The Rapid Decline of Helldivers 2’s Player Base?

[@brachlandmusic]

Just played it casual for a few days and most I've heard from 100+ lvl people was: "there's nothing new to do, nothing new to earn and I can't spend my stuff on anything."

[@simonphoenix3789]

yeah but to get to level 100+ means you have spent way more than 200 hours. I'm at 220 hours and at level 59. I really don't know how there are people crazy enough to get to level 100 without being bored. Im already tired, and the only reason I keep coming back is just how much fun the gameplay is, and my hope of seeing one of my favorite planets open on the terminid side. Still, I spend about an hour a day on the game, which is two missions a day.

[@sidhintzsche6773]

@@simonphoenix3789 I am at level 60 now. Unlocked every weapon and close to all ship upgrades. For a hardcore player thats about the point where it gets boring. All my friends are playing other games and waiting for more updates and content. Would be a really good timing to release the new race in the next weeks, or the playerbase will go down to a mere 10k or something.

[@brachlandmusic]

@@simonphoenix3789 I didnt know the hours for every level. Last game I grinded was Hell Let Loose but there was also a cap and nothing new came so I got bored after lvl150+ and played every role up to Commander. I think there always needs to be a goal after you unlocked almost everything. So I guess there needs to be more weapons, Armor etc. asap. I got stuck with the first shotgun and didnt use anything else. If I at least could earn attachments for my weapons that would be at least something.

[@sayit1196]

@@simonphoenix3789 I'm at 190 and lvl 71, wtf are you doing xD ?

[@dl30wpb]

​@@simonphoenix3789I got to level 20 and checked out. The constant freezing and crashing didn't help

[@KylewithaK]

I think Helldivers can make a comeback with the Illuminates but lesson learned, if I find out that the “balance” dev Alexus is involved in a future title/other game I will not purchase it until it’s been tested. If I find out. The CEO stepped down to get directly involved, lets see what happens.

[@CookieManCookies]

Pretty simple, fire alexus before the game goes freeware.

[@ozascheats]

@@CookieManCookies bro that would litrerally be a MIRACLE

[@davidagiel8130]

Ivr been playing the last four days and have had no issues finding matches. Obviously if you ban 180 countries the player base will drop, it's still a fun game.

[@kaakabe]

yeah its not - not with broken patrols,broken week ass weapons and boring missions.

[@thewintersoldier8387]

@@kaakabe still fun for me

[@kaakabe]

@@thewintersoldier8387 On wthat dificulty? on what front beacouse 9 on bots are pure cancer

[@invadeandraid]

@@kaakabeI got the game a week ago, nothing I have done is boring, weak or broken, seriously stop making up issues that barely change anything. Enjoy the game for what it is, it’s amazing

[@kaakabe]

@@invadeandraid yope- week ago, how about 3 months of nerfs dude :) its not amazing. its horrible.

[@Devast8r34]

The developers nerved the player base and fun right out of the game I want to be overpowered when I play not balanced

[@shippy1001]

Wow, is like if you actively sabotage your game you can actually lose the players. -PSN mandatory - L -Blocking Countries to buy the game - L -Bad PR/Community Managers - L -Bad patches, one after another, nerfing literally everything fun - L -Bad patches, one after another buffing enemies - L -Nothing "new" added to the game for awhile now, you can only do so much of the same mission until you are bored. -Really bad Warbonds.

[@tacticalmosquito6480]

Arrowhead goes no lube with some really harsh gameplay changes while Sony spitroasts us (and the brand) from the front. They might be able to turn it around with some new missions, lots of squishy hordes + weapons that kick ass (without becoming meta and the only thing you can run), PRESTIGE levels and rewards babyyy (lemme scratch that shiny medal itch)...

[@johncaster2159]

I still play almost daily. I don't get tired of it.

[@LobsterDeity]

As soon as new content drops, the numbers will go back up. I had logged around 300 hours before I stopped playing. For $40, you can’t beat that.

[@30nsg]

oh yeah you got your value. I have 68 hours and I feel like i got my value as well. I am going to go back in a few months down the line

[@Kingjesus96]

some crazy copiun

[@janfortuna3002]

Nerfs and the bugs made me quit after 200 hours in. You get a premium warbond Eruptor and they tripplenerf it... I am so done.

[@30nsg]

I feel you

[@pse2020]

"something isnt beautiful because it lasts" -Vision

[@searingllama5621]

Both natural burnout and the nerfs were definitely a major contributor in my playtime dropping. I'm at 250~ hours in HD2 and I have all stuff unlocked and nothing to grind for, but that's not even the source of my burnout, it's the nerfs. I don't need to get samples/medals/etc to enjoy the game, I want to kill bugs and bots with my cool space weapons, giant space guns and our saviour Eagle-1, but it becomes increasingly frustrating to constantly be pigeonholed into the few toys that actually work

[@simonphoenix3789]

what blows me away is that they sold millions of copies yet only hundreds of thousands of players get online at any one time (at its peak). what did all the other people buy the game for? did they just play the game at one time for half an hour and never touch it again?

[@watchwood]

Most people aren't going to play a game around the clock. Work and sleep and stuff also require time. Also, timezones.

[@nachocheez9690]

Bro really doesn't understand life

[@Cashprt]

I disagree that the natural burnout is the big factor. The game was so much fun when it came out. People stick around and play the same games for years. I have old games installed that I play on a weekly basis . IMO the two big factors are the PSN fiasco, and the nerfs. I had to take a couple of months off playing, when I came back right around Sony's idiotic move, the game felt completely different because of all the nerfs. It felt like a chore every time I was playing, none of my weapons were doing damage. The fun is slowly disappearing. Like you said, you don't nerf things in a PVE game, you buff the weak parts of the game. Unfortunately when microtransactions are involved, things become complicated. I'm still playing, searching for that fun time.

[@30nsg]

well I hope you can find the fun

[@Canis.Lupus.Arctos]

that is what mostly annoys me about "news", regardless of being in legacy media or social media... headlines and clickable stuff, yes the game was a huge success, sales wise, but also as a live-service despite receiving ridiculous high praise from both customers and reviewers it is not a success I wouldn't say... if anything, to truly and accurately assess if was or not, time is the key... live-service keyword should be a huge hint, but for me, any service should be judged on the quality and reliability of their services... in a multiplayer focused game, not having players to play w/ has a huge weight whether is successful or not for me....

[@GamerSingularity]

Still better than 97% of new stuff coming out though.

[@davidagiel8130]

The game needs to go multiplatform with crossplay

[@MixMeister5000]

It is though ... other than Xbox for now.

[@sonny2dap]

So live service is not unknown at this point, players have a voracious appetite for content, and accelerated player fall off is expected if new content doesn't show up, plenty will still play but fall off will happen, to feed the content you will need to expand your team, you can only sustain the expanded team so long as numbers stay up and players remain playing and spending, the key fundamentally with a successful live service is as big a starting base as possible, and then having a smooth on-boarding process for late comers, it feels like Sony hamstringed arrowhead somewhat on those last two points, but still a phenomenal success.

[@stephensniff]

I don’t think it can be narrowed down to just 1 or 2 things because it’s a lot of different things that have made the game lose its player base. 1: Too much nerfing, why am I grinding for a certain weapon and then as soon as I get it, it gets nerfed to the point it’s no longer usable. Why are the devs so worried about nerfing/ balancing the game when it’s a PVE anyways? So what if one of the guns is better than others or makes an extremely Overpowered Enemy with ridiculous spawn rates (that also are always getting tinkered with) slightly less difficult. There was a reason that the game exploded in popularity in the beginning when it released, why keep changing the recipe especially when every week a new patch came out that mostly nerfed everyone’s favorite weapons with some buffs of weapons that still go unused, changed spawn rates, and included some bug fixes but also always created a whole new set of bugs? 2: Due to the game being so much more popular than originally expected, the small team of devs spent the first month or so just trying to get enough servers up to support the giant player base. Then they had major bugs that caused games to crash that they had to fix so instead of working on making more content to release they were busy dealing with so many other issues. So now you have your most committed players that grind hours on end day after day having no new content to unlock and therefore no reason to keep grinding every day. The game needs more content to unlock for the hardcore players who are currently maxed out on samples, medals, rex slips, and super credits that they can’t spend because they keep recycling the same gear over and over in the super store. In the past 2 months they’ve had maybe 4 new sets added, 2 sets sprinkled into the rotation and then 3 or 4 weeks later another 2 sets sprinkled in. 3: The most recent Warbond seemed so thrown together and most of the weapons weren’t very good/ something people wanted to use and there’s really only 4 different percs you can get with armor. Why don’t the helmets or capes add extra perks? 4: The game is seeing a normal decline just like any game will but what especially seemed to be the final straw was when Sony was going to try to force people to have accounts that would inevitably force certain players that already owned the game out and make them unable to play a game they already paid for because they happened to be in a certain region of the world. Also Sony has back tracked they still haven’t completely fixed the issues and a lot of players in certain regions are still locked out of the game. What would help get the game back on track? New mission types added more frequently/ adding a completely new game mode, adding new guns and armor more frequently with new percs, adding more upgrades to the ship and new stratagems to buy. Adding a new faction like the Illuminate sooner than later. Rather than focusing on what weapons to nerf, focus on what weapons to buff. Stop releasing updates every week unless you know for sure you haven’t created a whole new set of bugs creating a never ending game of wack a mole. Help players regain access to the game that have been affected by Sonys attempt at forcing everyone to log into a PSN.

[@karlthomasjr5622]

Honestly, i played it to buy time until Killing Floor 3 comes out

[@pduh42]

That game had good balancing system according to difficulties too and leveling up made sense also.

[@davidagiel8130]

Killing Floor 2 is still massive on Steam

[@sidhintzsche6773]

I see it in my friendlist... they are all playing other games. Some wanna show up again after the next update because they are really annoyed by the nerfs and patrol changes, some would only show up if a new enemy race or other big update gets implemented.

[@lunatick3628]

i still laugh thinking about the fact that a SONY game sold more on PC then on PS.

[@dl30wpb]

I stopped playing 2 months ago with the constant crashing and freezing. I got to level 20. Fun game, but the first one didn't have all the issues. Should have kept it a top down twin stick shooter.

[@RagnarokX316]

I'm a pretty casual player, only playing 1-3 hour sessions a couple times a week since release. I've unlocked everything, there is nothing left to do but wait. It's not dead, its just cooking.

[@Turilda]

More like honeymoon phase is over.

[@ROADKIL80]

But it is a great game and I can see myself jumping back in down the road

[@A_New_Reality]

220 hours in and I’ve reached my saturation point as there’s nothing new to unlock. Amazing game, just need a break for now. Will be back when there’s fresh content. They need to stop nerfing everything though.

[@iwams1]

Cope harder about gaydivers 2 turning out to be a massive failure

[@bonepie]

Take this as THE PRIME EXAMPLE of why you NEVER Nerf Weapons in this type of game. You BUFF weapons that are lagging behind. BUFF items that aren't being used as much. NEVER NERF PvE GAME! Nerfed Weapons TANKS motivation to keep playing the game. Cause I stopped once the last order was finished. I only ran Dominator, Grenade Pistol and Stun. The entire time. It got sooooo boring to use JUST that set because if I don't run that set then it's INFURIATING to use anything else. I WANT to use some other loadouts but no. Mission Failed if I don't use it, Mission Finished when I do and feel relief of finally getting it over with.

[@mynameisandycook1]

Nerfing player power will 100% of the time reduce your player count. QUIT SCREWING UP THE WEAPONS.

[@Tek0nn]

Agreed, ALL weapons should be fun.

[@AhhZee]

Doesn’t help that after 3 months I’m still crashing back to my ship after wasting 40 minutes in a mission. Meanwhile they’re focusing on nerfing all the fun out of the game. Time to call in an Eagle Priorities Straight. ⬆️⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️➡️

[@philphilly9654]

I’d play the game more if weapons, armor and stratagems got buffed n it felt fun to play. HD2 was my fun, chill n kill time video game. Unfortunately there’s only like 2 or 3 guns that are fun to use (erupter nerf really jigged my jags), almost always using the same stratagems cause others are useless or just weak. On top of that, the debuffs at high level play aren’t challenging or fun, it’s just like “ha we threw more things at you while nerfing your combat ability into the dirt” 🥴

[@hook357]

The game is trying to sell weapons in the warbonds that are weaker than the starting weapons. What the?

[@ibdean1873]

My personal experience with the game: I already had a PS account as I was on PS3/4 before moving to PC so the whole account linking debacle didn't really stop me from playing. As much as that may annoy some, I just want to play games for the enjoyment and not be involved with the whole politic bs that gets created around games these days. But from what I could see it was very clearly a dev team that was waaaay out of their depth when it came to dealing with the explosion in popularity and level of interaction from the player base that came with that. They sort of scrambled around pointlessly nerfing weapons and messing with the enemy spawns in their patches to where now they've openly admitted the game is over spawning the enemies and the gun balancing is in a very poor state as is. Controversy aside, people were enjoying the crap out of your game, why go around messing with gun stats and enemy spawns to where it's now an almost unplayable mess? The reinforce glitch that happens pretty much every game. The constant crashing or disconnecting towards the end of a 40 minute mission which just ends up being time completely wasted. The clearly overpowered automatons that can see you through fog and smoke from 500m away and just spam infinite rockets at you over and over constantly ragdolling your character so you can't do a thing to defend yourself. Then theres the stupid m,ajor orders that they based on the player count when it was at its peak. Meaning with the average player base at the time, we each had to kill between 30,000 - 33,000 enemies each over 4 days. I'm sorry but gtfo here with that. Even the more dedicated players struggled to hit that amount. Ands that just an example, we failed about 4-5 major orders in a row because the expectations were just so stupid that it was clearly never going to get done. All are problems the dev team admit to but are too slow to do anything about. Overall its a shame what it's become and I was sad to uninstall the game so early after I thought it was going to be a game that stuck around for me for a few months at least

[@ROADKIL80]

Yeah like I said before I got like 68 hours in and it's just hard to go back to do the same stuff

[@GamerSingularity]

Time to move on then. Pretty simple.

[@MixMeister5000]

Can content creators stop with these videos already. Id say you are all on the same page as "Mainstream Media"..

[@SIedgeHammer83]

Non-Stop nerfs kills the game

[@elgrifolorian]

When the countries locked out get access I'll start playing again. I only got till lvl 22 also plenty of high lvls just kick you out when you join their game.

[@30nsg]

yeah that sucks. Sounds like Destiny back in the day when doing raids

[@theranger5774]

It appears that Helldivers is a metaphor for democracy. Maybe Arrowhead is trying to show everyone that democracy is undesirable to free people. Especially "managed democracy." Now, before you all attack me on this, please look at the definitions of democracy and republic. I think you will see what I'm saying.

[@mdtubeaccount2965]

I quit when hey nerfed scythe and the rover… and I’m sure I’m not the only one

[@JonStockman82]

yesterday I was in a mission and the 3 that dived in on my game started f**kin around and team killing constantly so kicked them and completed solo. Only been playing 2 weeks and it was the worst match ever, apparently there's a thing where a bunch of PS5 gamers are purposefully TK'ing PC players, don't know how true it is.

[@GamerSingularity]

Some people are always gonna be toxic but I've never seen what you described in all my hours. Hopefully it's an isolated incident. Good luck, Helldiver!

[@JonStockman82]

@@GamerSingularity yeah it was the first and only time it's happened, I know not every dive is gonna be a good one obviously but that one felt targeted if that makes sense.

[@GamerSingularity]

@@JonStockman82 100% agree and understand. I've had a few similar instances happen so I definitely get what you mean.

[@akeni3018]

so my thing with nerfing and buffing is wehn you have weapons that are so strong that they are of auto inklude and all other wepons are bad because of it i woud rather nerf 1 weapon so everything seams like a good option than buff everything so its all op as hell, because wehn it comes to high end dificulty you dont want to fell it like a cake walk but on the other hand every weapon, stratagem and backpack shoud be the same kinde of fun to play with long story short i think nerfing is somthing you shoud do but only if a thing is kinde of THE best thing in the game otherwise just buff the bad stuff (sorry if i had kinde of a bad grammer english not my first language)

[@damionausten689]

Reported to my nearest democratic officer... these traitors will be found.

[@johngray3449]

They made it unfun.

[@Talon97]

Typical flavor of the month bullsh*t hyped up by e-celebs. What did you expect?. It's the same thing with Palworld, everyone jumped on the hype train. I ALWAYS see through nonsense like this, I'm built different, I'm not a sheep.

[@novaDF6871]

game is dead in the water or should we say life support until the "balance/content patch" comes out. if that patch fails its over for HD2.. it feels like shore to play at the moment with these nerfed weapons on PVE game lol. the hype is gone, plus the sony debacle didn't help this game one bit

[@GamerSingularity]

Dead in the water, yet still swimming. 🤔

[@leightaylor11]

it woudl be ALOT less on the copys sold becasue they pulled a bait and switch after the point of refund... trust i wont play this game ever again and i cant get a refund after their BS move

[@fictionsecond5696]

Game wouldn't have fallen off if they didnt do constant "nerfs and rebalances". Plus, if they put it on xbox, annndd they need to break away from sony. Games dead.

[@SignifiKent]

Super toxic community

[@30nsg]

really? I never really played with random people. all 68 hours are with friends

[@darkstalkerknight63]

first, it is clear that helldrivers 2 didn't sell 12 million. it looks like it is close to 6 million. sony removing it from 180 counties did not lower the player numbers at all. the game player base actually went up during that week. yea, you have to nerf in a PVE game or you have to buff what you are fighting against. they have to balance it one way or another. the game has 15% of the players it started with. that means they lost 85% of the players within 3 months. the crying in this video is so hard. no, they did not sell 12 million copies. we know this because if they did, why did they never have at leas 1.2 million players online within a week. the most they had is is at best guess 600k from everywhere. even if you gave them the base case, why is only 5% of that 12 million only played the game since it came out. 6 million might be too high as well. it could be as low as 1 million.

[@ibdean1873]

You think because there weren't 1.2 million people on at once then they couldn't have sold that many copies? 🤣 What logic have you used to come to that conclusion? You know there are people that buy it, play for an hour, decide they don't like it and move on. There are also people that will buy it and play for a couple of hours a week because that's all the free time they have. Why would Sony or Arrowhead need to lie about selling 12 million copies? All you've done is show how low your IQ is to be honest

[@davidburke4101]

They did sell 12 million copies, did you not read about the server issues the game had at launc? Most people couldn't even play because the server capacity was too full? The current server capacity is 700k players, so even if everyone came back all at once, there can only ever be a 700k max playerbase. Also most games only have a fraction of total sales as their playerbase. A huge chunk of people buy a game but never play it, some of those players don't play often maybe once a week, and many of them only play for a short time both in playtime and people that move on to other games. A game having less than 10% of it's total sales be online at once is literally normal for every single game.

[@tabaflip]

No. You never nerf. You buff other stuff. And no. You don't buff enemies either. You make it so there are more enemies, so there's more stuff attacking you and there's more enemies to kill with said op weapons. You never nerf on a pve game.

[@darkstalkerknight63]

​@@davidburke4101 no they didn't. the servers issues were due to a problem with thembeing able to log into the game. "The current server capacity is 700k players, so even if everyone came back all at once, there can only ever be a 700k max playerbase. Also most games only have a fraction of total sales as their playerbase. " you do know that tell you they didn't sell 12 million copies right. " A huge chunk of people buy a game but never play it, some of those players don't play often maybe once a week, and many of them only play for a short time both in playtime and people that move on to other games. A game having less than 10% of it's total sales be online at once is literally normal for every single game." lol. then your math isn't adding up. think about it. if your max is 700k. that means only 17% of players who bought the game played it. that also means of those 17%, only 2.5% are still playing the game. you know how many games has that kind of number. 0. none. zero. that means in reality, they sold closer to 6 if not lower. its an always online game as well.

[@darkstalkerknight63]

@@tabaflip yea and that is why you are wrong. you have to balance stuff. you just want to be overpower and no challenge which gets boring really quick. "You make it so there are more enemies, so there's more stuff attacking you and there's more enemies to kill with said op weapons." they did that in a recent patch and people hated it. so nothing you said is correct.

[@garyt3hsna1l82]

Game is getting stale

[@30nsg]

I mean playing anything non stop can get stale. I hope they can fix a few things and get a lot of people back down the road.

[@stephensniff]

I don’t think it can be narrowed down to just 1 or 2 things because it’s a lot of different things that have made the game lose its player base. 1: Too much nerfing, why am I grinding for a certain weapon and then as soon as I get it, it gets nerfed to the point it’s no longer usable. Why are the devs so worried about nerfing/ balancing the game when it’s a PVE anyways? So what if one of the guns is better than others or makes an extremely Overpowered Enemy with ridiculous spawn rates (that also are always getting tinkered with) slightly less difficult. There was a reason that the game exploded in popularity in the beginning when it released, why keep changing the recipe especially when every week a new patch came out that mostly nerfed everyone’s favorite weapons with some buffs of weapons that still go unused, changed spawn rates, and included some bug fixes but also always created a whole new set of bugs? 2: Due to the game being so much more popular than originally expected, the small team of devs spent the first month or so just trying to get enough servers up to support the giant player base. Then they had major bugs that caused games to crash that they had to fix so instead of working on making more content to release they were busy dealing with so many other issues. So now you have your most committed players that grind hours on end day after day having no new content to unlock and therefore no reason to keep grinding every day. The game needs more content to unlock for the hardcore players who are currently maxed out on samples, medals, rex slips, and super credits that they can’t spend because they keep recycling the same gear over and over in the super store. In the past 2 months they’ve had maybe 4 new sets added, 2 sets sprinkled into the rotation and then 3 or 4 weeks later another 2 sets sprinkled in. 3: The most recent Warbond seemed so thrown together and most of the weapons weren’t very good/ something people wanted to use and there’s really only 4 different percs you can get with armor. Why don’t the helmets or capes add extra perks? 4: The game is seeing a normal decline just like any game will but what especially seemed to be the final straw was when Sony was going to try to force people to have accounts that would inevitably force certain players that already owned the game out and make them unable to play a game they already paid for because they happened to be in a certain region of the world. Also Sony has back tracked they still haven’t completely fixed the issues and a lot of players in certain regions are still locked out of the game. What would help get the game back on track? New mission types added more frequently/ adding a completely new player mode, adding new guns and armor more frequently, adding more upgrades to the ship and new stratagems to buy. Adding a new faction like the Illuminate sooner than later. Rather than focusing on what weapons to nerf, focus on what weapons to buff. Stop releasing updates every week unless you know for sure you haven’t created a whole new set of bugs creating a never ending game of wack a mole. Help players regain access to the game that have been affected by Sonys attempt at forcing everyone to log into a PSN.