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.
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.
The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage
And what exactly do you think is going to happen with this game?
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?
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.
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.
that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn’t it?
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.
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.
This game has like ten difficulty options. If you need the BFG on easy mode then you probably are just bad at videogames.
“Given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game”
Except people are complaining because they were having fun before and now they’re having less fun. It hasn’t affected me as I’ve replaced the railgun with EAT, but I do think the nerf was mostly unnecessary. All it did was give players less options for higher difficulties.
Pretty much true.
The dev comments are hilarious, and they were obviously trolling
Seems like a major case of Redditors being able to dish it out but not take anything in return.
Seems like a major case of Redditors being able to dish it out but not take anything in return.
Nah, this was Reddit just trolling the developers, that means it’s all part of the joke and not a problem.
Some people can’t take a joke I guess.
I was watching Mo1st play Helldivers the other night and he mentioned someone’s comment about it having the kernel anti-cheat, and one of his buddies immediately said “that guy’s a redditor.”
I had never felt more attacked yet agreed with something so much.
If people knew what devs said (justifiably) about players when nobody is looking, the internet would implode.
Like, I’m not trying to be an asshole, but holy fuck gamers are the worst about actually knowing how games are made or the consequences of various decisions they want made.
I don’t know why 80% of gamers think playing games means they know how to make games, but it infuriates many of us to no end. We get that it’s just misguided desire to see the games improve but jfc it makes life incredibly difficult (especially for the CMs)
EDIT: Imagine someone told an architect “You should just remove that load bearing wall. This other building doesn’t have one in that position and it’s great. Why is it so hard for you?”
Oh they definitely say that, and some are dumb enough to shop around for engineers they can bully. Just look at the Millennium Tower in San Fran. Idiot investors found engineers they could bully, built an inadequate foundation, and are now trying to save the building. A huge building they just built.
Yeah, and anyone with an ounce of common sense will point at that and be like “See? This is what happens.” But an outrageous chunk of gamers seem incapable of applying the same logic to game development 🤷
Edit: btw this is why knowing how to give good feedback is a really good skill to learn
Bad feedback: “You should remove this button, it sucks and I don’t want it”
Good feedback: “It disrupts my experience when I go to press button A but accidentally press button B because it’s so close.”
I’ve attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you’re spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I’ve spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.
But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that’s playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that’s breaking preventing them from logging in, that that’s not actually my area of expertise and that I’m just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we’ve tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn’t want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so… not really a choice there. And we can’t admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)
And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I’m never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can’t throw myself in front of that bus again. I’m gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.
I don’t think it has kernel anti cheat tho. Runs just fine on Linux without root permissions
Damn, getting downvoted for just stating my experience. It doesn’t require kernel level access on Linux and runs fine—it’s not a stretch to think it doesn’t have kernel level anticheat (it doesn’t on Linux, just on Windows).
I don’t know if this makes me “a redditor” somehow or what, but…
As a dev, I am deeply troubled by the gaming industry so calmly walking into kernel anti cheats. It’s insane and being tossed around like it’s nothing.
Helldivers especially, since they picked one of the sketchiest ones and it’s a game that entirely doesn’t need it.
I have no idea if Reddit has suddenly picked up on this, but I’ve been pissed since at least Valorants release, but have seen more YT videos talking about it recently.
I really do not understand how server anti cheat is not way easier. I feel like devs are caught up on realtime anti cheat and not willing to do anything asynchronous. Or they really like paying licensing fees for client-side anticheat. I just don’t understand how any competent software engineer or systems admin or architect trusts the client so fervently.
Game servers are incredibly expensive, and server side anticheat is more costs.
Whether or not the studios can afford it (they can.) is irrelevant, it’s simply cheaper to go for flawed client side because the client will do most of the processing.
Any software developer worth their salt simply does not trust the client, but management is gonna manage and the engineers have to come up with a solution to “we must have anticheat because we said so, and you must keep server costs per user below x”. It’s easy to forget that most implementation choices in video games aren’t made by developers who like games, they’re made by middle managers who view games as a money-generaring industry.
I really do not understand how server anti cheat is not way easier.
In a clean slate, it is. It’s also way more effective (except for things like wall hacks, aim bots, recoil suppressors, etc, but most of those things are only really important and popular in competitive FPS). It’s also much simpler to understand and to leave no “holes” behind. It also lives in the developers domain so it can’t be “compromised” or circumvented.
The thing is that client side “anti cheat” can be commoditized. Every game with server authority/anti cheat needs specific server software to run their game logic. Client anti cheat is basically “look at everything else running on the system and see if any of it seems suspicious”. As such, there’s not really anything “game specific” to these - they basically are just a watch dog looking for bad actors - so as such, one company can come along, make one, and sell it to other devs.
This being “off the shelf” and not something the dev team has to think about besides a price tag means that management is just going to buy a third party solution and check off the “anti cheat” box on their task list.
I feel like devs are caught up on realtime anti cheat and not willing to do anything asynchronous.
First, this is a management problem and not the devs. Any dev worth their salt knows this isn’t really a good solution.
But I’d say the more relevant and prominent thing here is that game companies just don’t want to have to run servers anymore. It’s a cost, requires dev time, and requires maintenance, and they don’t want to do that. If these games had servers running the game world like games used to, they’d inherently have their own “anti cheat” built in for free that wouldn’t necessarily catch everything but would do a better job than some of these. And it could be enhanced to cover more bases.
But studios don’t want to do this anymore. It’s easier to make the game p2p and slap an off the shelf anti cheat and call it a day.
Some games still require matchmaking servers etc, but the overhead there is way lower.
Or they really like paying licensing fees for client-side anticheat.
Not that I agree with the decision, but it is definitely cheaper and faster than the alternative. But picking something like nprotect totally fucking baffles me. There are better options.
I just don’t understand how any competent software engineer or systems admin or architect trusts the client so fervently.
In some ways, same. Every project I’ve been on that has gotten anywhere near client side trust I’ve fought adamantly about avoiding it. I’ve won most arguments on it, but there are some places where they just utterly refuse.
But then there are things like New World… I don’t know how the fuck that shit released like it did. The number of things trusted to the client were absolutely baffling. I expected Amazon’s first foray into gaming to be a fucking joke, but I was totally appalled at how bad it turned out. They even touted hiring ex blizzard talent to get my hopes up first.
This is exactly it.
" A moderator on the game’s Discord server, for instance, said “watching u all cry, amuses me so much,” while another said on Reddit that complaints about weapon nerfs were perhaps in reality a question of “skill issue.” "
Are you kidding? That’s fucking hilarious. Learn to use a different weapon than the railgun you absolute chuffs.
I was expecting hate speech or something… but this sounds almost like friendly banter
The crying comment comes off as more of a dick thing to say, but the skill issue bit is pretty funny.
What a whiney playerbase then
They literally said they were enjoying their customers tears.
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you’re a business, that’s just stupid to say.
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if you enjoy the suffering of other people you’re an absolute shit human being.
You are taking this way to seriously
Me, seeing the tears of 30 year-old children waaaahhhing because their favorite vidder gaem gun does X% less damage:
: - D
1 yup
2 have you played Dark Souls?
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“I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don’t have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”
Honestly, I don’t think it’s a big deal. But it’s just stupid as a developer to act like this.
I often ask about risk vs reward in these situations. What were they going to gain by acting like this and what were they going to risk by acting like this?
They’re humans, too.
Eh. I went and looked at the comments. Sometimes people get a little lippy and it’s whatever? Shit happens. But basically telling the customer ‘i get off on you crying about this’ is definitely going to cause some issues for the company.
Yeah, that’s a line you don’t cross in PR ever. “Cry more, I like it” is just not the message you want to send.
/Kleenex has entered the chat
My god some people have some thin skin…
