1y ago

Arrowhead CEO says Helldivers 2 balancing patches have 'gone too far' recently: 'It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed'

www.pcgamer.com

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."

68 comments

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 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.
  
  I remember COD Warzone being notorious for this back when I played it during COVID
  
  League of Legends did this when they released new champions. New champ is overtuned for about a month, then it gets nerfed back down to baseline. Who knows how much money they got when people bought RP to get the sexy new champ and all their skins.
  
  If this is the case why has the scorcher been so damned good forever?
  You're probably right though, I bet they'll nerf it before too long here.
- Just do what I do and main the Autocannon. Apparently the whole team thinks that it is the perfectly balanced weapon so they won’t touch it.
- 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'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...
- Agreed, but at the same time if feels wrong intuitively for that to do more damage than a direct hit. Feel like there should be a system to let the round actually penetrate a small bit before the shrapnel goes off if you hit the target in a weak spot.
  
  Fair enough
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 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.
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.
- 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 only hate the stalker because I don't see them coming lol
  
  In my head I was thinking more along the line of Mutations for the Bugs and Augmentations for the Bots. It would be cool to face a variant of the Charger that can jump or fly a short distance, or a machine weaker to small arms fire due to some kinetically-based shield that grows stronger the harder the weapons hit. Based on events though. I'm not sure this is a good game for enemies like this to show up randomly, even rarely.
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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...
  
  For real, I didn't pay anything after the game was in my Library and have all Warbonds with enough SC to go for the next.
  
  how do you farm super credits other than purchasing them with medals?
  
  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.
- The new warbond disproves this. 1 good weapon and 2 bad ones.
They should focus less on weapon balance and more on things like grenade exploits.
- delet
Kinda what happened to dota.
- Rip octarine core with aetherlens recipe
ITT: people describing that they don't want balance, but actually want balance.

68 comments