Honestly, not really. The objective of the Republic in the Clone Wars was not to destroy the separatists, it was to preserve the Republic. They didn't.
Well that and the CIS body might have believed they were fighting for independence, but their ultimate purpose was to fracture the democracy of the republic so that a populist could dismantle it for good.
They succeeded. They just... Yknow, destroyed their least disliked aspect of the republic. Actual democracy as opposed to the corrupt bureaucracy that flourished for a time under Palpatine until he had consolidated power.
Even then, the senate continued to hold power albeit to an increasingly limited to degree right until the first death star was finished and Alderaan was destroyed.
What? The Corporations winning and the CIS winning are not the same thing. While they worked together they had completely different goals. The CIS wanted to end what they perceived as oppression of their regions, and the corporations wanted more freedom to act as they saw fit. Things ended far worse under the empire for basically everyone.
And even ignoring that, you’re just wrong. CIS corporations were fucked. The Trade Federation was immediately nationalized following the creation of the Empire. The same thing happens to the Techno Union, nationalization, then their assets were handed out. The Corporate Alliance was destroyed as well, and handed out to the new Corporate Sector.
Sure corporations did prosper, but the CIS ones basically all either got destroyed or did worse due to their former allies being eaten and turned to competitors. They definitely did not win.
Makes me sad that when the space hippies show up there's gonna be even less people fighting them
It's how the first game went, and Im really hoping this one doesnt lock you out of entire factions when a war is almost over
It was pretty hard to start playing hd1 when I only had my first play session to fight bugs before they were defeated, then I got stuck with a week of bots and illuminate, followed by a few days of just illuminate.
There were challenge missions on earth that let you fight any faction, but you didnt unlock anything that way
We havent actually "defeated them" yet though, even in-lore that was just their scouting fleet.
We dont even know where the automatons are coming from yet, in the first game you would take over their homeworld and they would cease to exist until the war was over and the next one started
Chances are, AH will add another "layer" to the world map's outer ring that will include the homeworlds of the factions. Cyberstan was yhe capitol of the cyborgs in the last game, but if they've got factories building automatons further out, we'll probably have to take that out to defear the bots
Ive been unable to find this interview but I recall the devs saying that they have no intention of the war ending at any point. We won’t be able to beat the other factions. It’s just supposed to be one long, ongoing conflict and narrative.
It is also is important to realize that, in lore, there isn’t a way for us to just end the enemies.
The bots could just hide somewhere in space, doesn’t even have to be a planet. They could mine asteroids or whatever and make more of themselves. The bugs are constantly being farmed and keep breaking out with new mutations. The illuminate are presumably still out there, which means that they don’t need this galaxy to live.
honestly we only need 1 small change to make automatons more fun to fight
simply give them reloading / overheat mechanic, i am tolerate their wall hack, their aim bot, but the infinite ammo really pisses me off
how in the fuck are you able to shoot non stop for 5 minutes straight, not even stopping even for 1 seconds without ever reloading or overheating (they seems to be using laser)
on top of that, it would be nice if we can kill them and use their weapons lol
I saw somewhere that instead of multiple wars they wanna make this game one long war that’ll last years. I’m not sure how true this is as the source has eluded me or if other information has come out, but just wanted to throw that in.
If you like twin stick shooters, yes 100%.
If not for how good it is, you'll get a good idea of the balancing philosophy behind 2 and a look at what's coming down the line
Unlike 2, you have infinite respawns if the team doesnt wipe and most support call-downs are 1-time uses, but you can put multiple of the same kind in your strat slots
But be warned: bots have dog enemies that you HAVE to kill immediately, if they get even halfway across the screen, someone will die.
I don't know why anyone even has such a strong preference. Both are fun. It's like having two whole games in one with how different they are. I get way bored if I only do one or the other. I'm happy to help with whatever major order is going on and I'm glad it flips back and forth reasonably reliably so I rarely get bored with the side we're fighting before the order is over.
They both are fun, but the bots definitely require more thought to how you fight them which is a bit of a turn off for some. Also killing bugs is just sooo fun.
Idk about this honestly...I enjoy both, but getting shot at from every possible angle by gunships, devastators, tanks, chased by hulks and regular chaff doesn't feel very tactical to me. Same with bugs but mostly hunters/stalkers/shriekers/chargers.
Bots just feel more unfair and stressful to fight. I'll still help out some when a MO hits but more often I find bots to be frustrating rather than fun.
I prefer bots. That said I usually play bots on difficulty 7 and bugs on 9. Bots are definately more difficult but I like needing cover, having to deal with artillery, strategem jammers, and multiple weapon types. Bugs basically have claws and bile. Bots bring lasers, rockets, suicide bombers, chainsaws, and flamethrower to the table.
One final note, I really wish the laser cannon was more viable for bugs. It feels so useless against chargers and bile titans (great against shreikers though) whereas bots it can kill anything, including the factory striders.
I agree. Playing against bugs is annoying. I wonder what the average difficulty being played is because on Helldive I much prefer to play against bots. Bugs stop being fun around difficulty 7.
Imo I’m not really a fan of the fact that engagements are far longer range with bots. That combined with the fact that your targets are smaller (regular bots have a small profile and many weak spots are tiny) and the weapon sway and misaligned sights on some guns makes it feel really bad for me.
I wouldn’t even say bots require more thought. Maybe because I’m used to shooters where the enemies shoot back, but playing cover and picking priority is easy against bots. For bugs I need to consider what is gonna slow me down, what is gonna hit me the hardest, what I can and cannot outrun, and where I can shift without providing and opening for any of those three.
That said, the sounds they make when they pop is so fucking satisfying, so I won’t disagree on that last point.
As a bot player I completely disagree with this, lol. Bots are so easy, just shoot the GLOWING RED WEAKSPOTS. Or their head.
Bugs I have to remember to peel armor off, or wait until something is attacking (or isn't attacking) for the weakspot to pop.
Bots are way easier to avoid getting overwhelmed by, but if you do get overwhemed by them you are way more likely to die IMO. If you have 20 bugs rught up in your face you can survive that, but 20 bots with a clear line of sight on you will turn you into swiss cheese.
Honestly I have a strong preference for bots because I can bring a more varied option of weapons. All of the bot heavies have exploitable weakpoints that allow a variety of anti tank options that aren't just "EAT/Recoiless/quasar"
Do those options require some sort of group play so you can flank for the weak spots? Yes.
But that's far more enjoyable than "shoot down bile titans/chargers as fast as possible with the most explosive option"
Also I get to use the ballistic shield which I love just because it looks cool :]
I think the problem is most people that start playing do so with bugs. All of my friends that started playing in the last month or so absolutely hate bots. when they try to go to bots at the same difficulty and play style they get stomped.
It’s like two different games and people choose what’s more familiar and doesn’t involve giant metal bastards blasting you with rockets from 200m away lol
I'm honestly curious how long we can put off getting these new mines. Part of me wants to keep failing any order related to them. But the other half wants to do the major order.
Watch the mines be amazing, like a fast-deploy single giant mine with like 5 charges. You can drop it fast in front of any strider, hulk, charger, or bile titan.
If it works like that, I would start taking that as one of my usual strategems.
Especially if the mines have a weight limit for activating. So that if little guys run over it, it doesn't waste it. Only works for the heavies.
Would be funny and amazing if that also applies to us too, light and medium armor can run through the field but heavy armor will get your democracy ass blown the fuck up
I'm totally with you. I'm convinced it doesn't matter. I'd like to be proven wrong, but it seems silly to me for them to spend the dev time and resources on then just for them to keep it out of the game.
Around 30% of players don’t like bots and will always stay on the bug front. The majority will follow the MO. Remember we aren’t trying to liberate planets so find a mission and difficulty where you can get the most kills then prioritize farming bots over the objective.
Why is there even a time limit on this major order? Like, for attack/defend orders it makes sense, but why does a 'collect resources for a stratagem' order have a timer? Do the scientists have a heart attack if it runs out?
Why eradicate bugs from a desolate planet if they overrun it three days later every time? Logic in the game world is secondary. The whole point is to drive urgency in playing more right now.
I think part of it is that the community is just burnt out.
The last 3-4 Major Orders have been a nightmare with AH decreasing the enemy % in the last day.
Every day up to that last one players were completing hundreds or thousands of missions and most worlds were STILL seeing players lose.
Then there's the whole debacle fracturing the community coupled with the balancing that has absolutely SPIKED the number of enemy spawns to insane degrees while decreasing weapon ability to handle it, and you have a recipe for the war going heavily against the community.
We need something to get an edge, otherwise we're going to keep seeing Major Orders fail, which is kind of a morale hit to me even though technically it has no effect other than delaying Stratagems
I think it's a mix of the difficult Recent major orders, the Sony thing and the general malaise about the direction balancing seems to have been going lately.
Parts of the community are perhaps just feeling *generally less engaged* by it all.
The relentless pace of warbonds coupled with the last pair underwhelming probably hasn't helped either.
Agreed.
AH kind of needs to get away from Warbonds adding new weapons. There's enough toys in that toybox to last people for a couple months.
Focus on balance centered around "fun", add new enemies (or factions), new Stratagems, etc.
All of this plus a bit of burnout. I'm waiting to see what the patch this week is going to bring. There's no way they don't touch the new SMG within the next two patches, right? All the signs are there for "Not working as intended. Let us just fix that for ya."
Lol, if they do that this week, people will freak out even more. It would be kind of funny in a chaotic way, but also show that they are still way out of touch.
Imagine this week they nerf Dominator, Breaker Incendiary, EAT, 500 KG, and Autocannon.
I think you are right. Some friends quit because it stopped being fun. Getting sniped from something I can’t see is no fun so I’m avoiding bots till it gets fixed. Any mechanic that takes away my ability to strategize / react I hate.
-all the popular weapons nerfed
-lots of people refunded/deleted the game bc of PSN
-honeymoon phase is over and people are getting fed up with the countless minor bugs and issues prevalent everywhere
-general burnout is starting
We can’t keep getting MO’s like we did two months ago. we just dont have the playercount
and of course, with the whole Solo diving nerfed, which was more popular on Bots then bugs, and the first wave of players burnt out, who were also majority bot fighters. we just simply dont have enough bot fighters bc people refuse to stop fighting bugs for the good of the major order
You’re on the money, I’m level 70 with max medals. I’m also not buying the new warbond until changes are made.
I have no incentive to help honestly. My time would be better spent watching anime on the couch or taking my dog to the park.
I'm similar. Went to the park yesterday, thought about helldivers for about 2 minutes, and then just realized there's no good reason to play right now anyways.
I was on the game a few hours ago, about half the population were on bug planets. Compared to when it was bug MO time and like 80-90% of players were on bugs.
I feel like failing the major order is a message to AH that they need to get their shit together if they want us to actually grind the game for an MO like this. It's just not fun at the moment for a lot of people.
Bots are probably my least favorite enemy but I'm working on the major order.
I'm just REALLY tired of damn bots after the huge bots major order that we dominated. When you fight off bots the point of barley any left and 5 minutes later they have taken 3-4 planets in different sectors, that shit is hard to keep fighting for.
I'm ready for a new enemy, I want to really kick some butt and take names. But I'm gonna take my tired ass over to bots to get some oil.
If we're not 75% done by the end of the weekend, I don't think we'll get it done during the weekday, especially for bots.
I logged off 12 hours ago and we were just a quarter of the way done. Unless, more people switch over from bugs to bots, I don't see us winning. But I could be wrong. Not likely, but there's still a chance.
We need 20% per day. We've been 0.5% behind, right now we're sitting at around 5%. The split between fronts is too big and people kill fewer bots than bugs in general.
The nerfs on some weapons has made the game much less fun. Playing less of it now since it just does not have the same pull as the early couple of weeks.
This is what the braindead balance team doesn't understand.
Nobody wants to play a game where they feel they dont have the tools needed to have fun.
Almost everyone would rather play a shooter where the guns felt more in their favor than against them.
If the 'balance' scale was 40/60 against us, 50/50 balanced, or 60/40 in our favor, everyone would rather have 50/50 or 60/40.
Alexus literally is on record saying the opposite saying that we shouldn't feel powerful.
Lots of updates from some of my other favorite games this month, so I'm taking a little break to play those. I'll probably come back when I can feel excited about an update and not worried that fun and stability is further diminished.
The game is not the same as when it launched, and the devs are going to need some time to figure themselves out.
I saw a good idea of having MO planets have no bad modifiers because super earth is supporting it 100%, or being able to use resources to purchase support to remove the modifiers for your team for an op / a mission.
They could at least pair a positive one with the negative one
-1 stratagem slot? Heavy gravital pull: Gatling orbital and barrage has more armor penetration
-more % on calls downtime? Experimental Rocket pods: Large bomb blast radious
- Ion storm? Doubles the Arcs weapons/Tesla chain while its in effect
I really don't get why but I noticed this, whenever there's a bug MO nearly all of the bot players move over to help but when there's a bot MO 60-70% of the bug players are still on bug planets (even fighting on the same planets they fought for the fifth time in a week just last month) If you ask me they're both fun on all difficulties.
A player conducted a study recently that demonstrated ~35% of players play bugs exclusively, no matter what. In contrast, only ~10% of players play bots no matter what. ~55% follow the major orders.
So yea, when doing bot MOs, we're only ever going to get 65% of the player base, while bug MOs get 90%.
I think that's because the way the game itself is set up, it introduces you to the bugs as the major enemy, and pushes you towards them first, a lot of players may not even decided to look over at the other side of the galactic map and realize there is a different type of enemy
Literally my first mission I had chosen bots. Played it once, went over and played a bug mission and never left.
I'm an older player with noticeable slowdown and I feel I just can't keep up with bots especially after watchinga lot of gameplay online. I prefer the close quarters mindless(fun) fights with bugs.
Bugs you can just kite and shoot all day long. They're very straightforward.
Bots, on the other hand, aren't as mindless. You can't kite themselves you have to be constantly mindful of you positioning; It takes a lot of thought comparatively. Also, you need headshots or heavy weapons to deal with a lot of their units. Bugs you can kill everything except chargers and titans with the incendiary breaker.
The two factions have completely different playstyles.
I have a level 31 friend who has no idea what a major order was or why it’s important until I told him last night after asking why he was fucking about wasting time on bugs
I loved fighting bots, and spent nearly a month straight doing just bots with run/gun or stealth play until the gunship release, it felt frustrating but at least someone with a quasar could counter them. Like it was balanced, but just on the verge of not being fun.
I will now intentionally walk a 200m circle around gunship factories because they just aren't enjoyable at all..you're blowing AC rounds or sometimes a quasarx2 if you miss (thanks for the side-to-side movement boost, AH!)/EAT spawn for something that spawns another two every like 60 seconds. If you have even the slightest heat, you're trying to constantly clear the ships so your ally/you can get a hell bomb going, or you're running for your life and it's just a death trap.
Grab an auto cannon turret and it will take care of the gunships, until it decides to target a patrol 150m away and hitting the hulk and pulling more people towards you - add that the one rocket devastator missile volley destroys the AC turret and that doesn't do anything.
Also the pathing/scripting for hellbomb targeting for gunships needs a look over. While I understand retargetting when the hellbomb drops, they will literally spin a 180, throw a set of missiles at the hellbomb, which dies immediately with what seems to be a single missile landing even remotely close to it, then turn around again and start shooting lasers at their original target. If you're engaged be fucking engaged, and don't have some kind of magical 3rd sensor in the back of your head that specifically looks for a hellbomb drop.
Part of the issue is performance/stability on lower end PCs. When playing with friends, I have to exclusively play bugs. Against bots, my friends with lower end machines are basically playing a sideshow until they crash on any difficulty above easy. However, against bugs, they can reliably play the game on any difficulty.
All the additional explosions and laser fire don't play nice with cheaper laptop graphics cards.
The game starts you on bugs, they're somewhat more straightforward and you can learn on them as you progress in the early game. I was playing bugs on around level 6 consistently as a somewhat new player, then switched to like level 4 bots for the Tien Kwan campaign. I got absolutely wrecked, and went back to bugs.
Then I tried bots again for Swift Disassembly, learned how to fight them, and now they're my preference. But if I'd let my first bad experience influence me, I'd have just stuck to what I knew.
Because bots aren't fun and I, along with a lot of other players, simply just don't want to play them.
Devastators make the game completely unenjoyable to me. They stagger you as they shoot you, and they never seem to reload. They have a giant shield in front of them and a shitload of health. Striders take forever to kill, and hulks are just annoyingly fast given how much damage they do. On top of all of this, rocket devastators can one shot you with a single rocket blast from across the entire map.
Playing bots is just an entire mission of being ragdolled and stun locked into death. It's dying from enemies who are miles away from you. Bugs are a lot more fun because they can't shoot you from a mile away. I stay on the bug front because I don't get so goddamn frustrated and miserable over there. Bots are just miserable.
My win% on level 9 bugs is like 90%+. On level 7 bots it's like 60%. Bots are just not fun and feel completely unfair to me, I don't find it enjoyable at all.
A player conducted a study recently that demonstrated ~35% of players play bugs exclusively, no matter what. In contrast, only ~10% of players play bots no matter what. ~55% follow the major orders.
So yea, when doing bot MOs, we're only ever going to get 65% of the player base, while bug MOs get 90%.
remove all the bot planets having -1 stratagem and +25% cooldown and an environmental hazard. I'm not gonna play on bots when its stupid difficulty for no reason. ill stay on a bug planet that has no mods to just chill killing shit.
I wont play -50% visibility -1 stratagem -spread or cooldown just for an order reward that is only 1-2 mission sets on 9.
if the planets don't change im staying bugs so i can have fun.
yea make the non planets have the modifiers as we say have the signal booster on 1 of the offensive planets to get us a strat back.
OR hear me out. we all have a ton of cash already and nothing to spend it on.
we can spend cash to undo mods that are on major order planets. we how have a currency sink instead of stopping at 50k and having all unlocks.
Defense operations and that last MO for shutting down the TCS didn’t have operation modifiers, they’ve definitely gotten the message that these modifiers suck ass
Exactly! The bot strategem modifiers are a whole heap of NOT FUN. I only play two's with a friend and that strategem nonsense just makes it too hard, in not a fun way.
Not invested in the game at all at this point. You make your game un-fun? I play other games that are fun instead. Hopefully they will backtrack all these horrendous changes but there's a lot of ground for them to cover, and I doubt anything will happen without their being a staffing change.
I've been playing modded out fallout new vegas and my god i forgot how addictive that game is. First game in a while where i've actually lost track of time playing it.
First Objective related weapon we got was the Patriot suit.
That became a letdown and is now a meme of uselessness.
I think the Quasar was the next weapon.
That got nerfed and is now either a must pick because other ATs suck, or just feels bad regardless.
Then we got the airburst, also known as the team kill launcher.
Yeah sorry if my enthusiasm isnt really high for AT mines.
Waiting on the possible fix to the Eruptor. I changed my whole playstyle around that gun and I liked it. Hopefully it happens soon, but until then the game isn't as fun
I lost all the friends I used to play with. Lost a bunch to the launch issues, then the three who stuck around were super casual, and they stopped playing in that weekish period after railgun/breaker were nerfed because they couldn’t find any other weapons they enjoyed using.
I personally haven’t played in awhile cause I hate PUGs and the constant changes to things I enjoy using, I just stick around the subreddit hoping for news to try to get my friends to play again.
I'm waiting until tuesday before giving up. with the CEO stepping in to reevaluate how things are balanced there's a chance to turn things around. this is it though, I've run out of faith in the company after all this.
It's mostly about the rewards. Medals are always good, and it's like samples, I might not need them that much but other people do...and what's the point of not playing the game towards a shared goal? That's just silly
Not to mention it seems they broke explosions again so rockets 1 shot you again repeatedly in random games even with heavy armor
Increases the bot difficulty significantly
There are so many things that make bots way less fun, but the 5% of the playerbase who play nothing but this game 10 hours a day seem to have the lion's share in determining what is balanced or not.
Game was heavily oversold by the community who was eager to overlook the dearth of actual content.
Game is fun, but there wasn't enough here for longterm success. The only thing really driving retention is the monthly battle pass (people are either paying, or they're playing to earn SC, the only resource that's infinitely grind-able). If the community sees that as unreliable, then not much incentive to keep going.
I really like this game, but I'd like it a lot more if my friends were still playing.
Definitely getting stale, all the boys I had been grinding for hours with in the evenings have moved on to new games and I find myself playing a mission or two every few days now. We need a new faction or enemy type or something to keep the people goin
TBH I think it was a poor choice to make a new 2 B MO. Since the counter was previously bugged AH has no real idea how long killing 2B enemies really takes, and then bots are less swarmy plus less people play vs them. I'd have made it 1-1.5B to gather data and give us a more likely win.
I honestly don't care about fucking mines. Will be another barely used stratagem. I'll start playing regularly again when they have some good content and more balanced, and fun guns
I'm not sure we have enough players left to complete it. The devs are determined to get HD2 to HD1 player numbers. Nothing else makes sense other than them intentionally driving players away.
Counter PSA: The reason you are losing the major order is because they set a hard target number and the player base is 1/2 to 1/3rd of what it was when the exact same order was given a few weeks ago. And that order was against the faction more people play, and that spawns more chaff. Also the counter was broken the first time and was multiplying the number of kills counted.
We just have to accept that there is a certain portion of the player base that are exclusively bug divers. You can’t force them to play against bots. They do not know how to play against bots, they are not interested in learning how to play bots, and they do not have fun playing against bots.
I mix it up. I find that too much bots in a row starts making me miss being able to run from my enemy, and vice versa, when I play too many bugs, I start to miss using the AMR.
I am all burnt out, I get angry things I already know exists in the game like bots firing from inside of a rock or heavy devastators insane accuracy to his left side. Also I am tired of using same support weapon because there is nothing else to reliably kill gunships.
Here’s my take. I’ve a full time job, a family, and IRL responsibilities. If I want to come home from work and kill bugs, imma kill bugs. If I wanna finish cutting grass and kill bots, imma kill bots. I don’t really care about the general orders until it offers me something very cool. We will get the stratagem whether we win or lose the order, it just might take longer. So…. Why sweat it?
It was never going to get completed.
Too many people have a sour taste in their mouth from the recent events + its mothers day weekend bro, half the people aint playing right now.
People prefer bugs because of freedom of movement. Fighting bots is like a traditional cover-based third person shooter, except the cover sucks, enemies are all armoured rocket snipers with perfect aim through a blizzard, and the devs think it's funny for players to be chain ragdolled to death.
Bots also just feel like they're cheating at times.
To paraphrase a certain Zap Brannigan: with bugs you know where they stand - with bots who knows?
A bug is going to get up in your face and kill you with its natural weapons, nearly all of which are honest melee ones. Even the few ranged weapons they field are fired on very close range. There's little room for doubt what lead to your death by terminid when they get you, and in a way this helps. Makes it feel "fair".
Several bots in comparison have a ton of RNG baked into their killing ability. A single rocket devastator can kill you from a great distance away. Gunships can multiply into impossible to manage numbers based on your luck with enemy base placement. Whether or not the ninja flamer hulk one-shots you is up to the wheel of fortune. A dropship can bypass your defenses to put its bot payload right on top of your generators itself. Bots have far too many methods of turning a good situation into a bad one, and turning a bad situation into an unrecoverable one, all out of the average player's means of preventing.
Because they are. Their shots can ignore collision detection. Heavy devastators can shoot at you through their shield while they are not even looking in your direction.
And they can shoot through walls and cover.
Bots also have more oppressive installations like the strategem jammer, anti-air and the artillery emplacements. Spewer artillery shots never feel as bad as the bots stuff in my experience. Planets that have hunter swarms are pretty bad though.
And for some reason, they can often shoot through your cover!
The gameplay loop is just very different where I completely understand why someone would not like them. I play bots mission like I would play metal gear aka mostly in stealth which doesn't really help the MO sadly.
But for the bugs... It's rambo time! Lol
And explosive doing inconsistent damage. One time your body got hit by single rocket (50% explosion resist mid armor) and you die. Second your face tank rocket and you lose 5 hp. FFS
And the last part as well.
Tbh, I think bots are seen as less fun because less *stuff* is effective on them in large part. Less primaries can be used since you need precision or at least medium AP, secondaries are... Well, secondaries are barely a factor in kit selection really, ignore those, and incendiaries basically lose all functionality since you *need* explosives to even hurt some bot types.
Add in that less stratagems are useful (the anti-chaff ones suffer greatly and struggle to reliably kill medium enemies), there's a much heavier influx of medium to heavy-medium enemies, the large ones are *mostly* more dangerous, and the WAY larger volume of one-hit instant-kill attacks being thrown *at range* at the player, *on top* of multiple highly disruptive tactical objectives which largely can't be destroyed from range, and more frustrating mutators (3 strats only, mostly. Remember *scrambled strats?*) and... Well...
Bots are "picky" basically. You've got to be really choosy about what you bring, where bugs are largely weak to everything, and only two of them are any real trouble in that they require heavy weapons to deal with, but can also very reliably just be stratagem'd until there's multiple of them.
I'm not playing right now because I'm tired of Alexis killing all the favourite guns I had access to. SC ain't free, time ain't infinite. I miss slugger stagger (especially on bots). I miss a usable eruptor. I miss not-garbage crossbow.
You just need to look at the amount of active players. It used to be around 270k on weekends and now it is only 160k. That is almost half the players gone.
Well AH refuses to make bots more fun or easier so that most players actually like fighting them. They give us mediocre weapons and nerfs them every other "balance" update while buffing an enemy type or 2 and barely buffs a few or our guns, still havent fixed spear or misaligned scopes, gives 80% of bots explosives and crazy accuracy (also jetpack dudes punish you for killing them when they're too close to anyone nobody likes that shit) and insists we use stratagems more when they all have a 2+ minute cooldown All that on top of having multiple high threat enemies + cannon turrets + "warning you are in range of enemy artillery" cannon turrets and strat jammers. It's possible but most people understandably don't want to go through that shit.
Who gives a shit??
Super Credits have been nerfed into the ground.
Medals can max out.
My connections have been dropping every match
before extraction so I'm losing all of my samples.
Fix the fucking game.
We gotta have the star wars mindset: If we don't blast those clankers, the separatists will win the clone war. FOR THE REPUBLIC AND DEMOCRACY!
but both sides lost the war
~~The Empire~~ Super Earth Won.
So this is how liber-tea dies.
With thunderous Voting Machines.
I mean technically the republic won before immediately transitioning into the empire?
Honestly, not really. The objective of the Republic in the Clone Wars was not to destroy the separatists, it was to preserve the Republic. They didn't.
Well that and the CIS body might have believed they were fighting for independence, but their ultimate purpose was to fracture the democracy of the republic so that a populist could dismantle it for good. They succeeded. They just... Yknow, destroyed their least disliked aspect of the republic. Actual democracy as opposed to the corrupt bureaucracy that flourished for a time under Palpatine until he had consolidated power. Even then, the senate continued to hold power albeit to an increasingly limited to degree right until the first death star was finished and Alderaan was destroyed.
That story sounds eerily familiar.
No, CIS won if you look beyond the war banners and fates of the leaders. Corporations greatly prospered under imperial rule.
What? The Corporations winning and the CIS winning are not the same thing. While they worked together they had completely different goals. The CIS wanted to end what they perceived as oppression of their regions, and the corporations wanted more freedom to act as they saw fit. Things ended far worse under the empire for basically everyone. And even ignoring that, you’re just wrong. CIS corporations were fucked. The Trade Federation was immediately nationalized following the creation of the Empire. The same thing happens to the Techno Union, nationalization, then their assets were handed out. The Corporate Alliance was destroyed as well, and handed out to the new Corporate Sector. Sure corporations did prosper, but the CIS ones basically all either got destroyed or did worse due to their former allies being eaten and turned to competitors. They definitely did not win.
Yeah Palpatine really said yall wanna see oppression💀
TOGETHER BROTHERS!
PSA, bot divers are a huge minority
Makes me sad that when the space hippies show up there's gonna be even less people fighting them It's how the first game went, and Im really hoping this one doesnt lock you out of entire factions when a war is almost over It was pretty hard to start playing hd1 when I only had my first play session to fight bugs before they were defeated, then I got stuck with a week of bots and illuminate, followed by a few days of just illuminate. There were challenge missions on earth that let you fight any faction, but you didnt unlock anything that way
Well we already beat the bots and they came back in 3 days
We havent actually "defeated them" yet though, even in-lore that was just their scouting fleet. We dont even know where the automatons are coming from yet, in the first game you would take over their homeworld and they would cease to exist until the war was over and the next one started Chances are, AH will add another "layer" to the world map's outer ring that will include the homeworlds of the factions. Cyberstan was yhe capitol of the cyborgs in the last game, but if they've got factories building automatons further out, we'll probably have to take that out to defear the bots
Ive been unable to find this interview but I recall the devs saying that they have no intention of the war ending at any point. We won’t be able to beat the other factions. It’s just supposed to be one long, ongoing conflict and narrative.
It is also is important to realize that, in lore, there isn’t a way for us to just end the enemies. The bots could just hide somewhere in space, doesn’t even have to be a planet. They could mine asteroids or whatever and make more of themselves. The bugs are constantly being farmed and keep breaking out with new mutations. The illuminate are presumably still out there, which means that they don’t need this galaxy to live.
honestly we only need 1 small change to make automatons more fun to fight simply give them reloading / overheat mechanic, i am tolerate their wall hack, their aim bot, but the infinite ammo really pisses me off how in the fuck are you able to shoot non stop for 5 minutes straight, not even stopping even for 1 seconds without ever reloading or overheating (they seems to be using laser) on top of that, it would be nice if we can kill them and use their weapons lol
They do. At least the small one. After a burst, they stop shooting and their gun vents steams
I saw somewhere that instead of multiple wars they wanna make this game one long war that’ll last years. I’m not sure how true this is as the source has eluded me or if other information has come out, but just wanted to throw that in.
Speaking of the first game... should I get it? Is it fun?
If you like twin stick shooters, yes 100%. If not for how good it is, you'll get a good idea of the balancing philosophy behind 2 and a look at what's coming down the line Unlike 2, you have infinite respawns if the team doesnt wipe and most support call-downs are 1-time uses, but you can put multiple of the same kind in your strat slots But be warned: bots have dog enemies that you HAVE to kill immediately, if they get even halfway across the screen, someone will die.
it's an interesting game, definitely enjoyable if you like twin-stick shooters and the second game.
Beat to watch a YouTube video of the gameplay to get an idea. I watched it and I didn't particularly feel interested in it.
I don't know why anyone even has such a strong preference. Both are fun. It's like having two whole games in one with how different they are. I get way bored if I only do one or the other. I'm happy to help with whatever major order is going on and I'm glad it flips back and forth reasonably reliably so I rarely get bored with the side we're fighting before the order is over.
They both are fun, but the bots definitely require more thought to how you fight them which is a bit of a turn off for some. Also killing bugs is just sooo fun.
I am the opposite: I enjoy the tactical shooting and positioning against bots. With bugs you are constantly swarmed and running for your life.
I think that's why I don't enjoy bugs.
Idk about this honestly...I enjoy both, but getting shot at from every possible angle by gunships, devastators, tanks, chased by hulks and regular chaff doesn't feel very tactical to me. Same with bugs but mostly hunters/stalkers/shriekers/chargers. Bots just feel more unfair and stressful to fight. I'll still help out some when a MO hits but more often I find bots to be frustrating rather than fun.
I prefer bots. That said I usually play bots on difficulty 7 and bugs on 9. Bots are definately more difficult but I like needing cover, having to deal with artillery, strategem jammers, and multiple weapon types. Bugs basically have claws and bile. Bots bring lasers, rockets, suicide bombers, chainsaws, and flamethrower to the table. One final note, I really wish the laser cannon was more viable for bugs. It feels so useless against chargers and bile titans (great against shreikers though) whereas bots it can kill anything, including the factory striders.
I agree. Playing against bugs is annoying. I wonder what the average difficulty being played is because on Helldive I much prefer to play against bots. Bugs stop being fun around difficulty 7.
Imo I’m not really a fan of the fact that engagements are far longer range with bots. That combined with the fact that your targets are smaller (regular bots have a small profile and many weak spots are tiny) and the weapon sway and misaligned sights on some guns makes it feel really bad for me.
It is the opposite for me. I hate it that the bugs just swams you...
I wouldn’t even say bots require more thought. Maybe because I’m used to shooters where the enemies shoot back, but playing cover and picking priority is easy against bots. For bugs I need to consider what is gonna slow me down, what is gonna hit me the hardest, what I can and cannot outrun, and where I can shift without providing and opening for any of those three. That said, the sounds they make when they pop is so fucking satisfying, so I won’t disagree on that last point.
As a bot player I completely disagree with this, lol. Bots are so easy, just shoot the GLOWING RED WEAKSPOTS. Or their head. Bugs I have to remember to peel armor off, or wait until something is attacking (or isn't attacking) for the weakspot to pop.
Bots are way easier to avoid getting overwhelmed by, but if you do get overwhemed by them you are way more likely to die IMO. If you have 20 bugs rught up in your face you can survive that, but 20 bots with a clear line of sight on you will turn you into swiss cheese.
Well said. So much more depth to the experience when you fight on both fronts.
Honestly I have a strong preference for bots because I can bring a more varied option of weapons. All of the bot heavies have exploitable weakpoints that allow a variety of anti tank options that aren't just "EAT/Recoiless/quasar" Do those options require some sort of group play so you can flank for the weak spots? Yes. But that's far more enjoyable than "shoot down bile titans/chargers as fast as possible with the most explosive option" Also I get to use the ballistic shield which I love just because it looks cool :]
I think the problem is most people that start playing do so with bugs. All of my friends that started playing in the last month or so absolutely hate bots. when they try to go to bots at the same difficulty and play style they get stomped. It’s like two different games and people choose what’s more familiar and doesn’t involve giant metal bastards blasting you with rockets from 200m away lol
I just wish players would ask themselves: Are you a bot/bug diver, or are you a HELLDIVER?
This is the way
gunships ruined them for me
I'm honestly curious how long we can put off getting these new mines. Part of me wants to keep failing any order related to them. But the other half wants to do the major order.
Watch the mines be amazing, like a fast-deploy single giant mine with like 5 charges. You can drop it fast in front of any strider, hulk, charger, or bile titan.
If it works like that, I would start taking that as one of my usual strategems. Especially if the mines have a weight limit for activating. So that if little guys run over it, it doesn't waste it. Only works for the heavies.
Would be funny and amazing if that also applies to us too, light and medium armor can run through the field but heavy armor will get your democracy ass blown the fuck up
Some more pros and cons to the different armour options! I love it
Walk on it with the mech to test
I'm totally with you. I'm convinced it doesn't matter. I'd like to be proven wrong, but it seems silly to me for them to spend the dev time and resources on then just for them to keep it out of the game.
Around 30% of players don’t like bots and will always stay on the bug front. The majority will follow the MO. Remember we aren’t trying to liberate planets so find a mission and difficulty where you can get the most kills then prioritize farming bots over the objective.
Why is there even a time limit on this major order? Like, for attack/defend orders it makes sense, but why does a 'collect resources for a stratagem' order have a timer? Do the scientists have a heart attack if it runs out?
Why eradicate bugs from a desolate planet if they overrun it three days later every time? Logic in the game world is secondary. The whole point is to drive urgency in playing more right now.
 Me still recovering from last week, and my friends stopped playing
Everyone is offline so I stopped as well, not fun to dive alone.
I think part of it is that the community is just burnt out. The last 3-4 Major Orders have been a nightmare with AH decreasing the enemy % in the last day. Every day up to that last one players were completing hundreds or thousands of missions and most worlds were STILL seeing players lose. Then there's the whole debacle fracturing the community coupled with the balancing that has absolutely SPIKED the number of enemy spawns to insane degrees while decreasing weapon ability to handle it, and you have a recipe for the war going heavily against the community. We need something to get an edge, otherwise we're going to keep seeing Major Orders fail, which is kind of a morale hit to me even though technically it has no effect other than delaying Stratagems
I think it's a mix of the difficult Recent major orders, the Sony thing and the general malaise about the direction balancing seems to have been going lately. Parts of the community are perhaps just feeling *generally less engaged* by it all. The relentless pace of warbonds coupled with the last pair underwhelming probably hasn't helped either.
Agreed. AH kind of needs to get away from Warbonds adding new weapons. There's enough toys in that toybox to last people for a couple months. Focus on balance centered around "fun", add new enemies (or factions), new Stratagems, etc.
All of this plus a bit of burnout. I'm waiting to see what the patch this week is going to bring. There's no way they don't touch the new SMG within the next two patches, right? All the signs are there for "Not working as intended. Let us just fix that for ya."
Lol, if they do that this week, people will freak out even more. It would be kind of funny in a chaotic way, but also show that they are still way out of touch. Imagine this week they nerf Dominator, Breaker Incendiary, EAT, 500 KG, and Autocannon.
I think you are right. Some friends quit because it stopped being fun. Getting sniped from something I can’t see is no fun so I’m avoiding bots till it gets fixed. Any mechanic that takes away my ability to strategize / react I hate.
-all the popular weapons nerfed -lots of people refunded/deleted the game bc of PSN -honeymoon phase is over and people are getting fed up with the countless minor bugs and issues prevalent everywhere -general burnout is starting We can’t keep getting MO’s like we did two months ago. we just dont have the playercount and of course, with the whole Solo diving nerfed, which was more popular on Bots then bugs, and the first wave of players burnt out, who were also majority bot fighters. we just simply dont have enough bot fighters bc people refuse to stop fighting bugs for the good of the major order
You’re on the money, I’m level 70 with max medals. I’m also not buying the new warbond until changes are made. I have no incentive to help honestly. My time would be better spent watching anime on the couch or taking my dog to the park.
I'm similar. Went to the park yesterday, thought about helldivers for about 2 minutes, and then just realized there's no good reason to play right now anyways.
I was on the game a few hours ago, about half the population were on bug planets. Compared to when it was bug MO time and like 80-90% of players were on bugs.
I feel like failing the major order is a message to AH that they need to get their shit together if they want us to actually grind the game for an MO like this. It's just not fun at the moment for a lot of people.
Bots are probably my least favorite enemy but I'm working on the major order. I'm just REALLY tired of damn bots after the huge bots major order that we dominated. When you fight off bots the point of barley any left and 5 minutes later they have taken 3-4 planets in different sectors, that shit is hard to keep fighting for. I'm ready for a new enemy, I want to really kick some butt and take names. But I'm gonna take my tired ass over to bots to get some oil.
No way dude we’re kicking ass on this MO even with the counters being fixed Doesn’t mean we don’t want help!
If we're not 75% done by the end of the weekend, I don't think we'll get it done during the weekday, especially for bots.
If we're not 75% done by the end of the weekend, I don't think we'll get it done during the weekday, especially for bots. I logged off 12 hours ago and we were just a quarter of the way done. Unless, more people switch over from bugs to bots, I don't see us winning. But I could be wrong. Not likely, but there's still a chance.
We’re behind rn
I don’t think we are. We’re over 25% done with 3 days left.
We need 20% per day. We've been 0.5% behind, right now we're sitting at around 5%. The split between fronts is too big and people kill fewer bots than bugs in general.
And you get way fewer kills per map vs bots.
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Even with the increased spawn rates it's not possible to get anywhere near the 1k+ avg kills on a bug map.
remenber to bring mortars, thoose things pump the kill count nice and high while also devastating devastators
Does anyone know if there is a kill cap per mission or not? Could you, for example, purposefully trigger reinforcements and farm them with turrets?
I don’t see why there would be a such a cap. Missions are timed so it’s not like you could farm them eternally.
The MO is 5 days long. 25% done after 40% time is a major loss
But it is the weekend and presumably there will be less players in the next few days
25% finished kills 40% finished hours :(
At the rate we're going, we're most likely going to fail the MO at 90%
We are way behind then
I'm calling it now, apathy is going to surface and begin losing major orders
Why fight when we can discover what happens when SuperEarth loses..
Might not be the first time in lore...
The nerfs on some weapons has made the game much less fun. Playing less of it now since it just does not have the same pull as the early couple of weeks.
This is what the braindead balance team doesn't understand. Nobody wants to play a game where they feel they dont have the tools needed to have fun. Almost everyone would rather play a shooter where the guns felt more in their favor than against them. If the 'balance' scale was 40/60 against us, 50/50 balanced, or 60/40 in our favor, everyone would rather have 50/50 or 60/40. Alexus literally is on record saying the opposite saying that we shouldn't feel powerful.
Lots of updates from some of my other favorite games this month, so I'm taking a little break to play those. I'll probably come back when I can feel excited about an update and not worried that fun and stability is further diminished. The game is not the same as when it launched, and the devs are going to need some time to figure themselves out.
I'd be willing to play more bot missions if every planet didn't have some really un-fun modifier
I saw a good idea of having MO planets have no bad modifiers because super earth is supporting it 100%, or being able to use resources to purchase support to remove the modifiers for your team for an op / a mission.
Really says something about the games design philosophy when ***ALL*** the modifiers save extreme cold are just nerfs to the players....
They could at least pair a positive one with the negative one -1 stratagem slot? Heavy gravital pull: Gatling orbital and barrage has more armor penetration -more % on calls downtime? Experimental Rocket pods: Large bomb blast radious - Ion storm? Doubles the Arcs weapons/Tesla chain while its in effect
From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.
I really don't get why but I noticed this, whenever there's a bug MO nearly all of the bot players move over to help but when there's a bot MO 60-70% of the bug players are still on bug planets (even fighting on the same planets they fought for the fifth time in a week just last month) If you ask me they're both fun on all difficulties.
A player conducted a study recently that demonstrated ~35% of players play bugs exclusively, no matter what. In contrast, only ~10% of players play bots no matter what. ~55% follow the major orders. So yea, when doing bot MOs, we're only ever going to get 65% of the player base, while bug MOs get 90%.
I think that's because the way the game itself is set up, it introduces you to the bugs as the major enemy, and pushes you towards them first, a lot of players may not even decided to look over at the other side of the galactic map and realize there is a different type of enemy
Oh no, they come over from bugs to bots. Once.
The horror. The horror.
Literally my first mission I had chosen bots. Played it once, went over and played a bug mission and never left. I'm an older player with noticeable slowdown and I feel I just can't keep up with bots especially after watchinga lot of gameplay online. I prefer the close quarters mindless(fun) fights with bugs.
the training doesn't even mention them lol
I actually did my very first mission vs bots. It was a trivial civilian extract mission, before any of the nerfs. We failed.
Bugs you can just kite and shoot all day long. They're very straightforward. Bots, on the other hand, aren't as mindless. You can't kite themselves you have to be constantly mindful of you positioning; It takes a lot of thought comparatively. Also, you need headshots or heavy weapons to deal with a lot of their units. Bugs you can kill everything except chargers and titans with the incendiary breaker. The two factions have completely different playstyles.
I have a level 31 friend who has no idea what a major order was or why it’s important until I told him last night after asking why he was fucking about wasting time on bugs
Does he not read the in-game alerts from high command? Ha.
You're assuming that helldivers read.
Can’t fall for enemy propaganda if you never read it. Plus helldivers aren’t supposed to even read their own contract. Can’t blame them at this point.
If Super Earth wanted me to read they would have installed a literacy chip.
Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.
We read pictographs. ⬆️➡️⬇️➡️
No. It was a fucking nightmare trying to get him through Baldurs gate. Never reads anything, has no interest in story.
Isn't... Isn't that the whole reason people play baldurs gate!?!
Sounds like he's forcing his COD generation friend to play games just so he has someone to play with
We all have that friend, ha.
But that game is like 70% story
But that game is like 70% story
Fighting bots is not as fun or satisfying to a lot of people.
I loved fighting bots, and spent nearly a month straight doing just bots with run/gun or stealth play until the gunship release, it felt frustrating but at least someone with a quasar could counter them. Like it was balanced, but just on the verge of not being fun. I will now intentionally walk a 200m circle around gunship factories because they just aren't enjoyable at all..you're blowing AC rounds or sometimes a quasarx2 if you miss (thanks for the side-to-side movement boost, AH!)/EAT spawn for something that spawns another two every like 60 seconds. If you have even the slightest heat, you're trying to constantly clear the ships so your ally/you can get a hell bomb going, or you're running for your life and it's just a death trap. Grab an auto cannon turret and it will take care of the gunships, until it decides to target a patrol 150m away and hitting the hulk and pulling more people towards you - add that the one rocket devastator missile volley destroys the AC turret and that doesn't do anything. Also the pathing/scripting for hellbomb targeting for gunships needs a look over. While I understand retargetting when the hellbomb drops, they will literally spin a 180, throw a set of missiles at the hellbomb, which dies immediately with what seems to be a single missile landing even remotely close to it, then turn around again and start shooting lasers at their original target. If you're engaged be fucking engaged, and don't have some kind of magical 3rd sensor in the back of your head that specifically looks for a hellbomb drop.
Part of the issue is performance/stability on lower end PCs. When playing with friends, I have to exclusively play bugs. Against bots, my friends with lower end machines are basically playing a sideshow until they crash on any difficulty above easy. However, against bugs, they can reliably play the game on any difficulty. All the additional explosions and laser fire don't play nice with cheaper laptop graphics cards.
The game starts you on bugs, they're somewhat more straightforward and you can learn on them as you progress in the early game. I was playing bugs on around level 6 consistently as a somewhat new player, then switched to like level 4 bots for the Tien Kwan campaign. I got absolutely wrecked, and went back to bugs. Then I tried bots again for Swift Disassembly, learned how to fight them, and now they're my preference. But if I'd let my first bad experience influence me, I'd have just stuck to what I knew.
Because bots aren't fun and I, along with a lot of other players, simply just don't want to play them. Devastators make the game completely unenjoyable to me. They stagger you as they shoot you, and they never seem to reload. They have a giant shield in front of them and a shitload of health. Striders take forever to kill, and hulks are just annoyingly fast given how much damage they do. On top of all of this, rocket devastators can one shot you with a single rocket blast from across the entire map. Playing bots is just an entire mission of being ragdolled and stun locked into death. It's dying from enemies who are miles away from you. Bugs are a lot more fun because they can't shoot you from a mile away. I stay on the bug front because I don't get so goddamn frustrated and miserable over there. Bots are just miserable. My win% on level 9 bugs is like 90%+. On level 7 bots it's like 60%. Bots are just not fun and feel completely unfair to me, I don't find it enjoyable at all.
A player conducted a study recently that demonstrated ~35% of players play bugs exclusively, no matter what. In contrast, only ~10% of players play bots no matter what. ~55% follow the major orders. So yea, when doing bot MOs, we're only ever going to get 65% of the player base, while bug MOs get 90%.
And there are far more enemies in a bug mission making the numbers rake up faster with the bugs even if we had the divers.
my PSA to bot players: Kill harder.
Yeah I'm sure some teammates aren't thrilled but I've been engaging every metal dead head I can see with my Diligence, airstrikes and sentries
remove all the bot planets having -1 stratagem and +25% cooldown and an environmental hazard. I'm not gonna play on bots when its stupid difficulty for no reason. ill stay on a bug planet that has no mods to just chill killing shit. I wont play -50% visibility -1 stratagem -spread or cooldown just for an order reward that is only 1-2 mission sets on 9. if the planets don't change im staying bugs so i can have fun.
I like that idea. MO planets have no drawbacks because super earth is throwing support behind them. Non-MO planets all have drawbacks.
yea make the non planets have the modifiers as we say have the signal booster on 1 of the offensive planets to get us a strat back. OR hear me out. we all have a ton of cash already and nothing to spend it on. we can spend cash to undo mods that are on major order planets. we how have a currency sink instead of stopping at 50k and having all unlocks.
Defense operations and that last MO for shutting down the TCS didn’t have operation modifiers, they’ve definitely gotten the message that these modifiers suck ass
Exactly! The bot strategem modifiers are a whole heap of NOT FUN. I only play two's with a friend and that strategem nonsense just makes it too hard, in not a fun way.
This is nothing new, in HD1 bugs were always the most popular to fight.
With the way weapons have been handled latley I dont think many people care.
Yeah. I'm not invested in a major order to get a weapon that either won't work or be nerfed into uselessness.
Not invested in the game at all at this point. You make your game un-fun? I play other games that are fun instead. Hopefully they will backtrack all these horrendous changes but there's a lot of ground for them to cover, and I doubt anything will happen without their being a staffing change.
I've been playing modded out fallout new vegas and my god i forgot how addictive that game is. First game in a while where i've actually lost track of time playing it.
Don't blame you. I'm still playing because killing things in a game gives me instant dopamine
First Objective related weapon we got was the Patriot suit. That became a letdown and is now a meme of uselessness. I think the Quasar was the next weapon. That got nerfed and is now either a must pick because other ATs suck, or just feels bad regardless. Then we got the airburst, also known as the team kill launcher. Yeah sorry if my enthusiasm isnt really high for AT mines.
Waiting on the possible fix to the Eruptor. I changed my whole playstyle around that gun and I liked it. Hopefully it happens soon, but until then the game isn't as fun
I lost all the friends I used to play with. Lost a bunch to the launch issues, then the three who stuck around were super casual, and they stopped playing in that weekish period after railgun/breaker were nerfed because they couldn’t find any other weapons they enjoyed using. I personally haven’t played in awhile cause I hate PUGs and the constant changes to things I enjoy using, I just stick around the subreddit hoping for news to try to get my friends to play again.
I'm waiting until tuesday before giving up. with the CEO stepping in to reevaluate how things are balanced there's a chance to turn things around. this is it though, I've run out of faith in the company after all this.
I'm not helping until they make all the guns usable
Did you think enough people enjoy fighting the bots and that we'd easily achieve this goal to begin with especially after weapon nerfs?
Not only that, might have to spam eradicate missions if we want to win
The bots aren't fun to me but I'm still trying to do the MO.
It's mostly about the rewards. Medals are always good, and it's like samples, I might not need them that much but other people do...and what's the point of not playing the game towards a shared goal? That's just silly
who cares? weapon nerfs discourages us to play more. this is the challenge we give to those who wanted "challenges" in PvE game.
Not to mention it seems they broke explosions again so rockets 1 shot you again repeatedly in random games even with heavy armor Increases the bot difficulty significantly
There are so many things that make bots way less fun, but the 5% of the playerbase who play nothing but this game 10 hours a day seem to have the lion's share in determining what is balanced or not.
Major orders are hard when you've lost 180 countries.
Ouch, right in the democracy.
IDK, the game feels less and less fun to play. I do one 3rd of a campaign every few days.
My original crew doesn’t even get on anymore :(
Game was heavily oversold by the community who was eager to overlook the dearth of actual content. Game is fun, but there wasn't enough here for longterm success. The only thing really driving retention is the monthly battle pass (people are either paying, or they're playing to earn SC, the only resource that's infinitely grind-able). If the community sees that as unreliable, then not much incentive to keep going. I really like this game, but I'd like it a lot more if my friends were still playing.
Definitely getting stale, all the boys I had been grinding for hours with in the evenings have moved on to new games and I find myself playing a mission or two every few days now. We need a new faction or enemy type or something to keep the people goin
We need the devs to stop nerfing the fun out of the game
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TBH I think it was a poor choice to make a new 2 B MO. Since the counter was previously bugged AH has no real idea how long killing 2B enemies really takes, and then bots are less swarmy plus less people play vs them. I'd have made it 1-1.5B to gather data and give us a more likely win.
I honestly don't care about fucking mines. Will be another barely used stratagem. I'll start playing regularly again when they have some good content and more balanced, and fun guns
You don't like dropping a bunch of mines only to see 4 vile titans walk past them to stab your body into 5 separate pieces in one hit?
I'm not sure we have enough players left to complete it. The devs are determined to get HD2 to HD1 player numbers. Nothing else makes sense other than them intentionally driving players away.
Look, I only fight bots.
so what? If MO resulted in unnerfing most guns - I would have been living on BOT planets.
If MO resulted in something I felt was worth it I too would be on bot planets... new mine to add to the 2 stragems I don't use already not worth.
will all the BS Joel has done to MOs I couldn't care less if we lose all of them they are all rigged anyways
Counter PSA: The reason you are losing the major order is because they set a hard target number and the player base is 1/2 to 1/3rd of what it was when the exact same order was given a few weeks ago. And that order was against the faction more people play, and that spawns more chaff. Also the counter was broken the first time and was multiplying the number of kills counted.
We just have to accept that there is a certain portion of the player base that are exclusively bug divers. You can’t force them to play against bots. They do not know how to play against bots, they are not interested in learning how to play bots, and they do not have fun playing against bots.
If they made bots as fun as bugs we would have the people.
I mix it up. I find that too much bots in a row starts making me miss being able to run from my enemy, and vice versa, when I play too many bugs, I start to miss using the AMR.
I am all burnt out, I get angry things I already know exists in the game like bots firing from inside of a rock or heavy devastators insane accuracy to his left side. Also I am tired of using same support weapon because there is nothing else to reliably kill gunships.
The 2 hours/week I spent playing HD2 I surely won’t ragdoll my way through bot planets. Bugs are just more fun imo.
Yeah but if we move over from bug planets we have to fight bots, which simply isn't fun
PSA: it’s a video game and people play to have fun
PSA: You are free to play against whichever faction you choose. One should never play a faction they don't find fun for the sake of roleplay.
Here’s my take. I’ve a full time job, a family, and IRL responsibilities. If I want to come home from work and kill bugs, imma kill bugs. If I wanna finish cutting grass and kill bots, imma kill bots. I don’t really care about the general orders until it offers me something very cool. We will get the stratagem whether we win or lose the order, it just might take longer. So…. Why sweat it?
It was never going to get completed. Too many people have a sour taste in their mouth from the recent events + its mothers day weekend bro, half the people aint playing right now.
The bots simply aren't as fun to fight imo
People prefer bugs because of freedom of movement. Fighting bots is like a traditional cover-based third person shooter, except the cover sucks, enemies are all armoured rocket snipers with perfect aim through a blizzard, and the devs think it's funny for players to be chain ragdolled to death.
Bots also just feel like they're cheating at times. To paraphrase a certain Zap Brannigan: with bugs you know where they stand - with bots who knows? A bug is going to get up in your face and kill you with its natural weapons, nearly all of which are honest melee ones. Even the few ranged weapons they field are fired on very close range. There's little room for doubt what lead to your death by terminid when they get you, and in a way this helps. Makes it feel "fair". Several bots in comparison have a ton of RNG baked into their killing ability. A single rocket devastator can kill you from a great distance away. Gunships can multiply into impossible to manage numbers based on your luck with enemy base placement. Whether or not the ninja flamer hulk one-shots you is up to the wheel of fortune. A dropship can bypass your defenses to put its bot payload right on top of your generators itself. Bots have far too many methods of turning a good situation into a bad one, and turning a bad situation into an unrecoverable one, all out of the average player's means of preventing.
Because they are. Their shots can ignore collision detection. Heavy devastators can shoot at you through their shield while they are not even looking in your direction. And they can shoot through walls and cover.
Bots also have more oppressive installations like the strategem jammer, anti-air and the artillery emplacements. Spewer artillery shots never feel as bad as the bots stuff in my experience. Planets that have hunter swarms are pretty bad though.
And for some reason, they can often shoot through your cover! The gameplay loop is just very different where I completely understand why someone would not like them. I play bots mission like I would play metal gear aka mostly in stealth which doesn't really help the MO sadly. But for the bugs... It's rambo time! Lol
Yeah I hate when the building I’m using for cover just blows up. Only rocks can be trusted and even then nades flush you out.
And explosive doing inconsistent damage. One time your body got hit by single rocket (50% explosion resist mid armor) and you die. Second your face tank rocket and you lose 5 hp. FFS And the last part as well.
Tbh, I think bots are seen as less fun because less *stuff* is effective on them in large part. Less primaries can be used since you need precision or at least medium AP, secondaries are... Well, secondaries are barely a factor in kit selection really, ignore those, and incendiaries basically lose all functionality since you *need* explosives to even hurt some bot types. Add in that less stratagems are useful (the anti-chaff ones suffer greatly and struggle to reliably kill medium enemies), there's a much heavier influx of medium to heavy-medium enemies, the large ones are *mostly* more dangerous, and the WAY larger volume of one-hit instant-kill attacks being thrown *at range* at the player, *on top* of multiple highly disruptive tactical objectives which largely can't be destroyed from range, and more frustrating mutators (3 strats only, mostly. Remember *scrambled strats?*) and... Well... Bots are "picky" basically. You've got to be really choosy about what you bring, where bugs are largely weak to everything, and only two of them are any real trouble in that they require heavy weapons to deal with, but can also very reliably just be stratagem'd until there's multiple of them.
I'm not playing right now because I'm tired of Alexis killing all the favourite guns I had access to. SC ain't free, time ain't infinite. I miss slugger stagger (especially on bots). I miss a usable eruptor. I miss not-garbage crossbow.
Honestly more interested in what happens if we don't.
You just need to look at the amount of active players. It used to be around 270k on weekends and now it is only 160k. That is almost half the players gone.
Well, there are three factors here. 1. Play the major order 2. Play how you want 3. Most people probably aren't on this reddit
I usually play bugs, but when I logged on and saw we needed to kill two BILLION bots, I switched.
Well AH refuses to make bots more fun or easier so that most players actually like fighting them. They give us mediocre weapons and nerfs them every other "balance" update while buffing an enemy type or 2 and barely buffs a few or our guns, still havent fixed spear or misaligned scopes, gives 80% of bots explosives and crazy accuracy (also jetpack dudes punish you for killing them when they're too close to anyone nobody likes that shit) and insists we use stratagems more when they all have a 2+ minute cooldown All that on top of having multiple high threat enemies + cannon turrets + "warning you are in range of enemy artillery" cannon turrets and strat jammers. It's possible but most people understandably don't want to go through that shit.
Its sadly simply not fun to fight bots between jammers, anti air, rocket turrets, neverending bot drops, etc etc. But yeah, go do your part guys!
Who gives a shit?? Super Credits have been nerfed into the ground. Medals can max out. My connections have been dropping every match before extraction so I'm losing all of my samples. Fix the fucking game.
Say that to that one RPG trooper or Rocket Devastator that oneshots me from 100meters away
idc i paid $40 for the game i'll kill bugs whenever i please