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With the new patch at our doorstep, a larger question has been circulating the Helldivers 2 community – has Arrowhead regained the goodwill of the fans? Are we ready to trust them again? The question is as loaded as an EAT launcher – one missile and a high possibility of friendly fire. The community has offered their opinions, so let’s parse through a few of them.
Did Arrowhead do enough to win back the fans?
The original thread was posted mere hours before the patch dropped, by Reddit user WithGrit07, asking the simple question: “Hours from now, we will have another patch same as before, which had many positive reactions from the community causing the game to be overall enjoyable and increased the average number of players from an abysmal 8k-15k pre-patch to whopping 30-40k+ players on a random Tuesday. Trust was at an all-time low pre-patch, everyone saying that Pilestedt was all talk and everything being said in the Discord was just PR, multiple doomer posts of how the game will die, chaos divers even. One question, has Arrowhead regained your trust?”
Before we dive into comments, we’d like to say that we agree with the top one from PomegranateMassive71, stating: “They seem to be on the right track, but only time will tell.” It echoes our belief that there’s some movement in the right direction, but there needs to be more done before we’re convinced. It’s still too early to tell and only one display of goodwill isn’t enough for a community that has been maligned in the past.
Communication is key, and according to another Redditor, there needs to be constant transparency with the new patches: “[…] biggest improvements I could ask for is to release full balance changes in the patch notes instead of leaving things out or forgetting. Enemy spoilers notwithstanding there is soooo much that is constantly left out for no reason. Also, release the patch notes before the patch drops so we have time to parse the notes. I would rather read them on the train home instead of having to spend 30 minutes after work reading them in my free time when I could be playing the game.”
Most of the community agrees with the above sentiment, being cautiously optimistic about the game’s future. However, there are also those who have never lost any trust to begin with. Such is the case with Ntgco, who said: “AH never lost my trust. I played HD1. And knew they were going (are) to build a game of exceptional fun and expanded worlds. I cannot wait for the surprises that brew in the lore….the cloud has been cooking some vile mutants, and the black hole is going to awaken.” And they are not alone – plenty of other commenters stated that they never lost trust in Arrowhead in the first place.
Trust is a fickle thing
Yet on the other end of the spectrum, there are also plenty of sceptical fans. For instance, ZAGON117 is far more reserved: “I don’t trust them, I trust actions and their last action was decent. Their next one could be bad. I’ll play until it isn’t fun, simple as that.” Some took it a step further, criticizing the devs’ decisions when it came to reverting some of the nerfs early in a patch cycle. No_Ones_Records had a moderate yet critical view of the matter: “Honestly not yet. They said several times “We can’t reverse X change!” and the most egregious example is old fire. They changed it back like 2 weeks later. I support them, I’ve bought Super Citizen and will buy any other DLC they drop so long as it’s actual content. But they have lied in the past and have yet to lie since the – what, third time – they promised to make a change. This time though, they’ve evidently done something right. Player count has spiked and stayed for a while now. people are having fun. Is the game in the best spot? Probably not. More things need some love and the quality assurance is still shaky at best, but things are moving in the right direction. In short: do I trust them? No. Do I support them? Yes.”
As with most things, only time will tell. We’ll have to keep our collective eyes on the situation and see how it develops. Arrowhead still has a lot of work to do to get back on the good side of a good portion of the community. Yet some good signals have been sent, and the latest patch has just dropped. We’ll just have to check back in with the fans and dive into the game to see how it feels now. See you all on the front lines!