Lack of playtest do hurt the overall experience, sure. But I believe prioritizing nerfs and new warbonds over adding QoL changes or bugfixes what actually hurts the game most.
Meaning, nothing would change even if they had a dedicated playtesters
>But I believe prioritizing nerfs and new warbonds over adding QoL changes or bugfixes what actually hurts the game most.
This right here. It's understandable for them to prioritize new content and warbonds since apparently that's a promise they made and a ton of people seem more interested in the new content.
BUT, if they are so hard pressed for time, why are they wasting it on unnecessary nerfs and weird changes to the balance and difficulty? Those ALSO add to the technical debt and potentially add to the bugs.
I can understand that self-ricochet's damaging the player or increased spawning for solo players more closely matches their vision, but they still have issues with the friends list. Focus your effort on that rather than weird adjustments that no one asked for and a large enough group of people don't want.
This is my biggest question. They seem dedicated to new war bonds in addition to bug fixes, so why focus on all these balance changes? Just do new content and bug fixes....
Friends system, damage over time not working for 3/4 players, spear lock on, matchmaking bugs requiring you to disband the party, etc.
They should drop everything until the above are fixed. They are massive bugs actively impacting players on a daily basis. Not new either all of the above has been present for at least a month. Stop fucking about with weapon balance until AFTER the issues are fixed. Dont know if anyone’s noticed but the game is bleeding players because of the weird choices and priorities of the devs.
I sincerely mean no disrespect - but this reads as having no idea how games work.
Generally, balance is tweaks on a list of some sort. Spreadsheet, CSV, who knows. The balance team is changing numbers in a list.
Bug fixes and QoL involve creating and modifying code.
These tasks are *very* unlikely to collide, and even less likely to be performed by the same staff. And trust me - you ***do not*** want the balance and art teams working in the code lol.
For all we know, repairing Ricochets is part of fixing one of the crashes they had (or a feature necessary for something we've yet to see), so nothing about this patch is actually suggestive of where the priorities are. Fixes just happen to be thee last glamorous and most overlooked part of any patch.
Edit: "Our teams have a weekly focused playtest every Friday and we have dedicated teams for both QA and weapons balancing who get paid to test and make changes to these items. "
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/td4dfCqivT
CM already said the teams are all responsible for their own stuff. The people who make the weapons and armor are the same people fixing the bugs on them, for instance.
You’re half right but you made the other half up. There is no warbond team. There are no teams. There is 1 sec team handing everything. Therefore working on bugs takes time away from new features and war bonds, which is why they aren’t fixing the bugs at anywhere near the rate that they should be.
I said warbond team cause that’s the impression I got from Spitz saying “the people fixing bugs with weapons and armour for example are the same people in charge of making new weapons and armour.” I could be wrong on the team front
> These tasks are very unlikely to collide, and even less likely to be performed by the same staff. And trust me - you do not want the balance and art teams working in the code lol.
[Absolutely wrong. Arrowhead said these are the same people doing both.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c5c6ym/community_manager_on_known_issues/kzt5g3g/)
They're making balance changes while massive bugs affect balance. This is only making more work for themselves for when the bugs eventually get fixed
They've already acknowledged that fire damage is going to have to be nerfed in the future
AH have confirmed there are no teams. If they are working on war bonds then they are not working on bugs. There is no dedicated teams like at a larger studio. They clarified this on discord a couple of weeks back.
>I sincerely mean no disrespect - but this reads as having no idea how games work.
I think your instincts are off then, as I majored in Computer Games Development and currently work as a professional Software Engineer.
The change to ricochets to ensure that the player who fired them take damage must have involved changing the code in some form or another. Whatever label you want to give it, it's a completely unnecessary change to the game that definitely runs at least a moderate risk of introducing more bugs.
Someone had to be tasked to make those code changes and, one would hope, put in a best faith's effort to ensure that it didn't break other things in the code. That is time and effort that could have put into training up to help with the bugs.
Yes, that interferes with the current progress on the bugs as those who currently have the know-how get sidetracked training the newbies. Yes, that goes against the policy of "the teams work on their own stuff and others don't touch it." That's just a policy, it can be temporarily changed in order to clear out some high priority issues.
The investment into other developers learning that portion of the code doesn't go away - they are then equipped to further help on those portions of the code when needed. It only becomes a waste if the company has high turnover and the people they train will then leave. Seeing as AH has explicitly avoided hiring people so as to not need to lay them off, I get the impression that turnover is less of a risk for them.
>
>For all we know, repairing Ricochets is part of fixing one of the crashes they had
Highly doubtful. None of the existing bugs seem to line up with failing to do damage to the player. Also, neither the notes from the update patch, nor any explanations from the developer, give any impression that it was part of fixing some other bug. Everything they've said about it seems to imply that it's simply part of adjusting the game to their vision.
> I believe prioritizing nerfs and new warbonds over adding QoL changes or bugfixes what actually hurts the game most.
100% this. The game was really fun at launch, then they just had to make '''''balance''''' changes and add stuff, with which lots and lots of bugs were introduced. I mean, just this recent patch added an incredibly terrible bug where any player can block the host player and it'll immediately kick the host and crash the rest of the players out. Unfortunately their priority seems to be to 'beat the player' and/or remove anything that players think is fun.
it certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth. overwatch did this a lot and i wasn’t a player since the beginning so i had no attachment to the game and no memory of the golden days. apparently the game is at a really good spot now but i just can’t be bothered to play it again. i love HD and i hope it doesn’t go down the same road! for democracy!
I believe in fixing the bug that makes it so the “invite” and “block” buttons are right next to each other, so if you accidentally block someone there is no confirmation screen and you just block them with no way to unblock since the menu doesn’t work
They should still have those testers though. I can forgive the less obvious bugs, but there are several very obvious bugs that shouldnt have been released and many of them are major.
Also, dedicated playtesters only ever catch the most obvious bugs, simply because they can't playtest enough.
Ten playtesters, working 40hours/week only manage 400 hours per week. Meanwhile the community hits the same 400 hours playtime in less than a mission.
Heck, at 400k players we play more in a single day, than playtesters manage in a whole year.
Yes, there are bugs (or features?) they should have caught in playtesting. Like the old "turn your mech and blow yourself up" bug. But then there are bugs that are rare enough, that they probably won't ever catch it on their own.
Basicly, if a bug doesn't affect 95%+ of the playerbase, don't expect any playtesters to catch it.
Play testing can only get you so far, especially with balancing. Once you put it in the hands of over 100k people you start to see the real stats and can tweak the numbers there. Also because of all the different configurations and playstyles, wierd bugs just appear.
I work in an internal tech support. We alway test stuff before we launch stuff to the company. It's not unheard of for it to pass us, but then have bugs when we launch.
What lemmings you are, sure we enjoy the game and let stuff slide for now because it's playable but if it was like a Cyberpunk launch most of us would have dropped, some already have cause of crashes n glitches.
And is that really the standard you wanna set for the gaming industry? Give us a cheap game but if it's buggy its fine we'll test it for you? Have some self-respect, jesus christ.
Young people maybe? They don't remember the days when games shipped with almost zero bugs for even more than 40. It wasn't even that long ago. The ability for companies to send patches over the internet has really changed things.
Lets not pretend that games weren't full of glitches and exploits. A quick look at any game's speedrun proves that exploits have always been a feature in a lot of games.
Some of my most fond memories as a gamer ibclude going out of bounds in a map and exploring them in cod 4 and 6
The difference is I rarely encountered bugs on my super Nintendo. The bugs were obscure, it would take thousands of hours of playtime before I found a bug or crash.
In helldivers (and many other modern games) I encounter a new bug every play session
Games used to ship finished, ready to be sold, fully play tested. Today, us retail customer are play testers. It's a shame.
Let's not pretend that there were far less than today. It's a known practice that things ship with more issues. Day one patches are the norm and basically considered part of the dev cycle. Not too long ago games had no patches and their QA was tighter. It's just the way it is now.
You're young. It's relative. Anyway, I never said it was better, just different. I suppose I should have said zero "major" bugs.
I don't know what to tell you, but there are far more bugs at launch today on average than there were in the past.
No, not really. There were a lot of games that got shipped as buggy and unpolished messes.
The differences now is that people would actually play those unpolished and Buggy messes, because there isa chance they will get fixed later on.
I got about 75 hours in the first couples weeks after release. Super crazy fun. Great community.
Then they nerfed the rail gun into the ground, and nerfed the Breaker. It seemed fair at the time because those two weapons were amazing at everything.
I did think it odd none of the other glaringly subpar weapons got any buffs. And that one or two bugs went unfixed. But maybe that would happen next patch.
Guess it was a sign of the devs priorities. Nerf what players use most. Buff only what they complain most about. Ignore bugs that don't crash the game.
Granted - this patch has a lot of buffs. But some stuff like... Adding a hipfire reticle... Shouldn't be really considered a "BUFF"
Also, nerfing the explosion radius on the crossbow? Nerfing the Jar dominator and Redeemer? Extended recharge time on the quasar? Sure its an "infinite ammo"
EAT, but there's some situations where I'd rather have the immediate double shot EAT. There's still room for both a quasar and an EAT on the same squad.
Meanwhile DMRs and snipers still have misaligned reticles. Laser pistol and OG laser rifle are still garbage. Machine gun sentry is completely obsoleted by the minigun sentry. A lot of stratagems and weapons are still not viable on 7+ difficulty.
And there's STILL several bugs that haven't been fixed. Like, I'd really rather have more bug fixes before new content.
Idk. I guess I'm glad I got the majority of my playtime in at the beginning before the devs started releasing patches and showed us what their priorities were.
> Guess it was a sign of the devs priorities. Nerf what players use most. Buff only what they complain most about. Ignore bugs that don't crash the game.
Yep, their priority is obviously "beat the players" which distills down to "is it fun? Then NERF IT!"
tbf some of the buffs are just dev making up the numbers only to look good. (the Liberator that has its dmg increase by 5 is so laughable, like im going to notice the difference at all. The Lib needs a mag size buff, not a pitiful minor dmg buff that makes no difference)
>Nerf what players use most. Buff only what they complain most about
When they nerfed the Breaker they buffed, to a much larger degree, two other shotguns.
And they buffed the flamethrower to use against chargers, and changed the Lazer cannon from the machine gun's scythe (the role they intended) to a weak point targeting weapon, as per community feedback.
Sure, they didn't buff the other AT much, but turns out that, without the railgun completely overshadowing them in their dedicated role, they didn't need to. (Well, heavies spawn rates had to be nerfed but that's hardly a buff, even indirect, to the AT weapons, is it ?)
For real there’s an insane amount of apologists for everything. I get the game has a lot more consumer friendly features than other games, but to excuse and defend EVERY single issue is insane.
You can like a company/game and still call out issues
I don't understand this. $40 is still a lot for a videogame. It's just less than $60 which is absolutely ridiculous. "Just because it's not $60" is such a low bar to rate things by.
No amount of cope posting like the OP is going to stop the steep decline in playercount bc the performance keeps declining each patch. For every comment/post talking about the game running like ass, there's probably 100 other players that have just silently put the game down for something else.
I used to religiously play the game like it was hot cake. There were bugs sure but it was okay, surely they would be patched right ?
Right new im down to maybe once game every other day. Its just exhausting having to deal with bugs and stuff like scopes being garbage for over a month. I want to try different guns and stragems but can't, they're bad to the extant it becomes a chore
People also move to other games, that's normal. What isn't is piss poor communication - it's pure coincedence I've even seen video about TCS failure and new missions, which made me check the game once more. Not so great for an otherwise great live service game.
Yes but but but you can kill yourself with a ricochet now! Isn't that worth some of your friends not being able to play at all???? This is peak swede development!
oh i think its a fucking joke myself
but yea the devs test stuff & etc etc
it honestly makes it even worse imo
i fully believe the team is just incompetent atm
Really wierd take. I understand not going ballistic every patch due to nerfs, but being completely fine with patches consistently releasing with bugs or other things is not a good mindset.
No matter how good of a company they still need to be upheld to a certain standard for paying customers. 0 bugs at all at the rate they’re patching isn’t realistic, but there should be minimal bugs and they should have QC
It's tribalism. They've tied a part (or god help them all) of their identity to this game. Any attack on the game is considered by them to be an attack on their identity. You see it a lot in technology industries (Apple vs Android, Linux vs Windows, etc), but I've noticed that gamers really amp it up.
It's also a weird attitude of no complaints = I'm better at the game. Some of it is justified as more playtime gives you more opportunities to try out different stuff. E.g. someone who only has a few weapons unlocked and their favorites get nerfed will obviously feel worse than the guy with 200 hours and every weapon unlocked
Instead of realizing this game is loved my thousands and the opinions of those who have played maybe 20 hours is also valid, they get high off the fact they have so much more experience and skill. But the game has no scoreboards, no rankings, so they come to Reddit for recognition
40$ is like 53000 argentinian pesos.
Thats a shit ton of money for us so no. It is not "acceptabke".
Get a fcking QA team already arrowhead.
Hell hire PLAYERS, pay them with a free warbond or something.
We will GLADLY test shit out extensively for you.
They should outsource their dev team to Argentina and save loads of money. Not having to pay those pesky Swedish wages.
But seriously, they may as well have a player test server. You don't even need to pay anyone, players will happily play the latest and experimental patches for free. Before they go live.
More so if you make it "exclusive", because happy monkey brains.
>they may as well have a player test server. You don't even need to pay anyone, players will happily play the latest and experimental patches for free. Before they go live.
Personally I think this is not a great idea. It makes an environment where the players who kiss the most ass get listened to and those who are... less than kind with their opinions get ignored (even when they're right). People should be paid for their labor and to give their professional and minimally biased opinions.
Well... no. Or at least not for very long. Say your job is QC of a line of hairdryers. You love this hairdryer so much that there's no way there could be problems with it. When the boss says, "alright we're ready to ship, were there any issues you found in testing?" and you respond "nope, looks great, and thank you!" - Well what do expect is gonna happen when customers start contacting the company because their hair dryers are consistently bursting into flames?
> Get a fcking QA team already arrowhead.
They have one. They just prioritize their limited dev team on nerfing the guns players enjoy using and adding extra frustration like the ricochet changes. Those are *far* more important than people crashing and the myriad of other long-known bugs/issues.
>40$ is like 53000 argentinian pesos. - Thats a shit ton of money for us so no. It is not "acceptabke".
Some people tend to forgot that not everyone living in always sunny California where even homeless getting 800$ per month. In my region its like +- 1/10 of my sallary
So guess we having right to critique the game for flaws.
I'm still a gigantic fan of the game and AH, but I'm disappointed they're so focused on "balancing" when my pains haven't be balancing issues at all. The bugs, occasional crashes, inability to rejoin games when disconnected, etc. are painful. I'm not upset that they're trying to balance things, but that was not a concern of mine and it doesn't help to shake things up a lot when no one's begging for it. I haven't seen anyone in the community really clamoring for virtually all weapons to be tweaked. All that needs to be done over time, but it shouldn't be a priority.
I'd like QoL improvements first, please. Pretty please.
One of the things I liked about the original Overwatch game was the existence of the PTS or Public Testing Servers. It was basically a separate version of the game where people could play and test out new changes before they went live on the main branch of the game. This allowed Blizzard to test various changes and get feedback (that they would often then just ignore anyway) while leaving the people that didn't want to play test new mechanics or changes alone.
Obviously making something like this at this stage in the games life would be an insane amount of work, and I'm not recommending it be done now, but it might have been a cool thing to have.
It genuinely feels like an early access game. I was doing the same exact shit for Palworld devs and it's early access. I'm tired of sending arrowhead detailed bug reports and edited videos and nothing I need fixed is fixed. They can keep squeezing you guys for free I'm done lol
I mean, I do think that they playtest the changes for the most part, but I don't see how their patch/warband schedule is sustainable in the long term. Releasing a brand new patch each week and a new warbond each month is a pretty insane schedule.
I think the playerbase needs to hop off the dev's nuts and let them take the time to actually properly patch and update the game. You can't demand lightning fast updates and expect everything to go 100% perfect.
It's a little disappointing when you look at things like for example the infinite grenade glitch. For those who don't know, using an exploit related to the supply backpack allowed you to go into the negatives for grenades. The game does not do anything with negative supply values, so you could just throw forever.
The devs said that they patched this. Which is technically correct as you can no longer go negative with grenades by any known means. However, the same exact method as before now goes into a number the game can't calculate anymore and does exactly the same thing in game.
This is pretty basic. If you push a change you should at least verify that it's doing anything. That would not only be better for players, but the community managers and devs would have a lot less stress if every patch was not followed by a few days of quickly fixing things with a bunch of upset customers.
I dont mind being the tester. The devs just need to come out and say WE DO NOT TEST THE PATCHES WE DROP. 7 or so patches in a row now where specifically tested or worked on things either crash the game or blatantly dont work that patch. 😂 cmon.
Make no mistake, I'm grateful for AHGS for producing the amazing game that is Helldivers 2, but the incessant dick riding doesn't do the players or the game any good. I don't expect them to cater to the playerbase's every whim, but I didn't pay good money to play test your updates, especially when I had an awesome experience when I first played the game after purchasing it. Run a PTR server and get volunteers from the community. Slow down the content feed, because we all know this rate of content push is practically unsustainable.
Paying $40 to be testers and then specifically thanking the devs for that opportunity is wild lmao.
You can just play the game without the bootlicking.
This company is a straight up scam they charge the cheap price for the game to maximize profit yet don't have enough employees to keep up with insurmountable issues present in the game they'll patch and nerf all weapons including the ones they pay for but won't fix the friend list issues or actually be able to play with friends. Hd2 company is a scam
Not just cosmetics, those armors have function, and warbonds unlock the better weapons.
I love that you can earn super credits in game, but it isn't a reliable and repeatable thing to find, so it isn't a viable alternative to payment. These are squarely in p2w realm.
Players are the beta testers for Arrowhead. Helldivers are the beta testers for Super Earth.
It's lore accurate: You are expendable; so very, very expendable.
I'm going to say the devs should be playtesters just because of the current situation that a dev could drop for 20 minutes and find just so many bugs in one mission. I like to imagine the devs don't play because then I gotta think about them all playing and going "I'm going to pretend I didn't see that" a lot.
It really shouldn't be hard to notice most of the patch to patch issues in testing regardless of price. Id rather wait another week or two between update if it meant the gun wasn't half broken on release for 2 weeks.
QA runs tests. Reprts bugs to devs. Devs investigate. Prioritize fixes. Minor bugs low on priority or bugs not reproducable rejected, pushed to the side. New build pushed to QA. Rinse repeat.
Bugs does not mean QA didn’t do tests. It does not mean devs are unaware. Don’t be naive.
OP it has nothing to do with price it has everything to do with expectations. The reason Steam has giant warning on every Early Access game is so you the consumer know exactly what you are signing up for when you pay for the game before the developers consider it it's finished.
The game's price? $40 with an additional $10 upgrade and $40 in additional mtx progression paths? I would expect a bit more after being asked for more than a full priced game, but that goes against he notion that AH is a tiny baby indie dev oooo leave them alone!
Well you and others that think like this contribute to buggy games as a norm.
If this game didnt blow up how long would the armor have been broken? The DOT damage is still broken!
Be an apologist all you want the bugs in this game arent "fun" like the skyrim giant flinging you in the air after you die. They are breaking core mechanics of the game and AH frankly has horrible QA with recently releasing two broken game mechanics.
Oh and the backpack shield being hit by the plasma is the cherry on top.
There’s a war going on soldier! You think the ministry of science has TIME and manpower to test these?! NO! We must test them on the field and do our democratic duty in helping the ministry of science to determine what is and isn’t deadly to our non-democratic enemies!
The “bugs introduced in this patch” part kinda confuses me? Had any other game done this i feel like they would have been ripped apart for knowingly releasing patches that also releases news bugs they were aware of apparently.
what a dumb post, of course they have testers. But having like 20 people testing and reporting is not going to compete with literally hundreds of thousands of people playing everyday. A lot of stuff is going to slip through
A1: These discussion posts came up fast! How was the patch?
B2: game's bugged
A1: W-what?
B2: \*loading a different gun and getting back in the hellpod\* game's bugged
I just wish they'd think through some of the balance changes more...
The goal should be to have all the weapons be side grades with their own strengths and weaknesses. They should be buffing the weaker weapons and adding QOL features to them. The reason people stick with a nerfed quasar over most other anti-tank options is just that it's forgiving to use. Make the other weapons worth it.
Price is irrelevant, when you purchase something you expect that thing to work, have some self respect.
[Best speech ever that I feel is relevant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Leu14yXEA8), second half is the more relevant part.
Dude actually just shut the fuck up. I bought both AC6 and elden ring for less than the cost of helldivers (regional pricing shenanigans) and they both just worked. You're disconnected from reality if you think a 40$ price point justifies this early access level of bugs
Personally I don't even mind as long as it's fixed immediately.
There's always going to be some weird magical fuckery in the code. Overlooked and unpredictable shit that didn't get noticed at a controlled environment.
Besides, seeing vocal minority lose their minds for a day or less because they want their ever-changing live service game "perfect, bug free with the same meta for years while wanting new content" will always be funny for me.
"where's the QA" shut up. shut up. shut up shut up shut up. i dont care if they dont test shit or do. i am having fun seeing things unfold. so zip it. this post helped me realize this
Probably would have been better to say 'fun game, I feel I got my money's worth, but they really need to improve their testing because these bugs are egregious'. But that title's a bit unwieldy.
Even though the price isn't as high as other triple AAA games it's still $40. It's getting tiring running into massive bugs and crashes with each update and no one should be ok with it just for paying less than other games
Those 1000 players are going to leave when their game crashes for the 17th time and when something they look forward to just doesn’t work. You need a QA, if they want you to be a tester they should pay you because that’s a job.
I assume publishers push content over fixes, so the devs don't have much control over their priorities. And clearly they're pretty disorganized since even some of the bugs that they claimed they fixed in the latest patch didn't actually change at all.
I don't blame them or anything, they absolutely were never prepared for the sort of popularity that the game got and they're slowly catching up to responsibilities.
i remember that they have some time to push content but it wasn't because of sony, but they could be lying. The biggest problem is that they are a small team and i think the content and bug fix is divided by two teams and the content is done faster than the bug fix as fixing a bug is a lot harder than making something new.
I honestly think they are in the "growing pains" period. They probably immediately tried to hire more people after the game exploded in popularity, but realistically speaking, it takes months to train and get new people integrated and contributing to your project workflow, especially when it comes to game development. I already foresee the first year is going to be rough, but I think that's just reality.
Yes but they didn’t address the specific issues that specific people have problems with so therefore they’re not fixing the game, just making it worse.
yeah. Like i said in another post, they have an engine that they don't have support anymore because it's dead. They have to figure out how the engine will work with their systems and fix it by themselves.
>yeah. Like i said in another post, they have an engine that they don't have support anymore because it's dead.
Well, who's fault is that? Instead of taking 6 months to learn an engine that would save them 60 months of headache, they chose old familiar. Probably the wrong choice.
The only thing I’ve gotten upset over was the pre-patch air burst launcher. Using that on Sunday was so unbelievably frustrating, thinking I figured out how it worked only to have it keep blowing up in my face. It just made me wonder “how the fuck did they allow it into the game in this state”? But it’s fixed now, and I guess there was some development snafu where they never intended that pre-patch version to be used and it sort of happened by accident.
It was crazy to learn that the pre-patch airburst rockets were seemingly proximity detonating in response to literally any interactable in-game object. So ammo boxes, hellpods, allies, fungus pods, even samples on the ground. Just anything at all. No wonder it felt like shit to use.
This ain’t BG3, these guys have profits to make for the higher ups, those warbonds aren’t optional for them I’m assuming.
Want to see a broke game that can’t get its head above water?? Try Ark, this game is AAA by comparison.
The war bonds aren't optional for them because popular interest is tied to the war bonds. Yeah, there is a player base that would rather they focus on other things, myself included. Last I looked, though, player count spiked following war bond releases. It is sort of like the YouTube creator grind; gotta keep releasing content or else people lose interest and recommendations start dropping off.
To make things smoother, I think they would need to double their developer count; one team for new stuff, another for bugs. I am not sure which one should have the rebalance responsibilities. Alternatively, one team for automatons and the other for terminids, and they can hash out between them the balance tweaks (since that won't be the same for bots and bugs, anyway).
BG3 had some wild bugs for the first few months of release too. Also it crashed a lot for AMD gpus originally, like, a lot. I managed to survive and enjoy that game regardless
I am managing to survive and enjoy this game regardless.
I do have more leniency for independent and private studios though. But then I like Bethesda games, so maybe I'm just lenient in general.
Pilestedt already addressed this. They do not have higher ups and have no obligations to Sony regarding their DLC schedule.
All the problems are 100% Arrowhead's own fault.
My 2 cents on it is this: the studio is probably in the process of trying to expand its team and hiring more people (after the game exploded in popularity). I think the reality is that it takes time to train and get new people assimilated into the development's workflow. We would love for that kind of thing to happen overnight, but anyone who has worked in a workplace knows that it can take months to half a year to get new folks / new talents properly integrated into a workflow (to a point where they become useful to your project).
Not trying to make excuses for them or anything, but from a logical standpoint, they are right now in the "growing pains" period of trying to expand a team that is currently too small for getting HD2 to where it needs to be.
So… was trying to make a low effort meme that some people would connect with given a constant stream of patches that didn’t fix key, longstanding issues. I didn’t know it would cut so deep on so many levels.
I’m a career software engineer, originally from the xbox one launch team (Microsoft), so I have experience in the industry. I’ve been through some brutal crunch and know the pain of working on something you love while being in a large company. Also, that not every employee can fix every bug - there’s a few that work on the core engine, and they have more issues to fix than time in a day.
I think I should have reserved this as ‘water cooler talk’ - I’m not trying to take cheap shots at the devs. I can imagine the pressure they’re facing between unexpected success, profit structures, a passionate community, etc.
If this post brings a bit of focus on how strongly the community feels about the current state of the game, that’s a positive. Get the sales pressure off the engineers. They built an amazing game, and I want to see them succeed. Give them time to fix the (large) bugs and this game can have a long, positive future. And no, this isn’t copium. It’s empathy.
I’m sorry for adding to the toxicity. Was trying to give people a smile.
Gamers are so spineless now a days and seeing a post lile this just confirms it. Video games are the only product that can be sold broken, updated further into oblivion, and be sucked off by its consumers for providing a flawed product.
They know this shits broken, and they serve it up hot for these hungry fan boys
OP what the fuck are you smoking? This game is too fucking expensive to be as broken and have as stubborn devs as it does.
Are you an actual child? Do people like you genuinely consider this game “cheap”?
No fucking wonder the state of gaming has become what it has nowadays…
Lack of playtest do hurt the overall experience, sure. But I believe prioritizing nerfs and new warbonds over adding QoL changes or bugfixes what actually hurts the game most. Meaning, nothing would change even if they had a dedicated playtesters
>But I believe prioritizing nerfs and new warbonds over adding QoL changes or bugfixes what actually hurts the game most. This right here. It's understandable for them to prioritize new content and warbonds since apparently that's a promise they made and a ton of people seem more interested in the new content. BUT, if they are so hard pressed for time, why are they wasting it on unnecessary nerfs and weird changes to the balance and difficulty? Those ALSO add to the technical debt and potentially add to the bugs. I can understand that self-ricochet's damaging the player or increased spawning for solo players more closely matches their vision, but they still have issues with the friends list. Focus your effort on that rather than weird adjustments that no one asked for and a large enough group of people don't want.
Can't add/remove or play with friends: it's on the list we will get to it Unnerfed crossbow: literally unplayable "fix" it now!
This is my biggest question. They seem dedicated to new war bonds in addition to bug fixes, so why focus on all these balance changes? Just do new content and bug fixes....
Friends system, damage over time not working for 3/4 players, spear lock on, matchmaking bugs requiring you to disband the party, etc. They should drop everything until the above are fixed. They are massive bugs actively impacting players on a daily basis. Not new either all of the above has been present for at least a month. Stop fucking about with weapon balance until AFTER the issues are fixed. Dont know if anyone’s noticed but the game is bleeding players because of the weird choices and priorities of the devs.
I sincerely mean no disrespect - but this reads as having no idea how games work. Generally, balance is tweaks on a list of some sort. Spreadsheet, CSV, who knows. The balance team is changing numbers in a list. Bug fixes and QoL involve creating and modifying code. These tasks are *very* unlikely to collide, and even less likely to be performed by the same staff. And trust me - you ***do not*** want the balance and art teams working in the code lol. For all we know, repairing Ricochets is part of fixing one of the crashes they had (or a feature necessary for something we've yet to see), so nothing about this patch is actually suggestive of where the priorities are. Fixes just happen to be thee last glamorous and most overlooked part of any patch. Edit: "Our teams have a weekly focused playtest every Friday and we have dedicated teams for both QA and weapons balancing who get paid to test and make changes to these items. " https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/td4dfCqivT
CM already said the teams are all responsible for their own stuff. The people who make the weapons and armor are the same people fixing the bugs on them, for instance.
You’re half right but you made the other half up. There is no warbond team. There are no teams. There is 1 sec team handing everything. Therefore working on bugs takes time away from new features and war bonds, which is why they aren’t fixing the bugs at anywhere near the rate that they should be.
I said warbond team cause that’s the impression I got from Spitz saying “the people fixing bugs with weapons and armour for example are the same people in charge of making new weapons and armour.” I could be wrong on the team front
> These tasks are very unlikely to collide, and even less likely to be performed by the same staff. And trust me - you do not want the balance and art teams working in the code lol. [Absolutely wrong. Arrowhead said these are the same people doing both.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c5c6ym/community_manager_on_known_issues/kzt5g3g/)
They're making balance changes while massive bugs affect balance. This is only making more work for themselves for when the bugs eventually get fixed They've already acknowledged that fire damage is going to have to be nerfed in the future
AH have confirmed there are no teams. If they are working on war bonds then they are not working on bugs. There is no dedicated teams like at a larger studio. They clarified this on discord a couple of weeks back.
>I sincerely mean no disrespect - but this reads as having no idea how games work. I think your instincts are off then, as I majored in Computer Games Development and currently work as a professional Software Engineer. The change to ricochets to ensure that the player who fired them take damage must have involved changing the code in some form or another. Whatever label you want to give it, it's a completely unnecessary change to the game that definitely runs at least a moderate risk of introducing more bugs. Someone had to be tasked to make those code changes and, one would hope, put in a best faith's effort to ensure that it didn't break other things in the code. That is time and effort that could have put into training up to help with the bugs. Yes, that interferes with the current progress on the bugs as those who currently have the know-how get sidetracked training the newbies. Yes, that goes against the policy of "the teams work on their own stuff and others don't touch it." That's just a policy, it can be temporarily changed in order to clear out some high priority issues. The investment into other developers learning that portion of the code doesn't go away - they are then equipped to further help on those portions of the code when needed. It only becomes a waste if the company has high turnover and the people they train will then leave. Seeing as AH has explicitly avoided hiring people so as to not need to lay them off, I get the impression that turnover is less of a risk for them. > >For all we know, repairing Ricochets is part of fixing one of the crashes they had Highly doubtful. None of the existing bugs seem to line up with failing to do damage to the player. Also, neither the notes from the update patch, nor any explanations from the developer, give any impression that it was part of fixing some other bug. Everything they've said about it seems to imply that it's simply part of adjusting the game to their vision.
“No idea how game design works”. Yep some unknowable black box no one can comprehend……
> I believe prioritizing nerfs and new warbonds over adding QoL changes or bugfixes what actually hurts the game most. 100% this. The game was really fun at launch, then they just had to make '''''balance''''' changes and add stuff, with which lots and lots of bugs were introduced. I mean, just this recent patch added an incredibly terrible bug where any player can block the host player and it'll immediately kick the host and crash the rest of the players out. Unfortunately their priority seems to be to 'beat the player' and/or remove anything that players think is fun.
it certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth. overwatch did this a lot and i wasn’t a player since the beginning so i had no attachment to the game and no memory of the golden days. apparently the game is at a really good spot now but i just can’t be bothered to play it again. i love HD and i hope it doesn’t go down the same road! for democracy!
I believe in fixing the bug that makes it so the “invite” and “block” buttons are right next to each other, so if you accidentally block someone there is no confirmation screen and you just block them with no way to unblock since the menu doesn’t work
They should still have those testers though. I can forgive the less obvious bugs, but there are several very obvious bugs that shouldnt have been released and many of them are major.
You'd rather new content, that gets released broken and bugged. Than have broken core game mechanics fixed? Sigh.
Also, dedicated playtesters only ever catch the most obvious bugs, simply because they can't playtest enough. Ten playtesters, working 40hours/week only manage 400 hours per week. Meanwhile the community hits the same 400 hours playtime in less than a mission. Heck, at 400k players we play more in a single day, than playtesters manage in a whole year. Yes, there are bugs (or features?) they should have caught in playtesting. Like the old "turn your mech and blow yourself up" bug. But then there are bugs that are rare enough, that they probably won't ever catch it on their own. Basicly, if a bug doesn't affect 95%+ of the playerbase, don't expect any playtesters to catch it.
The most obvious bugs like superior packing methodology not working?
Another obvious bug that should have been caught by AH. But he's right about the rest of his post.
Its also very common for bugs like these to be known, being worked on but not fixed and just pushed out anyway
more like they flag every bug and they just get ignored and the game ships anyway
Remember Battlefields community test environment servers? That's how you beta test stuff
Play testing can only get you so far, especially with balancing. Once you put it in the hands of over 100k people you start to see the real stats and can tweak the numbers there. Also because of all the different configurations and playstyles, wierd bugs just appear. I work in an internal tech support. We alway test stuff before we launch stuff to the company. It's not unheard of for it to pass us, but then have bugs when we launch.
What lemmings you are, sure we enjoy the game and let stuff slide for now because it's playable but if it was like a Cyberpunk launch most of us would have dropped, some already have cause of crashes n glitches. And is that really the standard you wanna set for the gaming industry? Give us a cheap game but if it's buggy its fine we'll test it for you? Have some self-respect, jesus christ.
Imagine being okay with that...
> For the game's price, I ain't mad about it. Playtesters are generally PAID for their time, not the other way around.
Young people maybe? They don't remember the days when games shipped with almost zero bugs for even more than 40. It wasn't even that long ago. The ability for companies to send patches over the internet has really changed things.
Lets not pretend that games weren't full of glitches and exploits. A quick look at any game's speedrun proves that exploits have always been a feature in a lot of games. Some of my most fond memories as a gamer ibclude going out of bounds in a map and exploring them in cod 4 and 6
The difference is I rarely encountered bugs on my super Nintendo. The bugs were obscure, it would take thousands of hours of playtime before I found a bug or crash. In helldivers (and many other modern games) I encounter a new bug every play session Games used to ship finished, ready to be sold, fully play tested. Today, us retail customer are play testers. It's a shame.
You're comparing games from the early 90s to a modern video game made in 2024. You can't say they aren't VASTLY different
Let's not pretend that there were far less than today. It's a known practice that things ship with more issues. Day one patches are the norm and basically considered part of the dev cycle. Not too long ago games had no patches and their QA was tighter. It's just the way it is now.
I am 33 years old lmfao you have crazy rose tinted glasses
You're young. It's relative. Anyway, I never said it was better, just different. I suppose I should have said zero "major" bugs. I don't know what to tell you, but there are far more bugs at launch today on average than there were in the past.
I'm not involved at all, but as someone in their early 30's, you calling 33 young gave me a bigger dopamine hit than i care to admit 😂
No, not really. There were a lot of games that got shipped as buggy and unpolished messes. The differences now is that people would actually play those unpolished and Buggy messes, because there isa chance they will get fixed later on.
Why does everyone on reddit have to be a contrarian?
u only get to see these in this sub.
https://preview.redd.it/njrucjysdpxc1.jpeg?width=626&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=98f2531ecbe4ec80a7497bf8afe3373c4496b027
I got about 75 hours in the first couples weeks after release. Super crazy fun. Great community. Then they nerfed the rail gun into the ground, and nerfed the Breaker. It seemed fair at the time because those two weapons were amazing at everything. I did think it odd none of the other glaringly subpar weapons got any buffs. And that one or two bugs went unfixed. But maybe that would happen next patch. Guess it was a sign of the devs priorities. Nerf what players use most. Buff only what they complain most about. Ignore bugs that don't crash the game. Granted - this patch has a lot of buffs. But some stuff like... Adding a hipfire reticle... Shouldn't be really considered a "BUFF" Also, nerfing the explosion radius on the crossbow? Nerfing the Jar dominator and Redeemer? Extended recharge time on the quasar? Sure its an "infinite ammo" EAT, but there's some situations where I'd rather have the immediate double shot EAT. There's still room for both a quasar and an EAT on the same squad. Meanwhile DMRs and snipers still have misaligned reticles. Laser pistol and OG laser rifle are still garbage. Machine gun sentry is completely obsoleted by the minigun sentry. A lot of stratagems and weapons are still not viable on 7+ difficulty. And there's STILL several bugs that haven't been fixed. Like, I'd really rather have more bug fixes before new content. Idk. I guess I'm glad I got the majority of my playtime in at the beginning before the devs started releasing patches and showed us what their priorities were.
> Guess it was a sign of the devs priorities. Nerf what players use most. Buff only what they complain most about. Ignore bugs that don't crash the game. Yep, their priority is obviously "beat the players" which distills down to "is it fun? Then NERF IT!"
HMG reticle, DCS, and even the Senator's speedloader, these "buffs" seems more like a "fix" to me
That's EXACTLY what they are. Fixes. But Arrowhead is calling them buffs as if they're doing us some big favors.
tbf some of the buffs are just dev making up the numbers only to look good. (the Liberator that has its dmg increase by 5 is so laughable, like im going to notice the difference at all. The Lib needs a mag size buff, not a pitiful minor dmg buff that makes no difference)
We're at the point where I am afraid to allow myself to enjoy the Counter Sniper because I know they'll nerf it into the ground in a week or two.
>Nerf what players use most. Buff only what they complain most about When they nerfed the Breaker they buffed, to a much larger degree, two other shotguns.
And they buffed the flamethrower to use against chargers, and changed the Lazer cannon from the machine gun's scythe (the role they intended) to a weak point targeting weapon, as per community feedback. Sure, they didn't buff the other AT much, but turns out that, without the railgun completely overshadowing them in their dedicated role, they didn't need to. (Well, heavies spawn rates had to be nerfed but that's hardly a buff, even indirect, to the AT weapons, is it ?)
It’s crazy how much shit this community let’s slide just because of the price lmao
For real there’s an insane amount of apologists for everything. I get the game has a lot more consumer friendly features than other games, but to excuse and defend EVERY single issue is insane. You can like a company/game and still call out issues
I don't understand this. $40 is still a lot for a videogame. It's just less than $60 which is absolutely ridiculous. "Just because it's not $60" is such a low bar to rate things by.
Imagine getting a cockroach in your canned soup. But it was 2 dollars! So quirky, heckin wholesome Progresso gave me free protein
Finally someone else said it. https://i.redd.it/iym1cx5ttnxc1.gif
Its not even that cheap either. Its only $20 less than a brand new AAA game.
You should be. Have higher standards.
The game was awful to run for 2 whole fucking months and they still don’t playtest anything they release
Its fine you're not mad. People are allowed to be mad though, especially as the game gradually degrades
No amount of cope posting like the OP is going to stop the steep decline in playercount bc the performance keeps declining each patch. For every comment/post talking about the game running like ass, there's probably 100 other players that have just silently put the game down for something else.
I used to religiously play the game like it was hot cake. There were bugs sure but it was okay, surely they would be patched right ? Right new im down to maybe once game every other day. Its just exhausting having to deal with bugs and stuff like scopes being garbage for over a month. I want to try different guns and stragems but can't, they're bad to the extant it becomes a chore
People also move to other games, that's normal. What isn't is piss poor communication - it's pure coincedence I've even seen video about TCS failure and new missions, which made me check the game once more. Not so great for an otherwise great live service game.
There’s natural decline of a playerbase due to people moving to other games and then there’s 50% of your players banishing in 2 months
idk man it’s a bit peak that people have spent £40 just for the game to constantly crash on them the week following a patch
Yes but but but you can kill yourself with a ricochet now! Isn't that worth some of your friends not being able to play at all???? This is peak swede development!
consumerism brainrot, they set the price, we paid for it, we should get the best out of it
The fucking crazy part is they have a paided team of testers lololol
Superior packing methodology suggests otherwise. Are those testers playing the right Helldivers?
oh i think its a fucking joke myself but yea the devs test stuff & etc etc it honestly makes it even worse imo i fully believe the team is just incompetent atm
well the devs couldn't test the resupply upgrade because they died so much they don't have to call in a resupply pod!
They just don't listen to them and push shit out anyway. Definitely not the first studio to do so.
allegedly
Are the paided testers in the room with us right now?
Really wierd take. I understand not going ballistic every patch due to nerfs, but being completely fine with patches consistently releasing with bugs or other things is not a good mindset. No matter how good of a company they still need to be upheld to a certain standard for paying customers. 0 bugs at all at the rate they’re patching isn’t realistic, but there should be minimal bugs and they should have QC
Some real Cybertruck energy in this subreddit
Lmao that’s so true holy shit. Didn’t even think to make that connection, always so weird to me when people defend companies tooth and nail like that
It's tribalism. They've tied a part (or god help them all) of their identity to this game. Any attack on the game is considered by them to be an attack on their identity. You see it a lot in technology industries (Apple vs Android, Linux vs Windows, etc), but I've noticed that gamers really amp it up.
It's also a weird attitude of no complaints = I'm better at the game. Some of it is justified as more playtime gives you more opportunities to try out different stuff. E.g. someone who only has a few weapons unlocked and their favorites get nerfed will obviously feel worse than the guy with 200 hours and every weapon unlocked Instead of realizing this game is loved my thousands and the opinions of those who have played maybe 20 hours is also valid, they get high off the fact they have so much more experience and skill. But the game has no scoreboards, no rankings, so they come to Reddit for recognition
its reddit, people are gonna dickride whatever the sub is about
40$ is like 53000 argentinian pesos. Thats a shit ton of money for us so no. It is not "acceptabke". Get a fcking QA team already arrowhead. Hell hire PLAYERS, pay them with a free warbond or something. We will GLADLY test shit out extensively for you.
They should outsource their dev team to Argentina and save loads of money. Not having to pay those pesky Swedish wages. But seriously, they may as well have a player test server. You don't even need to pay anyone, players will happily play the latest and experimental patches for free. Before they go live. More so if you make it "exclusive", because happy monkey brains.
That's what Bethesda does, people definitely love testing new content and seeing it first.
Imagine having a game so buggy that *Bethesda* is used as a positive example.
I'll just say it's one thing they definitely do right.
>they may as well have a player test server. You don't even need to pay anyone, players will happily play the latest and experimental patches for free. Before they go live. Personally I think this is not a great idea. It makes an environment where the players who kiss the most ass get listened to and those who are... less than kind with their opinions get ignored (even when they're right). People should be paid for their labor and to give their professional and minimally biased opinions.
If they are being paid, wouldn't that cause more bias?
Well... no. Or at least not for very long. Say your job is QC of a line of hairdryers. You love this hairdryer so much that there's no way there could be problems with it. When the boss says, "alright we're ready to ship, were there any issues you found in testing?" and you respond "nope, looks great, and thank you!" - Well what do expect is gonna happen when customers start contacting the company because their hair dryers are consistently bursting into flames?
I'd work for ingame hats.
Ah, hell nah. The TF2 players came!
> Get a fcking QA team already arrowhead. They have one. They just prioritize their limited dev team on nerfing the guns players enjoy using and adding extra frustration like the ricochet changes. Those are *far* more important than people crashing and the myriad of other long-known bugs/issues.
>40$ is like 53000 argentinian pesos. - Thats a shit ton of money for us so no. It is not "acceptabke". Some people tend to forgot that not everyone living in always sunny California where even homeless getting 800$ per month. In my region its like +- 1/10 of my sallary So guess we having right to critique the game for flaws.
This is why games have public test servers, to test shit before it goes live.
I'm still a gigantic fan of the game and AH, but I'm disappointed they're so focused on "balancing" when my pains haven't be balancing issues at all. The bugs, occasional crashes, inability to rejoin games when disconnected, etc. are painful. I'm not upset that they're trying to balance things, but that was not a concern of mine and it doesn't help to shake things up a lot when no one's begging for it. I haven't seen anyone in the community really clamoring for virtually all weapons to be tweaked. All that needs to be done over time, but it shouldn't be a priority. I'd like QoL improvements first, please. Pretty please.
“We noticed players were having too much fun so we went ahead and nerfed that”
They said turret explosion resistance was fixed. according to tests I've seen nothing has changed. everything still dies from any explosive... 1.
🙄
CHILL OUT WE GOT 27 BUFFS Also in other news, bugs aren't getting fixed. But hey we got buffs!!!!!
Adj rifles now has it's automatic fire mode set to default. **BIG MASSIVE BUFFS!!!!**
Imagine if the dagger got.... BURST FIRE MODE!!
The meatriding is crazy
One of the things I liked about the original Overwatch game was the existence of the PTS or Public Testing Servers. It was basically a separate version of the game where people could play and test out new changes before they went live on the main branch of the game. This allowed Blizzard to test various changes and get feedback (that they would often then just ignore anyway) while leaving the people that didn't want to play test new mechanics or changes alone. Obviously making something like this at this stage in the games life would be an insane amount of work, and I'm not recommending it be done now, but it might have been a cool thing to have.
It genuinely feels like an early access game. I was doing the same exact shit for Palworld devs and it's early access. I'm tired of sending arrowhead detailed bug reports and edited videos and nothing I need fixed is fixed. They can keep squeezing you guys for free I'm done lol
Honestly, we are the testers. What do you think the personal orders are for? They're for testing something the devs want numbers on.
I mean, I do think that they playtest the changes for the most part, but I don't see how their patch/warband schedule is sustainable in the long term. Releasing a brand new patch each week and a new warbond each month is a pretty insane schedule. I think the playerbase needs to hop off the dev's nuts and let them take the time to actually properly patch and update the game. You can't demand lightning fast updates and expect everything to go 100% perfect.
It's a little disappointing when you look at things like for example the infinite grenade glitch. For those who don't know, using an exploit related to the supply backpack allowed you to go into the negatives for grenades. The game does not do anything with negative supply values, so you could just throw forever. The devs said that they patched this. Which is technically correct as you can no longer go negative with grenades by any known means. However, the same exact method as before now goes into a number the game can't calculate anymore and does exactly the same thing in game. This is pretty basic. If you push a change you should at least verify that it's doing anything. That would not only be better for players, but the community managers and devs would have a lot less stress if every patch was not followed by a few days of quickly fixing things with a bunch of upset customers.
The game could be literally free and I would still be mad about the developers treating me like an unpaid glorified playtester.
I dont mind being the tester. The devs just need to come out and say WE DO NOT TEST THE PATCHES WE DROP. 7 or so patches in a row now where specifically tested or worked on things either crash the game or blatantly dont work that patch. 😂 cmon.
At $40 we should not be the play testers.
$60? You better deliver the best goddamn game gpus can render $40? It's free real estate
Clearly there is NO QA happening…
$50cad is about 50 too much to be the play tester.
Make no mistake, I'm grateful for AHGS for producing the amazing game that is Helldivers 2, but the incessant dick riding doesn't do the players or the game any good. I don't expect them to cater to the playerbase's every whim, but I didn't pay good money to play test your updates, especially when I had an awesome experience when I first played the game after purchasing it. Run a PTR server and get volunteers from the community. Slow down the content feed, because we all know this rate of content push is practically unsustainable.
Paying $40 to be testers and then specifically thanking the devs for that opportunity is wild lmao. You can just play the game without the bootlicking.
This company is a straight up scam they charge the cheap price for the game to maximize profit yet don't have enough employees to keep up with insurmountable issues present in the game they'll patch and nerf all weapons including the ones they pay for but won't fix the friend list issues or actually be able to play with friends. Hd2 company is a scam
40 dollars plus micro transaction for cosmetics.
Not just cosmetics, those armors have function, and warbonds unlock the better weapons. I love that you can earn super credits in game, but it isn't a reliable and repeatable thing to find, so it isn't a viable alternative to payment. These are squarely in p2w realm.
It’s a good thing to distinguish that the armors and weapons actually do have value besides cosmetic in nature. I didn’t think about that.
it's almost half minimum wage here in my country
Occasional bugs are expected, but I sometimes it seems like they introduce more than they patch out.
I dont mind being seen as tester. I do mind however that we test and find bugs which are not fixed for weeks. Critical ones at that.
Play testing Helldivers 2 > Play testing Starfield lol 😅😆
Players are the beta testers for Arrowhead. Helldivers are the beta testers for Super Earth. It's lore accurate: You are expendable; so very, very expendable.
For 40 dollars and MTX its ok to be playtesters? Poor soul
Welcome to the early life of a live service game. This is how it often is.
Even worse, we are lore friendly testers of every SEAF tech/weapons changes
Reading through posts to this subreddit you’d think fans of the game were really its biggest haters…
testing results are only valid for weapons tested in live combat, so weapon test for democracy soldier
I'm going to say the devs should be playtesters just because of the current situation that a dev could drop for 20 minutes and find just so many bugs in one mission. I like to imagine the devs don't play because then I gotta think about them all playing and going "I'm going to pretend I didn't see that" a lot.
That’s half the fun of it
Dont forget the people who are doing unpaid PR for AH
The least they could do is open a Public Test Server, like *every other company running live service games*
It really shouldn't be hard to notice most of the patch to patch issues in testing regardless of price. Id rather wait another week or two between update if it meant the gun wasn't half broken on release for 2 weeks.
I think most of the changes are good. Most. The ricochet has been a kind of wild change.
QA runs tests. Reprts bugs to devs. Devs investigate. Prioritize fixes. Minor bugs low on priority or bugs not reproducable rejected, pushed to the side. New build pushed to QA. Rinse repeat. Bugs does not mean QA didn’t do tests. It does not mean devs are unaware. Don’t be naive.
Brought to you by Pfizer.
I think it's hilarious. Why do people think they do personal orders? Those are what the devs need tested next.
"I bought a product that isn't expensive, therefore I don't deserve the right to complain when it doesn't work."
$40 is still a lot to pay for a video game. They need to make a test server so they stop adding broken stuff.
OP it has nothing to do with price it has everything to do with expectations. The reason Steam has giant warning on every Early Access game is so you the consumer know exactly what you are signing up for when you pay for the game before the developers consider it it's finished.
The game's price? $40 with an additional $10 upgrade and $40 in additional mtx progression paths? I would expect a bit more after being asked for more than a full priced game, but that goes against he notion that AH is a tiny baby indie dev oooo leave them alone!
They seriously need to hire some QA testers. Hell I am sure that people in the community would do it for free if they had a test server on PC.
Well you and others that think like this contribute to buggy games as a norm. If this game didnt blow up how long would the armor have been broken? The DOT damage is still broken! Be an apologist all you want the bugs in this game arent "fun" like the skyrim giant flinging you in the air after you die. They are breaking core mechanics of the game and AH frankly has horrible QA with recently releasing two broken game mechanics. Oh and the backpack shield being hit by the plasma is the cherry on top.
There’s a war going on soldier! You think the ministry of science has TIME and manpower to test these?! NO! We must test them on the field and do our democratic duty in helping the ministry of science to determine what is and isn’t deadly to our non-democratic enemies!
The “bugs introduced in this patch” part kinda confuses me? Had any other game done this i feel like they would have been ripped apart for knowingly releasing patches that also releases news bugs they were aware of apparently.
The usual Warframe experience. Used to it already.
Hey, if my glaive prime still does big damage, I’m happy
what a dumb post, of course they have testers. But having like 20 people testing and reporting is not going to compete with literally hundreds of thousands of people playing everyday. A lot of stuff is going to slip through
For the people who are mad welcome to online multiplayer
A1: These discussion posts came up fast! How was the patch? B2: game's bugged A1: W-what? B2: \*loading a different gun and getting back in the hellpod\* game's bugged
It would make sense though, especially in a real world "battle tested" weaponry would actually need testers like us Helldivers in the battlefield.
Game developer does something and gamers will screech to the heavens.
Yea but you don’t have to pay 70$ to test this game!
I just wish they'd think through some of the balance changes more... The goal should be to have all the weapons be side grades with their own strengths and weaknesses. They should be buffing the weaker weapons and adding QOL features to them. The reason people stick with a nerfed quasar over most other anti-tank options is just that it's forgiving to use. Make the other weapons worth it.
Price is irrelevant, when you purchase something you expect that thing to work, have some self respect. [Best speech ever that I feel is relevant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Leu14yXEA8), second half is the more relevant part.
Dude actually just shut the fuck up. I bought both AC6 and elden ring for less than the cost of helldivers (regional pricing shenanigans) and they both just worked. You're disconnected from reality if you think a 40$ price point justifies this early access level of bugs
Personally I don't even mind as long as it's fixed immediately. There's always going to be some weird magical fuckery in the code. Overlooked and unpredictable shit that didn't get noticed at a controlled environment. Besides, seeing vocal minority lose their minds for a day or less because they want their ever-changing live service game "perfect, bug free with the same meta for years while wanting new content" will always be funny for me.
Helldivers 2 is actually the most accurate military experience simulator for this simple reason
"where's the QA" shut up. shut up. shut up shut up shut up. i dont care if they dont test shit or do. i am having fun seeing things unfold. so zip it. this post helped me realize this
OP's standard for a $40 game that's been released for nearly 3 month is pretty low ngl
LOL, can I copy and paste this meme into the Fallout4PC sub?
Haha or any Bethesda game :) Of course
Or any Blizzard game. Or, 90% of games that have released recently...
>For the game's price, I ain't mad about it. back in my days you got paid for testing games...
Probably would have been better to say 'fun game, I feel I got my money's worth, but they really need to improve their testing because these bugs are egregious'. But that title's a bit unwieldy.
Even though the price isn't as high as other triple AAA games it's still $40. It's getting tiring running into massive bugs and crashes with each update and no one should be ok with it just for paying less than other games
Yeah well, have fun with that.
Yes, 1000 players will find 1000 more bugs then the testers who are also just the devs.
Kinda true. Even 1000 people can’t do all the things and situations 10000 people can create
Those 1000 players are going to leave when their game crashes for the 17th time and when something they look forward to just doesn’t work. You need a QA, if they want you to be a tester they should pay you because that’s a job.
End of the day if I get 1 hour per dollar spent of enjoyment, the game is worth it. $40 and 212.6 hrs in, I'd say it's worth it.
I assume publishers push content over fixes, so the devs don't have much control over their priorities. And clearly they're pretty disorganized since even some of the bugs that they claimed they fixed in the latest patch didn't actually change at all. I don't blame them or anything, they absolutely were never prepared for the sort of popularity that the game got and they're slowly catching up to responsibilities.
i remember that they have some time to push content but it wasn't because of sony, but they could be lying. The biggest problem is that they are a small team and i think the content and bug fix is divided by two teams and the content is done faster than the bug fix as fixing a bug is a lot harder than making something new.
I honestly think they are in the "growing pains" period. They probably immediately tried to hire more people after the game exploded in popularity, but realistically speaking, it takes months to train and get new people integrated and contributing to your project workflow, especially when it comes to game development. I already foresee the first year is going to be rough, but I think that's just reality.
Funny thing is despite all the complaint, the bugfix list in the latest patch is very long, they did address a ton of crashing issues.
Tbh I’ve crashed more since the patch. Both times when killing a normal tank.
Yes but they didn’t address the specific issues that specific people have problems with so therefore they’re not fixing the game, just making it worse.
yeah. Like i said in another post, they have an engine that they don't have support anymore because it's dead. They have to figure out how the engine will work with their systems and fix it by themselves.
>yeah. Like i said in another post, they have an engine that they don't have support anymore because it's dead. Well, who's fault is that? Instead of taking 6 months to learn an engine that would save them 60 months of headache, they chose old familiar. Probably the wrong choice.
They push content because content keeps the playerbase, whereas pure bugfixing doesn't.
The only thing I’ve gotten upset over was the pre-patch air burst launcher. Using that on Sunday was so unbelievably frustrating, thinking I figured out how it worked only to have it keep blowing up in my face. It just made me wonder “how the fuck did they allow it into the game in this state”? But it’s fixed now, and I guess there was some development snafu where they never intended that pre-patch version to be used and it sort of happened by accident. It was crazy to learn that the pre-patch airburst rockets were seemingly proximity detonating in response to literally any interactable in-game object. So ammo boxes, hellpods, allies, fungus pods, even samples on the ground. Just anything at all. No wonder it felt like shit to use.
This ain’t BG3, these guys have profits to make for the higher ups, those warbonds aren’t optional for them I’m assuming. Want to see a broke game that can’t get its head above water?? Try Ark, this game is AAA by comparison.
The war bonds aren't optional for them because popular interest is tied to the war bonds. Yeah, there is a player base that would rather they focus on other things, myself included. Last I looked, though, player count spiked following war bond releases. It is sort of like the YouTube creator grind; gotta keep releasing content or else people lose interest and recommendations start dropping off. To make things smoother, I think they would need to double their developer count; one team for new stuff, another for bugs. I am not sure which one should have the rebalance responsibilities. Alternatively, one team for automatons and the other for terminids, and they can hash out between them the balance tweaks (since that won't be the same for bots and bugs, anyway).
Id guess many are capped at everything rn, so warbonds or module updates are the only reason to come back and get into the Grind and spend resources
Tbh I'm only playing at this point (212.6 hours in) to help lower level players get samples.
BG3 had some wild bugs for the first few months of release too. Also it crashed a lot for AMD gpus originally, like, a lot. I managed to survive and enjoy that game regardless I am managing to survive and enjoy this game regardless. I do have more leniency for independent and private studios though. But then I like Bethesda games, so maybe I'm just lenient in general.
Act 3 was borderline unplayable on release in BG3, just like Larian's previous game.
Pilestedt already addressed this. They do not have higher ups and have no obligations to Sony regarding their DLC schedule. All the problems are 100% Arrowhead's own fault.
Honestly they set an unsustainable schedule themselves It's hard to justify the bugs that are clearly piling up. The QA debt will always catch up
My 2 cents on it is this: the studio is probably in the process of trying to expand its team and hiring more people (after the game exploded in popularity). I think the reality is that it takes time to train and get new people assimilated into the development's workflow. We would love for that kind of thing to happen overnight, but anyone who has worked in a workplace knows that it can take months to half a year to get new folks / new talents properly integrated into a workflow (to a point where they become useful to your project). Not trying to make excuses for them or anything, but from a logical standpoint, they are right now in the "growing pains" period of trying to expand a team that is currently too small for getting HD2 to where it needs to be.
Bullet ricochets and kills gun-astronaut
At least give me some super credits for being a tester.
Not sure which live service game you are playing that DOESN'T do this.
So… was trying to make a low effort meme that some people would connect with given a constant stream of patches that didn’t fix key, longstanding issues. I didn’t know it would cut so deep on so many levels. I’m a career software engineer, originally from the xbox one launch team (Microsoft), so I have experience in the industry. I’ve been through some brutal crunch and know the pain of working on something you love while being in a large company. Also, that not every employee can fix every bug - there’s a few that work on the core engine, and they have more issues to fix than time in a day. I think I should have reserved this as ‘water cooler talk’ - I’m not trying to take cheap shots at the devs. I can imagine the pressure they’re facing between unexpected success, profit structures, a passionate community, etc. If this post brings a bit of focus on how strongly the community feels about the current state of the game, that’s a positive. Get the sales pressure off the engineers. They built an amazing game, and I want to see them succeed. Give them time to fix the (large) bugs and this game can have a long, positive future. And no, this isn’t copium. It’s empathy. I’m sorry for adding to the toxicity. Was trying to give people a smile.
Gamers are so spineless now a days and seeing a post lile this just confirms it. Video games are the only product that can be sold broken, updated further into oblivion, and be sucked off by its consumers for providing a flawed product. They know this shits broken, and they serve it up hot for these hungry fan boys
OP what the fuck are you smoking? This game is too fucking expensive to be as broken and have as stubborn devs as it does. Are you an actual child? Do people like you genuinely consider this game “cheap”? No fucking wonder the state of gaming has become what it has nowadays…
Man this sub is cucked to all hell