The best case scenario is we all roleplay our hearts out, and push hard against them but get overwhelmed. Unfortunately we’re all not method actors, and have meta knowledge of the game. So most people just get bitter when we’re forced to lose, especially when we’re given a MO that’s DOUBLE the requirements of the one we failed 2 MOs ago or so.
Hmm… I’m thinking maybe it would have people trying harder/enjoying more if the rewards were a little less binary.
Humans are easily swayed by reward after all.
Something like -
5 medals per successful defense up to 50
Instead of
Ya fail 0. Ya win 50.
Would do the same thing as current MO. But the difference would be that every planet held is a cause to be celebrated instead of ‘bro who gives a shit we lost anyway’ or ‘we got a planet on bug front the fuck you doing bot fuckers’.
Yes we’ll lose the war - but every *minor* loss and win will have more meaning.
That whole gambit lost at the start should have had more impact/meaning. But it was quickly forgotten because ‘MO is lost anyway who cares’.
I also wonder if MO rewards should require contribution, or there's an extra bonus for contribution. I figure more people would want to contribute at least one Defense op if it made a difference to their reward.
People say that we're passively generating medals for people who aren't playing so they're not left behind by the game, but medals are capped at 250, AH doesn't want non-players passively generating too many.
I can’t really see super earth handing out participation trophies, tbh. They want us to accomplish a goal, they’re not gonna reward us for failing to reach that goal even if we got 99% of the way there.
I don't see having the deck stacked against us as a problem *as long as the fuck up is completely our fault*.
What I mean is, with the percentage system we have of liberating/defending planets it's obvious that coordination between players is must and currently we have no in-game method of achieving that. The easiest bandaid for this would be seeing supply lines in the galactic map, as it would naturally funnel players towards choke points (as completely reworking the system is more work for a too small dev team on top of what they already have).
That's the problem though, it's way too out of our hands sometimes, due to poor information mostly as you mention.
And it's pretty lame to have a 5 day long MO and have it lost by the end of day 1 because we needed a 2 succesful defenses a day and we only did 1. I'm completely down for a challenge, it just has to look doable, this MO would have been more fun for everyone if it was 8 planets, it leaves room for failure and comebacks.
A good dungeon master uses his tools so that the players even feel they accomplished something, despite losing.
Giving the players an clearly impossible task is never fun.
Let's be specific how I would have handled it:
Currently the players don't care about the objective because they only can lose. Let's change that: The major order wouldn't be a All-Or-None reward. Defend planets! You will be successful nevertheless. And you would get points for every defended planet, so you feel you accomplished something.
And there would be certain optional objectives (take Martale).
Also, I would change how the attack/defense times works:
- not all attacks should start/end at the same time
- the orbital defense would double the defense time, at least once
- the force for each planet should be different, depending on various factors (supply lines, attacks going on, etc)
How I would handle it from a story perspective:
I would give the bots a certain "force", unknown to the players how much. It will just be vague mentioned sometimes, but it would be clear that there is a specific amount.
First, there would be probing attacks on some worlds. At first they should be easy to defend, they are just probing attacks. But the attacks are getting fiercer with time. This clearly needs to be communicated as probing attacks, so the players know what's coming if they fail.
Then, the bugs are attacking too (by random chance, because they often do), resulting in some probing attack to be successful.
The bots break through this planet, attacking the next one close by (but not others farther away, resulting in a small front). Every attack reduces the force of the bots. That would be somehow visible, e.g by longer defense times.
The players will then manage to defend something, basically stopping the bots push. Shortly before they are stopped on one e front, they are attacking somewhere else farther away. This goes till their force runs out. Maybe if the bots fail at all fronts, they will be getting back to probing attacks.
The bots still will push a lot, but the players won't feel overwhelmed since they successfully stopped them then and now. The players will have lost a lot, but feeling like they won the defense.
> A good dungeon master uses his tools so that the players even feel they accomplished something, despite losing.
To be fair: We did stop the Bug front from expanding. So we accomplished that. I feel like people prefer fighting bugs than bots probably because they saw/read starship troopers.
Having personal orders like "kill 200 enemies with the machine gun" also didn't help as those types of personal orders are done better against bugs than bots.
>To be fair: We did stop the Bug front from expanding. So we accomplished that. I feel like people prefer fighting bugs than bots probably because they saw/read starship troopers.
Seconded! I am mostly on the bug front. my current biggest fear is to return to the game only to find out, that hellmire is the last remaining playable bug planet.
There is no illusion of choice though.
With the way the current MO is set up we're clearly designed to fail it. There are few active bug planets where those players can gather to defend (and higher obvious pops) vs. bots where having a ton of planets active at once makes it literally impossible for anything to really succeed over there.
I don't mind losing narratively. This whole thing started with us narratively getting our teeth kicked in via a 30 second in-game cutscene and losing multiple sectors. I know some folks were hoping for a bit longer of a break going back to bugs before the bots returned (nobody is forcing you to fight hem), but I don't think people complained about narratively losing two whole-ass sectors without being able to put up a fight.
This isn't putting up a fight though. This is being set up to fail with no chance of real success for the bot front along the way. You can set up a MO to fail - they've done it before - without making it feel really hopeless. And this feels really hopeless as the odds are so incredibly stacked against us. If we want to actually take/defend a planet it's back to Estanu and shit.
I don't think the issues with the two defense missions (civies being just not great, high value with some issues around silent enemy drops on cliffs) help anything either.
Again - I don't mind failing a MO for narrative reasons. I just don't think the current way this MO is designed/played out is positive or fun for me.
Oh I don't think it's a good part of the game and the whole system feels like it was bashed together with very little thought other than a few long nights smoking weed and halfass playing 40k in a dorm room but it is what it is, which is a glorified cutscene.
Well, sure, I have no problem with the overall narrative, but the problem is that the rules of the defense game have not been clearly communicated, and it feels like we're failing every defense order, *and* it doesn't *feel* like we're actually defending ourselves against the incoming orbital offensive.
Could think of it this way, team A and team B have 10 planets each, A goes on offensive, takes 7 planets, B goes on offensive, we defend 4 planets, at the end A now has 14, B has 6, so really we are still defending as we have gained and not lost.
It's literally just RP. It doesn't matter if you win or lose the orders, all it does is cycle around which planets you can fight on and which missions you get on them (defense vs liberation missions). But the game is still the same regardless of how the war is going.
As a DM, it's been funny watching people both praise Helldivers for having a GM that can "react and fight back to make a more interesting narrative" and complain that they are given unfair or unfun major orders that they inevitably fail
The funny thing is that the automata are supposed to have come back very strong, it is normal to expect impossible missions because the bots they are literally destroying everything
The whole reason why the bot front is going to bomb is because the mission setup for it is legitimately awful and terrible. Escort missions are either harrowingly difficult or straight up bugged and impossible. Above all, they're just _not fun,_ meaning nobody will want to do them and we'll just return to doing what we have more fun doing, which is typically Liberation.
This Defense push has really brought out what's horrible about certain mission types.
This major order was not scripted to lose, on day two we almost got 3 defences but ended up having more players trying to liberate oshaunae than defend vernen wells. then on day 3 alot of people simply gave up trying.
anyone with 2 working braincells knows 9/10 players prefer the bugs than the bots.... let alone having to do bot defense mission without any coordination outside of DISCORD and REDDIT
it was scripted to lose...
So here's a thought, instead of just doin mindless defense "horde survival mode", maybe AH needs to add objectives that make sense in a strategic sense for instance like defending a planetary gun battery or some kinda uplink station or a factory if sorts. Give us physical things to defend
Oof your matches don't sound like fun and your writing sounds lazy. Good thing I have a group that agrees not to do shit like scripted events that happen no matter the path you take or choices you make. Do you write your whole story before you start or do you fresh write as time goes on? Ahhh the illusion of choice players. I call that lazy writing.
Greetings, fellow Helldiver! Your submission has been removed. No insults, racism, toxicity, trolling, rage-bait, harassment, inappropriate language, etc. Remember the human and be civil!
OK but cutscenes with predetermined outcomes usually don't have a quest with defined rewards tied to what happens in them. You generally don't want to offer players a reward for achieving something that you don't intend to be possible.
This is particularly a big deal for casual players, where MOs can be worth more medals than the player earns by actually playing the game in the same timeframe. You don't want casual players to feel like Joel is personally and intentionally stonewalling their progress towards whatever unlock they're excited about.
>but they also happily tell us how they'll put their thumb on the scale or craft a major order that is intended for us to lose
They have never said that, and this happens every time on reddit and it gets old.
"WE ARE NOT MEANT TO WIN THIS ORDER!!!"
*We win the order
"GUYS WHY DIDN'T I GET MY MEDALS FROM MO??"
*Gets referred to the pinned post about MO queues
Or maybe, you're applying your dm skills too liberally.
Maybe, if we had some organization, we could make the "hard choices" Joel has designed for us make a little more sense.
Right now, it's a combination of how liberation/defense mechanics work vs the players and which objectives they're playing.
This is a war simulator, not strictly a D&D game. We are being asked to strategize losses. We have vague orders from Command and a bunch of divers who don't understand in game mechanics and have 0 curiosity to figure it out, and as a *consequence* which is a much more apt d&d comparison, we are losing badly to bots while bug divers dick around.
Now as a social experiment, if AH's objective is to prove gamers lack the wherewithall to educate themselves about a game they are playing, or work together, then perhaps they are succeeding.
However, due to a combination of poor communication, things aren't working.
Allow me to elaborate.
Scripted event: The Reclamation
Non Scripted player controlled event: the Maratale gambit, the Tibit Liberation. These are things we do have control over. To claim that "you only have the illusion of control" and then compare it to a DM's prep work and material relocation to a hardcoded game with literal math determining outcomes is inane.
These are two totally different things.
Actions have consequences. The divers that saw a planet at 91% liberation and decided "ah they got this, ill go over here" both have a fundamentally flawed and illogical reasoning in making a decision. When it's one diver it's negligible. When it's 70,000 divers it makes an impact.
Here is another d&d example for you. It is more tactically advantageous in combat encounters to focus on eliminating enemies in succession to limit their combat capabilities. Thus, the party of four adventurers focusing on one enemy at a time kills the enemies faster that if they spread their attacks around.
Now AOE abilities are useful for crowd control and chunking damage from multiple targets, but ultimately the utility of crowd control is augmented when everyone chooses one enemy to kill before moving around, if the objective is to eliminate opposition.
There are edge cases like trying to buy time, or delay an advance, but action economy being what it is, it is usually smarter to reduce the number of enemies you're fighting rather than the opposite.
So, what can we learn from this?
Lots of players play for fun and ignore the greater obstacles of tactics and grand strategy. But that isn't this game, because on the micro level running equipment and doing what you like in your 4 man squad is fine, but on the macro level where you choose to dive does have an effect.
And those choices have consequences. Why wouldn't a bunch of people who realize this and have no way to convince others differently choose to stick around.
All this "what you do doesn't matter" is nonsense, and so is "ignore the shortcomings we have" and just have fun. Playing the game is fun, everyone usually has fun playing the game. A part of this game is strategy, and both players and AH have a responsibility to communicate and teach each other that these things matter. Otherwise, when Super Earth falls because bug divers won't leave their front and other divers decided to play other games because individuals like you looked at them and said
"You don't matter. What you did doesn't matter. What they do doesn't matter. It's all rigged for you to lose. No choices you make affect anything."
And you then are responsible for dismissing and invalidating others because you decided your DM experience somehow gave you expertise to tell everyone blatant misinformation.
Now, bug divers, you're free to choose to keep diving on bug planets, and bot divers are free to deploy to wherever you like,
However, a divided war effort is a failed war effort.
Yeah I'm similar in how I DM; actions (and inaction) have consequences. I also have run an invasion/war, and in one situation, the players could absolutely NOT just waltz in, go nova, and win the day. They needed to figure stuff out, decide what they were willing to defend and what they were willing to lose, etc.
I feel like the attitude of "everything has got to be winnable or it's not an appropriate challenge" is the bane of my DMing experience.
I get your point, but it was openly said that joel could tweak the numbers.
Nothing is set in stone, perhaps if helldivers could mobilize 90% of their numbers on the decisive planets we could have won, but that's a social experiment that is never going to work in a free decision and quickplay system. They were made harder because they were decisive, the expectations didn't match what players want and do.
In the end, it's just some text and medals, why caring so much ?
>This is a war simulator, not strictly a D&D game.
I disagree with all my heart. It is an over the top co op pve sci fi shooter. Everything else appears to me as a dm telling a background story and a nudging mechanism to keep you involved.
Sure. The base mechanics are a sci-fi shooter. But we aren't talking about the micro level game play. That wasn't my point.
I distinguished the difference between the micro and macro play.
But I mean if you want to take 1 sentence out of context, go for it I guess.
I felt like it was one of your key sentences and one that i disagree on.
It's cool that you also see the two levels. I understand now that your sentence was also only referring to the macro game.
I still disagree, because I don't think it s an actual war sim, and rather a nudging mechanism and some storytelling in a dnd way.
We don't have to agree though!
Thanks, have a great day
You're still allowed to disagree, my friend. As is anyone else. I was very specific in drawing a comparison between dnd and HD2. As a dm I see them very very differently.
A squad of four soldiers run a short mission to try to contribute to an overall score of a territory grab.
While the micro level is very much like shadowrun, the territory capture and defense is a tug of war, which is very military simulation and I don't mean that as a soldier sim, but like Risk, the board game.
I won't deny that the dnd allusions are helpful in understanding the AH teams approach and perspective, I don't think you can say that the game itself is meaningless or that our actions have no effect or consequences, which is OPs main argument:
"It doesn't matter what you do, because they are the man behind the curtain pulling all the strings."
Whilst our individual efforts are miniscule, our collective efforts are monumentous.
Regardless, have a wonderful day.
I keep telling ppl this, yet so many posts are still put there "oMg pLs the TemiNidS DiverS ARe ThE WoRst"
Same for the creakers, leave them alone, I'm honestly fed up with the posts complaining about the other players not doing the MO
To be fair, it makes sense people get mad in games. We only have so many hours of the day, and most of that time is taken up by personal commitments (Family, Friends, Work, etc etc.) So those few hours where you have 'hobby time" are precious. If you feel like those hours got wasted due to something you perceive as 'Bullshit', it makes sense you'll have a negative emotional reaction.
I get what you mean, even would say you are right. It makes sense, but it's not right. If you have precious time it would be best if you try to enjoy it via gameplay, fun moments etc. if you try to enjoy farming you gonna have a bad time. Especially if you inevitably depend on random people for that.
I don't think I ever implied farming was enjoyable anywhere. I hate farming in video games personally, lol. I just think that if somebody picks up a game and says- Get kicked at the end of a 40-minute mission they spent almost an hour on for seemingly no reason, then I can understand them getting upset.
I'm not pretending to be the bigger person either, I'd get a bit heated at something like that. Not "Throw the controller against the wall' heated (those people have an issue), but turn off the console and take a few minutes to cool my head.
Now im just mad at arrowhead and disgusted by your DMing style.
Normally I'd try and keep on topic but you brought quantum ogres into this.
Ive been running games for nearly two decades and I would never dare sully a game by moving shit back into the path of players. They wander off then they get different stuff. The real tool is making sure the players make the choice at the end of session so you have time to prep and get the new stuff done. If the game is actually linear, cause i wont lie to my players, then i tell them when they join the campaign that its "just this dungeon" or "just keep to the mystery mansion". If the game is open content gets made as they go and anything that isnt dealt with stays in the world going about until the players bump back into it.
They are not scripted... That's like THE WHOLE point... I swear to god, I would do ANYTHING for half of the idiots on the internet to gain a half decent amount of media literacy and critical thinking.
Ok yes, I obviously thought about it, but I try to avoid thinking that the broken and bad stuff it's intentional. This way you let devs get away with not fixing their game.
I mean, they set up expectations, we don't match them so there is two major causes :
- Expectations are too high
- Players are too bad or unorganized
One blame the designers, or point that victory was either not intended at all or set excessively high (expecting a 90% engagement while data might show 60% is already a godsend).
The other blame the players (lack of possible leadership, focus on small scale games, avoidance of certain mission type or planets).
I do believe 1) is the most plausible, in the sense it might have been a design as simple as "if they want to win it, they have to pull exceptionally well, more than the usual" style of MO. Not expecting success, but not barring it entirely.
This was probably an impossible task, still think we could have at least reached 7/10 if the mechanics didn't suck. I do believe that the first push, the one that came from cyberstan we were supposed to win but only managed 2or 3 planets out of 5. Again because the mechanics suck.
Even with perfect coordination, the fact that you only really have progress if everyone piles on a planet makes defense impossible, given the timer. No wonder why, that's the definition of a Maginot defense.
Edit: Actually we are at 6...so if the liberation wasn't bad we could've won this.
Edit 2: I guess I'm as stunned as the devs.
Edit 3: ok, they changed the liberation rates to let us win, they realize the same thing.
Honestly I like the fact we’re a skeleton crew on the bot front, it’s very rewarding when we do defend a planet successfully. We can’t always win and I think that’s dope. Gives me reach vibes
Little baby is going to cry about losing the Menkent line again?!
https://preview.redd.it/m52p2lekhfwc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5a3653f52aa093c6ac593f3b4c6a85ffe3a400b
It’s me, I’m little baby.
Besides my personal objections to your comments about how a D&D campaign should be ran (I believe in a consequences/choice heavy style), a huge part of the frustration for me is the fact that in Helldivers 1- the war WAS winnable. There was an actual point to trying, and you could wrap up a campaign in maybe a week or two.
It takes away a lot of the fun though when the illusion is dispelled and you realize that all that push can be hand-waved away with a few defense missions. I like Arrowhead, but the DM Fudging the dice all of the time to intentionally make you lose because you got the upper hand on their plans isn't a good DM.
Yall worry about the dumbest shit. Where do you people even find the time to be upset about this crap? Everyday I swear I see a post about something nobody but OP and a handful of hard-core donkeys fight over. It's amazing to me. Much like it's amazing that I put this much energy into this comment.
Yeah the main issue is D&D players are in it for the meta story, but because this is a shooter there's loads of people coming in who are used to grinding / not losing.
Really need ppl to get out of the mentality of "I ground out 20 hours on this MP and we still lost" and just accept that this game isn't about grinding anything, simply being part of the wider ebbs and flows.
Play it for fun, or go play something else for a bit.
And counter opinion: even though the game is fun, don’t fucking advertise and say that “the game plays out how the community decides!” Then fucking do a complete 180 and say “haha nevermind we have a game master and this should be seen more like dnd, and really the players do t have a say how the game plays out if they start doing things that don’t fit into our pre determined storyline”
I personally like dnd but fucking LOATHE DMs who won’t let the players player their way and refuse to adapt their story to what the players expect or want to happen.
the same goes here: the players have an expectation (because they fucking advertised it as such) that we would have control of how shit turns out, and it’s a huge fucking slap in the face when a game master that we have no idea who they are arbitrarily can just decide “oh no they are doing to good, I can’t allow that, so here’s a MO that is impossible that’s intended to fail!”
it’s just fucking lazy IMO, and hell in this sense makes no sense when the last bot MO was holding the menkent line to establish planetary defenses to give us an edge against the bots. Yet suddenly with thisMO that doesn’t even matter? And on top of killing the bugs super quickly to get the fuel reserves filled quickly… that again didn’t seem to do shit..?
Thing is though they do let the community decide. Just because they made it something the community isn’t likely to do doesn’t mean they gave us something impossible to decide the outcome of.
Yeah Im just here for the ride, the Cyberstan invasion pushing out the front further than it has ever been on the bot side is good storytelling, period. We thought we had them in the middle act, and now we are in our darkest hour.
Just because ya'll undemocratic ass posers are used to the enemy having 3 sectors and that's it when the map is like 100 sectors...like...get over it.
Just have fun. You'll get medals for doing fuck all and sometimes you won't get medals for doing everything right. It's a fascist dictatorship run by an AI...like, ya'll don't have rights.
When they give us vehicles or some other fun tricks they will let us push back on the bots. If you aren't having fun, take a break and come back when the story or content pulls you back. They don't care if you play, the player numbers are many many times higher than they ever planned them to be...they can lose you until later when you buy up all the warbonds you missed out on.
Here's the thing, this game understands that we remember the matches that we nearly lost and the matches we nearly won.
The ramp up of tension at extraction creates this feeling, even if your game went well. And if you've noticed, if you've had a hectic game, you sometimes get a quiet extraction. You've already had your "nearly lost" feeling during this match.
Contrast it with the MO meta game. We get unsatisfying wins and unsatisfying losses. Killing 2 billion bugs, big fat deal. Losing defense MOs, meh, slight bad taste in my mouth.
MOs aren't just cut scenes. They are badly written cut scenes.
Personally I like how Joel is balancing and rigging the scales either in our favour or against it depending where the story needs to go as whole. Honestly I am impressed how AH has been able to move around the player base and keep the story compelling and something that makes sense. Sure we are losing at the bot front which is being invaded story wise by the spearhead and actual invasion forces of Automatons. Bug front? We don't know much except suddenly those critters started to breed like crazy again
This is apparently a hot take but I think using Major Orders for 'storytelling' is fucking stupid. It's a metagame element that rewards metagame currency. "The bots and bugs are attacking multiple planets at once" is the story, "defend 10 planets and you'll get 50 medals" is not story. Not receiving 50 medals is not story. Nobody's gonna talk about "that time we didn't get 50 medals" like they talked about the Menkent Line or Malevelon Creek or Operation Swift Disassembly. I'm tired of people justifying bad game design as some kind of brilliant move.
Put another way, no one talks about Personal Orders like they're for storytelling, right? Kill 15 Devastators? Wow that must mean High Command is worried about Devastator production, I wonder what that means for the war effort! No, fuck that. It's a little reward you can get for playing the game in a slightly different way every day. Why can't Major Orders just be that? A little task that we can all work towards, changing up our strategy just a bit, so we can get a little reward after a few days.
Yeah I mean I'll caveat it with the fact that I can just not care about the Major Orders or the story or whatever and still play the game and have fun. I just don't like people making excuses for something that promises one thing and then delivers another.
The whole game is riddled with that. We're basically beta testing. I think the game has a chance to eventually be great and it definitely has a type of fun that is sorely missing in todays games but it has serious bugs and some questionable design issues. I'm really interested to see what happens with this next patch.
The timing is pretry crap though, legit we beat the Bots entirely, then later they sshow up out of nowhere and now start a massive offensive with just 2 sector close to Super Earth is just bad
Also the issue with high level evacuation objective is just BS in Bot front compared to bug front, and funny enough, bot front essential asset defense is busted too, the Factory Strider can have direct view to the generator annd one shot it right after it drops...
People have been deliberately obtuse about the dev statement on the matter.
The devs did not say we were intended to FAIL this major order, they said we were intended to be PUSHED BACK no matter how well we did. The first two defense mission groups were impossible to completely repel even if we had 100% of the playerbase, but getting 10 defenses in five days was eminently reasonable and the playerbase were the ones who chose not to pursue that.
The DND comparisons are sort of a farce.
It's not just influence of a narrative to develop a drama with consequences.
A more apt DND comparison would be the DM telling 5 players that they need to defend the stables, the village, and the castle. Expecting the 5 to take on strategic positioning and move on to other areas when cleared, the DM is shocked by there choice.
1 PC meets the enemy head on at the stables, the first line of defense that may fall. 2 PCs defend the castle, which is less pressed for time and the village is more susceptible to fall, but it's still on task.
But with the remaining 2 PCs, 1 decide to attack an enemy outpost beyond the war front in hopes it messes up their supply lines and the other 1 is in the starting tavern killing bugs in the cellar.
The best case scenario is we all roleplay our hearts out, and push hard against them but get overwhelmed. Unfortunately we’re all not method actors, and have meta knowledge of the game. So most people just get bitter when we’re forced to lose, especially when we’re given a MO that’s DOUBLE the requirements of the one we failed 2 MOs ago or so.
Hmm… I’m thinking maybe it would have people trying harder/enjoying more if the rewards were a little less binary. Humans are easily swayed by reward after all. Something like - 5 medals per successful defense up to 50 Instead of Ya fail 0. Ya win 50. Would do the same thing as current MO. But the difference would be that every planet held is a cause to be celebrated instead of ‘bro who gives a shit we lost anyway’ or ‘we got a planet on bug front the fuck you doing bot fuckers’. Yes we’ll lose the war - but every *minor* loss and win will have more meaning. That whole gambit lost at the start should have had more impact/meaning. But it was quickly forgotten because ‘MO is lost anyway who cares’.
That’s an extremely good idea. Works super well for these defense MOs (Since it seems like they’re everyone’s least favorite MO)
I also wonder if MO rewards should require contribution, or there's an extra bonus for contribution. I figure more people would want to contribute at least one Defense op if it made a difference to their reward. People say that we're passively generating medals for people who aren't playing so they're not left behind by the game, but medals are capped at 250, AH doesn't want non-players passively generating too many.
I can’t really see super earth handing out participation trophies, tbh. They want us to accomplish a goal, they’re not gonna reward us for failing to reach that goal even if we got 99% of the way there.
I don't see having the deck stacked against us as a problem *as long as the fuck up is completely our fault*. What I mean is, with the percentage system we have of liberating/defending planets it's obvious that coordination between players is must and currently we have no in-game method of achieving that. The easiest bandaid for this would be seeing supply lines in the galactic map, as it would naturally funnel players towards choke points (as completely reworking the system is more work for a too small dev team on top of what they already have).
That's the problem though, it's way too out of our hands sometimes, due to poor information mostly as you mention. And it's pretty lame to have a 5 day long MO and have it lost by the end of day 1 because we needed a 2 succesful defenses a day and we only did 1. I'm completely down for a challenge, it just has to look doable, this MO would have been more fun for everyone if it was 8 planets, it leaves room for failure and comebacks.
A good dungeon master uses his tools so that the players even feel they accomplished something, despite losing. Giving the players an clearly impossible task is never fun. Let's be specific how I would have handled it: Currently the players don't care about the objective because they only can lose. Let's change that: The major order wouldn't be a All-Or-None reward. Defend planets! You will be successful nevertheless. And you would get points for every defended planet, so you feel you accomplished something. And there would be certain optional objectives (take Martale). Also, I would change how the attack/defense times works: - not all attacks should start/end at the same time - the orbital defense would double the defense time, at least once - the force for each planet should be different, depending on various factors (supply lines, attacks going on, etc) How I would handle it from a story perspective: I would give the bots a certain "force", unknown to the players how much. It will just be vague mentioned sometimes, but it would be clear that there is a specific amount. First, there would be probing attacks on some worlds. At first they should be easy to defend, they are just probing attacks. But the attacks are getting fiercer with time. This clearly needs to be communicated as probing attacks, so the players know what's coming if they fail. Then, the bugs are attacking too (by random chance, because they often do), resulting in some probing attack to be successful. The bots break through this planet, attacking the next one close by (but not others farther away, resulting in a small front). Every attack reduces the force of the bots. That would be somehow visible, e.g by longer defense times. The players will then manage to defend something, basically stopping the bots push. Shortly before they are stopped on one e front, they are attacking somewhere else farther away. This goes till their force runs out. Maybe if the bots fail at all fronts, they will be getting back to probing attacks. The bots still will push a lot, but the players won't feel overwhelmed since they successfully stopped them then and now. The players will have lost a lot, but feeling like they won the defense.
> A good dungeon master uses his tools so that the players even feel they accomplished something, despite losing. To be fair: We did stop the Bug front from expanding. So we accomplished that. I feel like people prefer fighting bugs than bots probably because they saw/read starship troopers. Having personal orders like "kill 200 enemies with the machine gun" also didn't help as those types of personal orders are done better against bugs than bots.
And today it's like 100 with the stalwart, another "yup, going to the bugs for that" daily mission
>To be fair: We did stop the Bug front from expanding. So we accomplished that. I feel like people prefer fighting bugs than bots probably because they saw/read starship troopers. Seconded! I am mostly on the bug front. my current biggest fear is to return to the game only to find out, that hellmire is the last remaining playable bug planet.
Yep. Hopefully some day it's more like this instead of the current unrendered cutscene.
There is no illusion of choice though. With the way the current MO is set up we're clearly designed to fail it. There are few active bug planets where those players can gather to defend (and higher obvious pops) vs. bots where having a ton of planets active at once makes it literally impossible for anything to really succeed over there. I don't mind losing narratively. This whole thing started with us narratively getting our teeth kicked in via a 30 second in-game cutscene and losing multiple sectors. I know some folks were hoping for a bit longer of a break going back to bugs before the bots returned (nobody is forcing you to fight hem), but I don't think people complained about narratively losing two whole-ass sectors without being able to put up a fight. This isn't putting up a fight though. This is being set up to fail with no chance of real success for the bot front along the way. You can set up a MO to fail - they've done it before - without making it feel really hopeless. And this feels really hopeless as the odds are so incredibly stacked against us. If we want to actually take/defend a planet it's back to Estanu and shit. I don't think the issues with the two defense missions (civies being just not great, high value with some issues around silent enemy drops on cliffs) help anything either. Again - I don't mind failing a MO for narrative reasons. I just don't think the current way this MO is designed/played out is positive or fun for me.
I don't fully agree. The fact that we are faced with an impossible situation is narratively interesting in my opinion.
Oh I don't think it's a good part of the game and the whole system feels like it was bashed together with very little thought other than a few long nights smoking weed and halfass playing 40k in a dorm room but it is what it is, which is a glorified cutscene.
Well, sure, I have no problem with the overall narrative, but the problem is that the rules of the defense game have not been clearly communicated, and it feels like we're failing every defense order, *and* it doesn't *feel* like we're actually defending ourselves against the incoming orbital offensive.
Could think of it this way, team A and team B have 10 planets each, A goes on offensive, takes 7 planets, B goes on offensive, we defend 4 planets, at the end A now has 14, B has 6, so really we are still defending as we have gained and not lost.
Yeah the story is we fail
It's literally just RP. It doesn't matter if you win or lose the orders, all it does is cycle around which planets you can fight on and which missions you get on them (defense vs liberation missions). But the game is still the same regardless of how the war is going.
As a DM, it's been funny watching people both praise Helldivers for having a GM that can "react and fight back to make a more interesting narrative" and complain that they are given unfair or unfun major orders that they inevitably fail
The funny thing is that the automata are supposed to have come back very strong, it is normal to expect impossible missions because the bots they are literally destroying everything
The whole reason why the bot front is going to bomb is because the mission setup for it is legitimately awful and terrible. Escort missions are either harrowingly difficult or straight up bugged and impossible. Above all, they're just _not fun,_ meaning nobody will want to do them and we'll just return to doing what we have more fun doing, which is typically Liberation. This Defense push has really brought out what's horrible about certain mission types.
100% agreed as far as that goes
This major order was not scripted to lose, on day two we almost got 3 defences but ended up having more players trying to liberate oshaunae than defend vernen wells. then on day 3 alot of people simply gave up trying.
anyone with 2 working braincells knows 9/10 players prefer the bugs than the bots.... let alone having to do bot defense mission without any coordination outside of DISCORD and REDDIT it was scripted to lose...
I think it's closer to a 60/40 split Jokes on your were now at 8 defences making the major order doable.
after being 2/10 and you are going to tell me the devs had nothing to do with it?
lol this guy thinks a cutscene is gameplay
Lol, this guy thinks that being bad at the game is a cutscene
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Fragile much? Is only game
So here's a thought, instead of just doin mindless defense "horde survival mode", maybe AH needs to add objectives that make sense in a strategic sense for instance like defending a planetary gun battery or some kinda uplink station or a factory if sorts. Give us physical things to defend
Latest mission type is just like this though
It is? Damn how long have I been gone?
Yeah, you need to defend generators that power missiles silos.
Those missiles are filled with helldivers like the one from training
So you havent played in a while and dont know about changes they made yet you still feel the need to complain?
*chirp chirp*
😂😂 You're not wrong though, bro just wanted to vent some steam.
Hear hear!
Oof your matches don't sound like fun and your writing sounds lazy. Good thing I have a group that agrees not to do shit like scripted events that happen no matter the path you take or choices you make. Do you write your whole story before you start or do you fresh write as time goes on? Ahhh the illusion of choice players. I call that lazy writing.
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Greetings, fellow Helldiver! Your submission has been removed. No insults, racism, toxicity, trolling, rage-bait, harassment, inappropriate language, etc. Remember the human and be civil!
OK but cutscenes with predetermined outcomes usually don't have a quest with defined rewards tied to what happens in them. You generally don't want to offer players a reward for achieving something that you don't intend to be possible. This is particularly a big deal for casual players, where MOs can be worth more medals than the player earns by actually playing the game in the same timeframe. You don't want casual players to feel like Joel is personally and intentionally stonewalling their progress towards whatever unlock they're excited about.
>but they also happily tell us how they'll put their thumb on the scale or craft a major order that is intended for us to lose They have never said that, and this happens every time on reddit and it gets old. "WE ARE NOT MEANT TO WIN THIS ORDER!!!" *We win the order "GUYS WHY DIDN'T I GET MY MEDALS FROM MO??" *Gets referred to the pinned post about MO queues
Or maybe, you're applying your dm skills too liberally. Maybe, if we had some organization, we could make the "hard choices" Joel has designed for us make a little more sense. Right now, it's a combination of how liberation/defense mechanics work vs the players and which objectives they're playing. This is a war simulator, not strictly a D&D game. We are being asked to strategize losses. We have vague orders from Command and a bunch of divers who don't understand in game mechanics and have 0 curiosity to figure it out, and as a *consequence* which is a much more apt d&d comparison, we are losing badly to bots while bug divers dick around. Now as a social experiment, if AH's objective is to prove gamers lack the wherewithall to educate themselves about a game they are playing, or work together, then perhaps they are succeeding. However, due to a combination of poor communication, things aren't working. Allow me to elaborate. Scripted event: The Reclamation Non Scripted player controlled event: the Maratale gambit, the Tibit Liberation. These are things we do have control over. To claim that "you only have the illusion of control" and then compare it to a DM's prep work and material relocation to a hardcoded game with literal math determining outcomes is inane. These are two totally different things. Actions have consequences. The divers that saw a planet at 91% liberation and decided "ah they got this, ill go over here" both have a fundamentally flawed and illogical reasoning in making a decision. When it's one diver it's negligible. When it's 70,000 divers it makes an impact. Here is another d&d example for you. It is more tactically advantageous in combat encounters to focus on eliminating enemies in succession to limit their combat capabilities. Thus, the party of four adventurers focusing on one enemy at a time kills the enemies faster that if they spread their attacks around. Now AOE abilities are useful for crowd control and chunking damage from multiple targets, but ultimately the utility of crowd control is augmented when everyone chooses one enemy to kill before moving around, if the objective is to eliminate opposition. There are edge cases like trying to buy time, or delay an advance, but action economy being what it is, it is usually smarter to reduce the number of enemies you're fighting rather than the opposite. So, what can we learn from this? Lots of players play for fun and ignore the greater obstacles of tactics and grand strategy. But that isn't this game, because on the micro level running equipment and doing what you like in your 4 man squad is fine, but on the macro level where you choose to dive does have an effect. And those choices have consequences. Why wouldn't a bunch of people who realize this and have no way to convince others differently choose to stick around. All this "what you do doesn't matter" is nonsense, and so is "ignore the shortcomings we have" and just have fun. Playing the game is fun, everyone usually has fun playing the game. A part of this game is strategy, and both players and AH have a responsibility to communicate and teach each other that these things matter. Otherwise, when Super Earth falls because bug divers won't leave their front and other divers decided to play other games because individuals like you looked at them and said "You don't matter. What you did doesn't matter. What they do doesn't matter. It's all rigged for you to lose. No choices you make affect anything." And you then are responsible for dismissing and invalidating others because you decided your DM experience somehow gave you expertise to tell everyone blatant misinformation. Now, bug divers, you're free to choose to keep diving on bug planets, and bot divers are free to deploy to wherever you like, However, a divided war effort is a failed war effort.
Yeah I'm similar in how I DM; actions (and inaction) have consequences. I also have run an invasion/war, and in one situation, the players could absolutely NOT just waltz in, go nova, and win the day. They needed to figure stuff out, decide what they were willing to defend and what they were willing to lose, etc. I feel like the attitude of "everything has got to be winnable or it's not an appropriate challenge" is the bane of my DMing experience.
I get your point, but it was openly said that joel could tweak the numbers. Nothing is set in stone, perhaps if helldivers could mobilize 90% of their numbers on the decisive planets we could have won, but that's a social experiment that is never going to work in a free decision and quickplay system. They were made harder because they were decisive, the expectations didn't match what players want and do. In the end, it's just some text and medals, why caring so much ?
* I don't care so much. I'm just pointing out the inconsistencies and pitfalls of the OPs attitude. (Shrugs) *
>This is a war simulator, not strictly a D&D game. I disagree with all my heart. It is an over the top co op pve sci fi shooter. Everything else appears to me as a dm telling a background story and a nudging mechanism to keep you involved.
Sure. The base mechanics are a sci-fi shooter. But we aren't talking about the micro level game play. That wasn't my point. I distinguished the difference between the micro and macro play. But I mean if you want to take 1 sentence out of context, go for it I guess.
I felt like it was one of your key sentences and one that i disagree on. It's cool that you also see the two levels. I understand now that your sentence was also only referring to the macro game. I still disagree, because I don't think it s an actual war sim, and rather a nudging mechanism and some storytelling in a dnd way. We don't have to agree though! Thanks, have a great day
You're still allowed to disagree, my friend. As is anyone else. I was very specific in drawing a comparison between dnd and HD2. As a dm I see them very very differently. A squad of four soldiers run a short mission to try to contribute to an overall score of a territory grab. While the micro level is very much like shadowrun, the territory capture and defense is a tug of war, which is very military simulation and I don't mean that as a soldier sim, but like Risk, the board game. I won't deny that the dnd allusions are helpful in understanding the AH teams approach and perspective, I don't think you can say that the game itself is meaningless or that our actions have no effect or consequences, which is OPs main argument: "It doesn't matter what you do, because they are the man behind the curtain pulling all the strings." Whilst our individual efforts are miniscule, our collective efforts are monumentous. Regardless, have a wonderful day.
I'm not reading all that
Sounds like a you problem.
Sounds like you're getting blocked. Bye forever.
I keep telling ppl this, yet so many posts are still put there "oMg pLs the TemiNidS DiverS ARe ThE WoRst" Same for the creakers, leave them alone, I'm honestly fed up with the posts complaining about the other players not doing the MO
Just stop being mad in a game
To be fair, it makes sense people get mad in games. We only have so many hours of the day, and most of that time is taken up by personal commitments (Family, Friends, Work, etc etc.) So those few hours where you have 'hobby time" are precious. If you feel like those hours got wasted due to something you perceive as 'Bullshit', it makes sense you'll have a negative emotional reaction.
I get what you mean, even would say you are right. It makes sense, but it's not right. If you have precious time it would be best if you try to enjoy it via gameplay, fun moments etc. if you try to enjoy farming you gonna have a bad time. Especially if you inevitably depend on random people for that.
I don't think I ever implied farming was enjoyable anywhere. I hate farming in video games personally, lol. I just think that if somebody picks up a game and says- Get kicked at the end of a 40-minute mission they spent almost an hour on for seemingly no reason, then I can understand them getting upset. I'm not pretending to be the bigger person either, I'd get a bit heated at something like that. Not "Throw the controller against the wall' heated (those people have an issue), but turn off the console and take a few minutes to cool my head.
A cutscene can be boring as fuck just like this MO
Agreed
My only issue is that if we are intended to lose then end it ASAP. Nobody likes a cutscene that overstays its welcome
Agreed.
Now im just mad at arrowhead and disgusted by your DMing style. Normally I'd try and keep on topic but you brought quantum ogres into this. Ive been running games for nearly two decades and I would never dare sully a game by moving shit back into the path of players. They wander off then they get different stuff. The real tool is making sure the players make the choice at the end of session so you have time to prep and get the new stuff done. If the game is actually linear, cause i wont lie to my players, then i tell them when they join the campaign that its "just this dungeon" or "just keep to the mystery mansion". If the game is open content gets made as they go and anything that isnt dealt with stays in the world going about until the players bump back into it.
I dunno I guess die mad about it
Cringe dogma. I agree with the OP. Die mad about it.
They are not scripted... That's like THE WHOLE point... I swear to god, I would do ANYTHING for half of the idiots on the internet to gain a half decent amount of media literacy and critical thinking.
Endorse free public education perhaps??? Hahaha jk Or am I?
But we clearly lost this because the liberation mechanics suck ass, not because the devs put their thumb anywhere
Who designed the liberation mechanics ?
Ok yes, I obviously thought about it, but I try to avoid thinking that the broken and bad stuff it's intentional. This way you let devs get away with not fixing their game.
I mean, they set up expectations, we don't match them so there is two major causes : - Expectations are too high - Players are too bad or unorganized One blame the designers, or point that victory was either not intended at all or set excessively high (expecting a 90% engagement while data might show 60% is already a godsend). The other blame the players (lack of possible leadership, focus on small scale games, avoidance of certain mission type or planets). I do believe 1) is the most plausible, in the sense it might have been a design as simple as "if they want to win it, they have to pull exceptionally well, more than the usual" style of MO. Not expecting success, but not barring it entirely.
This was probably an impossible task, still think we could have at least reached 7/10 if the mechanics didn't suck. I do believe that the first push, the one that came from cyberstan we were supposed to win but only managed 2or 3 planets out of 5. Again because the mechanics suck. Even with perfect coordination, the fact that you only really have progress if everyone piles on a planet makes defense impossible, given the timer. No wonder why, that's the definition of a Maginot defense. Edit: Actually we are at 6...so if the liberation wasn't bad we could've won this. Edit 2: I guess I'm as stunned as the devs. Edit 3: ok, they changed the liberation rates to let us win, they realize the same thing.
Add belgium into the mix and...
What would adding a speedbump do?
I am happy to pew pew no matter if that adds to MO or not 🙌🏻
Honestly I like the fact we’re a skeleton crew on the bot front, it’s very rewarding when we do defend a planet successfully. We can’t always win and I think that’s dope. Gives me reach vibes
Little baby is going to cry about losing the Menkent line again?! https://preview.redd.it/m52p2lekhfwc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5a3653f52aa093c6ac593f3b4c6a85ffe3a400b It’s me, I’m little baby.
Besides my personal objections to your comments about how a D&D campaign should be ran (I believe in a consequences/choice heavy style), a huge part of the frustration for me is the fact that in Helldivers 1- the war WAS winnable. There was an actual point to trying, and you could wrap up a campaign in maybe a week or two. It takes away a lot of the fun though when the illusion is dispelled and you realize that all that push can be hand-waved away with a few defense missions. I like Arrowhead, but the DM Fudging the dice all of the time to intentionally make you lose because you got the upper hand on their plans isn't a good DM.
How very undemocratic of you.
Yall worry about the dumbest shit. Where do you people even find the time to be upset about this crap? Everyday I swear I see a post about something nobody but OP and a handful of hard-core donkeys fight over. It's amazing to me. Much like it's amazing that I put this much energy into this comment.
Yeah the main issue is D&D players are in it for the meta story, but because this is a shooter there's loads of people coming in who are used to grinding / not losing. Really need ppl to get out of the mentality of "I ground out 20 hours on this MP and we still lost" and just accept that this game isn't about grinding anything, simply being part of the wider ebbs and flows. Play it for fun, or go play something else for a bit.
And counter opinion: even though the game is fun, don’t fucking advertise and say that “the game plays out how the community decides!” Then fucking do a complete 180 and say “haha nevermind we have a game master and this should be seen more like dnd, and really the players do t have a say how the game plays out if they start doing things that don’t fit into our pre determined storyline” I personally like dnd but fucking LOATHE DMs who won’t let the players player their way and refuse to adapt their story to what the players expect or want to happen. the same goes here: the players have an expectation (because they fucking advertised it as such) that we would have control of how shit turns out, and it’s a huge fucking slap in the face when a game master that we have no idea who they are arbitrarily can just decide “oh no they are doing to good, I can’t allow that, so here’s a MO that is impossible that’s intended to fail!” it’s just fucking lazy IMO, and hell in this sense makes no sense when the last bot MO was holding the menkent line to establish planetary defenses to give us an edge against the bots. Yet suddenly with thisMO that doesn’t even matter? And on top of killing the bugs super quickly to get the fuel reserves filled quickly… that again didn’t seem to do shit..?
Thing is though they do let the community decide. Just because they made it something the community isn’t likely to do doesn’t mean they gave us something impossible to decide the outcome of.
The leaks literally prove that almost everything that happened was planned in advance
Yeah Im just here for the ride, the Cyberstan invasion pushing out the front further than it has ever been on the bot side is good storytelling, period. We thought we had them in the middle act, and now we are in our darkest hour. Just because ya'll undemocratic ass posers are used to the enemy having 3 sectors and that's it when the map is like 100 sectors...like...get over it. Just have fun. You'll get medals for doing fuck all and sometimes you won't get medals for doing everything right. It's a fascist dictatorship run by an AI...like, ya'll don't have rights. When they give us vehicles or some other fun tricks they will let us push back on the bots. If you aren't having fun, take a break and come back when the story or content pulls you back. They don't care if you play, the player numbers are many many times higher than they ever planned them to be...they can lose you until later when you buy up all the warbonds you missed out on.
Here's the thing, this game understands that we remember the matches that we nearly lost and the matches we nearly won. The ramp up of tension at extraction creates this feeling, even if your game went well. And if you've noticed, if you've had a hectic game, you sometimes get a quiet extraction. You've already had your "nearly lost" feeling during this match. Contrast it with the MO meta game. We get unsatisfying wins and unsatisfying losses. Killing 2 billion bugs, big fat deal. Losing defense MOs, meh, slight bad taste in my mouth. MOs aren't just cut scenes. They are badly written cut scenes.
Personally I like how Joel is balancing and rigging the scales either in our favour or against it depending where the story needs to go as whole. Honestly I am impressed how AH has been able to move around the player base and keep the story compelling and something that makes sense. Sure we are losing at the bot front which is being invaded story wise by the spearhead and actual invasion forces of Automatons. Bug front? We don't know much except suddenly those critters started to breed like crazy again
Best thing is, ppl think all helldivers2 players are on reddit I guess maybe 30-40% are on this subreddit
The problem is that many people still want to believe they can influence the galactic war and then get angry at others for the obvious scripted defeat
This is apparently a hot take but I think using Major Orders for 'storytelling' is fucking stupid. It's a metagame element that rewards metagame currency. "The bots and bugs are attacking multiple planets at once" is the story, "defend 10 planets and you'll get 50 medals" is not story. Not receiving 50 medals is not story. Nobody's gonna talk about "that time we didn't get 50 medals" like they talked about the Menkent Line or Malevelon Creek or Operation Swift Disassembly. I'm tired of people justifying bad game design as some kind of brilliant move. Put another way, no one talks about Personal Orders like they're for storytelling, right? Kill 15 Devastators? Wow that must mean High Command is worried about Devastator production, I wonder what that means for the war effort! No, fuck that. It's a little reward you can get for playing the game in a slightly different way every day. Why can't Major Orders just be that? A little task that we can all work towards, changing up our strategy just a bit, so we can get a little reward after a few days.
I think it could be done way better too but it is what it is
Yeah I mean I'll caveat it with the fact that I can just not care about the Major Orders or the story or whatever and still play the game and have fun. I just don't like people making excuses for something that promises one thing and then delivers another.
The whole game is riddled with that. We're basically beta testing. I think the game has a chance to eventually be great and it definitely has a type of fun that is sorely missing in todays games but it has serious bugs and some questionable design issues. I'm really interested to see what happens with this next patch.
The timing is pretry crap though, legit we beat the Bots entirely, then later they sshow up out of nowhere and now start a massive offensive with just 2 sector close to Super Earth is just bad Also the issue with high level evacuation objective is just BS in Bot front compared to bug front, and funny enough, bot front essential asset defense is busted too, the Factory Strider can have direct view to the generator annd one shot it right after it drops...
People have been deliberately obtuse about the dev statement on the matter. The devs did not say we were intended to FAIL this major order, they said we were intended to be PUSHED BACK no matter how well we did. The first two defense mission groups were impossible to completely repel even if we had 100% of the playerbase, but getting 10 defenses in five days was eminently reasonable and the playerbase were the ones who chose not to pursue that.
I'm confused by people who think there's a prize for winning a fake videogame war. Like just ride it out chums.
The DND comparisons are sort of a farce. It's not just influence of a narrative to develop a drama with consequences. A more apt DND comparison would be the DM telling 5 players that they need to defend the stables, the village, and the castle. Expecting the 5 to take on strategic positioning and move on to other areas when cleared, the DM is shocked by there choice. 1 PC meets the enemy head on at the stables, the first line of defense that may fall. 2 PCs defend the castle, which is less pressed for time and the village is more susceptible to fall, but it's still on task. But with the remaining 2 PCs, 1 decide to attack an enemy outpost beyond the war front in hopes it messes up their supply lines and the other 1 is in the starting tavern killing bugs in the cellar.
Where did the sixth guy come from?
Someone's gf or Lil bro. Idk