I’ve been trying to be helpful on the Helldivers sub. When people say "X is impossible and Y needs to be nerfed/buff I’d go earnestly say "okay this is how it works, and these are the tools you have, and here is how you can use those tools to solve the problem or succeed or overcome the situation.
And, invariably, what I get back is abuse and scorn and insults and incredulity. The poster, and the hundreds of people supporting them, don’t want the solution to be within them. They don’t want to hear that they have not mastered game systems, that they don’t understand how the weapons and enemies work, that they’re making mistakes that can be corrected or that they can learn new tactics that will grant them victory.
The problem cannot lie in them. The problem must be external. The game must be broken, or bugged, or the devs must be fools. They are good enough and skilled enough and smart enough to play on the highest difficulty, but they cannot win, so the highest difficulty is broken and the devs must mechanically reduce the difficulty until they can easily, effortlessly conquer, until their “power fantasy” of unlimited unearned prowess can be restored. If they are challenged, if they face difficulty, if they face hardship, that is a flaw in the game. All obstacles must be smoothed down. Their favorite weapon should be the ideal choice for all situations.
At first I was overjoyed at the opportunity to share my knowledge and expertise, to help others learn what I had learned and enjoy the sublime feeling of mastery.
Then i was confused, because the rejection of simple tactics, simple explanations of systems and ideas, must mean I was not communicating clearly enough. Surely, if I only found the right words?
Then, anger. Why won’t they engage with these ideas? Why do they reject simple explanations clearly explained? Why do they insult and berate instead of questioning or interrogating? Where is the desire to grow, to overcome, to perfect?
Finally; contempt. I do not care. These fools, let them stew in their own ignorance and misery. What can be said to them? They cannot be educated, not because they are illiterate, but because they refuse the mere possibility of education. They refuse to accept the world as it is, instead demanding from god the utopia they surely deserve.
What can you say to someone like that? What can you do but sneer “git gud” and move on?
I’d never really questioned where the “git gud” cliche that Dark Souls players threw around so mercilessly came from. But now I suspect that I know.
I don’t understand the problem. Every single difficulty of this game is very doable even for average players.
The main problem you face most of the time is that dying has a snowball effect, when you die you drop your equipment and it’s usually in the middle of a swarm. Recovering from that at the highest difficulty usually costs tonnes of lives. This frustrates people but it’s a part of the game, it wouldn’t be “hell” without it. Millions of lives are supposed to be lost in the pursuit of democracy, players dying a lot is essential to the satire of the game.
One problem I think I see among the audience is that people have no emotional self-control. They do not know how to cope with dying. They have a very poor mental game. And when they get tilted they play worse and worse and worse too.
The other problem I see with players is that they simply are not shooting enough. So often I see them wasting time staring at the enemy instead of firing their gun at the enemy or throwing an airstrike. 5 seconds is the time it takes to put down 15 bugs that are on screen right now but instead you just looked at them and jogged in a different direction. SHOOT. Crowd clearance is an essential part of the game and every member of the squad needs to be doing as much crowd clearance as possible as often as possible.
The last problem is aggroing enemies that are not aggro’d. Stop that. It’s totally unnecessary, and every non-aggro’d group should be engaged initially with an airstrike as the opening to the engagement anyway.
Agreed. And I think the new respawn rules have exacerbated it to an extent. In HD1 there were no lives. As long as reinforcement was off cooldown, and someone managed to get off the strat before they got run over by a charger, all dead teammates would reinforce. If you wiped you wiped, and that was it. But if you were holding the strat when a tank blew you up it would hit hte ground and call everyone in. That made the team’s survival critical, while the individual’s survival was not very important. In HD2, with limited lives and very long reinforcement cooldown after you run out, the individual’s survival becomes much more important and losing a life actually hurts the whole team. In HD1 it was sometime beneficial t blow yourself up if you were trapped on the wrong side of a swarm or illuminate barrier so the rest of the team could escape (screen tethering). You can’t really get away with that now.
I don’t know if they fixed it yet but there was definitely something wrong with the difficulty of the missions to extract scientists on Automaton planets. You needed to get lucky on top of having a highly coordinated 4-man team to trick the AI into not attacking the facility to MAYBE barely scrape by a victory. Those mission types would drop like 3-4x the normal amount of enemy reinforcements on top dropping more than normal amounts of the heaviest units. It was like 20x more difficult even on lower difficulties than the civilian rescue counterpart missions you would see in other operations.
They did deploy a fix for something on them, but it never really changed the difficulty. They’re supposed to be that hard I think.
These are planetary defence missions so I suspect they’re intentionally very hard to prevent players from stopping the AI from ever moving forwards with the war. That mission does not exist on Liberation planets that are already owned by the enemy.
I’m not sure what is/was going on with those missions, but I still haven’t developed a reliable strategy for doing them at high levels. The smoke everything strategy is extremely difficult to pull off. The last time I tried we couldn’t get the 3 people make noise, one person is sneaky and pushes buttons to work. We were experimenting with a variation on that where three people stay outside but in LOS of the base and try to draw enemies out of the base and away from the button pusher, but we still need work.
I’ve done it at level 8 with a full squad running 3 turrets each and an anti-heavy weapon. Everyone also needs impact grenades and to understand 3 impact grenades to the turret of a tank will kill it.
The sneaky approach does not work, bots will drop tanks dirtectly on the facility regardless of sneaking.
This map in particular suffers GREATLY from the problem of enemy forces becoming larger and larger over time, a mechanic that exists on other maps too but is harder to notice. The mode must be rushed.
I have a feeling that delayed use of mortar turrets would also be useful for it. The first 120 seconds do not require mortars and I suspect people are blowing their loads by deploying everything they have immediately.
Thank you for sharing. The narrative and developing strats around that specific mission have been really cool to watch.
Sadly I can’t get random groups to even play it anymore. Everyone on the defence planets is just farming levels, they instantly quit the lobby when you lock in the extract mission.
deleted by creator
There’s no avoiding it here. Sometimes you just get fucked. Seems to be helldivers shtick.
The fun parts are when that doesn’t happen, but every now and then some bad luck just returns an ungodly awful game.
I have no idea what you were hostile about, didn’t see it
deleted by creator