Git Gud and Helldivers
Git Gud and Helldivers
I've been trying to be helpful on the Helldivers sub. When people say "X is impossible and Y needs to be nerfed/buff I'd go earnestly say "okay this is how it works, and these are the tools you have, and here is how you can use those tools to solve the problem or succeed or overcome the situation.
And, invariably, what I get back is abuse and scorn and insults and incredulity. The poster, and the hundreds of people supporting them, don't want the solution to be within them. They don't want to hear that they have not mastered game systems, that they don't understand how the weapons and enemies work, that they're making mistakes that can be corrected or that they can learn new tactics that will grant them victory.
The problem cannot lie in them. The problem must be external. The game must be broken, or bugged, or the devs must be fools. They are good enough and skilled enough and smart enough to play on the highest difficulty, but they cannot win, so the highest difficulty is broken and the devs must mechanically reduce the difficulty until they can easily, effortlessly conquer, until their "power fantasy" of unlimited unearned prowess can be restored. If they are challenged, if they face difficulty, if they face hardship, that is a flaw in the game. All obstacles must be smoothed down. Their favorite weapon should be the ideal choice for all situations.
At first I was overjoyed at the opportunity to share my knowledge and expertise, to help others learn what I had learned and enjoy the sublime feeling of mastery.
Then i was confused, because the rejection of simple tactics, simple explanations of systems and ideas, must mean I was not communicating clearly enough. Surely, if I only found the right words?
Then, anger. Why won't they engage with these ideas? Why do they reject simple explanations clearly explained? Why do they insult and berate instead of questioning or interrogating? Where is the desire to grow, to overcome, to perfect?
Finally; contempt. I do not care. These fools, let them stew in their own ignorance and misery. What can be said to them? They cannot be educated, not because they are illiterate, but because they refuse the mere possibility of education. They refuse to accept the world as it is, instead demanding from god the utopia they surely deserve.
What can you say to someone like that? What can you do but sneer "git gud" and move on?
I'd never really questioned where the "git gud" cliche that Dark Souls players threw around so mercilessly came from. But now I suspect that I know.
I don't understand the problem. Every single difficulty of this game is very doable even for average players.
The main problem you face most of the time is that dying has a snowball effect, when you die you drop your equipment and it's usually in the middle of a swarm. Recovering from that at the highest difficulty usually costs tonnes of lives. This frustrates people but it's a part of the game, it wouldn't be "hell" without it. Millions of lives are supposed to be lost in the pursuit of democracy, players dying a lot is essential to the satire of the game.
One problem I think I see among the audience is that people have no emotional self-control. They do not know how to cope with dying. They have a very poor mental game. And when they get tilted they play worse and worse and worse too.
The other problem I see with players is that they simply are not shooting enough. So often I see them wasting time staring at the enemy instead of firing their gun at the enemy or throwing an airstrike. 5 seconds is the time it takes to put down 15 bugs that are on screen right now but instead you just looked at them and jogged in a different direction. SHOOT. Crowd clearance is an essential part of the game and every member of the squad needs to be doing as much crowd clearance as possible as often as possible.
The last problem is aggroing enemies that are not aggro'd. Stop that. It's totally unnecessary, and every non-aggro'd group should be engaged initially with an airstrike as the opening to the engagement anyway.
One problem I think I see among the audience is that people have no emotional self-control. They do not know how to cope with dying. They have a very poor mental game. And when they get tilted they play worse and worse and worse too.
Agreed. And I think the new respawn rules have exacerbated it to an extent. In HD1 there were no lives. As long as reinforcement was off cooldown, and someone managed to get off the strat before they got run over by a charger, all dead teammates would reinforce. If you wiped you wiped, and that was it. But if you were holding the strat when a tank blew you up it would hit hte ground and call everyone in. That made the team's survival critical, while the individual's survival was not very important. In HD2, with limited lives and very long reinforcement cooldown after you run out, the individual's survival becomes much more important and losing a life actually hurts the whole team. In HD1 it was sometime beneficial t blow yourself up if you were trapped on the wrong side of a swarm or illuminate barrier so the rest of the team could escape (screen tethering). You can't really get away with that now.
I don't know if they fixed it yet but there was definitely something wrong with the difficulty of the missions to extract scientists on Automaton planets. You needed to get lucky on top of having a highly coordinated 4-man team to trick the AI into not attacking the facility to MAYBE barely scrape by a victory. Those mission types would drop like 3-4x the normal amount of enemy reinforcements on top dropping more than normal amounts of the heaviest units. It was like 20x more difficult even on lower difficulties than the civilian rescue counterpart missions you would see in other operations.
They did deploy a fix for something on them, but it never really changed the difficulty. They're supposed to be that hard I think.
These are planetary defence missions so I suspect they're intentionally very hard to prevent players from stopping the AI from ever moving forwards with the war. That mission does not exist on Liberation planets that are already owned by the enemy.
Edit: sorry this is super hostile. I’m having flashbacks to trying to explain why a feature of a game was frustrating to me in DRG and having hordes of fans defend it as a thing I’m supposed to just “avoid” when the thing I was complaining about was stunlocking enemies and the meta status of dash
I’ve removed the hostile text because idk Mao speaking without knowledge you know
The problem cannot lie in them. The problem must be external. The game must be broken, or bugged, or the devs must be fools.
Very common in LOL community, there even is a conspiracy theory that there exists losers queue which is matchmaking intentionally matching you with bad players to reduce the winrate down to 50%
I thought losers queue was just a way to trash talk your teammates. Like you happen to have a few bad games and so then when your team sucks again they say "I must be in loser's queue". As in, my team is so bad. People actually believe that's a game system?
Some do
I think the type of people to continually post like that on subreddits etc have already made their choice. When I'm struggling to get better at something I'm usually reading other people's posts and advice, not posting myself to complain. If there is something specific I really can't understand how to do, I'll ask about that specific thing and take the advice I get. I suspect most people making posts like you describe are just their to vent and complain and don't really want help, hence their shitty reaction to you.
Personally, as an old who likes games but doesn't invest much time into getting good at them, I don't get why people are so worried about sucking. Especially in a PvE game. Especially, especially in a PvE game where the idea that you're actually idiotic canon fodder beneath all the ooh-rah bullshit is thematically baked in.
I just wish I had something that would play Helldivers. It seems like a game I'd really enjoy being rubbish at. And if someone helped me get better too, then cool.
With Helldivers, the game is very challenging and demanding on the player and the team. You can suck as long as you cooperate with your team and can contribute to success, but having one or two people on the team who don't understand how to play can really hurt the experience for everyone.
A core example is enemy patrols - Enemy groups patrol the map. If they see you they will call in an unlimited number of reinforcements. under most circumstances the reinforcements will never stop coming. If a player understands this they'll deal with any immediate threats and run away. The goal is to complete the objectives, enemies are an obstacle to completing that goal.
But players who don't understand that, who think they're playing a horde shooter, or who stubbornly believe that the in-game propaganda about Helldivers being one person armies is how you're supposed to actually play, they'll just sit there and keep fighting and keep fighting and keep fighting until they get overrun. At best, the rest of the team leaves them behind to die by themselves. At worst they constantly aggro enemies all around, making the mission much much harder for no benefit.
In a PvP game you can shuffle teams to make sure no one is always on the losing side. but with a challenging, demanding PvE game there's no fairness. The game is trying to kill you, and Helldivers in particular doesn't have a merciful AI director tasked with challenging you but not overwhelming you. Helldivers wants to kill you. A team can handle one or two players who aren't very good at shooting or struggle to consistently call in air strikes, but only one or maybe two, and only if they otherwise understand the game loop and are able to work with and contribute to the team. Four skilled individuals, playing as individuals, who don't cooperate are going to struggle. Any number of unskilled individuals who are not cooperating with the team are going to make things much much harder for everyone.
It's a team game that requires teamwork and cooperation in a way that most games don't.
Have you tried HD1? There's a small but steady community and it's a great game. In a lot of ways HD2 is HD1 in 3d, with the majority of systems and concepts intact.
If they see you they will call in an unlimited number of reinforcements. under most circumstances the reinforcements will never stop coming. If a player understands this they'll deal with any immediate threats and run away.
They're not really unlimited, breaches have a cooldown and another breach can not be called until that cooldown is up. The issue is that 1 person can't clear a breach wave before the next one is called in by themselves, so groups often get overrun if they're split between people focusing the objective vs people who want to clear waves fully.
A 4 person group that actually fights off these waves can completely fight them off and make the fighting go cold. A single individual can not. Groups should decide whether they're gonna be the run n gun objective hunting type of lobby or the full clear type of lobby before they launch the pods.
I can certainly see that. When I have dabbled in games I'm likely to struggle with but enjoyed, most notably Apex Legends for a while, it's always my instinct to learn what I can and be a team player. I've never had a problem following other people's lead, playing support, that sort of thing. And I've nearly always enjoyed it without seeming to inspire any ire from my teammates (although admittedly I pretty much never use voice chat with randoms).
I did play HD1 actually, back when it first came out (early PS4 I think?) and immeadiately enjoyed it, although always struggled to get past my own issues with top-down twin-stick coordination. I have mild, but diagnosed, dyspraxia and tend to be better at games with a first-person/over the should POV so that's a big part of the appeal of the sequel for me. Perhaps eventually it'll come to other platforms or I'll finally shell out for a PC that can do modern gaming instead of just work and older stuff. I appriciate the recommendation though!
"git gud" didn't come from Dark Souls (although dark souls is wedded at the hip to the concept). git gud started when i was in high school and multiplayer shooters hit their golden era (Halo 2, CoD:MW, etc) and a massive influx of casual gamers made matchmaking lobbies into shooting galleries for strong players. it became a pervasive meme across all gaming when nintendo released the Wii and Super Smash Bros: Brawl, which pulled in a huge crowd of - again, casual - gamers that had heard of SSB but didn't get a lot of hands-on time with it, and put them into contact with tryhards that had sunk thousands of hours of practice into the previous iterations on gamecube and n64
I think you're right about the casual/hardcore dichotomy. People who view a game as something like an interactive TV show - you're a participant, but you shouldn't be challenged or asked to learn anything, it's just idle passive entertainment. Vs. "hardcore" gamers who want to understand the system, dismantle it, put it back together, and then apply that knowledge to attaining systems mastery.
I am bad at this game so I simply play at the lower difficulties where my clumsy strategies work.
I love the clarity of the difficulty ranks for this reason. I think the game shines with maximum chaos but I love that a totally chill option exists for when people want lower intensity.
Low difficulty terminids is such a good vibe, feels like a whole different game.
these dorks don't have the spirit of OG Helldivers players and just want the new popular thing to play itself
they need to git gud
Totally agree
Or maybe they just want to have fun with friends and don’t have the social ability or clout to peer pressure them into playing something easier???
Game is a parody of the U.S. army, players are a parody of U.S. generals and military experts lmfao
100%. The game isn't satirizing some abstract fascism or 30s fascism, it is 100% satirizing western burgerstanis and the players, at least on reddit, are 100% the butt of the joke.
I thought the "bringing democracy on bugs" part was obvious
Wait these complainers are playing on the highest difficulty? Lol, ok.
I have one friend who thinks they need to take every fight and its frustrating playing with someone who refuses to think
true but at the same time taking every fight is fun
Isn't this just the
discourse? There is a framework to play the game within like using stealth and clearing waves that should be understood by the players. Within that framework there is plenty of room to discuss tuning or adjustments to the weapons and stratagems.If they are fundamentally misunderstanding how to play then yeah they should "git gud" but there are plenty of weapons and strategems that don't have a viable use in the current meta.
Another issue I'm seeing is that a lot of people are seeing those viral tiktoks to farm medals and whatnot, and that's all done on super high difficulties while everyone just brings a bunch of mortars and stays alive on the wave clear levels. The problem is they aren't ever actually playing the rest of the game, so they max their level and get a few primary weapons unlocked and think they know how to run level 9 objectives.
Isn't the proof to those dunning-krugerants that there's other players clearly winning the higher difficulties, so obviously they're worse than those are?
That’s not really proof of anything… those people could just be exceptional from complainer POV
I like games where you can't fail :)
Tale as old as time. Been discussing this with fighting games forever. I've been playing fighting games very competitively for about 13 years now, and the shit u hear nowadays is very different than when I started.
When I started with mvc3, the general sentiment was "fuckin deal with it". Fighting games were not receiving a ton of patches to deal with broken or insane shit so what you got was what you got. In marvels case there was like...3 total patches over its life? And we played that shit for half a decade. If it was busted, then figure it out dummy. Or use it yourself. Also since online was busted this was all shit talked about at locals at the bars and stuff. Good times.
Over time as fighting games started simplifying concepts, and the idea of continuous updates became commonplace, weird nerds infiltrated. I don't really want to say casuals, cause there is nothing casual about these nerds thirst for validation and excuses. People who don't understand basic concepts of fighting games are demanding the absolute dumbest shit, and just cannot accept being outplayed. Hell, half the reason I play fighting games because I want it to be me and another person playing on the same stage with the same information. I'm not looking to blame anything but my own ability. This idea is not that prevalent in modern fg discourse. Just shittons of posts about "fuck this character, fuck that mechanic, this is dogshit, patch now. Netcode fucked me. It ate my inputs. Why does this character have this, why doesn't MY character have that. Shit game, trash game, all these games are bad. We need more patches."
People desperately don't want to accept that they simply have not put the time in or just aren't very good. And its ok to not be top 10 in a FG. Its actually really fucking hard. It's not ok when you feel like Bandai, Capcom, arcsys have personally robbed you and should capitulate to your poorly thought out ideas, and that none of your losses count because it wasn't your fault.
Accept the L. Accept the game and it's current state. Work with it and work around it, and play, learn, and have fun. Instead we have a bunch of players who act like they are temporarily embarrassed EVO champs lol.
I wish there was a more widespread culture of mocking anyone who starts complaining like that.
Ugh. there is in some games, like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, where as I mentioned the refrain was git gud. What I don't think many people understood about the Soulslike games is you're not supposed to win, you're supposed to persevere. The whole core theme of the Dark Souls series is people who keep powering through all the horrible bullshit because they don't want to give up. You throw yourself at the same boss fifty times because you only need to win once, you just need that one boss fight where you get in one extra hit and carve off that last sliver of health. There's no being bad at Dark Souls. It doesn't matter how much you suck as long as you keep going. Eventually you can grind levels or summon phantoms or just cheat and beat that boss. That's the game. Don't give up. Don't go hollow. The only way to lose is exiting the game.
But I think a lot of people saw themselves getting killed, and thought they were being punished, so they threw their hands up and said the game was too hard and oppressive. And they decided the people telling them to skill up, to read guides, to talk to the community, were being mean. I've heard tons of people complain that you have to go online to learn about mechanics and that they just want to play the game and they don't want to interact with the community. But the communal process of learning how the game works is a huge part of the experience. It's people working together, cooperating, collaborating, sharing knowledge, to overcome hardship. You don't have to participate in that, but if you don't, then Dark Souls probably isn't your game.
And a lot of people, they just won't accept that a game isn't for them, that not all games are intended to appeal to all players. Arrowhead's motto is apparently "A game for everyone is a game for no one" and that's really showing up here, where their balance patch shut down all the "PvE games should be empty power fantasies where every button is a win button" crowd.
I can kinda relate. I play Warframe PvP sometimes because Warframe PvP is fucking hard. Every single kill you have to work for in a way I never felt in CoD. If you don't understand the movement techs, if you don't talk to the folks on the discord about how weapons work and how to use them, if you don't practice, you're going to get absolutely creamed and it's going to be like 20:0.
Or Naraka Bladepoint, another game where the skill floor is up around Jupiter orbit. You get a kill in Naraka you usually earned it the hard way, and there's far far more to the game than just learning the buttons and basic combos.
Ive been having a lot of fun, Im level 10 playing on dif 5, I dont get how would anyone get angry like in LOL in a game like this, being cannon fodder is part of the gameplay, you have thousands of diferent explosions to use, It feels great to just carpet bomb the insects, the propaganda is funny too.
hell yeah!
Permanently Deleted
Reminds me of playing (too much) Warframe. Managed to get a friend try it with me, and that was a trip.
So for the uninitiated in Warframe you play as a child soldier mentally piloting a warframe that's basically a robot space ninja shell. On the higher difficulty levels the enemies will mostly one- or twoshot you, so you have to keep moving and the game gives a lot of means for you to do all kinds of wild acrobatic shit. Every time you do something like that, the enemies get a debuff in hitting you, so an enemy goes from hitscan bullets to shooting wildly when you do a cool flip and slide through the air while putting 10inch blades into their eyeballs with your akimbo handcannons (the game is pretty fun).
I explained this all to my friend, and what does he do? Sits still behind cover and shoots with a sniper rifle, refuses to do any of the flippy shit and just keeps dying. After I carried him a few times he eventually stopped playing. My dude was always the one who found the most broken strat in any game and then complained that the game was boring as a result, I guess actually having to do a little bit of work for that was too much
"Maybe having your game shipped with kernel level spyware somehow disincentives intellectuals from playing the game?
No, the community is just toxic."
~Principle Skinner
I got like this about splatoon and had to take a long break from the game. Sometimes, when you're mad, you just wanna be mad and share your anger with others who are mad (this is why r/saltoon exists -- That game is infuriating). Advice doesn't validate the anger, so at best it's aside from the point, which is just a dumb emotional outburst.
Immature maybe, but that's what I think that's about
I mean any weapons besides railgun, autocannon and breaker is just not worth using imo
Figured that might be it, a lot of players get annoyed that the thing they like doesn't work and tbh that is a balance issue. Like yeah a lot of the items in eg Dark Souls just suck total ass and there's no way to know unless you do a bunch of experimentation (which will likely require farming for upgrade materials).
In my august and well researched opinion this is a mismatch between what players expect and what the game actually is. The railgun is viewed as essential because of a missapprehension that every player should be able to do anything by themselves. People fixated on the
failgunrailgun to the point where they become dismissive of the idea that anything else is viable.In truth there are many strats and weapons that can do what the railgun does, often better if you can tolerate specialization. The MG-43 will still be shredding medium enemies long after you run out of railgun rounds. The EAT17 is an all purpose problem solver. There are a wide range of air strikes and orbitals that cover most cases.
The only stand-out thing the railgun has is that it can do everything, alone. It's not a teamwork or coop weapon. It doesn't specialize, or require coordination of loadouts across your team. People can play by themselves, to an extent, without support from the team, and without supporting the team.
And what does that get you? A player base that doesn't know how to manage chargers and titans. Players run up against the limits of the failgun - slow rof, limited ammo, the whole "explodes in your face" thing, and it's bugged damage (if the host is on ps5 it's damage becomes massively higher for clients) and think something must be wrong. They will not, say, try running two eat17s, an ac, and an mg43 because they "know" all those strats aren't worth taking. They "know" everything else is useless because they're not coordinating with teammates to use anti-armor or horde clear strats as appropriate. As an individual they don't have enough firepower. As a team of four with a balance of weapons and strats you can kill the whole world.
Likewise, the breaker. It does everything and doesn't require much practice or effort. So of course the other weapons are trash, right?
Well, the breaker, like the railgun, is overtuned, and player's expectations of what guns should do and what they're for is out of whack with the game. Any primary in the game can deal with basic bugs and troops - that is to say, roughly human sized enemies. The primary weapons, excepting the spray and pray, are quite good at dealing with small, human sized enemies.
They begin to run in to problems when people believe that their standard assault rifle should be able to effortlessly blow away 650kg armored alien death beasts and 3m tall armored combat robots. An assault rifle or smg isn't appropriate for them. You need something bigger. The amr, gl, mg-43, jar, and a wide variety of strats cover this terrain. But they're not the railgun, so they're useless, so the enemies are too strong.
And then you go up a level to armoed enemies. For reasons i cannot fathom people think a 12.7mm or 20mm gun should pen main battle tank armor. They seem to think this ought to be another game where enemies are big piles of hitpoint that you can shoot with anything. The idea that armored enemies require anti-armor weapons seems to offend many people. And since they "know", with zealous fanaticism, that the railgun is the only good weapon, and it's not very good at dealing with armor at high levels, everything must be broken!
There's no willingness to examine their assumptions or evaluate any of the game's weapons and strategems on their merits. The breaker and railgun are wildly overtuned (and i suspect the railgun is suffering from several different bugs that make it much more effective against heavy armor than intended), but that's the meta and meta is god so everything else needs to be brought up to that level so all the meta players can win as easily and effortlessly as they believe they deserve. Anyone who claims that other weapons are not only viable but quite strong, and that over-reliance on the meta leaves players lacking the skills and balanced loadouts they need to suceed at high levels, is angrily chased away with insults and scorn.
I don't run the railgun or the breaker or the shield pack or the orbital railstrike or the orbital lasers. I don't like the limitations of the railgun and breaker. The railstrike and orbital laser have cooldowns far too long for what you get. The shield isn't worth giving up an attack strat for what you get.
The lib pen gives you accurate and precise medium armor pen at a distance, making it suitable for covering teammates, sniping light enemies, or mag-dumping in to berserkers. The jar shreds medium enemies. The lib explosive has massive stun and knockback and deals full damage to "weak points". The punisher and slugger both have brutal damage potential and the slugger has good armor pen. The defender smg is a powerful closer range damage dealer. The drm is very reliable at taking down light and medium bots if you can click heads.
There are a lot of very capable and effective options, but people have to set down their unwarranted conviction that the meta represents what the game " should" be, rather than bugged and overtuned stand outs.
I prefer the Defender to the Breaker by quite a lot.
Standard liberator and defender (and knight) are as good as the breaker. Liberator trades some damage to be effective and all ranges.
Slugger, scorcher and diligence are great, might need to pair them up with the redeemer and/or a guard dog to cover all bases but they outperform the breaker in their specific use cases. (Mainly vs med armor at range)
Liberator pen, lib explosive and Dominator are underrated because ppl don’t understand how weakpoints, armor and explosives interact, and I don’t blame them cos none of that shit is explained anywhere
If your team is willing to work together and specialise the other support weapons are completely viable (only exception might be the flamethrower). Crew manned recoilless rifle actually does the railguns job better, but you need to know where to position yourselves so you don’t lose 2 helldivers to sprays/explosions. (Ironically shield backpack on the gunner helps with this)
Literally a skill issue. Helldivers 2 maybe doesn't spell out what works well on what opponents and what not but it telegraphs it implicitly pretty well and you can figure everything out with a bit of experimentation, it's a very well designed game IMO.
It really is. And the patch is great. The laser cannon feels really good, the flamethrower is on much more solid footing. The 120mm and 380mm might a little too good, as they more or less just delete bot bases now. The slugger and punisher are just beastly and I wouldn't be surprised if they replace the breaker as the new "AHHHHHHHHHH THE GAME IS UNPLAYABLE WITHOUT THIS GUN IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE". Heavy armor feels amazing, the extra survivability is bonkers against bots and bugs and I've never felt slowed down by it. The new exterminate missions with that require 400ish kills are harder to just turn your brain off or spam mortars for. You have to work for it a little. All in all great improvements all around.
Lmao railgun got nerfed and now the subreddits crying about it
I've been doing the shittiest, most mean spirited victory dance all over the sub telling people how much they suck all day. I feel so vindicated, the patch was almost exactly what I predicted, right down to the railgun being out of line with other heavy weapons and being adjusted down to default to medium pen.
I figured this would happen too considering HD1's balancing (although I hope they buff my baby the recoilless back up to how it was in the last game) and imo maybe the Devs could have handled PR a bit more delicately.
That said, like omg it's really clear how many people just wanted to steamroll diff 9 and not, like, engage with the game at all on the game's terms, hell the nerf wasn't even that bad just switch to unsafe, hold the charge an extra second and shoot 3 times instead of 2 before switching to your primary and mag dumping. The exact same generalist loadout still works, it just has some drawbacks and a slightly longer time to kill to put it in line with all the other stuff in the game.
I finished 2 Helldive missions with randoms, with at least 1 diver managing to extract with all the samples, without voicecom; all the people complaining that the game is unplayable now are just straight up cappin'.
Just link them to this. It's a manual for how to get sweaty in games. It's a classic of the genre
Permanently Deleted
there's some stuff to unpack here, but most importantly I kinda wanna call out the idea that a game, in and of itself, is the only thing setting a player's expectation here. Games don't exist in a vacuum, they exist in the context of other games, and here especially there's at least a couple of things worth noting - two of which are that both dying and team killing are almost inherent to the style of game this is, and neither of those are as punishing as they are in about 90 percent of other games, and that failure is to be expected sometimes. Can a game do a better job at communicating this? Absolutely - but I would still argue that this only goes so far if a player is stuck in a mindset grounded in other gaming experiences and are not open to engaging in a different style of play. Add on top of that that once a game is released, like any other piece of media, the creator's ability to manage player expectations is greatly reduced, doubly so if the audience grows at an exponential rate and starts developing this brand of thinking outside of the game itself - again, there's only so much a developer can do once an independent community forms.
I guess thats true, but all of that is still a far cry from enabling a kind of “git gud” mindset about player engagement. Even if the game itself didn’t fail them, something did, and chances are they didn’t condition themselves towards a specific set of expectations on purpose. Overall I just fucking hate it when people say “git gud” under any context.
They were expecting about 50k concurrent players and got 750k!
I knew exactly what to expect going in, having played all the way back to the first Magicka. I actually don't like how HD2 handles re-vives. I think the limited lives make friendly fire too impactful, and make staying alive too important. A lot of the silliness of the game comes from death not mattering, but it matters a lot more than it did in HD1. Plus, if you lose all your lives you're stuck watching one person run around trying to stay alive for several minutes at a time, which is no fun. I'd much rather prefer the old 30 second cooldown and if you wipe you lose style.
I get annoyed with certain things people do too