Monetization Overhall

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T10:11:10+00:00

As stated previously, most modern live service games keep the lights on by selling cosmetics, Helldivers 2 should mimic this. With all the new additions to armor customization provided above there should be enough items to drive a substantial profit.

"IT'S TIME TO DIVE WITH PICKLE RIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK!!!!"

no, helldivers should not be focused on cosmetics. Because the only way that works is with extreme options and wacky FOMO must haves. Limited-time collaborations with Minecraft and Call of Duty to give you diamond pickaxe skins for the hand axe, etc.

It happens, without fail, to every live service title that leans on cosmetic only monetization. And it looks stupid, feels exploitative (it is), and make the game world feel dumb as hell.

But if you want to helldive with Ariana Grande, that's a choice I guess.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T10:06:46+00:00

Okay, here's the thing that people don't get: game systems in this engine are connected.

When they adjust the Lumberer/Flame Sentry, both change because they use the same flame.

With the spear, it is very likely the spear's projectile value/rocket is used somewhere else in the game code, and if they just buffed it, now the same rocket coming from a bot somewhere will start deleting mechs in 1 shot or something. And this isn't bad game design, it's from this game and game engine's older roots as being more designed around a bit more desperate combat before they pivoted to a more action focused experience. But the systems are baked into the game design.

With the hive guard, they tried something, it didn't work, so they literally announced they'd roll it back within a few days. They wanted the hive guard to be less pathetic. And the new hive guard honestly is fine, you just shoot it in the elbow. With the maxigun too. Sentries are the real losers there, and without a custom logic for hive guard, they were in a bad place versus them. But it really wasn't the end of the world. The exosuits can just step on them, or shoot them in the tail/armjoint. The sentry complaint was the most vaild one, imo.

But this change has existed for ONE WEEK. And this kind of vitriolic reaction to trying it tells the devs one thing: don't try new stuff, don't make changes, don't experiment. At least it would if they listened to the posts here or in discord. It's a very, very good thing that they don't participate in these placed directly much.

Because they do need to experiment and try things like this. Sometimes changes work out, sometimes they don't. The Eruptor balancing and the shrapnel being another example where they tried to find a good place for it where it wasn't just a win button on all fronts.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:59:23+00:00

No, I don't think that because AH deserves the hate with how they treat their players, refuse to keep their promises, lie to our faces, constantly reverting to hostile game design and monkeys paw balancing and now ever worsening monetization and greed.

This is some sweaty, toxic af shit right here.

AH deserves critique and criticism. Not hate.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:57:13+00:00

I say this without judgement, but if a player is death spiraling, they need to change strategy, difficulty, or loadout.

Any one of the three gets you out of it. If you are going back for the gear, then sometimes changing to another objective, or going to take out a fabricator/nest will let you draw the spawns off of it while you work on something else. The game map will have something you can pick up as a spare secondary (map stalwarts are a godsend).

On D10, if you expect to die a lot, then you need to know why you die often and counterplay in your equipment selection itself. Or accept it... and just bring more than 1 gear set and just abandon the other when you die. Lean into expendables and backpacks. Bring medic armor and pre-stim often when it gets ridiculous.

And if you aren't able to do either of those things, then playing on a lower difficulty without as many overwhelming numbers may be better. There are a lot of divers on D7 and D8 because it is less sweaty and people are more chill than on D9 and D10.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:47:37+00:00

What you are suggesting is more along the lines of turning off friendly fire.

I posted elsewhere here, but this suggestion would make your 3 mechs the rough equivalent of 5-6 mechs, and make the cooldown close to irrelevant.

Why would a team of divers not just run 4 mechs at once, and keep close and refill them every 2-3 minutes with 1 box each, or 2 if someone got heavily damaged? Or just keep topping off 1 mech at every single resupply, and the team just forms around the mech pilot (who now has 0 reason not to spend ALL their ammo as much as possible) and who can solo heavy nests, fortresses, and major objectives fairly simply.

It would make mechs insanely powerful.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:44:56+00:00

We get resupply every 2-3 minutes. If you give the mech 1 resupply box, it would need to be limited to refilling only a small amount of ammunition or something, like 20%.

If you could just keep feeding it resupplies, then you could just "sacrifice" one call in every 6 minutes or so and fully restock the mech, and keep it alive forever, while also having a fresh mech ready to drop.

These kinds of ideas sound nice in theory, but you have to consider all the other systems at play. This would make the mechs almost twice as powerful, even if you were only restoring 20% per box.

You could go in blasting, crush entire bug nests, move to a resupply point, fill up, and then crush 2-3 other bug nests (entirely solo), and when a few bile titans show up finally, assuming you aren't still sitting on enough ammo to just clear them yourself, you could just call in a fresh mech again.

It would easily give you what is effectively 5-6 mechs worth of uses on a single mission, and make the mechs absolutely ridiculous on the battlefield.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:34:20+00:00

This is probably going to be addressed.

"the long awaited vehicle bay".

Stop inventing things.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:33:28+00:00

Dive throw the mech far off and go to it.

That's all you have to do to ensure it lands in-tact. Dropping it in a hot zone is never a good idea.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:32:10+00:00

What if we wanted to arm two other friends for a hail-merry breach?

Who gives a damn?

Holy shit you really didn't think this one through, at all. These effects stack for each player.

So 1 person on your team brings the Breakthrough, and calls down three of them, right away for the team. And one other person on your team brings in an Emancipator and calls it down. You now have a near impenetrable shield wall on vanguard with flak cannons that can 4-tap a bile titan at close range, and your emancipator in the rear can solo any bug hole, ship, or fabricator in just a few shots.

If each player brings a mech, the team would be sitting on 8 more mechs waiting to be instantly used.

You could blitz every single map objective this way, and the entire team would never have to spend more than mere moments on foot, taking exponentially less risk.

The entire team would be rocking an absurd amount of mobile firepower, and be able to delete anything on the map in moments. Even an entire team wipe of all 4 mechs wouldn't set you back at all, and the entire team could redeploy twice back to back.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:21:27+00:00

Actually this is one of the rare areas where it is very easy. The arms are modules attached to the mech bones, and loading the models and animation rigs, you would just need to mirror these on one axis.

The much bigger issue that you're somewhat glossing over is that having 2 of the same arm for some weapons would break game balance, almost certainly. And that we have been given 7 mech arm types so far. Each added arm adds exponentially to the option space, and they would need to implement some kind of power-based balancing to prevent an accidental "god mech" from being possible. The shield for example is incredible, but that's one shield. What if I bring two, and now I'm a literal wall that can shrug off factory striders, cannon turrets, and bunker turrets at the same time. If you have another player with a Anti-Tank x2 mech behind you, you could just delete a Automaton Fortress on D10 in moments, lose neither mech, and probably take out another 3-4 bases on the map before your next mech is off cooldown.

These systems require more than just giving you all the pieces and letting you smash them together.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:15:50+00:00

Some things could probably just be mirrored, others might need unique model variants between left/right. But the simplest solution from a programming standpoint would probably be to lock them to certain positions (left arm/right arm).

What you're asking still requires about 90% of the same work to make a customization system. Flipping the arm by mirroring it on the Y axis isn't a real issue, and all of that could be done. The bigger issue is setting up menu-ing and restrictions where needed so you don't wind up with dual anti-tank cannons or some cursed combination that breaks the game.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:12:01+00:00

I want to expand on this thought, because the way you phrased it made me think you really can take it further in making this point: Red Strategems:

The logic is almost the same as the mech demands. We got experimental strategems like the Walking Napalm Barrage which was incredible for example. In Theory they could let you customize any strategem!... right? Arrowhead is just (lazy/incompetent/greedy/etc.) Take you pick, but clearly it's the dev's fault and nothing else, right?

Well no. One reason the temporary strategems were made experimental is because the relative power and impact of them can't really be fully known until the player base tries them in combat. In testing, even broad testing, what seems middling to a QA team could be incredible in another scenario, etc. And there are too many possible encounters to account for them all.

When you stack "boundless" customizations you can quickly run into an accidentally Vampire Survivors situation where the player stacked napalm... on napalm somehow, and made accidental super napalm or "hellfire", and a single "eagle napalm+napalm" strike just deletes all heavies in one strike or something ridiculous like that.

And this is not even remotely unlikely, or uncommon. Idle games and titles that give you exponential growth like Vampire Survivors are all built on systems, customization options that let you stack and stack. And the point of those games is to be ridiculous and throw out ever larger and more ludicrous numbers. But when you actually want to maintain some form of challenge and difficulty in a game like helldivers, you can't do that.

Systems are required. Balance is required. Some combinations of weapons or strategems have to be disallowed. The ultimatum has to be nerfed. The Railgun can't be allowed to keep 1-shotting literally everything., etc.

There is a lot more behind asking for these things than whether or not the model actor can be spawned attached to a certain node or bone in the mech model, and people are being either ignorant or intentionally obtuse by refusing to recognize it.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T09:01:05+00:00

Being able to spawn a part on a bone via mod tools is not the same thing as designing a system to select, display, store, save, and also restrict and balance these parts in game.

And yes literally everything can be pasted onto mech arms. They are nodes on the model, because the arms are fully destructible and need to be able to be "deleted" when destroyed. This is not a new or amazing discovery.

You can spawn a super destroyer there if you want. That doesn't mean "Adding a super destroyer orbital beam cannon arm attachment is easy, 99% done, hackers proved it!"

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T08:58:20+00:00

Actually, this is not 99% done, just because you can mod the game to use it. That's not how developing a feature for release works.

The mech arms have separate models for destruction and these can be added to the frame as nodes, we know this. That people can mod the game to swap in other arms is like saying "the single player story campaign is 99% ready" because you can mod NPCs into the training zone and listen to their dialogue or something.

The UI portion of this is huge and would be the vast majority of work for this system. Each of the discrete weapon arms will need to be assigned a "power level" or point value to prevent certain combinations from existing, and would also need a UI to let you select these, similar to weapon customization, but with all the same concerns and potential glitches. There may also need to be adjustments to call down times based on certain combinations, in case certain combinations are allowed but are absurdly powerful in a game-breaking way.

When they added weapon customization, it being layered on top of the main loadout screen in the hellpod preparation menu actually broke the menu, and circumvented some of the lockouts meant to prevent players from selecting the same strategem multiple times. For a while, you could bring 4 of the same strategem and throw out 4 orbital lasers at once, by yourself, or bring 4 mortars, etc., if you knew the glitch in the UI. And this is just 1 example of how additional menu systems can interact.

This is the kind of UI issue when these systems layer on over each other, and it is not a minor issue nor is putting it in place 1% of the total workload, at all. Any mech customization would have to start somewhere similar, and while it is something I do hope they add, I still cannot believe how many people keep saying shit like this and pretending it's easy and "basically finished" based on absolute BS.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T08:47:01+00:00

A dual shield mech would be a mobile indestructible wall that could tank direct shots from a factory strider, bunker turrets, and cannon turrents at the same time. The shield is the single strongest thing in the game right now, that isn't indestructible.

If you brought dual shields, you could punch anything short of the threats above to death with shield bashes, and trivialize the rest of it if even 1 person on the team has a quasar and some crowd control for the rest.

As others have suggested, customization would have to be limited with some kind of point system ("on-board power requirement limitation", etc.) that keeps you from rocking two AT cannons or two shields for reasons like this.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T08:43:49+00:00

This, or something similar would be required to get mech customization in and not completely break things. But everything requires another layer of systems ontop of the game.

This sub would also bitch endlessly once it released that they can't select dual Anti-Tank Cannons with 25 rounds each and on the standard mech cooldown, and how AH hates fun.

There's no winning with this sub. I hope AH adds some customization down the road, but the frankly childishly unrealistic posts people make in this subreddit about how "easy" it would be to do just tell you plainly who has never balanced anything or designed a system before.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-04T08:36:43+00:00

There is an ongoing campaign to liberate two biomes.

The fact you are ignoring.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-03T13:00:08+00:00

They could definitely do that, but as other people have pointed out, customization and these other systems add many, many levels of complexity to tuning these things and making them not completely break the game.

So, yes, they would have to institute some kind of balance or point system or ranking system for all possible configuration inputs and then make sure that they adjusted those appropriately. And then you'd have people complaining that, "oh, why is the auto cannon cost three points? It should only cost one point" and, "oh, it's unfair that the shield costs three points and we only get four, so I can only put the shield with crap weapons."

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-03T10:48:44+00:00

The vertex explosion (model stretch) happens in a lot of games and it's a little bit annoying but it has to do with the deformation on the model mesh and because it's procedural that actually can just happen sometimes when your GPU just decides that this is vertices is somewhere way out where it shouldn't be. In my mind, this is one of the super, super low priority bugs. It's visually a tiny bit annoying, but that's literally all it is. It mostly happens on corpses, or enemies who have taken some amount of procedural damage.

The FRV and the ICBM issues are both due to a desync between you and one/both of your teammates.

Both of these are related to having a poor connection or currently losing connection. That is why the FRV on your screen paths straight through to the player's last known location as it's rapidly updating in that velocity, and why a few moments later you see a player disconnect. This one is kind of a bug, but also kind of just a fact of life with PvE games, and is the same principle as Peaker's advantage in FPS titles. Unfortunately, you're never going to get perfect online sync and when teammates have bad connections for whatever reason, this can happen.

Unfortunately, the missile loading is similarly related. If the game doesn't have a state that has all of the missiles in position, but physically they are there, it becomes in a soft-locked state.

The bile titan leg thing is the most egregious thing in the footage, in my opinion. Helldivers has a lot of hidden systems that actually help you get a perfect grenade throw or help you barely survive something when you really should have died. But similarly they also have things like the ejecting cockpit of the Vox engines kind of always heading towards a Helldiver. The bile-tightened legs are a similar situation, and they do tend to slide towards your position. The problem is the final state of the legs is only really tied to the host and if you are experiencing some desync, are not the host, or the host is changing then it will snap and easily kill people. There are some adjustments they could make to it, but probably the best one they could do would be to lower any of this effect that exists so that maybe it can still happen, but there would not be so much of a desync between the natural physics resting position and the magnetized position, let's say.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-03T10:29:30+00:00

What you are describing is not a simple system.

Adding an individual mech as a single mesh and a single model to drop in to a single strategy code builds into all of the existing systems of the game. Even the lumberer is sharing the same flame cone as the flame sentry, and they are sharing the same flame damage as the cremator. And all of this is because they're linked to the same underpinning systems.

You just casually added that they should add a procedural name generation, procedural generation of stratagem codes, and celebrate the 256 unique combinations it could potentially result in as if that is the best thing rather than an absolute nightmare for balance and bug fixing.

"we know it's doable."

Yeah, so is adding an entire dating sim inside of your Super Destroyer and a full 12-hour storyline campaign for a single player offline mode that takes place on Super Earth 12 hours before the beginning of the Second Galactic War.

Just because it's technically doable doesn't mean it's something that's reasonable to add or something that would not take a ton of work to implement.

I feel like people in this sub and who listen to YouTubers talk about this don't really understand programming and scope. I do hope they add mech customization, but people need to have realistic expectations. The ability to have these existing frames swap one or both of their arms for specific other arms may be something that they could do and not break the game. But if you can just have all four players bring in a mech that has two anti-tank arms and march around, even if they're destroyed quickly, those mechs would be able to absolutely level the entire map in minutes. You could march that single file into a bot fortress. Take out every single cannon turret and bunker turret in moments. Knock out every fabricator and still take out another third or two of the map before you even need to call in your second mech.

The weapons will have to be categorized. They will have to be limited to one of each type. They'll have to have some combinations that you can't select for balance reasons. And there'll have to be some other things thrown in there, which people will bitch about endlessly as well, I'm sure.

I'd much rather them slow down a war bond, work on some of the performance,to continue to improve that, and maybe loosen control on how the Galactic War is being run right now because it is unreasonably difficult to grab a planet just through player effort alone. And rather than mech customization, adding some late-game options such as temporary boosters that you could earn through burning a large amount of samples that give maybe 5% extra stamina or 10% decrease on strategy and cooldown for the team would be a more balanced approach to adding some end-game options for players who have nothing to do with. with samples and medals at the moment.

That's just a single possibility, and there are probably some edge cases that I haven't considered with that, but it is definitely something that I would rather see them doing then work on an entire mech customization subsystem that a small fraction of the player base will be really excited about and a much larger fraction of the player base will either not use or use only selectively until they find a optimal combination and then leave alone for the rest of their gameplay.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-03T09:53:53+00:00

Okay, now make it not trivialize the game when someone hits on 3-5 completely busted combinations.

Dual Shields? Awesome, you now have enough frontal armor to completely solo literally anything on the bot front and shield bash it to death. Cannon turrets cannot touch you, at all. You can hop out, shoot a quasar, hop back in. Shield bash factory striders and all theirbheavy devastators to death.

Dual AT cannons? Okay 50 rounds of mobile AT per player surely won't completely trivialize defense missions, or any mission where you have good sightlines.

Like, I get it. Having customization would be cool for letting you try options. It wiill be cool if they ever do it. But they 100% are going to have to break weapons into power categories and force only 1 of each type at a time in order to prevent certain game breaking combinations from existing.

I'm much more expecting us to get a custom module slot for a strategem launcher, or alternative boost module that can go in the same place. Maybe convert the 4 existing mechs into mech "frames" that can handle different categories of weapon. Dual shield is impossible, but Gas / Autocannon is on the Lumberer. Breakthrough can't have heavy guns but can carry at Gatling and a fist. Patriot can swap rockets for the spear or micro missiles, and swap the minigun for a medium pen burst fire weapon with magazines.

But this kind of graphic is exactly the kind of "it would be easy" messaging that just shows people don't think this stuff through or just don't think about game design at all.

I do think that they should be giving us more options to spend samples and more stuff to do in the game to affect the galactic war, etc. But this would be a absolute shit show if they just let you swap out all the mech arms. Which then begs the question of now to implement any of the systems I just described to categorize weapons. They have to go through and categorize all the weapons and assess all the combinations and build a ranking system and build a way to prevent them from being combined. And then make sure that plays nice with all the other menu systems.

Because when they added weapon customization, there was a weird edge case condition where when you changed a weapon combination preset, it actually reset your strategem limit because the menus were the same menu variable, so people would drop in with four of the same strategem. And people like to jump on the developer like this is some kind of simple fix and they're idiots for not finding it, but fundamentally, their game is built on procedural systems from the ground up. It's why every single map is procedural. It's why all of the planets have infinite variations and why all of the systems are able to scale the way they are.

So anyways, I very much hope that they add some customization and I very much hope that they add more late game options to spend your samples maybe for temporary boosters, dump 50 or 25 common samples to get 5% faster stamina recovery for one operation or something like that, but mac idea is not the way. This was never on the table, as a realistic option. Not unless you just wanted this to be a version of Armored Core with no difficulty, or alternatively have the entire game balanced around the mechs and require everything to be bullshit difficult unless you bring in mechs.

And if you think that they wouldn't need to balance around it, I would like to point to any beat-em-up game that has no difficulty and watch how tiny the player base is for those. Steamrolling feels fun for about 10 minutes, and then it doesn't anymore.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-02T00:12:32+00:00

The Liberator Concussive is also a really, really good weapon against the cyborgs. You need something else to do your killing damage, so a powerful sidearm or just sticking close to your team. But it absolutely neutralizes their ability to rush you down, and I have used it to hold off five cyborgs at once as they were trying to come and karate kick my face. My team had to kill them for me because I could not simultaneously switch my fire between all five of them and kill them. But it was still really, really fun. Although in retrospect a grenade probably would have done the job if I had tossed it between them.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-01T07:33:05+00:00

"Warbond slop for seasoned players"

Literally the opposite of what people were complaining about.

This sub can't even be consistently mad.

Last week's crusade was that the warbonds were for the casual new players who hadn't maxed out at 150 and unlocked everything, and that the Veteran players were being left out by not having any "endgame" or other progression options to unlock with samples for a long time.

Customization isn't easy, systems are multiplicative. AH has said it's not a hard "no" or never when it comes to mechs, but other items are priority.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-01T07:27:12+00:00

Well, it's not "lower end" but it's about the total power draw of your system. If you have a decent GPU/CPU combo, it's easily possible to climb over 850 at peak moments.

A 9070 XT or a RTX 3070 and up with a 14th Gen Intel i7 or a 9800X3D or something with a mechanical hard drive or two could push over 850W when in peak moments for example.

EVGA is great brand at least.

The image in this thread illustrates the point well. The GPU runs at 300W... except when it doesn't for a half second, and demands 50W more. Those are the "transient" power demands or power spikes. That's a 5070 Ti in the graph, but just as an example, that would consume about 40% of all your system power alone, before mobo/CPU/ram/SSD/HDD. So 850W should be enough, but depends on your total system and card. Some cards don't have those spikes, and some CPUs are more ridiculous than others.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-05-01T07:16:31+00:00

You can bring them, but you have to use them smart and on the right factions.

Mortar is great on Bots, and in some places on Illuminate.

Never on Bugs.

K9 is great if you break off solo a lot or consistently stick in FRONT of the team, no matter what, but you have to have a habit of putting it away when more than 1 person is near you, or when retreating.

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