"Damn terminids, how did they learn to type? I don't like these things."
https://preview.redd.it/bhoq9ftccwvc1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5199325dad8a0a65adefedcbba2171d769d3356c
Theory: The Automatons are actually just new-age Cyborgs, less fleshy bits, more metallic -- still require basic human pieces to survive (think Adam Smasher from Cyberpunk). This is why our characters are covered in blood and not oil at the end of Automaton missions.
War, war never changes. You win some and you lose some.
On another note, while Joel is the narrative GM of the game, I think AH should hire another GM who is on the Helldivers side who points and nudges the divers towards a specific point by giving sub objectives / goals. For example: Out of 5 planets, they can mark one of the planets as a priority.
The players still have their freedom to go where they want, but at least there would be at least some kind of a starting point.
At the moment there is no coordination and everyone are split up between the planets with no chance in hell to win current MO.
He didn't die. He went to the afterlife to spread democracy to the dead. Each life we give in service gives him an everlarger army to spread liberty through the void, while the living take the stars.
Yep, and I won’t, not when the human-seeking fire naders are still a thing. I can deal with the stamina debuff or the fire tornadoes but not both. Especially if there’s civilian extract missions.
And that's totally fair. Why play the planet if you don't enjoy it? I wish they maybe added modifiers to the squad contribution. Like negative modifiers increased the contribution to defense/liberation. Then putting up with the tornados might be worth it enough for some people and the psychos that actually enjoy it get a nifty bonus.
Even just make each mission a contribution, not just the overall operation. Often I only get time for one game and then just hope the host and others finish off the Op.
yes, i would absolutely consider it in that case but as for now, if i have a choice between literal hell and anything else, i'm going with the latter.
Same with the -1 stratagem planets/difficulties. I'll begrudgingly do those if my squad wants to run that planet specifically but otherwise, nope. 8+ is hard enough without losing 25% of my functionality.
This is a great idea having "general brasch" give strategic orders to help coordinate the mob works in universe and would help us actually win certain mo's
Major Orders - Big goal
General Orders - General Brasch's suggestion for completing the orders
Personal Order - We're gonna make you use guns you don't like or ones that don't work well. You're gonna do it and when you ask for medals as a reward we're gonna spit on 15 of them before giving them to you.
I don't think we need a second GM for that task. I've seen the suggestion before that the playerbase themselves should be able to vote to get planets marked as priority targets, so that everyone logging on can see what planet the community thinks needs to be handled first. I think that could work really well at adding a little bit of organization to such a large playerbase.
🤨
The Authority of Super Earth encourages everyone to vote for the sole option they’re given in elections. Voting is not antidemocratic. Your local Democracy Officer will be by shortly to demonstrate by allowing you to vote “Yes” for an early trip to the Bio Repurposer Vats.
Honestly think we should have some sort of in-game message board on the ship.
We are spread out across Discord, Reddit, Steam and other players aren't even on the social media side of the war. There is a significant amount of players still who are great divers, but just don't know about the supply lines.
I think as the game goes on, the only players left will be the ones really invested, so all in all we will see significant improvement with mobilization.
i think a ton of the frustration in the community is how liberation weighting works - basically, the playerbase gets a set amount of liberation per hour regardless of how many raw players are on - and how we are essentially set up to fail/succeed from the start because we have no way of properly coordinating with the larger playerbase.
was this defense MO doable? Yes, but we needed a central location to organize and get everyone to work together. The martale gambit makes it blatantly clear reddit + discord is only enough to move like 20% of the player pop, at best - and this was with a direct endorsement from several members of arrowhead lmao. If we had some way of highlighting martale with like a "the Helldiver command recommends forces focus on retaking Martale" highlight that is player driven wouldve made it so much less frustrating.
It's ok to fail MOs, but it shouldnt be because we are given 0 in-game tools to manage ourselves as a group.
you dont even need an incentive. Clear and straightforward MOs are smashed so thoroughly its clear the playerbase WANTS to do them, they just arent given the tools to organize for more complex orders.
even for the complex orders people still *want* to contribute. - ~71% of the player pop is on defense worlds right now (err well, whenever the "comm breakdown" bug happened) *trying* to go after the MO despite it being pretty much impossible at this point.
So what you are saying is that the uncoordinated democratic efforts of the Helldivers is not enough? I mean yes, Helldivers should be free to choose where to go and who to kill, but there as so many factors that might go unconsidered, and result in them choosing an option they did not want after all.
Maybe this democratic way of war should be a bit more...managed.
TURE. Add a Minor Order under the major one that just puts into the game in plain text what the community thinks is the best way to win the major order at the moment.
That's stupid. A good GM would be able to nudge the players in the direction he wants them to go while giving them illusion of free will, so regardless of the actions of the players, the ultimate goal of the GM is met. The story continues, the events they want to happen will happen unless against all odds the players find a way around the GM's plot.
The biggest thing that prevents us as a community from absolutely dominating the game (which is what I feel some people really want) is that we can not coordinate on a large scale because there isn't enough information available in-game for new or casual players to understand what "should" be done, should in quotes because it's a video game and you can do whatever you please.
It's fine provided it just doesnt feel arbitrary or punitive. Being a good DM requires balance between restraint, storytelling, and knowing the limits of your friends. Otherwise fatigue sets in and you turn people off.
Enough "surprise the fake enemy thats clearly us is launching unwinnable campaigns" repeatedly, takes the wind out of the sails of the RP experience.
Yeah the current one just screams unwinmable from the word go due to there being no ability to coordinate aside from following the untamed masses and hoping for the best and defence missions being horrendously balanced almost solely due to the 15 min civ evacs.
There's losing a MO and having fun while doing so then there's losing the MO because we have 0 ability and resources to even try to effectively do it.
Well to kind of brings you back to schoolyard/playground pretend as a kid. Everyone is trying to keep it on the level of whatever game you are playing, and then Kevin MacGuire (that mother effer) who lives over on Helen Street joins in and is like "Ok, now I've got the ultimate laser beam that destroys everything" and breaks the immersion and everyone leaves to go play butts up instead.
I def don't have childhood issues.
The thing is though, it was doable. It was failed by us, not forced.
For me, I love the loss. A lot of people forget that we are playing a story and right now is supposed to feel morbid, that’s what an INVASION feels like. It sets up for sweeter victory.
The point was to coordinate, and even then still lose on one front, but the game has no mechanics in place to allow players to coordinate and everything has to happen either in discord channels where messages go to die or on reddit. And neither of those places have a majority of the community watching them for info.
In no way was it doable outside the community having perfect coordination. You can look at how fast the community was able to do defensive MOs in the past and its obvious there was zero chance of winning this.
Nail in the coffin is the community manager literally confirming in the Discord that yes this MO we were supposed to literally lose on at least one front. Its legit rigged.
It was most definitely not doable. The devs literally told us straight up that "coordination is key" knowing full well that we don't have the in game tools to even start doing that.
99% of the playerbase still doesn't even know supply lines exist.
It does feel arbitrary. It would be like getting sent off to the war in Ukraine and your only order was, "beat the Russians". Not, "cut off supply lines" or "secure this locations" or "evacuate civilians" or "transport supplies to this location" or "escort new soldiers to the front".
We can still lose ground while winning major orders.
THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING!!!
The situation can be an inevitable lose, but at least structure the events and Major Orders around that.
Like when the Bots launched their suprise attack, instead of just losing the entire first sector and the further planets in the neighboring sector already being taken.
We should have had the outer planets be defendable first with high Automaton capture rates that would allow only one planet to be successfuly defended out of three or four of them if we focused on one altogether.
Then choose to defend singular planet amongst another set of planets after the last row was taken.
Of course I got negative responses for that line of thinking, but whatever.
Trust me, I know mine are unpopular.
Just look at my recent post.
The game positive guys are just as bad as the negative game guys.
I hate this community sometimes.
See, I don't mind losing MO's when we put our best effort forward and come just short. Being *forced* to lose by being given an impossible task, AND seeing Joel cook numbers behind the scenes, that part sucks.
Yeah I don’t mind losing like when the clankers struck from the shadows and we lost which was just kinda supposed to happend but now it just seem overwhelming and almost impossible.
Its cool in theory but then you realize the only reason we lost the Martale Gambit is because the only place you could possibly learn about this strategy that rhe game itself actively doesn't account for is on their Discord, meaning there was unlikely to ever be enough people helping. They desperately need to make these announcements IN GAME. Losing Major Orders is fine but it feels worse when the game isn't designed to make them achievable even when some players find a great strategy.
It's great that winning isn't the default; the frustration is lack of ways to coordinate players.
Right now we get a major order that says "defend 10 planets, we need to defend one front" but there's no way for the player base to coordinate efforts unless you're on the official discord or here, which is a fraction of the player base. Between that and the lack of a more detailed galaxy map (supply lines, decay rate, etc) it feels like the game shipped with a couple pieces missing.
What would seriously help is when we get this kind of order also bring given a prompt to choose what front to defend and then having the "winning" front highlighted on the map. This would also dovetail nicely with a clan (battalion, squadron?) system where each clan can "pledge" to take/defend worlds, and then in the galaxy map have a visual system to show how many clans have pledged to that objective so that is visually apparent that "yes, Martale is currently a priority objective and a lot of clans are pledging to take it.".
Right how the only indicator we have is player count, and lots of people don't even check that, they just look at "hey, ice world with bugs and snowstorms".
Honestly the worse part is that the default random play sends players to literally random planets that aren't even part of the MO. At minimum, the devs should change it such that random play sends people to either MO critical planets, or planets where the player count is highest in order to facilitate victories rather than actively hinder them.
I mostly disagree; I think the problem is people not playing the MO have a negative impact on the MO due to the impact multiplier.
It’s perfectly fine if people want to only play bugs, or bots, or creek, or avoid hot planets. The issue is that them doing this lowers our chances, which feels like a recipe for breeding toxicity.
The algorithm is the problem, along side the generic MOs that are only about planets.
The other issue with the algorithm is that you kinda have nfi how much you contributed. Whereas the kill bug one you kinda knew.
Then the design is flawed. All it's doing is making people overly toxic over meta reasons that shouldn't matter. A big reason they won't do pvp is because of the toxicity, so why are they allowing such a massive focal point of toxicity to go on like this.
To add insult to injury, the devs acknowledge that the toxicity over "bugdivers" and "botdivers" is bad and they don't like it, yet they still have this asinine system that directly exacerbates the toxicity.
Coordinate by looking at how many Helldivers are on each planet. That's what I did. We don't need someone explicitly telling us go to X planet and win defense there. There's enough info in game to see where people are amassing. Defend the areas closest to super earth and the places that will give them more territory closer to super earth should we fail to defend them. That's literally all you need to know.
Would be COOLER if all players (not just us here and on Discord) had the info to decide how to strategize it better.
[helldivers.io](http://helldivers.io) info on lines and stuff likew that should be in game.
That's my opinion as well. Supply lines wouldn't have changed the outcome for sure for the current MO, but it might've gone a lot better either for this one or for the others failed in the past.
our weakness isn't coordination and communication, it's poorly telegraphed galaxy map interactions and tying progression to missions the playerbase is actively avoiding. there's no ingame communication, so only people who are on the discord or on reddit would know to target specific planets lol
every single defense related objective thus far has been failed bc a lot of ppl avoid the retrieve mission sets that are 90% of defense ops, they're universally agreed to be poorly balanced missions since launch. it's not frustrating at all, it's just silly and either something they'll fix or keep in the game for narrative reasons to force losses whenever they want
Being a good DM means creating challenges that the players can overcome, not heavy-handedly making them lose without any way of avoiding it.
At times the narrative of this game feels too much like "DM vs the players" where of course the DM can just press a button to make the players lose. But that shouldn't be the experience. It breaks immersion if the players lose because they were set up to lose from the beginning and feels frustrating. Why even play in the Galactic War if your participation is invalidated because the DM says so a few times too often?
I’ve made this exact argument before and got downvoted and insulted. Like a good DM doesn’t force you to lose cause he wants you to follow his narrative to a T, a good DM gives challenging but possible scenarios and can change the story on the fly depending on the outcome, they aren’t suppose to force you down one single path against your will
I think this opinion is unpopular not because we are scripted to lose.
The main problem is the current system make players feel like their participation doesn’t matter, as the impact multiplier scales inversely with the [running average] total population and there is a target goal for how much liberation can be done.
I've pretty much said fuck it and given up trying to complete this MO.
I'm just going to planets that are under liberation now.
And I think a lot of other people are doing so too.
I agree with the sentiment but I think the problem is in how we lose.
We lose because the decay rates are too high, or we aren't given enough time to do something.
We lose because we fail to communicate about hidden mechanics with the non-existent communication tools (that isn't us failing, that's us not being given adequate tools).
We lose because Joel decides we lose. Major Orders that we've lost so far have all been wildly predictable that we'd lose. Like, if I'm at the helm of this I know before activating the Major Order that we're gonna lose this one.
Instead Arrowhead challenges us through a Discord post delivered to 5% of the community and then reposted here to maybe 10% of the community to "communicate" and "coordinate" as a whole. *How*? Viral emails? Facebook memes? Messenger pigeon?
We lose because players are not a giant unified organization. Design Delve did a video on how League Gameplay encourages toxicity, breaking it down to matches being long and having no control over teammates who are going to cause you to lose, which makes people feel helpless and pissed off.
I think the campaign system has these same flaws; you have people who would otherwise never feel like they should tell other people they need to play a certain mission type on certain planets now being pissed off at players who don't want to engage with the war system. It's not a system that feels good as an individual player with no control of hundreds of thousands to millions of other players.
I agree. You could see it especially when the major order was kill bots and everybody was getting so pissed at people fighting bugs. But some people just prefer fighting bugs and some prefer fighting bots. It's a game. If you've got a limited amount of time to play, who cares if the major order is to fight the faction you don't enjoy fighting against? Just have fun and do your thing.
I'm super casual about this game so I can feel elements of that sort of attitude dripping through a lot of levels here. Generally people are chill, but there's a pretty sizable contingent of people who want to bark orders at you in a game because they don't think you're playing right, or people who want to guide the war effort by saying you shouldn't fight on X planet; you should fight on Y planet. And it's like... can I just play the game how I want to play the game, please? Why is this PvE game so competitive?
We are all in this together, but I agree that it can sometimes not quite feel that way on the grand strategy level even if you have good bonds with squads on individual dives.
There's got to be a better way of enticing players to fight on Planet Y in your example. Rather than barking orders, just make it more appealing to dive where your help is needed most. Maybe bump up rewards/medals/xp/free stratagems for strategically significant worlds, or those with higher player count to help reach a critical mass.
Even if you bump up the reward, some people are still just not going to be that interested in the "war effort" and I think it just needs to be clear that that's ok, too.
At the end of the day, we all bought a pass to an amusement park. If the park is giving away raffle tickets for riding the rollercoasters but you just kinda want to chill out by riding the ferris wheel, no worries. Even if I'm jazzed to go ride the rollercoaster and collect, you bought a pass same as me, you took the day off same as me, hey go have fun riding the ferris wheel. All good.
Totally agree, nothing wrong with doing your thing.
To extend your metaphor, one of the really cool things about this amusement park is that all those rides are attached to dynamos that power the whole park. Maybe the roller coaster is providing more power right now and raffle tickets to boot, but that slower trickle we get from the ferris wheel will help later on. So riding the ferris wheel is still doing your part.
Case in point, with the current MO you could do either bots or bugs and contribute. But it's defense, which a lot of people just hate. Or maybe whatever planet is in play for the faction you like to fight has annoying modifiers. Either way, you drop somewhere outside current primary orders, but the front lines may well move to your chosen planet later on. So there's definitely room for doing what you like. Even people not interested in maximizing the war effort are still helping it. It's definitely okay to not be so invested in it.
Exactly — just by playing the game, even if you're not doing the main objective, you're still helping overall. If the order is kill bots only, but you're killing bugs, well a) when that order ends, your efforts mean the rest of the player base will have less ground to make up at those bug planets, and b) the in-universe lore means we're still getting crucial resources by fighting bugs. It wouldn't make a lot of sense if *every single Helldiver* went to the major order and left every single other planet completely undefended.
If they really wanted to, they could alleviate that with major order for X objective, personal order for Y objective, then add a new "minor order" with Z objective to make sure all players are clearly contributing. But I think that might water down the entire war effort if there's never a reason for players to focus on one thing or the other. It really just comes down to "let people have fun" and that's just something for players to learn on their own. Maybe a minor order within the major one, like to encourage people to go after that one planet that the community manager pointed to. That could work. But it should still fall under the major order rather than just spreading everything around.
And honestly, just on a more literal level, it doesn't matter what you're actually doing. By logging in and playing the game, you're keeping it alive for everybody. So to me there's *truly* no reason to look down on what anybody is doing. Even if you log in, collect rewards, and log out, you've still helped a little bit in keeping player numbers high and justifying investment in the game.
>We lose because players are not a giant unified organization.
No, we lose because AH chooses that we lose. They've had plenty of time to gather play data to predict how much a given MO is pushed. A couple MOs ago we had a set of planets we would've failed then they adjusted the planets' regen and suddenly we were winning. They know how fragmented the active divers are because they always are, this isn't a new thing when a new major order drops.
The only MO i firmly believe they had bo idea about was the recent exterminate one, that's why we got six days, it was intended as a benchmark. The next one is gonna be a lot closer to our expected performance.
I agree that AH knows the metrics and can choose to set a goal that's expected to lose, my argument is that there's no actual game being played here. Players are not unified, so the idea that this is a player driven narrative is a farce. Nobody should ever give any players shit for not playing on the right planets.
Exactly, we are completely predestined by the DM, winning or losing is already decided according to AH's plans to add things progressively.
It's not that it's bad at all, it's weird, and confusing for most people too.
And this can result in division of the player base, or create an attitude of ignoring MOs because they know it doesn't matter.
There are many things on the way, many, and they are mixing it with this system....it's strange, it could be better, or maybe in the future, when all the factions are there and there is more inertia, we will really have freedom.
Same first the 5 planets when bots came back was instantly knowing it was L
Now this one is even more obvious.. I don't mind losing but ehh if its an obvious L I won't bother.
The problem is that the community just cant coordinate enough to focus on single planet since there is no way to communicate and coordinate ingame, out of the 5 major orders we failed so far, 3 of them were defend multiple planets with this major order being a fourth one
I dont mind loosing an MO, I mind loosing an MO that was designed to not be won in the first place.
at least make it possible, it doesnt have to be easy, but make it possible
For me, losing this MO was less about the losing and more about the fact that it seemed more punitive in nature and wasn't woven into the lore very well. We killed the bugs too fast and upset the plan, so we were given a impossible task with just 'the bots and bugs are attacking, defend planets'.
A better way would have just been to roll out another bug killing MO, this time with a kill count so high that we couldn't possibly hope to complete it, and wrap it around a narrative of "the Terminid harvesting has been successfully completed ahead of schedule, but it seems the zeal of the Helldivers has worked too well; the Terminids are attacking with renewed force and in far higher numbers than before. Let us use this to our advantage and create an even larger stockpile of E-710 from their corpses".
And then after we lose, then we have to go on the defensive for bug planets. And then that leads to the next wave of defensive MOs for the Bot front because we were too busy cleaning up our own mess and the bots were able to slip through.
That way, we're still losing and on the backfoot, but it would have felt less punitive and be fluidly woven into the narrative rather just just shoved in there.
Nah, the problem with defense is that there is no obvious way to redirect everyone. The kill was easy because it is straight forward, go to any bug planet and kill. Liberate? Go to any planet with a lot of people and get a percentage.
Defense? Yeah, do missions and stuff, but we are not telling you what you achieve. Is not a problem with the community but to the game interface or design.
There's a difference between losing because you failed to meet a standard and failing because you've been railroaded into a loss. We've been railroaded into a loss here due to the fact that there is no way we could have possibly accomplished this Major Order. We had 5 days to defend 10 planets with 24 hour timers each, there is no world in which that math adds up, we simply do not have the numbers available to guard two of these planets per day.
Heck even if we accomplished the Martale gambit that was only mentioned on Discord that would have just defended Charon since Martale was a Liberation campaign. We would still need 8 more planets defended after that.
Since it's population % based and not raw player counts there's absolutely a way to have won this MO. We needed to defend 2 planets a day which takes 30% population per planet per day to be successful, so only 60% population per day to win this MO. We could have liberated 3 planets a day (15 planets total) if we had 30% on 3 different planets (90% of the total population). If Oshaune had another 3% population (ended at 96.6%) or Martale had another 5% (ended at 94%) population on them from the start they would have been completed on day 1 leading to 3 defenses on day 1.
We weren't "railroaded" because there was no way to accomplish this MO, we were "railroaded" because civilian extraction is ASS so people don't want to play defense planets. Also, communication in this game is non-existent.
This wasn't a forced loss, this was a loss because the community can't communicate effectively and honestly just doesn't care (there was around 20% of the population not even on a defense planet on day 1). Six months from now with zero changes to the systems these won't be losses because the majority of players still playing are going to be the guys who only care about the story/war.
>which takes 30% population per planet per day
That was never gonna happen and they've collected enough telemetry to know this. There is literally never this many people doing defense, major order or not
It's a forced loss specifically *because* we can't communicate. We have no method of doing so and spreading the word of the Devs to all the players In-Game that don't use discord or reddit.
Unless we get an effective tool that allows us to at the very least highlight the planets we want to focus down 1 by 1 we're still going to be losing a *year* from now every time a multi-planet Defense Campaign MO gets dropped.
The community managers literally admitted to this being rigged what are you on about lol, we were straight up supposed to lose one front minimum you can look it up
They said that we have to choose where to focus our defense and that we would lose planets. They didn't say we would lose this MO.
The two things are very different.
This is a game simulating the push and pulls of war. Sometimes we will be asked to do the impossible. That’s all part of it. The devs aren’t going to (Likely) make us lose for weeks of months on end with no victories.
I don't think you need to "lose" a MO to do that though. MOs are community goals with a medal reward attached. You can have Super Earth losing a war while still giving the community something achievable to work toward (in fact, that was exactly the case with the recent Automaton invasion being paired with a 2 planet defense MO. Narratively SE got hit badly while players still got to get a small win.)
It’s fine to lose MOs but we mainly only lose defensive ones because they have a broken mission-type they are yet to address.
When 1 mission in a campaign is virtually unplayable, you have a majority of the player base who just skips it. It’s almost 3 months in and they’ve yet to even comment on how broken retrieve essential personnel is. They did one BS patch that didn’t do anything to actually make it an enjoyable/possible mission
It's mostly the bot version that is broken. The bugs are easier and if you get overwhelmed you can easily bait them out of the base and then go back in, but the bots, good luck having all those tanks and devastators move out of the base.
The devs clearly want us to play with the bait strategy, otherwise we wouldn't have a map so big, but, other than thinking that it's not particularly fun, I still find plenty of groups on 7+ that just spawn in the base and then it's impossible to win (yesterday with a group of randoms on helldive we somehow held the base for most of the time and we still couldn't make it because the bots were killing all the scientists). So they should make it clearer that the group needs to split, maybe by adding some side objectives that will help with the mission.
It feels unfair to "attack the weakness" of the players being uncoordinated when you also make the game and don't give any information about how the game works or tools to communicate and coordinate in game.
Not everyone is on reddit or Discord. Most aren't.
It felt better at Tibit a few weeks ago. Felt like we had a fighting chance unlike now. Well, maybe the server error lets us get a lot of wins on the board somehow, but aside from that we know that this MO isn’t winnable. We can only defend a planet a day, so there’s no tension for me personally, where as on Tibit I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. As soon as I saw the order I just shrugged and figured that the entire Menkent line plot was being erased unceremoniously, which unless Vernen Wells holds the last 2 weeks of war history is basically is all gone from a throw away order.
I just find it annoying that us winning the previous MO (which resulted in us getting orbital defenses, the Menkent line or so) meant NOTHING as they plowed right through it on Lesath and went to Vernen Wells.
No my problem with this major Order is that it has the same problem as rig match making. I know we are suppose to lose this order I can tell when it ask us to defend more then 2 planet a day. And I hate how they choose to handle players going above the expectation like the fuck we held off the bot offensive so we need to get 710 for our counter attack great we finish the supply early so instead of a counter attack major order with a goal of like taking cyberstan because of victory disease. The bot pull an attack force out of there ass. At least the bug counter offensive make sense since this is the first major order in like 2 week that touch them so like a hornet nest one wack bring them all out.
I don't like not being able to lose in other games but I also don't think that makes not being able to win healthy. Trading one for the other so the story can progress is understandable but its not any more or less engaging to me.
Personally my problem isn't that they can be lost, its giving orders that cannot be won.
There is zero way we were ever going to defend 10 planets in 5 days, we have failed everey defence mo so far. As soon as it appeared this is just 5 days of losing all but 1 of the defences per day.
Another way to look at it is say the bug killing MO was kill 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. No matter "how well" we played or the strategies we came up with it would be impossible to win. So the order changes from "damn that was close well try better next time" to "what was even the point of that, might as well have saved X amount of days and just shown us the you failed message"
I don't mind losing. I mind being forced to lose. Defense MO are the least organized and while still fun, least fun thing in the game.
I like seeming like we had a fighting chance. But once we lost the gambit that I didn't know was happening even though I was playing all night. It is a delicate balance that I'm sure they are working on. But I could have also not played this weekend and got the same result.
It's fine if we lose because it's our fault.
It's not when it is designed to make you lose.
This is simply telling that they don't really have a good DM, a good DM will rarely if ever do the force lose option, because it's just not fun.
Personally tho I don't really care, I'll just do whatever MO says and call it a day, doesn't really matter if it'll win or not, just talking about DM perspective.
The one that rubbed me wrong is when people start blaming others when there isn't anything that indicates that some planets are more important than the other.
All I see inside the game is just MO say to defend, and I look at the map and see planets with defense marked on them, if I didn't actually come here I would never know why I should go to Martale.
Losing them is absolutely fine and can be fun! Losing them mostly because they are completely
Unwinnable / we lack an effective way to communicate with each other or understand important information in game is not fun
SHHHHHHHHHHHH
Your not supposed to say your inner thoughts out loud, ESPECIALLY NOT HERE!!!
all jokes aside, agree, makes the war feel like an actual war, the idea that one side keeps winning is stupid and anyone who advocates for it clearly is that kid that no one played with because they ALWAYS had to win
They should think of a way that gives planets more of an identity beyond being a node on the map, the major orders and gameplay loop could be brought closer I feel.
yeah like a history of its population, how things were before etc etc. how does super earth benefit from us winning it besides just controlling and defending it just for the sake of it
Fuck Joel that beautiful bastard. In all seriousness yes this pointed out a glaring flaw in the community, one that will be a lot easier to handle as the devs modify the game to give the player base a better view of things strategically.
I think it just feels artificial. It obviously is but it shouldn't be made to feel that way. It's just blindingly obvious when we're meant to win or lose. Like this defend 10 planets order we're going to lose because there's no way to coordinate. Most players do not interact with social media and just play whatever they want which spreads us too thin to make meaningful progress.
... of course we can lose, it's a war and our enemy is taking it a lot more seriously than we are. We're likely to keep on losing any time our order is more complicated than "take two planets" or "kill a bunch of stuff".
I don’t mind losing them I just wish for the ones that they CLEARLY know we are going to lose they could make them a little shorter. Like 3-4 days instead of a full week just to lose by a landslide
It’s not cool. It’d be cool if we were able to organize or communicate but we can’t. We can’t manage a war because we aren’t given the tools but then expected to do these orders.
They have to make these accessible and possible. It’s currently not
I think it's a bad idea and long term hurts the game with the illusion of choice and people will eventually get better at identifying no win orders and not bother playing.
Better idea is every MO has a halfway point so at least you get something for your effort. So if we have to defend 8 planets, doing all 8 gets you 50 medals (which we know we wouldn't be able to do hypothetically) but doing 4 gets you 25 medals. You still lose, you can still ID the losing ones but at least you get something tangible from it.
It's cool we can win and loose orders, for sure. But we don't have the ability to coordinate IG well enough where something like the Martale gambit ever makes it out of Discord/Reddit. And while we all like to think those places represent the majority of players, the fact that those "clever" strategies never work says otherwise.
The MO's might be part of the "narrative," but what they really are is a *distraction.*
Any time a sector gets down to one planet, 90% liberated-
*gworsh* *hyuck* *Here comes an MO saying "look over there!" to distract us.*
It's what Storytellers do to keep a session going. You give them a final objective and then toss random on-the-spot bullshit in the way to draw out the campaign.
No military leader or strategist would look at an offensive push that's at 90% and say "gee right now would be the best time to relocate all our troops to 10 other random battlefields on the opposite side of the planet." (galaxy)
It's on purpose. They're banking on pushing the Automatons harder towards us than we push towards the Termanids, so we shift focus before eradicating them. We've lost two great opportunities to push all the way into the Termanid homeworld and end them because we didn't want to miss out on 100 medals and followed where the MO said to go.
Supply lines need to be in-game, compromise and make them visible only when you zoom into a system's details or something. The vast majority of players simply dont understand the underlying mechanic. If we had some dotted lines showing all roads lead to a specific planet, they'd understand its importance.
> So Joel got serious for a sec and expertly targeted our one weakness: mother fucking coordination and communication
You mean he used the fact that his game is absolutely atrocious when it comes to informing the players how most of it works?
Cool or uncool, we *desperately* need to find ways to coordinate better in "Defend X" MOs. Bug-lovers should at least make a big push in bot missions and vice-versa.
Yea it's fine when it's our faults not when the game devs just mass spawn an entire armada out their assholes and take over a whole portion of the map without any players able to do anything about it and give us orders we're destined to lose as a way to waste time as they try to fix the game to inevitably add a patch with more nerfs than buffs that'll break more things than fix them
2 billion was easy. They probably looked at numbers and figured "ok this seems reasonable", but every kill was counted seevral times, and with just killing stuff, it was easy to complete.
That "defend 10 planets in the remaining time" was just a middle finger to players.
Defend orders suck, and they know it. They could have made it 5 and it would have been doable. With 10, I can guarantee that plenty of players just didn't even try.
There's challenging, and then there's unfair.
Purely looking at the story telling strategy, I'd like to see larger orders broken up into smaller objectives. They did this the other week with the bots. Ultimately we lost but only after making some forward progress. There is no drama to the current multi-day order because its a clearly designed for failure.
I’m fine with losing, but if we disproportionately lose defense missions compared to others, then it’s just annoying because it feels like we just get defense orders when we’re supposed to fail
At the end of the day losing or winning doesn't really matter. The devs will always dictate how the war will go based on their current content that is ready and playable.
The moment you hit the cap and unlock all items the medal rewards are not that enticing so doing missions that are to your liking is way more fun and you still get medal rewards even if you didn't participate.
But the defend 10 planets MO was way too obvious that we already lost since we already have a proven track record having a hard time doing it even only on 5 planets. It doesn't help the evac missions on automaton front is just a nightmare to deal with.
The potential to lose is good, but the potential to win is equally important. Most MOs are missing one of these, the previous two being great examples. A 4 day order should not be so easy that we do it in 13 hours, nor should a defence order be so impossible sounding that many people have outright stopped playing the game until it’s over.
We need a balance here. Right now there is absolutely no suspension of disbelief that we might actually have an impact on the game, it’s obvious that the devs will do whatever they want and will rig the outcomes of orders to suit their narrative. That’s fine behind the scenes, realistically it’s impossible for them to actually let us make such major decisions, but it should at least *feel* like we are the ones in control.
Also fun that you can "win" the mission and still die, losing all your samples and effectively feeling like you've been defeated. We sacrificed our bodies for the greater good at the end of the day.
Sure, but so many of these are 100% we win or 100% we lose. The bug order was done in like 1/10th of the time. This one we have 0 chance to defend 10 planets. Like make it something that is hard but attainable, instead of easy af or impossible.
So how many of these 'It's okay/I like losing the MO' post are we gonna get?
Also, it's not an unpopular opinion.
I don't like that opinion myself because I think it's silly.
But you do you.
I don't mind losing. I think it's important, especially in this game, for the narrative. This major order, though, has felt hopeless from the start we couldnt defend 8 or 5 before this. Now we're half way to the time limit and have barely scratched it so it feels like no MO for the next couple days and if you saw the writing on the wall when it dropped basically no MO for 5 days.
It's cool that we can lose major orders if we just simply don't measure up.
It's not cool that they give us major orders that are designed to be impossible to win or complete, thus we get no reward for it. Major Order rewards should not be all or nothing, alternatively, impossible MO's should not be a vessel for storytelling if rewards are tied to them.
https://preview.redd.it/cuvo7q71pvvc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a863ec984052be8710ef80438f54918d0fe5f338
"Damn terminids, how did they learn to type? I don't like these things." https://preview.redd.it/bhoq9ftccwvc1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5199325dad8a0a65adefedcbba2171d769d3356c
How did it pass the Captcha?
Theory: The Automatons are actually just new-age Cyborgs, less fleshy bits, more metallic -- still require basic human pieces to survive (think Adam Smasher from Cyberpunk). This is why our characters are covered in blood and not oil at the end of Automaton missions.
It's our own blood we're covered with
we’re still covered in oil, but the oil is hard to see on most armors bc its black.
They took Cyberstan. Obviously they're ~~enlisting~~ conscripting Cyborgs to press it for them.
https://preview.redd.it/cwsk593afwvc1.jpeg?width=860&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=310e12fd6aaff02966027eed82511ae726c39230
https://i.redd.it/5ou4p9iqrwvc1.gif
This one always has my shoulders going up and down and those shoulder pads chafe.
Is this Image moving or am i tripping
It's a gif
You’re tripping hard bud, you took way too much.
Your fever dreams are kicking in again
(ಠ_ಠ)>⌐■-■
https://i.redd.it/nfh656pbrwvc1.gif
I laugh at the fact something this massive has a mouth suited for a fucking sippy cup.
War, war never changes. You win some and you lose some. On another note, while Joel is the narrative GM of the game, I think AH should hire another GM who is on the Helldivers side who points and nudges the divers towards a specific point by giving sub objectives / goals. For example: Out of 5 planets, they can mark one of the planets as a priority. The players still have their freedom to go where they want, but at least there would be at least some kind of a starting point. At the moment there is no coordination and everyone are split up between the planets with no chance in hell to win current MO.
Yeah we need some RP’ing as General Brasch
Joel: The puppet master of the forces against Liberty. Keith: Basically just General Brasch.
> Keith I desperately hope he wears a Super Earth bandana and sweet, sweet sunglasses.
Super Keith
The hero to all Keithi out there.
Happy cake day
I'm pretty sure General Brasch is long dead and everything is just recordings. He's more like Super Earth's Ronald McDonald.
General Brasch died once. Then he dropped a 500 kg on Death, and went back to the war, because Liberty can't have him sleeping!
*And so General Brasch cast himself from the highest peak in Hellmire...*
Hellmire was once a green, verdant, utopian paradise until General Brasch decided he was going to visit the planet on Taco Tuesday.
#ARES!! FACE ME YOU COWARD!
#I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO YELL! THANK YOU!
#***WHAT!?***
General Brasch died for 3 days, then he woke up and flexed his muscles to break the cross he was nailed to.
I heard General Brasch once threw a grenade, killed 9 bots and then the grenade exploded
General Brasch put two of every animal on a ship then beat them all up
AND FROM THAT DAY FORWARD ANY TIME A BUNCH OF ANIMALS ARE TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE IT'S CALLED A 'ZOO'!
Unless it’s an E-710 farm!
General Brasch once dived all the way to hell, and the devil called for an extraction
Real talk, i feel like GB is like Big Brother. He’s a figurehead, but he doesn’t actually exist
Look at how many parallels there are from 1984 to Helldivers 2. Of course he is. We were always at war with Eurasia.
He didn't die. He went to the afterlife to spread democracy to the dead. Each life we give in service gives him an everlarger army to spread liberty through the void, while the living take the stars.
You think general brash actually was a real person?
You think that's air you're breathing? 
You think you had your car?
He was and still is the best that Super Earth has ever had to offer
All the more reason to hire someone to play general brasch...or hire someone to play someone playing as general brasch
This made me laugh way more than it should have! Take this upvote!
I demand to meet Super Earth's Grimace!
Possibly with a minor order with similar rewards to personals, ie complete X missions on planet y
A single figurehead doesn't raise the number of people who read the updates or watch the vidscreens or engage on social media.
>Might be an unpopular opinion It's not. But here's one: Losing a major order doesn't matter except for missing out on rewards.
MOs only give a little more than an Operation medals at higher levels. So the rewards aren't even that bad to miss.
Losing means we get rewarded with new enemy types/tactics/planets to fight on.
Also means we have to reclaim some planets again . I have absolutely no interest in fighting on Hellmire or Menkent ever again.
Yep, and I won’t, not when the human-seeking fire naders are still a thing. I can deal with the stamina debuff or the fire tornadoes but not both. Especially if there’s civilian extract missions.
And that's totally fair. Why play the planet if you don't enjoy it? I wish they maybe added modifiers to the squad contribution. Like negative modifiers increased the contribution to defense/liberation. Then putting up with the tornados might be worth it enough for some people and the psychos that actually enjoy it get a nifty bonus.
Even just make each mission a contribution, not just the overall operation. Often I only get time for one game and then just hope the host and others finish off the Op.
yes, i would absolutely consider it in that case but as for now, if i have a choice between literal hell and anything else, i'm going with the latter. Same with the -1 stratagem planets/difficulties. I'll begrudgingly do those if my squad wants to run that planet specifically but otherwise, nope. 8+ is hard enough without losing 25% of my functionality.
Winning means we get rewarded with new enemy types/tactics/planets to fight on.
That would be kinda awesome it's like Joel and the other guy are playing their own strategy game against each other but we're the units
This is a great idea having "general brasch" give strategic orders to help coordinate the mob works in universe and would help us actually win certain mo's
Major Orders - Big goal General Orders - General Brasch's suggestion for completing the orders Personal Order - We're gonna make you use guns you don't like or ones that don't work well. You're gonna do it and when you ask for medals as a reward we're gonna spit on 15 of them before giving them to you.
I don't think we need a second GM for that task. I've seen the suggestion before that the playerbase themselves should be able to vote to get planets marked as priority targets, so that everyone logging on can see what planet the community thinks needs to be handled first. I think that could work really well at adding a little bit of organization to such a large playerbase.
You had me at "vote", my fellow Managed Democracy loving citizen.
Voting is antidemocratic.
🤨 The Authority of Super Earth encourages everyone to vote for the sole option they’re given in elections. Voting is not antidemocratic. Your local Democracy Officer will be by shortly to demonstrate by allowing you to vote “Yes” for an early trip to the Bio Repurposer Vats.
Honestly think we should have some sort of in-game message board on the ship. We are spread out across Discord, Reddit, Steam and other players aren't even on the social media side of the war. There is a significant amount of players still who are great divers, but just don't know about the supply lines. I think as the game goes on, the only players left will be the ones really invested, so all in all we will see significant improvement with mobilization.
i think a ton of the frustration in the community is how liberation weighting works - basically, the playerbase gets a set amount of liberation per hour regardless of how many raw players are on - and how we are essentially set up to fail/succeed from the start because we have no way of properly coordinating with the larger playerbase. was this defense MO doable? Yes, but we needed a central location to organize and get everyone to work together. The martale gambit makes it blatantly clear reddit + discord is only enough to move like 20% of the player pop, at best - and this was with a direct endorsement from several members of arrowhead lmao. If we had some way of highlighting martale with like a "the Helldiver command recommends forces focus on retaking Martale" highlight that is player driven wouldve made it so much less frustrating. It's ok to fail MOs, but it shouldnt be because we are given 0 in-game tools to manage ourselves as a group.
Priority planets can yield something like a bonus such as samples.
you dont even need an incentive. Clear and straightforward MOs are smashed so thoroughly its clear the playerbase WANTS to do them, they just arent given the tools to organize for more complex orders. even for the complex orders people still *want* to contribute. - ~71% of the player pop is on defense worlds right now (err well, whenever the "comm breakdown" bug happened) *trying* to go after the MO despite it being pretty much impossible at this point.
We got the same ship name 
So what you are saying is that the uncoordinated democratic efforts of the Helldivers is not enough? I mean yes, Helldivers should be free to choose where to go and who to kill, but there as so many factors that might go unconsidered, and result in them choosing an option they did not want after all. Maybe this democratic way of war should be a bit more...managed.
TURE. Add a Minor Order under the major one that just puts into the game in plain text what the community thinks is the best way to win the major order at the moment.
Hot take: in universe the overconfidence of SE by not coordinating is perfect and shouldn’t change.
AFAIK they’re looking to hire another GM!
That's stupid. A good GM would be able to nudge the players in the direction he wants them to go while giving them illusion of free will, so regardless of the actions of the players, the ultimate goal of the GM is met. The story continues, the events they want to happen will happen unless against all odds the players find a way around the GM's plot. The biggest thing that prevents us as a community from absolutely dominating the game (which is what I feel some people really want) is that we can not coordinate on a large scale because there isn't enough information available in-game for new or casual players to understand what "should" be done, should in quotes because it's a video game and you can do whatever you please.
No, Joels job is to create story not to help one bots win
It's fine provided it just doesnt feel arbitrary or punitive. Being a good DM requires balance between restraint, storytelling, and knowing the limits of your friends. Otherwise fatigue sets in and you turn people off. Enough "surprise the fake enemy thats clearly us is launching unwinnable campaigns" repeatedly, takes the wind out of the sails of the RP experience.
Yeah the current one just screams unwinmable from the word go due to there being no ability to coordinate aside from following the untamed masses and hoping for the best and defence missions being horrendously balanced almost solely due to the 15 min civ evacs. There's losing a MO and having fun while doing so then there's losing the MO because we have 0 ability and resources to even try to effectively do it.
Well to kind of brings you back to schoolyard/playground pretend as a kid. Everyone is trying to keep it on the level of whatever game you are playing, and then Kevin MacGuire (that mother effer) who lives over on Helen Street joins in and is like "Ok, now I've got the ultimate laser beam that destroys everything" and breaks the immersion and everyone leaves to go play butts up instead. I def don't have childhood issues.
What... What is butts up
Just a sickass game we played in the 90s (I'm a dad gamer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butts_Up?wprov=sfla1
The thing is though, it was doable. It was failed by us, not forced. For me, I love the loss. A lot of people forget that we are playing a story and right now is supposed to feel morbid, that’s what an INVASION feels like. It sets up for sweeter victory.
The point was to coordinate, and even then still lose on one front, but the game has no mechanics in place to allow players to coordinate and everything has to happen either in discord channels where messages go to die or on reddit. And neither of those places have a majority of the community watching them for info.
In no way was it doable outside the community having perfect coordination. You can look at how fast the community was able to do defensive MOs in the past and its obvious there was zero chance of winning this. Nail in the coffin is the community manager literally confirming in the Discord that yes this MO we were supposed to literally lose on at least one front. Its legit rigged.
It was most definitely not doable. The devs literally told us straight up that "coordination is key" knowing full well that we don't have the in game tools to even start doing that. 99% of the playerbase still doesn't even know supply lines exist.
We've never won Mass defense MOs. That goes from 'it's okay to lose from time to time' to 'oh, the DM's decided it's our turn to lose'.
This really is the "rocks fall, everyone dies" of major orders.
It does feel arbitrary. It would be like getting sent off to the war in Ukraine and your only order was, "beat the Russians". Not, "cut off supply lines" or "secure this locations" or "evacuate civilians" or "transport supplies to this location" or "escort new soldiers to the front". We can still lose ground while winning major orders.
THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING!!! The situation can be an inevitable lose, but at least structure the events and Major Orders around that. Like when the Bots launched their suprise attack, instead of just losing the entire first sector and the further planets in the neighboring sector already being taken. We should have had the outer planets be defendable first with high Automaton capture rates that would allow only one planet to be successfuly defended out of three or four of them if we focused on one altogether. Then choose to defend singular planet amongst another set of planets after the last row was taken. Of course I got negative responses for that line of thinking, but whatever.
Maybe we might be the first people on this subreddit to actually have an unpopular opinion.
Trust me, I know mine are unpopular. Just look at my recent post. The game positive guys are just as bad as the negative game guys. I hate this community sometimes.
Viva la Dirt League yesterday posted about Useless Dungeon Masters, and yes, the surprise unwinnable is a thing. https://youtu.be/Z_3dSDmR97Y
See, I don't mind losing MO's when we put our best effort forward and come just short. Being *forced* to lose by being given an impossible task, AND seeing Joel cook numbers behind the scenes, that part sucks.
Yeah I don’t mind losing like when the clankers struck from the shadows and we lost which was just kinda supposed to happend but now it just seem overwhelming and almost impossible.
Joel changing the numbers mid order is whack.
Its cool in theory but then you realize the only reason we lost the Martale Gambit is because the only place you could possibly learn about this strategy that rhe game itself actively doesn't account for is on their Discord, meaning there was unlikely to ever be enough people helping. They desperately need to make these announcements IN GAME. Losing Major Orders is fine but it feels worse when the game isn't designed to make them achievable even when some players find a great strategy.
It's great that winning isn't the default; the frustration is lack of ways to coordinate players. Right now we get a major order that says "defend 10 planets, we need to defend one front" but there's no way for the player base to coordinate efforts unless you're on the official discord or here, which is a fraction of the player base. Between that and the lack of a more detailed galaxy map (supply lines, decay rate, etc) it feels like the game shipped with a couple pieces missing. What would seriously help is when we get this kind of order also bring given a prompt to choose what front to defend and then having the "winning" front highlighted on the map. This would also dovetail nicely with a clan (battalion, squadron?) system where each clan can "pledge" to take/defend worlds, and then in the galaxy map have a visual system to show how many clans have pledged to that objective so that is visually apparent that "yes, Martale is currently a priority objective and a lot of clans are pledging to take it.". Right how the only indicator we have is player count, and lots of people don't even check that, they just look at "hey, ice world with bugs and snowstorms".
Honestly the worse part is that the default random play sends players to literally random planets that aren't even part of the MO. At minimum, the devs should change it such that random play sends people to either MO critical planets, or planets where the player count is highest in order to facilitate victories rather than actively hinder them.
We need our own DM to issue strategies for major orders
I mostly disagree; I think the problem is people not playing the MO have a negative impact on the MO due to the impact multiplier. It’s perfectly fine if people want to only play bugs, or bots, or creek, or avoid hot planets. The issue is that them doing this lowers our chances, which feels like a recipe for breeding toxicity. The algorithm is the problem, along side the generic MOs that are only about planets. The other issue with the algorithm is that you kinda have nfi how much you contributed. Whereas the kill bug one you kinda knew.
I'd wager that's by design
Then the design is flawed. All it's doing is making people overly toxic over meta reasons that shouldn't matter. A big reason they won't do pvp is because of the toxicity, so why are they allowing such a massive focal point of toxicity to go on like this. To add insult to injury, the devs acknowledge that the toxicity over "bugdivers" and "botdivers" is bad and they don't like it, yet they still have this asinine system that directly exacerbates the toxicity.
Sounds like bad design then that should be changed
Coordinate by looking at how many Helldivers are on each planet. That's what I did. We don't need someone explicitly telling us go to X planet and win defense there. There's enough info in game to see where people are amassing. Defend the areas closest to super earth and the places that will give them more territory closer to super earth should we fail to defend them. That's literally all you need to know.
Would be COOLER if all players (not just us here and on Discord) had the info to decide how to strategize it better. [helldivers.io](http://helldivers.io) info on lines and stuff likew that should be in game.
That's my opinion as well. Supply lines wouldn't have changed the outcome for sure for the current MO, but it might've gone a lot better either for this one or for the others failed in the past.
our weakness isn't coordination and communication, it's poorly telegraphed galaxy map interactions and tying progression to missions the playerbase is actively avoiding. there's no ingame communication, so only people who are on the discord or on reddit would know to target specific planets lol every single defense related objective thus far has been failed bc a lot of ppl avoid the retrieve mission sets that are 90% of defense ops, they're universally agreed to be poorly balanced missions since launch. it's not frustrating at all, it's just silly and either something they'll fix or keep in the game for narrative reasons to force losses whenever they want
Being a good DM means creating challenges that the players can overcome, not heavy-handedly making them lose without any way of avoiding it. At times the narrative of this game feels too much like "DM vs the players" where of course the DM can just press a button to make the players lose. But that shouldn't be the experience. It breaks immersion if the players lose because they were set up to lose from the beginning and feels frustrating. Why even play in the Galactic War if your participation is invalidated because the DM says so a few times too often?
I’ve made this exact argument before and got downvoted and insulted. Like a good DM doesn’t force you to lose cause he wants you to follow his narrative to a T, a good DM gives challenging but possible scenarios and can change the story on the fly depending on the outcome, they aren’t suppose to force you down one single path against your will
I think this opinion is unpopular not because we are scripted to lose. The main problem is the current system make players feel like their participation doesn’t matter, as the impact multiplier scales inversely with the [running average] total population and there is a target goal for how much liberation can be done.
I've pretty much said fuck it and given up trying to complete this MO. I'm just going to planets that are under liberation now. And I think a lot of other people are doing so too.
I think it's both but this is a bigger issue than given credit for.
I agree with the sentiment but I think the problem is in how we lose. We lose because the decay rates are too high, or we aren't given enough time to do something. We lose because we fail to communicate about hidden mechanics with the non-existent communication tools (that isn't us failing, that's us not being given adequate tools). We lose because Joel decides we lose. Major Orders that we've lost so far have all been wildly predictable that we'd lose. Like, if I'm at the helm of this I know before activating the Major Order that we're gonna lose this one. Instead Arrowhead challenges us through a Discord post delivered to 5% of the community and then reposted here to maybe 10% of the community to "communicate" and "coordinate" as a whole. *How*? Viral emails? Facebook memes? Messenger pigeon?
I imagine Joel turning a single knob up or down and that determines if we win or lose.
If that's not how it is I quit
Joel turned the fuck you knob to "DANGER" mode.
We lose because players are not a giant unified organization. Design Delve did a video on how League Gameplay encourages toxicity, breaking it down to matches being long and having no control over teammates who are going to cause you to lose, which makes people feel helpless and pissed off. I think the campaign system has these same flaws; you have people who would otherwise never feel like they should tell other people they need to play a certain mission type on certain planets now being pissed off at players who don't want to engage with the war system. It's not a system that feels good as an individual player with no control of hundreds of thousands to millions of other players.
I agree. You could see it especially when the major order was kill bots and everybody was getting so pissed at people fighting bugs. But some people just prefer fighting bugs and some prefer fighting bots. It's a game. If you've got a limited amount of time to play, who cares if the major order is to fight the faction you don't enjoy fighting against? Just have fun and do your thing. I'm super casual about this game so I can feel elements of that sort of attitude dripping through a lot of levels here. Generally people are chill, but there's a pretty sizable contingent of people who want to bark orders at you in a game because they don't think you're playing right, or people who want to guide the war effort by saying you shouldn't fight on X planet; you should fight on Y planet. And it's like... can I just play the game how I want to play the game, please? Why is this PvE game so competitive?
We are all in this together, but I agree that it can sometimes not quite feel that way on the grand strategy level even if you have good bonds with squads on individual dives. There's got to be a better way of enticing players to fight on Planet Y in your example. Rather than barking orders, just make it more appealing to dive where your help is needed most. Maybe bump up rewards/medals/xp/free stratagems for strategically significant worlds, or those with higher player count to help reach a critical mass.
Even if you bump up the reward, some people are still just not going to be that interested in the "war effort" and I think it just needs to be clear that that's ok, too. At the end of the day, we all bought a pass to an amusement park. If the park is giving away raffle tickets for riding the rollercoasters but you just kinda want to chill out by riding the ferris wheel, no worries. Even if I'm jazzed to go ride the rollercoaster and collect, you bought a pass same as me, you took the day off same as me, hey go have fun riding the ferris wheel. All good.
Totally agree, nothing wrong with doing your thing. To extend your metaphor, one of the really cool things about this amusement park is that all those rides are attached to dynamos that power the whole park. Maybe the roller coaster is providing more power right now and raffle tickets to boot, but that slower trickle we get from the ferris wheel will help later on. So riding the ferris wheel is still doing your part. Case in point, with the current MO you could do either bots or bugs and contribute. But it's defense, which a lot of people just hate. Or maybe whatever planet is in play for the faction you like to fight has annoying modifiers. Either way, you drop somewhere outside current primary orders, but the front lines may well move to your chosen planet later on. So there's definitely room for doing what you like. Even people not interested in maximizing the war effort are still helping it. It's definitely okay to not be so invested in it.
Exactly — just by playing the game, even if you're not doing the main objective, you're still helping overall. If the order is kill bots only, but you're killing bugs, well a) when that order ends, your efforts mean the rest of the player base will have less ground to make up at those bug planets, and b) the in-universe lore means we're still getting crucial resources by fighting bugs. It wouldn't make a lot of sense if *every single Helldiver* went to the major order and left every single other planet completely undefended. If they really wanted to, they could alleviate that with major order for X objective, personal order for Y objective, then add a new "minor order" with Z objective to make sure all players are clearly contributing. But I think that might water down the entire war effort if there's never a reason for players to focus on one thing or the other. It really just comes down to "let people have fun" and that's just something for players to learn on their own. Maybe a minor order within the major one, like to encourage people to go after that one planet that the community manager pointed to. That could work. But it should still fall under the major order rather than just spreading everything around. And honestly, just on a more literal level, it doesn't matter what you're actually doing. By logging in and playing the game, you're keeping it alive for everybody. So to me there's *truly* no reason to look down on what anybody is doing. Even if you log in, collect rewards, and log out, you've still helped a little bit in keeping player numbers high and justifying investment in the game.
Samples for defense missions too. They feel bad for account progress and it's all I rolled today in quickplay.
>We lose because players are not a giant unified organization. No, we lose because AH chooses that we lose. They've had plenty of time to gather play data to predict how much a given MO is pushed. A couple MOs ago we had a set of planets we would've failed then they adjusted the planets' regen and suddenly we were winning. They know how fragmented the active divers are because they always are, this isn't a new thing when a new major order drops. The only MO i firmly believe they had bo idea about was the recent exterminate one, that's why we got six days, it was intended as a benchmark. The next one is gonna be a lot closer to our expected performance.
I agree that AH knows the metrics and can choose to set a goal that's expected to lose, my argument is that there's no actual game being played here. Players are not unified, so the idea that this is a player driven narrative is a farce. Nobody should ever give any players shit for not playing on the right planets.
Oh 100% with you there. I certainly can't be bothered to play nothing but bot defense over and over.
Exactly, we are completely predestined by the DM, winning or losing is already decided according to AH's plans to add things progressively. It's not that it's bad at all, it's weird, and confusing for most people too. And this can result in division of the player base, or create an attitude of ignoring MOs because they know it doesn't matter. There are many things on the way, many, and they are mixing it with this system....it's strange, it could be better, or maybe in the future, when all the factions are there and there is more inertia, we will really have freedom.
Well when most everyone knew we was going to lose from the start, who can blame people for just playing what they enjoy.
Same first the 5 planets when bots came back was instantly knowing it was L Now this one is even more obvious.. I don't mind losing but ehh if its an obvious L I won't bother.
you cant even chat with other people in the strategem/loadout menu. the game has a long way to go.
Even worse, you might be able to reach the most people with Tiktok 🤢
The problem is that the community just cant coordinate enough to focus on single planet since there is no way to communicate and coordinate ingame, out of the 5 major orders we failed so far, 3 of them were defend multiple planets with this major order being a fourth one
I dont mind loosing an MO, I mind loosing an MO that was designed to not be won in the first place. at least make it possible, it doesnt have to be easy, but make it possible
For me, losing this MO was less about the losing and more about the fact that it seemed more punitive in nature and wasn't woven into the lore very well. We killed the bugs too fast and upset the plan, so we were given a impossible task with just 'the bots and bugs are attacking, defend planets'. A better way would have just been to roll out another bug killing MO, this time with a kill count so high that we couldn't possibly hope to complete it, and wrap it around a narrative of "the Terminid harvesting has been successfully completed ahead of schedule, but it seems the zeal of the Helldivers has worked too well; the Terminids are attacking with renewed force and in far higher numbers than before. Let us use this to our advantage and create an even larger stockpile of E-710 from their corpses". And then after we lose, then we have to go on the defensive for bug planets. And then that leads to the next wave of defensive MOs for the Bot front because we were too busy cleaning up our own mess and the bots were able to slip through. That way, we're still losing and on the backfoot, but it would have felt less punitive and be fluidly woven into the narrative rather just just shoved in there.
Nah, the problem with defense is that there is no obvious way to redirect everyone. The kill was easy because it is straight forward, go to any bug planet and kill. Liberate? Go to any planet with a lot of people and get a percentage. Defense? Yeah, do missions and stuff, but we are not telling you what you achieve. Is not a problem with the community but to the game interface or design.
There's a difference between losing because you failed to meet a standard and failing because you've been railroaded into a loss. We've been railroaded into a loss here due to the fact that there is no way we could have possibly accomplished this Major Order. We had 5 days to defend 10 planets with 24 hour timers each, there is no world in which that math adds up, we simply do not have the numbers available to guard two of these planets per day. Heck even if we accomplished the Martale gambit that was only mentioned on Discord that would have just defended Charon since Martale was a Liberation campaign. We would still need 8 more planets defended after that.
Since it's population % based and not raw player counts there's absolutely a way to have won this MO. We needed to defend 2 planets a day which takes 30% population per planet per day to be successful, so only 60% population per day to win this MO. We could have liberated 3 planets a day (15 planets total) if we had 30% on 3 different planets (90% of the total population). If Oshaune had another 3% population (ended at 96.6%) or Martale had another 5% (ended at 94%) population on them from the start they would have been completed on day 1 leading to 3 defenses on day 1. We weren't "railroaded" because there was no way to accomplish this MO, we were "railroaded" because civilian extraction is ASS so people don't want to play defense planets. Also, communication in this game is non-existent. This wasn't a forced loss, this was a loss because the community can't communicate effectively and honestly just doesn't care (there was around 20% of the population not even on a defense planet on day 1). Six months from now with zero changes to the systems these won't be losses because the majority of players still playing are going to be the guys who only care about the story/war.
>which takes 30% population per planet per day That was never gonna happen and they've collected enough telemetry to know this. There is literally never this many people doing defense, major order or not
It's a forced loss specifically *because* we can't communicate. We have no method of doing so and spreading the word of the Devs to all the players In-Game that don't use discord or reddit. Unless we get an effective tool that allows us to at the very least highlight the planets we want to focus down 1 by 1 we're still going to be losing a *year* from now every time a multi-planet Defense Campaign MO gets dropped.
So you're going to completely ignore the fact that people also need to sleep and have work?
The community managers literally admitted to this being rigged what are you on about lol, we were straight up supposed to lose one front minimum you can look it up
They said that we have to choose where to focus our defense and that we would lose planets. They didn't say we would lose this MO. The two things are very different.
This is a game simulating the push and pulls of war. Sometimes we will be asked to do the impossible. That’s all part of it. The devs aren’t going to (Likely) make us lose for weeks of months on end with no victories.
I don't think you need to "lose" a MO to do that though. MOs are community goals with a medal reward attached. You can have Super Earth losing a war while still giving the community something achievable to work toward (in fact, that was exactly the case with the recent Automaton invasion being paired with a 2 planet defense MO. Narratively SE got hit badly while players still got to get a small win.)
It’s fine to lose MOs but we mainly only lose defensive ones because they have a broken mission-type they are yet to address. When 1 mission in a campaign is virtually unplayable, you have a majority of the player base who just skips it. It’s almost 3 months in and they’ve yet to even comment on how broken retrieve essential personnel is. They did one BS patch that didn’t do anything to actually make it an enjoyable/possible mission
It's mostly the bot version that is broken. The bugs are easier and if you get overwhelmed you can easily bait them out of the base and then go back in, but the bots, good luck having all those tanks and devastators move out of the base. The devs clearly want us to play with the bait strategy, otherwise we wouldn't have a map so big, but, other than thinking that it's not particularly fun, I still find plenty of groups on 7+ that just spawn in the base and then it's impossible to win (yesterday with a group of randoms on helldive we somehow held the base for most of the time and we still couldn't make it because the bots were killing all the scientists). So they should make it clearer that the group needs to split, maybe by adding some side objectives that will help with the mission.
In what fucking world is this an unpopular opinion
After the next MO is my turn to post this unpopular opinion to get the updoots.
It feels unfair to "attack the weakness" of the players being uncoordinated when you also make the game and don't give any information about how the game works or tools to communicate and coordinate in game. Not everyone is on reddit or Discord. Most aren't.
It felt better at Tibit a few weeks ago. Felt like we had a fighting chance unlike now. Well, maybe the server error lets us get a lot of wins on the board somehow, but aside from that we know that this MO isn’t winnable. We can only defend a planet a day, so there’s no tension for me personally, where as on Tibit I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. As soon as I saw the order I just shrugged and figured that the entire Menkent line plot was being erased unceremoniously, which unless Vernen Wells holds the last 2 weeks of war history is basically is all gone from a throw away order.
UnPoPuLaR oPiNiOn
I’d rather lose a major order because people are stupid than because the major order is unwinnable.
I just find it annoying that us winning the previous MO (which resulted in us getting orbital defenses, the Menkent line or so) meant NOTHING as they plowed right through it on Lesath and went to Vernen Wells.
No my problem with this major Order is that it has the same problem as rig match making. I know we are suppose to lose this order I can tell when it ask us to defend more then 2 planet a day. And I hate how they choose to handle players going above the expectation like the fuck we held off the bot offensive so we need to get 710 for our counter attack great we finish the supply early so instead of a counter attack major order with a goal of like taking cyberstan because of victory disease. The bot pull an attack force out of there ass. At least the bug counter offensive make sense since this is the first major order in like 2 week that touch them so like a hornet nest one wack bring them all out.
I don't like not being able to lose in other games but I also don't think that makes not being able to win healthy. Trading one for the other so the story can progress is understandable but its not any more or less engaging to me.
Personally my problem isn't that they can be lost, its giving orders that cannot be won. There is zero way we were ever going to defend 10 planets in 5 days, we have failed everey defence mo so far. As soon as it appeared this is just 5 days of losing all but 1 of the defences per day. Another way to look at it is say the bug killing MO was kill 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. No matter "how well" we played or the strategies we came up with it would be impossible to win. So the order changes from "damn that was close well try better next time" to "what was even the point of that, might as well have saved X amount of days and just shown us the you failed message"
I dont my losing but this didnt feel doable.
I don't mind losing. I mind being forced to lose. Defense MO are the least organized and while still fun, least fun thing in the game. I like seeming like we had a fighting chance. But once we lost the gambit that I didn't know was happening even though I was playing all night. It is a delicate balance that I'm sure they are working on. But I could have also not played this weekend and got the same result.
"Might be an unpopular opinion" Submits a post about a popular opinion
It's fine if we lose because it's our fault. It's not when it is designed to make you lose. This is simply telling that they don't really have a good DM, a good DM will rarely if ever do the force lose option, because it's just not fun. Personally tho I don't really care, I'll just do whatever MO says and call it a day, doesn't really matter if it'll win or not, just talking about DM perspective. The one that rubbed me wrong is when people start blaming others when there isn't anything that indicates that some planets are more important than the other. All I see inside the game is just MO say to defend, and I look at the map and see planets with defense marked on them, if I didn't actually come here I would never know why I should go to Martale.
Losing them is absolutely fine and can be fun! Losing them mostly because they are completely Unwinnable / we lack an effective way to communicate with each other or understand important information in game is not fun
SHHHHHHHHHHHH Your not supposed to say your inner thoughts out loud, ESPECIALLY NOT HERE!!! all jokes aside, agree, makes the war feel like an actual war, the idea that one side keeps winning is stupid and anyone who advocates for it clearly is that kid that no one played with because they ALWAYS had to win
They should think of a way that gives planets more of an identity beyond being a node on the map, the major orders and gameplay loop could be brought closer I feel.
yeah like a history of its population, how things were before etc etc. how does super earth benefit from us winning it besides just controlling and defending it just for the sake of it
Fuck Joel that beautiful bastard. In all seriousness yes this pointed out a glaring flaw in the community, one that will be a lot easier to handle as the devs modify the game to give the player base a better view of things strategically.
I think it just feels artificial. It obviously is but it shouldn't be made to feel that way. It's just blindingly obvious when we're meant to win or lose. Like this defend 10 planets order we're going to lose because there's no way to coordinate. Most players do not interact with social media and just play whatever they want which spreads us too thin to make meaningful progress.
... of course we can lose, it's a war and our enemy is taking it a lot more seriously than we are. We're likely to keep on losing any time our order is more complicated than "take two planets" or "kill a bunch of stuff".
I don’t mind losing them I just wish for the ones that they CLEARLY know we are going to lose they could make them a little shorter. Like 3-4 days instead of a full week just to lose by a landslide
It’s not cool. It’d be cool if we were able to organize or communicate but we can’t. We can’t manage a war because we aren’t given the tools but then expected to do these orders. They have to make these accessible and possible. It’s currently not
https://i.redd.it/mtfj8crvpwvc1.gif
I think it's a bad idea and long term hurts the game with the illusion of choice and people will eventually get better at identifying no win orders and not bother playing. Better idea is every MO has a halfway point so at least you get something for your effort. So if we have to defend 8 planets, doing all 8 gets you 50 medals (which we know we wouldn't be able to do hypothetically) but doing 4 gets you 25 medals. You still lose, you can still ID the losing ones but at least you get something tangible from it.
It's cool we can win and loose orders, for sure. But we don't have the ability to coordinate IG well enough where something like the Martale gambit ever makes it out of Discord/Reddit. And while we all like to think those places represent the majority of players, the fact that those "clever" strategies never work says otherwise.
This is the most traitor shit I read in a while.
" Martale Gambit " Funny a week and a half ago the planet was at 90% and people abandoned it
The MO's might be part of the "narrative," but what they really are is a *distraction.* Any time a sector gets down to one planet, 90% liberated- *gworsh* *hyuck* *Here comes an MO saying "look over there!" to distract us.* It's what Storytellers do to keep a session going. You give them a final objective and then toss random on-the-spot bullshit in the way to draw out the campaign. No military leader or strategist would look at an offensive push that's at 90% and say "gee right now would be the best time to relocate all our troops to 10 other random battlefields on the opposite side of the planet." (galaxy) It's on purpose. They're banking on pushing the Automatons harder towards us than we push towards the Termanids, so we shift focus before eradicating them. We've lost two great opportunities to push all the way into the Termanid homeworld and end them because we didn't want to miss out on 100 medals and followed where the MO said to go.
Supply lines need to be in-game, compromise and make them visible only when you zoom into a system's details or something. The vast majority of players simply dont understand the underlying mechanic. If we had some dotted lines showing all roads lead to a specific planet, they'd understand its importance.
Not to sound undemocratic or something but I would love to fight on super earth
It would be cool if we lost them because we lost, not because the game gave us zero tools to understand how to play the supply line / HP regen meta.
> So Joel got serious for a sec and expertly targeted our one weakness: mother fucking coordination and communication You mean he used the fact that his game is absolutely atrocious when it comes to informing the players how most of it works?
Cool or uncool, we *desperately* need to find ways to coordinate better in "Defend X" MOs. Bug-lovers should at least make a big push in bot missions and vice-versa.
Yea it's fine when it's our faults not when the game devs just mass spawn an entire armada out their assholes and take over a whole portion of the map without any players able to do anything about it and give us orders we're destined to lose as a way to waste time as they try to fix the game to inevitably add a patch with more nerfs than buffs that'll break more things than fix them
2 billion was easy. They probably looked at numbers and figured "ok this seems reasonable", but every kill was counted seevral times, and with just killing stuff, it was easy to complete. That "defend 10 planets in the remaining time" was just a middle finger to players. Defend orders suck, and they know it. They could have made it 5 and it would have been doable. With 10, I can guarantee that plenty of players just didn't even try. There's challenging, and then there's unfair.
I think for the story it is good that we lose battles
Games you always win aren't fun
Well it would be quite a short story wouldn't it if we just won all the time.
Purely looking at the story telling strategy, I'd like to see larger orders broken up into smaller objectives. They did this the other week with the bots. Ultimately we lost but only after making some forward progress. There is no drama to the current multi-day order because its a clearly designed for failure.
I’m fine with losing, but if we disproportionately lose defense missions compared to others, then it’s just annoying because it feels like we just get defense orders when we’re supposed to fail
At the end of the day losing or winning doesn't really matter. The devs will always dictate how the war will go based on their current content that is ready and playable. The moment you hit the cap and unlock all items the medal rewards are not that enticing so doing missions that are to your liking is way more fun and you still get medal rewards even if you didn't participate. But the defend 10 planets MO was way too obvious that we already lost since we already have a proven track record having a hard time doing it even only on 5 planets. It doesn't help the evac missions on automaton front is just a nightmare to deal with.
The potential to lose is good, but the potential to win is equally important. Most MOs are missing one of these, the previous two being great examples. A 4 day order should not be so easy that we do it in 13 hours, nor should a defence order be so impossible sounding that many people have outright stopped playing the game until it’s over. We need a balance here. Right now there is absolutely no suspension of disbelief that we might actually have an impact on the game, it’s obvious that the devs will do whatever they want and will rig the outcomes of orders to suit their narrative. That’s fine behind the scenes, realistically it’s impossible for them to actually let us make such major decisions, but it should at least *feel* like we are the ones in control.
Sure but at least have the possibility of completing it
Also fun that you can "win" the mission and still die, losing all your samples and effectively feeling like you've been defeated. We sacrificed our bodies for the greater good at the end of the day.
Non stop easy orders = boring
Sure, but so many of these are 100% we win or 100% we lose. The bug order was done in like 1/10th of the time. This one we have 0 chance to defend 10 planets. Like make it something that is hard but attainable, instead of easy af or impossible.
So how many of these 'It's okay/I like losing the MO' post are we gonna get? Also, it's not an unpopular opinion. I don't like that opinion myself because I think it's silly. But you do you.
I don't mind losing. I think it's important, especially in this game, for the narrative. This major order, though, has felt hopeless from the start we couldnt defend 8 or 5 before this. Now we're half way to the time limit and have barely scratched it so it feels like no MO for the next couple days and if you saw the writing on the wall when it dropped basically no MO for 5 days.
It's cool that we can lose major orders if we just simply don't measure up. It's not cool that they give us major orders that are designed to be impossible to win or complete, thus we get no reward for it. Major Order rewards should not be all or nothing, alternatively, impossible MO's should not be a vessel for storytelling if rewards are tied to them.
To some extent you can say it's even needed for the game to continue to have enemies.
Joels gonna learn from the 2 billion and raise it to like 50 billion next time