I sincerely think Arrowhead panicked. The core team is only twenty people, they've had their heads down working on the game for years. Then a game that was intended to sell maybe a few hundred k units exploded, outsold most of the most popular games in history, and a niche comedy tactical shooter suddenly had a vast audience that... couldn't figure out how to deal with a a fairly basic charging mini-boss and felt oppressed by anti-tank weapons.
Despite having very good daily player numbers on steam I think the vast social media hate campaign, the endless tirades and histrionics on the main subreddit, and the outright harassment got to them and they basically just caved to the mob's demands. It didn't matter that they had a steady 25k players, all they were seeing was seething, unhinged anger from every direction.
But hey, their 24 peak is went up to 35k as of this writing, so gutting everything that made their labor of love special and unique was probably totally worth it!
I absolutely cannot understand it. They added difficulty 10 specifically to be extremely challenging for people who wanted that... and then hordes of people... complained it was too hard? They didn't say that, htey used words like "unfair" and "tedious" and "imbalanced", but in the end they were complainging that the 10th and most challenging of 10 fairly granular difficulty modes was too hard for them and they demanded it be made drastically easier.
They had ten difficulties to choose from, but they demanded to play on 10 and for 10 to be brought down to their level.
The whole episode legitimately caused me to re-assess... uhh... there's no not-arrogant way to say this, but my broad competencies compared to a normal person. I still can't really grasp how people were unable to deal with chargers at all. "Clumsy armored enemy that charges you but is vulnerable from behind" is one of the simplest and oldest stock game bosses and it absoltuely, competely, utterly defeated the problem solving abilities of at minimum hundreds of thousands of people and I'm still struggling to fit that in to how I view the potential and limits of other people.
I think a big chunk of it is; Normal people cannot cooperate with others.
Like, Vermintide, Darktide? Pretty niche games where cooperation is both necessary and enforced by special disabler and assassin enemies.
HD2, success also required cooperation, but it reached a massive audience and most of those people... just... don't... communicate. They don't ping, they don't use chat, they don't use voice. They don't even passively stick together. I worked out, it actually makes things exponentially worse when you have players that don't cooperate, because they trigger every patrol and spawn, they don't cover or protect each other, the players aren't making use of all their strats together. If you're all together you're rarely ever not going to have some gigantic bomb ready to go. BUt if it's four people running off alone they're gonna get overwhelmed even by minor threats. And since they don't know how to cooperate they don't know they have to cooperate, so when they get absolutely ruined by something that would be trivial for a squad working together they can only think that the game is being mean and punishing them.
It's sad and pathetic. How did we get to the point where people can't even stay together and point at interesting things? We talk about alienation so much but this is it; People cannot communicate or cooperate at the simplest, most basic level.
"I'm great at the game so i'm going to run to the other side of the map alone and do objectives"
27s later
"Why didn't you jerks help me when i was getting killed by that monster i quit!"
And even if john helldiver is good enough to run off alone they never, ever think about whether the rest of the team can manage when they're at 3/4 instead of 4/4.
Vermintide 2 has so many communication hotkeys/shortcuts it baffles me people don't call out threats and whatnot more often. People with natural bond who don't pick up tomes when another person has health duping/sharing is one of my pet peeves. I shouldn't even have to ask.
Champion is secretly the hardest difficulty (more than legend or cataclysm) because that's where all the """"solo carry"""" players congregate.
That's because youre a fake gamer. Real gamers only play on the hardest difficulty, because they are the true elite. Only they are about to take on these difficult challenges that filthy causuals could never handle. So if the highest difficulty is too hard for a real then its obviously unfair, poorly balanced, and badly implemented. Hope that helped
deleted by creator
I sincerely think Arrowhead panicked. The core team is only twenty people, they've had their heads down working on the game for years. Then a game that was intended to sell maybe a few hundred k units exploded, outsold most of the most popular games in history, and a niche comedy tactical shooter suddenly had a vast audience that... couldn't figure out how to deal with a a fairly basic charging mini-boss and felt oppressed by anti-tank weapons.
Despite having very good daily player numbers on steam I think the vast social media hate campaign, the endless tirades and histrionics on the main subreddit, and the outright harassment got to them and they basically just caved to the mob's demands. It didn't matter that they had a steady 25k players, all they were seeing was seething, unhinged anger from every direction.
But hey, their 24 peak is went up to 35k as of this writing, so gutting everything that made their labor of love special and unique was probably totally worth it!
deleted by creator
I absolutely cannot understand it. They added difficulty 10 specifically to be extremely challenging for people who wanted that... and then hordes of people... complained it was too hard? They didn't say that, htey used words like "unfair" and "tedious" and "imbalanced", but in the end they were complainging that the 10th and most challenging of 10 fairly granular difficulty modes was too hard for them and they demanded it be made drastically easier.
They had ten difficulties to choose from, but they demanded to play on 10 and for 10 to be brought down to their level.
The whole episode legitimately caused me to re-assess... uhh... there's no not-arrogant way to say this, but my broad competencies compared to a normal person. I still can't really grasp how people were unable to deal with chargers at all. "Clumsy armored enemy that charges you but is vulnerable from behind" is one of the simplest and oldest stock game bosses and it absoltuely, competely, utterly defeated the problem solving abilities of at minimum hundreds of thousands of people and I'm still struggling to fit that in to how I view the potential and limits of other people.
deleted by creator
I think a big chunk of it is; Normal people cannot cooperate with others.
Like, Vermintide, Darktide? Pretty niche games where cooperation is both necessary and enforced by special disabler and assassin enemies.
HD2, success also required cooperation, but it reached a massive audience and most of those people... just... don't... communicate. They don't ping, they don't use chat, they don't use voice. They don't even passively stick together. I worked out, it actually makes things exponentially worse when you have players that don't cooperate, because they trigger every patrol and spawn, they don't cover or protect each other, the players aren't making use of all their strats together. If you're all together you're rarely ever not going to have some gigantic bomb ready to go. BUt if it's four people running off alone they're gonna get overwhelmed even by minor threats. And since they don't know how to cooperate they don't know they have to cooperate, so when they get absolutely ruined by something that would be trivial for a squad working together they can only think that the game is being mean and punishing them.
A
deleted by creator
It's sad and pathetic. How did we get to the point where people can't even stay together and point at interesting things? We talk about alienation so much but this is it; People cannot communicate or cooperate at the simplest, most basic level.
deleted by creator
Yeah. I hate that.
"I'm great at the game so i'm going to run to the other side of the map alone and do objectives"
27s later
"Why didn't you jerks help me when i was getting killed by that monster i quit!"
And even if john helldiver is good enough to run off alone they never, ever think about whether the rest of the team can manage when they're at 3/4 instead of 4/4.
Vermintide 2 has so many communication hotkeys/shortcuts it baffles me people don't call out threats and whatnot more often. People with natural bond who don't pick up tomes when another person has health duping/sharing is one of my pet peeves. I shouldn't even have to ask.
Champion is secretly the hardest difficulty (more than legend or cataclysm) because that's where all the """"solo carry"""" players congregate.
Getting DOTA flashbacks....
That's because youre a fake gamer. Real gamers only play on the hardest difficulty, because they are the true elite. Only they are about to take on these difficult challenges that filthy causuals could never handle. So if the highest difficulty is too hard for a real
then its obviously unfair, poorly balanced, and badly implemented. Hope that helped 