In case you haven’t been paying attention to your Super Earth-mandated briefings, Helldivers 2 players have been entrenched in a defensive war with automatons for some time now – and while the playerbase has had some issues (and yours truly), I can’t deny that Arrowhead has achieved its goal of creating a rad as hell survival story. i don’t know
Even this second big order spawned countless memes, propaganda posters, and an entire planet of “robot Vietnam” where, say, 30,000 individual people were glued together for almost zero tactical benefit. They just think it’s neat. But it’s officially over – those damn dirty robots have won.
We’ve lost the main order – what’s next? Weld. This is so. While the war against the automatons is a long, drawn-out campaign, the next major command is “Hey. Go liberate a single planet.” Should be simple, right? Nice windy mission. Log in and out, earn 45 medals as fast as at least one day. Is that right?
I decided to extract some oil from the planet for Super Earth myself, and aside from some distinctly Creek-ian jungle vibes, I didn’t find anything too bad. It was a standard “kill bugs” mission. I laughed, my teammates laughed, the bug laughed, we killed the bug. It was a good time. Then I double checked Discord and everyone was having a heart attack.
Well, that’s the reason for the fear – politely helldivers.io and a couple of boffins currently tearing their hair out on the Helldivers 2 Discord as we speak. Veld originally had a recovery rate of about 7%. It’s about how many percentage points per hour the bugs are on the planet, and players need to overcome and win a certain amount of friction.
In the beginning, 80,000 souls barely made a dent with a survival rate of about 2% per hour. If they wanted to jump over 7% and make progress – well, it would take about 300,000 soldiers with boots on the ground. Although some of these predictions may be premature. Looking at Heldivers.io, these mavericks are currently pulling in a 6% release rate, just over half that number.
But Arrowhead Games had its hand on the wheel. In the time it’s taken me to write this paragraph, Veld’s regen has dropped to 3%, and the 180,000 bug-smashing souls currently taking over the planet in record time. If this pace had continued, the players would have won in less than 24 hours.
But after seeing the 7%-3% swing happen before my eyes, I was convinced that the third shoe would drop, and sure enough.
20 percent
Turns out, yes, Arrowhead is still into numbers. When I went to bed last night, Veld regeneration went from 3% to 6% to 20%. These changes weren’t particularly unreasonable, especially if Arrowhead’s intention was to have players contribute to the war effort over the weekend.
The players went out 13% recovery rate with about 230,000 According to helldivers.io the invaders – I mean the liberators – last night. The tracking site no longer shows the regeneration speed or release speed of the planets – just the overall speed. At the time of writing, our brave troops are holding the line at a rate of 0.34% every hour, crushing bugs of 122,000 soldiers.
I want to emphasize that sites like Heldivers.io are community-built tracking sites with homebrew code. They’re fun places to watch Galaxy Wars, but I’m sure there will be glitches in the data stream until players are given a developer-approved API to work with.
I also want to point out that, like the game’s server issues, the law of large numbers messes with Arrowhead’s expected GMing math. In the same way that you might test a server, I’d bet that these initial base orders are Arrowhead’s way of stopping the undoubtedly complex math behind 300,000 players, all affecting the same number at the same time before moving on to more complex ones. scenarios.
It’s fun to joke about a whimsical DM, but Arrowhead’s toil with Veld is to me the equivalent of a D&D dungeon master making a boss, being shocked by the damage his players are taking, and smearing numbers on the back of the screen to give them something good. battle instead of steamroll. Similar to playing a board game, I’m sure lots of notes are made so that the difficulty changes less next time.