this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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It was the patch that got me to stop playing. Why you would nerf weapons in a non-competitive game rather than make poor preforming weapons viable is beyond me.
It's akin to Steve Jobs telling everyone they're holding their phone wrong.
It's to keep design space open and to minimize developer work.
Let's say we decide to keep an overperforming gun. It does all the things. It has all the ammo, all the damage, all fire rate, all the reload speed. Now, all future weapons have to be made with that as a consideration. Why would players choose this new weapon, when there's the old overperformer? The design space is being controlled and minimized by the overperformer. Players will complain if new weapons aren't on the level of the overperformer.
Now, let's say we have ten weapons with one clear overperformer. Now, we can either nerf a single weapon to bring it in line with the others, or buff nine weapons to attempt to bring them up to the level of the overperformer. Assuming the balance adjustments of each weapon are the same amount of work, that's 9x the effort. However, if we assume we do this extra work to satisfy players, now we have ten overperforming guns and players find the game too easy, so now we also have to buff enemies to match. However, the game isn't designed to handle these increase in difficulty. Players complain if we just add more health to enemies, so we have to do other things like increase enemy count, but adding more enemies increases performance issues. It's a cascading problem.
I consider nerfs a necessary evil. It's absurd to ask developers to always buff weapons and give them so much work when they could be developing actual additions to the game. Sometimes, a weapon really does need a nerf.
Also, I'm not sure how much this applies to helldivers specifically, but from what I've seen, teams didn't really teamwork. Because they didn't have to.
This can be very bad because if it follows these steps:
Then people will complain, justly, that they don't have the tools and methods to beat the challenge. Which is correct. They don't. But you can't just tell people to "go play easy mode and learn the game", when they are "max level" and put 40-100 hours into the game.
Of course the synergy tools still have to exist and I'm not knowledgeable about helldivers whether they do.
There is no good choice to "encourage" teamplay, except via creating "natural" funnels that people will "end up at" "organically", and putting a challenge in front of them that they can only work with teamwork. But that means the challenge has to beat them, until they get it. And that may never happen.
One game I have found exceptional as a case study for what is "overpowered" and what isn't, and why, is magic the gathering. All the "code" is public. The complaints are public. The bans are public, and explained. So if anyone here wants to nerd out about balance and doesn't know mtg yet, there is a rabbit hole for you.
I remember an incident in Red Orchestra where we were on a tank map. A teammate hopped in a tank. So, I did too. He jumped out of the tank and into another; so I joined. He jumped out and started shooting at me, basically insisting I get my own tank. Apparently, his level of tactical sense and reflexes in a tank vastly outweighed the value of having a second player in the gunner’s seat; even though the game was realistically meant to depict tank crews cooperating.
It's a common issue with lots of team play games. The other player decided that it was better to have two people operating separate mortars than to have one of them provide small arms cover on the flanks of the tank.
Helldivers 2 has a similar problem where some players can help other players reload their larger weapons at a much faster rate than typically; however the player base decided that it's better to fan out and each operate the weapon solo because shots do not need to be made so rapidly and clumping together increases the odds both players die.
Thank you so fucking much.
If you want the game to have long term viability, you have to have nerfs. Otherwise in 3 years everyone who has been playing since day 1 has a mech with a gattling cannon that fires nukes and is fighting gods.
Average anime protagonist progression.
*Cough* Warframe *cough*
Preach.
The game does have a bit of a balance problem, but as usual the players are not the best at designing the solution.
Left 2 Dead 2 wants to have a word with you 😏
Making all the weapons overpowered to match ruins the intended difficulty.
I dont know what everyone is so upset about, the shotgun feels fine, the recoil doesnt feel bad, and the mag size isnt a huge problem for me.
Plus the flamethrower buff and laser cannon buff are super nice. Im usually in favor of the whole "buff everything else, no debuff" but this honestly feels fine.
It's been rough adjusting to how many overcharged shots it takes to take down a charger, but it's been a blast running with some flamethrower friends.
It also gave me an excuse to bring back my rover. No, it's still not as practical as the shield, but it is more fun.
This is a dumb take.
If there was a gun that 1 tapped every enemy in the game and had infinite ammo and maybe even auto aimed for you, that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn't it?
Would you not want that gun to be nerfed or would you want every gun in the game to become a 1 tap super weapon?
Good thing you get to choose which gun you use. I personally would love that weapon. I've got two kids and a full time job. I need a nerf mode. The rest of y'all can use whatever other guns you like. But give me the BFG and let me have my fun.
This game has like ten difficulty options. If you need the BFG on easy mode then you probably are just bad at videogames.
So what. Let me be bad at video games and still enjoy it. Not everything needs to be a side hustle, maxed out, semi-pro, rise and grind. I just want to have a hobby, even if I'm shit at it forever, because it's fun.
You should try it sometime. It's a much less stressful and actually enjoyable way to live.
Yea, that's why difficulty easier than "impossible" and "helldive" exist, so that you can enjoy the game on your time.
But when other players want their guns to be of roughly equal value, so that they don't feel pressured to not take the meta, that's not a bad thing imo
That's what the difficulty mode selection is for. If you want an easy One-Shot experience just play on the easier modes. Overpowered over tuned weapons just create assholes in the higher difficulties kicking people out of games for not taking "the correct" load out.
Those of us with a little more time or a little more skill or a little more both enjoy the harder difficulties actually being... Difficult. Imagine that, the correct place to give people the ability to have a Nerf mode is in the difficulty slider which thankfully the developers have done!
Instead of complaining about weapon balance just turn down the difficulty and enjoy your easy experience
Nope, I want a balanced sandbox. If I went into a lobby and everyone was using the 1 tapper (because why wouldn't they) Then the game would be way too easy and I would have to do closed lobbies and go out of my way to find people that want to run the game without the 1 tapper, just to have fun.
If you're bad at games you can just play on easy mode.
Bad straw man argument
Eh...it's sort of a valid argument..however...it's like instagib in unreal. It was one of the funniest game modes in the game.
Instagib on low level enemies would be fun as hell...then the boss spawns show up and obliterate you...that's how I thought this game was going to go.
Now it's really a game of find more ammo and run from anything with armor until your strategems recharge.
No part of that guy's comment is valid. He's not even the barest bit subtle about how badly he is distorting the facts.
Nobody is talking about any of these things: a gun that 1 tapped every enemy, infinite ammo, auto aiming, wanting every gun to become a 1 tap super weapon. It's not even part of the discussion. All of these are imaginary things this person made up. Somehow people are just looking at it and nodding instead of calling out the bullshit.
The guy I replied to said it's always better to buff under performing weapons than nerf OP weapons. I employed a line of logic called a "logical extreme" where I devise an extreme scenario that both follows the original logic and is also an untenable position, thus showing that the original logic does not hold up and therefore shouldn't intrinsically apply to the realistic scenario.
Because in both my extreme and the real scenario, you have a weapon that was so good it made most other weapons not worth using and made the game easier than intended. In that scenario you could either go and buff almost every other weapon in the game and then make sweeping enemy balance changers to make them harder in the face of all the buffs, or you can simply nerf the one OP weapon. And I think the more sensible option is clear.
1 tap super weapon, and introduce a viable challenge to make that obsolete.
But you'll just get premium war bond weapons from here on out to close the difficulty gap.
The weapons in premium war bond aren't really good. Also, if it's a nudge at the premium part being a money grab... I'm lvl 17 and I have the premium unlocked without spend any real money.
This game has like ten difficulty modes.
Did you ever played Payday 2, where powercreep made us go from guns with all the best attachments could maybe kill the toughest enemy in the game in half a mag, or about 15 shots, to the devs needing to implement 3 (technically 4) more difficulty levels with new enemies that were just old enemies with more resistances or 10 times the health as their stock launch counterparts, and those things dying in 2 hits from all the meta build weapons. All because they kept introducing more powerful weapons, more attachments that made launch guns more and more obsolete, and general more power creep through skill tree expansions and entirely new jobs for perks. The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage and even using stuff you could get only from the base game and free updates left every weapon feeling samey with the same tactics being used and things not in the meta utterly ignored by anyone playing end game content. Because instead of reigning in the things that overperformed and broke the balance curve, they just kept powercreeping new items into the game.
And what exactly do you think is going to happen with this game?
You're missing the point. Player counts for that game dived because despite fairly regular new content and replay value, the meta and power creep pushed all players into using very similar functioning builds with everything that could be considered an alternate playstyle being so underperforming many people couldn't even make them work in the 2-3 difficulty range. HD2 has much better variance in maps and enemies, so as long as devs keep the trickle of new content and powercreep under control this game easily has a 6-8 year shelf life. Community will trickle downwards like all games do as they age and new games pop up. But as long as the devs don't fall into the trap of caving to vocal minority of players demanding any exploits they find stay in the game, we could easily have 100k-200k regular pops a year from now.
I’ve been playing since launch. I played a lot last night. I do not see the problems. I play on hard difficulty. I have a good time whether winning or losing.
There are players that take the game far more seriously than I and honestly they make the game more tense than it needs to be. They make it feel competitive, in that if I’m not doing what they think a “good” player should then I’m unwelcome.
I think the vast majority of complaints stem from these players. I lament that another Call of Duty is not coming out sooner so that the community can diminish into relative obscurity, hopefully populated with like minds that view this as a game and not an e-Sport.
Lack of further content and wanting to lock the little content they do have behind the premium bonds, which will drive people to buy credits since they don’t have time to grind out the credits needed.