I've been trying to be helpful on the Helldivers sub. When people say "X is impossible and Y needs to be nerfed/buff I'd go earnestly say "okay this is how it works, and these are the tools you have, and here is how you can use those tools to solve the problem or succeed or overcome the situation.
And, invariably, what I get back is abuse and scorn and insults and incredulity. The poster, and the hundreds of people supporting them, don't want the solution to be within them. They don't want to hear that they have not mastered game systems, that they don't understand how the weapons and enemies work, that they're making mistakes that can be corrected or that they can learn new tactics that will grant them victory.
The problem cannot lie in them. The problem must be external. The game must be broken, or bugged, or the devs must be fools. They are good enough and skilled enough and smart enough to play on the highest difficulty, but they cannot win, so the highest difficulty is broken and the devs must mechanically reduce the difficulty until they can easily, effortlessly conquer, until their "power fantasy" of unlimited unearned prowess can be restored. If they are challenged, if they face difficulty, if they face hardship, that is a flaw in the game. All obstacles must be smoothed down. Their favorite weapon should be the ideal choice for all situations.
At first I was overjoyed at the opportunity to share my knowledge and expertise, to help others learn what I had learned and enjoy the sublime feeling of mastery.
Then i was confused, because the rejection of simple tactics, simple explanations of systems and ideas, must mean I was not communicating clearly enough. Surely, if I only found the right words?
Then, anger. Why won't they engage with these ideas? Why do they reject simple explanations clearly explained? Why do they insult and berate instead of questioning or interrogating? Where is the desire to grow, to overcome, to perfect?
Finally; contempt. I do not care. These fools, let them stew in their own ignorance and misery. What can be said to them? They cannot be educated, not because they are illiterate, but because they refuse the mere possibility of education. They refuse to accept the world as it is, instead demanding from god the utopia they surely deserve.
What can you say to someone like that? What can you do but sneer "git gud" and move on?
I'd never really questioned where the "git gud" cliche that Dark Souls players threw around so mercilessly came from. But now I suspect that I know.
I don't understand the problem. Every single difficulty of this game is very doable even for average players.
The main problem you face most of the time is that dying has a snowball effect, when you die you drop your equipment and it's usually in the middle of a swarm. Recovering from that at the highest difficulty usually costs tonnes of lives. This frustrates people but it's a part of the game, it wouldn't be "hell" without it. Millions of lives are supposed to be lost in the pursuit of democracy, players dying a lot is essential to the satire of the game.
One problem I think I see among the audience is that people have no emotional self-control. They do not know how to cope with dying. They have a very poor mental game. And when they get tilted they play worse and worse and worse too.
The other problem I see with players is that they simply are not shooting enough. So often I see them wasting time staring at the enemy instead of firing their gun at the enemy or throwing an airstrike. 5 seconds is the time it takes to put down 15 bugs that are on screen right now but instead you just looked at them and jogged in a different direction. SHOOT. Crowd clearance is an essential part of the game and every member of the squad needs to be doing as much crowd clearance as possible as often as possible.
The last problem is aggroing enemies that are not aggro'd. Stop that. It's totally unnecessary, and every non-aggro'd group should be engaged initially with an airstrike as the opening to the engagement anyway.
One problem I think I see among the audience is that people have no emotional self-control. They do not know how to cope with dying. They have a very poor mental game. And when they get tilted they play worse and worse and worse too.
Agreed. And I think the new respawn rules have exacerbated it to an extent. In HD1 there were no lives. As long as reinforcement was off cooldown, and someone managed to get off the strat before they got run over by a charger, all dead teammates would reinforce. If you wiped you wiped, and that was it. But if you were holding the strat when a tank blew you up it would hit hte ground and call everyone in. That made the team's survival critical, while the individual's survival was not very important. In HD2, with limited lives and very long reinforcement cooldown after you run out, the individual's survival becomes much more important and losing a life actually hurts the whole team. In HD1 it was sometime beneficial t blow yourself up if you were trapped on the wrong side of a swarm or illuminate barrier so the rest of the team could escape (screen tethering). You can't really get away with that now.
I don't know if they fixed it yet but there was definitely something wrong with the difficulty of the missions to extract scientists on Automaton planets. You needed to get lucky on top of having a highly coordinated 4-man team to trick the AI into not attacking the facility to MAYBE barely scrape by a victory. Those mission types would drop like 3-4x the normal amount of enemy reinforcements on top dropping more than normal amounts of the heaviest units. It was like 20x more difficult even on lower difficulties than the civilian rescue counterpart missions you would see in other operations.
They did deploy a fix for something on them, but it never really changed the difficulty. They're supposed to be that hard I think.
These are planetary defence missions so I suspect they're intentionally very hard to prevent players from stopping the AI from ever moving forwards with the war. That mission does not exist on Liberation planets that are already owned by the enemy.
I'm not sure what is/was going on with those missions, but I still haven't developed a reliable strategy for doing them at high levels. The smoke everything strategy is extremely difficult to pull off. The last time I tried we couldn't get the 3 people make noise, one person is sneaky and pushes buttons to work. We were experimenting with a variation on that where three people stay outside but in LOS of the base and try to draw enemies out of the base and away from the button pusher, but we still need work.
I've done it at level 8 with a full squad running 3 turrets each and an anti-heavy weapon. Everyone also needs impact grenades and to understand 3 impact grenades to the turret of a tank will kill it.
The sneaky approach does not work, bots will drop tanks dirtectly on the facility regardless of sneaking.
This map in particular suffers GREATLY from the problem of enemy forces becoming larger and larger over time, a mechanic that exists on other maps too but is harder to notice. The mode must be rushed.
I have a feeling that delayed use of mortar turrets would also be useful for it. The first 120 seconds do not require mortars and I suspect people are blowing their loads by deploying everything they have immediately.
Thank you for sharing. The narrative and developing strats around that specific mission have been really cool to watch.
Sadly I can't get random groups to even play it anymore. Everyone on the defence planets is just farming levels, they instantly quit the lobby when you lock in the extract mission.
There's no avoiding it here. Sometimes you just get fucked. Seems to be helldivers shtick.
The fun parts are when that doesn't happen, but every now and then some bad luck just returns an ungodly awful game.
I have no idea what you were hostile about, didn't see it
The problem cannot lie in them. The problem must be external. The game must be broken, or bugged, or the devs must be fools.
Very common in LOL community, there even is a conspiracy theory that there exists losers queue which is matchmaking intentionally matching you with bad players to reduce the winrate down to 50%
I thought losers queue was just a way to trash talk your teammates. Like you happen to have a few bad games and so then when your team sucks again they say "I must be in loser's queue". As in, my team is so bad. People actually believe that's a game system?
Isn't that legitimately in dota2? Where it matches you with other toxic players or smt?
I dont know, but even if there is, that doesnt mean there is losers queue in league
DOTA2 has a "low priority penalty" that it applies to your account temporarily if you get reported by many people in a short amount of time. Aside from that the DOTA2 community has some absolutely wild superstitions about how matchmaking works.
My low-stakes conspiracy theory is that you get prioritized higher in matchmaking if you quickly click okay on that alert that comes up if you wait for 10 minutes, since it proves that you're still around and will actually join a game
I think the type of people to continually post like that on subreddits etc have already made their choice. When I'm struggling to get better at something I'm usually reading other people's posts and advice, not posting myself to complain. If there is something specific I really can't understand how to do, I'll ask about that specific thing and take the advice I get. I suspect most people making posts like you describe are just their to vent and complain and don't really want help, hence their shitty reaction to you.
Personally, as an old who likes games but doesn't invest much time into getting good at them, I don't get why people are so worried about sucking. Especially in a PvE game. Especially, especially in a PvE game where the idea that you're actually idiotic canon fodder beneath all the ooh-rah bullshit is thematically baked in.
I just wish I had something that would play Helldivers. It seems like a game I'd really enjoy being rubbish at. And if someone helped me get better too, then cool.
With Helldivers, the game is very challenging and demanding on the player and the team. You can suck as long as you cooperate with your team and can contribute to success, but having one or two people on the team who don't understand how to play can really hurt the experience for everyone.
A core example is enemy patrols - Enemy groups patrol the map. If they see you they will call in an unlimited number of reinforcements. under most circumstances the reinforcements will never stop coming. If a player understands this they'll deal with any immediate threats and run away. The goal is to complete the objectives, enemies are an obstacle to completing that goal.
But players who don't understand that, who think they're playing a horde shooter, or who stubbornly believe that the in-game propaganda about Helldivers being one person armies is how you're supposed to actually play, they'll just sit there and keep fighting and keep fighting and keep fighting until they get overrun. At best, the rest of the team leaves them behind to die by themselves. At worst they constantly aggro enemies all around, making the mission much much harder for no benefit.
In a PvP game you can shuffle teams to make sure no one is always on the losing side. but with a challenging, demanding PvE game there's no fairness. The game is trying to kill you, and Helldivers in particular doesn't have a merciful AI director tasked with challenging you but not overwhelming you. Helldivers wants to kill you. A team can handle one or two players who aren't very good at shooting or struggle to consistently call in air strikes, but only one or maybe two, and only if they otherwise understand the game loop and are able to work with and contribute to the team. Four skilled individuals, playing as individuals, who don't cooperate are going to struggle. Any number of unskilled individuals who are not cooperating with the team are going to make things much much harder for everyone.
It's a team game that requires teamwork and cooperation in a way that most games don't.
Have you tried HD1? There's a small but steady community and it's a great game. In a lot of ways HD2 is HD1 in 3d, with the majority of systems and concepts intact.
If they see you they will call in an unlimited number of reinforcements. under most circumstances the reinforcements will never stop coming. If a player understands this they'll deal with any immediate threats and run away.
They're not really unlimited, breaches have a cooldown and another breach can not be called until that cooldown is up. The issue is that 1 person can't clear a breach wave before the next one is called in by themselves, so groups often get overrun if they're split between people focusing the objective vs people who want to clear waves fully.
A 4 person group that actually fights off these waves can completely fight them off and make the fighting go cold. A single individual can not. Groups should decide whether they're gonna be the run n gun objective hunting type of lobby or the full clear type of lobby before they launch the pods.
Good to know! I've been trying to puzzle that out for weeks. There's so much to learn about the game.
It can be used tactically. If a breach just got called elsewhere you know you have a window in which another one will not be called at you location, so whatever you see around you is finite or based on existing holes that can be closed. It's why some groups run 2-2 just to split the breaches, and why simply 1 person acting as distraction while others do objectives can make runs very fast with a good squad.
I don't think there's any difference in the timer between breaches on different difficulties either. I think it simply alters the quantity of enemies.
I just play on the lower difficulties so I can just pretend I'm playing doom. I might try to play with how you're saying though. Getting all four of your teammates together is like herding cats usually.
Very true. Playing Solid Snake sneaky spy mode calls for different tactics, but i find it quite rewarding. Calling in an airstrike on a patrol and wiping them out before they can alert, or creeping up on an installation and bombarding it with massive amounts of airstrikes, styealing everything, then running away before the enemy can retaliate makes me feel like a bad ass commando.
And even when you do your best to stealth a mission, there's always points where you have to fight like hell!
I can certainly see that. When I have dabbled in games I'm likely to struggle with but enjoyed, most notably Apex Legends for a while, it's always my instinct to learn what I can and be a team player. I've never had a problem following other people's lead, playing support, that sort of thing. And I've nearly always enjoyed it without seeming to inspire any ire from my teammates (although admittedly I pretty much never use voice chat with randoms).
I did play HD1 actually, back when it first came out (early PS4 I think?) and immeadiately enjoyed it, although always struggled to get past my own issues with top-down twin-stick coordination. I have mild, but diagnosed, dyspraxia and tend to be better at games with a first-person/over the should POV so that's a big part of the appeal of the sequel for me. Perhaps eventually it'll come to other platforms or I'll finally shell out for a PC that can do modern gaming instead of just work and older stuff. I appriciate the recommendation though!
"git gud" didn't come from Dark Souls (although dark souls is wedded at the hip to the concept). git gud started when i was in high school and multiplayer shooters hit their golden era (Halo 2, CoD:MW, etc) and a massive influx of casual gamers made matchmaking lobbies into shooting galleries for strong players. it became a pervasive meme across all gaming when nintendo released the Wii and Super Smash Bros: Brawl, which pulled in a huge crowd of - again, casual - gamers that had heard of SSB but didn't get a lot of hands-on time with it, and put them into contact with tryhards that had sunk thousands of hours of practice into the previous iterations on gamecube and n64
I think you're right about the casual/hardcore dichotomy. People who view a game as something like an interactive TV show - you're a participant, but you shouldn't be challenged or asked to learn anything, it's just idle passive entertainment. Vs. "hardcore" gamers who want to understand the system, dismantle it, put it back together, and then apply that knowledge to attaining systems mastery.
these dorks don't have the spirit of OG Helldivers players and just want the new popular thing to play itself
they need to git gud
I am bad at this game so I simply play at the lower difficulties where my clumsy strategies work.
I love the clarity of the difficulty ranks for this reason. I think the game shines with maximum chaos but I love that a totally chill option exists for when people want lower intensity.
Low difficulty terminids is such a good vibe, feels like a whole different game.
Game is a parody of the U.S. army, players are a parody of U.S. generals and military experts lmfao
100%. The game isn't satirizing some abstract fascism or 30s fascism, it is 100% satirizing western burgerstanis and the players, at least on reddit, are 100% the butt of the joke.
I thought the "bringing democracy on bugs" part was obvious
no one can replace you, beautiful
, not even if they tried. id fight them, you're my absolutely adorable androgynous commie demon.but can you tell me that their blushing isn't even a little bit cute? C'mon just a bit?
Wait these complainers are playing on the highest difficulty? Lol, ok.
Isn't this just the
discourse? There is a framework to play the game within like using stealth and clearing waves that should be understood by the players. Within that framework there is plenty of room to discuss tuning or adjustments to the weapons and stratagems.If they are fundamentally misunderstanding how to play then yeah they should "git gud" but there are plenty of weapons and strategems that don't have a viable use in the current meta.
I have one friend who thinks they need to take every fight and its frustrating playing with someone who refuses to think
Another issue I'm seeing is that a lot of people are seeing those viral tiktoks to farm medals and whatnot, and that's all done on super high difficulties while everyone just brings a bunch of mortars and stays alive on the wave clear levels. The problem is they aren't ever actually playing the rest of the game, so they max their level and get a few primary weapons unlocked and think they know how to run level 9 objectives.
Isn't the proof to those dunning-krugerants that there's other players clearly winning the higher difficulties, so obviously they're worse than those are?
Just seems too capital G gamer but it's fine
I get annoyed with certain things people do tooI have very limited options for recreation. It's this, or... well "go insane" would be redundant, but go more insane, I guess.
All's well comrade, enjoy yourself in what way you can
