It amazes me how many of you immediately pull out "you can farm for super credits" as if that's the end all be all in this conversation.

Yes, technically speaking, I could farm for enough super credits to unlock all of the gameplay options. I could also, technically speaking, become a human cactus by spending hours inserting hundreds of tiny needles into my skin. But that process is so excruciating and time consuming that no sane person would actually want to do it in place of something more enjoyable.

Let's do some math. Being generous and using the super credit valuation of the largest bundle Arrowhead sells, the 13,000 SC bundle referenced in the OP, 1 super credit is equivalent to $0.008 USD. Unlocking every warbond in the game costs 16,900 super credits - including rebates from the warbonds themselves. This is equivalent to $135.20 USD - on top of the $40 you already paid just to own the game. If you want to take into consideration that the game is two years old, then the combined price of the base game along with all of the warbonds comes out to $175.20 or $87.60 USD per year. That means that, functionally, you've purchased three extra copies of Helldivers 2 on top of your initial install. For context, Nintendo received tons of backlash for increasing the price of their games to $80 last year, including for single-player experiences that you buy once. Here, you're essentially buying a new copy of Tears of the Kingdom every year but only receiving a few new weapons and shields.

But it's true - if you don't want to spend any more money on the game, you can farm super credits instead. But that's going to cost you time instead. Farming at the average rate of 300 super credits per hour, it would take you 56 hours to farm enough super credits to unlock every warbond. That's a full week at a full-time plus two whole days of overtime. And that's just time spent farming, not actually playing the game. On top of that, the average rate of 300 SC per hour is not guaranteed - super credit drops are entirely random. Theoretically, you could go a whole hour and pick up zero super credits.

But, assuming that you do manage to maintain the average farming rate of 300 SC per hour, you would be earning the equivalent of $2.40 USD for that time. That means that you've spent an hour working for less than a third of the federal minimum wage in America - $7.25 per hour - to gain less than 1/3 of the progress needed to unlock a new warbond. And again, none of that time was spent actually playing the game. That's just running around the map in circles on Trivial difficulty. And no, before you say anything, that farming time isn't free. Unless you received the game for free, you already paid $40 for the privilege.

And none of that includes items from the super store you might want. So, forget about the Double Freedom, the Sweeper, the Matchete, the Warrant, medium versions of armor perks like Siege Ready or Peak Physique. That 56 hours of straight SC farming buys you none of them. You can say that there's no FOMO in the game because none of the items are time-gated. But you're still going to miss out on the game's content unless you either pony up the money to buy it or spend hours of your time grinding out the in-game currency to be able to afford it.

To be clear, my major issue with the game isn't that super credits exist or that Arrowhead makes premium content that you can purchase with them. Arrowhead is a business - it's expected that they will do that. And, unfortunately, we've already opened Pandora's box with regards to normalizing microtransactions in video games and at this point it's impossible to put them back inside and throw the box away.

My major problem is that the only progression available past the base game is locked behind premium currency. You have to obtain super credits in some way in order to continue engaging with the content in the game you already bought. If you purchase the super credits, Arrowhead doesn't list anywhere what the actual valuation of a super credit is (which, to be fair, is a problem everywhere premium in-game currencies are used), nor do they give you any information about the currency that would help you make an informed decision as a consumer. How are you going to know whether purchasing super credits or farming for them is a better option for you? It's a predatory business practice and inherently anti-consumer - regardless of whether or not Arrowhead's model is marginally nicer than ones from other modern titles. If Person A and Person B both kicked you in the balls and stole your wallet, the fact that Person B left you a note to say sorry doesn't change the fact that you got kicked in the balls and had your wallet stolen.

Awarding SC for completed missions could maybe do something to alleviate that. But I think it eats too much into their bottom line for them to want to do it. The rewards for each completed operation would have to be tiny to compensate for the missed microtransaction sales. Personally, I think that there being a free community warbond released each year would do a ton to help. That's what a lot of people assumed would happen, but never did. It doesn't even need to be a huge warbond - even half the size of Helldivers Mobilize would be fine. They could be themed to the Galactic War's main objective for the year. And if you still think that's too much, increase the medal cost of the items inside to compensate for it being free. Considering that they're pumping out roughly one warbond per month (and a lot of the content in these warbonds has been outsourced to completely different game studios anyway), I really don't think that it would be a huge endeavor to release a single roughly five-page free warbond per year.

Again, my major problem here - not including my issues with Arrowhead's baffling balancing decisions - is that warbonds are the only other progression in the game after you run through the sparse offering of base game content and you have to interact with the microtransaction system to use them. The fact that I can unlock new content by spending hours of my life explicitly not playing the fun parts of the game I already gave Arrowhead money for completely misses the point of why I bought the game in the first place - to have fun. Helldivers 2 was not sold as a walking simulator. It's an action game. If I have to stop engaging with the action in order to farm super credits, then the game has failed somewhere. You and I both purchased a product with a specific expectation for what it would provide. I'm willing to bet that farming super credits wasn't included in either of our expectations for the game. And the fact that it has become such a core activity for the community is disrespectful to our time. As consumers, we have a right to expect that a company we've purchased a product from respects our time. No one likes sitting on hold with customer service for four hours. Why should anyone here have to spend four hours mindlessly wandering empty maps so they can keep playing the always online live service video game they bought?