Chill out, Helldivers 2 hardcores trying to get casual players to stick to the battle plan, Arrowhead's doing what it can to help out

1 week ago 40

"Short of handing you the win, there isn't a lot more we can do."

Helldivers 2 Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios

Some Helldivers 2 Major Orders are harder than others. Kill something like two billion bugs? Easy. Co-ordinate the defense of 10 planets in one go? Not so easy. Unfotunately, the latter's the latest mission folks have been given, and getting everyone to stick to a plan has proven a step too far for the community, even if it does sound like Arrowhead's doing what it can to help the hardcores who're determined to play armchair General.

Yup, even though they're fresh off a maths-inducing bout of Terminid destruction and now have armour sets that definitely should boast the intended passives, the myriad whims of the average video game player are now standing in the way of Super Earth victory. And there's nothing you can really do about it.

While the game's community has, as of writing, managed to defend of four of the ten planets involved in this latest chapter of the Galactic War, there's been a bunch of arguing going on when it's come to devising with the ideal strategy to keep these worlds safe and, more importantly, getting enough players to buy into it.

The central issue - it's being expressed by memes on Reddit, as all truly key problems of our time are - is that hardcore players are hoping that the game's entire player base will focus on specific Major Order-centric objectives, but sadly, a lot of their more casual brethren just want to, er, have fun playing a video game.

Over the weekend, some misguided blaming of the devs for this disconnect seems to have happened on the game's Discord server, prompting a series of responses from an Arrowhead community manager with the handle Spitz (thanks, GamesRadar). "Supply lines and more information on the map [are] already being worked on," they said in response to one comment about the communication issues when it comes to player organisation during orders like this one.

"Even if we dedicated resources and time to adding some method of in-game voting on which planets should be the priority, that does absolutely nothing to stop casual players from ignoring the vote and just continuing to play where they want to play," they continued, "People who want to engage in strategy and planning are generally already in the Discord or [on] Reddit because they've sought out like-minded players."

Interestingly, they then added: "Frankly, you can't continue to blame the developers when the community came up with a plan, asked me if it'd work, I got direct confirmation from the [Game Master] that it would work, told you all that it'd work and encouraged you to do it, the [Game Master] tweaked the decay rate to make it even easier, and there still wasn't enough of a player effort to make it happen."

To finish off that response, which seems to run counter to the widely-held view among players that there are some Major Orders Arrowhead designs to be a bit of a humbling experience - or at least to be very difficult to complete within the time limit - they said: "Short of handing you the win, there isn't a lot more we can do."

So, maybe chill out with your interstellar General Patton impressions, and don't get angry at Arrowhead about these orders, especially since it's been very honest about aiming to deliver what folks want.

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