Replying to a player on Twitter who said recent patches have made the game “unplayable,” Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt conceded that he’s not satisfied with his studio’s current balancing approach.
“Hey, yeah I think we’ve gone too far in some areas. Will talk to the team about the approach to balance,” he wrote. “It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.”
I don’t get it.
There is no need for balance in PVE.
Just make every primary viable to use (within a reasonable level by boosting them all), then balance the enemies off that and add new enemies and guns.
As long as you don’t get severely punished for not using meta weapons, then why does it matter? Not everything has to be perfectly balanced, especially a non-competetive game…
I fucking hate the “meta” era of online gaming we are in. Everything has to be meta. “You shouldn’t use that gun, it deals 0.3 DMG less than the others”, “that armor is bad since patch 27383727 3 minutes ago”, “how dare you play this champion that has a 2% lower win-rate”.
Fuck off, meta is something that became relevant for pro gaming. I don’t give a shit about the meta, this is bronze, it literally doesn’t matter at the skill level 99% of players are at. People just want to have something to blame when they lose: “of course you won, that weapon is OP/imba/busted”.
And it’s making its way into pve/coop too now. Every time I launch a new online game I have to learn what people want me to play so that I don’t get yelled at. How about you just let me play? So what if my build is not optimal?
I think gaming has made amazing strides, but along the way some people forgot that the main goal is to have fun.
MWO and EvE have entered the chat
What are you going on about lol? I am saying that anyone can use any gun without being literally unable to play higher difficulties because it is too bad… If something is so fucked that you will never get close to winning without using X gun, then that is literally a “meta” that you can’t win without and I am arguing against doing that?
Helldivers is literally one of the least toxic games I have ever played. Nobody gives a fuck what you use or do as long as you don’t intentionally team kill or screw the team.
I was agreeing with you but ok.
What I’m talking about is the culture of constantly balancing everything, which inevitably creates a meta that needs to be followed. In pve games like helldivers, no need to balance imo. Back when constant patches in games weren’t a thing, a strong gun was just that, a strong gun.
Also, even though I don’t play the 2nd game, from cursory readings of Reddit and Lemmy posts that reach the front page, it seems a lot of players are quite mad at some weapons being stronger than others.
You are describing balance, actually. If all weapons are viable and you’re not punished for using one instead of another, it means that they each have their niche or they’re balanced well. And the balancing target is the enemy.
It’s easier to balance in a pve game because the AI behave predictably and have known stats. Tweaking AI and enemies is a good tool for pve balance, but only as it can allow some mechanics to be viable. Tweaking enemies will do nothing to balance weapons between themselves.
There is another balancing bullet too : making the game so easy that the relative power of weapons between themselves doesn’t matter. But it cannot work with HD2 because the game is supposed to be hard.
ITT: people describing that they don’t want balance, but actually want balance.
They should focus less on weapon balance and more on things like grenade exploits.
It does seem that whenever a primary gun feels fun to use, it’s nerfed into the ground.
They do that to keep people chasing the new primaries from the war bonds.
The cycle is pretty obvious at this point: warbond comes out, weapon is god, weapon gets nerfed, repeat.
I remember COD Warzone being notorious for this back when I played it during COVID
I really have to disagree with this. Can’t think of another weapon besides the eruptor to have god status aside from the release breaker on the free starter warbond.
People mistaken fun and trivializing.
The game is balanced around being difficult, so that you need your team and stratagems (weapons included) to beat it.
When you get a new overpowered weapon, it feels great because the game is so hard/tedious otherwise. But it is actually an overpowered weapon.
I’d prefer they not attempt to balance things so much as change aspects of interactions with the environment and even enemies that force us to reconsider and utilize weapons and tactics we normally wouldn’t.
Then again I’m only level 17. So honestly, what do I know.
You’re not even wrong tho. It is a co-op game. There’s no need for “balance”. All they need is to have a reason to consider bringing something other than a single standard loadout.
At the end of the day, the type of player who cares will find the single mathematically best loadout and will just use that, even if they nerf everything into the ground.
What they should focus on is making sure all loadouts have their uses. And perhaps work on matchmaking so the kind of person who plays with randoms won’t get kicked from games for not using The Meta; ideally by matching those non-meta-kickers together so the normal people can have fun.
If I’m being honest, and because I’m still grinding for modules and such, I tend towards the Orbital Laser and Grenade Launcher with Supply Pack. It seems to trivialize pretty much everything when used correctly.
I mean, imagine a Bug system where a hidden event is keeping tabs on common weapons used. The numbers show a large amount of explosives. Event triggers and says the Bugs have begun evolving to be faster and are spread out more, though less massive enemies appear, which would force a loadout swap to focus on agility within that sector.
I dunno, things like that.
That’d be rad.
It occurred to me that Helldivers has that kind of potential. What if the Bots and Bugs clashed in a previously unknown middle sector and we are sent into the chaos on the pretense of, “This is our chance, Helldiver! While those mechanized tyrants and grotesque arthropods are distracted with one another go down there and give them a lesson in Managed Democracy!”
Different scenarios would balance equipment on their own, with maybe micro changes needing to be made for outliers. Of course this would probably also mean magnitudes more work.
So long as we’re airing our dreams, I would kinda love if eventually the player faction realised the real problem was the Super Earth government all along and we got to fight the rest of SEAF.
No idea how the hell that would work mechanically, though.
That sort of thing is my hope for a future Campaign. With it either ending with the Super Earth’s real leaders activating some form of failsafe alien reset button or if enough players complete the game some form of significant change of power balance in the Universe.
Buuut yeah, dreams probably, unfortunately.
The game already works like this. Automatons and terminids behave extremely differently, and push for very different weapons. And in each faction some enemies will be more easily dealt with with specific weapons.
Two infamous examples are the berzerker bot and the stalker bug. Control weapons (weapons with high stagger) trivialise them. But most people don’t use these weapons, and thus those enemies are among the most hated ones by the community.
I’m pretty sure targeting a shot so splash shrapnel goes somewhere beneficial to you is not an “exploit” so much as “good tactics” in the same way that aiming for a weak spot to do extra damage is…
What they mean to say is that they’ve been proven to make new weapons that are behind micro transactions are released OP and then needed right before the new batch of weapons is released.
The new warbond disproves this. 1 good weapon and 2 bad ones.
Micro transactions? You mean the super credits you can fairly easily farm without paying a penny of real money extra?
Doesn’t seem very “locked” to me…
Credit grinding is only possible on high level missions, which are easier done with the unbalanced weapons. Even then on average you will extract with 5-10 credits per mission, which makes the 1000 point buy-in take ~150 missions to complete, ranging from 25-40min per mission.
So you estimate someone playing an average of 30min per mission * 150 missions = 75hrs of play time (if you’re lucky to survive and extract each mission that is).
Or someone can pay $10 and instantly have access to those clearly over powered weapons.
This is by definition a setup of micro transactions, which is weighted to put players who don’t no life the game to feel like they have to keep buying credits to get usable gear.
I sort of like the changes. Who knew I would go from the liberator, to punisher, to spray and pray, to eruptor, and finally to the punisher plasma with the bugs.
I only play lvl 6 to 7.
Every time people are freaked out about a weapon being unusable and trash, i continue using them and i would never know if people weren’t crying about it. The only thing i immediately realised was the senator buff. I only play on helldivers difficulty
The slugger having stun removed killed my main build. That one was immediately noticeable to me.
Luckily I unlocked the dominator which fools the exact same role.
I gotta try the dominator, I was fucked up when the slugger lost its crazy stun
I thought they nerfed guns specifically so there were no “meta” loadouts. They want you to pick a gun based on your playing style, not because it is a known fact that it is the “best” gun
Also, don’t touch my dominator.
