Arrowhead Games is feeling the pressure from Helldivers 2's successes—and its blunders, community manager reveals: 'many of us at AH more or less lost a week' due to the PSN controversy
Helldivers 2 is going through some growing pains—its runaway success is a blessing for any developer, but it's also thrust the game into a burning spotlight. With a massive playerbase comes scrutiny, review bombing, and community drama in heaps.
As part of said growing pains, CEO Johan Pilestedt recently admitted he believes the game's balancing patches have «gone too far». Recent replies from community manager Twinbeard on the game's Discord have subsequently confirmed that there's a ton of balancing talks going on at Arrowhead HQ right now—and that the pressure's been building.
In a series of 10 questions offered to Discord-goers, Twinbeard noted that the team was «aware there's a lot of concern regarding warbond cadence and us possibly over-balancing and/or nerfing too much,» and that the team has been «discussing it a lot internally ATM!»
Twinbeard states that, while he doesn't want to «speak on other people's behalf,» he believes that Arrowhead Games is listening. «I really do hope it's not a matter of us not listening or dying on a hill, rather than admitting if [something] is off. We're nothing without the players.»
The devs of Helldivers 2 have expressed a pretty concrete set of design goals for weapon balance in the past, namely that the «don't buff, only nerf» philosophy shouldn't always be adhered to. But while it's clear that something's off (and there's certainly plenty of reasonable points happening) I'm not sure Twinbeard's further note that «we should always adhere to player sentiment» pans out.
Considering the sheer amount of unadulterated noise the Helldivers 2 playerbase makes—sheerly by virtue of how big it is—it's already a mammoth task just to tune in and filter. Generally speaking, player bases are very good at identifying genuine problems, but not so great at offering solutions—or even understanding why said problems are happening.
As an example, ricochet changes had a swarm of players decrying them, but it turned out it was an issue with
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