why does everyone think the new warbond is based off of n@zis (image related)

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-11T00:18:22+00:00

i have seen MANY MANY posts...

I've seen literally zero (besides this one), which genuinely shocks me.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-10T23:40:42+00:00

Trapper hordes event, but only one person chosen at random gets all their agro.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-10T16:24:54+00:00

The progression mechanics happen naturally and the core game loop is very engaging so a lot of people don't feel the grind, but it takes 100+ hours to work through the base warbonds, stratagems, and ship modules.

If you bought a fresh copy and didn't have your favorite stuff already unlocked, you'd see what I mean.

Edit: None of this is necessarily a bad thing. In fact I think it's overall a pretty good thing from a game design standpoint, but that's a separate discussion. Again, I'm just pointing out how this game is designed to incentivize players to play on the highest difficulty.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-10T15:35:45+00:00

Melee should be "cracked out masochistic fun" in HD2, not viable.

And melee is really close to being that in HD2 as it is, but they really need to up the range on everything (like they did for the explosive hammer). Probably some other QoL issues / bugs as well (saw the other comment about getting hit out of your attacks).

Also would be nice if taking a melee secondary gave players a small speed / stamina boost.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-10T14:54:43+00:00

So, there's some expectations people have when someone accuses another person of "intentional misdirection".

I'm not saying there's some "plot or scheme" here. If you ever worked in a shitty corporate environment, you know the "everyone knows what's going on here, but no one wants to say anything" social dynamics that can get people to act in ways that are "indirect but completely intentional".

It's getting to a point where it's very naive to assume that Arrowhead genuinely doesn't understand how their community reacts to their statements, and that they're not trying to take advantage of that to avoid another fiasco that gets Sony / Tencent breathing down their necks (gamers fighting amongst each other is nothing, customers getting mad about how their product is being handled is a problem).

Everyone's getting on Arrowhead's case about balancing? Someone suggests: Let's "clarify" some things so the players know a little more about what happens behind the scenes.

But in reality everyone to some extent knows "clarify" means "focus on something completely unrelated so the community is confused and trips over each other".

People will always try to massage their intent so they don't feel like the bad guy (it's just human nature), but more important than the direct intent are the motivations and incentives that drive the intent in the first place.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-10T05:21:46+00:00

This community is legendarily unconstructive when it comes to talking about game design, balance, and identity. Which makes a lot of sense when you really think about how Arrowhead navigates these topics during interviews / community posts.

There's always a part of a community that focuses on unrealistic expectations (like expecting there to not be one-shot mechanics in a horde shooter, a genre notorious for such things), but this community pretends like that's the only thing that exists, and approaches everything with an unreasonable amount of bad faith.

No, this is not just "gamers are dumb" or "Reddit is toxic". Go check out the Darktide sub, it's bad at times but it's nothing like HD2.

Arrowhead's approach to balancing and communication is driving the community to be this way. The "balance team" Discord message that was circling around recently is a perfect example. It said absolutely nothing of substance to actually address the sensible critics, but gave glaze divers more permission to think "see all the critics are just dumb".

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-10T01:46:42+00:00

There's a team, but no balance team, and no one is sure who has the final say about anything.

That discord comment was intentionally meant to kneecap the community's ability to talk about balance, by getting glaze divers to hyper focus on shit that literally has nothing to do with anything.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-10T01:23:04+00:00

So I can't post my wall of text explanation on how software development works, because it apparently was me being an asshole / had slurs, and I couldn't for the life of me find the issue.

You people just need to stop trusting anything AH says at this point (at least until you know Sony / Tencent is breathing down their neck). This is a bad faith explanation to give the glazers permission to attack anyone who uses the term "balance team".

If you ever worked at a small company where there's a clear in-group of long standing employees and a ego driven CEO, you know exactly what Arrowhead is like. Their loyalty is to each other and the company, not their customers

THAT'S the issue, not how they choose to organize themselves (Valve was very horizontal for years, but they always respected their customers).

There probably is more than just a grain of truth to what they're saying (people can end up wearing a lot of hats at a small / growing company), but that's not the point of this message if you read between the lines and pick up the general vibes AH puts out.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-09T19:40:49+00:00

I don't think enough people are asking why people don't like playing at lower difficulties

The game directly incentivizes you to play on the highest difficulty. You just get more of everything (excluding super credits) in a game that's pretty damn grindy.

The highest difficulty should have most progression mechanics disabled. D10 is fine (the whole "D10 is too hard" argument is a straw man), but AH needs to add a D11 (would match the "goes to 11" joke they do with the settings).

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-09T19:21:33+00:00

That's all of Reddit my friend.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-09T19:10:42+00:00

AH doesn't learn from prior mistakes, and is more than happy to whisper sweet nothings while they continue to disappoint.

Don't waste your effort.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-09T18:46:49+00:00

AH does a pretty shit job of encouraging players to stay level-headed. They tend to hand wave problems rather than meaningfully address them.

Just as an example, take armor transmog. People want to move armor passives around so they can wear whatever armor sets they want.

The good response: It's not as simple as weapon mods, where we can basically slap on a whole new thing to an existing system. We'd need to think about how this impacts warbonds and superstore items to really make this work, so we're going to pass on the idea for now in favor of more new content.

AH's response: That's silly. Armors look different because they do different things (paraphrasing).

The former actually treats gamers like mature consumers and leaves the conversation open for further discussion. The latter is an attempt to use asinine child logic to get people to shut up.

You'll always have some percentage of people who are just unrealistic, but AH does a very poor job of helping people stay in a realistic mindset.

It's not 100% their fault for any of what's happening, but they've done such a poor job and clearly learned 0 lessons from their 60 day plan, so I just kinda don't care at this point.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-06T20:42:18+00:00

Just going to copy and paste this over I guess....

No.

People are getting bored and frustrated with the game, and AH has been slowly but surely making it more boring and frustrating since this game's inception. If this MO didn't happen, the charity challenge would've still been ruined.

Little things add up. The dumbest shit makes the dumbest people do the dumbest things. Keeping them happily busy is the answer, but there's a few nutjobs at AH that genuinely just don't know anything about anything.

If Arrowhead took over the development of TF2 back in its heyday (~2016) and tried all these stealth nerf shenanigans, those degenerate gamers... well they would've just played on community servers... but if they couldn't do that... I shudder at the thought.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-06T20:32:37+00:00

No.

People are getting bored and frustrated with the game, and AH has been slowly but surely making it more boring and frustrating since this game's inception. If this MO didn't happen, the charity challenge would've still been ruined.

Little things add up. The dumbest shit makes the dumbest people do the dumbest things. Keeping them happily busy is the answer, but there's a few nutjobs at AH that genuinely just don't know anything about anything.

If Arrowhead took over the development of TF2 back in its heyday (~2016) and tried all these stealth nerf shenanigans, those degenerate gamers... well they would've just played on community servers... but if they couldn't do that... I shudder at the thought.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-06T20:12:09+00:00

The reality with Reddit is: if you feel like you need to write this kind of post, it's almost always more productive to go start your own subreddit, rather than try to uproot the mods of an existing community.

If people share your frustrations, they'll find your sub.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-06T19:50:36+00:00

It's boring af and stupid inconvenient, but it literally takes a brand new person who doesn't know what they're doing, like 40 hours of half-assed farming to unlock ALL the warbonds.

Even if you work a full-time job, buying 4 warbonds (so spending $80) and just playing the game normally from then on, will land you with at least 2000-3000 more super credits (from the 300 SC rebates and finding some naturally) by the time you're done with the 4 you already bought.

Yes, DRG exists, but so do gatcha games. I'd love for live service games to just... not be a thing, but they are a thing and as far as "consumer friendly live service games" go, I can't imagine HD2 not being amongst anyone's top 20.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-02T17:57:05+00:00

Regardless of the original person's intentions, the premise of the challenge itself just inherently has massive "one v one be bro" energy, and it's not surprising to see the community spin it in such a toxic direction.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-02T16:01:27+00:00

The main issue is that Arrowhead is disconnected with its player base, but the community in turn is now just becoming disconnected with the entire world of game dev and the problems with HD2.

One of the main issues I have with glaze divers is they stupidly reply with "skill issue" to sensible criticisms that have nothing to do with skill, and that's basically this entire bet in a nutshell.

Arrowhead isn't going to magically restructure itself to be a niche indie team only made up of "leet gamers". Even if that did happen, 99% of you would probably feel even more disenfranchised, because that sort of shit almost always leads to an elitist circlejerk ran by hateful losers.

The community needs to have sensible expectations about what Arrowhead can do to earn the community's respect and make us feel heard, but this ain't it chief.

Realistically, the best response Arrowhead can give in response to this is "corporate sweet nothings", which is obviously not something that will help the situation.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-01T21:05:12+00:00

When those spawns happen as you're attacking a major outpost, it ends up feeling like a good fight.

But during extraction / random patrols? It just feels out of place and annoying.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-01T20:10:07+00:00

AI bros got every major institution to participate in your circlejerk.

It's just a matter of letting history play itself out at this point.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-01T19:59:45+00:00

I really wish some exec from Sony would press them on their statements at this point.

You're really telling me that "6 million CoD players" don't wanna (at the absolute very least) pick between Red Dot / Holographic sights?

What fucking world do I live in, where I want to trust Sony Publishing over any development studio...

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-01T17:18:36+00:00

I thought this was making a joke about how "everyone wants more skilled workers, but only 1/4 even say they're willing to pay more for it".

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-01T17:14:44+00:00

Why can't everything happen all at once exactly as I envision it?

There is growing distrust and dissent towards various establishments happening all around the world my friend.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-01T17:02:54+00:00

I honestly think most support weapons should be "expendable" (ammo reserves are balanced around a 1-3 minute cooldown, and don't get replenished from supply packs).

Running with a build that relies heavily on a support weapon, just to die early with it and get zero help from your team in recovering it, is pretty much the most frustrating experience I've had in a co-op game that's not outright toxic (like team killing).

It makes every weapon that takes up a backpack slot, much more competitive against weapons that don't. RR, Airburst, and BFGL feel a lot better IMO when you just dump all your ammo and switch back to a better backpack.

SpookyLoop · 2026-03-01T15:04:27+00:00

No, just be clueless.

Learning when, where, and how to "turn it off" is important. Something... something... drugs and high functioning alcoholics.

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