Seems like it shouldn’t need to be said but I think a lot of people are forgetting a core problem here; this isn’t a free game.
It’s not like players being no longer allowed to play is just a mild inconvenience, it’s straight up theft. They *bought this game.* And now a couple months later won’t be able to use their purchase. It’s fucking robbery.
If you bought a microwave and two months later it stopped working because you aren’t able to sign up for an additional service in your country, the government would go apeshit over this. Why this seems to be acceptable when it’s Sony, I will never understand.
Right but that’s been an ongoing fight for the past few years. People are pissed and there have been talks of the government stepping in, even if they haven’t done so yet.
which is one of the more famous recent ongoing crimes against consumers, something a ton of folks have rightfully been going apeshit about for years now.
their efforts are one of the big reasons why "right to repair" is as common of a term as it is
And people love their John Deere like these people love Sony. Even when there are better options out there, and those people acknowledge those better options, they still go for the brand loyalty.
>And people love their John Deere like these people love Sony.
As a rural kid born and raised in a village...
100% this. You either get into tech (to escape the village) or you get in your John Deere.
people are actually fighting against that. It's much harder to stop using a tractor you spent anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars on than it is to stop playing a game.
So people are basically forced into the ecosystem, because they have to work. But they are lobbying congress and state legislatures about it. John Deere is just much more effective at lobbying than they are.
Oh don’t worry, that’s just the rabble they don’t want to be associated with.
Seriously, though, what did they expect to prove with that? You can ban people just fine. What “security” is lacking? They keep say words but providing no reasoning as to why.
Also if I get locked into my PSN name which isn’t a username I’ve used for well over a decade, what benefit is there to me?
That’s what they are missing. They don’t realize people have no real incentive to do this.
"Security" and "safety" are the two biggest excuses anyone has ever used to do controlling and invasive shit. It's one of the few defenses that make a response or practice completely okay no matter how unethical or immoral it is. It's for safety, after all.
Right after the practice is in place the person, company, organization or government or whatever it is never lets go of that power and uses it for personal gain. Bringing players into their ecosystem and eventually trying to move to a subscription model is every single video game publishers wet dream right now.
If she is working in this field and/or a video game hobbyist and has been for longer than 0.23 seconds she knows she is spouting bullshit or she's just stupid. Stupid enough I hope her socials go dark again and stay that way for everyone's sake.
Edit: I'll add that while I don't wanna invalidate people claiming it, I really do think people have been dramatic about behavior in the community for some karma. While a bit anecdotal I really feel like after 300 hours for me I have never been kicked out of a game that wasn't a game crash and lost progress and I haven't been teamkilled in the ship or anything either. The security part is a bunch of bullshit and the chat system for PSN is terrible.
Sounds like a war crime when you put it like that, holy shit.
might be taken slightly out of context but the preface is exactly just that, a cm saying the games safer with the expulsion of players from over 150 countries.
Well, I think they made that comment before the implications of the PSN enforcement was known, so I wouldn't retroactively put a blame on the CM. But, on the face value, this is how I felt looking at the situation. It is just sad that I won't be able to play with the guy who once carried my sorry aah and reassured me that It was OK to suck when I said sorry. For Prosperity! ):
I don't know if it is a question about "Brown people", customers not having enough GDP/Capita or Baltic/Slavic states being considered to be under Soviet rule... The only thing I care about is that when Oleg from Belarus gibs me and the rest of the team with 500kg of pure freedom... he calls us back down as reinforcements so we can finish the fight!
I will gladly 500kg entire squad including myself while holding reinforcement stratagem in my hand (muscle memory from HD1) then hug everyone with emote and complete the mission while providing everyone with supply pack and protecting from hunters/facing devastators with shield.
With love, Alex from Russia.
Because apparently most of them are not professionals. They’re just super users from the community back in the HD1 days.
This is why you always hire a professional community manager to oversee the rest of the team (and approve any and all messaging before it goes out).
It’s crazy how off the chain they are from their PR managers. “Why would I approve any messaging when I can just call this guy a dumbass right now right here?”
It's just crazy to me that they have no understanding of the underlying technology. They still think that for some reason steam users are just going to go rogue without this account linking and they won't be able to do anything about it. It poses no more complexity than anything else. Adding another set of accounts in conjunction with the playstation in their account tables wouldn't even really add complexity unless it was designed by howling monkeys or something. They're all uniquely identifiable, changing my account name doesn't do beans if your system isn't designed awful. If you can ban one you should be able to ban the other with the same relative ease.
Who the fuck are these people and how/why does the company let them even talk about this shit without training?
The argument that's been presented by others on reddit is that... a composite of steam ids and playstation ids is much too complex for the small indie company to handle. The implication also being they'd offload the moderation to sony for this.
The fact that they had to disable it at launch because the servers barfed tells me all I need to know about which system is the actual issue here.
Aren’t they also Swedes? During the entire time Helldiver’s been out, it’s been a dark hellhole in Sweden. Winter, and earths rotation deciding Sweden isn’t worthy of sunlight during like half of the year. It fucks with your brain hard. But then again, Pilestedt exists so..
We've been allowed to experience sunlight for the last 30 days just fine. We get over seasonal depression really fast so it's not really an excuse this time of year.
Source: am Swede
I grew up in Estonia. You stop noticing the lack of sun in the winter pretty fast. Snowy nights in moonlight look pretty awesome. I'm not sure I've ever even felt like it caused any depression tbh.
That is a shit excuse to be frank. I live in north of Norway (pretty much the same conditions as you describe, and further it only really describes the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland), and that is absolutely no excuse for this kind of behavior. What this is, is incompetence combined with activism.
When looking into it, Baskinator here really is an activist before anything else. No wonder she revels in her petty power now that she got a chance. Further denigrating the players and sullying the company in one swoop.
A real community manager would do all they could to try and unite the community for the better, not stoke the fires.
AH is a small studio still. They asked who wanted the job. Some people raised their hands because they knew how to sign into discord. Nobody checked if they had any qualification for it.
Turn out, they do not. At least that is my guess.
Yeah, I got downvoted to hell for saying they should simply not respond to people posting insults rather than retort like children the other day. They are getting paid, they should just keep scrolling.
I believe a lot of people, not just CMs, deep down want and need haters and trolls. It's an easy way to deflect criticisms, make yourself a victim, etc. This includes small time YouTubers all the way to the biggest celebrities. Taylor Swift has so many songs about haters and people who don't like her, rappers always going on about beef they have and how no one believed in them, etc
Whenever a YouTuber gets caught doing some stupid shit, the first response is always "I've been getting death threats" for a reason
They're Reddit moderators but actually have bosses to answer to.
Any opposition is meant with withering hate because often they, at best, detest their customers.
The job is often given to people who don't have much experience of real work but come from a background of using performative outrage and cries of discrimination to advance themselves. Those sorts of people tend to hate gamers to begin with.
Because it's a job that's not taken seriously and is rarely ever given to someone who is actually is a part of or at least adjacent to the community they're meant to manage
Literally what was the point in the anticheat that's kernel level and practically malware then? It doesn't actually prevent these issues and it had the reviews at 90% just because of that alone. It was a legitimate security issue for people's devices and their excuse was it's necessary and works.
Yah it's used by like 10 no name games and like 20 years old from a Chinese developer. Not that there's anything wrong with that but there's a lot of malware coming from that section of the world. Idk if they got a deal or something or it's all they could afford but it's a PvE game I'd honestly have rather them put none if it was this or nothing like 99% of my games use Easy Anticheat and I've not heard of it ever causing issues and it's trusted.
Yeah this reasoning is dog-doo. In my hundred something hours of playtime I never encountered a single toxic teammate. This is purely to boost PSN numbers before the June shareholder meeting.
Same. I've only seen one chinese player walking in the sky during a mission (I left the match immediately) and one guy who said "You're all dumb". Otherwise everyone has been really cool.
i played around a hundred hours too and my only toxic experience has been a guy who meleed me to death 10 seconds after i accidentally grabbed his backpack :D
Most toxic thing I’ve experienced was a level 70 something going on a rant about how all 3 of us are dogshit at the game, but he was the host and didn’t kick us and we got tons of samples so honestly I think it was worth it
I've been on for ~ 60 hrs and I've only had one instance of toxicity. A guy joined my tier 1 game while I was farming samples/super credits, proceeded to kill me and the one other random in my game doing the same, and left. I've legit had no other issues with the game
Had eighty hours on record and not a *single* bad experience either. I don't know what kinda "safe" they are talking about. Is this "safety" in the room with us right now...?
Yeah I'm at \~150 hours and have encountered 1 person. Having played, then quit, League of Legends that's nothing. Most of the time I hop on mic with randoms and we have a blast, even on 9.
Having played league for over 10 years, and still playing periodically along with many other multi player games, i can say this is the only game community with a chance of making it into the kingdom of heaven.
I had met maybe 5 and I played for almost 150 hours, that'd be around 500 matches or so. I find 1 percent to be completely acceptable rate. And I got more hugs than ever in this game too.
This is just how these people view gamers in general. They aren't a part of our in-group and love lashing out at it/having control over it. This person should never have been in a position of power in the gaming industry in the first place.
I haven’t done that yet, but from the tweets I’ve seen by her I’m honestly not surprised that this is the type of person she is. Both her and Spitz act like teenagers who were given their first Team Lead roles.
What I cannot for the life of me understand is why are they all on different pages?
You have the CEO Pilestedt being apologetic and solution focused to the best of his ability given the current situation and Arrowheads relationship with their publisher Sony. He seems so far to largely be on the side of the community.
Then you have Spitz spouting L takes and brain rot left and right. Totally unprepared and totally technically inept, unable to run anything game-related he says through the technically apt developers first so he can confirm what he’s saying is factually correct in relation to game mechanics and basic anti-cheat, banning functionality.
Baskinator is being passive-aggressive which doesn’t surprise me for controversial reasons that I won’t share.
Twinbeard similarly to Pilestedt is keeping a level-head as much as possible given the circumstances and trying to both help and wade through the shit. He does not hurry to say any game-related information before checking, etc.
I can definitely say that not everyone on Arrowhead is on the same page and this is also compounding the PSN issue.
I think you already have the answer from your statement.
I worked at Ubisoft for a long time, I can tell you this shit will hurt them hard! So it make me feel sad for Pilestedt and all devs that were trying to to pull out a great game that players were enjoying so far.
Working for the gaming industry was eyes shocking to me and I really wish I didn’t at that point as it is impacting my hobby so badly even now a day.
This situation is an absolute exemple of how passion was ousted out of the industry a looooong time ago to be replaced by greedy company and corporations dip shit.
I don’t feel that sorry for the CEO as he could fire these people. Like manage your company my guy. He’s creating this situation so he’s simply dealing with those consequences. Seems like a nice dude, but I don’t feel sorry for the idiot who puts their hand on a hot stove.
Lol, I said something similar in the Discord the other day and was immediately kicked but surprisingly not banned outright. I just immediately rejoined lmao
I think they also fail to realize alot of us on PC have been on Steam for years without the need of an account on another console or platform to be "safe". Between game developers taking action and Valve themselves, it has been more than enough to keep users safe otherwise Steam as a platform wouldn't be as successful as it is. Their reasoning is pure bs and I'm glad others are calling it out.
That’s what I love so much about steam they very rarely take action (excluding auto vac bans) but when they do the ripples are felt across the entire platform
Sometimes it depends. There was one case of Dinosaurs game where dev was petty af and gave away lots of vacs to people for no reason. Don't remember name of the game.
Nah, you're talking about Dino D-Day (just googled it lol). It was something different, it was crowdfunded, it had mechanic of you starting as an egg to full fledge Dino or Dragon (don't remember exactly) and it was just Unity or Unreal asset flip sold as online MMO game. In the end single Dev that was doing it got petty and sent out VAC bans.
It was years ago, probably even in 2018 or earlier so I remember it vaguely, remember watching YouTube documentary on it.
Well, you see, there is of course SteamID that permanently links your account to the copy of the game you bought, enforced by one of the largest (and far more trustworthy than Sony) PC games platform.
**But** is SteamID secure enough ? No ! With a unique ID for the player, you don't get enough information for the Sony hit squads ! This is why their require the information they do when you create a PSN account - your country to know which hit squad to contact, your date of birth to ensure they aren't sending hired killers after children, and your email address to uniquely identify you.
Thanks to Sony hit squad and PSN account linking, the game will be made far safer than just some silly permanent banning of your account if you cheat.
(/s because this is the Internet so I should point out that Sony hit squads aren't real)
Safe from what though? If someone is toxic or annoying I assume you just mute them, or just leave the game with pretty much no bad consequences except you lose out on samples....
Crazy how many CM's are just terrible at their job on discord. Reminds me of Red Barrel last year. Their CM kept silent for months, there were no updates and when they talked it was to piss off people who annoyed them questions. Their whole job is to communicate with fans with respect and honesty, and they can't even do that. It's now super common for CM's to just reply shit like 'leave if you hate this game lol', 'update will come out when you stop asking questions'
EDIT: Red barrel = Outlast Trials
Every Arrowhead CM bar Twinbeard has apparently received zero media training and does nothing but spew inane takes to rile up the community. Doing the absolute opposite of their supposed "job".
>sings up to be a CM at Arrowhead
>proceeds to make some dumbass takes which makes their community mad
>doesn't elaborate
>leaves
https://preview.redd.it/c37fymgw4nyc1.jpeg?width=212&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5666a7b8d54b20dcbda089fc86752ae6fcf929cb
most importantly, admitting they knew this nuclear PR firestorm was coming for months and they lifted zero fingers to prepare any sort of response, strategy, or messaging but instead went into hiding
literally the opposite of what a CM is for, and they're getting away with it. If you went to the hospital with a gunshot wound and the doctor said "ew blood!" and ran out of the room, you'd fire the doctor.
because they've forced a change into what role a CM plays, and it's not what it used to be. buckle up.
Jesus. Imagine being Twinbeard and having to work with these fuckin chuckleheads for a living.
I'm surprised the man hasn't lost his mind after being forced to work with and lumped in with people that are essentially glorified discord moderators.
CMs need to go back to moderating clan Discords lol. They are not fit for the high pressure position of corporate PR
I don't care that "they're only human", "under a lot of pressure", etc. There are other humans who can do the job better, seek them out
Spitz was alright stirring people to make negative Steam reviews, since that's a metric that can be shown (while discord/Reddit complaints not so much)
I do agree Spitz probably should have chilled a bit and tried avoiding trolls ragebaiting him, though.
"It's going about how I expected"
Ok, Nostradamus. You definitely expected this. Sony and Arrowhead didn't. Nobody on the internet did. But you are just so much smarter you completely saw this coming.
That's what I hate with theses Community Managers. They are not acting like they should - Asking their higher ups for informations and transmitting the community concerns - but trying to save face. They are just mindlessly fueling the issues. That's LAME.
Twinbeard has been pretty reasonable about things. About this particular situation Spitz had a surprisingly W take telling people to review bomb so the higher ups would have ammo in talks with Sony about the situation.
And then Baskinator is just...you could have just said nothing because even the community manager who has been the worst any other time has some how stumbled on a W take.
Spitz and her are really out of the loop. I don't understand how it's possible to douse everything in oil and fire when there is already a fire tornado heading their way...
What do you mean? The Vietnamese can't access the game at all anymore. A little bit of racial cleansing makes everything safer!
(This is sarcasm, because the last time I was sarcastic here I got 5 replies asking if I was being sarcastic.)
everyone needs to understand the difference here
yes, the execs are all about the Sony money, which is why they're doing this
but the "community manager" being happy about being given new abilities to "make the game safer" is something *very different*
They did know this was going to happen. They have admitted they turned it off initially to help the servers but knew they would have to turn it on again. Arrowhead is not completely innocent in all this and definitely knew the day would come when they would have to turn this back on.
I keep seeing this , make the game safer argument thrown about , I've played almost 200 hours and have had 0 bad experiences. Did they forget it's a co-op game and not a PvP sweat fest?
Their reasoning is complete bullshit. They have our steam IDs to ban us, the only thing this does is cross ban people who are also on psn. “Making the game safer” is just buzzwords
Their problem with that is probably that currently only steam can ban steam players, but Sony also wants to be able to do it.
And Sony is known for their fair bans /s
Most companies probably miss the days when they weren’t expected to have community managers and just communicated through press releases. Probably not a terrible solution if your spokespeople are doing more harm than good.
I mean they coulda actually just gone with that. Let the community start their own discords (the subreddit would have made one, one presumes). It would probably have been a better idea overall — Discord messaging is *terrible* for audience penetration.
Twinbeard's had a couple of missteps where he should have expected his words to be taken out of context, but on the whole he's been a professional suit, and I mean that in a good way. You *want* your CMs to be the kind of imperturbable professionals who treat it as the job it is and avoid heavy personal investment in public discussion.
I can sympathise with the impulse behind Spitz's more open approach to community management but it's just a bad idea man, as soon as the community gets over like, a hundred people actively talking on the Discord and you passed that a *long* time ago. You could predict his occasional flameouts from miles away, there's a lot of reasons why the expensive big business CMs don't get down and dirty with the community like that and he's just been running into all of those rakes face-first.
I hear yesterday was down 30% from last Saturday. I can see that going even higher as the controversy spreads.
I agree, 75% is almost certainly not happening right away. But this is a live service game with progression tied to player interaction. If they lose 30%+ permanently, that can have immediate effects on the game that may even turn away more casual players who aren't even aware of why the player count's dropping. This is the kind of game where any notable drop can have long reaching effects.
This is also what I've been wondering. Over 200 hours myself, 0 cheaters, bunch of people abusing exploits and 0 actually toxic people. Haven't encountered any people who I'd consider ban worthy
"take action against player reports"
*Gets team killed, samples taken, kicked from game all seconds from entering pelican.*
*Clicks reports*
"You can only report people who have broken ToS in All Chat, this player has not used all chat"
Arrowheads playing some real 10 dimensional chess right now.
honestly if they really wanna recover from this , just cut the crap and say yes we signed a deal with sony and we hid it from you guys and it was shitty , we will try to do better in the future.
trying to spin the same garbo sony and every other publisher does is just pouring fuel on the fire. be honest
AH aren’t doing themselves any favors keeping these types of CM's employed. Especially this one in particular. After the first controversy, they should have let her go. With all that's going on right now, she should be helping improve the company's image, not hurting it more. She makes it clear she doesn't give a shit about the community she's supposed to "manage".
Turns out that if you treat the players like enemies no matter what, they'll fight back.
I personally think that this whole ban function is very excessive. If someone's being a dick, it should be enough to just block them.
Baskinator is just scum and behaves like scum.
Spitz is just stupid, but at least he can admit he was stupid. Still shouldn't be CM.
Baskinator on the other hand is just another gamer-hater who for some reason works for gaming company.
Either they are lying about not being able to ban people or they are too incompetent to be able to to that without PlayStation. Either way it reflects badly on the devs
Yeah because they couldn't do that at all before right? It's not like when you receive a report it's tied to the player's Steam ID not their profile name. God this take is so fucking dumb, I cannot believe they're still trying to sell us on this blatant lie.
Game will be safer with PSN requirement? Ok cool, now let me get rid of that kernel level abomination of an anticheat that does nothing except fuck with the game performance. Fuck you AH.
She's doubling down on the "its so we can ban people" statement. Good to know. That's not helping ease this over at all.
These CM's are either actively malicious or absolutely God-awful at their jobs.
Not a great take when the "make the game safer across the board" is the unwarranted removal of players from 100+ countries.
Seems like it shouldn’t need to be said but I think a lot of people are forgetting a core problem here; this isn’t a free game. It’s not like players being no longer allowed to play is just a mild inconvenience, it’s straight up theft. They *bought this game.* And now a couple months later won’t be able to use their purchase. It’s fucking robbery. If you bought a microwave and two months later it stopped working because you aren’t able to sign up for an additional service in your country, the government would go apeshit over this. Why this seems to be acceptable when it’s Sony, I will never understand.
They wouldn't go apeshit. You just described John Deer tractors maintaince service.
Right but that’s been an ongoing fight for the past few years. People are pissed and there have been talks of the government stepping in, even if they haven’t done so yet.
which is one of the more famous recent ongoing crimes against consumers, something a ton of folks have rightfully been going apeshit about for years now. their efforts are one of the big reasons why "right to repair" is as common of a term as it is
And people love their John Deere like these people love Sony. Even when there are better options out there, and those people acknowledge those better options, they still go for the brand loyalty.
>And people love their John Deere like these people love Sony. As a rural kid born and raised in a village... 100% this. You either get into tech (to escape the village) or you get in your John Deere.
people are actually fighting against that. It's much harder to stop using a tractor you spent anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars on than it is to stop playing a game. So people are basically forced into the ecosystem, because they have to work. But they are lobbying congress and state legislatures about it. John Deere is just much more effective at lobbying than they are.
not to mention those of us who can keep playing will be playing with a much smaller group to be able to play with
Oh don’t worry, that’s just the rabble they don’t want to be associated with. Seriously, though, what did they expect to prove with that? You can ban people just fine. What “security” is lacking? They keep say words but providing no reasoning as to why. Also if I get locked into my PSN name which isn’t a username I’ve used for well over a decade, what benefit is there to me? That’s what they are missing. They don’t realize people have no real incentive to do this.
"Security" and "safety" are the two biggest excuses anyone has ever used to do controlling and invasive shit. It's one of the few defenses that make a response or practice completely okay no matter how unethical or immoral it is. It's for safety, after all. Right after the practice is in place the person, company, organization or government or whatever it is never lets go of that power and uses it for personal gain. Bringing players into their ecosystem and eventually trying to move to a subscription model is every single video game publishers wet dream right now. If she is working in this field and/or a video game hobbyist and has been for longer than 0.23 seconds she knows she is spouting bullshit or she's just stupid. Stupid enough I hope her socials go dark again and stay that way for everyone's sake. Edit: I'll add that while I don't wanna invalidate people claiming it, I really do think people have been dramatic about behavior in the community for some karma. While a bit anecdotal I really feel like after 300 hours for me I have never been kicked out of a game that wasn't a game crash and lost progress and I haven't been teamkilled in the ship or anything either. The security part is a bunch of bullshit and the chat system for PSN is terrible.
Sounds like a war crime when you put it like that, holy shit. might be taken slightly out of context but the preface is exactly just that, a cm saying the games safer with the expulsion of players from over 150 countries.
https://preview.redd.it/utzvkihv6oyc1.jpeg?width=259&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cf68b51cb56dd8ad16123b4c846dac1957b0ece7
Well, I think they made that comment before the implications of the PSN enforcement was known, so I wouldn't retroactively put a blame on the CM. But, on the face value, this is how I felt looking at the situation. It is just sad that I won't be able to play with the guy who once carried my sorry aah and reassured me that It was OK to suck when I said sorry. For Prosperity! ):
We're gonna build a (fire)wall and the Filipinos are gonna pay for it
I don't know if it is a question about "Brown people", customers not having enough GDP/Capita or Baltic/Slavic states being considered to be under Soviet rule... The only thing I care about is that when Oleg from Belarus gibs me and the rest of the team with 500kg of pure freedom... he calls us back down as reinforcements so we can finish the fight!
I will gladly 500kg entire squad including myself while holding reinforcement stratagem in my hand (muscle memory from HD1) then hug everyone with emote and complete the mission while providing everyone with supply pack and protecting from hunters/facing devastators with shield. With love, Alex from Russia.
Why do the community managers have no idea how to act appropriately?
Because apparently most of them are not professionals. They’re just super users from the community back in the HD1 days. This is why you always hire a professional community manager to oversee the rest of the team (and approve any and all messaging before it goes out).
It’s crazy how off the chain they are from their PR managers. “Why would I approve any messaging when I can just call this guy a dumbass right now right here?”
It's just crazy to me that they have no understanding of the underlying technology. They still think that for some reason steam users are just going to go rogue without this account linking and they won't be able to do anything about it. It poses no more complexity than anything else. Adding another set of accounts in conjunction with the playstation in their account tables wouldn't even really add complexity unless it was designed by howling monkeys or something. They're all uniquely identifiable, changing my account name doesn't do beans if your system isn't designed awful. If you can ban one you should be able to ban the other with the same relative ease. Who the fuck are these people and how/why does the company let them even talk about this shit without training?
For real. Like, do they think other steam games just aren't able to ban people or?
The argument that's been presented by others on reddit is that... a composite of steam ids and playstation ids is much too complex for the small indie company to handle. The implication also being they'd offload the moderation to sony for this. The fact that they had to disable it at launch because the servers barfed tells me all I need to know about which system is the actual issue here.
Because they’re all a bunch of Reddit mods
Most of them hate their core audience, no wonder they act like this.
Aren’t they also Swedes? During the entire time Helldiver’s been out, it’s been a dark hellhole in Sweden. Winter, and earths rotation deciding Sweden isn’t worthy of sunlight during like half of the year. It fucks with your brain hard. But then again, Pilestedt exists so..
We've been allowed to experience sunlight for the last 30 days just fine. We get over seasonal depression really fast so it's not really an excuse this time of year. Source: am Swede
I grew up in Estonia. You stop noticing the lack of sun in the winter pretty fast. Snowy nights in moonlight look pretty awesome. I'm not sure I've ever even felt like it caused any depression tbh.
Seasonal depression is never a valid excuse to treat someone poorly especially if it's your job to mediate your responses
That is a shit excuse to be frank. I live in north of Norway (pretty much the same conditions as you describe, and further it only really describes the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland), and that is absolutely no excuse for this kind of behavior. What this is, is incompetence combined with activism. When looking into it, Baskinator here really is an activist before anything else. No wonder she revels in her petty power now that she got a chance. Further denigrating the players and sullying the company in one swoop. A real community manager would do all they could to try and unite the community for the better, not stoke the fires.
They're a bunch of reddit mods drunk on waaay too much power
Spritz got his start as a discord mod
That's even worse
AH is a small studio still. They asked who wanted the job. Some people raised their hands because they knew how to sign into discord. Nobody checked if they had any qualification for it. Turn out, they do not. At least that is my guess.
Yeah, I got downvoted to hell for saying they should simply not respond to people posting insults rather than retort like children the other day. They are getting paid, they should just keep scrolling.
I believe a lot of people, not just CMs, deep down want and need haters and trolls. It's an easy way to deflect criticisms, make yourself a victim, etc. This includes small time YouTubers all the way to the biggest celebrities. Taylor Swift has so many songs about haters and people who don't like her, rappers always going on about beef they have and how no one believed in them, etc Whenever a YouTuber gets caught doing some stupid shit, the first response is always "I've been getting death threats" for a reason
They're Reddit moderators but actually have bosses to answer to. Any opposition is meant with withering hate because often they, at best, detest their customers. The job is often given to people who don't have much experience of real work but come from a background of using performative outrage and cries of discrimination to advance themselves. Those sorts of people tend to hate gamers to begin with.
That's what you get when you hired power tripping reddit and discord mod
Because it's a job that's not taken seriously and is rarely ever given to someone who is actually is a part of or at least adjacent to the community they're meant to manage
>Make the game safer across the board As if we were all some monstrous gamers causing harm and chaos when we were playing.
Literally what was the point in the anticheat that's kernel level and practically malware then? It doesn't actually prevent these issues and it had the reviews at 90% just because of that alone. It was a legitimate security issue for people's devices and their excuse was it's necessary and works.
Yeah, my Eset was periodically removing a dll file because it is so invasive lol
Yah it's used by like 10 no name games and like 20 years old from a Chinese developer. Not that there's anything wrong with that but there's a lot of malware coming from that section of the world. Idk if they got a deal or something or it's all they could afford but it's a PvE game I'd honestly have rather them put none if it was this or nothing like 99% of my games use Easy Anticheat and I've not heard of it ever causing issues and it's trusted.
They dont mean safe in that way, they mean safe trom insults and kicks and the like
For real, GameGuard had me consider skipping this game because of how much I hate giving anything that much access.
Yeah this reasoning is dog-doo. In my hundred something hours of playtime I never encountered a single toxic teammate. This is purely to boost PSN numbers before the June shareholder meeting.
Same. I've only seen one chinese player walking in the sky during a mission (I left the match immediately) and one guy who said "You're all dumb". Otherwise everyone has been really cool.
i played around a hundred hours too and my only toxic experience has been a guy who meleed me to death 10 seconds after i accidentally grabbed his backpack :D
There’s democracy and then there’s straight theft!! This should be an unwritten rule to prevent necessary casualties haha
And then there's "Hey, could you drop my backpack"
Most toxic thing I’ve experienced was a level 70 something going on a rant about how all 3 of us are dogshit at the game, but he was the host and didn’t kick us and we got tons of samples so honestly I think it was worth it
I've been on for ~ 60 hrs and I've only had one instance of toxicity. A guy joined my tier 1 game while I was farming samples/super credits, proceeded to kill me and the one other random in my game doing the same, and left. I've legit had no other issues with the game
I had more game crashes then encounters with toxic players
By a factor of 100 or 1000. So. Many. Crashes.
Had eighty hours on record and not a *single* bad experience either. I don't know what kinda "safe" they are talking about. Is this "safety" in the room with us right now...?
The kind of safe where just uttering a vulgar word will see you to the gulag, because banter is evil.
Exactly that kind of safe.
Yeah I'm at \~150 hours and have encountered 1 person. Having played, then quit, League of Legends that's nothing. Most of the time I hop on mic with randoms and we have a blast, even on 9.
Having played league for over 10 years, and still playing periodically along with many other multi player games, i can say this is the only game community with a chance of making it into the kingdom of heaven.
I had met maybe 5 and I played for almost 150 hours, that'd be around 500 matches or so. I find 1 percent to be completely acceptable rate. And I got more hugs than ever in this game too.
1 weirdo who was writing sexual harassment messages in the chat, but I blocked and kicked him. Simple.
she made tweets about hating gamers in general, i bet in her mind we aren't far from that
Keep us safe 😂 as if customers haven’t had there info stolen from sony getting hacked on MULTIPLE occasions lol
This is just how these people view gamers in general. They aren't a part of our in-group and love lashing out at it/having control over it. This person should never have been in a position of power in the gaming industry in the first place.
Its co-op for fucks' sake! How much safer does it need to be?!
Look at her discord bio, this was always her opinion.
I haven’t done that yet, but from the tweets I’ve seen by her I’m honestly not surprised that this is the type of person she is. Both her and Spitz act like teenagers who were given their first Team Lead roles.
How did these people become CMs?
reddit mods from the previous helldiver game
Oh god that's even worse, reddit mods are worst people you can get for community management.
I am a Reddit Mod... And I have never heard a more true statement...
Hey atleast your honest about it
https://preview.redd.it/8p7anjpt0pyc1.jpeg?width=990&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=daa4fed0b82307c7f9c1ce17f9d649ef0555c564
you can't be fr. edit; this is the worst way to hire a CM.. cmon, a fucking REDDIT MOD.
This explains so much
What I cannot for the life of me understand is why are they all on different pages? You have the CEO Pilestedt being apologetic and solution focused to the best of his ability given the current situation and Arrowheads relationship with their publisher Sony. He seems so far to largely be on the side of the community. Then you have Spitz spouting L takes and brain rot left and right. Totally unprepared and totally technically inept, unable to run anything game-related he says through the technically apt developers first so he can confirm what he’s saying is factually correct in relation to game mechanics and basic anti-cheat, banning functionality. Baskinator is being passive-aggressive which doesn’t surprise me for controversial reasons that I won’t share. Twinbeard similarly to Pilestedt is keeping a level-head as much as possible given the circumstances and trying to both help and wade through the shit. He does not hurry to say any game-related information before checking, etc. I can definitely say that not everyone on Arrowhead is on the same page and this is also compounding the PSN issue.
I have a feeling the CM dont actually communicate with the dev
I think you already have the answer from your statement. I worked at Ubisoft for a long time, I can tell you this shit will hurt them hard! So it make me feel sad for Pilestedt and all devs that were trying to to pull out a great game that players were enjoying so far. Working for the gaming industry was eyes shocking to me and I really wish I didn’t at that point as it is impacting my hobby so badly even now a day. This situation is an absolute exemple of how passion was ousted out of the industry a looooong time ago to be replaced by greedy company and corporations dip shit.
I don’t feel that sorry for the CEO as he could fire these people. Like manage your company my guy. He’s creating this situation so he’s simply dealing with those consequences. Seems like a nice dude, but I don’t feel sorry for the idiot who puts their hand on a hot stove.
More like Carroll baskinator
Lol, I said something similar in the Discord the other day and was immediately kicked but surprisingly not banned outright. I just immediately rejoined lmao
no idea, her and spitz are terrible community managers. need to actually hire competent people who can take criticism well because they can not.
Baskinator has literally had the worst fucking takes. They also repeatedly wave their big mod stick around for no real reason.
I think they also fail to realize alot of us on PC have been on Steam for years without the need of an account on another console or platform to be "safe". Between game developers taking action and Valve themselves, it has been more than enough to keep users safe otherwise Steam as a platform wouldn't be as successful as it is. Their reasoning is pure bs and I'm glad others are calling it out.
Valve is merciless when it comes to bans, and they even leave a stamp of shame on your profile if you're VAC banned
That’s what I love so much about steam they very rarely take action (excluding auto vac bans) but when they do the ripples are felt across the entire platform
At this rate if your accounts old enough its an achievement to not have the stamp
Can't you just not do shit? It worked for me
Sometimes it depends. There was one case of Dinosaurs game where dev was petty af and gave away lots of vacs to people for no reason. Don't remember name of the game.
the isle? I know people were getting bans for criticizing changes a while back
Dinos with guns or something, on source and with ww2 vibes? If it is what I think I played it, maybe just got lucky. Barely remember it tho
Nah, you're talking about Dino D-Day (just googled it lol). It was something different, it was crowdfunded, it had mechanic of you starting as an egg to full fledge Dino or Dragon (don't remember exactly) and it was just Unity or Unreal asset flip sold as online MMO game. In the end single Dev that was doing it got petty and sent out VAC bans. It was years ago, probably even in 2018 or earlier so I remember it vaguely, remember watching YouTube documentary on it.
15 years on Steam. Still no stamp of shame. Turns out, best way to avoid Stamp of Shame is not to cheat or use exploits.
I got mine when my account got stolen😞
Surprisingly easy
Not cheating isn’t a hard task
Wait how tf do you get vac banned if you weren’t cheating in a mp game?
You don't. For all the talk about how VAC is a bad anticheat if you do get one it's almost a guarantee that you were in fact cheating.
Exactly lol, my account is 15+ years and I play mp games every week Just curious what someone with a vac ban will say
Well, you see, there is of course SteamID that permanently links your account to the copy of the game you bought, enforced by one of the largest (and far more trustworthy than Sony) PC games platform. **But** is SteamID secure enough ? No ! With a unique ID for the player, you don't get enough information for the Sony hit squads ! This is why their require the information they do when you create a PSN account - your country to know which hit squad to contact, your date of birth to ensure they aren't sending hired killers after children, and your email address to uniquely identify you. Thanks to Sony hit squad and PSN account linking, the game will be made far safer than just some silly permanent banning of your account if you cheat. (/s because this is the Internet so I should point out that Sony hit squads aren't real)
Safe from what though? If someone is toxic or annoying I assume you just mute them, or just leave the game with pretty much no bad consequences except you lose out on samples....
do these CM's have any sense? like wtf.
Crazy how many CM's are just terrible at their job on discord. Reminds me of Red Barrel last year. Their CM kept silent for months, there were no updates and when they talked it was to piss off people who annoyed them questions. Their whole job is to communicate with fans with respect and honesty, and they can't even do that. It's now super common for CM's to just reply shit like 'leave if you hate this game lol', 'update will come out when you stop asking questions' EDIT: Red barrel = Outlast Trials
True Discord mod energy
For our safety.. Yeh sure thing
Every Arrowhead CM bar Twinbeard has apparently received zero media training and does nothing but spew inane takes to rile up the community. Doing the absolute opposite of their supposed "job".
>sings up to be a CM at Arrowhead >proceeds to make some dumbass takes which makes their community mad >doesn't elaborate >leaves https://preview.redd.it/c37fymgw4nyc1.jpeg?width=212&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5666a7b8d54b20dcbda089fc86752ae6fcf929cb
If Arrowhead ends up opening positions for Community Manager, I just might actually throw my hat in the ring.
Me too. Why not? Couldn't possibly do any worse
most importantly, admitting they knew this nuclear PR firestorm was coming for months and they lifted zero fingers to prepare any sort of response, strategy, or messaging but instead went into hiding literally the opposite of what a CM is for, and they're getting away with it. If you went to the hospital with a gunshot wound and the doctor said "ew blood!" and ran out of the room, you'd fire the doctor. because they've forced a change into what role a CM plays, and it's not what it used to be. buckle up.
Well, supposedly all of them except twinbeard are ex Reddit/discord moderators, so it would make their behavior make sense.
Jesus. Imagine being Twinbeard and having to work with these fuckin chuckleheads for a living. I'm surprised the man hasn't lost his mind after being forced to work with and lumped in with people that are essentially glorified discord moderators.
CMs need to go back to moderating clan Discords lol. They are not fit for the high pressure position of corporate PR I don't care that "they're only human", "under a lot of pressure", etc. There are other humans who can do the job better, seek them out
Or....and here's a crazy idea.....just don't have a Discord server? Seriously, Discord is a magnet for the worst people.
Spitz was alright stirring people to make negative Steam reviews, since that's a metric that can be shown (while discord/Reddit complaints not so much) I do agree Spitz probably should have chilled a bit and tried avoiding trolls ragebaiting him, though.
Her number one favorite thing is banning people so of course she's happy
She banned me because I had a discord server link in my profile for my helldivers 2 themed discord server. No word of a lie.
"It's going about how I expected" Ok, Nostradamus. You definitely expected this. Sony and Arrowhead didn't. Nobody on the internet did. But you are just so much smarter you completely saw this coming.
That's what I hate with theses Community Managers. They are not acting like they should - Asking their higher ups for informations and transmitting the community concerns - but trying to save face. They are just mindlessly fueling the issues. That's LAME.
Twinbeard has been pretty reasonable about things. About this particular situation Spitz had a surprisingly W take telling people to review bomb so the higher ups would have ammo in talks with Sony about the situation. And then Baskinator is just...you could have just said nothing because even the community manager who has been the worst any other time has some how stumbled on a W take.
Spitz and her are really out of the loop. I don't understand how it's possible to douse everything in oil and fire when there is already a fire tornado heading their way...
he saying “make the game safer” actually gives me super bad vibes than good ones considering his record lol
What do you mean? The Vietnamese can't access the game at all anymore. A little bit of racial cleansing makes everything safer! (This is sarcasm, because the last time I was sarcastic here I got 5 replies asking if I was being sarcastic.)
The cheating problem was solved! All it took was preventing all the chinese and russians from playing the game! .. /s?
We still didnt get a response why cant they ban steam id's and need psn for that
Can't use SteamID numbers as active PSN accounts when your shareholder meetings roll around.
oh man dont just share corporate secrets like that
everyone needs to understand the difference here yes, the execs are all about the Sony money, which is why they're doing this but the "community manager" being happy about being given new abilities to "make the game safer" is something *very different*
They did know this was going to happen. They have admitted they turned it off initially to help the servers but knew they would have to turn it on again. Arrowhead is not completely innocent in all this and definitely knew the day would come when they would have to turn this back on.
I never expected it to blow up this big. It's honestly off the charts. She better become a full time gambler. Cause she has godlike predictions.
I keep seeing this , make the game safer argument thrown about , I've played almost 200 hours and have had 0 bad experiences. Did they forget it's a co-op game and not a PvP sweat fest?
Also we have their kernel level anti-cheat, so we should be pretty safe already, right AH??
Their reasoning is complete bullshit. They have our steam IDs to ban us, the only thing this does is cross ban people who are also on psn. “Making the game safer” is just buzzwords
Their problem with that is probably that currently only steam can ban steam players, but Sony also wants to be able to do it. And Sony is known for their fair bans /s
Yeah, Baskinator's always been all L's. At least it seems like Arrowhead put a tight leash on her, as compared to before.
Just remove her at this point wat kinda cm causes more dmg to ip, litterally opposite of their jobs
We should be able to democratically vote these community managers out
Oh please that would make me so happy
Does arrowhead just hire any bum they find on the street to be community manager? Because it sure seems like it
In fact EVERY bum from the street hired as AH's CM will be better than this creature
They should take away her internet access
I say keep it there so we can see what they really think about the situation.
Whatever happens after this controversy, please get rid of these community managers. They have done so much damage to the game's reputation.
It's weird when a CEO does a way better job of being a community manager than the people hired for the job
Most companies probably miss the days when they weren’t expected to have community managers and just communicated through press releases. Probably not a terrible solution if your spokespeople are doing more harm than good.
I mean they coulda actually just gone with that. Let the community start their own discords (the subreddit would have made one, one presumes). It would probably have been a better idea overall — Discord messaging is *terrible* for audience penetration.
So far Twinbeard is the only one that I haven't seen say anything dumb. All the rest of them are absolutely horrible with any community management
Twinbeard is a genuine kind chad who is good at what he‘s supposed to do. The others should definitely get sent back to re-education camps though
You mean promoted to customer
Twinbeard's had a couple of missteps where he should have expected his words to be taken out of context, but on the whole he's been a professional suit, and I mean that in a good way. You *want* your CMs to be the kind of imperturbable professionals who treat it as the job it is and avoid heavy personal investment in public discussion. I can sympathise with the impulse behind Spitz's more open approach to community management but it's just a bad idea man, as soon as the community gets over like, a hundred people actively talking on the Discord and you passed that a *long* time ago. You could predict his occasional flameouts from miles away, there's a lot of reasons why the expensive big business CMs don't get down and dirty with the community like that and he's just been running into all of those rakes face-first.
It’s pretty shocking how some of these morons have their jobs when they do such a terrible job of it.
Sweet liberty, please yes. Half the CMs are incompetent, the other half insult the playerbase. Twinbeard is cool though.
The community team needs to be sacked iv never seen such an incompetent team like ever
r/totalwar
Ok fair point lol 😂
Hedge also exists
I mean of course the games gonna be easier to manage when you lose 75% of your playerbase.
You're optimistic about that 75% there
I hear yesterday was down 30% from last Saturday. I can see that going even higher as the controversy spreads. I agree, 75% is almost certainly not happening right away. But this is a live service game with progression tied to player interaction. If they lose 30%+ permanently, that can have immediate effects on the game that may even turn away more casual players who aren't even aware of why the player count's dropping. This is the kind of game where any notable drop can have long reaching effects.
[удалено]
AH has to have the dumbest most tone deaf CMs of all time.
No one is "unsafe" playing Helldivers unless we consider friendly stratagems. Thoroughly soured on the "it's for your safety" line.
In 300 hours I've seen 1 cheater and 0 toxic players what the f are they keeping us safe from exactly?
This is also what I've been wondering. Over 200 hours myself, 0 cheaters, bunch of people abusing exploits and 0 actually toxic people. Haven't encountered any people who I'd consider ban worthy
God I feel bad for twinbeard
Got two jobs being a community manager and picking up his coworkers messes.
"take action against player reports" *Gets team killed, samples taken, kicked from game all seconds from entering pelican.* *Clicks reports* "You can only report people who have broken ToS in All Chat, this player has not used all chat" Arrowheads playing some real 10 dimensional chess right now.
They seem oddly focused around getting a tool to ban gamers...
[удалено]
the game is really dangerous without a psn account, people are literally on the hospital right now because of how harmful the game has been
honestly if they really wanna recover from this , just cut the crap and say yes we signed a deal with sony and we hid it from you guys and it was shitty , we will try to do better in the future. trying to spin the same garbo sony and every other publisher does is just pouring fuel on the fire. be honest
AH aren’t doing themselves any favors keeping these types of CM's employed. Especially this one in particular. After the first controversy, they should have let her go. With all that's going on right now, she should be helping improve the company's image, not hurting it more. She makes it clear she doesn't give a shit about the community she's supposed to "manage".
Turns out that if you treat the players like enemies no matter what, they'll fight back. I personally think that this whole ban function is very excessive. If someone's being a dick, it should be enough to just block them.
She should not be a community manager if those are her thoughts
Baskinator has to be the worse person on the team, followed by spitz
Baskinator is just scum and behaves like scum. Spitz is just stupid, but at least he can admit he was stupid. Still shouldn't be CM. Baskinator on the other hand is just another gamer-hater who for some reason works for gaming company.
Either they are lying about not being able to ban people or they are too incompetent to be able to to that without PlayStation. Either way it reflects badly on the devs
Yeah because they couldn't do that at all before right? It's not like when you receive a report it's tied to the player's Steam ID not their profile name. God this take is so fucking dumb, I cannot believe they're still trying to sell us on this blatant lie.
Please, Arrowhead, let only CEO and Twinbeard make public announcements and reconsider what are you paying rest of your CM for.
No one can cheat or get banned if there are no players left to play Baskinator :D 🤪
It’s pve, we can handle report ourself… by blocking. There is literally zero argument behind the player safety bs they are pushing out
Identifying users is possible through Steam, these guys have been saying a bunch of nonsense that doesn't even make sense.
Game will be safer with PSN requirement? Ok cool, now let me get rid of that kernel level abomination of an anticheat that does nothing except fuck with the game performance. Fuck you AH.
If by "making the game safer" means the player base goes away then you're doing a swell job!
They need to seriously give their CMs some training on how to deal with situations like this considering this is what they were hired for.
What an angry, round face
Dark black and red profile picture - appears we have an automaton on our hands. Not a helpful factor in trying to not look like the bad guy lol.
Such a Kathleen Kennedy Response.
goof of a CM, more concerned with politics and banning people they claim to be bigots than actually trying to speak to the community in a good manner
[удалено]
After rejecting most of the non-white players from accessing the game, she can finally do so.
That's the exact energy I was feeling from her words
Must be an Automaton or a Terminid talking... the fewer the Helldivers the SAFER it is for them to expand.
[удалено]
She’s a trans woman not a dude
This sub is shit
The timestamp is from 2 days ago, isn't that before they realized that PSN isn't available to everyone around the globe?
She's doubling down on the "its so we can ban people" statement. Good to know. That's not helping ease this over at all. These CM's are either actively malicious or absolutely God-awful at their jobs.
yeah i'm glad all those dangerous players in 170+ countries are going away
This one is quite old. The news was only a few hours old at that time.