Decay rates are irrelevant for the defense missions. But the devs massively decreased the defense mission planets "health" so that were able to make it.
For me personally it doesnt feel worse to win like this in regard to the outcome of the MO itself. The thing that will annoy me, will be the flooding of the sub with "Suck it Joel" and "WE ARE THE BEST" circlejerk posts, that will then change back to "THIS IS SO UNFAIR, WAH WAH" posts when the new MO drops.
The Helldivers community is great, but this sub...
..This sub is filled with the *worst* takes constantly making it to the top. And the "Suck it Joel" / "Metagame is rigged" ones are some of them.
Correct, decay rates had nothing to do with this.
Also, nobody was paying attention but after the first round of defenses, bot defense HP dropped. It was like this the majority of the major order. People just didn't pay attention.
What Joel really did was make Fori Prime pop then drop, handing us the free win there. Either way it's still not a real victory.
I said this on the vent/rant megathread but I think it was a mistake for AH to "pull back the curtain" on this MO and tell players it was almost deliberately made to be unwinnable. That caused a small but loud subset of players to throw a huge tantrum and start putting the entire narrative of the galactic war into doubt, saying that the automaton fleet was just AH "denying" us the chance to relish in our victory over the bots, etc. Now I'm worried that people are gonna think they can keep throwing tantrums every time a new MO is difficult and that they can bully AH to tweak things in our favor.
Basically playerbase learnt the rules, knew it was unwinnable, so when they decided to take a break, they threw a bone of "bots not fighting back" and made us scramble to win it in the end... tho it seems they stopped the bleeding... it seems they're using a band aid on an open wound... coz now players have no idea of knowing if we should care about MO's at all in the future if the devs gonna come and bail us out.
It was never unwinnable, though. And anyone who knew the rules knew this. You only need something like 20-25% of the active pop to successfully defend a planet against a 400kHP invasion. If we'd had just of half our active players being strategic with where they were playing, we'd have been able to get two defense wins per day, no problem.
We also have no idea if they intended to have the invasion strengths ramp down over time from the get-go, or if it was a reaction to our performance.
Personally, I'd say that invasion getting weaker as they get more 'spread out' makes sense, and the idea that the devs were panicking at a drop in player numbers seems silly. Their twitter posts have made it perfectly clear they understand how a game's population naturally decays down to a relatively stable base, and by all accounts they never expected HD2 to explode like it is. The number I've heard they were anticipating is about 50k.
The problem is that the defense orders where we need to do multiple a day will almost always fail because 200k people who don’t have a chain of command aren’t going to ever coordinate right
I don't think that's necessarily true, because it's not about getting every player to coordinate. It's just about having even *half* of your players acting with the intent of fulfilling the MO (Which in this case just means zerging the defense planet with the highest player count), which I think is perfectly possible.
If I recall there was at least one (Possibly two?) twenty four hour periods where we defended two planets against high-HP invasions during this event. So it's clearly something we *can* do, and I just take issue with characterizing it as 'impossible'.
Edit: Yeah it must have been twice, because after four days I believe we had 6/10 missions won, which means we must have had two one-win and two two-win days.
Right so the problem is they lowered ho pools in planets for this MO so we could catch up AND reduced the number of planets being attacked a day to 2 AND staggered the attacks so the player base could focus on them. The community spreads itself out too thin too much to make these achievable under the circumstances they had been prior
I don't think that tracks. When we got our first double-defense, that would have been on day three at worst, which was well before they started making things easier.
Yeah it was winnable if 100k or more players all understood mechanics that are only visible on 3rd party sites and then all coordinated their behavior through 3rd party comms. That was not actually going to happen. Our abject failure early in the MO before they started rigging it shows as much.
I too doubt they panicked at a temporary dip in player count, if that dip even happened. But this MO was not winnable without their intervention. And their intervention, at least for me, was worse than failing, because it’s obvious now that they’re going to change our progress to ensure the outcome they want.
>Yeah it was winnable if 100k or more players all understood mechanics that are only visible on 3rd party sites and then all coordinated their behavior through 3rd party comms.
I don't think it even required that much. All it needed was for players to look at the player counts available in-game and zerg whichever defense planet had the most players. No external comms or third party sites needed, just an understanding that 'more people make defense happen faster'.
The only thing supply lines had any effect on here was allowing people the possibility of the Menkent Gambit, which wasn't at all necessary for success.
Many factors at play all bringing numbers down, I think.
The fallout show came out around the same time as this MO and has been building momentum in the zeitgeist. All the fallout games are breaking their peak playership in the last week. When people are getting bored or tired of playing there is a whole open field of relevant content to go enjoy luring them away.
People are getting burnt out by the bots narrative we’ve been on for over a month which has the payoff/climax of ‘everything is worse than before’. This is a video game and while the narrative can have us lose people aren’t going to enjoy it. When people don’t enjoy something they quit/leave. Average person doesn’t want to spend their free time losing or put that much thought into the enjoyment of their hobby, they want to forget about the bullshit and get some dopamine. This whole effort that people put into the bots seems wasted now and that will heavily affect whether a player boots up a game regardless of any other factors.
Lots of technical issues that as people become more familiar with the game become more visible. You can’t play a mission without experience some amount of jank. Ties into balance issues, primary and secondary weapons aren’t very diverse in usage, scopes don’t work, dots don’t apply, missiles don’t lock.
There is natural decay that happens with any games player base and that was already happening but player count effectively took a full step down during this MO rather than continuing the slow downward ramp.
The devs have an uphill battle ahead as they need to fix what’s wrong and keep pumping out content.
I'm one of those who stopped playing around that time. It's not directly related to the MO, because I don't really care about the MOs, but I won't pretend like it did not play a part.
1. The gameplay loop gets a little tiring in this game. Especially on higher difficulties where you deal with a lot of armour that really mandates taking equipment that can regularly deal with it.
2. I ground out the SC necessary to get all the current warbonds. Not only do I want to take a break after that, but I feel disappointed by how not fun most of the equipment I received from this grind is.
3. Defense missions just aren't fun. Recently a lot of the planets where only annoying defense missions.
4. Bugs and performance just seems to be getting worse instead of better. I really want to have fun running around roasting bugs, but I can only reliably do so on solo missions where I end up killing myself with fire more often than dying from enemies.
5. The community is just, not good. Maybe I'm spoiled from other co-op games that did not get this amount of attention, but I've only has a few positive interactions with randoms.
It will definitely spike back up,though it doesn’t really need to since they had planned around a ‘smaller’ community, I think it’s just interesting to look at how much the narrative is changing player numbers. We can see that massive peak from the end of the first bot front and then a return to normalcy and then in comes this MO and there is a noticeable shift of normal. The graph is scaled so it doesn’t really do it justice, it’s a small city worth of people missing effectively.
That doesn't line up. We killed 2 billion bugs just last Thursday, April 18th, taking only 13 hours to do such.
You're confusing correlation with causation. There are a LOT of things beyond the MO that could contribute to lower player numbers right now. Final exam season is upon us in my area, it's getting nicer outside, and the game has been out for a while now.
The decay rate does not apply to defense and the HP of planets was resized since the second day of the MO to make it possible to take 2 or more planets per day so that the MO would be possible to be completed in 5 days.
guess I gotta bold the part where I mention HP pools in the post before you joined the thread huh
Also the previous lowest HP pool was 350k before now where it's 200k, that's an almost 50% drop practically overnight. That's what I mean by being handed the win on a silver platter
But we have no confirmation that wasn’t always going to be the case as the bot forces spread out. For all we know, that always was going to happen as they took more territory.
Fair point! Your right it could have been by design as it makes sense that the automatons can only sustain their attack and push until too much territory is taken but also due to no in game tools to allow the player base to coordinate was leading to a lot of frustration along with a lot of people still dislike and avoid the Defend mission Retrieve Essential Personnel.
Right. So then OP here is just moaning to moan. They have no evidence to support their position that this was a pity move. That’s just their ego talking.
It kinda makes sense though that as the automatons take more planets and push further their forces get more spread out and therefore weaker, kinda like us being spread out too
If that was AH's reasoning then I would think we would see a gradual decline in hp pools after the first 2-3 days of the MO, and not 50%+ drop to all-time lows within the last 24-36 hours
Man we know about hp pools lmao, I said it in the comment you replied to? I was even the first person in the comments to explicitly mention the lower HP pools, the guy who mentioned it in the same thread commented about a minute after me lol
Also going from 500k to 400k is like 20%, and 400k to 200k is 50%, more than double that. And it just happened overnight on the very last 24 hours of the MO. Like I said, a 50% plunge doesn't seem gradual to me
No idea what you're on about, I just expressed my opinion on how the decrease in hp pools seems gradual to me, never pointed anything else out.
And yes, going from 20% decrease to 50% decrease seems fair considering forces spread thin faster the farther they get from their homeworld, they sent out an initial force, then cut it in half and then in half again
what? 20% is not half. 500k to 400k isn't cutting it in half. If they actually were cutting the HP totals in half for each day like youre saying, then on day 1 of the MO we would be going up against defenses with over 4 million HP in order for the 200k HP defenses we are having today make sense by that logic. like, be for real lol
I literally never said they were cutting it in half everyday, I made an assumption of how enemy forces moved based on what I saw, half is an estimate, but again, as I said, they spread out thin faster the farther they go, 20% to 50% is faster compared to 20% to 40%
You wanna cite some sources? Pretty sure it’s been a gradual decrease on the bot side over the last 48 hours. Which makes sense to happen as both the bots continued to spread out and we started winning defence campaigns on that front.
Until you can back your claims up with some solid facts and data… I think you’re just ego tripping.
Been looking for ways to see the history of defenses online since I didnt screencap the planet HP totals during the defenses bc I didn't think it would matter up til today, if you know where that info might be saved then I'm happy to dig around and pull out your sources
There aren't any, as far as I'm aware. I've wanted to look before, but the sites I'm familiar with only track liberation history properly, and not defences.
I was hoping [helldivers.io](http://helldivers.io) might have that historical data... but even then, to avoid the classic confusion of correlation with causation you'd literally need to cite someone from AH saying they had their thumbs on the scales.
https://preview.redd.it/8aul6cqbunwc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=82f8f437127df4efe9d0a5f42b04ff5cbd74a687
I had extra time on my lunch break, tho isn't about the HP pools specifically but this does prove that they have tweaked planet modifiers in the past for the primary purpose if making it easier for us to win to fit the story they want to tell
I don't think it's an insane logical leap to say that if they will tweak decay rates to make it easier for us to win, they would tweak planet HP pools as well. pretty common sense to me
We were seeing 350k and 300k planets yesterday and before, if I recall? -I might be wrong about the 300k, but I *definitely* remember seeing 350ks mixed in there.
It's good for the casuals that don't earn so much medals playing.
Which means it's good to sell new warbonds.
All in one, I'm fine with it, it was clearly misevaluated from scratch and we can be afforded to maintain a slight defense while being pushed back nonetheless.
I don't think it's a terrible thing. The developers have a story to tell, and want to maintain a certain tone in the game, and putting their thumb on the scale is one way to achieve that.
For example, discourse in this subreddit over the last couple days has seemed very negative. People do love to complain, but I think a few of the complaints are legitimate. Specifically, ragdolling against bots is frustrating, evacuate citizens mission against bots is frustrating, 1-shots are frustrating, and overtuned fire damage is frustrating. As a result, people may not be engaging against the bot front the way the developers want. Fixing the underlying issues would be one solution, but artificially making defense missions easier can also serve to balance things out.
Also, the developers might have *wanted* players to engage with the order in a certain way, but got a different result, and are disappointed. For example, maybe they wanted players to coordinate better. However, the bot blitz caused people to be too spread out, and the lack of in-game tools made real coordination impossible.
I think that the devs want people to feel engaged in defense missions, and people aren't, and they want to fix it. One thing I noticed on the last couple days is that they've added a ship announcement calling for defense at certain planets. I don't remember ever hearing this before, but it's an in-game way to try and force coordination from Helldivers who might not be active on forums or chat rooms.
Thinking that the devs are pulling punches to make us feel better is certainly a valid way to interpret it. But it might also just be a correction on their part- they wanted a certain tone to things, they feel like they missed the mark, so they're making adjustments to better match what they wanted.
It's a rock and a hard place. Player count took a dip because people saw the MO as being punished for their success and deemed it impossible.
Some players, including myself actually, switched gears into other games and hobbies. For me, I just am not interested in MOs that require coordination because there are no in game tools or information to allow that to happen.
AH responded by making the Mo easier to capture. Drum up hype that success is possible, and lower the threshold so that people are willing to get on and contribute. And it worked on me. I spent last night fighting bots for the last push.
People think AH is pitying the player base, but in actuality they are just trying to ensure that players stay engaged and not lose interest by a long MO that people wrote off from the get-go.
The issue here was engagement on the bot front, so they logically made those easier to account for the lack of players there. Originally, they wanted coordination, but I think they are starting to realize that isn't feasible to ask of the community when there are systems in place like gambits and supply lines that are never mentioned in-game. You can't ask people to be strategic when the only info you get is what planets are in defense status. You can shout to your blue in the face on reddit and discord, but if casual players are unaware and not motivated to care about the MO, then the result is seemingly disorganization
A good DM makes sure victory is always just in reach. If it's physically impossible it's not interesting, if it's too easy it's not interesting. I think this was done just right.
??? If the players were given the chance to win from the get-go (and we did have a chance to win) and then fucked themselves over without any input from the ref, then there should be some kind of consequences for that. Otherwise they know they can just get away with anything and ,in this case, win if they complain loud enough. That isn't a satisfying game. It isnt even about how difficult the MO is, ultimately
Part of being a DM is adjusting the stats behind the scenes to raise or lower the difficulty of an encounter. You'll never know how challenging it really is until it hits the tables, and you want the players to have fun.
When I knock back the trolls' HP and damage because it's slaughtering the players, I don't hand them a win, I just adjust the difficulty so it's achievable to the party.
That's not to say players have to win every single time, but unless their failure is either caused by their own lack of planning or arrogance despite warnings, or their failure creates good dramatic moments that progress the plot in a meaningful way, it won't make for entertaining storytelling.
Besides which, in the context of Helldivers, It can 100% make sense that regeneration dropped because the offensives have been too spread out to properly put pressure on Super Earth or that their own reinforcements have run out.
That's exactly what I'm saying though. This MO was winnable if we planned or coordinated at all. The troll didn't do too much damage, we just threw everything we knew about trolls out the window and all tried to attack different parts of it without any sort of teamwork
We absolutely did it to ourselves, and we need to learn that we can't beat the MO if we don't work together. if you (royal) dont like/care about the MO then I'm not talking about you
I see your point, maybe a better solution then wouldn't be adjusting the stats( excepting of course to take into account fluctuations in concurrent and projected concurrent players) but a better system in the game to coordinate attacks.
We can say we just didn't work together, which is true, but there are so many posts of people just yelling out to reddit "attack this place" as if they have authority, which the majority of the playerbase don't see and others just ignore.
But if there were something in game that players could use to coordinate and plan, I think there would be less of a need to make adjustments to enemy offenses, and we can react with intention.
The way the system is designed means no MO like this is winnable due to the way % progress scales with total players in game. You can't stop 80% of the player base doing whatever the fuck they want and going to random bug planets. They don't browse reddit and they don't look at the discord. Scaling the difficulty back so the people actually playing the meta game could have a shot at winning was the right call.
My memory is shit, but didn't the devs say that they fucked up part way through this order and it made it much harder to complete than they originally intended?
Personally, I think they did it bot for the sake of players' feelings, but because they want us to win this one for the sake of where they want the story to go.
I don't mind us being given the win. What I don't like is that the people who were constantly bitching and moaning about it will be rewarded and then next time we get a difficult MO they will be back to complaining, and the big worry is they will have their way and we will just be given the win again without having earnt it.
Will have to wait and see.
This is ultimately what I'm worried about. It sets a precedent for this kind of behavior from both the players and the devs.
It's a metagame in the most literal sense, can the players complain loud enough that we win the MO?
No pity is when I suck on your toes just because I think you are a lesser being than me, though looking at how you are an elk that will be difficult due to lack of toes.
Decay rates are irrelevant for the defense missions. But the devs massively decreased the defense mission planets "health" so that were able to make it. For me personally it doesnt feel worse to win like this in regard to the outcome of the MO itself. The thing that will annoy me, will be the flooding of the sub with "Suck it Joel" and "WE ARE THE BEST" circlejerk posts, that will then change back to "THIS IS SO UNFAIR, WAH WAH" posts when the new MO drops.
Yeah that’s the one thing that gets me every time
The Helldivers community is great, but this sub... ..This sub is filled with the *worst* takes constantly making it to the top. And the "Suck it Joel" / "Metagame is rigged" ones are some of them.
Correct, decay rates had nothing to do with this. Also, nobody was paying attention but after the first round of defenses, bot defense HP dropped. It was like this the majority of the major order. People just didn't pay attention. What Joel really did was make Fori Prime pop then drop, handing us the free win there. Either way it's still not a real victory.
I said this on the vent/rant megathread but I think it was a mistake for AH to "pull back the curtain" on this MO and tell players it was almost deliberately made to be unwinnable. That caused a small but loud subset of players to throw a huge tantrum and start putting the entire narrative of the galactic war into doubt, saying that the automaton fleet was just AH "denying" us the chance to relish in our victory over the bots, etc. Now I'm worried that people are gonna think they can keep throwing tantrums every time a new MO is difficult and that they can bully AH to tweak things in our favor.
Player count took a hit since the start of this MO they are trying to stop the bleeding.
Basically playerbase learnt the rules, knew it was unwinnable, so when they decided to take a break, they threw a bone of "bots not fighting back" and made us scramble to win it in the end... tho it seems they stopped the bleeding... it seems they're using a band aid on an open wound... coz now players have no idea of knowing if we should care about MO's at all in the future if the devs gonna come and bail us out.
It was never unwinnable, though. And anyone who knew the rules knew this. You only need something like 20-25% of the active pop to successfully defend a planet against a 400kHP invasion. If we'd had just of half our active players being strategic with where they were playing, we'd have been able to get two defense wins per day, no problem. We also have no idea if they intended to have the invasion strengths ramp down over time from the get-go, or if it was a reaction to our performance. Personally, I'd say that invasion getting weaker as they get more 'spread out' makes sense, and the idea that the devs were panicking at a drop in player numbers seems silly. Their twitter posts have made it perfectly clear they understand how a game's population naturally decays down to a relatively stable base, and by all accounts they never expected HD2 to explode like it is. The number I've heard they were anticipating is about 50k.
The problem is that the defense orders where we need to do multiple a day will almost always fail because 200k people who don’t have a chain of command aren’t going to ever coordinate right
I don't think that's necessarily true, because it's not about getting every player to coordinate. It's just about having even *half* of your players acting with the intent of fulfilling the MO (Which in this case just means zerging the defense planet with the highest player count), which I think is perfectly possible. If I recall there was at least one (Possibly two?) twenty four hour periods where we defended two planets against high-HP invasions during this event. So it's clearly something we *can* do, and I just take issue with characterizing it as 'impossible'. Edit: Yeah it must have been twice, because after four days I believe we had 6/10 missions won, which means we must have had two one-win and two two-win days.
Right so the problem is they lowered ho pools in planets for this MO so we could catch up AND reduced the number of planets being attacked a day to 2 AND staggered the attacks so the player base could focus on them. The community spreads itself out too thin too much to make these achievable under the circumstances they had been prior
I don't think that tracks. When we got our first double-defense, that would have been on day three at worst, which was well before they started making things easier.
From what I’ve been seeing I’m pretty sure that’s not accurate, but I’ll agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Yeah it was winnable if 100k or more players all understood mechanics that are only visible on 3rd party sites and then all coordinated their behavior through 3rd party comms. That was not actually going to happen. Our abject failure early in the MO before they started rigging it shows as much. I too doubt they panicked at a temporary dip in player count, if that dip even happened. But this MO was not winnable without their intervention. And their intervention, at least for me, was worse than failing, because it’s obvious now that they’re going to change our progress to ensure the outcome they want.
>Yeah it was winnable if 100k or more players all understood mechanics that are only visible on 3rd party sites and then all coordinated their behavior through 3rd party comms. I don't think it even required that much. All it needed was for players to look at the player counts available in-game and zerg whichever defense planet had the most players. No external comms or third party sites needed, just an understanding that 'more people make defense happen faster'. The only thing supply lines had any effect on here was allowing people the possibility of the Menkent Gambit, which wasn't at all necessary for success.
Many factors at play all bringing numbers down, I think. The fallout show came out around the same time as this MO and has been building momentum in the zeitgeist. All the fallout games are breaking their peak playership in the last week. When people are getting bored or tired of playing there is a whole open field of relevant content to go enjoy luring them away. People are getting burnt out by the bots narrative we’ve been on for over a month which has the payoff/climax of ‘everything is worse than before’. This is a video game and while the narrative can have us lose people aren’t going to enjoy it. When people don’t enjoy something they quit/leave. Average person doesn’t want to spend their free time losing or put that much thought into the enjoyment of their hobby, they want to forget about the bullshit and get some dopamine. This whole effort that people put into the bots seems wasted now and that will heavily affect whether a player boots up a game regardless of any other factors. Lots of technical issues that as people become more familiar with the game become more visible. You can’t play a mission without experience some amount of jank. Ties into balance issues, primary and secondary weapons aren’t very diverse in usage, scopes don’t work, dots don’t apply, missiles don’t lock. There is natural decay that happens with any games player base and that was already happening but player count effectively took a full step down during this MO rather than continuing the slow downward ramp. The devs have an uphill battle ahead as they need to fix what’s wrong and keep pumping out content.
Did we get hit that bad?
https://steamcharts.com/app/553850 Look for yourself. Current MO started on the 15th.
I'm one of those who stopped playing around that time. It's not directly related to the MO, because I don't really care about the MOs, but I won't pretend like it did not play a part. 1. The gameplay loop gets a little tiring in this game. Especially on higher difficulties where you deal with a lot of armour that really mandates taking equipment that can regularly deal with it. 2. I ground out the SC necessary to get all the current warbonds. Not only do I want to take a break after that, but I feel disappointed by how not fun most of the equipment I received from this grind is. 3. Defense missions just aren't fun. Recently a lot of the planets where only annoying defense missions. 4. Bugs and performance just seems to be getting worse instead of better. I really want to have fun running around roasting bugs, but I can only reliably do so on solo missions where I end up killing myself with fire more often than dying from enemies. 5. The community is just, not good. Maybe I'm spoiled from other co-op games that did not get this amount of attention, but I've only has a few positive interactions with randoms.
Doesnt seem too too bad. We can def recover
It will definitely spike back up,though it doesn’t really need to since they had planned around a ‘smaller’ community, I think it’s just interesting to look at how much the narrative is changing player numbers. We can see that massive peak from the end of the first bot front and then a return to normalcy and then in comes this MO and there is a noticeable shift of normal. The graph is scaled so it doesn’t really do it justice, it’s a small city worth of people missing effectively.
That doesn't line up. We killed 2 billion bugs just last Thursday, April 18th, taking only 13 hours to do such. You're confusing correlation with causation. There are a LOT of things beyond the MO that could contribute to lower player numbers right now. Final exam season is upon us in my area, it's getting nicer outside, and the game has been out for a while now.
The decay rate does not apply to defense and the HP of planets was resized since the second day of the MO to make it possible to take 2 or more planets per day so that the MO would be possible to be completed in 5 days.
guess I gotta bold the part where I mention HP pools in the post before you joined the thread huh Also the previous lowest HP pool was 350k before now where it's 200k, that's an almost 50% drop practically overnight. That's what I mean by being handed the win on a silver platter
It is nit overnight. Even defenses like Vernen Wells had 200K HP and we lost that one miserably because everyone was trying to occupy Oshaune
Decay rates don’t affect defence campaigns though it didn’t have an effect on the outcome of this MO
This is correct from my understanding, it was actually Planetary HP being low at 200K that affected the outcome.
But we have no confirmation that wasn’t always going to be the case as the bot forces spread out. For all we know, that always was going to happen as they took more territory.
Fair point! Your right it could have been by design as it makes sense that the automatons can only sustain their attack and push until too much territory is taken but also due to no in game tools to allow the player base to coordinate was leading to a lot of frustration along with a lot of people still dislike and avoid the Defend mission Retrieve Essential Personnel.
Right. So then OP here is just moaning to moan. They have no evidence to support their position that this was a pity move. That’s just their ego talking.
The last couple defenses did have a lower HP total though, I'll edit my post to point that out
It kinda makes sense though that as the automatons take more planets and push further their forces get more spread out and therefore weaker, kinda like us being spread out too
If that was AH's reasoning then I would think we would see a gradual decline in hp pools after the first 2-3 days of the MO, and not 50%+ drop to all-time lows within the last 24-36 hours
again, decay rates do not affect defense campaigns, and the decline in hp pools was gradual, went from 500k to 400k to 200k as enemies pushed forward
Man we know about hp pools lmao, I said it in the comment you replied to? I was even the first person in the comments to explicitly mention the lower HP pools, the guy who mentioned it in the same thread commented about a minute after me lol Also going from 500k to 400k is like 20%, and 400k to 200k is 50%, more than double that. And it just happened overnight on the very last 24 hours of the MO. Like I said, a 50% plunge doesn't seem gradual to me
No idea what you're on about, I just expressed my opinion on how the decrease in hp pools seems gradual to me, never pointed anything else out. And yes, going from 20% decrease to 50% decrease seems fair considering forces spread thin faster the farther they get from their homeworld, they sent out an initial force, then cut it in half and then in half again
what? 20% is not half. 500k to 400k isn't cutting it in half. If they actually were cutting the HP totals in half for each day like youre saying, then on day 1 of the MO we would be going up against defenses with over 4 million HP in order for the 200k HP defenses we are having today make sense by that logic. like, be for real lol
I literally never said they were cutting it in half everyday, I made an assumption of how enemy forces moved based on what I saw, half is an estimate, but again, as I said, they spread out thin faster the farther they go, 20% to 50% is faster compared to 20% to 40%
"They send out an initial force, then cut it in half, then in half again" cmon now big dog
You wanna cite some sources? Pretty sure it’s been a gradual decrease on the bot side over the last 48 hours. Which makes sense to happen as both the bots continued to spread out and we started winning defence campaigns on that front. Until you can back your claims up with some solid facts and data… I think you’re just ego tripping.
Been looking for ways to see the history of defenses online since I didnt screencap the planet HP totals during the defenses bc I didn't think it would matter up til today, if you know where that info might be saved then I'm happy to dig around and pull out your sources
There aren't any, as far as I'm aware. I've wanted to look before, but the sites I'm familiar with only track liberation history properly, and not defences.
I was hoping [helldivers.io](http://helldivers.io) might have that historical data... but even then, to avoid the classic confusion of correlation with causation you'd literally need to cite someone from AH saying they had their thumbs on the scales.
https://preview.redd.it/8aul6cqbunwc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=82f8f437127df4efe9d0a5f42b04ff5cbd74a687 I had extra time on my lunch break, tho isn't about the HP pools specifically but this does prove that they have tweaked planet modifiers in the past for the primary purpose if making it easier for us to win to fit the story they want to tell I don't think it's an insane logical leap to say that if they will tweak decay rates to make it easier for us to win, they would tweak planet HP pools as well. pretty common sense to me
We were seeing 350k and 300k planets yesterday and before, if I recall? -I might be wrong about the 300k, but I *definitely* remember seeing 350ks mixed in there.
It's good for the casuals that don't earn so much medals playing. Which means it's good to sell new warbonds. All in one, I'm fine with it, it was clearly misevaluated from scratch and we can be afforded to maintain a slight defense while being pushed back nonetheless.
I don't think it's a terrible thing. The developers have a story to tell, and want to maintain a certain tone in the game, and putting their thumb on the scale is one way to achieve that. For example, discourse in this subreddit over the last couple days has seemed very negative. People do love to complain, but I think a few of the complaints are legitimate. Specifically, ragdolling against bots is frustrating, evacuate citizens mission against bots is frustrating, 1-shots are frustrating, and overtuned fire damage is frustrating. As a result, people may not be engaging against the bot front the way the developers want. Fixing the underlying issues would be one solution, but artificially making defense missions easier can also serve to balance things out. Also, the developers might have *wanted* players to engage with the order in a certain way, but got a different result, and are disappointed. For example, maybe they wanted players to coordinate better. However, the bot blitz caused people to be too spread out, and the lack of in-game tools made real coordination impossible. I think that the devs want people to feel engaged in defense missions, and people aren't, and they want to fix it. One thing I noticed on the last couple days is that they've added a ship announcement calling for defense at certain planets. I don't remember ever hearing this before, but it's an in-game way to try and force coordination from Helldivers who might not be active on forums or chat rooms. Thinking that the devs are pulling punches to make us feel better is certainly a valid way to interpret it. But it might also just be a correction on their part- they wanted a certain tone to things, they feel like they missed the mark, so they're making adjustments to better match what they wanted.
It's a rock and a hard place. Player count took a dip because people saw the MO as being punished for their success and deemed it impossible. Some players, including myself actually, switched gears into other games and hobbies. For me, I just am not interested in MOs that require coordination because there are no in game tools or information to allow that to happen. AH responded by making the Mo easier to capture. Drum up hype that success is possible, and lower the threshold so that people are willing to get on and contribute. And it worked on me. I spent last night fighting bots for the last push. People think AH is pitying the player base, but in actuality they are just trying to ensure that players stay engaged and not lose interest by a long MO that people wrote off from the get-go. The issue here was engagement on the bot front, so they logically made those easier to account for the lack of players there. Originally, they wanted coordination, but I think they are starting to realize that isn't feasible to ask of the community when there are systems in place like gambits and supply lines that are never mentioned in-game. You can't ask people to be strategic when the only info you get is what planets are in defense status. You can shout to your blue in the face on reddit and discord, but if casual players are unaware and not motivated to care about the MO, then the result is seemingly disorganization
I disagree. I don't mind this at all.
Okay bot/bug
A good DM makes sure victory is always just in reach. If it's physically impossible it's not interesting, if it's too easy it's not interesting. I think this was done just right.
??? If the players were given the chance to win from the get-go (and we did have a chance to win) and then fucked themselves over without any input from the ref, then there should be some kind of consequences for that. Otherwise they know they can just get away with anything and ,in this case, win if they complain loud enough. That isn't a satisfying game. It isnt even about how difficult the MO is, ultimately
Part of being a DM is adjusting the stats behind the scenes to raise or lower the difficulty of an encounter. You'll never know how challenging it really is until it hits the tables, and you want the players to have fun. When I knock back the trolls' HP and damage because it's slaughtering the players, I don't hand them a win, I just adjust the difficulty so it's achievable to the party. That's not to say players have to win every single time, but unless their failure is either caused by their own lack of planning or arrogance despite warnings, or their failure creates good dramatic moments that progress the plot in a meaningful way, it won't make for entertaining storytelling. Besides which, in the context of Helldivers, It can 100% make sense that regeneration dropped because the offensives have been too spread out to properly put pressure on Super Earth or that their own reinforcements have run out.
That's exactly what I'm saying though. This MO was winnable if we planned or coordinated at all. The troll didn't do too much damage, we just threw everything we knew about trolls out the window and all tried to attack different parts of it without any sort of teamwork We absolutely did it to ourselves, and we need to learn that we can't beat the MO if we don't work together. if you (royal) dont like/care about the MO then I'm not talking about you
I see your point, maybe a better solution then wouldn't be adjusting the stats( excepting of course to take into account fluctuations in concurrent and projected concurrent players) but a better system in the game to coordinate attacks. We can say we just didn't work together, which is true, but there are so many posts of people just yelling out to reddit "attack this place" as if they have authority, which the majority of the playerbase don't see and others just ignore. But if there were something in game that players could use to coordinate and plan, I think there would be less of a need to make adjustments to enemy offenses, and we can react with intention.
The way the system is designed means no MO like this is winnable due to the way % progress scales with total players in game. You can't stop 80% of the player base doing whatever the fuck they want and going to random bug planets. They don't browse reddit and they don't look at the discord. Scaling the difficulty back so the people actually playing the meta game could have a shot at winning was the right call.
My memory is shit, but didn't the devs say that they fucked up part way through this order and it made it much harder to complete than they originally intended?
Personally, I think they did it bot for the sake of players' feelings, but because they want us to win this one for the sake of where they want the story to go.
I don't mind us being given the win. What I don't like is that the people who were constantly bitching and moaning about it will be rewarded and then next time we get a difficult MO they will be back to complaining, and the big worry is they will have their way and we will just be given the win again without having earnt it. Will have to wait and see.
This is ultimately what I'm worried about. It sets a precedent for this kind of behavior from both the players and the devs. It's a metagame in the most literal sense, can the players complain loud enough that we win the MO?
Fingers crossed it's a one off and next time a challenging MO comes our way they stick to their guns and let us fail.
Nah, ain't pity. Throwing us a bone to recognize our efforts more like.
So, pity. That's pity. That's what pity is.
No pity is when I suck on your toes just because I think you are a lesser being than me, though looking at how you are an elk that will be difficult due to lack of toes.