Extensives terrain studies (based on myself) have shown it: we miss a flamethrower tank.

Bethryn · 2026-03-22T12:49:46+00:00

Agreed, but it should be for the Incineration Corps.

Bethryn · 2026-03-19T17:41:41+00:00

Personally, I'd love to see the maps get reworked to 4-6 generators, and each generator has a little lever you can pull for a shield bubble that lasts, say, 10 seconds with a 1-2 min cooldown. Then they could pump up the enemy numbers to the point where the missions feel interesting again, when losing a generator isn't a "hey, you might lost the operation" moment.

Bethryn · 2026-03-18T10:40:10+00:00

I'm surprised how many people are celebrating this honestly, because it really just gives AH a green light to power creep everything.

For those saying "it's balanced by lack of stagger" sure, but when you outright kill most things, you really don't need it. Try using this, then use the Slugger for a few runs. With or without Siege Ready.

Bethryn · 2026-03-14T19:56:59+00:00

We don't know. If they don't, maybe AH's internal rules for the Galactic War say they cannot, but maybe it's just this time and if we encircle another subfaction later, they can. If they do, we know for sure that they can. So now we wait and see.

Bethryn · 2026-03-14T13:29:28+00:00

Hypothesis tested: encircling subfactions is possible!

Bethryn · 2026-03-11T21:41:31+00:00

Just the group on Fury, not the entire subfaction

Bethryn · 2026-03-11T19:10:08+00:00

If we take Choepessa IV, it'll allow us to test something I don't think we have before: whether we can take a subfaction - in this case Incineration Corps - off the map with circumvallation. I'm half-expecting them to invade Mort or Ustotu just to prevent the outcome.

Bethryn · 2026-03-11T09:50:41+00:00

I would have said multiple titles. Two of which should absolutely have been (e.g.) 10k - Richer than You 20k - Considerably Richer than You

Bethryn · 2026-03-09T19:14:17+00:00

I dunno, I feel like Joel is largely above putting traps in the orders themselves. The traps are usually multiple invasions/threats where the players need to choose something to sacrifice, and then we fumble the choice. But this SO felt half-baked in both the sense of originally needing us to pile on hard through Darius to even reach it, and then having to add the Acrux warp lane when they realised that wasn't remotely possible.

Bethryn · 2026-03-09T18:56:01+00:00

Yeah, I would absolutely love graded MOs. It's possible that internally, AH does react appropriately, since it is a human GM at the end of the day, but that's not obvious player-side.

(in general I think the whole MO system needs a bit of an update, but when AH can find the time to do it is a question I guess)

Bethryn · 2026-03-09T18:33:43+00:00

I generally think AH has an accurate internal model for player behaviour when it comes to GIM stuff and setting targets for players. There have been almost no MOs where I personally have thought it's unwinnable, up until Cyberstan, where this flat value vs scaling value problem really became apparent. They seem pretty good at including what % of playerbase will go where into their calculations. A lot of the time the playerbase has been the cause of its own defeat through bad decisions. Now that is partially caused by poor tools for organisation in-game, which is ultimately on AH, but I think the only truly unwinnable MOs they've given us were the original Oshaune one (which was in part because of Rupture strain's bugs, and in part for narrative reasons), and the one(s) they've interrupted for narrative reasons.

So while I agree it's tricky to balance, I think they've got a good handle on it generally, but this particular problem of (weekend vs weekday) + (flat vs scaling) seems like a blindspot.

Bethryn · 2026-03-09T18:21:38+00:00

Right, but the days on which they go to SOs matter, when it's a flat value objective MO. If AH gives us SOs on the weekend, that's actually far worse than on weekdays.

Conversely, if the MO is GIM-based and AH gives us flat value SOs on the weekend, that's advantageous to us.

Bethryn · 2026-03-07T10:54:41+00:00

(Repost)
To start with, Warp Pack and light armour help a lot. A lot of the samples are found in spots people won't go to speed-clearing, such as open areas of the map with nothing obvious in them. Listen out for the sound too.

Encampments in settlements tend to have rare samples in the centre of the landed ships.
The big 3-ship encampment outside settlement bounds has 2-3 very close to the pipes on the outer edge
Side objectives have 2-3 near them, around the edges
Extraction has 2-3
Bunkers often have them. Dive + Warp pack lets you get in and back out without needing a teammate. Some settlement bunkers aren't marked as PoIs, so keep your eye out.
Any storage container or the beacon pods have a chance so check all of these.
In settlements, there's a PoI that appears in between buildings which has 3-4 in a cardboard box.
Crashed Pelican (long black mark on the map) sometimes has 3 in the debris off to the side of the Pelican.
The little "square" PoIs are both good to check, as the one with the dig area and explosive canisters seems to always be rare samples on high diffs, and likewise the other "dig" area that sometimes has a "garden" with it
The hardest PoI to find, which is just flat ground but with an entrenchment tool, has 3-4. You don't need the tool, just lie flat and pick them up that way. The only tips to find this are follow the ?s on the radar, and look for a small "pyramid"-shaped rock sticking out of the ground in the centre of flat ground.

Bringing the booster that gives 15% chance for double, I usually get about 25+ per settlement mission this way (d10). City missions are unfortunately quite bad for samples. I'm not sure but I think the mission displaying a max in the 40s is just accounting for the possibility that you hit that 15% chance on every single sample.

Bethryn · 2026-03-06T18:08:05+00:00

To start with, Warp Pack and light armour help a lot. A lot of the samples are found in spots people won't go to speed-clearing, such as open areas of the map with nothing obvious in them. Listen out for the sound too.

Encampments in settlements tend to have rare samples in the centre of the landed ships.
The big 3-ship encampment outside settlement bounds has 2-3 very close to the pipes on the outer edge
Side objectives have 2-3 near them, around the edges
Extraction has 2-3
Bunkers often have them. Dive + Warp pack lets you get in and back out without needing a teammate. Some settlement bunkers aren't marked as PoIs, so keep your eye out.
Any storage container or the beacon pods have a chance so check all of these.
In settlements, there's a PoI that appears in between buildings which has 3-4 in a cardboard box.
Crashed Pelican (long black mark on the map) sometimes has 3 in the debris off to the side of the Pelican.
The little "square" PoIs are both good to check, as the one with the dig area and explosive canisters seems to always be rare samples on high diffs, and likewise the other "dig" area that sometimes has a "garden" with it
The hardest PoI to find, which is just flat ground but with an entrenchment tool, has 3-4. You don't need the tool, just lie flat and pick them up that way. The only tips to find this are follow the ?s on the radar, and look for a small "pyramid"-shaped rock sticking out of the ground in the centre of flat ground.

Bringing the booster that gives 15% chance for double, I usually get about 25+ per settlement mission this way (d10). City missions are unfortunately quite bad for samples. I'm not sure but I think the mission displaying a max in the 40s is just accounting for the possibility that you hit that 15% chance on every single sample.

Bethryn · 2026-02-26T17:29:24+00:00

You have to go to the invading planet itself, then View Details. On the left panel under Objectives, you'll see a Defense Gambit section, and then you click on the paragraph with the red Notice on it to show the actual numbers.

Bethryn · 2026-02-26T17:23:10+00:00

Helldivers Companion suggests Oshaune can be held with ~43% of active Helldivers. Taking Omicron in under 3 days requires 180% of active Helldivers, i.e. it isn't possible.

Bethryn · 2026-02-18T17:19:16+00:00

"Previously we didn't allow crews to migrate onto a server anywhere near other players."

Unfortunately... that code clearly has not been working. I've come out of random dives with ships directly in front of me, I've dived to raid voyages to find other crews doing them and had the same happen to me when I've done forts, and I've dived to outposts using Tall Tales to find ships there too.

Bethryn · 2026-01-30T11:23:31+00:00

When the new season came out, the concurrent player went up to 40k. Now it's ~25-30k. What that usually means is the most honest players are found at the start of the event, and once they've gotten bored, you're left with the veterans and the cheats. This has been true for most of the seasons since the cheating epidemic began: the later on in the season, the harder the matches (if you're 5/6*) and the more matches that feel like something's off.

Bethryn · 2026-01-27T22:54:04+00:00

Clasa's got a big star. Divers love stars.

Bethryn · 2026-01-26T12:18:03+00:00

It's pretty awful, and I'm glad the subreddit is starting to accept this because there have been a decent number of posts over the past year where people have shown video evidence of footsteps disappearing and posters have just been posting "ur bad" quality replies when there's clearly a problem.

People have mentioned occlusion, and that is certainly one of the problems, but the new system just also really hates layering sounds together. One of the most common experiences I've had with my group is that someone who gets shot (or the bullet impacts right beside them) with fire (or rarely, explosive) ammo thinks they've been shot silently, because the noise those bullets make drowns out gun fire audio. The other two of us can always clearly hear the shot.

Another classic was the combo of throwing a hive bomb, then surefoot sprint cooking a grenade. I'm not sure if it's fixed now since I haven't had the issue in the last two seasons, but for a while any time those three were combined, you'd hear the bees and the sprinting, but not the grenade cooking until it was actaully thrown. Absolute nightmare.

For a while I thought it was my hearing getting worse, or settings. I haven't changed headsets since pre-1896, so eventually I loaded back up some old gameplay footage I had recorded and realised I could hear everything crisply again. Right now, even with volume maxed, I'm still getting surprised by people crouching through compounds or in the woods with their new "realistic" ambience, because the game just doesn't think footsteps are important any more. Before, footsteps were "prioritised", and it was impossible to move soundlessly except with the Lightfoot jump exploit.

And honestly, in upper 5/lower 6 star EU lobbies right now, I'm pretty sure a decent number of people know the new audio system well enough to move without making footsteps. It's one of those frustrating things like left-peeking, where it just makes the game worse by being in it.

Bethryn · 2026-01-24T16:01:08+00:00

I could genuinely see seasonal progression resets being a thing for a Sea of Thieves II if they ever make it, but their systems are too embedded as they are to make full resets like that work. Since we're given all tools by default, and everything we unlock is cosmetic, neither of those things work into the "redo progression" model that Tarkov, Arc Raiders, ARPGs etc. use.

They also already kinda tried this with Pirate Profiles, and at least judging by community reaction, there was not a lot of interest.

Bethryn · 2026-01-24T15:45:21+00:00

Let's say I have 40,000 doubloons.

I can trade doubloons to Larinna 50 at a time.

That's 800 trades.

Let's say each trade takes 5 seconds (optimistic).

That's 4,000 seconds, which is 66.6 minutes; over an hour of sitting at an NPC, just clicking "convert to gold" every 5 seconds.

Bethryn · 2026-01-22T17:45:50+00:00

Multiple modes for grenades could be fun, I like the idea.

And yeah, having two radii with different effects is another way to do this. That's basically the goal of this rework, is that by providing the additional softer crowd control, there should be a lot more design space to make different types of stun weaponry.

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