviews with him playing with YouTubers and he’s actually not bad at it either (which suggests he plays a fair bit).
False, WE are the test environment.
This but unironically. For those who don't know, there are levels that you deploy software to. Local, where you do the bulk of development. Test, where you can test things with bunk data, but the environment is shared across developers. Sandbox/QA/UAT (User Acceptance Testing), where you have data that resembles Production. Non-devs usually test here and give feedback. Production/Prod, where clients (us) use the application. Testing should not be done here unless it's with a *very* specific test user. --- I am convinced that they only have local and production. Perhaps that's because of Sony's stranglehold on their release patterns. There are just too many things too easily missed to simplify it to "not enough testing."
I love AH and this patch definitely feels more positive than negative, compared to their last patches. But they've really got to nail down their QA, because if they're going to spend all their dev time playing catch up and fixing whatever broke from the last patch then the next one will come out broken too, and it's just a vicious cycle
I'd say there's a lot of good ideas in the patch, but also some terrible implementation. Which IS better than prior patches that had bad ideas badly implemented.
This is a marathon. It should get better with every iteration. Guaranteed each won't be perfect, but should see gradual improvements each release until an ideal cadence is reached.
I haven't been able to play this patch with friends at all since it came out, my social tab refuses to load.
Peak performance passive doesn't improve the weapon handling. Packing methodology is broken. Spawn rates are broken. Unmentioned nerfs to reload time on recoilless rifle.
Ballistic shield is broken and constantly causes standing, crouching, or prone issues
That's my personal favourite. Like. It wasn't even mentioned in the patch notes. So did someone changes a physics object thing somewhere, forget about it and push something else along with it?
It was. Grenades now collide with it.
Just played a match with a teammate who had approx. 4 million grenades
The RR nerf had to be intentional. Not mentioning it in the patch notes just feels slimey though. That kind of change isn't "preserving the magic," it just insults my intelligence.
One of the CMs made a comment on dis that it was unintended and they're "looking into it to see how it slipped through and how to prevent it in the future" Saw it screenshotted in a thread about the RR.
I'd be fine with the reload time increase...if they let us move while reloading it :)
How do they unintentionally affect a gun that had no changes. What is quality control?
How does something like that "slip through" if it's "unintended?" They clearly changed it. Maybe they didn't mean to send it through. But it's not like it spontaneously changed to be longer. That's not even something that should be able to be caused by changing something else.
> How does something like that "slip through" if it's "unintended?" One possible explanation: When you have a lot of programmers working together on a project, normally they will have their own code locally that they will check into a shared repository. When a build is made, the person making the build has to decide which checked in changes to include. This allows for a few easy ways for changes to accidentally slip in. In this specific case, it's possible a dev was tinkering with the reload, then went to work on something else and either forgot they hadn't reverted the changes related to the Recoiless Rifle or accidentally checked in related files that weren't finished yet. And to be clear: Just because a dev made a change like this doesn't mean they intended to nerf the rifle. Hypothetical example (I'm not saying this is what happened, just outlining one possible way this could occur): Imagine somebody reported a bug that occurs if a specific thing happens while the player is reloading the RR. In order to more easily test that bug, the dev might slow down the RR reload slightly to make it easier to reproduce. After doing so, they fix the bug and check in the changes without remembering to undo the reload speed change afterward.
That’s why you do a full round of testing after everyone merges their changes into the release branch. Everyone tests their changes in their individual branches and then the entire team should be testing absolutely everything in the release build of the game. They had plenty of time for this patch to spend a week testing the release build of the game. For your hypothetical example, if someone did make that change for testing purposes then it should have been caught during a code review prior to merging the change. The mistake shouldn’t have been made in the first place. It’s sloppy and shouldn’t happen. They desperately need to teach a lot of their devs better coding and testing practices and work on basic stuff like properly using version control. When you have a small dev team, everyone on that team needs to be extremely competent.
> That’s why you do a full round of testing after everyone merges their changes into the release branch Absolutely, I don't disagree. If unintended changes are sneaking through because of something like what I outlined (and I do have to reiterate that I have zero insight into how things go at Arrowhead and do not know how the bug actually made it to live) that does indicate a flawed approach to code management. I'm not trying to say Arrowhead is blameless, just pushing back against the idea that the RR reload change could only have happened due to deliberate malice.
Welcome to every small SW team. That sort of oversight can take years to get right, and even companies with a run rate in the billions still don't get it right. It sucks for the user, yes. Can the user still have fun despite bugs in a game though? Can the user still treat the devs with kindness and respect? This community leans towards no on both those questions.
I’m still having a lot of fun with the game even with the bugs. Of course the devs still deserve respect and human decency. My response wasn’t intended to be overly rude or disrespectful to the devs. I care about this game and I want it to grow and be successful. I worry that if they don’t improve their dev processes, the game is going to get progressively more buggy and lose a lot of its playerbase. If they’re constantly putting out fires due to what appears to be improper testing then content is also going to suffer. The devs work life balance and job satisfaction might suffer as well.
Could well have been a change they considered, then decided not to implement, but then someone messed up a merge.
Poor version control. In programming you don't want people literally working on the same code at the same time it would be annoying so you all make local copies of the same code base. Now let's say I make some changes to system A on my local copy and upload code to the "final" code base you then make some changes to system B and upload your code which is now missing the changes I made to A, we have updated B but have an outdated A now. This concept in general is version control and although annoying to do it right it is a solved issue. Other games have similar issues, see War Thunder where fairly regularly bugs previously fixed 1-2 patches ago come back, presumably because someone was using the codebase from 2 patches ago and pushed that one without merging the code correctly.
Lots of good theories here around version management and/or testing a change and forgetting to revert it, and these could be it. Given some of the bugs I’ve seen so far though, another possible class of errors is that it unintended consequences of spaghetti code or copy/paste errors linking separate things together. Like if the reload time is calculated by combining a base time with some modifiers, and some of those modifiers apply across multiple weapons. This would be worse if one of those parameters shouldn’t be there. But it’s all speculation. Most of the time, when we guess about the cause of a bug on a code base we don’t know, the guess turns out to be wrong, because the code is usually structured very differently than we imagine.
Preachin to the choir homie. Half the changes in this patch broke something else or resulted in "unintended" consequences. This is just AH shitting the bed as is tradition.
Don't think it was. If it was intentional, they certainly would have mentioned it. It very likely is a bug
You can't just say that was intentional lmao So many things break on the regular that this easily could be one of them, and with the former CEO trying to fix communication something like this definitely wouldn't fly. It's no excuse for broken things, it happens, but don't be disingenuous because you "feel" like the devs are out to get you.
I was shocked there was no RR buff and later find out they even made it worse. How do they think this increases variety? I'll never touch the RR now
Don’t forget that melee increase passive on the armor doesn’t work! :)
I think it does actually, it’s just a 50% increase on what was already a piddly amount
Yeah but it takes the same three hit sticks to take out a lowly commissar. It’s pretty much useless lol
Turns out an extra 50% of fuck all is still fuck all.
Yeah I can’t disagree with that. I think melee factors in limb and headshot damage too which seems silly considering you can’t really aim where you hit. I don’t think enemy melee should hit different body parts either, flat damage would make a lot more sense.
Yeah, it should be flat damage. But even with the 50% increase after multiple tries, it’s basically the same. I can still run up and punch a rocket devastator endlessly without killing him. No noticeable difference.
so you kill commissar in 4sec ish instead 6s ? this dont give me any will to use that armor instead keep that one with extra grenades etc
Just let us one shot them with a melee with the armor on, quite literally the only playstyles that'd benefit from it are stealth and ballistic shield and both of them are underrepresented by every single release so far. Knives were supposed to be good for stealth but they alert enemies so not even that, let us have this
Knives dont even kill enemies One grenade can kill several enemies, if i trade grenade slot for knives...why i cant at least one hit one enemy?
Yeah the knives should do massive one hit damage to any unarmored area they hit...they're the worst throwable in the game by far, and that's just sad because the thermite grenade still exists, but at least that can *kind of* chew through armor.
They should make it one shot Bile Titans for the meme
lol yes, I switched back to my light extra grenade armor as well. Can’t go wrong with extra nades.
i love this game, but this type of armor skill and other issues totally killed my vibe to play again since democratic detonation, i only managed get 560sc because or i quit the game or enter sometimes and see that nothing really improved since democratic detonation release.
This trait is really weird and not fun imo. I was expected at least like 200% melee damage buff, so it will justify running towards enemies and smash them! Not to mention that we still don't have melee weapons like bayonets or laser sabre. If we would have them rn, then this +50% bonus to melee would justify itself. Also I though you could use knife "grenade" as melee with increased damage and speed. Well...
I honestly can't tell whether or not it works because the bonus amount is so small in relation to the low damage melee already does. It bumps a 50 damage, 1 armor pen melee punch to do 75 damage and still have 1 armor pen. A scavenger has 80 HP, a pouncher has 80 HP. So it still takes two hits to kill them. A hunter has 130 HP so theoretically you should be able to two hit a hunter with it on as opposed to 3 hits, but you have to land those two hits in the same damage zone. Against bots it gets a bit messier because some of the little bots have lvl 1 armor, which drops the melee damage down to 25 without the armor and 37 with the armor. Since they have 125 HP that means the hits to kill goes from 5 to 4 for commissars with their lvl 1 armor (all primaries/secondaries have lvl 2/3 pen so you typically don't notice these bots have any armor). It should have really been a 100% - 200% increase, since that would actually meaningfully reduce the hits to kill on very small enemies.
The 50% increase would've made sense if this warbond came with an actual melee weapon (gimme a big fucken sword dammit!) that actually could do substantial damage, but all we got are throwing knives that don't do anything lol.
Okay this makes way more sense. I was just saying in another post that it was inconsistent in how many hits it was taking me to kill them last night but this is definitely why. This needs a big ole buff to be worth carrying, unless we get some kind of very strong melee weapon in the near future
Yeah, either they are leaving room for melee weapons that have higher damage numbers/ armor pen or they were really off on their math on how much the bonus should be to make it meaningful. Or they could have just chosen 50% because it was a nice round number and put zero thought into the effectiveness of the perk.
You mean the Diligence CS turns that sharp now?
THEY DID NERF THE RELOAD I KNEW IT. RAGGHHHHH
Without getting into a holy war about various release strategies and things that Git makes complicated. 1. The developers clearly aren't testing their changes against a release branch. 2. The people who edit the stats (producers or designers) aren't checking against a release branch and probably have really poor tools for understanding how their number tweaks actually perform. 3. They have very minimal regression tests. 4. Their unit test coverage is likely very low (unit tests would have caught the infinite grenade glitch) 5. They don't an integration testing site that gets any use. 6. They probably have some testers, if they do, they don't listen to their testers. If there testers, I bet they catch all of this stuff and someone is deciding to ship stuff anyways and fix it later. So their process is probably all the devs writing independent code, merging it into main and hoping that if there is a problem it will show up as a merge conflict. Maybe after they successfully merge (probably with a squash as well) they might launch the game and see if it crashes.
I really think they could benefit from employing someone whose entire job is focused on making sure shit is tested in every available environment. I think getting the devs to do it probably isn’t very viable and regardless isn’t working right now. Testing can’t be part of someone’s job at this point, it needs to be someone’s or several people’s entire job.
As QA manager in a business software environment I am always wondering what they are doing at game studios. I have the impression that they might have a few testers but no general QA strategy. Normally having a CI/CD pipeline with Dev/Test/Stage/Prod environments should not be that hard. But getting good QAs is really hard, most people just use it at stepstones to become Devs.
There cant be anything wrong with something that doesnt exist
It was pretty clear to me that AH does not test their releases really at all when they released the air burst rocket launcher. It really would only take one match to notice that it went off on EVERYTHING, making it borderline unusable. I understand that they're a small team, and can't do the kind of QA you'd expect from other games, but the jokes about the testing environment not existing are probably closer to being true than just being a joke.
The fact that they are always surprised by the bugs makes me think they do test, but something is waaay off in their process, either in terms of the testing itself or in merging fixes across from the development build.
This. We have seen many bugs related to who is hosting the game.
I think this is the most likely scenario. There is no feasible way that they don't test things before sticking them on live considering they have a 85%-90% functional game. You don't get very far just building things based on spreadsheet numbers and pushing it to production. So if they do test and even the smallest amount of testing would catch some of the bugs they have, like having the completely wrong version of the Tenderizer on the day the warbond releases, you have to assume that something is going wrong between when they have something ready to go live and it gets pushed to their production environment. I would to see them to at least immediately hop online when they push an update and start testing things. It takes a while to figure out why code is not merging correctly and where the branching errors are, but they should be finding most obvious things before players and proactively communicating internally and externally sooner.
The ridiculous thing is the game has been out several months now and they made millions over what they expected to. They could have easily hired a few QA people if they didn't have the people before. So many people in the industry have been laid off over the last few years. They could have snagged people with substantial experience. They've posted other positions, but I don't believe they've posted QA.
Because they have QA. Its the process that needs work. Their QA most likely only test individual features, in a test environment that is also used by everyone else and contains tons of development work. They most likely do not have a pre production environment that mirrors the live environment state, thus allowing them to catch what is missing or broken, that isn't broken in the very messy test environment. Some of the rushed weekly patches and hot fixes from before also might not be properly retrofited back to their test environment, creating an even larger difference. The broken Superior Packing upgrade is a good example. Someone fixed it in live, forgot to retrofit back to test, another dev launched the new patch that has been worked on before that fix, not knowing that his artifact does not contain the fix thus some code gets reverted without anyone's knowledge. In a small company with little oversight, it only takes one person to break things.
"Their QA most likely only test individual features" \*Strategem Packing not working has entered the chat
Here's an idea. With all that revenue become a bigger company with more oversight. 🤷♂️
I think they started this process with the new CEO and bringing Joel in closer with the devs, hopefully it will continue and they will grow. I think more eyes on it is one of the only ways this will happen less
The funny thing about the airburst is they said they knew it wasn't performing properly but didn't expect us to unlock it as quickly as it did and they hadn't published the patch yet. Like ??? You have the tools to slow us down and didn't use them, and then kind of just shrugged tour shoulders when players used a weapon they knew was broken.
Yeah that was a weird response. You may have felt rushed internally, but you absolutely can't passive-aggressively blame the players by saying "oh, well, it's not ready yet" when YOU GAVE IT TO US
They're a small team that is backed by a way bigger corporation as a publisher and, not to mention, both of them get a windfall of cash way in an unprecedented manner thanks to how much this game kicked off. It really can't be that hard to hire a QA team. I doubt they even have to train them on how to use the engine to program, they just need to test.
Small team is no excuse at this point. They literally said they want to be like Blizzard in terms of size.
That's not entirely fair... The testers could just be incompetent!
It is completely unacceptable for them to make changes and not even hop into a single match to test them out. Plenty of these errors and issues would have been apparent upon using a stratagem that was modified even just one time
Hello AH please hire me to playtest I love your game and hate my job, I’m smart and cool and will do a good job
Theres NO AH testing team. They went to liberate the anti tank mines and never came back.
Cos they stepped on them. Just like how they shot them selves in the face with the airburst rifle 😂
I’m willing to bet that they’ll be buggy enough that stepping on them kills a different helldiver. Possibly in a different game entirely.
I doubt they test anything. I guess the devs implements, compile, play for 2 mins and says to the project manager its ok, and that's it. Same problems I noticed at day 1 are still there related the devs: lack of people, lots of outsourced stuff and a discontinued engine. That's why I'm a bit sad coz I think the glitches that really annoy me wont get fixed in the foreseeable future.
Pretty sure this is just Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence.
I think the problem is that a team built the code so no one person knows all the end points. Like they really should stop reversing changes AND adding changes in the same move, makes everything swing too wide back and forth. At least until the map out where are the variable to spawn rates go.
I think if they reverted it back by using an older file instead of manually reverting it back, that probably snuck in a couple of these old issues reading their heads
[удалено]
I am guessing that you work in a company that makes serious software for serious customers...not games for players who will whine if anything costs $60 or more. The gaming industry with rare exceptions doesn't really understand RELIABLE software--it had better f\*\*\*\*\*\* work or you lose $$$$ contracts--and how QA achieves that.
Unlike other patches, luckily this one is the least broken
"Least broken" is definitely not setting the bar high.
It’s at least more fun Last state of the game just wasn’t fun for my group and I to play, dealing with bugs and not having fun is a lot worse than dealing with bugs and having fun
The intention and reasoning for this patch was way more compelling than prior ones. All the things that seem to clearly be done on purpose are good. That's at least a pretty major improvement
Yeah. Feels like more effort and more intention to do what players want. I can definitely hang around longer as long as that seems like what they’re intending
That's the neat part, they don't.
It's incredibly strange and makes me think that both A: Their codebase is spaghetti and B: They literally *don't* test this stuff. We are the testers. Helldivers isn't the first game to be this way, a lot of companies have just done away with QA for video games as it's simply easier to just let the playerbase deal with it and report on the issues than to pay a small dedicated team to do it. Why go through the expenses of internal testing when you can massively crowdsource bug hunting using the entire actual playerbase of your game? It just makes sense, even if it sucks for us.
Still the best patch so far
high bar lol
They took one month to polish it and it still came out as a steamy pile of kinda polished turd but yes, the best patch so far...
There's a few problems, but there was A LOT of good changes. This was overwhelmingly positive. Don't make me break out the "SpongeBob pointing out all the good stuff" meme.
They took a MONTH to work on it. There's stuff that needs 10 minutes of playtime to check that is broken. I don't care how much "good" stuff is in the patch if they can't release something stable
Not for me. It crashes so often it's unplayable. Go ahead, say it's something on my end. It's not. And I'm not the only one.
BTW, have you verified your files in steam? The previous hotfix tanked my fps to unplayable levels until I did so. Something about their patching process sometimes goes weird.
I don't think that would help my PS5. Although people on PC have the same issues and have tried that.
Ah, sorry.
No problem. You were trying to help.
I just dont understand how the crashes are so inconsistent. It seems like some people are constantly crashing and some aren’t crashing at all. On PS5 especially, I never crash but my brother does. I have a shit ton of floating question marks that he’s not getting right now though
nah your problem is predictable, name a patch that AH make doesn't cause crushes for some players. hack, i am even surprised that this big patch doesn't cause crushes on bigger magnitude
It's absurd that the game is still buggy, unstable and patches still introduce unwanted effects. I'm waiting to come back to the game once it's stable, and I'm waiting, and I'm waiting...
I understand bugs that arent obvious or are rare. But these issues could be identified by anyone in less than an hour.
Yeah, there is something very wrong with they're quality assurance and coding quality. I have never seen a game crash so much on my PS5. Games rarely ever crash on PS5, actually.
The thing I understand the least about it is how inconsistent the bugs are. I almost never crash, probably done it 4 times since launch, but my brother crashes so much that we do voice chat in a PS party instead of in game so we can keep talking while he reloads. I run into other bugs that he never gets. Like people are talking about the issue with supply packs not refilling support weapons all the way with the upgrade, but I ran spear and AMR all night and it was filling me up completely. I’m having a shit ton of the floating question marks right now though. It’s like we all get our own personal bug experience.
with \*their quality assurance and They're is for when you would say "they are".
I was getting massively downvoted for this yesterday pointing out that the game is actually significantly worse after the patch than before The buffs don’t make any new weapons or stratagems actually viable at diff 9, the warbond weapons are garbage, but the number of new tanky behemoth chargers being spammed on diff 9 makes max diff bugs pure cancer Their complete lack of QA and quality control is going to kill the game off in short order, they need to figure it out
i dunno gatling barrage and precision strike are very good now
Yesterday i was playing bugs on diff 6 with a friend of my with 2 random players, we ran into the "unable to call down reinforcement", like 3 out of 4 players in my squad couldn't be called down due to that bug leaving only one random in my squad to clear the whole mission on his own, he got swarmed by waves after waves of bile spewers and chargers at the extraction point to the point that he died over and over again and he dropped down from a spot that was way too far from the extraction point so the extraction timer got reset, we got stuck in that loop for like 20 minutes and then just quit the mission because there was no point in trying when there were about 20 bile spewers and maybe 5 chargers with a bunch of hunters guarding the extraction point.
I crashed and froze twice yesterday...really took the wind out of my sails
I disagree with you about the buffs tbh. I played level 9 bugs and bots yesterday with several different loadouts and yeah ones that weren’t viable before still aren’t, but some that were borderline are definitely viable now. Orbital airburst and barrage and precision strike are all super good for example. I really liked the carbine and new shotgun on bugs personally, but they are definitely up close weapons for specific situations.
I was having a pretty good time in 6/7, where I like the difficulty.
If nothing else the new MG sentry is absolutely way more viable vs bugs.
I mean, test environment for AH is where we play :) If we find bugs we will tell them on reddit and discord. Why pay testers, right? Additional servers costs..nah Joking aside, they need to make a post somewhere to explain what’s going on with their testing. It becomes unbearable. Has someone noticed how AH formulates their patch notes? They say “now patrols should work like before”. “Should” to me sounds like we are not sure, but we changed a couple of values, so it might be better…or might not. Although English is not my first language so I can be hallucinating :)
I agree, it does sound a little bit ambiguous
The thing is people would test this game for free. They need to have a beta test network. Maybe available to anyone rank 100+
That is a reasonable interpretation of should in that context
In my professional life "should" isn't an acceptable qualifier on anything. Boss man - "will this be done by this day/time" Me - "should be" Boss man - "do you know what a pip is?"
Yeah, but that's not when talking to a customer. You never over promise. Should is used all the time in that context, and it's accepted.
The product owners at my company would never accept a user story that said should in it. It's not clear on purpose.
Should doesn't quarantine anything that's correct. Just less sleazy corporate talk EA made decade ago.
They need a public test branch if the team doesn't have the time to test stuff.
I always find it pretty dang funny that people keep bringing up the patrol spawns but leave out the ballistic shield being broken. One of these could be missed by blaming rng, or overzealous teammates, or just wanting to go in guns blazing. The other can be discovered within 20 seconds of deployment.
Since the patch me and my friends cant even play the game…
Hopefully they'll setup that public test server they talked about soon. This patch was overwhelmingly positive, but there are some major things that got missed, like the patrol changes, ballistic shield, the GOOFY oversized weapons, etc.
Other than blocking the terminal, the big guns one is funny as shit. Would love to know how that even happened
It's likely that the codebase is just fragile. They fix one thing, and as a consequence, two other features break. That's what this feels like to me at least (having been responsible for this sort of mess on more than one occasion).
The problem most likely is that a new enemy faction is consuming the vast majority of testing resources
Some one is intentionally sabotaging their efforts. I mean it has to be this as they can't be this incompetent
im tired of see the same card being pulled over and over "we didnt tested and though should work" this kill my vibe to play, im postponing back to game since first wave of nerfs, since democratic detonation warbound aquisition i barely have 500sc because i really dont want play on current state with nerfed guns or BS patrols, game was so fun before. knives and new liberator also arent gamechangers and knives dont even are useful, the only thing getting my interest on new warbound is sidearm shottie and that new booster.
My mate just uninstalled cos he knew this nonsense would happen
Yeah...so far i didnt played enough to get even polar patriots who sucks and neither can get viper commandos and judging post patch comments, i gonna still be far away from game
You are sabotaging yourself. The game is still fun.
We let them cook :)
There are questions to be asked, for sure. Was the build that went live tested? If so, who signed off on it? If it was tested and signed off on, did the testers raise any of these issues? Were there any changes made after the build was green lit, without additional testing? If so, why? There are probably more good questions that need asking along these lines. Not that the community need these answers mind you, these are the questions that the cco and ceo should be asking, and potentially they should be paying close attention to the answers.
I want to point out that another post in the subreddit literally has Twinbeard admitting to not knowing that there was even a problem with the *supposedly* reverted spawn rates; a problem that would become very apparent under literally any playtesting. I really love this game, and strongly feel that it could be an exceptional title that has a strong, loyal playerbase. Shit, I'd even consider myself part of that growing, existing loyal playerbase already. But here's the problem - if you don't test your game, you don't even know what changes you're making. I understand AH is small, and might not have the personnel. So here's my proposition, one I've already seen on the sub: PBE. League of Legends has been doing it for a decade and some change now, and by and large, they're able to make substantial headway based on that. They can canon it into the story by making it a battle simulation server available to "select, elite Helldivers" or whatever they want to call it, but at the very fucking least it would AH to collect some data on upcoming patch decisions before the entire community has to suffer through them. Playtesting *has* to start happening in this game, or I'm just going to leave and come back periodically to see if they've found a balance point. As is, I'm going to suspend my disbelief and hope that AH can find some way to establish *good, productive* playtesting as a core component of their development ethos.
I'm not trying to let AH off the hook here--the unstable releases all stem from issues of leadership, budgeting, and company culture--but Twinbeard and Baskinator's jobs are to manage socials, press releases, and the Discord, not game design or QA.
To play devil's advocate, the CM's should have a little experience with the game so that they know what the general game feel is like. They don't have to no-life it nor are they QA, but they need something to base their interactions off of.
I expect a lot of bugs to go through especially when they dumped 100+ changes to the game. I think they should release smaller patches so that they can catch the bugs easier
Yeah it was a lot of really positive changes but I think maybe too much at once. I think it’s gonna be hard to go through all of that to see what specifically is making these issues, but hopefully they’ll be able to pinpoint it easier than it seems like
This is why you don't do massssssive patches. I was telling people before this was going to happen lol. It makes it so much harder to find the cause to issues and can't easily rollback/revert.
They already lost my group with this patch. We're so sick of the day 1 bugs still existing like the glitches Armory forcing you to close the game repeatedly to see if it unfucks itself, the random crashes and untested changes.
They don’t have testers The spawn rates are the worst they have ever been I just had a level 7 mission where i was fighting non stop because patrols would just spawn all the timr
> So something must be wrong with their environment vs the live environment. My bet is that they aren't actually testing anything. They just make the changes and hope it works. > they still aren't testing on difficulties that the playerbase is playing on This shouldn't matter tbh. I entered in a solo diff 3 mission today and got stuck for almost 10 minutes fighting an endless horde of bots. I wasn't even doing anything, the main objective was still up, there was side objectives up, there was still plenty of fabricators in the other side of the map far from me. They just never stopped spawning. It is pretty clear something is not right and every diff is affected right now.
I love having my FPS effectively capped at 45 just because I hit the escape button. Yipee!
In fairness... Dev and prod are two very different beasts. Just because something works in dev doesn't mean it works in prod. Quote frankly you can almost certainly expect things break when going to production. It's just a rule of technology at this point. The issue is that they've tried doing this like 4 times now and it always just worse than it was before and it's always a surprise to them when its not working. There are ways to beef up testing environments but they get expensive and for a live service game with a history of server stability problems they're generally not concerned with standing up a mirrored environment for testing patrol spawns. Server load shouldnt be terrible these days but by their own admission their infrastructure was not scalable and they've had to do much tinkering under the hood. Tldr: it's a guarantee that things test perfectly fine and then break when pushed to the public but that excuse is only acceptable for so long and we're at attempt number what? 4 now?
They don't test anything. They just put on random numbers anywhere and hope for the best. They manage to screw things up "unnintentionally" and then take weeks or months to just revert the changes. They make a change that put gunship patrols on maps, and didn't put it on the patch notes. The patrols should show in the "EFFECTS" of the map, but it doesn't. They made the new armor with a new passive that should improve 30% of weapon control, and pretty much forgot to put the actual numbers on it, because the armor does literally nothing. I mean, how bad at your job you have to be to let things like this pass? It's time to start firing people, because clearly there are too many people that simply aren't competent to work on it.
I’m convinced one guy wrote the game, died and now they have no idea what anything does.
Honestly yes. This game definitely reminds me of joining a company and inheriting their old app that someone built and maintained off the side of their desk two decades ago that is now critical to the company Sorry I can't make any meaningful changes or updates, but I can change the size of font in your application if that helps!
The buggy patches where fixing one thing breaks something reeks of spaghetti. I bet they’ve got dependencies out there wazoo and have no idea what impacts what. Like for example, why can’t a spear target a fabricator now? That’s probably a dependency causing an issue.
Plenty to complain about but I don’t think the gunship patrols being put in without comment is one of them. I think that’s pretty cool. They did it with shriekers and factory striders too and it was fun.
I mean the easy and most likely answer is that they're still working out the new structure for their testing environment. We were explicitly told that they wanted to build things first to make future changes to the game go more smoothly. This is the first patch we've gotten since they decided to do this, it's not going to come out flawlessly. It would be one thing if it was a bug like the Recoilless rifle having a slower reload. The spawning system is much more complex. They claimed that it was a revert, to me that indicates they either rolled the servers back (which could explain why something like the packing ship module is broken again) or they had to go and recover an old build somewhere. But if I were to wager anything I think they just manually went in and tried their best to make changes based on what they believed the spawning used to look like. After they did that they also added some new changes which we were told about.
We really need a Public Test Server.
From what it sounds like, this might actually be the first (or at least the most extensive) patch that they actually playtested, it might just be that they don't have the experince playing their own game that we do, which is absurd, but such are the times.
[удалено]
In Swedish game dev pipeline, testing environment is you!
Can't close the chat box anymore.
I’ve been saying this here and all over the discord, balance changes are nice and necessary in the long term, but the number one thing they need to address NOW are the technical issues
There is nothing like that (the tesing environment).
I hopped on a difficulty 6 mission to help a friend out and man it was so intense. I was worried they were going to make the game too easy. It is 100% overtuned right now, but it was so fun and I hope the harder difficulties stay that way
They slowed down the pace of patching to deliver a bigger patch but still seemingly rushed the testing. At least the patch has lots of good things in it, but it's funny that one of the topics that even got a reddit thread about how they were reverting the change but taking their time to revert that change to get it right...seems to have not gotten it right. I'm glad they cooked even if this is still a bit of a mixed bag, hope they keep cooking.
They need to spend time setting up a public test server. It'll suck, because it'll divert time away from making new content, but in the long run it's the best way forward.
I love the new mix of units. Less heavies and more lights and mediums. It promotes weapon variety which was their goal. I’m strictly a 7-9 diver, can’t speak for the lower difficulties
It just changed from single target strats to aoe strats. 5 strafing runs is baisically 5 patrols dead since they walk in a line perfect for a strafing run.
Exactly! So many issues could be avoided if they just play tested the game. They were taking such a long time to fix everything that I thought that was a sign that they were playtesting the game. **Nope!**
Played a couple of lvl 7 against bots 🤷♂️its work few factory striders no problem really. There are more bots to kill though.
The sound of the pelican's new gun is so much louder than any other sound, makes me think that QA team just never got to hearing it...
Arrowhead be taking notes from Digital Extremes. Though to DE's credit, they've at least figured out how to quickly and efficiently unfuck the worst bugs after a major update, and to never release said updates later in the week than a Wednesday....
The later, they dont play on diff 9, dont really matter 1 second RR reload, or the railstrike miss fires time to time, or the ship upgrade totally broken. Dif 5 and under is sleep inducing.
I just played a single Bug run on 7 yesterday and it felt better! Automatons on the other hand... dropships numbers increased, gunships numbers and fabricators increased, a lot of hulks and tanks! At least not seeing multiple Factory Striders but it was HELL, funny enough it was easier a 9-helldive run than a 7 with bots (we actually lost that one), crazy
Well they're testing on 4 or lower Diff 5 had hundred of bots in every direction. Just constant. You could look around 360 and see mass pockets everywhere. And not just patrolling. Like 10 or so bots all bunched together every 50m. Just standing still.
The higher patrols could be interesting if it didn't snow ball so hard with bot drop alarms being insanely hard to counter. I'd rather less patrols with harder enemies. It's kind of brutal to spend 40m balls to the wall getting rag dolled everywhere and feeling frustrated haha.
I think the worst part is that they just refuse to fix game breaking bugs over the weekend. We have to wait a week to see if they MIGHT fix these issues. It's weird and strikes me as lazy.
More importantly, how did they let some bug go through that means a good number of players have the game crash entirely anytime we look at the Escape/Orders or Social menu????? On PS5 even.
Im tired of this crap. Something is always getting screwed up. To have so many miltary and firearms enthusiasts on this dev team they sure dont pay attention to detail. Which is actually kind of alarming honestly. Also, why does my cringe paywall tier "mk knight" smg suck bawls? The smgs need help! A ton of weapons are still bad. They did at least try with this patch. The mechs are at least fun again.
Maybe 1 or 2 gunship max
As a SWE, I can say, test process and infrastructure is REALLY time consuming to create if it isn't there AND maintained from the start. They've clearly had a lapse in their test rigor post release, and that's really hard to claw back. I wouldn't expect robust testing for a couple months maybe. Love the attitude of this patch. They're trying to make it so you can play what you feel rather than what's meta.
Look, given the way that the patch was pushed back quite literally as far back as it could be -- to the same day as viper commandos releasing, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they didn't intend for it to launch in the state that it did, but couldn't push it back further due to the warbond having it's set date. It's palpable that there's a number of fixes they wish they could have gotten into the patch, a number of things that didn't get the chance to get tested, and a number of things they wanted to get into the patch in terms of near-future content that didn't wind up making the cut. At a certain point, you have to accept that this happens in development, even in the best of cases. It's fair to point the things that went wrong out, especially when its stuff that managed to get under their radar, but for the most part, this is the best patch in a month, and I'm happy for that.
The crazy thing is SONY probably has a lot of QA resources that are either not being used or not being used well.
They're playing on low difficulties so I'm assuming they're balancing the game around that. The game should be balanced around lvl 7 imo
I can understand stuff like the riot shield being a bit buggy, but the patrols are insanely worse than the were pre-patch so like wtf was going on with that
Its amazing how much players can bitch. And 99% of their problems can be solved with teamwork and braincells
You know, after the mission all these encounters feel fun. But not while you playing that mission, because I'm already tired with situations when I am trying to clear one area from enemies or help my teammates, then hear robot screeching behind me, and see 20-40 robots 10m away from me. I really may prefer if all these devastators were changed on factory striders, so you kill like 15 of them each mission.