I sincerely think Arrowhead panicked. The core team is only twenty people, they’ve had their heads down working on the game for years. Then a game that was intended to sell maybe a few hundred k units exploded, outsold most of the most popular games in history, and a niche comedy tactical shooter suddenly had a vast audience that… couldn’t figure out how to deal with a a fairly basic charging mini-boss and felt oppressed by anti-tank weapons.
Despite having very good daily player numbers on steam I think the vast social media hate campaign, the endless tirades and histrionics on the main subreddit, and the outright harassment got to them and they basically just caved to the mob’s demands. It didn’t matter that they had a steady 25k players, all they were seeing was seething, unhinged anger from every direction.
But hey, their 24 peak is went up to 35k as of this writing, so gutting everything that made their labor of love special and unique was probably totally worth it!
I absolutely cannot understand it. They added difficulty 10 specifically to be extremely challenging for people who wanted that… and then hordes of people… complained it was too hard? They didn’t say that, htey used words like “unfair” and “tedious” and “imbalanced”, but in the end they were complainging that the 10th and most challenging of 10 fairly granular difficulty modes was too hard for them and they demanded it be made drastically easier.
They had ten difficulties to choose from, but they demanded to play on 10 and for 10 to be brought down to their level.
The whole episode legitimately caused me to re-assess… uhh… there’s no not-arrogant way to say this, but my broad competencies compared to a normal person. I still can’t really grasp how people were unable to deal with chargers at all. “Clumsy armored enemy that charges you but is vulnerable from behind” is one of the simplest and oldest stock game bosses and it absoltuely, competely, utterly defeated the problem solving abilities of at minimum hundreds of thousands of people and I’m still struggling to fit that in to how I view the potential and limits of other people.
That’s because youre a fake gamer. Real gamers only play on the hardest difficulty, because they are the true elite. Only they are about to take on these difficult challenges that filthy causuals could never handle. So if the highest difficulty is too hard for a real then its obviously unfair, poorly balanced, and badly implemented. Hope that helped
I’ve had heated arguments with Soulslike devotees that hate even the idea of difficulty options, but considering that this particular game has a voluntary difficulty setting right there on the proverbial tin, what the fuck?
I enjoyed Vermintide 2 even while being not very great at the higher difficulties (helped having experienced companions in premades) but I knew what I was getting into, and yes, as a voluntary difficulty choice, things being really brutal and having to really strive to survive was indeed part of the fun.
I think, ultimately, the most toxic of want basically the impossible: they want to stand on a mighty gatekept hill of superiority with all the plebs/scrubs/npcs/noobs/whatever beneath them, but at the same time they don’t want to actually be challenged in a way that might humble them.
I think a big chunk of it is; Normal people cannot cooperate with others.
Like, Vermintide, Darktide? Pretty niche games where cooperation is both necessary and enforced by special disabler and assassin enemies.
HD2, success also required cooperation, but it reached a massive audience and most of those people… just… don’t… communicate. They don’t ping, they don’t use chat, they don’t use voice. They don’t even passively stick together. I worked out, it actually makes things exponentially worse when you have players that don’t cooperate, because they trigger every patrol and spawn, they don’t cover or protect each other, the players aren’t making use of all their strats together. If you’re all together you’re rarely ever not going to have some gigantic bomb ready to go. BUt if it’s four people running off alone they’re gonna get overwhelmed even by minor threats. And since they don’t know how to cooperate they don’t know they have to cooperate, so when they get absolutely ruined by something that would be trivial for a squad working together they can only think that the game is being mean and punishing them.
It’s sad and pathetic. How did we get to the point where people can’t even stay together and point at interesting things? We talk about alienation so much but this is it; People cannot communicate or cooperate at the simplest, most basic level.
Vermintide 2 has so many communication hotkeys/shortcuts it baffles me people don’t call out threats and whatnot more often. People with natural bond who don’t pick up tomes when another person has health duping/sharing is one of my pet peeves. I shouldn’t even have to ask.
Champion is secretly the hardest difficulty (more than legend or cataclysm) because that’s where all the “”““solo carry””“” players congregate.
I’ve played such bideo bames for decades, and I’ve seen so, so many “main characters” that couldn’t even entertain the thought of cooperating with others, at best accepting having disposable sidekicks.
How? HOW?
I sincerely think Arrowhead panicked. The core team is only twenty people, they’ve had their heads down working on the game for years. Then a game that was intended to sell maybe a few hundred k units exploded, outsold most of the most popular games in history, and a niche comedy tactical shooter suddenly had a vast audience that… couldn’t figure out how to deal with a a fairly basic charging mini-boss and felt oppressed by anti-tank weapons.
Despite having very good daily player numbers on steam I think the vast social media hate campaign, the endless tirades and histrionics on the main subreddit, and the outright harassment got to them and they basically just caved to the mob’s demands. It didn’t matter that they had a steady 25k players, all they were seeing was seething, unhinged anger from every direction.
But hey, their 24 peak is went up to 35k as of this writing, so gutting everything that made their labor of love special and unique was probably totally worth it!
Are you telling me that the self-described epic
got especially mad at the game being too difficult this particular time?
I absolutely cannot understand it. They added difficulty 10 specifically to be extremely challenging for people who wanted that… and then hordes of people… complained it was too hard? They didn’t say that, htey used words like “unfair” and “tedious” and “imbalanced”, but in the end they were complainging that the 10th and most challenging of 10 fairly granular difficulty modes was too hard for them and they demanded it be made drastically easier.
They had ten difficulties to choose from, but they demanded to play on 10 and for 10 to be brought down to their level.
The whole episode legitimately caused me to re-assess… uhh… there’s no not-arrogant way to say this, but my broad competencies compared to a normal person. I still can’t really grasp how people were unable to deal with chargers at all. “Clumsy armored enemy that charges you but is vulnerable from behind” is one of the simplest and oldest stock game bosses and it absoltuely, competely, utterly defeated the problem solving abilities of at minimum hundreds of thousands of people and I’m still struggling to fit that in to how I view the potential and limits of other people.
That’s because youre a fake gamer. Real gamers only play on the hardest difficulty, because they are the true elite. Only they are about to take on these difficult challenges that filthy causuals could never handle. So if the highest difficulty is too hard for a real
then its obviously unfair, poorly balanced, and badly implemented. Hope that helped 
I’ve had heated arguments with Soulslike devotees that hate even the idea of difficulty options, but considering that this particular game has a voluntary difficulty setting right there on the proverbial tin, what the fuck?
I enjoyed Vermintide 2 even while being not very great at the higher difficulties (helped having experienced companions in premades) but I knew what I was getting into, and yes, as a voluntary difficulty choice, things being really brutal and having to really strive to survive was indeed part of the fun.
I think, ultimately, the most toxic of
want basically the impossible: they want to stand on a mighty gatekept hill of superiority with all the plebs/scrubs/npcs/noobs/whatever beneath them, but at the same time they don’t want to actually be challenged in a way that might humble them.
I think a big chunk of it is; Normal people cannot cooperate with others.
Like, Vermintide, Darktide? Pretty niche games where cooperation is both necessary and enforced by special disabler and assassin enemies.
HD2, success also required cooperation, but it reached a massive audience and most of those people… just… don’t… communicate. They don’t ping, they don’t use chat, they don’t use voice. They don’t even passively stick together. I worked out, it actually makes things exponentially worse when you have players that don’t cooperate, because they trigger every patrol and spawn, they don’t cover or protect each other, the players aren’t making use of all their strats together. If you’re all together you’re rarely ever not going to have some gigantic bomb ready to go. BUt if it’s four people running off alone they’re gonna get overwhelmed even by minor threats. And since they don’t know how to cooperate they don’t know they have to cooperate, so when they get absolutely ruined by something that would be trivial for a squad working together they can only think that the game is being mean and punishing them.
A
Mandatory cooperation games seem to have a sort of curse like that when they get popular enough. MOBAs with teams come to mind.
Getting DOTA flashbacks…
It’s sad and pathetic. How did we get to the point where people can’t even stay together and point at interesting things? We talk about alienation so much but this is it; People cannot communicate or cooperate at the simplest, most basic level.
Vermintide 2 has so many communication hotkeys/shortcuts it baffles me people don’t call out threats and whatnot more often. People with natural bond who don’t pick up tomes when another person has health duping/sharing is one of my pet peeves. I shouldn’t even have to ask.
Champion is secretly the hardest difficulty (more than legend or cataclysm) because that’s where all the “”““solo carry””“” players congregate.
I’ve played such bideo bames for decades, and I’ve seen so, so many “main characters” that couldn’t even entertain the thought of cooperating with others, at best accepting having disposable sidekicks.