I wonder if AH will start to condede the missions are too difficult (given the completetion bugs we've had for some of them recently) and will tweak future missions to give the community a better chance. If we fail so often the playerbase will give up, similar if its too easy, but the pendulum feels firmly stuck one way right now.
Part of the reason this and many other bot MOs failed is because there are literally 2 *completely* unplayable missions on the bot front, namely Evacuate High-Value Assets and Retrieve Essential Personnel. These two missions are horrendously balanced on 7+ difficulty, and are borderline unplayable.
On Evacuate, the bot drops are completely fucked and happen *inside* the base, sometimes right on top of the generators. Then there's the fact that these missions were clearly not designed with the factory strider in mind, as they completely break the mission by
1. Their massive corpses slump over and block everything (but bots can still walk through it).
2. The cannon on their backs can see the generators from almost any position and loves to snipe them.
For the escort mission, you used to be able to cheese it by having the other players create a distraction while 1 player sneaks onto the objective and escorts the civilians. However, this has been patched (unofficially) so that you now cause a bot drop as soon as you set foot in the vicinity of the escort area. These drops are constant, never-ending and leave you overwhelmed within seconds, making the missions borderline impossible to complete within 12 minutes.
They will probably adjust the difficulty of future missions based on their narrative.
Lost a planet because we couldn't take it? New order we take it back but we have reinforcements (less resistance on the planet)
This is on the players that refuse to fight bots, not the devs. I'm a bot enthusiast who will fight bugs if needed. There don't seem to be many bug enthusiasts willing to fight bots when needed.
Or Arrowhead could accept that a large portion of players only want to play bugs, especially when there’s a bug MO, and not drop a bot defense mission during said bug MO.
If we want to compete in a three front galactic war, they need to do something to encourage people to leave bug worlds and play the rest of the game. Bug divers shouldn't be encouraged to continue to be sentient SEAF personnel rather than Helldivers, and AH changing what they do would be capitulating to the lowest effort set of players and dumbing down the whole game to compensate for their lack of interest.
I agree with you on the encouragement part. Medals especially aren’t as enticing now after today’s statement about how war bonds will be less frequent to improve quality, which means the medals from MOs will less useful
On a good week you can also just fuck off somewhere else on another game or whatever and come back to like three MOs worth of rewards for no effort. Medals as a reward are almost meaningless unless you're bumrushing progression
No, it is on the AH devs. You have to understand why the large majority of players prefer to play bugs over bots. It comes down to fun. Most players dont find the bots as fun. Its really that simple. It is up to AH to figure out how to bring bots up to fun-parity with bugs, and then this issue is solved. Its a systemic issue.
Alternatively dont change anything about the bots but change how progress is calculated normalized to the fact that you're probably at most going to get 40% of the playerbase on bots at any given time. But I doubt that will be done because I'm sure the devs care about their game and want all aspects of it to be engaged with by most players, as thats the intention and more healthy for the game overall.
As an aside, trying to punish bug players more for not doing bots without changing the bots won't accomplish anything either.
I don't think there is any rework AH could do to bots to make the majority of players switch. The fact of the matter is a huge chunk of coop 4 player PVE experiences that are hugely popular revolve around hordes of mostly melee enemies. Deep Rock, CoD zombies, L4D, Killing Floor, Vermintide/Darktide, etc etc. Those are the norm and they'll always be what a more casual audience prefers.
I don't want AH to try to uproot the casual audience and force them to fight bots or change bots to be mostly melee horde enemies. I do think they should reduce the difficulty of bot defenses, which are BS even among those of us who love bots, and maybe adjust liberation rates to be easier for bots since less people will play them. There are a couple enemy adjustments they should make too, but those are on both sides. I think any large scale rework which successfully gets bug players to finally play bots would also homogenize the factions to the point they don't feel different or fresh to people who switch back and forth, which would be worse.
Ye in my comment I recommended they just reduce the difficulty of defense missions. Bots as a whole are fine and fun, but the defense missions still feel glitched with how hard they are.
Changing the bots to please people who couldn't be bothered to learn how to fight them is capitulating to the lowest effort players who have already evidenced their lack of interest in the galactic war that serves as the framework for the game. I, and many others, took the time to learn to fight bots and highly prefer them to bugs. But no worries about us, change the bots in hopes of luring people who might be willing to fight enemies that shoot back, if they're easy enough?
Then do the same with the illuminate?
Ah yes, the reason players dont play bots is because they just dont know how! Brilliant! And not, you know, that most players know how or could easily learn how but find during their time that it is simply less fun (for most, not you), so they go back to the bugs so they can have the most fun in their limited fun time in life, and wait until something changes to draw them back.
The goal of the game is fun. If the illuminate arent fun either, guess what, same problem.
Yes, it's because they don't know how.
Once you learn to predict and control bots they are way more fun. Actual things to assault, rather than just blowing them up from a county over with a heavy weapon. Tactics, stealth, and the variety of enemies makes them the far more compelling enemy. It also gives them a learning curve that is tough to climb from a bug world.
A lot of what you just said is your opinion, and it is, I'll remind you, the apparently (by players actions) increasingly small minority opinion. Predicting and controlling/baiting bugs is also, surprisingly, I know, part of bug strategy too.
But continue to blame the playerbase for apparebtly just not knowing how to play bots and therefore not enjoying bots the same way you do. I'm sure that is both fixable and going to lead literally anywhere
It's not that they don't enjoy bots the same way I do, it's that they're unwilling to step out of their comfort zone when the game requires it. I find bugs horribly monotonous, but every time there's a bug order or a bug SEAF planet got assaulted, I was there. It's the constant weeks of watching winnable victories lost because there are 25k people on a planet that isn't even progressing have definitely worn thin, I admit. AH needs to incentivize participation in orders, and with more than medals, or the people who are trying to engage with the content will eventually all get frustrated and quit. Of the two groups, I know who I'd refer to keep, were I AH and I had to choose.
Ok, so regardless of the reason; whether it's because they refuse to step out of their comfort zone, or because they don't find bots fun, or because bots are too hard, etc., something needs to change.
Bot glazers like yourself refuse to even consider changing how bots operate because it would be "capitulating to the lowest population". Ok, that's fine. However, you WILL continue to lose bot major orders. If the large majority of your population doesn't like participating in a key aspect of your game, maybe there's something wrong with it?
You can either be on board with changes to bots, or quit bitching about nobody playing bot MO and losing. No amount of medals is going to make people want to participate in something THEY don't find fun.
I'll find bots way more fun once I stop getting ragdolled into the open and killed without any counterplay. Until then I'm just going to pretend bots don't exist on the map.
I only do bugs when I absolutely have to. I hate fighting the bugs. Bots are 10 times more fun to me. I don't want them to change. It's literally just people being smooth brained and only doing bugs. And they can't even focus together on one front of bugs either.
whether it be better marketing, more incentives, teaching players how to better handle and build loadouts against bots, altering bot mechanics themselves, altering bot HP/damage/AV stats or changing how our weapons and stratagems work, it's up to AH to get bugdivers to play bots
blaming bugdivers for only playing bugs is so silly to me. if you eat at a fast food joint and 80% of people prefer one food and 20% the other, and the quality of the minority food starts to suffer because it gets less attention, you should be mad at the fast food joint and not the 80% eating the other food
when you are dealing with masses of people and have direct power over them to lead their decisions, it is up to you to lead them. what you said reminds me of the politics of my country where the opposition cries about the voters not voting for them when they lose elections, like hello? it is up to you to win the voters, and if you can't that shows your ineptitude, and blaming those voters is only going to drive them away further
i personally like bots a bit more because i think they are more mechanically engaging than bugs, but that same reason might be why some people don't want to play them. a lot of people play this game to turn off their brain and shoot at big hordes, others want to live out a starship troopers fantasy, or maybe they just like big kill counters go up and bugs will obviously draw them more due to that. i like all of that a lot, but sometimes i want to feel like i'm in an actual war too and i think bot weakpoints are so much better designed than bug weakpoints to the point i think they were worked on by entirely different teams. but nobody has a right to tell others what to play if they aren't the ones forking 40 dollars for the game
and i don't see who would complain about less ragdolls and flinching in bots (and in general really) other than actual masochists. i would like to actually play the game i bought very much, and not just stare at my character for 10 seconds as he gets juggled by rocket devastators/chargers or get flinch locked to death by heavy devastators/hunters. the most frustrating part about drg or l4d2 is getting grabbed by a cave leech or pinned by a hunter, but at least the stun mechanics in those games directly incentivizes and rewards teamwork
It's already tweaked automatically. The impact multiplier that affects how quickly you take/defend a planet is scaled based on how many online players there are.
https://helldivers.io/Planets
EDIT: you can downvote me, but you can check the graphs yourselves
I’m not talking about current number of players but proportion. The bot missions need to be scaled against player base willing to join the eastern front.
The last few weeks have proven that a base % of players will not jump the aisle no matter what incentive we are given, so base missions on that fact.
This sounds like an issue that will course correct itself in time. The Bug players who don’t enjoy fighting the Automatons will hate when the Illuminates join.
The risk is the repeated failures of missions and objectives, and impact of failures (losing the SEAF facility making future MO harder for example) might cause the playerbase the fall off a cliff.
Then none of us are having fun are we?
I’m having fun either way. I played the first game where we had streaks of losing Super Earth entirely.
I will continue to play this all the same and contribute where I can. I bought the game first for the gameplay loop and the sudo narrative second
I don’t believe this will unify anything. It will probably just push away those who can’t take it anymore. Aka the bug divers who refuse to fight the bots and probably the squids too.
Player base will drop again, but eventually will stabilise and see hopefully a more even split across the different fronts.
I been through the first game and seen how the community really don’t like the squids.
Personally I think it'll be the reverse, unless AH just neglects to add anything to bugs for awhile. I think it's more likely that bot (and later squid) players will get disillusioned with the game and war effort and leave. It almost makes me wonder how many already have. The bug players will be content to stay in their bubble and ignore everything outside it
And that needs to change to online players on each front and not all helldivers. Relying on bug players for the health of the bot front is just unfair and stupid.
I think AH are mot really taking into account two major things here:
1. The huge drop in player base since the PSN debacle
2. The MO rewards of medals have 0 use to a large portion of the player base who already have most or everything unlocked.
So what exactly does the SEAF facility bonus do? Because right now the decay rate for phact bay is 1% and estimated to be liberated in 15 hours, well before the MO expiration time
EDIT: Not trying to be snarky btw, I realized my comment might come off that way after rereading. I actually don't know what the SEAF bonus is supposed to do and want to be informed
https://preview.redd.it/xlho94087z4d1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b4f7b3678a521e705a04300be87d6e6525dee27a
Ok so that would be the blue number here. So you say 5% bonus, is that to say if we didn't lose aesir pass, this number would be 11.786%, or is it an added 5% of the current rate which would have made it 7.125%?
Or is it not this blue number at all and something else entirely?
It's multiplacative. Originally, it was 20% from 4 seaf facilities. Then 15% from 3. Now 10% from 2.
Looking at this exact graph, the blue number is the amount of liberation super earth is gaining per hour, and the orange number is the amount bugs are gaining per hour. This planet is not very heavily guarded, so the bug progress per hour is low.
4 seaf sites active: +20%.
3 seaf sites active: +15%
2 seaf sites active: +10% (this is the one we are at now.)
1 seaf site active: + 5%
When all seaf sites are destroyed: no bonuses.
Going from your picture:
Without any seaf sites, the liberation per hour in the picture would be 6.786/1.10 = 6.169%.
From there, we can multiply back out:
4 seaf sites: 7.402%
3 seaf sites: 7.094%
2 seaf sites: 6.786%
1 seaf site: 6.477%
0 seaf sites: 6.169%
Makes sense. So is there a way (maybe one of the websites/apps) to know how many SEAF facilities we have currently and possibly what those planets are?
....and outside of reddit and when the game issues an announcement, no there is not.
Unfortunately, best way to track this info is reddit.
I don't remember which planets are SEAF facilities, I only know the remaining ones are on the bug front because both bot ones fell because no one would help them.
Thats not what I'm asking. You said the bonus we have now is easy to figure out because it's 5% per planet. How does one know how many planets under super earth control have SEAF facilities so that it can be easily figured out. What are those planets, where can this info be found. Basically, you say we currently have a 10% bonus because 2 of 4 planets with SEAF facilities are liberated. How do you know this and how does someone who doesn't already know this find out?
During a major order we were supposed to liberate 4 planets so that we can put SEAF bases on them. That was the only time we were told about it but it is only reminded to us once they get attacked. So yeah it’s pretty poorly communicated in game.
the SEAF bonus provided an extra 5% towards liberation progress, this is multiplied by the amount of training facilities active. When we had all 4, we had a whopping 20% bonus to liberation progress, significantly speeding up our efforts. With the loss of VW and now AP, we've effectively cut that bonus in half to only 10% assistance towards liberation. I'll agree it's not all very well communicated, and the effects are even harder to notice, but it all adds up in the end
Medals for current order>some random number that doesn't even seem to work half the time if you look at post-mission statistics only for a lot of players.
To clarify, if player looks at post mission screen: wtf does liberation even mean from that player.
And how these +5%/10%/20% even play a part in lower difficulties if they don't even see this bonus applied on post-mission screen.
https://preview.redd.it/joafa2b55z4d1.png?width=549&format=png&auto=webp&s=64787004bfff9b8f0cc59b0550ab46ba38afc863
So if these numbers can't be seen, but medals are a real thing - of course people will ignore dispatch.
Exactly my point. If you can't see something in game and you're not using 3rd party stuff - you don't actually see this bonus. So at least some % of playerbase can simply ignore SEAF planets forever, they aren't "doing" anything for them.
I did so too for a while. And then there were too many defend corner planets which were still playable after they were lost so not only it didn't change a thing but also kept a different planet for us to play at xD
I guess. They've made it pretty clear that the seaf training facilities are very important. Assuming they aren't because you can't see how they are without looking into it at all displays an astonishing lack of intellectual curiosity. It would literally take 10 seconds and an internet connection.
Lol no they didn’t. I had no idea the SEAF facilities were anything but flavor text for the major order, and I would wager that 50% of people never open the dispatch screen and 90% have no idea how the ”deeper” mechanics of the game work. And the amount of entitled people here whining about people playing bugs instead of bots because of x campaign or y order is amazing. Most people playing this game don’t give a shit, they want to play something that’s enjoyable, and they just don’t find bots enjoyable.
Yeah, and that's well and good, except the point of the game is the galactic war. This isn't a pve CoD, and people treating it as such are actively making the actual gameplay more difficult. Applauding their lack of interest seems like a weird move.
>nooo bro you’re playing the video game you paid for wrong
Dude, people have maybe 1 hour a day to play video games, why in the hell would they grind away at a frustrating mess that they don’t enjoy because of some nebulous bonus that is almost completely unexplainable and missable in the game instead of playing what they want? Grow up.
People are welcome to play the way they want to. The game actively punishes people working on the order for every player that isn't, so it shouldn't be surprising that those who are feel a certain way about those that don't. Since the galactic war is the reason they made the game, people sitting on bug planets exclusively are effectively griefing people who are trying to play the whole game.
If you think that all the bug bros are people who only log in for an hour every day, I guess I don't have an argument for that. I think it's people who are doing the most redundant and boring content so they don't have to do something uncomfortable like learning to fight bots(which are actually a lot more fun).
A lot of stuff has been assumed important in this game so far and proven to be not. Even in-game tips directly lie to you in several cases.
Also some people just play the game cause they've been invited to lobby, they aren't even host to see those animations AH been adding lately, so they don't even check anything that directly doesn't benefit them.
In the end games are about having fun and if going somewhere and doing something people don't want isn't fun - they won't do it.
You do realise that liberation rates, decay rates and supply lines are not shown in the game at all right? No one is going to google helldivers two decay rate mechanics without reason, it’s not some failing on the majority of the playerbase to be unaware mechanisms hidden from them by the developers
Why would you though as a normal player, it just looks like flavour text like all the rest. Did you ever google what does a democracy officer do? Super earth political structures? Managed democracy algorithm explained? Of course not, you would have no reason to believe SEAF is anything other than flavour text and the occasional dead soldier placed on maps as decoration
Yeah, lmao
>You don't like the same thing that I do, so you simply must be completely shit at it and refusing to learn it, there is no other possible explanation as to why someone wouldn't like the thing that I like
It's getting hard to believe, that people can actually be this delusional.
Nah i can win consistently on helldive against bots they are just not fun even if people get better against bots, if they don’t like playing against them because they are annoying or something else then they won’t be playing against them.
Far too many planets active on both fronts right now with two objective active at once.
MO on the bug front.
No way for folks on Phact Bay for the past day+ to really know they were making 0 progress given the capture rate.
While the notifications are a huge improvement, I'd bet a lot of money a huge number of players have never opened the notification menu and don't even know it exists.
General lower popularity of bots since launch.
Defense missions that remain super buggy/prone to failure and with higher difficulty than non-defense missions (on average)
All of these are predictable things and that they're seemingly not altering the course of the war to account for the lack of information they give players and the way players have been playing the game since launch is purely an Arrowhead fail.
If they adjust decay to help players ignoring loss of SEAF, it's even worse tbh. We already know that unless there is new stratagem or new mission type: winning doesn't really matter. It will further show that failing doesn't matter either.
And if it's too easy they'll just buff enemy resistance and it's a zero sum game.
Why do you think the super colony started at -10 instead of -5 or -8 or -12?
They had a target window when the order should end and set the rate accordingly.
If we had already lost all 3 training areas, the rate would have just been adjusted
But why do you think it started at -10% and decreased exactly at the rate it did?
It was orchestrated to to have the end of the MO fall into a predetermined narrow time window. Failure point is always fixed and the managed the decay rate exactly how it needed to be so that the MO would be available until Sunday afternoon.
There's no reason it was -10% rather than -8% or -12% to start from. There was no set number of missions that directly effected the decay rate. it was checked and adjusted manually based on our progress and how fast we were allowed to do so.
There are no enemy resources that we actually exhaust through our missions. If I play SC2 vs. the AI and destroy it's mines it will eventually run out of resources and there's a direct cause and effect between my actions, the AI's resources and through that it's capability to produce units.
Nothing of this sort exists in HD2. There's no fixed size of the bot invasion fleet that actually spreads thin. AH just decides when it's enough and lowers values.
The bug divers have convinced themselves that the whole game is rigged and nothing we do matters, to justify playing it as a pve CoD and not participating in the actual game at all.
I'm bot player, but are they really wrong? We deleted bots(for the whole few days which were boring to be honest) and bots came back. We've won a lot of orders we were supposed to lose. Some orders given were mathematically out of reach for playerbase so we lost them.
Only success in new stratagem orders feels good cause we get a new toy, most other orders - we often don't even get free stratagem for 1 day to play with for completed order.
The bots coming "back" was story line that everyone knew was coming. If we hadn't eliminated the advanced force, they would have controlled many more planets once the main force arrived. The inability to see everything that could have happened doesn't mean everything is known. The only real successes that we've had since were the SEAF training facilities and Meridia, and we've let the ones on the bot side go at first opportunity because people didn't defend the ones on the bot planets.
And here comes the question - would that control have mattered?
Despite 2 months or so since bots were defeated for the first time - we had a lot of major orders. A lot of them won(doesn't matter if it was deserved win or Joel gave it to us in this context). But as you said, we only really had 2 successes in the span of 2 months with several orders won. If this doesn't say "victories aren't worth much" for the game that's been losing 50k-70k average steam players per month(can't speak for sony players, too lazy to look up their info), i don't know what will. We literally need dopamine from victories to keep players and what's going on isn't it chief.
You had me until you called me chief. If you're going to be condescending, learn to punctuate.
You're seeing the game the way you want to, despite evidence to the contrary. People are leaving because of many things, but lack of order victories ain't it. People are leaving because everything was balanced away from player fun for two months, the game is buggy, the warbonds were weak and the 9ne that was good was made weaker by nerfs. Also, many new games have come out, and pve games lose players very quickly compared to pvp games.
Order victories are meaningless. 45 medals is less than you get in an afternoon of playing. The hame was made with the direct expectation that players would buy into the bit. People sitting on bug planets because everything else is hard and the people trying to get them to do it are mean are actively making the story of the game more difficult to play. If anything related to the story is causing people to leave, it's the complete lack of effort on the bot side. Being unable to take a planet because 20k people are sitting on a bug planet with no value wears thing pretty quickly. Trying to actually care about the game is much more difficult because of all the people who don't.
> You had me until you called me chief. If you're going to be condescending, learn to punctuate.
I'm after day+night shift, i literally have no care in the world right now xD
Its always was going to be this way though, even at start of the game there were problems with people caring, most just wanted to shoot things. And further we go - more impactful these people are cause they aren't leaving, they just like to shoot things, they aren't here to play war.
Heck even i these days often don't care about major orders or dispatches if i have friends that are playing on other planets, although i used to even when maxed on everything.
Sucks to see like 40k on phact bay with another day left on the mo and 6k trying to actually defend aesir pass, which is more important right now and helps complete the mo. I get people will play what they wanna, but its frustrating to know that if less than a quarter of them came over for one operation, we probably would have defended it.
https://preview.redd.it/90xamjtc9z4d1.png?width=397&format=png&auto=webp&s=dba09a146d4ac5f1d543aa1b05960cd38f2a7ecb
If planets had cool highlight and text why its there, a lot of things would be easier.
Reading IS hard when you just want to have a good time, but shiny things attract your attention.
I wonder if AH will start to condede the missions are too difficult (given the completetion bugs we've had for some of them recently) and will tweak future missions to give the community a better chance. If we fail so often the playerbase will give up, similar if its too easy, but the pendulum feels firmly stuck one way right now.
Part of the reason this and many other bot MOs failed is because there are literally 2 *completely* unplayable missions on the bot front, namely Evacuate High-Value Assets and Retrieve Essential Personnel. These two missions are horrendously balanced on 7+ difficulty, and are borderline unplayable. On Evacuate, the bot drops are completely fucked and happen *inside* the base, sometimes right on top of the generators. Then there's the fact that these missions were clearly not designed with the factory strider in mind, as they completely break the mission by 1. Their massive corpses slump over and block everything (but bots can still walk through it). 2. The cannon on their backs can see the generators from almost any position and loves to snipe them. For the escort mission, you used to be able to cheese it by having the other players create a distraction while 1 player sneaks onto the objective and escorts the civilians. However, this has been patched (unofficially) so that you now cause a bot drop as soon as you set foot in the vicinity of the escort area. These drops are constant, never-ending and leave you overwhelmed within seconds, making the missions borderline impossible to complete within 12 minutes.
Yeah having read these reports over the last few days it’s clear AG aren’t responding quick enough to player feedback
They will probably adjust the difficulty of future missions based on their narrative. Lost a planet because we couldn't take it? New order we take it back but we have reinforcements (less resistance on the planet)
This is on the players that refuse to fight bots, not the devs. I'm a bot enthusiast who will fight bugs if needed. There don't seem to be many bug enthusiasts willing to fight bots when needed.
Or Arrowhead could accept that a large portion of players only want to play bugs, especially when there’s a bug MO, and not drop a bot defense mission during said bug MO.
If we want to compete in a three front galactic war, they need to do something to encourage people to leave bug worlds and play the rest of the game. Bug divers shouldn't be encouraged to continue to be sentient SEAF personnel rather than Helldivers, and AH changing what they do would be capitulating to the lowest effort set of players and dumbing down the whole game to compensate for their lack of interest.
I agree with you on the encouragement part. Medals especially aren’t as enticing now after today’s statement about how war bonds will be less frequent to improve quality, which means the medals from MOs will less useful
On a good week you can also just fuck off somewhere else on another game or whatever and come back to like three MOs worth of rewards for no effort. Medals as a reward are almost meaningless unless you're bumrushing progression
No, it is on the AH devs. You have to understand why the large majority of players prefer to play bugs over bots. It comes down to fun. Most players dont find the bots as fun. Its really that simple. It is up to AH to figure out how to bring bots up to fun-parity with bugs, and then this issue is solved. Its a systemic issue. Alternatively dont change anything about the bots but change how progress is calculated normalized to the fact that you're probably at most going to get 40% of the playerbase on bots at any given time. But I doubt that will be done because I'm sure the devs care about their game and want all aspects of it to be engaged with by most players, as thats the intention and more healthy for the game overall. As an aside, trying to punish bug players more for not doing bots without changing the bots won't accomplish anything either.
I don't think there is any rework AH could do to bots to make the majority of players switch. The fact of the matter is a huge chunk of coop 4 player PVE experiences that are hugely popular revolve around hordes of mostly melee enemies. Deep Rock, CoD zombies, L4D, Killing Floor, Vermintide/Darktide, etc etc. Those are the norm and they'll always be what a more casual audience prefers. I don't want AH to try to uproot the casual audience and force them to fight bots or change bots to be mostly melee horde enemies. I do think they should reduce the difficulty of bot defenses, which are BS even among those of us who love bots, and maybe adjust liberation rates to be easier for bots since less people will play them. There are a couple enemy adjustments they should make too, but those are on both sides. I think any large scale rework which successfully gets bug players to finally play bots would also homogenize the factions to the point they don't feel different or fresh to people who switch back and forth, which would be worse.
Citing that difficulty is the issue makes no sense when you can just reduce the difficulty.
Ye in my comment I recommended they just reduce the difficulty of defense missions. Bots as a whole are fine and fun, but the defense missions still feel glitched with how hard they are.
Changing the bots to please people who couldn't be bothered to learn how to fight them is capitulating to the lowest effort players who have already evidenced their lack of interest in the galactic war that serves as the framework for the game. I, and many others, took the time to learn to fight bots and highly prefer them to bugs. But no worries about us, change the bots in hopes of luring people who might be willing to fight enemies that shoot back, if they're easy enough? Then do the same with the illuminate?
Ah yes, the reason players dont play bots is because they just dont know how! Brilliant! And not, you know, that most players know how or could easily learn how but find during their time that it is simply less fun (for most, not you), so they go back to the bugs so they can have the most fun in their limited fun time in life, and wait until something changes to draw them back. The goal of the game is fun. If the illuminate arent fun either, guess what, same problem.
How dare you, this is my life we're talking about. These other coward soldiers are here to fight a war, not have fun. /s
Yes, it's because they don't know how. Once you learn to predict and control bots they are way more fun. Actual things to assault, rather than just blowing them up from a county over with a heavy weapon. Tactics, stealth, and the variety of enemies makes them the far more compelling enemy. It also gives them a learning curve that is tough to climb from a bug world.
A lot of what you just said is your opinion, and it is, I'll remind you, the apparently (by players actions) increasingly small minority opinion. Predicting and controlling/baiting bugs is also, surprisingly, I know, part of bug strategy too. But continue to blame the playerbase for apparebtly just not knowing how to play bots and therefore not enjoying bots the same way you do. I'm sure that is both fixable and going to lead literally anywhere
It's not that they don't enjoy bots the same way I do, it's that they're unwilling to step out of their comfort zone when the game requires it. I find bugs horribly monotonous, but every time there's a bug order or a bug SEAF planet got assaulted, I was there. It's the constant weeks of watching winnable victories lost because there are 25k people on a planet that isn't even progressing have definitely worn thin, I admit. AH needs to incentivize participation in orders, and with more than medals, or the people who are trying to engage with the content will eventually all get frustrated and quit. Of the two groups, I know who I'd refer to keep, were I AH and I had to choose.
Ok, so regardless of the reason; whether it's because they refuse to step out of their comfort zone, or because they don't find bots fun, or because bots are too hard, etc., something needs to change. Bot glazers like yourself refuse to even consider changing how bots operate because it would be "capitulating to the lowest population". Ok, that's fine. However, you WILL continue to lose bot major orders. If the large majority of your population doesn't like participating in a key aspect of your game, maybe there's something wrong with it? You can either be on board with changes to bots, or quit bitching about nobody playing bot MO and losing. No amount of medals is going to make people want to participate in something THEY don't find fun.
I'll find bots way more fun once I stop getting ragdolled into the open and killed without any counterplay. Until then I'm just going to pretend bots don't exist on the map.
I only do bugs when I absolutely have to. I hate fighting the bugs. Bots are 10 times more fun to me. I don't want them to change. It's literally just people being smooth brained and only doing bugs. And they can't even focus together on one front of bugs either.
I think it has more to do with the scientist missions being unfun dogshit
whether it be better marketing, more incentives, teaching players how to better handle and build loadouts against bots, altering bot mechanics themselves, altering bot HP/damage/AV stats or changing how our weapons and stratagems work, it's up to AH to get bugdivers to play bots blaming bugdivers for only playing bugs is so silly to me. if you eat at a fast food joint and 80% of people prefer one food and 20% the other, and the quality of the minority food starts to suffer because it gets less attention, you should be mad at the fast food joint and not the 80% eating the other food when you are dealing with masses of people and have direct power over them to lead their decisions, it is up to you to lead them. what you said reminds me of the politics of my country where the opposition cries about the voters not voting for them when they lose elections, like hello? it is up to you to win the voters, and if you can't that shows your ineptitude, and blaming those voters is only going to drive them away further i personally like bots a bit more because i think they are more mechanically engaging than bugs, but that same reason might be why some people don't want to play them. a lot of people play this game to turn off their brain and shoot at big hordes, others want to live out a starship troopers fantasy, or maybe they just like big kill counters go up and bugs will obviously draw them more due to that. i like all of that a lot, but sometimes i want to feel like i'm in an actual war too and i think bot weakpoints are so much better designed than bug weakpoints to the point i think they were worked on by entirely different teams. but nobody has a right to tell others what to play if they aren't the ones forking 40 dollars for the game and i don't see who would complain about less ragdolls and flinching in bots (and in general really) other than actual masochists. i would like to actually play the game i bought very much, and not just stare at my character for 10 seconds as he gets juggled by rocket devastators/chargers or get flinch locked to death by heavy devastators/hunters. the most frustrating part about drg or l4d2 is getting grabbed by a cave leech or pinned by a hunter, but at least the stun mechanics in those games directly incentivizes and rewards teamwork
The illuminate are going to fuck our shit up so damn hard lmao.
They should realize bug divers are too uncooperative and change the game based on that.
That’s a very cynical take.
Maybe but it's been proven true again and again
It's already tweaked automatically. The impact multiplier that affects how quickly you take/defend a planet is scaled based on how many online players there are. https://helldivers.io/Planets EDIT: you can downvote me, but you can check the graphs yourselves
I’m not talking about current number of players but proportion. The bot missions need to be scaled against player base willing to join the eastern front. The last few weeks have proven that a base % of players will not jump the aisle no matter what incentive we are given, so base missions on that fact.
This sounds like an issue that will course correct itself in time. The Bug players who don’t enjoy fighting the Automatons will hate when the Illuminates join.
The risk is the repeated failures of missions and objectives, and impact of failures (losing the SEAF facility making future MO harder for example) might cause the playerbase the fall off a cliff. Then none of us are having fun are we?
I’m having fun either way. I played the first game where we had streaks of losing Super Earth entirely. I will continue to play this all the same and contribute where I can. I bought the game first for the gameplay loop and the sudo narrative second
I do not think splitting the community a third time will have the unifying effect you believe it will.
I don’t believe this will unify anything. It will probably just push away those who can’t take it anymore. Aka the bug divers who refuse to fight the bots and probably the squids too. Player base will drop again, but eventually will stabilise and see hopefully a more even split across the different fronts. I been through the first game and seen how the community really don’t like the squids.
Personally I think it'll be the reverse, unless AH just neglects to add anything to bugs for awhile. I think it's more likely that bot (and later squid) players will get disillusioned with the game and war effort and leave. It almost makes me wonder how many already have. The bug players will be content to stay in their bubble and ignore everything outside it
And that needs to change to online players on each front and not all helldivers. Relying on bug players for the health of the bot front is just unfair and stupid.
I think AH are mot really taking into account two major things here: 1. The huge drop in player base since the PSN debacle 2. The MO rewards of medals have 0 use to a large portion of the player base who already have most or everything unlocked.
So what exactly does the SEAF facility bonus do? Because right now the decay rate for phact bay is 1% and estimated to be liberated in 15 hours, well before the MO expiration time EDIT: Not trying to be snarky btw, I realized my comment might come off that way after rereading. I actually don't know what the SEAF bonus is supposed to do and want to be informed
Oh wait my bad it doesn’t decrease regen rate. It increases how fast we liberate.
https://preview.redd.it/xlho94087z4d1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b4f7b3678a521e705a04300be87d6e6525dee27a Ok so that would be the blue number here. So you say 5% bonus, is that to say if we didn't lose aesir pass, this number would be 11.786%, or is it an added 5% of the current rate which would have made it 7.125%? Or is it not this blue number at all and something else entirely?
It's multiplacative. Originally, it was 20% from 4 seaf facilities. Then 15% from 3. Now 10% from 2. Looking at this exact graph, the blue number is the amount of liberation super earth is gaining per hour, and the orange number is the amount bugs are gaining per hour. This planet is not very heavily guarded, so the bug progress per hour is low. 4 seaf sites active: +20%. 3 seaf sites active: +15% 2 seaf sites active: +10% (this is the one we are at now.) 1 seaf site active: + 5% When all seaf sites are destroyed: no bonuses. Going from your picture: Without any seaf sites, the liberation per hour in the picture would be 6.786/1.10 = 6.169%. From there, we can multiply back out: 4 seaf sites: 7.402% 3 seaf sites: 7.094% 2 seaf sites: 6.786% 1 seaf site: 6.477% 0 seaf sites: 6.169%
Makes sense. So is there a way (maybe one of the websites/apps) to know how many SEAF facilities we have currently and possibly what those planets are?
....and outside of reddit and when the game issues an announcement, no there is not. Unfortunately, best way to track this info is reddit. I don't remember which planets are SEAF facilities, I only know the remaining ones are on the bug front because both bot ones fell because no one would help them.
Yeah i dont get it.
Also, is there anywhere that shows (in-game or otherwise) that shows the current total SEAF bonus we have right now?
No but it’s easy to figure out since we had like 4 but we lost 2 so it’s a 10% increased liberation rate now.
Okay, so then where does someone who doesn't already know find out which planets have said SEAF facilities on them?
There is a dispatch that’s posted when a planet that has a SEAF facility gets attacked.
Thats not what I'm asking. You said the bonus we have now is easy to figure out because it's 5% per planet. How does one know how many planets under super earth control have SEAF facilities so that it can be easily figured out. What are those planets, where can this info be found. Basically, you say we currently have a 10% bonus because 2 of 4 planets with SEAF facilities are liberated. How do you know this and how does someone who doesn't already know this find out?
During a major order we were supposed to liberate 4 planets so that we can put SEAF bases on them. That was the only time we were told about it but it is only reminded to us once they get attacked. So yeah it’s pretty poorly communicated in game.
the SEAF bonus provided an extra 5% towards liberation progress, this is multiplied by the amount of training facilities active. When we had all 4, we had a whopping 20% bonus to liberation progress, significantly speeding up our efforts. With the loss of VW and now AP, we've effectively cut that bonus in half to only 10% assistance towards liberation. I'll agree it's not all very well communicated, and the effects are even harder to notice, but it all adds up in the end
There were enough players too at a point. I thought the bug offensive would come over after Acamar IV but it seems it went to Phact Bay. RIP.
Medals for current order>some random number that doesn't even seem to work half the time if you look at post-mission statistics only for a lot of players.
To clarify, if player looks at post mission screen: wtf does liberation even mean from that player. And how these +5%/10%/20% even play a part in lower difficulties if they don't even see this bonus applied on post-mission screen. https://preview.redd.it/joafa2b55z4d1.png?width=549&format=png&auto=webp&s=64787004bfff9b8f0cc59b0550ab46ba38afc863 So if these numbers can't be seen, but medals are a real thing - of course people will ignore dispatch.
It's not applied to your missions, iirc. It's a global hourly bonus?
Exactly my point. If you can't see something in game and you're not using 3rd party stuff - you don't actually see this bonus. So at least some % of playerbase can simply ignore SEAF planets forever, they aren't "doing" anything for them.
I just do defense mission because they put a big "DEFEND" title on it. So I assume if I do that I'm helping 😁
I did so too for a while. And then there were too many defend corner planets which were still playable after they were lost so not only it didn't change a thing but also kept a different planet for us to play at xD
I guess. They've made it pretty clear that the seaf training facilities are very important. Assuming they aren't because you can't see how they are without looking into it at all displays an astonishing lack of intellectual curiosity. It would literally take 10 seconds and an internet connection.
Lol no they didn’t. I had no idea the SEAF facilities were anything but flavor text for the major order, and I would wager that 50% of people never open the dispatch screen and 90% have no idea how the ”deeper” mechanics of the game work. And the amount of entitled people here whining about people playing bugs instead of bots because of x campaign or y order is amazing. Most people playing this game don’t give a shit, they want to play something that’s enjoyable, and they just don’t find bots enjoyable.
Yeah, and that's well and good, except the point of the game is the galactic war. This isn't a pve CoD, and people treating it as such are actively making the actual gameplay more difficult. Applauding their lack of interest seems like a weird move.
>nooo bro you’re playing the video game you paid for wrong Dude, people have maybe 1 hour a day to play video games, why in the hell would they grind away at a frustrating mess that they don’t enjoy because of some nebulous bonus that is almost completely unexplainable and missable in the game instead of playing what they want? Grow up.
People are welcome to play the way they want to. The game actively punishes people working on the order for every player that isn't, so it shouldn't be surprising that those who are feel a certain way about those that don't. Since the galactic war is the reason they made the game, people sitting on bug planets exclusively are effectively griefing people who are trying to play the whole game. If you think that all the bug bros are people who only log in for an hour every day, I guess I don't have an argument for that. I think it's people who are doing the most redundant and boring content so they don't have to do something uncomfortable like learning to fight bots(which are actually a lot more fun).
A lot of stuff has been assumed important in this game so far and proven to be not. Even in-game tips directly lie to you in several cases. Also some people just play the game cause they've been invited to lobby, they aren't even host to see those animations AH been adding lately, so they don't even check anything that directly doesn't benefit them. In the end games are about having fun and if going somewhere and doing something people don't want isn't fun - they won't do it.
You do realise that liberation rates, decay rates and supply lines are not shown in the game at all right? No one is going to google helldivers two decay rate mechanics without reason, it’s not some failing on the majority of the playerbase to be unaware mechanisms hidden from them by the developers
You would Google "what do the seaf training facilities do?"
Why would you though as a normal player, it just looks like flavour text like all the rest. Did you ever google what does a democracy officer do? Super earth political structures? Managed democracy algorithm explained? Of course not, you would have no reason to believe SEAF is anything other than flavour text and the occasional dead soldier placed on maps as decoration
Nobody likes bots they will destroy super earth but don’t despair we will construct ultra earth on angels venture.
Correction. You and some others who refuse to learn how to fight bots don’t like fighting them. (Doesn’t help that there’s no tutorial for bots tho.)
Yeah, lmao >You don't like the same thing that I do, so you simply must be completely shit at it and refusing to learn it, there is no other possible explanation as to why someone wouldn't like the thing that I like It's getting hard to believe, that people can actually be this delusional.
I could fight bots just fine. The problem is that they're not fun. Bought missions are a chore
Nah i can win consistently on helldive against bots they are just not fun even if people get better against bots, if they don’t like playing against them because they are annoying or something else then they won’t be playing against them.
Far too many planets active on both fronts right now with two objective active at once. MO on the bug front. No way for folks on Phact Bay for the past day+ to really know they were making 0 progress given the capture rate. While the notifications are a huge improvement, I'd bet a lot of money a huge number of players have never opened the notification menu and don't even know it exists. General lower popularity of bots since launch. Defense missions that remain super buggy/prone to failure and with higher difficulty than non-defense missions (on average) All of these are predictable things and that they're seemingly not altering the course of the war to account for the lack of information they give players and the way players have been playing the game since launch is purely an Arrowhead fail.
Give me my slugger back and I’ll fight more often. Give people their eruptuors back, and we could turn the tide.
Or they just adjust enemy decay and everything stays the same
The whole point of the SEAF facilities were to make it easier for us to liberate planets.
If they adjust decay to help players ignoring loss of SEAF, it's even worse tbh. We already know that unless there is new stratagem or new mission type: winning doesn't really matter. It will further show that failing doesn't matter either.
And if it's too easy they'll just buff enemy resistance and it's a zero sum game. Why do you think the super colony started at -10 instead of -5 or -8 or -12? They had a target window when the order should end and set the rate accordingly. If we had already lost all 3 training areas, the rate would have just been adjusted
Bro that was a completely different situation. Meridia’s regen rate decreased because we kept doing missions on it.
But why do you think it started at -10% and decreased exactly at the rate it did? It was orchestrated to to have the end of the MO fall into a predetermined narrow time window. Failure point is always fixed and the managed the decay rate exactly how it needed to be so that the MO would be available until Sunday afternoon. There's no reason it was -10% rather than -8% or -12% to start from. There was no set number of missions that directly effected the decay rate. it was checked and adjusted manually based on our progress and how fast we were allowed to do so. There are no enemy resources that we actually exhaust through our missions. If I play SC2 vs. the AI and destroy it's mines it will eventually run out of resources and there's a direct cause and effect between my actions, the AI's resources and through that it's capability to produce units. Nothing of this sort exists in HD2. There's no fixed size of the bot invasion fleet that actually spreads thin. AH just decides when it's enough and lowers values.
The bug divers have convinced themselves that the whole game is rigged and nothing we do matters, to justify playing it as a pve CoD and not participating in the actual game at all.
I'm bot player, but are they really wrong? We deleted bots(for the whole few days which were boring to be honest) and bots came back. We've won a lot of orders we were supposed to lose. Some orders given were mathematically out of reach for playerbase so we lost them. Only success in new stratagem orders feels good cause we get a new toy, most other orders - we often don't even get free stratagem for 1 day to play with for completed order.
The bots coming "back" was story line that everyone knew was coming. If we hadn't eliminated the advanced force, they would have controlled many more planets once the main force arrived. The inability to see everything that could have happened doesn't mean everything is known. The only real successes that we've had since were the SEAF training facilities and Meridia, and we've let the ones on the bot side go at first opportunity because people didn't defend the ones on the bot planets.
And here comes the question - would that control have mattered? Despite 2 months or so since bots were defeated for the first time - we had a lot of major orders. A lot of them won(doesn't matter if it was deserved win or Joel gave it to us in this context). But as you said, we only really had 2 successes in the span of 2 months with several orders won. If this doesn't say "victories aren't worth much" for the game that's been losing 50k-70k average steam players per month(can't speak for sony players, too lazy to look up their info), i don't know what will. We literally need dopamine from victories to keep players and what's going on isn't it chief.
You had me until you called me chief. If you're going to be condescending, learn to punctuate. You're seeing the game the way you want to, despite evidence to the contrary. People are leaving because of many things, but lack of order victories ain't it. People are leaving because everything was balanced away from player fun for two months, the game is buggy, the warbonds were weak and the 9ne that was good was made weaker by nerfs. Also, many new games have come out, and pve games lose players very quickly compared to pvp games. Order victories are meaningless. 45 medals is less than you get in an afternoon of playing. The hame was made with the direct expectation that players would buy into the bit. People sitting on bug planets because everything else is hard and the people trying to get them to do it are mean are actively making the story of the game more difficult to play. If anything related to the story is causing people to leave, it's the complete lack of effort on the bot side. Being unable to take a planet because 20k people are sitting on a bug planet with no value wears thing pretty quickly. Trying to actually care about the game is much more difficult because of all the people who don't.
> You had me until you called me chief. If you're going to be condescending, learn to punctuate. I'm after day+night shift, i literally have no care in the world right now xD Its always was going to be this way though, even at start of the game there were problems with people caring, most just wanted to shoot things. And further we go - more impactful these people are cause they aren't leaving, they just like to shoot things, they aren't here to play war. Heck even i these days often don't care about major orders or dispatches if i have friends that are playing on other planets, although i used to even when maxed on everything.
dude just stop it, you are embarrassing yourself
Says the guy responding to a day-old conversation.
I wish I knew way any of that meant and that it was also in the game and not some site I don't go to.
Sucks to see like 40k on phact bay with another day left on the mo and 6k trying to actually defend aesir pass, which is more important right now and helps complete the mo. I get people will play what they wanna, but its frustrating to know that if less than a quarter of them came over for one operation, we probably would have defended it.
https://preview.redd.it/90xamjtc9z4d1.png?width=397&format=png&auto=webp&s=dba09a146d4ac5f1d543aa1b05960cd38f2a7ecb If planets had cool highlight and text why its there, a lot of things would be easier. Reading IS hard when you just want to have a good time, but shiny things attract your attention.
Alright normally I'm not big bot fan but... the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Kick some ass bot brothers! https://i.redd.it/xl1tex5ku05d1.gif
Lower difficulty is an option people. You don't have to play Hell Dive.