This has nothing to do with the shitstorm (it mostly hit Arrowhead anyway), and I think the review bombing didn’t affect their decision making that much. What I think happened was, Sony saw the massive refunds. They got hit right into the wallet 😩
Once again, Arrowhead decided to go with Sony as publisher, they agreed with PSN account linking. No offense, they are are an independent studio, they did not need to do that. It is sad they lost money, but the developers already got paid. The worst thing that can happen is they have to switch jobs.
Developers generally have a choice between going to one of the massive publishers (which allows for better promotion and for expensive games to pay off, but comes at a cost of their will over devs), or to self-release, which means way less players will even know about the game, not to mention buy it.
Arrowhead realistically only had the first option.
That’s not to say there’s no fault of theirs in the situation, just that it’s not a free choice and that Sony is still the main culprit
If they truly go through that for the promotion, then they are idiots and deserve all the hate. Video games don't blow up because there is a commercial on time square that costs a million dollars, games blow up because they are good and people/youtubers and (yuck) influencers talk about it
That’s what pisses me off with the steam review bombing.
If that’s the only way to express discontent then that will fucking sucks for everybody involved in game development.
If at least review bombing was a last resort but now it’s the norm. These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.
Sure let’s destroy this game all together because of this issue.
A well thought out and mature reaction is to pretend the game is bad in the steam reviews even though you clocked 100+ hours into it.
I mean there is a ton of things Helldivers does better than any other games and we are gonna trash that because of a PSN account requirements ?
I understand this is a valid issue for certain players but is it a proportionate response to this situation to trash the game on steam? I don’t think so.
Legit question: Did you completely stopped playing Helldivers 2 ?
Is it uninstalled?
Did you ask for a refund ?
Because if you still play the game and at the same time say it should be trashed that’s a lot of hypocrisy.
It can’t be both. You can criticize the game that’s fine. But if you still play it and you are so vocal for its demise then you are definitely part of the problem here.
So you are asking other players to review bomb and try to kill a game you never bought yourself?
Fascinating.
Edit: I think the above conversation is a good example of why I don’t think Steam Review Bombing is the best solution. You get people delivering fake reviews sometimes for games they don’t even play themselves. I understand why they do that I just don’t think that’s the right way to do so. And also thinks it’s not fair for the actual devs working on the project.
I asked but was denied my first one, and did not submit a second one before Sony walked back the changes.
I don’t actually have plans to return to the game, because Sony is consistently fucking with the dev team and the game has now accrued so much technical debt that the constant bugs and issues would impact me every time I log in.
I will also no longer be supporting Sony titles on PC. Even if they release my holy grail Bloodborne, I’ll pirate it and play it offline.
Fuck Sony forever, and stop trying to gatekeep hating a company over their shitty practices.
First would you mind telling me where I defend Sony ?
It must be very subtle.
This conversation already starts in bad faith. You are trying to undermine my comment by declaring I’m taking side with Sony. There is nothing in my recent comments that says Sony has done something right or that I agree with their move. Nothing.
Am I allowed to genuinely think this account issue wasn’t that much of a big deal ? Or do I only get to choose if I’m a Sony shill or not ? I have seen my favorite game franchise getting shat on for years by their developers (EA) and I have seen things thousands of time much worse from EA than this account requirement from PS. Still right to call out Sony for this but this is not a “this game is unplayable” issue like we had many times on other games. So yeah I have a nuanced opinion on this and didnt immediately accept that Sony murdered Helldivers 2 and that the game is dead.
My suggestion is not complicated. Stay truthful in your reviews. That’s not rocket science. A lot of these reviews are rating or presenting the game as much worse than they really think it is. Most of these players will review bomb and will play hundred of hours just after that. I’m fucking French I understand what protests are and that being an annoyance is kind of the point. But review bombing on steam and telling a naive player that would definitely enjoy the game that the game is trash will never be cool. You can say in your review that you don’t like that aspect of the game but if the point is only to be negative and untrustworthy this is not the way. Again if you truly suddenly think that game is “the worst game ever” after playing hundreds of hours and learning of the PS requirements then fine but I doubt it’s what happens.
Also did you stop to think what is your comment bringing to the table here ? It’s just an unnecessarily aggressive comment and doesn’t either provide anything beside telling me I’m wrong and it’s a bad take.
It’s a bad take to tell people their only means of effective protest is not going through proper channels.
Steam review bombing is absolutely not the proper channel to voice discontent. It’s a review. Not a forum, not a dev support channel. It’s a review. You are giving your honest feedback on a game. The good and the bad. Not just “the thing everyone told me is bad” and nothing else.
This is not cool to tell devs their game is trash on the steam page if you don’t really and truthfully think so.
Absolutely despise th fact that devs have to constantly read their game is trash in steam reviews because some higher-ups decided to go full greed mode.
So yeah Steam REVIEWS are NOT the proper channel to voice discontent. Almost any other forum or social network is. Just not a steam review page.
These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.
Steam has a specific thing that appears when you keep playing a lot on a game that you’ve negatively reviewed asking if you want to change it. I think a game is rarely impacted long-term by review bombing for a resolved issue, unless the reviewers actually dropped the game and went on with their lives.
This type of review bombing is actually against steams terms of service for reviews in the first place, they’ve stepped in a few times now to hide campaigns like that, I expect they will do the same with this one. Basically it’ll keep the recent review metric but, it will hide the reviews from the historical and the overall metric. So worst case out of this will be it has a negative recent reviews for awhile.
your last sentence is actually the exact reason they implemented that policy and they moreorless quote it in their forum post where they talk about how the new system works
The refunds may have hurt, but what hurt more was the fact that in the last week HD2 went from #1/2 on the Steam global top sellers to #11. The big red “Overwhelmingly Negative” next to a title is a huge turnoff to new buyers.
Some executive somewhere has a chart showing daily sales numbers and watched them fall off a cliff in the last week.
The golden age of gaming was the late SNES/early playstation era.
Graphics were beautiful, games were long and generally had incredible, immersive, and even heart wrenching stories.
Unlike today, where the focus on hyperrealism, generally at the expense of story and definitely performance. but hey, its only 6 hours long and you get to pay 80 dollars for it, so thats great, right?
The golden era depends on your personal preferences. What you said is true, but golden era for MMOs was early 2000s to early 2010s, and for me personally it was during that period
While sending your password in plaintext over email is very much a bad idea and a very bad practice, it doesn’t mean they store your password in their database as plaintext.
Point is, a hash isn’t a password. giving the most you don’t need tech knowledge analogy, it’s like the passwords fingerprint.
The police station may keep your daughters fingerprint so that if they find a lost child they can recognize it is your daughter beyond any doubt. Your daughters fingerprints, is like a hash, your daughter is a password.
The police should not store your daughter… that’s bad practice. The fingerprints are all they should store, and needless to say the fingerprints aren’t your daughter, just as a hash isn’t a password.
It’s possible that this email is a result of forum user creation, so during that submission the plaintext password was available to send to the user. Then it would be hashed and stored.
I’m just explaining how user authentication works for most web applications. The server will process your plaintext password when your account is created. It should then store that as a hashed string, but it can ALSO send out an email with that plaintext password to the user describing their account creation. This post does not identify that passwords are stored in plaintext, it just identifies that they email plaintext passwords which is poor security practice.
You’re correct and after reading more of the thread I saw OP say this was sent immediately after registering. I don’t have reason to believe it is stirred in plaintext unless they’re storing s copy of every email they send.
Spotify did that too. Got to listen to THE definitive worst cover of Hotel California I’ve ever heard. I don’t trust cloud services with my music anymore. Mp3’s forever.
The memory card game only had four eight different layouts, so by using deduction you could figure out which of the four was being presented to you at the time.
I still have the paper sketches of said memory game somewhere in my house. My mom would draw them to help us play the game (I was like 4 at the time)
This statement reminds me awfully of the Living World Season 4 Story in Guild Wars 2.
And yes, before people become angry about this comparison: I said “reminds me”, not “the same as” or anything else.
Explanation (hard spoiler!):
spoilerIn essence, you do everything you can, unite different people for the fight that determines the fate of the world. But… you lose and that was the only chance. You barely survive with your friends; but not all. youtu.be/jk5nfHxyQno?t=7220The Commander (you) are asked what to do (because you always had some kind of answers; a plan; every time). But since this was the only hope, you say “I don’t know.”
That line hit hard when I played it. It’s rare to see protagonists acknowledge being at the end of their wits and have no clue what to do in face of impending doom.
At least for me I could get into the next story part after I was like “wtf just happened” but for players at the time of release this was the latest part of the story and they were stuck with this awful last line for week(s).
Also riddled with microtransactions and yeah it’s not the worst in that regard but there’s still a lot of game design decisions that are worse off because of it.
What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been playing it since it came out and I would totally understand if someone never even found the menu for spending real money. All the weapons all the Armor All the strategends are all in game currency that you can’t even buy. You can pretty much only get Cosmetics with the super credits and a couple hilariously enough pretty bad weapons that are so cheap that you’ll be able to buy them off the super credits you can simply find laying around in maps if you really want them
I feel like neither of you have played it with your description.
For those that havent played -
The game has 4 types of currency, Medals, Requisition Slips, Samples and Super Credits. Medals, Requisition and Samples are only rewarded through playing the game(Either for completeing missions, or found in missions).
Super Credits can be bought with real money, but can also be found in mission.
You unlock Strategems with Requisition Slips and upgrade them(Ship Upgrades) with the Samples.
You then have “War Bonds” which are where you unlock the rest of the gear(Weapons, Armour, Boosts and more). This is where you use Medals. The War bonds are most equivilant to a Battlepass, but they are not timed and do not disappear so even if you come to the game a year later you will be able to buy and unlock everything on the very first one. The game shipped with the basic war bond that everyone had, and the first premium war bond, this is 1000 Super Credits to unlock, then you use Medals to unlock items with in it.
As for other micro transactions, there is a “Super Store” that has 4 items in it that rotate ever few days(I cant remember the time it is 2 or 3 days), that has surprisingly cheap items especially compared to what other companies are doing. They are not just purely cosmetic though, but they do not really offer anything you can not already unlock through the warbonds. Armour has different classes(Light Medium Heavy), and they have a different bonus(More Stims, More Grenades, throw grenades further) and so you might find a combination that you can not get on a warbond that you want(Light Armour with more range on grenades for example). I don’t know if I would class it as P2W, no bonus is overpowered or game changing, but it is definitely not just cosmetic.
I don’t have the game yet, but I’m planning on getting it and… That sounds annoying as fuck and needlessly complicated. What’s wrong with just having a single currency? What you earn by playing is a single currency, everything you buy in game only uses that 1 currency. Everything you only get with real money is just purchased outright, without the need for some BS currency that only has value in that 1 game. Why the hell does nobody do that?
It’s not annoying. It wasn’t explained that well I guess but it’s very easy to get into and play with the progression system.
The reason for having multiple resources for these is the same reason for having multiple resources in a tabletop game. It’s fun to balance what you do, risk reward with different modes of play.
Long term goal is finding samples on the map and extracting alive with someone that has carried them with you. If you die you drop them etc. This resource loop makes sense it is a whole secondary to the main missions and will net you upgrades in the end that are for your ship which means anyone that joins your squad.
The money you get from everything and is used for unlocking the “spells” and they are also gated by xp. This is also great and well thought out as the player will unlock toys in bursts and have time to learn them side by side with learning new mission types.
When you select a mission you get to choose an operation which is several missions in a row with increasing medal rewards for completing main objectives.
You can do side objectives and clear enemy sites for more rewards at the end.
All this is also balanced by the run having a timer which makes the enemy count increase steeply, so you have to balance if you want to complete more or less, if you want to safely extract, if you want more medals or money etc.
This creates a dynamic difficulty choices so the players can together calculate different risk reward scenarios based on what they want and how intense.
You can win big on a hard mission, but can’t extract unless you fail. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and run out of reinforces (extra lives)
Gosh it’s so much brilliant progression and gameplay choices put in here and it makes my game design brain gush. It’s so anti pay to win which is very refreshing, you get the suoercredits to unlock stuff in missions and in passes and it doesn’t give better stuff exactly, it gives different stuff, like the tf2 weapons or something like that, and it’s just different tools to finish jobs that needs to be done, which makes all players be able to contribute in their own way. It’s just very very smart.
The main issues I have with it are the grinding rpg style gameplay loop, and forcing players to return to the ship as often as possible.
Maybe I’m being too cynical but I assume its to try to get people to play as long as possible and look at the storefront as often as possible.
You can unlock a lot of things for free including some premium currency, but that’s just to increase player familiarity with the premium store and to make the player think about the cosmetic upgrades as often as possible.
Another issue is with the difficulty scaling: it doesn’t scale with the number of players or add AI players to the game if someone drops out. On its surface this can be explained by not wanting to spend the man hours to develop smart friendly AI or put more work into difficulty balancing, but the financial incentives also work against this as without it people are encouraged to invite friends to play with them, thus generating free advertising for the in game store.
That’s just a couple of examples, but every game design decision gets influenced to some extent by the way players interact and think about microtransactions. This isn’t really the case with baulders gate 3, which is in a completely different league in terms of quality(and dev budget tbf) to hell divers: it feels a bit like comparing McDonald’s with a michelin star restaurant 😂 (I haven’t played lethal company so can’t comment on that one)
Calling you back to the ship frequently so that you have the ability to change planets or change systems. The entire map of the game is basically real time and dynamic with a game master occasionally coming in to fuck with things.
You’re supposed to tug of war fight with the AI over different planet systems and objectives. A lot of people are just basically sticking to One Planet their entire gaming session and it’s currently causing super Earth to not really gain much ground because they will simply hard liberate a planet say from the automatons but then rush over to the bugs who have taken over a planet in the meantime. You’re supposed to try to spread your effort out like it’s an actual Active war
And there is so much design language in the game that shows this, did you know that if you are looking out at the ships while you’re at a planet that those are fairly real time? Not perfectly obviously but when you see ships out your window shooting down orbitals sending down drop pods or exploding that’s all something that was caused by an active gameplay session on that planet.
When people call down supplies you see that, if their ship explodes it means they just lost the mission, it helps you gauge how well a planet is currently going with the idea being you can now decide whether or not this planet is in need of more help or you should go elsewhere.
You also may want to change your loadout, you may have gotten enough metals to unlock a new weapon enough samples to unlock a new strategym or a ship module. So if you weren’t frequently going back to the ship to spend them you would be stuck on an equipment set for quite a while which could easily kill the pace of the game.
Literally everyone I know is currently playing the game and I did a little bit of a pole in my group and most of them don’t even remember that there is a store for spending real money and not a single one of us ever has spent any real money the game really isn’t pushing it hard you can ignore it completely very easily
That’s because the anti cheat is running in a fake kernel with Proton. Developers have ways of detecting when the kernel isn’t real… Sometimes… But the Helldivers devs don’t seem to mind for now.
Lately I’ve been running more and more into situations where am so thankful GDPR is a thing. Law is pretty good on its own but with EU being extremely willing to use it makes it all that much more powerful. They don’t shy away from punishing the biggest and the richest and fines from GDPR violation hit percentages of income which makes it such that it can hurt everyone.
Stop wasting time on Lemmy and get back to spreading freedom and democracy soldier. Those bugs and robots aren’t going to get a taste of Liber-tea by themselves.
And hopefully tomorrow we get some shiny new toys to play with.
Check out guild wars 2. Yes it is mmo but the pve side is about as laid back as you can get. You literally don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want. Or you can find a group and play pve. Or you can try pvp, but I’ve never tried that side of it.
I heard sPvP is toxic but I have not played that. For WvW it depends on the server/commander/guild. There are certainly commander being very aggressive about getting the absolute maximum out of it but it also ranges to “just follow me so at least have a larger group”.
And yeah, PvE is pretty chill. I find it fascinating time and time again at AB that it is possible to speed through it without any communication.
The height of new game glory for me were the old school huge boxes PC games came in. It wasn’t uncommon to get a thick manual with wonderful art, sometimes spiral bound, maps, other neat add-ins. Even console games had nice manuals with useful information you may not otherwise know. I miss that stuff.
I wrote a similar reply to a higher comment without seeing yours, and I completely agree - I miss it.
I was a bit younger in the 90s and half the magic of the ride home was reading the manual so you could hit the ground running when you installed it/put the cartridge in/loaded the tape.
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