Helldivers 2 boss apologizes for 'horrible' dev comments, says Arrowhead has 'taken action internally to educate our developers'

Seems like a major case of Redditors being able to dish it out but not take anything in return.

I was watching Mo1st play Helldivers the other night and he mentioned someone's comment about it having the kernel anti-cheat, and one of his buddies immediately said "that guy's a redditor."
I had never felt more attacked yet agreed with something so much.
- If people knew what devs said (justifiably) about players when nobody is looking, the internet would implode.
  Like, I'm not trying to be an asshole, but holy fuck gamers are the worst about actually knowing how games are made or the consequences of various decisions they want made.
  I don't know why 80% of gamers think playing games means they know how to make games, but it infuriates many of us to no end. We get that it's just misguided desire to see the games improve but jfc it makes life incredibly difficult (especially for the CMs)
  EDIT: Imagine someone told an architect "You should just remove that load bearing wall. This other building doesn't have one in that position and it's great. Why is it so hard for you?"
- I don't know if this makes me "a redditor" somehow or what, but....
  As a dev, I am deeply troubled by the gaming industry so calmly walking into kernel anti cheats. It's insane and being tossed around like it's nothing.
  Helldivers especially, since they picked one of the sketchiest ones and it's a game that entirely doesn't need it.
  I have no idea if Reddit has suddenly picked up on this, but I've been pissed since at least Valorants release, but have seen more YT videos talking about it recently.
- I don't think it has kernel anti cheat tho. Runs just fine on Linux without root permissions
  Damn, getting downvoted for just stating my experience. It doesn't require kernel level access on Linux and runs fine—it's not a stretch to think it doesn't have kernel level anticheat (it doesn't on Linux, just on Windows).
What else is new lol
Right? I just assumed the developer said the N word or something.
This is exactly it.
Seems like a major case of Redditors being able to dish it out but not take anything in return.
Nah, this was Reddit just trolling the developers, that means it's all part of the joke and not a problem.
Some people can't take a joke I guess.

"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

"Given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game"

Pretty much true.
Except people are complaining because they were having fun before and now they're having less fun. It hasn't affected me as I've replaced the railgun with EAT, but I do think the nerf was mostly unnecessary. All it did was give players less options for higher difficulties.

" A moderator on the game's Discord server, for instance, said "watching u all cry, amuses me so much," while another said on Reddit that complaints about weapon nerfs were perhaps in reality a question of "skill issue." "

Are you kidding? That's fucking hilarious. Learn to use a different weapon than the railgun you absolute chuffs.

I was expecting hate speech or something… but this sounds almost like friendly banter
- The crying comment comes off as more of a dick thing to say, but the skill issue bit is pretty funny.

Honestly, I don't think it's a big deal. But it's just stupid as a developer to act like this.

I often ask about risk vs reward in these situations. What were they going to gain by acting like this and what were they going to risk by acting like this?

They're humans, too.
- Eh. I went and looked at the comments. Sometimes people get a little lippy and it's whatever? Shit happens. But basically telling the customer 'i get off on you crying about this' is definitely going to cause some issues for the company.
- Sure? But actions have consequences.

The dev comments are hilarious, and they were obviously trolling

Agreed, Agreed and they still shouldnt have done it. Sometimes I say shit I know I shouldnt to customers because they are being assholes. They complain, the boss tells me off, I say "Fair enough" and I dont do it again for a while. But I know when I say the thing I shouldnt that "I'm gonna get a talking to for this" fortunately I'm government employed and I'm union so I know that a little backtalk isnt going to result in outright dismissal.
Ultimately the company could have turned around and sacked them all because I'm sure the company has a social media policy that basically says "if you do anything we dont like, we can fire you" and they would have had to fight it. They took a risk and I'm glad they didnt get fired (yet) but with all the layoffs in this space at the moment I wouldnt have.
- If you say one thing to a single customer, there's that. But when you make that snarky post on a public forum it has a chance of getting amplified and misunderstood.
- They couldn’t per Swedish employment laws.
Absolutely. People should stop being so whiney and start liberating instead.

It was the patch that got me to stop playing. Why you would nerf weapons in a non-competitive game rather than make poor preforming weapons viable is beyond me.

It's akin to Steve Jobs telling everyone they're holding their phone wrong.

It's to keep design space open and to minimize developer work.
Let's say we decide to keep an overperforming gun. It does all the things. It has all the ammo, all the damage, all fire rate, all the reload speed. Now, all future weapons have to be made with that as a consideration. Why would players choose this new weapon, when there's the old overperformer? The design space is being controlled and minimized by the overperformer. Players will complain if new weapons aren't on the level of the overperformer.
Now, let's say we have ten weapons with one clear overperformer. Now, we can either nerf a single weapon to bring it in line with the others, or buff nine weapons to attempt to bring them up to the level of the overperformer. Assuming the balance adjustments of each weapon are the same amount of work, that's 9x the effort. However, if we assume we do this extra work to satisfy players, now we have ten overperforming guns and players find the game too easy, so now we also have to buff enemies to match. However, the game isn't designed to handle these increase in difficulty. Players complain if we just add more health to enemies, so we have to do other things like increase enemy count, but adding more enemies increases performance issues. It's a cascading problem.
I consider nerfs a necessary evil. It's absurd to ask developers to always buff weapons and give them so much work when they could be developing actual additions to the game. Sometimes, a weapon really does need a nerf.
- Thank you so fucking much.
  If you want the game to have long term viability, you have to have nerfs. Otherwise in 3 years everyone who has been playing since day 1 has a mech with a gattling cannon that fires nukes and is fighting gods.
- Also, I'm not sure how much this applies to helldivers specifically, but from what I've seen, teams didn't really teamwork. Because they didn't have to.
  This can be very bad because if it follows these steps:
  game is easy, no teamwork required, players learn to play the game without teamwork
  game gets harder, but some people can still manage solo, complain about "newbs" and tell them to "git gud"
  game gets even harder, now it's impossible to play "quasi solo" but the environment is no longer fit to learn teamwork in the context of this game. "How" to work together effectively.
  Then people will complain, justly, that they don't have the tools and methods to beat the challenge. Which is correct. They don't. But you can't just tell people to "go play easy mode and learn the game", when they are "max level" and put 40-100 hours into the game.
  Of course the synergy tools still have to exist and I'm not knowledgeable about helldivers whether they do.
  There is no good choice to "encourage" teamplay, except via creating "natural" funnels that people will "end up at" "organically", and putting a challenge in front of them that they can only work with teamwork. But that means the challenge has to beat them, until they get it. And that may never happen.
  One game I have found exceptional as a case study for what is "overpowered" and what isn't, and why, is magic the gathering. All the "code" is public. The complaints are public. The bans are public, and explained. So if anyone here wants to nerd out about balance and doesn't know mtg yet, there is a rabbit hole for you.
- Preach.
  The game does have a bit of a balance problem, but as usual the players are not the best at designing the solution.
  Railgun was overpowered, since it did literally everything without any risk. The funny thing is - you can still do things it did before, you just need to actually use the unsafe mode.
  The armoured bugs are a bit overtuned, the devs have announced they will be looking at them, but just giving you an OP gun is not a way to fix that.
  Shield was probably alright as it was, but the current iteration of armour doesn't really make up for the lack of it.
- Left 2 Dead 2 wants to have a word with you 😏
Making all the weapons overpowered to match ruins the intended difficulty.
I dont know what everyone is so upset about, the shotgun feels fine, the recoil doesnt feel bad, and the mag size isnt a huge problem for me.
Plus the flamethrower buff and laser cannon buff are super nice. Im usually in favor of the whole "buff everything else, no debuff" but this honestly feels fine.
- It's been rough adjusting to how many overcharged shots it takes to take down a charger, but it's been a blast running with some flamethrower friends.
  It also gave me an excuse to bring back my rover. No, it's still not as practical as the shield, but it is more fun.
This is a dumb take.
If there was a gun that 1 tapped every enemy in the game and had infinite ammo and maybe even auto aimed for you, that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn't it?
Would you not want that gun to be nerfed or would you want every gun in the game to become a 1 tap super weapon?
- that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn't it?
  Good thing you get to choose which gun you use. I personally would love that weapon. I've got two kids and a full time job. I need a nerf mode. The rest of y'all can use whatever other guns you like. But give me the BFG and let me have my fun.
- Bad straw man argument
- 1 tap super weapon, and introduce a viable challenge to make that obsolete.
  But you'll just get premium war bond weapons from here on out to close the difficulty gap.
Did you ever played Payday 2, where powercreep made us go from guns with all the best attachments could maybe kill the toughest enemy in the game in half a mag, or about 15 shots, to the devs needing to implement 3 (technically 4) more difficulty levels with new enemies that were just old enemies with more resistances or 10 times the health as their stock launch counterparts, and those things dying in 2 hits from all the meta build weapons. All because they kept introducing more powerful weapons, more attachments that made launch guns more and more obsolete, and general more power creep through skill tree expansions and entirely new jobs for perks. The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage and even using stuff you could get only from the base game and free updates left every weapon feeling samey with the same tactics being used and things not in the meta utterly ignored by anyone playing end game content. Because instead of reigning in the things that overperformed and broke the balance curve, they just kept powercreeping new items into the game.
- The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage
  And what exactly do you think is going to happen with this game?
This game has like ten difficulty modes.
I’ve been playing since launch. I played a lot last night. I do not see the problems. I play on hard difficulty. I have a good time whether winning or losing.
There are players that take the game far more seriously than I and honestly they make the game more tense than it needs to be. They make it feel competitive, in that if I’m not doing what they think a “good” player should then I’m unwelcome.
I think the vast majority of complaints stem from these players. I lament that another Call of Duty is not coming out sooner so that the community can diminish into relative obscurity, hopefully populated with like minds that view this as a game and not an e-Sport.
Lack of further content and wanting to lock the little content they do have behind the premium bonds, which will drive people to buy credits since they don’t have time to grind out the credits needed.

What a whiney playerbase then

They literally said they were enjoying their customers tears.
you're a business, that's just stupid to say.
if you enjoy the suffering of other people you're an absolute shit human being.
- You are taking this way to seriously
- 1 yup
  2 have you played Dark Souls?
- Me, seeing the tears of 30 year-old children waaaahhhing because their favorite vidder gaem gun does X% less damage:
  : - D

It’s unfortunately a case of developers being required to stay “on mute” because of their inherent power - much like being rich, male, and white.

I play a lot of Dead by Daylight, and many friendly content creators will offhandedly say comments like “If you can’t outrun a Hag who’s not using her traps on Garden of Joy, you should probably uninstall.” It’s an exaggerated sentiment, definitely in a mean spirit; but unfortunately that brand of sarcasm won’t work with everyone, and in the case of most people, they could react with “Well, fine, I don’t care about YOU - surely the developers agree with me.” But people feel MUCH more powerless when developers speak, even if it’s for a topic the community has consensus on. Even Dead by Daylight had its period of outcry when the developers effectively stated through changes “Camping survivors that are downed is not fun and we’d like to discourage it.”

It’s unfortunately a case of developers being required to stay “on mute” because of their inherent power - much like being rich, male, and white.
How does the quote go? "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
Ridiculous comparisons aside, primary issue is that there are basically no upsides and a lot of potential downsides to a developer actively like an ass in customer facing channels.
And feeding the cycle of "clapbacks" isn't going to do the community any favors.
- potential downsides to a developer actively like an ass
  Did you accidentally a word?
- While I'm very much on board with the equality quote for the white-male thing (If you're privileged, you shouldn't be making comments about welfare and employment), I don't know if that has so much equivalence to being a game dev. In the end, a small team of people are the ones with the control to make and update the popular game, and that power will never be spread among its playerbase.
  The thing is, as obvious as it sounds to say "never act like an ass", conversational spontaneity is unpredictable, and the simplest and fastest way to achieve that is with the directive "Never speak". I've even seen that issue with coding standards - the best way to never be blamed for a bug is to just never put up any code changes. In social settings, if people try to act in 'honest' ways, that can involve sometimes speaking in slightly inflammatory ways towards concepts that they think the group should agree are bad. In this very comment chain, for instance, we've made metaphors to oppressive patriarchy from controlling white men. (I'm a white guy with above-average income, by the way, and I'm very okay with that comparison)
  So, these developers decided to be more vocal than others in the past (think of every publisher that responds with stock "We recognize your concerns and appreciate your feedback") and, this unfortunately can be the consequence of that. I know it seems plausible to expect them to be perfect, but they're human - not much different from all other internet commenters. I'd even question whether everyone here knows the full context of the comments that are receiving complaints. Quite often, when people are putting attention on you, they can selectively quote you to make you seem terrible. ("I KILLED EARL MILFORD.")
  If your position is simply "Devs shouldn't speak outside of patch notes and press releases", that's kind of a fair stance, I just want to make sure that's what you intend.