Penny Arcade - Comic - Community Engagement

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Penny Arcade - Comic - Community Engagement

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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Armored Chocobo

I've never even played it

*cue "I'm doing my part!" gif*

palidine40

I love me some hell diving, between enshroudening jumps. But around nerf number eight for the incendiary breaker (for real, 8th nerf, not even the last one) I started to get angry at super earth itself.

Why lower the damage again, put fewer bullets in the clip Again, why make the clip covered in more grease so you drop it while reloading Again, why put fewer magazines per belt Again.

dennis

This is where difficulty settings come in. You want people to not be OP? Let them crank the slider up. Don't just arbitrarily make them stop doing things they find to be fun.

ArmsForPeace84

dennis wrote: »

This is where difficulty settings come in. You want people to not be OP? Let them crank the slider up. Don't just arbitrarily make them stop doing things they find to be fun.

Helldivers 2 has those, as missions can be tackled on one of ten difficulty levels, with rewards scaling up by difficulty. However, players are used to taking on the higher difficulties using powerful weapons, that it would be far-fetched to describe as OP because they do not trivialize these missions. They merely outcompete weapons that are universally agreed to be garbage in their own right and in need of substantial buffing.

If these players must, now, dial down the difficulty due to the developer's habit of nerfing of all the legitimately good weapons in the game, then what the developer has done looks less like game-balancing, and more like the reduction of awards available, without spending extra money, to players who purchased the game at retail. In a live-service game monetized on the back end. And published by Sony.

Train Dodger

The devs want Helldives to be practically impossible. As in, they want people to statistically lose them 50% of the time, instead of finding something that works and then completing 90% of all Helldives. They want the game to feel unfair, like a survival-horror thing, at high levels. That's why they keep nerfing everything. If you're feeling overwhelmed, like you don't have a gun that actually works at stopping the giant swarms of enemies trying to rip you in half, it's basically on purpose. This is their intent.

They want you to use Stratagems instead of just carrying The One Broken Gun, but Stratagems have long cooldowns made longer by level hazards. Anti-armor weapons are handy, but situational, and they take up a slot that could be used for something else.

So, what they've done, essentially, is to take the few guns that actually work and nerf them to force players to use other things. This, of course, breaks the few "usable" meta builds that consistently win at high difficulty levels, which pisses off players because now their success rate in missions overall is lower. This is a terrible way to balance PVE games; never let a playerbase get used to a certain level of power and then hamstring them. That never works out. It just pisses people off.

A Dabble Of Thelonius

I've been steady using the same gun since release and spamming disposable rockets. Haven't missed a beat

Hevach

Train Dodger wrote: »

The devs want Helldives to be practically impossible. As in, they want people to statistically lose them 50% of the time, instead of finding something that works and then completing 90% of all Helldives. They want the game to feel unfair, like a survival-horror thing, at high levels. That's why they keep nerfing everything. If you're feeling overwhelmed, like you don't have a gun that actually works at stopping the giant swarms of enemies trying to rip you in half, it's basically on purpose. This is their intent.

They want you to use Stratagems instead of just carrying The One Broken Gun, but Stratagems have long cooldowns made longer by level hazards. Anti-armor weapons are handy, but situational, and they take up a slot that could be used for something else.

So, what they've done, essentially, is to take the few guns that actually work and nerf them to force players to use other things. This, of course, breaks the few "usable" meta builds that consistently win at high difficulty levels, which pisses off players because now their success rate in missions overall is lower. This is a terrible way to balance PVE games; never let a playerbase get used to a certain level of power and then hamstring them. That never works out. It just pisses people off.

I got the sense very early (when a few devs were basically mocking players who were complaining about this balance method way back in the early weeks of the game) was that the game wasn't PVE. It was asymmetrical PVP against the devs.

Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Armored Chocobo

Train Dodger wrote: »

The devs want Helldives to be practically impossible. As in, they want people to statistically lose them 50% of the time, instead of finding something that works and then completing 90% of all Helldives. They want the game to feel unfair, like a survival-horror thing, at high levels. That's why they keep nerfing everything. If you're feeling overwhelmed, like you don't have a gun that actually works at stopping the giant swarms of enemies trying to rip you in half, it's basically on purpose. This is their intent.

They want you to use Stratagems instead of just carrying The One Broken Gun, but Stratagems have long cooldowns made longer by level hazards. Anti-armor weapons are handy, but situational, and they take up a slot that could be used for something else.

So, what they've done, essentially, is to take the few guns that actually work and nerf them to force players to use other things. This, of course, breaks the few "usable" meta builds that consistently win at high difficulty levels, which pisses off players because now their success rate in missions overall is lower. This is a terrible way to balance PVE games; never let a playerbase get used to a certain level of power and then hamstring them. That never works out. It just pisses people off.

The Devs sound like they're being a "Me Vs The Players" kind of DM, which in only a few niche cases is considered something people enjoy. It's already got mixed results in D&D, I doubt doing it on a live-service online game is any better. Especially when you're making events and punishing players for not hitting goals.

Case and point: Their "Director" recently gave them a weekend to kill 1.5 million enemies, with 1/7th the playerbase they had at launch, and when it failed they gave them a Mine stratagem the community outright hated and didn't want in the game. The community literally voted to save kids, for no benefit whatsoever, instead of having this stratagem. It got forced in and the devs were just like "lol. lmao."

I think they got a BIT too high off their own supply.

Tofystedeth

I mean, hating the anti-tank mines is a meme, not real.
The last one was to get them in the game so that the thing they made like 2-3 months ago would finally see the light of day instead of being wasted work.
Only getting them if you fail the objective was the joke.
Lighten up.

Ringo

Red Hook Studios had much the same take on their game Darkest Dungeon - players shouldn't win, the game is about suffering

ArmsForPeace84

My unsolicited advice to Arrowhead would be, take advantage of the fact that your game is a live-service title, and if the players who form really effective teams are breezing through the most challenging content on offer... then release some more challenging content. Balance the weapons by introducing Terminids and Automatons who are armored against damage types that players have come to rely on. Maybe at the expense of their resistance to others, or to some underutilized strategems.

Watch, then, the narrative go from, the devs are fiddly and obsessed with making changes, they're trying to make us play a certain way, to... The enemy is adapting. That's what bugs and robots do, that's why they're such terrifying enemies. You frame it that way, and back it up by making better bugs and bots, instead of worse guns with less bullets, and the Helldivers will be flinging themselves against these new foes with abandon, and they will love you for it.

Armored Chocobo

ArmsForPeace84 wrote: »

My unsolicited advice to Arrowhead would be, take advantage of the fact that your game is a live-service title, and if the players who form really effective teams are breezing through the most challenging content on offer... then release some more challenging content. Balance the weapons by introducing Terminids and Automatons who are armored against damage types that players have come to rely on. Maybe at the expense of their resistance to others, or to some underutilized strategems.

Watch, then, the narrative go from, the devs are fiddly and obsessed with making changes, they're trying to make us play a certain way, to... The enemy is adapting. That's what bugs and robots do, that's why they're such terrifying enemies. You frame it that way, and back it up by making better bugs and bots, instead of worse guns with less bullets, and the Helldivers will be flinging themselves against these new foes with abandon, and they will love you for it.

That's another thing, apparently the units have weaknesses but either they're arbitrarily changed from the HD1 versions, or make no sense.

Like the Charger. It's rear is unarmored and tends to stun itself running into things. Is the weakness the unarmored butt? No...

ArmsForPeace84

Armored Chocobo wrote: »

ArmsForPeace84 wrote: »

My unsolicited advice to Arrowhead would be, take advantage of the fact that your game is a live-service title, and if the players who form really effective teams are breezing through the most challenging content on offer... then release some more challenging content. Balance the weapons by introducing Terminids and Automatons who are armored against damage types that players have come to rely on. Maybe at the expense of their resistance to others, or to some underutilized strategems.

Watch, then, the narrative go from, the devs are fiddly and obsessed with making changes, they're trying to make us play a certain way, to... The enemy is adapting. That's what bugs and robots do, that's why they're such terrifying enemies. You frame it that way, and back it up by making better bugs and bots, instead of worse guns with less bullets, and the Helldivers will be flinging themselves against these new foes with abandon, and they will love you for it.

That's another thing, apparently the units have weaknesses but either they're arbitrarily changed from the HD1 versions, or make no sense.

Like the Charger. It's rear is unarmored and tends to stun itself running into things. Is the weakness the unarmored butt? No...

Wow, that seems like enemy design 101. They must be "subverting expectations."