Helldivers 2 - Are YOU doing your part for managed democracy?

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**BrookM**

Before the grumps come in, YMMV obviously, but I did not expect this game to go this hard and be so good and satisfying at everything. Hectic combat with satisfying shooting, fun strats to call in, both enemy factions fighting in completely different ways, what's not to like? Even friendly fire incidents, where your head explodes like an overripe melon when it's hit by a stray LMG round, nine times out of ten, you laugh it off and that's also what the hug emote is for. As many peeps have said before now: this is the Starship Troopers game people have been asking for all along.

That said.. the devs are still reeling from just how successful the game is on both PS5 and PC, their servers are still struggling with the weekend uptick in players and right now the bonus 50% XP - Requisition slip compensation modifier is not properly triggering at all.

But the game is doing so well right now (top seller, healthy player population and all that), that the devs have been hiring on more people to get new content out sooner rather than later! We already know that the mech suit is on the way and that the third faction from the first game may make a return, as "Super Earth in its arrogance has been biting off more than it can chew", per the devs.

So, are YOU doing your part for managed democracy citizen?

**Cyel**

I did my part A LOT with the first game. But the second one without the split screen multiplayer doesn't interest me at all. A top party game, for its hilarious couch coop, the first part was, absolutely awesome!

**Ahtman**

PC won't run it and no PS5 so I can only sit on the sidelines and watch.

**Eumerin**

I've been having a blast with it. But unfortunately, when my friends started playing last night, I was stuck behind a "Server Full" error message for an hour until I finally gave up.

Very frustrating experience.

**Souleater**

Sadly not this time around. I’d need to subscribe to PS+ just to play and the third person view would likely induce my delightful migraine/motion sickness combo.

My mates and I loved the first game - easily my most played online with IRL friends.

This sequel looks like a ton of fun; I’m really happy to see that folks are having so much fun with it. 🙂

**Grimskul**

Played a bunch of the first Helldivers, got the DLC and went pretty far in that game, so when this was announced, my friends and I were all onboard. I'm lucky that I'm on the PS5, so I was able to play week 1 since I didn't need to do quick matches, and so far we've gotten to roughly lvl 10. Biggest things that have thrown us off a bit are how stratagems play a much bigger role than your primary weapons compared to the first game, especially since you can't upgrade the primaries anymore. Hoping that we get vehicles added into the game again, would love to see how walkers and things like APC's/tanks are adjusted to the new 3rd person mode.

**Eumerin**

The current major goal involves playing 8 Defend Campaign missions against the Automatons. Since my friends weren't on, and I have lousy success in attempting to join other player lobbies, I went to the target planet, set the difficulty to Easy (2), and dropped in solo. Another player (Rank 1, as it turned out) joined me shortly afterwards, and we took a crack at it.

Huge mistake. HUGE mistake. It was a complete and utter mess. Constant bots all over the place pretty much all the time, and no way to kill them quickly enough. After we failed, I dropped it down to the lowest difficulty. We still failed, although we nearly pulled it off. But boy, are those missions a painful mess. It's not so much an escort as a "tell the civilians to run for it, and hope bad guys don't suddenly show up while they're moving to the target building - which is pretty much right next door."

I did get an achievement for playing a Defend Campaign mission even though I failed miserably. According to the achievement, only 0.1% of players have the achievement. I'm very suspicious about that number, though.

**BrookM**

The current priority mission for the bots; evacuate 30 scientists, is bugged! The mission is supposed to have a 40 minute timer, but they shortened it to 15 minutes, but forgot to adjust the enemy wave ratio to compensate for this, meaning you will get 40 minutes worth of enemy waves crammed into those 15 minutes, it's the main reason why the war effort against the bots has dropped off so sharply. We tried the mission on hard and barely got by with three players, but it's both not fun and the XP pay-out is not worth it either, so we went back to hunting actual bugs instead.

edit.

Just now checked the current progress of the major order and 2 out of 8 defence operations have been achieved against the bots. These are not supposed to be easy goals to reach, but I get a feeling that this one will probably fail due to the bug and low pay-out in both XP and other things.

**Pacific**

At the moment just giving it a few weeks for them to iron out crossplay and other bugs then my pals and I are going to jump right in.

The first one was honestly the most fun I have ever had playing couch co-op. I would say up there with N64 GoldenEye back in the day, almost crying with laughter with the team kills and people accidentally dropping airstrikes on themselves etc. it was an absolutely wonderful game, this one has a lot to live up to!

**BrookM**

I do not blame people for giving it a few more weeks to settle down, server capacity was upped yet again, but more and more players come flooding in due to positive reviews and a lot of promotion from YouTubers and the like, so on the weekends and during certain peak hours in the US, there's still a short wait to get a spot. It's not ideal, but it's the right kind of success to have.

**Eumerin**

BrookM wrote:
The current priority mission for the bots; evacuate 30 scientists, is bugged! The mission is supposed to have a 40 minute timer, but they shortened it to 15 minutes, but forgot to adjust the enemy wave ratio to compensate for this, meaning you will get 40 minutes worth of enemy waves crammed into those 15 minutes, it's the main reason why the war effort against the bots has dropped off so sharply. We tried the mission on hard and barely got by with three players, but it's both not fun and the XP pay-out is not worth it either, so we went back to hunting actual bugs instead.

That makes a lot of sense. One of my friends got online last night, and we managed to clear one. But it was *really* rough. And we both agreed that the reward was nowhere near worth what it should have been.

The issues you describe are interesting, because I thought that they were supposed to be able to rapidly change all of that if they decided that the players were having too easy of a time. But I guess it's not quite that responsive.

**BrookM**

The CEO of Arrowhead has come out and stated if people are still on the fence about getting the game, wait a few weeks until everything is fixed and stable, they'll be rolling out another fix later today which will implement a kick feature where people who are inactive for more than 30 minutes will get kicked from the game and free up a slot on the servers, as many people are staying logged in overnight now as to not lose their slot.

In other news, the mechs are raring to go, but require a final bit of polish, which they will receive once the servers have been stabilised.

**Eumerin**

Probably smart, as adding mechs might persuade even more people to jump in, making the server issues even worse...

**BrookM**

The CEO has been really honest and up front about everything so far, when called out on the double XP weekends, he did admit that in hindsight, it was a bad way of compensating people for server downtime.

That said, the game is still gaining more and more traction, not bad for a game whose predecessor had around 7000 players at its peak.

**Apple fox**

It looks really good, and the first was fun.
Was really hoping to pick it up, but not sure I could put in the time to make it worth it.

But it may mean by the time I can play it’s just way better than if I got now anyway.

Also need to find out how it plays on the PS Access controller. But I don’t know of anyone with both who review it.

It’s on my if sale risk purchase list for now lol

**BrookM**

Patch notes:

🔧 Fixes

Fixed crash when replicating ragdoll momentum.

Fixed crash when replicating destructions.

Fixed crash when displaying the mission end rewards.

Resolved a 100% block issue for quickplay matchmaking on PC

Tuned extract civilian mission difficulty.

Improved the way that we handle platform authentication to avoid things like the black screen issue at startup.

Improvements to our client > backend communication for better backend performance.

Implemented an automatic retry mechanism to quickplay.

Added proper login error message for error "10002038.”

🧠 Known Issues

These are issues that were either introduced by this patch and are being worked on, or are from a previous version and have not yet been fixed.

Login rate limiting when many are logging in at the same time.

Players can become disconnected during play.

Rewards and other progress may be delayed or not attributed.

Various UI issues may appear when the game interacts with servers.

Pick-up of certain objects in-game may cause characters to freeze in place for an extended period of time.

Other unknown behaviors may occur.

Japanese VO is missing from intro cutscene and Ship TV.

Armor values for light/medium/heavy armor do not currently function as intended.

PS5 players may still be unable to use quickplay.

Civilian rescue mission has been toned down, let's see if we can turn this offensive around now!

**Grimskul**

Sucks that they haven't addressed heavy armour yet, though it's good to see that the escort civilian missions has been fixed finally. It was a bummer whenever it was part of a mission list since you basically had to have a squad armed to the teeth.

**Eumerin**

Not only armed to the teeth, and properly (since many strategem types aren't appropriate), but also for poor rewards. With no secondary objectives or enemy bases, you can only get the rewards for mission completion and extraction, and can also get penalized for dead civilians. So the escort missions were ridiculously hard, but gave the worst rewards in the game.

**Grimskul**

Eumerin wrote:
Not only armed to the teeth, and properly (since many strategem types aren't appropriate), but also for poor rewards. With no secondary objectives or enemy bases, you can only get the rewards for mission completion and extraction, and can also get penalized for dead civilians. So the escort missions were ridiculously hard, but gave the worst rewards in the game.

That too of course. All that effort for basically no gain.

The weird part is seeing the number of cheaters that have popped up (unsurprisingly, primarily PC players) that are hacking to get a ridiculous amount of samples or aimbotting. For a purely PvE game.....why? It seems really pointless when half the fun besides playing with friends is getting through the grind.

**Eumerin**

Why? To get the good stuff. And to get the rush of completion even if they didn't earn it. Cheating in co-op PvE has been a problem for a long time. I remember hearing people complaining about playing with obvious cheaters in Dragons Crown several years ago.

**Pacific**

Cheating has been a part of online gaming since it has existed unfortunately. I remember reading about the very first MUD text games in the 80s running on ARPANET "Lord Testicles has entered from the north, riding a horse and armed with a twig and a tower shield. The twig hits you for 2,678,263 damage. You are dead"

I remember going to school in the early 90s and leaving my character on Ultima Online running on macros (repeating actions was a way to boost abilities). I came home and my character had been transported into a room with no doors with a sign on the wall "think upon what you have done", or similar. Was one way of dealing with it

**BrookM**

Who doesn't remember when Lord British was assassinated?

But yeah, sadly PVE games are also rife with cheaters and exploiters, on Reddit a few players have complained about having their games ruined by cheaters who gave them in one game more than enough rare resources they would ever need to upgrade everything.

Played another evacuation mission and.. eh.. barely 100XP for all the running we had to do. The devs are aware of this, but who knows if a fix will come in time, I can see us as a whole not hit this target by the end, it's just not fun and rewarding doing the same low paying mission over and over again.

Nay, the SES Advocate of Family Values shall commence operations against the Terminids instead. Seriously, what have you lot named your ship?

**Grimskul**

I feel like the family values ship name was the first thing most people went for (my friend certainly did at least), so I ended up going for a more serious sounding one for once. I was tempted to do a more direct 40k reference with the choice for Emperor of Mankind, but I ended up settling for Herald of Judgment. Wanted to see if there was something like the Invincible Reason, but this works too.

**creeping-deth87**

I haven't played this yet but it's all over my feed. I honestly don't even think I'd heard of the first game, but the clips I've seen of 2 have looked like a total blast. Is it class-based? Looks very Battlefield meets Starship Troopers.

**Eumerin**

creeping-deth87 wrote:
I haven't played this yet but it's all over my feed. I honestly don't even think I'd heard of the first game, but the clips I've seen of 2 have looked like a total blast. Is it class-based? Looks very Battlefield meets Starship Troopers.

No, there are no classes. There is complete character customization from mission to mission. You select various "strategems", which provide support abilities (ranging from orbital strikes to defensive turrets, to man-portable support weapons), armor (which provides a slight buff, as well as - currently bugged - protection), and basic weapons (there's a small variety available). All are unlocked over the course of play as you grind out the resources used to build up your options. You can go full-engineer build for one mission, and then switch over to a build that emphasizes orbital bombardments for the next mission.

**Eumerin**

I'm still having trouble joining other groups of players. I can do it sometimes, which is an improvement. But all too often I get the "Failed to join game lobby" error message when I try to join a group currently in combat.

The worst, though, is an instance in which I did successfully join another player, we dropped, ran around a bit completing objectives, and then got a message that another destroyer had joined the squad.

I was *immediately* booted back to my own ship, and out of the squad.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrookM wrote:
Who doesn't remember when Lord British was assassinated?

That wasn't cheating, though. That was a screw-up on Richard Garriott's part. There was a character reset of some sort. Unbeknownst to Richard Garriott - and everyone else on the development team - Lord British's Invulnerability flag got turned off in the reset. It wasn't obvious, since there wouldn't be any sign of it unless a character who wasn't supposed to enter combat took damage. And no one thought to check it.

And then one of the players thought, "Yeah, I know it won't hurt Lord British, but it would be amusing to put a wall of fire right where he's standing..."

**chaos0xomega**

I've been reading and watching helldivers 2 content, and I'm really considering doing my part for managed democracy. Looks like a ton of fun.

**Grimskul**

Seems like there's quite a few new test weapons and items out in the wild that's been leaked for testing by some select players. Includes a displacer pack, a new arc shotgun, plasma shotgun and crossbow.

The mech leak also looks like the Obsidian autocannon variant from HD1, so it looks like it will likely be anti-medium infantry and best against automatons.

**Eumerin**

Reportedly the devs have been randomly giving players the mech summon stratagem as a way to test it out. The chance of being in a group with someone who gets the stratagem (let alone actually being the person with the stratagem) is quite low. But that's what I'm hearing.

It's reportedly fun, but the ammo capacity of the thing sucks. And you can only use it once per mission.

**BrookM**

No chance of a resupply for its ammo? That would be a shame, our resident mech-fanatic has poor trigger discipline.

Still, having a lot of fun so far, the community rocks and the Joel memes are just chef kiss.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Well gak, Malevelon Creek has fallen again. 😭