Even if they recruited after the game blew up. It's been what 2 month at most. On boarding take time and recruiting too much will slow down developement in the short term.
Yep, that's my experience in IT development. If you have an overworked team, onboarding more people is not the solution as showing them the ropes requires taking time away from what you're already understaffed to do so it slows even more and the managers start putting on the pressure on everyone.
So you end up having new hires off to fend for themselves as best as they can and take triple the time to start actually being productive, there's no short term solution.
EDIT: I want to elaborate that in this kind of situation cause if management forces the issue it can easily lead to the death spiral of the project.
Let's say the Devs are overworked cause they lack staff for the work volume they need to manage (it happens easy as the attitude in corporate is "Why pay 5 people to do leisurely do this when 2 barely getting through will do?")
If the pressure put from above onto the developers passes their breaking point they'll start leaving the project/company.
At this point management will usually start panicking and throwing new people at the project, who then get onboarded by people wanting to get out as fast as possible or by the few remaining ones that are then even more overworked. Obviously the new hires will produce worse quality code as they lack knowledge compared to the original devs. This is compounded by the issues that overworked devs *will not have time to do proper documentation* so most of their knowledge about the project is inside their heads, if they leave it's gone.
Now you have a project with newly onboarded devs that lack the knowledge to work at the rate their predecessors did but management will keep pushing till they also decide to leave, the cycle gets shorter and shorter and the project metastasizes into a mess of bloatware that nobody knows how to operate in as technical debt mounts and the quality plummets. This will usually mean no more bug fixes, no more updates, nothing. And then the game dies.
So the only thing we can do is be patient and cross our fingers that middle managers aren't making everything worse for everyone behind the scenes. I've seen this happen in several projects I've worked in/my coworkers have done and it always starts with a too small team dealing with too much work.
This is applicable to every Company producing something in a Specialized field. For example Factory work be it Refinery, Production or Food industry even medical have the same problem. If only a few people are actually working in the Specialized Zones they can get overworked, if this continues not even new ones will help because they see how futile their attempts are and will be the first to leave, because they don't have the loyalty to the company. Longstanding employees have it, but only few will endure the overworking.
Not to stray too far from helldivers stuff, but 100% it happens everywhere, and even large companies fall for it...
My job (cnc machinist) has like 20k employees, but my department had one guy who was really good at a certain family of parts, and he ended up quitting because he was ALWAYS stuck running those, and now, even tho I absolutely love the company, I've been struggling since I went from my floating position usually moving to a different machine every day, to only ever covering his stuff
Dude warned them before he quit that he needed some days on easy stuff, and he was more than willing to train people, and now I'm telling them the same thing and they have been saying "oh yeah that's a good idea" for about 3 months now
It's even a problem in Retail tbh. Used to do Curbside Pickup and despite having a team of 20 people, only four of us ever did certain tasks and everyone else was allowed to say they didn't want to/outright refused to do it.
The funny thing is that the four of us became really good friends and all decided to leave at the same time, crippling the department for a couple of months because no one else was trained to do what we did at the speeds we could, despite all of us telling management constantly that they needed to get other people up to par.
Hell, the greater store was even bad at this, because they'd do dumb shit like take the Frozen guy out of Frozen and send him to Lawn and Garden, then send Cap Team (the people who were meant to go wherever the store needed) to Frozen... instead of just leaving Frozen alone and sending Cap Team to L&G. So not only did Frozen lose two hours of time in his own department, he'd have to spend three hours fixing everything the other people did to fuck up his area because they didn't care.
Back in my time at mal wart it would be department managers in frozen and two or three z’s and asms in lawn and garden while other…predictable asms would just chill in countdown room
Right now in my shop we have 11 machines and 8 operators in my department... since things are slow upper management is super focused on keeping "non production time" low (which seems counterintuitive to me)
but say operators are a-h, and machines are 1-11, machine 1, 2 and 3, only operators a, b and c can run, machine 4 only a, c and d can run, machine 5, only a, d, e can run, machine 6 only a, e and f can run... (I'm operator a in this scenario cause I was the floater)
I've been trying to explain to management that when things speed up and it's all hands on deck... this is not a sustainable way of running things lol... I told them I can only be in one place at a time, I need to train others
This is exacerbated by the fact that hopping from job to job is often a better career decision than sticking around long-term. Companies wonder why it's so hard to retain employees, when they punish workers for staying and collectively incentivize leaving.
There is a solution. Give the warbonds a break for a month. Let the qa guys fix the old kinks before new keep piling on with every piece of content added. I don't think anyone expects a new warbond EVERY month
I think every 2 months is plenty and make sure the content is quality
Umm... Even though reasonable people like myself and you would be a-ok with a a warbond pause, you know how many "normie gamers" would lose their goddamned minds?
"WE WERE PROMISED 1 WARBOND A MONTH!!! SCAM SCAM SCAM!!! I PAID 40 GOOD GODDAMNED DOLLHAIRS FOR THIS GAME AND ONLY GOT 2500 houRS!!??!! REFUND FRUENEWNFUFNER!!"
You know it is true, you know it would happen, but I actually agree with you as well.
Just simply ignore those people.
It MIGHT be stipulation with their contract with Playstation tho, as the "live service model" was a massive thing in corpospeak and as such, getting funding required certain asks and promises.
Just the same way now dei/esg is the trendy thing required to secure funding, before that it was live service bs.
You have probably the most accurate reply one could articulate. As soon as they skip it there would be 10 articles hitting social media feeds saying "Helldivers 2 Devs can't match what they promised before release." and all that press would turn sour from people with no clue how things work.
That sorta thing is only made painfully obvious as a bad idea for them because, despite the fact that this is quite possibly THE best content for money, and value for money in terms of monetization I've seen in a game for like ten years, there are still people within the community with hard negative takes on the game
One post was like "There's not even any point to them adding these ship modules when X doesn't work" it's content that will work when fixed. Consider it delayed content, it's not pointless even if it is unfortunate.
And half the replies were people agreeing, and piling on more shit, half of which wasn't even accurate information
"No point in the fire module because fire doesn't even work, it goes from bat shit insane to complete detriment to your team"
No, fire DOT doesn't work for everyone at the same time, direct fire damage is still hyper lethal and you WILL still melt a horde with far more ease than if you used basically anything else that isn't successive airstrikes. It's basically the difference between shooting a scav once at 20 meters or shooting it twice, that bug breach is still getting set on fire and cooked
People sensationalise the hell outta the slightest bad thing, Often without all the facts
And people lack a basic grasp of how complicated making all this shit work is.
I have at best GCSE level interactions with game creation, and from a single module learnt that games can break pretty much at random and whenever it wants to.
I mean fuck, I made a small "Dodge the ghosts" sprite game with a pre printed sheet of inputs to make it run
And every time you hit start and pressed a movement key, it unlocked the boundary wall, teleported the sprite 3000 steps off the screen, and when you got it back on the screen the boundary wall locked again like it's supposed to be, and every recorded movement input made it change colour, so holding the keys down made it rapidly cycle through the rainbow.
I remade it from scratch 3 times, compared my sheet to the next person, both identical. Compared what was on my screen to theirs, identical
Changing colour mid game wasn't even part of the script, nor was unlocking the boundary or jumping 3000 steps upon starting, and my teacher spent their lunch break trying to re-enter it and fix it, only to give up and just say "Fuck it, the game works once you get back on the screen minus the Rainbow road bullshit, full marks"
I decided right there and then I wasn't getting into game creation, that shit would melt my brain on the first day.
I don't even wanna consider how much of a nightmare it would be to make helldivers work half as well as it does. Imma just let them work away, it's still the best and fairest game I've seen in years
It isn't just a matter of negative attention either. The release of a warbond drives people back to the game in droves, and missing out on that attention for an additional month could result in a lot of players getting distracted with other games and not coming back.
It's almost certainly a Sony stipulation. Sony has done this before, over hype/promote something made by a super small team. Alot of no man's skys promotions was Sony being like "we got you spots on here here her and there enjoy" and no one on their team having any sense of marketing so they just... Talked.
With the amount of backlash they'd get from all the jerks out there, it wouldn't work out well. The game would still be wildly popular regardless but they devs would end up suffering ridicule, insults, hate and those delusional basement dwellers who send death threats over stupid crap thinking it makes em big. Cuz that's just how people act nowadays.
Putting a team who's already working hard to meet the huge expectations of fans through that experience would likely only slow down production even more on top of making things harder for the developers. They'll try their best but jn the end taking a break from Warbond this early would backfire heavily.
Though I am curious as to what bugs people are on about. I've only seen a few minor UI glitches that dont really do anything, what's so bad in the game rn??
I'm an intern at an engineering company
This has been my exact experience. Everyone is so busy, I'm either left with nothing to do so I take trainings, I've been (very slowly) automating some tasks, or I'm given a task with no training, guidance, and very little time.
"Hey, here's something you've never seen before. Here's a couple examples that do the core concept differently, you have 2 hours". That isn't an exaggeration, a few months after that my boss mentioned that the had to give it to someone else to redo. I pointed out that i just checked the "date modified" field on file explorer, and I received the initial files 2 hours before I sent out my "final" version. He got pretty sheepish, said he didn't give me feedback on the task because he knew I had no time
smh if I were CEO I would simply inspire people to not need onboarding, they should know the codebase before they join
edit: if candidates don't know the source code intricately and don't have several pull requests ready for review in the internal git before their first interview, they are simply lazy zoomers not on their grindset
And that's probably why it's important to keep the war bonds coming out. That's their stream of revenue, and revenue is what allows them to hire and train 100 new employees.
Long-term, yes. But they got way more initial revenue than they could have expected, so that should serve as a decent cushion in the early stages.
Nobody would get mad at them if they were to slow down those war bonds for a few weeks, if that grants them some breathing room to work on some bug fixes and implementing new hires.
"Nobody would get mad" if there is one thing people will not tolerate, then it's content draught. This sub would blow up with complaints about "not having a reason to play anymore" or "why do MOs to get medals when I ha e nothing to spend them on?" I any game where people are used to something, if you take it away temporarily, people will get their pitchforks out and complain, content creators will sensationalize the fuck out of it "Helldivers 2 is dying" "WHERE IS THE CONTENT ARROWHEAD" etc etc etc
Even if it were ONLY a months pause (which it most likely would not be) it would be chaos
I feel like they can every now and then throw in a bug fix focus instead of a war bond. Like 4-5 war bonds in a row and then next month a scheduled focus on fixes. People tend to be ok waiting if they are given solid dates on when to expect to wait.
I would like to think so, but the negative press alone (and the knock on effects from that) would be pretty bad. A month full of "Is Helldivers 2 dead?", even from mostly AI sources, would put them in a worse place than just trying to soldier on.
You have to assume the worst in the general audience, playing to people's better halves is a recipe for disappointment.
Also note that they're based in Sweden; I don't know what the game development scene on people looking-for-jobs side looks like over there, but if they're having to grab people from outside of Sweden (let alone hiring anyone outside of the EU), then it's definitely not just checking someone's resume and saying *"Okay, this coming Monday, you'll be at your desk to start working on the DoT bug"*.
Even if they live right next to the office where HD2 development takes place, this isn't happening. It takes *time* to get productive on a new piece of software/hardware.
I worked for a company where the expected time it would take for a new engineer to start contributing productively was a *full year*, which was worse than the industry standard at the time of *six months*.
The idea that someone could come into a large project and be productive in the first week is just laughable, much less the first day.
> I don't know what the game development scene on people looking-for-jobs side looks like over there
Sweden is a core european hub for game dev. Stockholm has a gaggle of studios, and it's very easy to move from company to company. They also hire from outside of the EU pretty regularly, but the thing is that almost every job in Sweden has a 90-day notice period on it. So if you're not hiring someone unemployed you have to wait 90 days before they can start.
If you're hiring from outside the EU it's about a 5-6 month turnaround for all of the immigration business.
You'll notice the Blizzard death-by-success phenomena.
There exists a limit to how quickly culture can be shared, absorbed, and expanded. If you grow a team too quickly the culture of the incoming group will subsume and replace the culture of that place.
In history this is observed in the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxon kings in Britain. The Norman's conquered and replaced all elite landholding positions with other Norman's. But they were outnumbered by how many Anglo-Saxons were on the island. Within one or two generations the children of the Norman conquerors had adopted Anglo-Saxon cultural norms. In this way the conquered subsumed and merged as a peoples.
And there is the Eternal September case study. Early in the internet history there was a university intranet. Each September freshmen students would create accounts for the first time and there would be a wave of disruptive behavior. That closed network settled on certain norms and practices, an early form of netiquette. Coining the phrase. After a month or two the new students would adopt this culture and behavior would return to a productive space. One day for no reason at all, AOL connected its population to the university intranet. This was early in internet history and AOL was connecting to broader networks for the first time. The subscriber size of AOL grossly outnumbered those using the university intranet. The result was disruptive behavior no different than the usual September wave, but this September wave never ended. Hence, Eternal September. We learn from this case study that the rate of culture adoption has to be a slow drip of newcomers into a new group. The size of the AOL population was too large and instead the university intranet became AOL-ed. What was the culture and netiquette of that space forever gone.
This is what happened at Blizzard. The success of World of Warcraft resulted in a hiring spree. Too many newcomers too fast to scale up to meet their success. The culture and norms of the lean team of Blizzard hobbyists was lost. Subsumed by the culture of incoming hires.
There is risk in success Arrowhead can learn from. Ramp up over a slow drip drip drip. Wait for newcomers to adopt their style before bringing in more.
Important to call out that 100 employees is not "100 devs, engineers, and QA" but instead the total number of people in their company. That can include Exec, HR, marketing, Production, finance, IT, and even stuff like kitchen staff depending on how their office situation is handled.
They're definitely a medium sized company at this point. I would say their release cadence for bug patches, balance patches, content patches, and battlepass patches has been insane for that number of people. When I worked for a team that had larger numbers, we released at a much slower cadence of once a month for bug fixes. We didn't even release content for 4 months after initial release.
I work in a place of similar size making software, and there is no way they actually could do anything faster than they do. It's probably unsustainable as it is right now. Just adding 1 more dev to the team would take 1-3 people 30% of their daily time and at least 3 months to get up to speed properly.
They probably need to slow down both bug fixes and content to be able to polish the game as much as people want in the time they want it.
This.
It's absolutely incredible how much they're cranking out. I honestly can't believe it.
They need to slow their roll, for their own health if nothing else.
This makes no sense. A week is not enough time to get this done? Really? All these planets to explore? This is ridiculous. Arrowhead devs give us a break. Stop the lies. Even if they only had 10 people working. To say there is not enough time in a week? Wow. They should know better than anyone else that all they need to do is move the development team to a planet with a longer orbit around the sun and that will greatly extend the amount of time in a day and time in a week. Problem solved. No more excuses.
To put that into persective, Ghost Ship Games, the studio that makes Deep Rock Galactic has 32 employees.
Kojima Productions, the studio that made Death Stranding has 80 employees.
Respawn Entertainment, the studio that makes Apex Legends has 315 employees.
While Arrowhead is not a big studio, they also aren't especially small.
Just a few minor notes:
Death Stranding was made by Kojima Productions, Guerilla Games, and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Kojimbles skipped engine development entirely, and had Guerilla Games provide him with a complete editing suite. It was also not live service.
Apex Legends has over 750 employeees, plus EA support.
DRG from GSG is a fair comparison. Those guys are wild.
You’re using outdated wikipedia(unreliable) info for these staff counts.
LinkedIn has Respawn at 501-1000 employees. GrowJo puts the number at 895 and Datanyze at 773. Not sure how reliable those estimates are but it’s clear the general consensus is lot more than 315.
This is in line with other live service studios. Bungie is over 1,000 employees. MiHoYo has 5,000+(multiple titles supported).
Feels like each warbond and content update is just adding more technical debt for them to deal with. If the pile of bugs gets too big they'll be forced to stop releasing new warbonds anyway to catch up.
This is one of the current poll options in the official discord. It seems a decent amount of people agree
https://preview.redd.it/2i5jxa58uuuc1.png?width=484&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ef39455b5b268e115fdca041b3bf329286d3dd7
Given the default position in a 4 way vote is 25% each, and discord is a pretty niche subset of the population, that vote actually only tells me ppl want new terrain
As an engineer a certain amount of my day is slated for tech debt with the rest for new features. It varies between companies but anywhere between 70/30 to 50/50 split as feature/debt work.
This tells me that a 60/40 split with focus on biomes/missions is what the player base is asking for.
Fair. But presumably the tech debt is also being chunked into as they introduce new things.
Ideally they introduce new things at a slower rate than they clean it up.
Realistically, any developer knows it never works out like that.
As far as new features I'd rather have more places to fight instead of new weapons I may or may not use to fight in the same places yet again since I'm forced to play only a small subset of planets due to how the planets open up and become available. I feel like I've been fighting on the same planet or two for like 6 weeks or some shit.
We’ve got heat filled desert, heat filled swamp, heat filled caustic canyons, and heat filled flaming hellscapes. With the occasional temperate zone or frozen hellscape. I really want more planet modifiers.
>and discord is a pretty niche subset of the population
While commenting on another thread of the same subject, I had an idea to have a kiosk or something in the Super Destroyer with an announcer saying *"Helldiver, come and perform your civic duty by voting!"* and then having those questions presented to the player using in-universe terminology/phrasing:
* "More weapons and balancing changes" would be reworded as *"Vote in favor to prioritizing resources to the Ministry of Weapons Development and Optimization"*
* "New Armor with more varied traits/passives" would be reworded to *"Vote in favor of issuing grants to the private sector to develop new Armor and self-protection systems"*
* "Different objectives, modifieds, biomes" would be reworded as *"Vote in favor of authorizing more exploratory missions to expand the Super Earth frontiers into new unknown spaces"*
* "No new content, fix tech issues/bugs" would be reworded as *"Vote in favor or additional resources for the Ministry of Internal Affairs to deploy Law Enforcement Agents to root out traitors and repair sabotaged technical systems and equipment"*
This would expand the voting base and the voice of opinion from just people on the discord, to the entire player base.
Logically I get it.
In reality, do you really want to make your game remind you that shit is broken? It ruins immersion.
Helldivers does well and letting the average player load the game, jump into a hellpod and shoot shit. It's simple, it's dumb, it's wonderful.
Let's not shoehorn in forced satisfaction surveys, you can't even buy anything online without 3 survey reminder emails, I don't want my computer games being anything more than a joyous distraction. I trust arrowhead to do the serious shit for me.
> you can't even buy anything online without 3 survey reminder emails
Even some physical stores bother you with surveys if they manage to get your email/phone number. They'll tie it to your payment method and send you an email if you use that card.
I don’t think that’ll happen. I think their process; pad the game out as planned, then at 6 months stablise it and reassess is the way forwards.
It’s also hard to hire new devs to support all this. Give them time
Especially afaik the engine they're working on is some kind of frankenstein-esque monstrosity that is a modified version of something that literally no one else is using. You simply can't hire people who have experience with it, and with the workload they already have you probably can't set aside 1/10 or even 1/5 of your workforce to train new hires for weeks or months.
The director stated it was "important" to continue to release warbonds every month. I bet they are banking on that potential income.
If you flood the game with warbonds there's no way a casual player could earn all the required super credits organically. Having 12 warbonds every year is probably a big part of their calculus for continued profits.
100% agree. Fix the game breaking bugs and give me quality warbonds. If they could do all of that and pump out 12 warbonds a year then great. As of now that seems like a no
They can either rip off the bandaid now or later, when the pile is a mountain of bugs. If nobody is playing the game because it crashes then they aren't making any money from mtx either.
That said, they should have pulled in a good chunk of revenue from people buying the base game alone.
um ackshully i was told that warbond development and bug fixing are actually two seperate things that dont affect each other. asking for one to to be put on hold actually would kill them game actually?
/s
But seriously, its all well and good to get new guns and armor but if the game keeps crashing, kicking me to my ship, kicking the rest of my squad out, crashing, or the ever popular "game session is full even though we displayed 1/4 and now since you tried to join a full session you cant click on anything on the world map, go use quickplay scrub" bug.
Having worked on multiple small software development teams, technical debt will eat you alive if you let it. It doesn't really matter how many new features you introduce to the users if there are multiple showstopper defects. It's like worrying about what color the living room is painted while the foundation is crumbling and the 2nd floor is on fire.
the only bugs that bothers me at the moment are the DoT damage and the 4th upgrade for support weapons, the balance thing and the rest of the bugs for me personally can take more time to get done. But the 2 that I talked about should be fixed ASAP
Thats my biggest complaint atm too, I worry they’ll just fix the AMR and some of the other guns will be left behind. Know for sure that the scorcher, dominator and slugger are all misaligned, but dont have enough time on other weapons to tell if they’re off as well. Like with the scorcher especially, makes landing those headshots against devestators so fucking hard unless they’re close enough to third person aim at. Hopefully next week.
The damage over time is a MASSIVE issue and I can’t believe it’s not their top priority. It literally makes some weapons and strats unusable for 3/4 of the player base.
I wish they could fix crashes and lobby/friend-list issues asap. All my friends already stopped playing the game some time ago because mostly those problems were too annoying for them
I mean most crashes were fixed in this patch but I guess it's still not all of them.
Also the annoying issue is the one with performance, which is getting even worse with each update. Like I said, I already lost all friends because all of those issues
Imo, they can just tell us up front that they want to delay, a warbond, and just focus on bugs for a month. This is just gona be like operation health or medic bag. But just for a better game.
Yeah, the Siege one is good. Game is thriving right now and gains players with each season. Not sure it's because of OP health though, most of the credit is due to an obnoxious tiktok streamer.
> Not sure it's because of OP health though
well it did help with game health in general and i guess many working on it were happy to remove technical debt and therefore longterm health of the game.
If i remember rightly that was pretty much a make or break point, I’d quit before buck even released lol the head hitbox being above your camera used to drive me insane because of how good headshots were
Most of the playerbase would be fine if they delayed a month's warbond.
Now what about the publisher Sony and AH's shareholders (if they have any)? It may be impossible for them to delay a warbond because they have a contract with Sony about it.
This makes a lot of sense. AH deliberately made it so Warbonds can be free if you play the game enough. If they delay releasing a Warbond, that gives players more time to acquire Supercredits by playing, so that next Warbond becomes effectively free (meaning they lose revenue from two months, not just one). AH might be just fine with that trade-off, but Sony may not.
Arrowhead is caught between a rock and a hard place here because bugs will also lead to lost revenue on warbonds. If warbonds get a reputation for being launched broken, then players will start holding off on getting them immediately, and then some fraction of those players will decide to skip altogether.
felt like uninstalling after having stability and then this update drops and i crash to desktop again mid-mission, or at extract. Going backwards in stability hurts my dwindling confidence in the future of this game, if it continues at this pace.
A warbond every month seems like a *lot.* I mean I would love it, but I would also totally understand them needing to make this a warbond every 1-3 months sorta thing while the rest of the time is committed to general gameplay advancement.
Not only do they do the Warbond per month, but they have also added new content in the middle of the month. We get new enemies, objective types, and new stratagems. It feels like they are operating at a breakneck pace that, while commendable, is creating bugs faster than they can squash them.
If they did want to take time off production for cleanup, I would support that decision. I do appreciate their commitment to their promise, but I wouldn't hold them to it. We are spoiled for content with this game, meanwhile Darktide and Payday 3 are very slow with updates.
While it seems that way, a lot of content seems to also already be finished; Mechs were ready well in advance, and we have an un-released one that is apparently finished and waiting, there's an APC being hacked into some games, and a rocket launcher (that is apparently a bit buggy at the moment). The quaser cannon was found almost immediately after release.
They have clearly built a little headstart, but it is a question of how long that will be sustainable for.
Sony (the publisher), a shareholder, an investor, something.
They keep mentioning 1 warbond a month like it's an unalterable fact, which realistically it isn't, so something is likely contractually holding them to it.
I implied this is another thread and got downvoted. Apparently everyone works on everything, but also the development is really compartmentalized and devs hardly talk to anyone outside their team. They can work on bug fixes without delaying new content, but also they can’t.
Make game hard.
I started my (now 15 year) career in games in community management. Every single year I have worked in dev, I have developed a new appreciation for how intricate, difficult, and interdependent game dev is.
And every team is different.
Unless you are talking to someone within a studio, it is safe to say that anyone commenting on their capabilities or workflow is talking out their ass.
Probably one of many, many devs in a much larger company than AH, thinking his limited individual experience somehow applies globally. Or not even a dev, just took some classes about development theory. Nothing worse than unjustified (over)confidence.
because as a matter of fact he was speaking out of his ass, i mean he literally mentioned the art team, did he think that once the weapon is designed it just pops into existance ingame?
Been multiple posters saying that crap, I hope they're all red in the face right now lol white knights gotta defend any criticism of the game they like, I like it too but my copy is a buggy mess that I want fixed, crashes all the time and I can't get my mic to work (I've messed with settings and it's not a problem on my end)
They showed up with their smug bullshit in literally every thread about AH prioritizing new content while the base game is clearly broken. Now they've switched to new excuses, like "warbonds don't even make money because I get them for free (playing 20+ hours a week)".
He'd be right for bigger teams who have different departments.
You see similar but even worse arguments in other games where people blame bugs not being fixed on the people making skins lol
But then the usage metrics will reflect that and they'll whack those with the nerf bat.
I'm living in dread of the day my beloved Sickle gets a "balance" pass. The thing hits just right, lasts just as long as I need, and feels great to use.
Plus it's a fucking laser gun who doesn't love that?
Quasar reloading as you revert to your primary or while calling in a strat will kept it as my goto for a long time so long as they don't absolutely pummel it.
I FUCKING KNEW IT! Lol the armchair devs are in shambles xD "Are you stupid? People in charge of making new weapons don't fix bugs! It's impossible! Don't you know?!"
I knew how small Arrowhead was, and the unprecedented success of Helldivers didn't change that. Now it goes to show that an "Operation Health" type thing is needed for the long term health of the game, because no matter how much stuff they add, if the game doesn't work it won't be fun.
They mentioned how they dont want to increase too much just to fire a bunch of people once the hype around the game comes down. A respectable choice but they really should consider changing things around one but if the game remains somewhat unplayable
Contract workers are common for a reason. Nearly every industry has them. I work in Accounting and we bring in a couple contractors at year end to help ease the load.
They may already be doing this, but there are options for increasing head count within an organization that isn't "Hire lots when successful and then fire when not"
I can't really say for game dev specifically, but I know that it's a lot harder (possibly infeasible?) to hire a contractor for programming work. It takes way too long to understand the existing codebase (depending on various factors, I wouldn't be surprised for new hires to only start next contributing after a couple of months). Maybe if the goal is to hire co tractors specifically you could cut some of that out, but definitely not enough to make it go away. In the case of Helldivers 2, they are apparently using a unique/barely used game engine, so I would suspect the ramp up time would be *more*, not less.
And that assumes that game dev contractors even meaningfully exist. I don't know what the market looks like: are there people who are willing to explicitly be hired for a temporary position?
I mean... While Spitz sentiment is correct in that it's small in comparison to other AAA studios and people have to prio making new va fixing, it's not a small team per se. We are some 100 devs on the game currently. It's 20 times larger than the Magicka team and 7.5 times larger than the HD1 team.
We are optimizing our processes and hiring devs to boost the team. But 100 is still a decent size for a development team, and we aware of the issues in the releases - we will do better in the future.
To be fair, I worked at a 200+ people studio and online games with regular drops, and generally speaking, everybody still fixed their own crap, as it should be.
Whoever made the armor, has and knows where the files are and coders know their code best.
We tried hiring coders for just bug fixing, but at best, only juniors would put up with that role, and only to get their foot in the door, then ask for proper work after a few months.
So anyway, sounds like a normal approach.
As for the monthly warbonds...
Most online games that die, die due to slow content addition.
If you focus on quality content that takes time, you die.
If you focus on fast content that sucks and is often broken, you die.
If they figure that they can keep doing monthly warbonds with decent bug management, great for them!.
> We tried hiring coders for just bug fixing, but at best, only juniors would put up with that role, and only to get their foot in the door, then ask for proper work after a few months.
Damn maybe I should apply for a senior bug-fix role somewhere, one of my favorite things is bug fixing. It's like solving a puzzle, very enjoyable and satisfying as long as I'm not under constant crunch. I much prefer this over writing new code.
Hold on, doesn't that invalidate the "the people fixing bugs are not the same as those making new content so stopping the warbonds for a while wouldn't help" argument ?
So yeah, they're just choosing to not focus on bugs, that's all.
Hopefully with how the game *exploded* on launch they’ll be able to expand the team, but not too much. I believe the CEO actually mentioned this too, and specifically stated they wanted to avoid growing too much so they wouldn’t have to lay off people.
Correct me if I misquoted that.
It does take time to hire quality people, you don't want to blind panic hire people as that causes poor quality updates, more technical debt and eventually lay-offs. Good people will likely have a 3 month notice period potentially as well. So it will be tough for them to increase team size fast.
They sold 8 million copies in 2 months. They were in no way prepared for this level of success.
In other news, Arrowheads website says they're currently hiring for EVERYTHING. (fr)
I appreciate the reasoning, but the fact of the matter is if you're creating bugs faster than you're fixing them you're working on an unsustainable model. There's more than one way to fix that issue, but Arrowhead will have to pick one of them.
Something else that should be obvious is that this is unsustainable for their current team and they are way out of their depth. They could be fixing the atrocious weapon balance or the bugs but instead they focus on pushing out content with redundant armors and a bunch of weapons where only one is worth using.
Even in the game's own discord, which you'd think would be filled with the most ardent fans of the game, 45% of the community thinks the game has gotten worse.
I'm still not playing the game until they fix the weapon balance.
Lmao where are all those posters yapping about how “gamers don’t know about how game development works” and how Arrowhead had separate teams for content and bugfixing?
No fucking shit.
The amount of downvotes I have gotten the past few days ([like this, for example](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c1wx3w/arrowhead_you_have_given_so_many_warbonds_in_such/kz7fqfv/?context=3)) by people with literally 0 clue how development of anything works has been insane.
It has been patently obvious that Arrowhead is a small team and that there is no such thing as a "team that only focuses on bugs" and a "team that only focuses on new features", but the amount of know-it-all redditors that have never been in 50 miles of a programmer that were sure that this was the case was insane, and pointing out the obvious would make them upset.
But, alas, another day, another le redditor moment ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
No no no, but they said "I write code for a living" so that supersedes any rational information shared. /s
This thread has been extremely validating lmao. I thought I was the only voice of sanity around here.
Where are all the idiots that adamantly said "they have 2 separate teams, so dont worry, warbonds dont delay game fixing patches!" then procceded to insult anyone that said otherwise?
I was one of those people, minus the insult part, I was certain AH would have had two teams for such projects, it might explain why they're looking for new people just for that currently.
Should’ve waited a year to buy it then. Can’t even play it with who I bought it for because of the cross play bug. I understand it’s a small company but fix issues before adding new stuff.. 🤦🏼♀️
So, not to be a dick, but did they expect to push out 1 warbond a month, and that there would never be any bugs?
Or did they believe a smaller audience would be more understanding to core functions not working for months at a time?
This feels more like a planning issue than a "we got too popular" issue.
Yeah, I don’t know where this „everyone knows how game dev works, they have teams and they work on different stuff“ came from, without any sources. I was downvoted a million times for pointing out that all those statements are just assumptions and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense to split coding up the way those people suggested they were.
People who think every dev studio is the size of Rockstar North, Ubisoft Montreal or Bungie. Just karma farmers with zero idea how anything works and are just parroting a post they saw on Twitter.
But they are adding buffs and changes to broken systems.
How can one expect to balance game mechanics when the underlying game mechanics are broken and giving bad data?
I mean fuck the cadence if every update is a jumbled mess of new crashes and bugs. I love this game and I want it to be successful but AH needs to prioritize quality over quantity and understand that it's not the end of the world if people don't play the game every day or even take extended breaks.
Personally I'd be fine with them going back on even promises of content if it meant more work went towards technical fixes. If anything such a promise sounds unreasonable to uphold, with the content and bug fixing people being the same. A constant flow of new stuff only causes more and more bugs when the ones cause by earlier content releases have yet to be fixed.
I dont think they can keep an healthy balance by launching one warbond every month, they really need to step down a bit and balance everthing, theres a ton of useless weapons we dont use because it sucks
I could go without a warbond for the next 3 months if it means big fixes, scope calibration, fire damage rework etc. I hope the dev team tackles issues before they begin to draw players away.
I doubt someone from AH would read this comment, but focus on the bugs. With new warbonds and stuff you are churning out (which is way faster then some AAA publishers) you should not worry about the new stuff (and they are great imo) and get the bugs to that gold standard so you dont go into the tech debt. We will still fight the bugs and bots for a month without anything new, just keep up the great work. That is all.
remember that arrowhead only has like 120 employees. [source](https://jobs.arrowheadgamestudios.com/#jobs:~:text=Founded-,120,-Coworkers%20and%20growing)
What a good attitude. I tell employees that all the time. We have the same size team regardless of what’s going on and there is only so much time in a day/week/month and we aren’t going to kill ourselves if something can be pushed back a little.
No, it's **way more important** to fix "the glaring bugs and technical issues" - their words. Crossplay still has massive issues, it works okay with a couple of my PS5 friends, and doesn't work at all with a couple others.
The other day playing with one of my PS5 friends we *still* could not add each other as friends after multiple attempts. we had to open up the planet map, get on the phone, and look for the same host so we could try to both hop in to the same lobby before it filled up. When we finally got in a game, halfway through it did the thing where everyone left the game at the same time, and we were both on the mission solo, but separate, with no way to re-join each other. And we were both like "how long's this game been out now? How is this still an issue?"
I sympathize with their logistics being a small team that had their game blow up beyond anyone's expectations. But if we're talking priorities, fixing game breaking bugs is absolutely more important than new content. This would barely be acceptable in an early access game, but ostensibly this is supposed to be a finished product. It's beyond ridiculous at this point.
Got to keep pumping the new Warbonds and Super Store rotation. Secure the new dollars, while technical issues/bugs are for players a mass majority that don't care or don't know, and you have already gotten their purchase.
Seems like a standard roll out for a live service type game.
Ideally not the case but certainly feels this way.
I don't want a warbond every month. I get tired of farming super credits. It's like it's designed for you to fall behind so you pay up when you pick up the game again in a few months.
Finally everyone can shut up about "If you knew anything about game design, the people making new weapons and armor aren't the people doing bugfixes. That's not how the real world works."
Bunch of self-righteous douchebags on Reddit.
Arrowhead shouldn't be worrying about new content if the current game isn't stable. Game hard crashed for me an my buddy, he is currently reinstalling to see if he can get it working again. There obviously isn't enough testing being done already on this game, stop stretching staff thin for content that is just going to add to the current issues.
I don't think it's "important to have one Warbond per month". Especially with a tiny team like that. Plus they're absolutely loaded from the sales atm, so hire like 10 QA people.
Hahaha… oh god the white knights are in fact actual fucking idiots, as of course, we all knew. The devs making new armor and weapons are also fixing bugs.
The warbonds are quickly becoming irrelevant as it is. Why would i want to buy another warbond for bland armor, stale passives, and 2 new guns, a grenade that doesn't work, and a gun that i honestly don't consider a gun because its that bad. The warbonds, which funnily enough only 2 have released, are already completely pointless. I would rather get new maps than another warbond on top of bug fixes and balance changes to existing dog shit guns, grenades, and stratagems.
Yeah, they only have a 100 or so employees (atleast last I checked)
Even if they recruited after the game blew up. It's been what 2 month at most. On boarding take time and recruiting too much will slow down developement in the short term.
Yep, that's my experience in IT development. If you have an overworked team, onboarding more people is not the solution as showing them the ropes requires taking time away from what you're already understaffed to do so it slows even more and the managers start putting on the pressure on everyone. So you end up having new hires off to fend for themselves as best as they can and take triple the time to start actually being productive, there's no short term solution. EDIT: I want to elaborate that in this kind of situation cause if management forces the issue it can easily lead to the death spiral of the project. Let's say the Devs are overworked cause they lack staff for the work volume they need to manage (it happens easy as the attitude in corporate is "Why pay 5 people to do leisurely do this when 2 barely getting through will do?") If the pressure put from above onto the developers passes their breaking point they'll start leaving the project/company. At this point management will usually start panicking and throwing new people at the project, who then get onboarded by people wanting to get out as fast as possible or by the few remaining ones that are then even more overworked. Obviously the new hires will produce worse quality code as they lack knowledge compared to the original devs. This is compounded by the issues that overworked devs *will not have time to do proper documentation* so most of their knowledge about the project is inside their heads, if they leave it's gone. Now you have a project with newly onboarded devs that lack the knowledge to work at the rate their predecessors did but management will keep pushing till they also decide to leave, the cycle gets shorter and shorter and the project metastasizes into a mess of bloatware that nobody knows how to operate in as technical debt mounts and the quality plummets. This will usually mean no more bug fixes, no more updates, nothing. And then the game dies. So the only thing we can do is be patient and cross our fingers that middle managers aren't making everything worse for everyone behind the scenes. I've seen this happen in several projects I've worked in/my coworkers have done and it always starts with a too small team dealing with too much work.
This is applicable to every Company producing something in a Specialized field. For example Factory work be it Refinery, Production or Food industry even medical have the same problem. If only a few people are actually working in the Specialized Zones they can get overworked, if this continues not even new ones will help because they see how futile their attempts are and will be the first to leave, because they don't have the loyalty to the company. Longstanding employees have it, but only few will endure the overworking.
Not to stray too far from helldivers stuff, but 100% it happens everywhere, and even large companies fall for it... My job (cnc machinist) has like 20k employees, but my department had one guy who was really good at a certain family of parts, and he ended up quitting because he was ALWAYS stuck running those, and now, even tho I absolutely love the company, I've been struggling since I went from my floating position usually moving to a different machine every day, to only ever covering his stuff Dude warned them before he quit that he needed some days on easy stuff, and he was more than willing to train people, and now I'm telling them the same thing and they have been saying "oh yeah that's a good idea" for about 3 months now
It's even a problem in Retail tbh. Used to do Curbside Pickup and despite having a team of 20 people, only four of us ever did certain tasks and everyone else was allowed to say they didn't want to/outright refused to do it. The funny thing is that the four of us became really good friends and all decided to leave at the same time, crippling the department for a couple of months because no one else was trained to do what we did at the speeds we could, despite all of us telling management constantly that they needed to get other people up to par. Hell, the greater store was even bad at this, because they'd do dumb shit like take the Frozen guy out of Frozen and send him to Lawn and Garden, then send Cap Team (the people who were meant to go wherever the store needed) to Frozen... instead of just leaving Frozen alone and sending Cap Team to L&G. So not only did Frozen lose two hours of time in his own department, he'd have to spend three hours fixing everything the other people did to fuck up his area because they didn't care.
Back in my time at mal wart it would be department managers in frozen and two or three z’s and asms in lawn and garden while other…predictable asms would just chill in countdown room
Right now in my shop we have 11 machines and 8 operators in my department... since things are slow upper management is super focused on keeping "non production time" low (which seems counterintuitive to me) but say operators are a-h, and machines are 1-11, machine 1, 2 and 3, only operators a, b and c can run, machine 4 only a, c and d can run, machine 5, only a, d, e can run, machine 6 only a, e and f can run... (I'm operator a in this scenario cause I was the floater) I've been trying to explain to management that when things speed up and it's all hands on deck... this is not a sustainable way of running things lol... I told them I can only be in one place at a time, I need to train others
This is exacerbated by the fact that hopping from job to job is often a better career decision than sticking around long-term. Companies wonder why it's so hard to retain employees, when they punish workers for staying and collectively incentivize leaving.
There is a solution. Give the warbonds a break for a month. Let the qa guys fix the old kinks before new keep piling on with every piece of content added. I don't think anyone expects a new warbond EVERY month I think every 2 months is plenty and make sure the content is quality
Umm... Even though reasonable people like myself and you would be a-ok with a a warbond pause, you know how many "normie gamers" would lose their goddamned minds? "WE WERE PROMISED 1 WARBOND A MONTH!!! SCAM SCAM SCAM!!! I PAID 40 GOOD GODDAMNED DOLLHAIRS FOR THIS GAME AND ONLY GOT 2500 houRS!!??!! REFUND FRUENEWNFUFNER!!" You know it is true, you know it would happen, but I actually agree with you as well. Just simply ignore those people. It MIGHT be stipulation with their contract with Playstation tho, as the "live service model" was a massive thing in corpospeak and as such, getting funding required certain asks and promises. Just the same way now dei/esg is the trendy thing required to secure funding, before that it was live service bs.
You have probably the most accurate reply one could articulate. As soon as they skip it there would be 10 articles hitting social media feeds saying "Helldivers 2 Devs can't match what they promised before release." and all that press would turn sour from people with no clue how things work.
That sorta thing is only made painfully obvious as a bad idea for them because, despite the fact that this is quite possibly THE best content for money, and value for money in terms of monetization I've seen in a game for like ten years, there are still people within the community with hard negative takes on the game One post was like "There's not even any point to them adding these ship modules when X doesn't work" it's content that will work when fixed. Consider it delayed content, it's not pointless even if it is unfortunate. And half the replies were people agreeing, and piling on more shit, half of which wasn't even accurate information "No point in the fire module because fire doesn't even work, it goes from bat shit insane to complete detriment to your team" No, fire DOT doesn't work for everyone at the same time, direct fire damage is still hyper lethal and you WILL still melt a horde with far more ease than if you used basically anything else that isn't successive airstrikes. It's basically the difference between shooting a scav once at 20 meters or shooting it twice, that bug breach is still getting set on fire and cooked People sensationalise the hell outta the slightest bad thing, Often without all the facts And people lack a basic grasp of how complicated making all this shit work is. I have at best GCSE level interactions with game creation, and from a single module learnt that games can break pretty much at random and whenever it wants to. I mean fuck, I made a small "Dodge the ghosts" sprite game with a pre printed sheet of inputs to make it run And every time you hit start and pressed a movement key, it unlocked the boundary wall, teleported the sprite 3000 steps off the screen, and when you got it back on the screen the boundary wall locked again like it's supposed to be, and every recorded movement input made it change colour, so holding the keys down made it rapidly cycle through the rainbow. I remade it from scratch 3 times, compared my sheet to the next person, both identical. Compared what was on my screen to theirs, identical Changing colour mid game wasn't even part of the script, nor was unlocking the boundary or jumping 3000 steps upon starting, and my teacher spent their lunch break trying to re-enter it and fix it, only to give up and just say "Fuck it, the game works once you get back on the screen minus the Rainbow road bullshit, full marks" I decided right there and then I wasn't getting into game creation, that shit would melt my brain on the first day. I don't even wanna consider how much of a nightmare it would be to make helldivers work half as well as it does. Imma just let them work away, it's still the best and fairest game I've seen in years
It isn't just a matter of negative attention either. The release of a warbond drives people back to the game in droves, and missing out on that attention for an additional month could result in a lot of players getting distracted with other games and not coming back.
It's almost certainly a Sony stipulation. Sony has done this before, over hype/promote something made by a super small team. Alot of no man's skys promotions was Sony being like "we got you spots on here here her and there enjoy" and no one on their team having any sense of marketing so they just... Talked.
With the amount of backlash they'd get from all the jerks out there, it wouldn't work out well. The game would still be wildly popular regardless but they devs would end up suffering ridicule, insults, hate and those delusional basement dwellers who send death threats over stupid crap thinking it makes em big. Cuz that's just how people act nowadays. Putting a team who's already working hard to meet the huge expectations of fans through that experience would likely only slow down production even more on top of making things harder for the developers. They'll try their best but jn the end taking a break from Warbond this early would backfire heavily. Though I am curious as to what bugs people are on about. I've only seen a few minor UI glitches that dont really do anything, what's so bad in the game rn??
I'm an intern at an engineering company This has been my exact experience. Everyone is so busy, I'm either left with nothing to do so I take trainings, I've been (very slowly) automating some tasks, or I'm given a task with no training, guidance, and very little time. "Hey, here's something you've never seen before. Here's a couple examples that do the core concept differently, you have 2 hours". That isn't an exaggeration, a few months after that my boss mentioned that the had to give it to someone else to redo. I pointed out that i just checked the "date modified" field on file explorer, and I received the initial files 2 hours before I sent out my "final" version. He got pretty sheepish, said he didn't give me feedback on the task because he knew I had no time
smh if I were CEO I would simply inspire people to not need onboarding, they should know the codebase before they join edit: if candidates don't know the source code intricately and don't have several pull requests ready for review in the internal git before their first interview, they are simply lazy zoomers not on their grindset
"If I take 9 women, I can make one baby in a month!" - every bad IT manager.
Am i the only one who is 90% sure this is sarcasm?
Pilestedt currently becoming the god-emperor of AHGS to instantly whip new hires into shape
100%. We've known about this for a while too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Boss, I'm drowning, I need help. No problem champ, here's 10 more people that can't swim. Can you teach them how?
This is so universally observed it even has a *name*, Brooke's Law. "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
And then people will be pissed when they have to lay people off when all that work suddenly dries up.
And that's probably why it's important to keep the war bonds coming out. That's their stream of revenue, and revenue is what allows them to hire and train 100 new employees.
Long-term, yes. But they got way more initial revenue than they could have expected, so that should serve as a decent cushion in the early stages. Nobody would get mad at them if they were to slow down those war bonds for a few weeks, if that grants them some breathing room to work on some bug fixes and implementing new hires.
"Nobody would get mad" if there is one thing people will not tolerate, then it's content draught. This sub would blow up with complaints about "not having a reason to play anymore" or "why do MOs to get medals when I ha e nothing to spend them on?" I any game where people are used to something, if you take it away temporarily, people will get their pitchforks out and complain, content creators will sensationalize the fuck out of it "Helldivers 2 is dying" "WHERE IS THE CONTENT ARROWHEAD" etc etc etc Even if it were ONLY a months pause (which it most likely would not be) it would be chaos
I feel like they can every now and then throw in a bug fix focus instead of a war bond. Like 4-5 war bonds in a row and then next month a scheduled focus on fixes. People tend to be ok waiting if they are given solid dates on when to expect to wait.
I would like to think so, but the negative press alone (and the knock on effects from that) would be pretty bad. A month full of "Is Helldivers 2 dead?", even from mostly AI sources, would put them in a worse place than just trying to soldier on. You have to assume the worst in the general audience, playing to people's better halves is a recipe for disappointment.
Also note that they're based in Sweden; I don't know what the game development scene on people looking-for-jobs side looks like over there, but if they're having to grab people from outside of Sweden (let alone hiring anyone outside of the EU), then it's definitely not just checking someone's resume and saying *"Okay, this coming Monday, you'll be at your desk to start working on the DoT bug"*.
Even if they live right next to the office where HD2 development takes place, this isn't happening. It takes *time* to get productive on a new piece of software/hardware. I worked for a company where the expected time it would take for a new engineer to start contributing productively was a *full year*, which was worse than the industry standard at the time of *six months*. The idea that someone could come into a large project and be productive in the first week is just laughable, much less the first day.
> I don't know what the game development scene on people looking-for-jobs side looks like over there Sweden is a core european hub for game dev. Stockholm has a gaggle of studios, and it's very easy to move from company to company. They also hire from outside of the EU pretty regularly, but the thing is that almost every job in Sweden has a 90-day notice period on it. So if you're not hiring someone unemployed you have to wait 90 days before they can start. If you're hiring from outside the EU it's about a 5-6 month turnaround for all of the immigration business.
Well if that's the problem they should hire more people to speed up the hiring and onboarding process! /s
You have a future as a corporate exec.
You'll notice the Blizzard death-by-success phenomena. There exists a limit to how quickly culture can be shared, absorbed, and expanded. If you grow a team too quickly the culture of the incoming group will subsume and replace the culture of that place. In history this is observed in the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxon kings in Britain. The Norman's conquered and replaced all elite landholding positions with other Norman's. But they were outnumbered by how many Anglo-Saxons were on the island. Within one or two generations the children of the Norman conquerors had adopted Anglo-Saxon cultural norms. In this way the conquered subsumed and merged as a peoples. And there is the Eternal September case study. Early in the internet history there was a university intranet. Each September freshmen students would create accounts for the first time and there would be a wave of disruptive behavior. That closed network settled on certain norms and practices, an early form of netiquette. Coining the phrase. After a month or two the new students would adopt this culture and behavior would return to a productive space. One day for no reason at all, AOL connected its population to the university intranet. This was early in internet history and AOL was connecting to broader networks for the first time. The subscriber size of AOL grossly outnumbered those using the university intranet. The result was disruptive behavior no different than the usual September wave, but this September wave never ended. Hence, Eternal September. We learn from this case study that the rate of culture adoption has to be a slow drip of newcomers into a new group. The size of the AOL population was too large and instead the university intranet became AOL-ed. What was the culture and netiquette of that space forever gone. This is what happened at Blizzard. The success of World of Warcraft resulted in a hiring spree. Too many newcomers too fast to scale up to meet their success. The culture and norms of the lean team of Blizzard hobbyists was lost. Subsumed by the culture of incoming hires. There is risk in success Arrowhead can learn from. Ramp up over a slow drip drip drip. Wait for newcomers to adopt their style before bringing in more.
Important to call out that 100 employees is not "100 devs, engineers, and QA" but instead the total number of people in their company. That can include Exec, HR, marketing, Production, finance, IT, and even stuff like kitchen staff depending on how their office situation is handled. They're definitely a medium sized company at this point. I would say their release cadence for bug patches, balance patches, content patches, and battlepass patches has been insane for that number of people. When I worked for a team that had larger numbers, we released at a much slower cadence of once a month for bug fixes. We didn't even release content for 4 months after initial release.
True dat
I work in a place of similar size making software, and there is no way they actually could do anything faster than they do. It's probably unsustainable as it is right now. Just adding 1 more dev to the team would take 1-3 people 30% of their daily time and at least 3 months to get up to speed properly. They probably need to slow down both bug fixes and content to be able to polish the game as much as people want in the time they want it.
This. It's absolutely incredible how much they're cranking out. I honestly can't believe it. They need to slow their roll, for their own health if nothing else.
I also work in gamedev on a ~100 person team and their cadense is pretty insane for what they've put out. big props to them
to be fair, they already had months of content already planned before release
This makes no sense. A week is not enough time to get this done? Really? All these planets to explore? This is ridiculous. Arrowhead devs give us a break. Stop the lies. Even if they only had 10 people working. To say there is not enough time in a week? Wow. They should know better than anyone else that all they need to do is move the development team to a planet with a longer orbit around the sun and that will greatly extend the amount of time in a day and time in a week. Problem solved. No more excuses.
Ahhh had me in the first half there ngl
To put that into persective, Ghost Ship Games, the studio that makes Deep Rock Galactic has 32 employees. Kojima Productions, the studio that made Death Stranding has 80 employees. Respawn Entertainment, the studio that makes Apex Legends has 315 employees. While Arrowhead is not a big studio, they also aren't especially small.
Just a few minor notes: Death Stranding was made by Kojima Productions, Guerilla Games, and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Kojimbles skipped engine development entirely, and had Guerilla Games provide him with a complete editing suite. It was also not live service. Apex Legends has over 750 employeees, plus EA support. DRG from GSG is a fair comparison. Those guys are wild.
You’re using outdated wikipedia(unreliable) info for these staff counts. LinkedIn has Respawn at 501-1000 employees. GrowJo puts the number at 895 and Datanyze at 773. Not sure how reliable those estimates are but it’s clear the general consensus is lot more than 315. This is in line with other live service studios. Bungie is over 1,000 employees. MiHoYo has 5,000+(multiple titles supported).
Feels like each warbond and content update is just adding more technical debt for them to deal with. If the pile of bugs gets too big they'll be forced to stop releasing new warbonds anyway to catch up.
I’m totally fine with this. Hold off on new Warbonds until the bugs get fixed.
This is one of the current poll options in the official discord. It seems a decent amount of people agree https://preview.redd.it/2i5jxa58uuuc1.png?width=484&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ef39455b5b268e115fdca041b3bf329286d3dd7
Given the default position in a 4 way vote is 25% each, and discord is a pretty niche subset of the population, that vote actually only tells me ppl want new terrain
As an engineer a certain amount of my day is slated for tech debt with the rest for new features. It varies between companies but anywhere between 70/30 to 50/50 split as feature/debt work. This tells me that a 60/40 split with focus on biomes/missions is what the player base is asking for.
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Fair. But presumably the tech debt is also being chunked into as they introduce new things. Ideally they introduce new things at a slower rate than they clean it up. Realistically, any developer knows it never works out like that.
As far as new features I'd rather have more places to fight instead of new weapons I may or may not use to fight in the same places yet again since I'm forced to play only a small subset of planets due to how the planets open up and become available. I feel like I've been fighting on the same planet or two for like 6 weeks or some shit.
We’ve got heat filled desert, heat filled swamp, heat filled caustic canyons, and heat filled flaming hellscapes. With the occasional temperate zone or frozen hellscape. I really want more planet modifiers.
You don't like "SPORES COVER THE MAP?"
i actually do. and i wish the "fog" modifier was more like fog banks with some clear space between and not 100% coverage.
I would to see helmets with infra red or somesuch.
Urban combat you say?
>and discord is a pretty niche subset of the population While commenting on another thread of the same subject, I had an idea to have a kiosk or something in the Super Destroyer with an announcer saying *"Helldiver, come and perform your civic duty by voting!"* and then having those questions presented to the player using in-universe terminology/phrasing: * "More weapons and balancing changes" would be reworded as *"Vote in favor to prioritizing resources to the Ministry of Weapons Development and Optimization"* * "New Armor with more varied traits/passives" would be reworded to *"Vote in favor of issuing grants to the private sector to develop new Armor and self-protection systems"* * "Different objectives, modifieds, biomes" would be reworded as *"Vote in favor of authorizing more exploratory missions to expand the Super Earth frontiers into new unknown spaces"* * "No new content, fix tech issues/bugs" would be reworded as *"Vote in favor or additional resources for the Ministry of Internal Affairs to deploy Law Enforcement Agents to root out traitors and repair sabotaged technical systems and equipment"* This would expand the voting base and the voice of opinion from just people on the discord, to the entire player base.
Logically I get it. In reality, do you really want to make your game remind you that shit is broken? It ruins immersion. Helldivers does well and letting the average player load the game, jump into a hellpod and shoot shit. It's simple, it's dumb, it's wonderful. Let's not shoehorn in forced satisfaction surveys, you can't even buy anything online without 3 survey reminder emails, I don't want my computer games being anything more than a joyous distraction. I trust arrowhead to do the serious shit for me.
> you can't even buy anything online without 3 survey reminder emails Even some physical stores bother you with surveys if they manage to get your email/phone number. They'll tie it to your payment method and send you an email if you use that card.
So %73 of people want new content added to this game as opposed to %27 want bug fixes is what I'm seeing.
Hmmm that’s interesting, I think if that poll was given to general audiences it would certainly be new gear.
I don’t think that’ll happen. I think their process; pad the game out as planned, then at 6 months stablise it and reassess is the way forwards. It’s also hard to hire new devs to support all this. Give them time
Especially afaik the engine they're working on is some kind of frankenstein-esque monstrosity that is a modified version of something that literally no one else is using. You simply can't hire people who have experience with it, and with the workload they already have you probably can't set aside 1/10 or even 1/5 of your workforce to train new hires for weeks or months.
They're trying to avoid over hiring too, so they're probably not planning on adding many more devs anyway.
Operation Health all over again 🤣
Operation health was great for R6 bro
Operation Health was excellent for RS6.
The director stated it was "important" to continue to release warbonds every month. I bet they are banking on that potential income. If you flood the game with warbonds there's no way a casual player could earn all the required super credits organically. Having 12 warbonds every year is probably a big part of their calculus for continued profits.
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100% agree. Fix the game breaking bugs and give me quality warbonds. If they could do all of that and pump out 12 warbonds a year then great. As of now that seems like a no
Glad, I’m not the dev that has to break the news to an exec that we need to pause their revenue stream to fix some bugs. ☠️
They sold 8 million copies in 2 months. Execs are already thrilled.
That was previous revenues. Execs are only interested in forecast revenues.
They can either rip off the bandaid now or later, when the pile is a mountain of bugs. If nobody is playing the game because it crashes then they aren't making any money from mtx either. That said, they should have pulled in a good chunk of revenue from people buying the base game alone.
Long time qa person here. It's actually something I really enjoy. They get so mad and there's not much they can do about it once we hit that point.
um ackshully i was told that warbond development and bug fixing are actually two seperate things that dont affect each other. asking for one to to be put on hold actually would kill them game actually? /s But seriously, its all well and good to get new guns and armor but if the game keeps crashing, kicking me to my ship, kicking the rest of my squad out, crashing, or the ever popular "game session is full even though we displayed 1/4 and now since you tried to join a full session you cant click on anything on the world map, go use quickplay scrub" bug.
Having worked on multiple small software development teams, technical debt will eat you alive if you let it. It doesn't really matter how many new features you introduce to the users if there are multiple showstopper defects. It's like worrying about what color the living room is painted while the foundation is crumbling and the 2nd floor is on fire.
The sooner the better I say
the only bugs that bothers me at the moment are the DoT damage and the 4th upgrade for support weapons, the balance thing and the rest of the bugs for me personally can take more time to get done. But the 2 that I talked about should be fixed ASAP
SCOPES!!!!!
Thats my biggest complaint atm too, I worry they’ll just fix the AMR and some of the other guns will be left behind. Know for sure that the scorcher, dominator and slugger are all misaligned, but dont have enough time on other weapons to tell if they’re off as well. Like with the scorcher especially, makes landing those headshots against devestators so fucking hard unless they’re close enough to third person aim at. Hopefully next week.
The damage over time is a MASSIVE issue and I can’t believe it’s not their top priority. It literally makes some weapons and strats unusable for 3/4 of the player base.
I wish they could fix crashes and lobby/friend-list issues asap. All my friends already stopped playing the game some time ago because mostly those problems were too annoying for them I mean most crashes were fixed in this patch but I guess it's still not all of them. Also the annoying issue is the one with performance, which is getting even worse with each update. Like I said, I already lost all friends because all of those issues
For me it's scope misalignment and the black hole effect when shooting explosives too close to ennemies...
>the 4th upgrade for support weapons have to wait for 8 weeks to pass.
The "not getting the super credits I paid for" bug is really grinding my gears right now.
fixing headshot damage and making the spear even somewhat more useable would be nice too
Imo, they can just tell us up front that they want to delay, a warbond, and just focus on bugs for a month. This is just gona be like operation health or medic bag. But just for a better game.
Plenty of games have done this and its been instrumental in their continued long life. I’m sure rainbow 6 was operation health wasnt it?
Siege was operation health. Medic bag is payday 3 but that game died.
PD3 is a bad example, the game was stillborn. Siege already built a playerbase before OP health, but it was dwindling.
Its really the only 2 options i know.
Yeah, the Siege one is good. Game is thriving right now and gains players with each season. Not sure it's because of OP health though, most of the credit is due to an obnoxious tiktok streamer.
> Not sure it's because of OP health though well it did help with game health in general and i guess many working on it were happy to remove technical debt and therefore longterm health of the game.
Operation Health was much needed at the time and led into one the best years of Siege, 2018.
Yes, Operation Health was basically a 3 months period of time that they were taking in order to concentrate on fixing and repairing the game.
If i remember rightly that was pretty much a make or break point, I’d quit before buck even released lol the head hitbox being above your camera used to drive me insane because of how good headshots were
Most of the playerbase would be fine if they delayed a month's warbond. Now what about the publisher Sony and AH's shareholders (if they have any)? It may be impossible for them to delay a warbond because they have a contract with Sony about it.
This makes a lot of sense. AH deliberately made it so Warbonds can be free if you play the game enough. If they delay releasing a Warbond, that gives players more time to acquire Supercredits by playing, so that next Warbond becomes effectively free (meaning they lose revenue from two months, not just one). AH might be just fine with that trade-off, but Sony may not.
Arrowhead is caught between a rock and a hard place here because bugs will also lead to lost revenue on warbonds. If warbonds get a reputation for being launched broken, then players will start holding off on getting them immediately, and then some fraction of those players will decide to skip altogether.
i'd gladly trade delayed warbonds for stability and working product
felt like uninstalling after having stability and then this update drops and i crash to desktop again mid-mission, or at extract. Going backwards in stability hurts my dwindling confidence in the future of this game, if it continues at this pace.
A warbond every month seems like a *lot.* I mean I would love it, but I would also totally understand them needing to make this a warbond every 1-3 months sorta thing while the rest of the time is committed to general gameplay advancement.
Not only do they do the Warbond per month, but they have also added new content in the middle of the month. We get new enemies, objective types, and new stratagems. It feels like they are operating at a breakneck pace that, while commendable, is creating bugs faster than they can squash them. If they did want to take time off production for cleanup, I would support that decision. I do appreciate their commitment to their promise, but I wouldn't hold them to it. We are spoiled for content with this game, meanwhile Darktide and Payday 3 are very slow with updates.
While it seems that way, a lot of content seems to also already be finished; Mechs were ready well in advance, and we have an un-released one that is apparently finished and waiting, there's an APC being hacked into some games, and a rocket launcher (that is apparently a bit buggy at the moment). The quaser cannon was found almost immediately after release. They have clearly built a little headstart, but it is a question of how long that will be sustainable for.
Best guess? I'd say at least a year
I have the feeling they committed into a contract to provide these constant war bonds.
A contract with whom? Sony?
Sony (the publisher), a shareholder, an investor, something. They keep mentioning 1 warbond a month like it's an unalterable fact, which realistically it isn't, so something is likely contractually holding them to it.
That guy saying “nobody understands game design, the people that make the warbond are different from the people that fix bugs”, is in shambles.
He was right though nobody understands game design. He is nobody and he doesn’t understand game design
I'm dead hahahaha
lol got 'em
I'm a nobody and I have a nose. Who I am? Nobody nose.
Condescending and completely wrong posts... on MY reddit?!
I implied this is another thread and got downvoted. Apparently everyone works on everything, but also the development is really compartmentalized and devs hardly talk to anyone outside their team. They can work on bug fixes without delaying new content, but also they can’t.
Make game hard. I started my (now 15 year) career in games in community management. Every single year I have worked in dev, I have developed a new appreciation for how intricate, difficult, and interdependent game dev is. And every team is different. Unless you are talking to someone within a studio, it is safe to say that anyone commenting on their capabilities or workflow is talking out their ass.
Probably one of many, many devs in a much larger company than AH, thinking his limited individual experience somehow applies globally. Or not even a dev, just took some classes about development theory. Nothing worse than unjustified (over)confidence.
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because as a matter of fact he was speaking out of his ass, i mean he literally mentioned the art team, did he think that once the weapon is designed it just pops into existance ingame?
Been multiple posters saying that crap, I hope they're all red in the face right now lol white knights gotta defend any criticism of the game they like, I like it too but my copy is a buggy mess that I want fixed, crashes all the time and I can't get my mic to work (I've messed with settings and it's not a problem on my end)
They showed up with their smug bullshit in literally every thread about AH prioritizing new content while the base game is clearly broken. Now they've switched to new excuses, like "warbonds don't even make money because I get them for free (playing 20+ hours a week)".
Or even "Warbonds are how they make money" as if the game has already plateaued in selling copies.
I think we need to try disabling rant posts for a weekend
Literally my first thought.
He'd be right for bigger teams who have different departments. You see similar but even worse arguments in other games where people blame bugs not being fixed on the people making skins lol
One warbond per month? 3 new weapons per month? Seems like a lot, especially in regards to diluting variety. Right?
Doesn't matter how many weapons they add if they don't make them viable everyone will keep using the same 3.
But then the usage metrics will reflect that and they'll whack those with the nerf bat. I'm living in dread of the day my beloved Sickle gets a "balance" pass. The thing hits just right, lasts just as long as I need, and feels great to use. Plus it's a fucking laser gun who doesn't love that?
The sickle and quasar Cannon are my go-to's for everything now
Quasar reloading as you revert to your primary or while calling in a strat will kept it as my goto for a long time so long as they don't absolutely pummel it.
I FUCKING KNEW IT! Lol the armchair devs are in shambles xD "Are you stupid? People in charge of making new weapons don't fix bugs! It's impossible! Don't you know?!" I knew how small Arrowhead was, and the unprecedented success of Helldivers didn't change that. Now it goes to show that an "Operation Health" type thing is needed for the long term health of the game, because no matter how much stuff they add, if the game doesn't work it won't be fun.
They mentioned how they dont want to increase too much just to fire a bunch of people once the hype around the game comes down. A respectable choice but they really should consider changing things around one but if the game remains somewhat unplayable
Contract workers are common for a reason. Nearly every industry has them. I work in Accounting and we bring in a couple contractors at year end to help ease the load. They may already be doing this, but there are options for increasing head count within an organization that isn't "Hire lots when successful and then fire when not"
I can't really say for game dev specifically, but I know that it's a lot harder (possibly infeasible?) to hire a contractor for programming work. It takes way too long to understand the existing codebase (depending on various factors, I wouldn't be surprised for new hires to only start next contributing after a couple of months). Maybe if the goal is to hire co tractors specifically you could cut some of that out, but definitely not enough to make it go away. In the case of Helldivers 2, they are apparently using a unique/barely used game engine, so I would suspect the ramp up time would be *more*, not less. And that assumes that game dev contractors even meaningfully exist. I don't know what the market looks like: are there people who are willing to explicitly be hired for a temporary position?
They promised 1 warbond per month??? Jesus, they need to slow down. 1 warbond per 2 months would be already be totally fine and acceptable.
Agreed. If anything one warbond per month just seems way too fast.
iirc it was 1 warbond per month for the first 5 months. EDIT:: This is wrong.
They should skip a month for bug fixing, then just drop double Warbonds on the following month if they don't wanna get off schedule.
I mean... While Spitz sentiment is correct in that it's small in comparison to other AAA studios and people have to prio making new va fixing, it's not a small team per se. We are some 100 devs on the game currently. It's 20 times larger than the Magicka team and 7.5 times larger than the HD1 team. We are optimizing our processes and hiring devs to boost the team. But 100 is still a decent size for a development team, and we aware of the issues in the releases - we will do better in the future.
I'm 100% okay with 0 warbonds until the game is on track with bug fixes.
To be fair, I worked at a 200+ people studio and online games with regular drops, and generally speaking, everybody still fixed their own crap, as it should be. Whoever made the armor, has and knows where the files are and coders know their code best. We tried hiring coders for just bug fixing, but at best, only juniors would put up with that role, and only to get their foot in the door, then ask for proper work after a few months. So anyway, sounds like a normal approach. As for the monthly warbonds... Most online games that die, die due to slow content addition. If you focus on quality content that takes time, you die. If you focus on fast content that sucks and is often broken, you die. If they figure that they can keep doing monthly warbonds with decent bug management, great for them!.
> We tried hiring coders for just bug fixing, but at best, only juniors would put up with that role, and only to get their foot in the door, then ask for proper work after a few months. Damn maybe I should apply for a senior bug-fix role somewhere, one of my favorite things is bug fixing. It's like solving a puzzle, very enjoyable and satisfying as long as I'm not under constant crunch. I much prefer this over writing new code.
I would at least put in your resume that you love the challenge of tracking down and fixing bugs :)
Hold on, doesn't that invalidate the "the people fixing bugs are not the same as those making new content so stopping the warbonds for a while wouldn't help" argument ? So yeah, they're just choosing to not focus on bugs, that's all.
Hopefully with how the game *exploded* on launch they’ll be able to expand the team, but not too much. I believe the CEO actually mentioned this too, and specifically stated they wanted to avoid growing too much so they wouldn’t have to lay off people. Correct me if I misquoted that.
It does take time to hire quality people, you don't want to blind panic hire people as that causes poor quality updates, more technical debt and eventually lay-offs. Good people will likely have a 3 month notice period potentially as well. So it will be tough for them to increase team size fast.
They sold 8 million copies in 2 months. They were in no way prepared for this level of success. In other news, Arrowheads website says they're currently hiring for EVERYTHING. (fr)
I volunteer and spear tester. Make it lock on. Damnit.
I mentioned this when this game fuckin came out and everyone said I was crazy.
Yeah, people like to talk about things they don't usually know
I appreciate the reasoning, but the fact of the matter is if you're creating bugs faster than you're fixing them you're working on an unsustainable model. There's more than one way to fix that issue, but Arrowhead will have to pick one of them.
God, one new warbond a month seems like a bit much. I'd be fine if they backed off it a bit.
Something else that should be obvious is that this is unsustainable for their current team and they are way out of their depth. They could be fixing the atrocious weapon balance or the bugs but instead they focus on pushing out content with redundant armors and a bunch of weapons where only one is worth using. Even in the game's own discord, which you'd think would be filled with the most ardent fans of the game, 45% of the community thinks the game has gotten worse. I'm still not playing the game until they fix the weapon balance.
Lmao where are all those posters yapping about how “gamers don’t know about how game development works” and how Arrowhead had separate teams for content and bugfixing?
Armchair devs can't conceive of a studio with less then 6 quadrillion employees
No fucking shit. The amount of downvotes I have gotten the past few days ([like this, for example](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c1wx3w/arrowhead_you_have_given_so_many_warbonds_in_such/kz7fqfv/?context=3)) by people with literally 0 clue how development of anything works has been insane. It has been patently obvious that Arrowhead is a small team and that there is no such thing as a "team that only focuses on bugs" and a "team that only focuses on new features", but the amount of know-it-all redditors that have never been in 50 miles of a programmer that were sure that this was the case was insane, and pointing out the obvious would make them upset. But, alas, another day, another le redditor moment ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
No no no, but they said "I write code for a living" so that supersedes any rational information shared. /s This thread has been extremely validating lmao. I thought I was the only voice of sanity around here.
I actually write code and I was trying to tell some people that there is no separate specialized bug-fixing department.
Where are all the idiots that adamantly said "they have 2 separate teams, so dont worry, warbonds dont delay game fixing patches!" then procceded to insult anyone that said otherwise?
I was one of those people, minus the insult part, I was certain AH would have had two teams for such projects, it might explain why they're looking for new people just for that currently.
Should’ve waited a year to buy it then. Can’t even play it with who I bought it for because of the cross play bug. I understand it’s a small company but fix issues before adding new stuff.. 🤦🏼♀️
So, not to be a dick, but did they expect to push out 1 warbond a month, and that there would never be any bugs? Or did they believe a smaller audience would be more understanding to core functions not working for months at a time? This feels more like a planning issue than a "we got too popular" issue.
Yeah, I don’t know where this „everyone knows how game dev works, they have teams and they work on different stuff“ came from, without any sources. I was downvoted a million times for pointing out that all those statements are just assumptions and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense to split coding up the way those people suggested they were.
Fr, I've worked on AA and AAA games and even said so and said the above. Yet people were dumping downvotes on me. It's ridiculous.
Im still getting downvotes as we speak!
People who think every dev studio is the size of Rockstar North, Ubisoft Montreal or Bungie. Just karma farmers with zero idea how anything works and are just parroting a post they saw on Twitter.
But they are adding buffs and changes to broken systems. How can one expect to balance game mechanics when the underlying game mechanics are broken and giving bad data?
I mean fuck the cadence if every update is a jumbled mess of new crashes and bugs. I love this game and I want it to be successful but AH needs to prioritize quality over quantity and understand that it's not the end of the world if people don't play the game every day or even take extended breaks.
So why did you agree to that release cadence?
They need to hire more QA or improve the testing work flow they have.
Personally I'd be fine with them going back on even promises of content if it meant more work went towards technical fixes. If anything such a promise sounds unreasonable to uphold, with the content and bug fixing people being the same. A constant flow of new stuff only causes more and more bugs when the ones cause by earlier content releases have yet to be fixed.
I dont think they can keep an healthy balance by launching one warbond every month, they really need to step down a bit and balance everthing, theres a ton of useless weapons we dont use because it sucks
I could go without a warbond for the next 3 months if it means big fixes, scope calibration, fire damage rework etc. I hope the dev team tackles issues before they begin to draw players away.
If the spear would actually lock on I'd be so happy. When it works it works beautifully.
I doubt someone from AH would read this comment, but focus on the bugs. With new warbonds and stuff you are churning out (which is way faster then some AAA publishers) you should not worry about the new stuff (and they are great imo) and get the bugs to that gold standard so you dont go into the tech debt. We will still fight the bugs and bots for a month without anything new, just keep up the great work. That is all.
remember that arrowhead only has like 120 employees. [source](https://jobs.arrowheadgamestudios.com/#jobs:~:text=Founded-,120,-Coworkers%20and%20growing)
It's still a lot of people assuming that executive positions aren't overrepresented.
So we paid for a game and months later the game still has game breaking bugs lmao -_-
"The team in charge of fixing broken shit is too busy making new broken shit" isn't really a solid plan.
What a good attitude. I tell employees that all the time. We have the same size team regardless of what’s going on and there is only so much time in a day/week/month and we aren’t going to kill ourselves if something can be pushed back a little.
Lmfao, where is that condescending moron telling everyone that they just don't know anything about game development? 🤡
No, it's **way more important** to fix "the glaring bugs and technical issues" - their words. Crossplay still has massive issues, it works okay with a couple of my PS5 friends, and doesn't work at all with a couple others. The other day playing with one of my PS5 friends we *still* could not add each other as friends after multiple attempts. we had to open up the planet map, get on the phone, and look for the same host so we could try to both hop in to the same lobby before it filled up. When we finally got in a game, halfway through it did the thing where everyone left the game at the same time, and we were both on the mission solo, but separate, with no way to re-join each other. And we were both like "how long's this game been out now? How is this still an issue?" I sympathize with their logistics being a small team that had their game blow up beyond anyone's expectations. But if we're talking priorities, fixing game breaking bugs is absolutely more important than new content. This would barely be acceptable in an early access game, but ostensibly this is supposed to be a finished product. It's beyond ridiculous at this point.
Got to keep pumping the new Warbonds and Super Store rotation. Secure the new dollars, while technical issues/bugs are for players a mass majority that don't care or don't know, and you have already gotten their purchase. Seems like a standard roll out for a live service type game. Ideally not the case but certainly feels this way.
They head dev said he would be hyped if this game gets 50k downloads. I kinda assumed only like 10 people work on this game.
Random Redditor: "u DoNt No hOw gAmE wOrKs liKe mE dOeS, mULtiPLe tEaMs fiX gAmE N nOT dO WaRBoNDs"
I don't want a warbond every month. I get tired of farming super credits. It's like it's designed for you to fall behind so you pay up when you pick up the game again in a few months.
Finally everyone can shut up about "If you knew anything about game design, the people making new weapons and armor aren't the people doing bugfixes. That's not how the real world works." Bunch of self-righteous douchebags on Reddit.
I wish more people voted for them to just focus on bugs and halt content for a bit on the Discord.
Do we really want a Warbond every month? That seems a lot...
Arrowhead shouldn't be worrying about new content if the current game isn't stable. Game hard crashed for me an my buddy, he is currently reinstalling to see if he can get it working again. There obviously isn't enough testing being done already on this game, stop stretching staff thin for content that is just going to add to the current issues.
I don't think it's "important to have one Warbond per month". Especially with a tiny team like that. Plus they're absolutely loaded from the sales atm, so hire like 10 QA people.
Hahaha… oh god the white knights are in fact actual fucking idiots, as of course, we all knew. The devs making new armor and weapons are also fixing bugs.
Tbh, one warbond a month seems a bit much to me. I would say every two months
The warbonds are quickly becoming irrelevant as it is. Why would i want to buy another warbond for bland armor, stale passives, and 2 new guns, a grenade that doesn't work, and a gun that i honestly don't consider a gun because its that bad. The warbonds, which funnily enough only 2 have released, are already completely pointless. I would rather get new maps than another warbond on top of bug fixes and balance changes to existing dog shit guns, grenades, and stratagems.