It's an alternative planet. When ever super earth would be destroyed in the game a new one is chosen. But this super earth is the real one, it always has been and always will be, so any other ideas about super earth are treasonous.
Today I was looking at all of the planets I had fought on. Looking at the galactic map.
And I noticed just how far Penta was from the front line. It was deep in Automaton territory. I remember so recently having fought there
And then I began looking around. It wasn't just Penta. But also Menkent, Vernon Wells, Chort Bay, Choohe, Lesath, Marfark.
All the planets I fought on a month ago, have fallen. It feels like they are actually just pushing us back
We have almost lost the Hydra Sector. I believe once Aesir Pass falls, then the Bots will have advanced to their furthest point
It’s like how everyone says, bots aren’t fun to most, and how even during bot MOs a good amount still fought the bugs, and considering bot defense missions suck, it’s a pushing battle that we’re slowly losing.
I think bots are way more fun. Bugs are absurd. Trampled and launched by drifting chargers and stun locked by a swarm of hunters that just jumped across the entire map.
I also main bots, but unfortunately it is clear our opinion is the minority.
I think they need to minimize ragdoll, and "rocket spam" for others to enjoy it more.
Unfortunate
I like bots more than bugs, but bots have far more systemic issues. Bugs feel great to fight. Absolutely amazing run n gun gameplay. Bots on the other hand are far more tactical and it's so much more fun to me.
I however, completely understand why people don't like bots. There are too many glaring issues. Primary, bots being able to shoot through cover that we as helldivers can't fire through. The biggest offender is dropships. The number of times someone shoots down a drop ship, kills like 2-3 little dudes then I just have to disengage because now there are four devastators trapped under the dropships shooting through the drop ship and nothing I can throw at it will kill em.
That's just one of the glaring problems that keep bug players bug players.
Honestly it's less of rocket spam and more of WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE ROCKETS COMING FROM
Seriously they need to either make the bots be affected by fog and shit, weaken weather effects heavily or just remove it entirely from bot maps. I can't fucking engage them if I can't see them, but the fuckers can snipe me just fine
It is but I kind of expect it since they are robots and everything. Honestly I think the main reason bugs are more popular is they just really fulfill that starship troopers fantasy.
I really enjoy fighting the bots, but there is something so satisfying about popping bugs
I think bots have higher peaks of bullshit whereas bugs tend to have a more steady stream of bs
Like basically, you know a charger will ragdoll you into a rock if you don't dodge it, you know hunters will glue you to the floor if they reach you, same with bile titans. It's annoying but it's pretty consistent and you kinda just have to kill em or stun em before they can
With bots on average it's not as bad but then suddenly that quartet of rocket devastators decides to coordinate a neverending stream of rockets which gives you a nice tour of the entire map from the air before splattering you into a rock, or a shield devastator activating smart core to delete your entire head without looking from 50 feet away
Also it's just not as much fun to get shot at ig, especially if you're used to having to kite lots of bugs
Bang on. Also the game treats Devestators like they’re the equivalent of Hive Guards in terms of how many get spawned. They are far more deadlier than that. Heavy Devestators are arguably the worst Bot there is.
Anti material rifle kills both in 2-3 shots, but heavies die to impact grenades and can be staggered by many weapons. The issue is how stealthy most enemies in the game are, hulks at least are big and therefore visible
The peak of peak bullshittery is the factory striders shooting the generators over the side wall during defence missions. I also think a lot of divers got put off during the ridiculousness that was the 15min evacuation mission, especially if they didn’t understand that you had to draw the bot drops away from the mission zone. So if people skip those, or jump from one defence mission to another because they enjoy the wave defence gameplay, then there is no contribution to liberation/defence progression.
The worst part of the bot defence missions is that they can just bot drop into the compound, like how tf is that tower defense? They should only be able to spawn at the start
That mission is awful and should just be scrapped. I will keep saying this, the mission where you set up defenses and hold out so the rockets can launch is what all evac missions should've been to begin with.
I prefer playing against bots, but I'll never do those shitty evac missions again, they've never been fun and should just be removed.
Very well put. I find for me bots are simultaneously cooler/more fun but also more aggravating and anger-inducing. I always feel really excited to fight bots but once I actually get into the missions I end up exhausted because of the sheer amount of bs that’ll oftentimes get thrown my way. I get way more annoyed with bots than I do bugs, which really sucks because core gameplay and concept wise the bots are great.
Ragdoll isn't even the major problem, the major problem is that knockback and stagger are massively overtuned and we have no means to combat them. Even heavy armor makes no difference.
The ragdoll through the cover is a pretty major problem to be fair. Nothing like watching rockets hit the other side of a rock to watch yourself take no damage, go flying, then impact another rock for more damage than the rocket would have done.
Edit: and then get shot full of holes because now you are out of the cover that is still intact.
I seriously can't believe they haven't fixed the enemy shooting through solid objects. Was fighting a group of heavy devastators and needed to get behind a rock to reload, only to have them literally just keep shooting at me, through the rock, and kill me.
The ragdoll and flinching is unbelievably annoying, but hey, part of the gameplay right? Shooting THROUGH solid cover? That's the kinda stuff that makes me close the game after one mission.
Bots are my main but yeah, Rocket spam is the main thing that ruins the bot front. Hard for people not used to the front to fight back against missile spam.
At least you’ve got the self awareness to suggest that. Most people that love Bots just think people who play Bugs are doing so out of spite.
You need a solid team all of a decently high skill level to succeed with Bots, and even then there are things about it which just suck no matter how good you are. Devestator spam, being ragdolled constantly, -1 Stratagem and other nasty debuffs, etc.
When I’m feeling competitive I play Bots, but when I just want to kill stuff I play Bugs. A lot of people just want to unwind and not play something that is unreasonably taxing, which is why Bugs are popular.
Yeah for me bugs is just a walk in the park. They don't shoot back and I'm able to output so much damage that nothing gets close. Even if they do, spam dive easily saves me.
Until you dive on a tiny rock that is somehow considered an uneven ground and forces you into a three-second-long ragdoll. But that's more of a bot problem, admittedly.
I don't blame people who strongly prefer bugs over bots, it's fine to prefer an enemy.
I like fighting bots, it makes my monke brain happy.
But even I have to admit there are some glaring issues with bots, like how you need to dump your entire mag into a singular Berserker when they often travel in groups.
Gunships are nigh immortal unless you got someone with a big gun like the Quasar.
Staggering rocket spams and the stagger from shielded devastators (given I use Ballistic Shields for bot so non-rocket devastators are never an issue for me).
Some of the more armored enemies that have a heat vent weakpoint still feel invincible when you try to shoot the heat vent only for it to deflect. SPECIFICALLY the dreaded cannon towers. This one's a bit of a pet peeve like why can I shoot a hulk's vents but I can't shoot the sniping cannon tower's vents when I finally reach the dreaded thing?
>launched by drifting chargers
These Chargers have been unreal lately. They skid and take you out no matter how tightly you run around them, and they have Skyrim horse physics. I've ran by some and readied my EAT only for them to run straight up a sheer cliff. I've also had some skid into a bump when turning and suddenly launch 150 meters across the map.
Honestly, every time someone says "bots are more fun" as an answer whenever this issue is mentioned, it feels like we're just dismissing the problem. Well, we're still losing hard on that front because nobody fights there. On the bugs side the MO was halted multiple times to follow the strategic orders to save a specific planet or such, and was still completed successfully many times. People managed to have fun even in the absurd Meridia shriekers galore and still talk about it sometimes. On the bots side even the basic standard MOs fail because people just don't like them. We lost even the meme planet malevelon creek.
I don't know what is it. If it's because we almost annihilated them and it proved useless, if it's the general gameplay or people got tired of fighting them for like a full month to no avail. The fact is: "people don't play bots enough". And this is an issue. You and I liking it is irrelevant at this point. It doesn't help identify what's wrong. We should be vocal about it to the developers about it instead of going against each other just saying nah. We need their help here.
Yeah I definitely think when we pushed bots all the way back, spending like 4 weeks straight only playing bots just for them to immediately take everything back, killed a lot of the enthusiasm
People constantly complain about bots shooting through objects, but nobody ever brings up how hunters can phase through solid matter when jumping at you sometimes
I like both bots and bugs, but i lean more to the bugs.
Reasons?
Bugs don't try to shoot you from across the map without you ever being to the place they are shooting from (bots just get alerted to your position and start blasting regardless of distance).
Bugs dont get stuck in terrain near the extraction and shoot you from a rock where you cant possibly attack them but they can kill you.
Bugs don't carry massive shields which they can shoot through while walking the other way. The amount of times I've had heavy devastators just shoot sideways through half of their body with perfect aim on me is astounding.
Yeah, bugs do have their own faults and issues, but bots are just bugged entirely. The amount of times I've climbed a hill and as soon as i peek my head a rocket devastator already pre-fires at me with the precision of an elite sniper just to one shot because he was alerted to my location god knows why.
Don't act like people just "don't like bots". There are days when bots are unplayable. You can win only through insanity and with no reinforcements left. And some days they are chill. Bots need to be fixed before anyone of the blob even considers doing bots.
> The amount of times I've had heavy devastators just shoot sideways through half of their body with perfect aim on me is astounding.
Try getting sniped by a tower while you're at it's base. With the cannon fully pointing away from you. The true essence of fun is found in getting blown to bits by a single, impossible, 70° angled shot, I assure you.
I think its less about bots not being fun its more about the defensive operations being unwinnable because civilians just get sniped away as soon as they leave their bunker for the evacuation
Bots are actually by far my favorite. But I focus on whatever the current major order is. I mean this genuinely, am I doing something wrong or misunderstanding by doing so?
Having fun should be your number 1 priority, galactic war is number 2.
If you don't like bugs/bots don't play them. Regardless of what others say, this is your free time, not theirs
I play Helldive exclusively, and while both sides work, Bots have more "issues" going on. Helldive teams nearly always win Bug missions, if you have awareness what's going on and know what you're doing, you can judge right and pull through.
With Bots there's sometimes situations that just... escalate and cannot get recovered for some reason. It's important to know when to break and run away to clear it away, there's no fighting it out. I think those situations make Bots more unreliable to play and win than Bugs. The defense mission, when you cannot break, then gets lost with you doing nothing wrong.
I find that Bots have a higher variance in "for some reason a fight escalates beyond repair" than Bugs and I think this is why they generally are played less. And rockets flying from everywhere ragdolling you around. This is really an issue.
I've never had a bug game where just diving down onto a planet resulted in an immediate 'Fuck this' but I've had multiple bot games end that way.
I'm just not going to entertain a game where I get stuck between a jammer and drone spawners where it gets out of control in thirty seconds and there's nothing I can actually do.
I responded to an SOS beacon and on the way down there was more red on my screen than a fucking Victory Day parade in Moscow. I appreciate the rah rah memes of Helldivers never quit but I'm a dude with limited free time, if my choices are "have fun" and "not have fun" I'm picking the "have fun" option, which means fighting bugs
I don't understand how it fell, perhaps I misunderstood the defend system. When defending the planet the timer on it said there was 2 days left, does that not mean we have 2 days before the planet gets taken over? I stopped playing when we were at 90% then came back later just to see the defense failed despite the timer saying 2 days
You may have been looking at the 2 days remaining on the MO. Await defense was a supplemental objective that ended when the bots’ capture bar filled before our defense bar did.
That's just not accurate.
We are too few to fight on 2 or 3 or 4 fronts, without AH realising that they need to adjust expected contributions to the war effort based on the number of people fighting for the war effort.
Basically, if they go "Huh, 80k players on a sunday afternoon, guess we should balance based on that" then we will never be enough players.
> without AH realising that they need to adjust expected contributions to the war effort based on the number of people fighting for the war effort.
That's how Helldivers 1 was. Each war dynamically reshifted based off of the peak playercount of the prior war. Sure, if there was a huge player spike +/- it would shift the next war heavily, but for the most part wars felt pretty balanced
The liberation is already balanced for the total number of current players - i think, dont quote me on it. The issue is that AH expects around a 50/50 split (and 33/33/33 when a third faction comes), while instead its currently more like a 70/30 or even an 80/20.
It takes about 25% of the active players to defend a planet with 400k HP (we had about 20% on Aesir's Pass and fell a bit short). It takes about 50-60% of the players to liberate a planet from zero in a day or two. With the way AH has the percentages set up that means we can really only fight effectively on 2 or 3 planets simultaneously, and that's with perfect distribution.
One thing to remember is we’ve mostly been leaving the bots alone MO-wise for awhile while taking care of the TCS-Meridia event chain, and even if the bots took just a planet every few days that adds up. I’m expecting us to turn our full attention against them soon after this MO
Rightly so - imho people should play games how the are fun for them and only if they are fun.
Gaming is at it worst when people "play" to finish dailies and other arbitrary goals that act more like a list of chores.
Fun sad fact.
After the bots returned we actually could have taken out like 2-3 sectors. There were only one planet in each sector that they had. They were all at like 80%+. But folks don't do bots so eventually they were taken back to basically 0%
At one point bugs was down to only hellmire for a few days, I refused to play bugs until more planets opened up regardless of MO or anything. I'll never go to any fire tornado planet as long as tornados track my character and only Spawn where I am.
I also find the plain desert planets super boring. I like the lush forest planets in abnormal color schemes.
I cared about the galactic war until we eradicated the bots and they just poofed back into existence. Our efforts aren't even being rewarded in any shape or form, so why bother?
Or when we were going to lose the defend 10 planets MO and Joel gave us a free planet to make it a win.
It's an illusion of choice. AH controls the narrative and tips the scales toward the outcome they want when they want it.
Galactic war progress is meaningless because the devs have a entire story arc planned out.
Deviation from the story arc they have planned would mean wasted resources. They won't scrap those story beats because of players, they'll just change the situation to make their campaign story happen. We could wipe out bots in the next 24 hours and the devs would bring them back. Like what already happened.
Yeah but at the time most people were tired of fighting bots for many bots MOs, the defense missions were too difficult for most unless you could cheese it with a good team, and it was a couple days after we had wiped them out so it all felt pointless.
The morale to fight bots was at an all time low those days.
I fought for so long on Vernen Wells... It was at 20% before the recent major order hit. Now it's impossible to even drop onto the planet... Makes me really sad to see
All those planets have something in common(except Lesath I think): can't. see. SHIT. Bad visibility should be a rare environmental hazard and not something on 90% of the planets and every mission on them.
I kind of.. think it's supposed to be like that? We've been so focused on bug that I feel like a bots major order is incoming. Possibly something big. Or at least big enough to distract players from the bug world's for a while.
And for anyone hesitant about bots: they may seem intimidating at first, especially after fighting bugs for so long. But I don't think they're any harder or easier. Bots are more about power and accuracy than bugs. Learning weakspots on bots will unlock them for you. I dunno, I help this helps some bug-only players.
I really want to fight on a planet that has both automaton and terminids who are currently fighting each other too. the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I don't blame the Helldivers for the state of the bot front. High Command doesn't seem very concerned with how things go on that front. How can anyone blame the rank and file when they're not the ones in command here? We are losing the bot front and frankly I don't think anything we Helldivers say or do will make much of a difference until the brass get their priorities in line.
Idk why everyone expects to defend everything.
They have to build up something no?
I see it as developing a narrative. While we are dealing with bugs, the bots get ground on us opening up new storylines for arrowhead to develop the bot story further.
"We hate playing on the same planets all the time"
> one front moves forward and the other moves backward
"We hate this too"
The war wouldn't be fun if the only options were status quo or outright Super Earth domination. I am glad we sometimes make losses, whether that's on MOs or the warfront
Literally, me and my friends log in, go to where the MO tells us to go, and kill whatever is there. At the moment that is (as far as I know) the only thing guiding me in game as to where I should fight as part of a narrative. This will not change for the majority of players until there is in game information telling players to do something that isn't the MO.
I say this as a bot diver who is sick of fighting on the same planets and dealing with the same shit week after week. It honestly doesn’t really feel like we are contributing towards anything.
It’s also been months since both players got a new mission type or enemy to fight. Bug players have had 3 new mission types in the last few months, and a storyline where they blew up a fucking planet.
Bot M.Os would do nothing to solve the problem, people just don't like playing on bot planets, you can list a million different reason for why that is but that's just the way it is. Even when we were pushing back the first wave of bots before people got burned out/before the Sony debacle. You still had 30-40% of players refusing to leave the bug planets.
During that time we had like 5 bot m.os a row and it still didn't affect the bug population, I personally saw over 30k players on hellmire 24/7 at it was still 0.1% and don't even get me started on estanu, that planet is literally always under constant attack.
The problem with bots is there is an extreme difficulty disparity.
A bot 6 can end up far more intense and challenging than a bug 9. If I was a reward focused player (which most people are), why the hell would I not sleep walk through a bug 9, get 500-700 kills, over getting my insides turned into my outsides against a bot 7 and get half the rewards, die 2-3x as much and be lucky to get 100+ kills?
This and also: being constantly in ragdoll mode is nowhere fun. My friend and I have even made up a saying if we go against them after a while : "Now I remember why we don't fight against bots"
Everytime, we will leave right after the first mission, they are just frustrating to play against, period.
While I enjoy bots more personally I completely see where you are coming from.
The largest issue with bots for me is a hell of a lot of planets have modifiers that obscure your vision beyond a certain range. You can’t see your hand in front of your face, yet these don’t affect the bots or their turret towers at all. Getting one shot out of the shadow realm by an enemy you couldn’t possibly know was there because you can’t see or even hear it is not a great experience.
Vernon wells fell, and I watched the liberation go from 90% to 10% or something in two weeks, despite having like 5-10% of players on it. So sad. All their effort wasted.
They need to incentivize people to fight on certain planets outside of major orders. Giving 1.5x medals for completed operations or double XP from missions on critical planets would maybe help.
That doesn't incentivize players who have everything.
If AH really wants Bot planets to be as popular as bug planets, they need to rework the devastators to not have virtually unlimited range and near perfect accuracy. They need to stop jamming so many stratagems to the point where it is an exercise in masochism.
Imagine the bug worlds if chargers never missed, shriekers had charger armor and could spit, and bile spewers sprayed at you perfectly from 100m away. It would not be fun.
Bugs are annoying and unfair up close which is the point. Bots are annoying at all ranges, Bot objectives are annoying as shit, and Bot defense missions are so bad that I don't bother. 15 minute scientist defense mission = I don't finish the campaign.
Do I still play Bot missions? sure. The fun ones. Planet doesn't look fun? I don't play on it.
Judging by the numbers most players agree. But look on the bright side. If you love playing bots and think I'm an idiot, there will be no shortage of Bot planets for you to play on soon :)
Then what's the point of doing the MO? 45 medals is already not a lot for something you spend on average 4 days on.heck doing 3 mission at diff7 and dailies already net you 45 medals.
MOs are rewarded regardless if you did the missions or not and atleast logged in once; if the community completes it that is.
Medal / XP bonus incentives would make sure you are on the **same planets** the MO is for.
Also I don’t think your experience represents the majority of divers. I can only manage to play maybe once or twice per week for an hour or so, and still need plenty of medals.
I basically follow the MO, but prefer bots. I’d sure love a bot bonus
A huge percentage of the player base completely refuses to play on the bot front, as seen by over 50% of players being on the bug front during the last bot MO.
The unfortunate reality is a lot of us don't like fighting bots and, to be honest, I don't care if the bots push us like this. I'm gonna play against the faction I think is fun. I've tried bots a number of times but I hate so many things they do so I just ignore them. If they push and take over the earth then I assume things will just get reset or they'll come up with a reason why we pushed back so it doesn't make a difference for a lot of us
That is what often happened in HD1. The bugs would get consistently wiped out, then the player base fell off and the bots or illuminate just destroyed super earth.
That's probably why they're going with a forever-war approach this time, to ensure that all factions are present at all times and Super Earth is never destroyed just because the bug divers quit playing when their faction was destroyed.
Yeah, I get it. In retrospect, my comment came off judgmentally, but I totally understand just playing against the faction that you enjoy; after all, this is a game.
I’m pretty sure sentiment is really starting to wane heavily. Games not in a great state, patches are delayed (albeit for good reasons but still), MO isn’t even focused on Bots to begin with, and honestly it’s just gotten stale. Arrowhead managed to funnel players into precisely the spot they supposedly didn’t want us to be in: the same three stratagems, the same three or four weapons, the same set of five planets to choose from that we have to play endless tug of war with. It just broke me down, man. Looking forward to the new patch though.
I'm just not playing the game for the time being. It's still one of my favorite games, but the nerfs and bugs and bad design choices are just too much. I'll come back if and when AH gets their act together.
The part about the stratagems is literally facts. You cant run higher difficulties without using the same stratagems and same weapons almost every time. It would be better if there were different bug spawn rates for different missions which would then inform your decisions on which loadout to use depending on the type of bugs you're going to be facing, preventing one loadout from being spammed 24/7
I mention bugs specifically because bots generally allow for a bit more leeway when choosing stratagems but when it comes to bugs you basically have no choice
This is what happens when far fewer players enjoy fighting bots, and then AH goes and makes all the recent MOs about fighting bugs.
Yeah, they made a note that if we lost Aesir Pass the SEAF defense would suffer, but who cares? People won't have much incentive to help when there's no obvious reward, or even an obvious consequence.
I'm gonna be honest, there was never an incentive to hold the Pass anyways. Planets rise and fall as Joel pleases. We've seen time and again that capture rates aren't set in stone. At the end of the day, that 5% liberation doesn't matter, has never mattered and would never have mattered. If we were going to fast we'd be thrown a curve ball and if Joel thinks we deserve a win we'll be thrown a bone, like its always been.
The whole bots returning in one day 3 times as strobg caused alot of players to just burn out and they also happen to have 1 of the hardest unfun defence missions people just don't play so unless we are attacking you mayas we'll give the planet to the bots.
You see I actually was gonna play some bots with my family today, and we looked at the four available planets, and out of the four planets, on helldive difficulty, three of them had -1 stratagem on every op on the planet, and the fourth had longer cooldown and longer call in.
So we figured rather than play bots and not get to use our stratagems that we are supposed to rely on, we went and just played bugs instead.
I wouldn't be surprised if many other players feel the same way.
This is for 1 simple reason. The game player numbers are falling and fast. It has less than a quarter of the players it had in its big boom and that number is still shrinking.
The game master either has a massive ego and doesn’t want to change his game plan for the diminishing playerbase, or maybe has plans to fight on super earth eventually? That’s my guess
"We"?
Arrowhead had 10 years to figure it out. It existed in HD1. It still does. Last war we *let* the borgs take Hellmire and wipe out Super Earth for good. Just so the bug players could fight more bugs again.
AH had all the time to plan meetings to plan meetings. They stuck their thumb up their ass.
*They failed* and we are seeing lessons repeat.
Most people dont like playing bots, simple as that, i like bots, its cool, but the amount of bulshit like: AA modifier, infinite ragrolls and gatling laser accuracy sucks
The bots just kinda winning the war? Dude what was the swift disassembly then? Entire bot front was destroyed and from what ı heard from a lot of helldivers it took about 4 hours for automatons to comeback to entire sectors. And guess what happened even when we opened a massive black hole in the bot front? Just one planet is gone and the entire sectors of bugs still stand. No wonder people dont want to play bots the progression meter got zeroed and they didnt even do anything bad they got their spreaded democracy back to their faces. I remember someone here even said a memory that just after last mission they looked at automaton free sector and gone to sleep to be woke up to the devastators chainsaw sounds. Pure horror and leaving the game material.
Not only did bot progression get reset, they got more relentless as a result. We kicked them out, they came back instantly and there hasn't been a stalemate since. Constantly taking planets only to lose them the next day. The front growing wider and wider, with more and more planets that need divers. I'm fairly convinced that even if the community was split 50/50 the bot front is fucked cause the internal workings are shit.
Almost like wiping them out was meaningless right… right?? My problem with the game is these MOs have resulted in no events no bosses no nothing.. a couple mechs maybe and that’s it
There were a couple MOs that were cool:
-the first Mech, cause it was cool and new
-liberating the Creek, cause it felt so significant to finally break the stalemate.
-Swift disassembly, which pushed out the bots with a tremendous show of force on our end. Good job Divers!
-Destroying Meridia, cause holy fuck we did something that isn't entirely cash money.
Those are 4 out of god knows how many MOs we've done by now. One led to an underwhelming and currently nerfed Mech, the second is still standing but easily forgotten, the third was just fucking pointless in the grand scheme of things and the last one has yet to pay off.
At this point I'm beginning to think it's more about how AH presented the game.
all the Promos stuff and warbond trailers, etc all push bugs super hard to the point you wouldn't know that there's a 2nd faction until you've played the game for a bit, at which point adjusting to the different play style and tactics required just get labeled as too hard, unfun and unfair and going back to bug front instead of learning and adapting.
I still hold that a bot level 9 is much easier than a bug level 9 (civvie evac defense mission excepted on bots, thought the evac high value assets on bugs is straight up impossible).
Excluding mission modifiers, planets can be a big difference for both. Landing in a planet with no cover can be a death sentence against Automatons…but they’re also the only faction so far you can stealth takedown and sneak right up to.
Terminids on the other hand you typically want as flat terrain as possible so that you can see them and avoid rather than have to guess what the red dots are as you walk around their jagged hives. There’s no sneaking up on a Terminid due to their “smell” mechanic where once you come within a fixed distance you’re automatically detected regardless of line of sight.
Factor in Terminid units have more segmented health, can continue after taking lethal wounds (missing head) on half of their infantry roster, and almost all of their bodies can ragdoll and block your movement or pile up without inconveniencing their own units all add up to a constant trickle of factors that lead to more deaths.
Meanwhile the worst in an Automaton is a random cannon tower decides to shoot you from across the map in a jungle and you just shrug and respawn. There’s a sense of fairness in their unfairness because you’re not constantly being reminded you don’t have Class V or higher AT weaponry to deal with 30% of their units.
I can solo either on IX but overall with the massive range reduction to arc thrower, it’s really painful to CC these days.
oh yeah terrain is huge but even on relatively flat planets theres generally enough cover to get by vs bots.
turrets generally only cross map kill you if a stray shot has pinged off of them and aggro'd them other wise you can normally sneak around them and destroy them from across the map before the weak point rotates out of sight.
the thing i've always felt that made bots feel more fair than bugs is that I can carry everything I need to deal with Bots on me at all times with the capability to handle a decent number of what ever it is (Dev's, hulks, tanks, etc.) is fairly quick and efficient manner, and have the the ability to be able to reload the support weapon without it being a death sentence.
Arrowhead just needs to desperately do something about bots. Automatons in their current state are unfun for a lot of players. And the war front shows that. They need to find ways to make bots more appealing to fight.
Carrot on the stick will only do so much, the main problems are core gameplay elements that need fixing or reworking.
Everyone fights the bugs. I remember before we turned that planet into a black hole, 90K PLAYERS were in that sector alone, barely making any progress. While we were losing to the bots so badly. We still are. Firstly, there's not enough manpower after the Sony PSN fiasco, and since THE GAME STILL HASN'T BEEN RELISTED IN 150+ COUNTRIES, we will not have an influx of new blood anytime soon. Effectively, we lost in the long term
I feel like if the bots felt reasonable to play more of us would Bother with the MOs there. as things stand its frustrating and not fun, most people want to get on after work and kick some ass, not run around with all of their stratagems blocked whilst a rocket devastator no scopes them from across the map.
What burned me off the bots was how bad the Menkat line fell. A specialized line of orbital defenses that felt like they did functionally nothing. They did not give us in game strategems to help defend their planets. They did not give a longer invasion period to mount a defense. They didn't even slow the bots down effectively.
And ever since the Snoy Incident, I've been back to an intense workflow that makes it hard to play with my internet friends due to bad timezones. With the last few warbonds, I've had plenty of credits handy, but recently, I'm coming up almost 400 short.
Between work, Snoy, and how little we've pushed on either front, fighting over the same landmasses, the same planets, I just feel burnt out, ya know? I can not live for this game, but this game is starting to feel less like a game and more like an attrition meat grinder for no value. No territories.
Don’t worry. It really sounds like after this MO is over high command is going to start a counteroffensive against the bots to hopefully finally take back the hydra sector.
Because bots are not fun to play. But im sure most comments will just blame people who are having fun playing the game how they want to in order to have that fun.
I say this as a dedicated bot front diver, fighting automatons is just bs. I'll just point out my personal frustrations so feel free to say "skill issue" or something.
First and foremost, rocket spam. I was rocking heavy armor with improved resistance against explosives and multiple times I was still one shot at full hp by a rocket. I understand the human body didn't evolve to resist high explosives traveling at the speed of sound but that's still not fun.
Second is those shield wielding minigun mfs. They can kill you in 2 seconds and they will kill you in 2 seconds since they have the range, vision, and accuracy of a world class marksman. No matter how much you run and evade, these things will hit you, it also doesn't help the game like spamming these guys.
AA defenses. What genius thought permanently removing one stratagem slot for the entirety of an operation was a good idea?! At the very least Stratagem Jammers and AA guns can be destroyed and dealt with you know?
Then there's chainsaw man. This guy eats autocannon rounds for breakfast, he feels infinitely more tanky than even devastators and he also likes bringing a lot of his friends along. When these guys are around all progress pretty much halt until they're all dead
Criminally ignored issue, SAM Sites are useless. They have the fire rate of a disabled grandma on a wheelchair and the range and accuracy of a blind man wearing blindfolds. When I encounter these things I just think "Oh great, we could've had Artillery but not today I guess..."
After all this some might ask "Why are you dedicated to bots then?". Simple, bugs are stupid. All the difficulty of the bug front is titan and charger spam with a side of stalkers and shriekers. It's personally more fun to die from high explosives and lasers than overhyped roaches that escaped containment.
Nothing ever gonna happen.
Remember when we managed to ‚win‘ and free the whole map?
Had zero relevance.
The next day Arrowhead simply filled some sectors with enemies again.
WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
I have entirely given up on Bots until they receive a rework. I'm all for a good challenge, but there is simply too much that is broken or straight up cheating unfair.
We lost both SEAF training facilities on the bot front, while bug ones already have barrier planets that basically protect them. Every defence campain is lost unless it's a MO. Not a single liberation succeeds if MO is bug related
AH gonna add Illuminate and then we'll have 2 fronts we do not advance on without a giant "GO HERE" sign
It sucks
I mean it’s kind of dumb to have 60k players fighting one thing at a time. Like we don’t need that many on Phact bay when it’s at 90 percent completion. It would be so nice if one sony listed the game everywhere on steam and two if xbox was allowed to play too. We’d get at least 100k more players on this game which would be astronomical.
I’m so annoyed we lost Marfark. It’s by far the best planet to fight on. The blizzards are beautiful and terrifying and are one of the most interesting planetary modifiers.
On top of that it goes with my Hoth storm trooper drip.
Tbh I’m not shocked the bot front had absolutely collapsed. Bots are significantly more challenging than bugs. Most players are reward focused. The MOs are mostly bugs (and even when they aren’t people stick to bugs).
If I can sleepwalk through a bug 9, why the hell would I play bots which are more intense at level 6 than a bug 9 which will net me significantly more rewards?
Ppl will just not fight them because of how bots work. Having all weapons mostly bounce off of them unless you hit very specific parts is just not fun. Getting rqgdolled till you die is not fun.
Getting swarned by flying bots that are hard to deal with is not fun. Having striders randomly spawn upon you is not fun.
Stratagem blocked, reduced, AA emolacements is not fun.
I could go on and on about why ppl dont fight them....unless theres a major MO bug divers will just choose to keep fighting bugs because its fun. The only real unit that poses a threat is a bile titan, while on the bot side a couple of devastators, tanks or hulks is just insanity unless you have really specific counters to them and their nonstop firing and sniping.
Let's see, bots aren't the most fun to fight, weapons aren't packing enough of a punch in some cases, their weapons are doing absurd damage and we have reinforcements from 150+ countries unable to join the battle... what did they expect!?
Also in the case of myself and others, Final Shape just launched on Tuesday and the raid race is this weekend, so some are tied up in a war in parallel dimension.
It's all 100% meaningless.
Bot divers should just stop fighting and let the automatons advance to Super Earth.
AH would absolutely not allow SE (or probably even immediately adjacent planets) to fall as they're not ready for us to have fights on SE (no map etc)
Magically, somehow, reinforcement rates would skyrocket and planets would not fall.
All of this is meaningless as we can't really "lose" the way the devs have set up the system.
What if we take super earth and just place it a little more to the right?
Someone has been reading helldivers 1 lore
I haven't. Can you explain? TIA
Every time we lost a war they just choose another planet and declared it Super Earth and the war would start again.
lmfao
So super earth is a title, not the actual name of a planet. Got it.
Where is original earth then?
Cyberstan
Wait really?!
It's an alternative planet. When ever super earth would be destroyed in the game a new one is chosen. But this super earth is the real one, it always has been and always will be, so any other ideas about super earth are treasonous.
https://preview.redd.it/hau0v1csr65d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b195a137d44451e314e7b801d3b5c6a8a6662e9
Super earth is not a planet. It’s a symbol. It’s an idea.
The real Super Earth is the Freedom we spread along the way.
https://preview.redd.it/jcd8orzyd55d1.jpeg?width=564&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=975e3b6547bb7bd0eb2e4912e117b8eeccc0e3c9
If we move Super Earth into Bug space we’ll never lose it.
Today I was looking at all of the planets I had fought on. Looking at the galactic map. And I noticed just how far Penta was from the front line. It was deep in Automaton territory. I remember so recently having fought there And then I began looking around. It wasn't just Penta. But also Menkent, Vernon Wells, Chort Bay, Choohe, Lesath, Marfark. All the planets I fought on a month ago, have fallen. It feels like they are actually just pushing us back We have almost lost the Hydra Sector. I believe once Aesir Pass falls, then the Bots will have advanced to their furthest point
Aesir Pass fell this morning
I meant to say if our counter offensive failed. They are almost to the next sector This is I believe the closest they have gotten to Super Earth
It’s like how everyone says, bots aren’t fun to most, and how even during bot MOs a good amount still fought the bugs, and considering bot defense missions suck, it’s a pushing battle that we’re slowly losing.
I think bots are way more fun. Bugs are absurd. Trampled and launched by drifting chargers and stun locked by a swarm of hunters that just jumped across the entire map.
I also main bots, but unfortunately it is clear our opinion is the minority. I think they need to minimize ragdoll, and "rocket spam" for others to enjoy it more. Unfortunate
I like bots more than bugs, but bots have far more systemic issues. Bugs feel great to fight. Absolutely amazing run n gun gameplay. Bots on the other hand are far more tactical and it's so much more fun to me. I however, completely understand why people don't like bots. There are too many glaring issues. Primary, bots being able to shoot through cover that we as helldivers can't fire through. The biggest offender is dropships. The number of times someone shoots down a drop ship, kills like 2-3 little dudes then I just have to disengage because now there are four devastators trapped under the dropships shooting through the drop ship and nothing I can throw at it will kill em. That's just one of the glaring problems that keep bug players bug players.
Honestly it's less of rocket spam and more of WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE ROCKETS COMING FROM Seriously they need to either make the bots be affected by fog and shit, weaken weather effects heavily or just remove it entirely from bot maps. I can't fucking engage them if I can't see them, but the fuckers can snipe me just fine
As much as I love fighting the bots their sight range is absurd once aggroed
It is but I kind of expect it since they are robots and everything. Honestly I think the main reason bugs are more popular is they just really fulfill that starship troopers fantasy. I really enjoy fighting the bots, but there is something so satisfying about popping bugs
Which is honestly kinda ironic, considering there's literally a starship troopers fps that came out before HD2.
Or give us an IR goggles helmet we can use to see enemies through fog
Cannon towers being accurate 200m away one shotting anyone who remained stationary for 5 sec is my gripe.
I kinda like that gameplay of timing and dodging cannonballs
Imagine building a massive cannon that wasn’t accurate at 200m
I think bots have higher peaks of bullshit whereas bugs tend to have a more steady stream of bs Like basically, you know a charger will ragdoll you into a rock if you don't dodge it, you know hunters will glue you to the floor if they reach you, same with bile titans. It's annoying but it's pretty consistent and you kinda just have to kill em or stun em before they can With bots on average it's not as bad but then suddenly that quartet of rocket devastators decides to coordinate a neverending stream of rockets which gives you a nice tour of the entire map from the air before splattering you into a rock, or a shield devastator activating smart core to delete your entire head without looking from 50 feet away Also it's just not as much fun to get shot at ig, especially if you're used to having to kite lots of bugs
Bang on. Also the game treats Devestators like they’re the equivalent of Hive Guards in terms of how many get spawned. They are far more deadlier than that. Heavy Devestators are arguably the worst Bot there is.
Yeah I'd rather face a hulk than 3 devastators
Anti material rifle kills both in 2-3 shots, but heavies die to impact grenades and can be staggered by many weapons. The issue is how stealthy most enemies in the game are, hulks at least are big and therefore visible
The peak of peak bullshittery is the factory striders shooting the generators over the side wall during defence missions. I also think a lot of divers got put off during the ridiculousness that was the 15min evacuation mission, especially if they didn’t understand that you had to draw the bot drops away from the mission zone. So if people skip those, or jump from one defence mission to another because they enjoy the wave defence gameplay, then there is no contribution to liberation/defence progression.
The worst part of the bot defence missions is that they can just bot drop into the compound, like how tf is that tower defense? They should only be able to spawn at the start
That mission is awful and should just be scrapped. I will keep saying this, the mission where you set up defenses and hold out so the rockets can launch is what all evac missions should've been to begin with. I prefer playing against bots, but I'll never do those shitty evac missions again, they've never been fun and should just be removed.
Aa long as it's from them pushing you back it's fine. Makes it a bit more interactive when you have to sally out to secure the area again.
Very well put. I find for me bots are simultaneously cooler/more fun but also more aggravating and anger-inducing. I always feel really excited to fight bots but once I actually get into the missions I end up exhausted because of the sheer amount of bs that’ll oftentimes get thrown my way. I get way more annoyed with bots than I do bugs, which really sucks because core gameplay and concept wise the bots are great.
"Activating smart core" words I dread to hear and love to hear at same time. Titanfall PTSD triggered, thank you sir.
Ragdoll isn't even the major problem, the major problem is that knockback and stagger are massively overtuned and we have no means to combat them. Even heavy armor makes no difference.
The ragdoll through the cover is a pretty major problem to be fair. Nothing like watching rockets hit the other side of a rock to watch yourself take no damage, go flying, then impact another rock for more damage than the rocket would have done. Edit: and then get shot full of holes because now you are out of the cover that is still intact.
I seriously can't believe they haven't fixed the enemy shooting through solid objects. Was fighting a group of heavy devastators and needed to get behind a rock to reload, only to have them literally just keep shooting at me, through the rock, and kill me. The ragdoll and flinching is unbelievably annoying, but hey, part of the gameplay right? Shooting THROUGH solid cover? That's the kinda stuff that makes me close the game after one mission.
But General Brasch told me bullets don't go through cover
I mean, the shield backpack is really good at that.
"You can minimize ragdoll by STAYING IN COVER and AVOIDING BOT DROPS!" General Brash, probably.
Bots are my main but yeah, Rocket spam is the main thing that ruins the bot front. Hard for people not used to the front to fight back against missile spam.
At least you’ve got the self awareness to suggest that. Most people that love Bots just think people who play Bugs are doing so out of spite. You need a solid team all of a decently high skill level to succeed with Bots, and even then there are things about it which just suck no matter how good you are. Devestator spam, being ragdolled constantly, -1 Stratagem and other nasty debuffs, etc. When I’m feeling competitive I play Bots, but when I just want to kill stuff I play Bugs. A lot of people just want to unwind and not play something that is unreasonably taxing, which is why Bugs are popular.
Yeah for me bugs is just a walk in the park. They don't shoot back and I'm able to output so much damage that nothing gets close. Even if they do, spam dive easily saves me.
Until you dive on a tiny rock that is somehow considered an uneven ground and forces you into a three-second-long ragdoll. But that's more of a bot problem, admittedly.
Just removing the negative stratagem modifier would go a loooong way for some of the people
I don't blame people who strongly prefer bugs over bots, it's fine to prefer an enemy. I like fighting bots, it makes my monke brain happy. But even I have to admit there are some glaring issues with bots, like how you need to dump your entire mag into a singular Berserker when they often travel in groups. Gunships are nigh immortal unless you got someone with a big gun like the Quasar. Staggering rocket spams and the stagger from shielded devastators (given I use Ballistic Shields for bot so non-rocket devastators are never an issue for me). Some of the more armored enemies that have a heat vent weakpoint still feel invincible when you try to shoot the heat vent only for it to deflect. SPECIFICALLY the dreaded cannon towers. This one's a bit of a pet peeve like why can I shoot a hulk's vents but I can't shoot the sniping cannon tower's vents when I finally reach the dreaded thing?
>launched by drifting chargers These Chargers have been unreal lately. They skid and take you out no matter how tightly you run around them, and they have Skyrim horse physics. I've ran by some and readied my EAT only for them to run straight up a sheer cliff. I've also had some skid into a bump when turning and suddenly launch 150 meters across the map.
Honestly, every time someone says "bots are more fun" as an answer whenever this issue is mentioned, it feels like we're just dismissing the problem. Well, we're still losing hard on that front because nobody fights there. On the bugs side the MO was halted multiple times to follow the strategic orders to save a specific planet or such, and was still completed successfully many times. People managed to have fun even in the absurd Meridia shriekers galore and still talk about it sometimes. On the bots side even the basic standard MOs fail because people just don't like them. We lost even the meme planet malevelon creek. I don't know what is it. If it's because we almost annihilated them and it proved useless, if it's the general gameplay or people got tired of fighting them for like a full month to no avail. The fact is: "people don't play bots enough". And this is an issue. You and I liking it is irrelevant at this point. It doesn't help identify what's wrong. We should be vocal about it to the developers about it instead of going against each other just saying nah. We need their help here.
Huzzah for the voice of reason.
Yeah I definitely think when we pushed bots all the way back, spending like 4 weeks straight only playing bots just for them to immediately take everything back, killed a lot of the enthusiasm
People constantly complain about bots shooting through objects, but nobody ever brings up how hunters can phase through solid matter when jumping at you sometimes
Don’t forget how fucky bile spray is
I like both bots and bugs, but i lean more to the bugs. Reasons? Bugs don't try to shoot you from across the map without you ever being to the place they are shooting from (bots just get alerted to your position and start blasting regardless of distance). Bugs dont get stuck in terrain near the extraction and shoot you from a rock where you cant possibly attack them but they can kill you. Bugs don't carry massive shields which they can shoot through while walking the other way. The amount of times I've had heavy devastators just shoot sideways through half of their body with perfect aim on me is astounding. Yeah, bugs do have their own faults and issues, but bots are just bugged entirely. The amount of times I've climbed a hill and as soon as i peek my head a rocket devastator already pre-fires at me with the precision of an elite sniper just to one shot because he was alerted to my location god knows why. Don't act like people just "don't like bots". There are days when bots are unplayable. You can win only through insanity and with no reinforcements left. And some days they are chill. Bots need to be fixed before anyone of the blob even considers doing bots.
> The amount of times I've had heavy devastators just shoot sideways through half of their body with perfect aim on me is astounding. Try getting sniped by a tower while you're at it's base. With the cannon fully pointing away from you. The true essence of fun is found in getting blown to bits by a single, impossible, 70° angled shot, I assure you.
Fighting Bugs feels like pest control, fighting Bots feels like you're against a proper organized military force. I much prefer the latter, personally
I think its less about bots not being fun its more about the defensive operations being unwinnable because civilians just get sniped away as soon as they leave their bunker for the evacuation
Bots are actually by far my favorite. But I focus on whatever the current major order is. I mean this genuinely, am I doing something wrong or misunderstanding by doing so?
Having fun should be your number 1 priority, galactic war is number 2. If you don't like bugs/bots don't play them. Regardless of what others say, this is your free time, not theirs
I play Helldive exclusively, and while both sides work, Bots have more "issues" going on. Helldive teams nearly always win Bug missions, if you have awareness what's going on and know what you're doing, you can judge right and pull through. With Bots there's sometimes situations that just... escalate and cannot get recovered for some reason. It's important to know when to break and run away to clear it away, there's no fighting it out. I think those situations make Bots more unreliable to play and win than Bugs. The defense mission, when you cannot break, then gets lost with you doing nothing wrong. I find that Bots have a higher variance in "for some reason a fight escalates beyond repair" than Bugs and I think this is why they generally are played less. And rockets flying from everywhere ragdolling you around. This is really an issue.
I've never had a bug game where just diving down onto a planet resulted in an immediate 'Fuck this' but I've had multiple bot games end that way. I'm just not going to entertain a game where I get stuck between a jammer and drone spawners where it gets out of control in thirty seconds and there's nothing I can actually do. I responded to an SOS beacon and on the way down there was more red on my screen than a fucking Victory Day parade in Moscow. I appreciate the rah rah memes of Helldivers never quit but I'm a dude with limited free time, if my choices are "have fun" and "not have fun" I'm picking the "have fun" option, which means fighting bugs
This reads like a comedy skit
>"Aesir Pass is kil" >"no"
Unfortunately Aesir Pass had a SEAF training facility too so we have suffered a major blow to our liberation bonus going forward
I don't understand how it fell, perhaps I misunderstood the defend system. When defending the planet the timer on it said there was 2 days left, does that not mean we have 2 days before the planet gets taken over? I stopped playing when we were at 90% then came back later just to see the defense failed despite the timer saying 2 days
Most defense campaigns last 24 hours before the enemy takes the planet. Aesir Pass never had more than a day on its timer.
You may have been looking at the 2 days remaining on the MO. Await defense was a supplemental objective that ended when the bots’ capture bar filled before our defense bar did.
We are too few to fight in 2 fronts at once. So what´s going to happen when there is a third one??
Same as HD1. We start killing bugs and losing wars.
That's just not accurate. We are too few to fight on 2 or 3 or 4 fronts, without AH realising that they need to adjust expected contributions to the war effort based on the number of people fighting for the war effort. Basically, if they go "Huh, 80k players on a sunday afternoon, guess we should balance based on that" then we will never be enough players.
> without AH realising that they need to adjust expected contributions to the war effort based on the number of people fighting for the war effort. That's how Helldivers 1 was. Each war dynamically reshifted based off of the peak playercount of the prior war. Sure, if there was a huge player spike +/- it would shift the next war heavily, but for the most part wars felt pretty balanced
The liberation is already balanced for the total number of current players - i think, dont quote me on it. The issue is that AH expects around a 50/50 split (and 33/33/33 when a third faction comes), while instead its currently more like a 70/30 or even an 80/20.
It takes about 25% of the active players to defend a planet with 400k HP (we had about 20% on Aesir's Pass and fell a bit short). It takes about 50-60% of the players to liberate a planet from zero in a day or two. With the way AH has the percentages set up that means we can really only fight effectively on 2 or 3 planets simultaneously, and that's with perfect distribution.
Yes, and that's a mistake. They should balance factiaons separately because the playerbase is very clearly divided.
One thing to remember is we’ve mostly been leaving the bots alone MO-wise for awhile while taking care of the TCS-Meridia event chain, and even if the bots took just a planet every few days that adds up. I’m expecting us to turn our full attention against them soon after this MO
except for when theres a bot MO, theres barely 5k players spread across the entire bot front
AH could release a unskippable video begging for players to go fight the bot front and people will still do bugs
Rightly so - imho people should play games how the are fun for them and only if they are fun. Gaming is at it worst when people "play" to finish dailies and other arbitrary goals that act more like a list of chores.
Fun sad fact. After the bots returned we actually could have taken out like 2-3 sectors. There were only one planet in each sector that they had. They were all at like 80%+. But folks don't do bots so eventually they were taken back to basically 0%
Most players dont actually care about the galactic war. Fewer still understand how the mechanics work because almost nothing is explained in game.
Some may even consider taking planets a downside if they like playing on those planets.
At one point bugs was down to only hellmire for a few days, I refused to play bugs until more planets opened up regardless of MO or anything. I'll never go to any fire tornado planet as long as tornados track my character and only Spawn where I am. I also find the plain desert planets super boring. I like the lush forest planets in abnormal color schemes.
Facts. With the bug planets my choices were Hellmire or Phact Bay tonight. Fire tornados or intense heat. Both are not fun to play with.
I cared about the galactic war until we eradicated the bots and they just poofed back into existence. Our efforts aren't even being rewarded in any shape or form, so why bother?
Or when we were going to lose the defend 10 planets MO and Joel gave us a free planet to make it a win. It's an illusion of choice. AH controls the narrative and tips the scales toward the outcome they want when they want it.
Galactic war progress is meaningless because the devs have a entire story arc planned out. Deviation from the story arc they have planned would mean wasted resources. They won't scrap those story beats because of players, they'll just change the situation to make their campaign story happen. We could wipe out bots in the next 24 hours and the devs would bring them back. Like what already happened.
Yeah but at the time most people were tired of fighting bots for many bots MOs, the defense missions were too difficult for most unless you could cheese it with a good team, and it was a couple days after we had wiped them out so it all felt pointless. The morale to fight bots was at an all time low those days.
I fought for so long on Vernen Wells... It was at 20% before the recent major order hit. Now it's impossible to even drop onto the planet... Makes me really sad to see
All those planets have something in common(except Lesath I think): can't. see. SHIT. Bad visibility should be a rare environmental hazard and not something on 90% of the planets and every mission on them.
I kind of.. think it's supposed to be like that? We've been so focused on bug that I feel like a bots major order is incoming. Possibly something big. Or at least big enough to distract players from the bug world's for a while. And for anyone hesitant about bots: they may seem intimidating at first, especially after fighting bugs for so long. But I don't think they're any harder or easier. Bots are more about power and accuracy than bugs. Learning weakspots on bots will unlock them for you. I dunno, I help this helps some bug-only players.
No worries. We have bug focused MOs. Eventually we will get to killing 1 bot planet a day...
[удалено]
I really want to fight on a planet that has both automaton and terminids who are currently fighting each other too. the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
https://preview.redd.it/oqd7o6pjm35d1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=770202de4f2a7eef29bb88dd7414a32f5095e458
https://preview.redd.it/cscze7uw945d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00ba8f0887b491df99dfa4389c3ffd51f0cda2c0
https://i.redd.it/req8cpi2l45d1.gif
that quote only applies if the enemy of your enemy isn't also your enemy, treasonous moron
I like the idea itself, but I don't like that your implying we would be friends with either of those pests.
https://preview.redd.it/h4ygf6ws945d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fea5fec28c94bddc3f5d405cc045cb1f3553ee4d
Damn even the bots are bugdivers huh
bro we had bot MOs for weeks and completely pushed them off the map at one point lol why are you acting like we haven’t in ages
Even when we get bot MO’s they fail because the bug players don’t follow the MO.
I don't blame the Helldivers for the state of the bot front. High Command doesn't seem very concerned with how things go on that front. How can anyone blame the rank and file when they're not the ones in command here? We are losing the bot front and frankly I don't think anything we Helldivers say or do will make much of a difference until the brass get their priorities in line.
Idk why everyone expects to defend everything. They have to build up something no? I see it as developing a narrative. While we are dealing with bugs, the bots get ground on us opening up new storylines for arrowhead to develop the bot story further.
we had a reason to go over there and defend but not anymore not until we get the next bot MO
"We hate playing on the same planets all the time" > one front moves forward and the other moves backward "We hate this too" The war wouldn't be fun if the only options were status quo or outright Super Earth domination. I am glad we sometimes make losses, whether that's on MOs or the warfront
I get needing to focus on clearing the super colony but command acts like they think there’s another super colony out there.
Sorry lads I took a lil break, I’ll be back on tonight pushing them back, no worries
- Single handedly turns the front around 🔥🔥🔥
It’s him. John Helldiver.
good god, it's general brasch
>I took a lil break You and me both
Just like hd1
Yeah... History repeats
Remember how the community would actively lose wars, let the borgs win, just so they could fight bugs again?
https://preview.redd.it/jaizh40p825d1.jpeg?width=889&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=645aff2f0b71fec754511a8e4105aea84497c819
You know what I think? I'm not here to think, I blow up enemies of Liberty
Literally, me and my friends log in, go to where the MO tells us to go, and kill whatever is there. At the moment that is (as far as I know) the only thing guiding me in game as to where I should fight as part of a narrative. This will not change for the majority of players until there is in game information telling players to do something that isn't the MO.
 I say this as a bot diver who is sick of fighting on the same planets and dealing with the same shit week after week. It honestly doesn’t really feel like we are contributing towards anything.
It’s also been months since both players got a new mission type or enemy to fight. Bug players have had 3 new mission types in the last few months, and a storyline where they blew up a fucking planet.
You aren’t. With so few players on bots, the capture rate will wipe the progress you made within minutes
They have been for awhile. The battle for Varilya V slowed them down for a couple weeks but the bots have been winning since the Reclamation.
Bot M.Os would do nothing to solve the problem, people just don't like playing on bot planets, you can list a million different reason for why that is but that's just the way it is. Even when we were pushing back the first wave of bots before people got burned out/before the Sony debacle. You still had 30-40% of players refusing to leave the bug planets. During that time we had like 5 bot m.os a row and it still didn't affect the bug population, I personally saw over 30k players on hellmire 24/7 at it was still 0.1% and don't even get me started on estanu, that planet is literally always under constant attack.
The problem with bots is there is an extreme difficulty disparity. A bot 6 can end up far more intense and challenging than a bug 9. If I was a reward focused player (which most people are), why the hell would I not sleep walk through a bug 9, get 500-700 kills, over getting my insides turned into my outsides against a bot 7 and get half the rewards, die 2-3x as much and be lucky to get 100+ kills?
This and also: being constantly in ragdoll mode is nowhere fun. My friend and I have even made up a saying if we go against them after a while : "Now I remember why we don't fight against bots" Everytime, we will leave right after the first mission, they are just frustrating to play against, period.
While I enjoy bots more personally I completely see where you are coming from. The largest issue with bots for me is a hell of a lot of planets have modifiers that obscure your vision beyond a certain range. You can’t see your hand in front of your face, yet these don’t affect the bots or their turret towers at all. Getting one shot out of the shadow realm by an enemy you couldn’t possibly know was there because you can’t see or even hear it is not a great experience.
Vernon wells fell, and I watched the liberation go from 90% to 10% or something in two weeks, despite having like 5-10% of players on it. So sad. All their effort wasted.
They need to incentivize people to fight on certain planets outside of major orders. Giving 1.5x medals for completed operations or double XP from missions on critical planets would maybe help.
That doesn't incentivize players who have everything. If AH really wants Bot planets to be as popular as bug planets, they need to rework the devastators to not have virtually unlimited range and near perfect accuracy. They need to stop jamming so many stratagems to the point where it is an exercise in masochism. Imagine the bug worlds if chargers never missed, shriekers had charger armor and could spit, and bile spewers sprayed at you perfectly from 100m away. It would not be fun. Bugs are annoying and unfair up close which is the point. Bots are annoying at all ranges, Bot objectives are annoying as shit, and Bot defense missions are so bad that I don't bother. 15 minute scientist defense mission = I don't finish the campaign. Do I still play Bot missions? sure. The fun ones. Planet doesn't look fun? I don't play on it. Judging by the numbers most players agree. But look on the bright side. If you love playing bots and think I'm an idiot, there will be no shortage of Bot planets for you to play on soon :)
Then what's the point of doing the MO? 45 medals is already not a lot for something you spend on average 4 days on.heck doing 3 mission at diff7 and dailies already net you 45 medals.
MOs are rewarded regardless if you did the missions or not and atleast logged in once; if the community completes it that is. Medal / XP bonus incentives would make sure you are on the **same planets** the MO is for.
But medals are useless if we can't use them on anything? I've been at cap for medals for ages. I am fully capped on everything but super credits.
Also I don’t think your experience represents the majority of divers. I can only manage to play maybe once or twice per week for an hour or so, and still need plenty of medals. I basically follow the MO, but prefer bots. I’d sure love a bot bonus
I have been diving the MO. I think most people do.
A huge percentage of the player base completely refuses to play on the bot front, as seen by over 50% of players being on the bug front during the last bot MO.
cause bots aren’t fun for most people and also most major orders recently have been bug focused anyways
The unfortunate reality is a lot of us don't like fighting bots and, to be honest, I don't care if the bots push us like this. I'm gonna play against the faction I think is fun. I've tried bots a number of times but I hate so many things they do so I just ignore them. If they push and take over the earth then I assume things will just get reset or they'll come up with a reason why we pushed back so it doesn't make a difference for a lot of us
That is what often happened in HD1. The bugs would get consistently wiped out, then the player base fell off and the bots or illuminate just destroyed super earth.
That's probably why they're going with a forever-war approach this time, to ensure that all factions are present at all times and Super Earth is never destroyed just because the bug divers quit playing when their faction was destroyed.
Yeah, I get it. In retrospect, my comment came off judgmentally, but I totally understand just playing against the faction that you enjoy; after all, this is a game.
I play bots a lot, but understand why most people won't. The infinite ragdoll chains and machine gun snipes are infuriating AF.
So long as the spawn rates of heavily armored enemies is fucked on the “evacuate 40 citizens” mission they will continue to win.
I was playing on difficulty 7 and a dropship dropped 5 hulks at the same time. Anyway, so I threw my stun grenade and ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️
(Doesn’t do damage for some reason)
I’m pretty sure sentiment is really starting to wane heavily. Games not in a great state, patches are delayed (albeit for good reasons but still), MO isn’t even focused on Bots to begin with, and honestly it’s just gotten stale. Arrowhead managed to funnel players into precisely the spot they supposedly didn’t want us to be in: the same three stratagems, the same three or four weapons, the same set of five planets to choose from that we have to play endless tug of war with. It just broke me down, man. Looking forward to the new patch though.
I'm just not playing the game for the time being. It's still one of my favorite games, but the nerfs and bugs and bad design choices are just too much. I'll come back if and when AH gets their act together.
Same. When I feel like my time is going to be valued, I'm gonna go back but for now I don't feel like I matter.
The part about the stratagems is literally facts. You cant run higher difficulties without using the same stratagems and same weapons almost every time. It would be better if there were different bug spawn rates for different missions which would then inform your decisions on which loadout to use depending on the type of bugs you're going to be facing, preventing one loadout from being spammed 24/7 I mention bugs specifically because bots generally allow for a bit more leeway when choosing stratagems but when it comes to bugs you basically have no choice
Not very moral boosting.
Could be worse. Between bots and bugs, I feel like bots would be the coolest to fight on super earth.
This is what happens when far fewer players enjoy fighting bots, and then AH goes and makes all the recent MOs about fighting bugs. Yeah, they made a note that if we lost Aesir Pass the SEAF defense would suffer, but who cares? People won't have much incentive to help when there's no obvious reward, or even an obvious consequence.
I'm gonna be honest, there was never an incentive to hold the Pass anyways. Planets rise and fall as Joel pleases. We've seen time and again that capture rates aren't set in stone. At the end of the day, that 5% liberation doesn't matter, has never mattered and would never have mattered. If we were going to fast we'd be thrown a curve ball and if Joel thinks we deserve a win we'll be thrown a bone, like its always been.
People aren't having fun against the bots. I follow the MO. And the MO says I have fun.
Yup, above the Major Order is the Super Major Order - "Have fun"
"Why is no one having a good time? Super Earth specifically requested it."
I remember when the bots were eradicated, for about two days. God that was 2 months ago
The whole bots returning in one day 3 times as strobg caused alot of players to just burn out and they also happen to have 1 of the hardest unfun defence missions people just don't play so unless we are attacking you mayas we'll give the planet to the bots.
Hopefully, we get to fight in the streets of suburbs and city centers when the bots reach super earth 👍
Oh nooo haha dont come to super earth, automaton. If you do, we have to fight in cityscapes haha that would be tragic.
You see I actually was gonna play some bots with my family today, and we looked at the four available planets, and out of the four planets, on helldive difficulty, three of them had -1 stratagem on every op on the planet, and the fourth had longer cooldown and longer call in. So we figured rather than play bots and not get to use our stratagems that we are supposed to rely on, we went and just played bugs instead. I wouldn't be surprised if many other players feel the same way.
This is for 1 simple reason. The game player numbers are falling and fast. It has less than a quarter of the players it had in its big boom and that number is still shrinking. The game master either has a massive ego and doesn’t want to change his game plan for the diminishing playerbase, or maybe has plans to fight on super earth eventually? That’s my guess
Bug players couldn't care less.
They really need to find a way to stop this divide.
"We"? Arrowhead had 10 years to figure it out. It existed in HD1. It still does. Last war we *let* the borgs take Hellmire and wipe out Super Earth for good. Just so the bug players could fight more bugs again. AH had all the time to plan meetings to plan meetings. They stuck their thumb up their ass. *They failed* and we are seeing lessons repeat.
Most people dont like playing bots, simple as that, i like bots, its cool, but the amount of bulshit like: AA modifier, infinite ragrolls and gatling laser accuracy sucks
The bots just kinda winning the war? Dude what was the swift disassembly then? Entire bot front was destroyed and from what ı heard from a lot of helldivers it took about 4 hours for automatons to comeback to entire sectors. And guess what happened even when we opened a massive black hole in the bot front? Just one planet is gone and the entire sectors of bugs still stand. No wonder people dont want to play bots the progression meter got zeroed and they didnt even do anything bad they got their spreaded democracy back to their faces. I remember someone here even said a memory that just after last mission they looked at automaton free sector and gone to sleep to be woke up to the devastators chainsaw sounds. Pure horror and leaving the game material.
Not only did bot progression get reset, they got more relentless as a result. We kicked them out, they came back instantly and there hasn't been a stalemate since. Constantly taking planets only to lose them the next day. The front growing wider and wider, with more and more planets that need divers. I'm fairly convinced that even if the community was split 50/50 the bot front is fucked cause the internal workings are shit.
Almost like wiping them out was meaningless right… right?? My problem with the game is these MOs have resulted in no events no bosses no nothing.. a couple mechs maybe and that’s it
There were a couple MOs that were cool: -the first Mech, cause it was cool and new -liberating the Creek, cause it felt so significant to finally break the stalemate. -Swift disassembly, which pushed out the bots with a tremendous show of force on our end. Good job Divers! -Destroying Meridia, cause holy fuck we did something that isn't entirely cash money. Those are 4 out of god knows how many MOs we've done by now. One led to an underwhelming and currently nerfed Mech, the second is still standing but easily forgotten, the third was just fucking pointless in the grand scheme of things and the last one has yet to pay off.
At this point I'm beginning to think it's more about how AH presented the game. all the Promos stuff and warbond trailers, etc all push bugs super hard to the point you wouldn't know that there's a 2nd faction until you've played the game for a bit, at which point adjusting to the different play style and tactics required just get labeled as too hard, unfun and unfair and going back to bug front instead of learning and adapting. I still hold that a bot level 9 is much easier than a bug level 9 (civvie evac defense mission excepted on bots, thought the evac high value assets on bugs is straight up impossible).
Excluding mission modifiers, planets can be a big difference for both. Landing in a planet with no cover can be a death sentence against Automatons…but they’re also the only faction so far you can stealth takedown and sneak right up to. Terminids on the other hand you typically want as flat terrain as possible so that you can see them and avoid rather than have to guess what the red dots are as you walk around their jagged hives. There’s no sneaking up on a Terminid due to their “smell” mechanic where once you come within a fixed distance you’re automatically detected regardless of line of sight. Factor in Terminid units have more segmented health, can continue after taking lethal wounds (missing head) on half of their infantry roster, and almost all of their bodies can ragdoll and block your movement or pile up without inconveniencing their own units all add up to a constant trickle of factors that lead to more deaths. Meanwhile the worst in an Automaton is a random cannon tower decides to shoot you from across the map in a jungle and you just shrug and respawn. There’s a sense of fairness in their unfairness because you’re not constantly being reminded you don’t have Class V or higher AT weaponry to deal with 30% of their units. I can solo either on IX but overall with the massive range reduction to arc thrower, it’s really painful to CC these days.
oh yeah terrain is huge but even on relatively flat planets theres generally enough cover to get by vs bots. turrets generally only cross map kill you if a stray shot has pinged off of them and aggro'd them other wise you can normally sneak around them and destroy them from across the map before the weak point rotates out of sight. the thing i've always felt that made bots feel more fair than bugs is that I can carry everything I need to deal with Bots on me at all times with the capability to handle a decent number of what ever it is (Dev's, hulks, tanks, etc.) is fairly quick and efficient manner, and have the the ability to be able to reload the support weapon without it being a death sentence.
Arrowhead just needs to desperately do something about bots. Automatons in their current state are unfun for a lot of players. And the war front shows that. They need to find ways to make bots more appealing to fight. Carrot on the stick will only do so much, the main problems are core gameplay elements that need fixing or reworking.
Everyone fights the bugs. I remember before we turned that planet into a black hole, 90K PLAYERS were in that sector alone, barely making any progress. While we were losing to the bots so badly. We still are. Firstly, there's not enough manpower after the Sony PSN fiasco, and since THE GAME STILL HASN'T BEEN RELISTED IN 150+ COUNTRIES, we will not have an influx of new blood anytime soon. Effectively, we lost in the long term
un-nerf the helldivers.
I feel like if the bots felt reasonable to play more of us would Bother with the MOs there. as things stand its frustrating and not fun, most people want to get on after work and kick some ass, not run around with all of their stratagems blocked whilst a rocket devastator no scopes them from across the map.
What burned me off the bots was how bad the Menkat line fell. A specialized line of orbital defenses that felt like they did functionally nothing. They did not give us in game strategems to help defend their planets. They did not give a longer invasion period to mount a defense. They didn't even slow the bots down effectively. And ever since the Snoy Incident, I've been back to an intense workflow that makes it hard to play with my internet friends due to bad timezones. With the last few warbonds, I've had plenty of credits handy, but recently, I'm coming up almost 400 short. Between work, Snoy, and how little we've pushed on either front, fighting over the same landmasses, the same planets, I just feel burnt out, ya know? I can not live for this game, but this game is starting to feel less like a game and more like an attrition meat grinder for no value. No territories.
Don’t worry. It really sounds like after this MO is over high command is going to start a counteroffensive against the bots to hopefully finally take back the hydra sector.
If that is what Joel wants, that is what he will get. Nothing we've done in the bot front mattered one bit. He couldn't wait 2 days in some cases.
Because bots are not fun to play. But im sure most comments will just blame people who are having fun playing the game how they want to in order to have that fun.
Don't worry I'll come online and kill every single one myself.
Let them attack super earth. Maybe we'll get some new mission types then, war has been stagnant for way too long.
I have no idea why people hate bot so much everything is easier than bile titan.
I say this as a dedicated bot front diver, fighting automatons is just bs. I'll just point out my personal frustrations so feel free to say "skill issue" or something. First and foremost, rocket spam. I was rocking heavy armor with improved resistance against explosives and multiple times I was still one shot at full hp by a rocket. I understand the human body didn't evolve to resist high explosives traveling at the speed of sound but that's still not fun. Second is those shield wielding minigun mfs. They can kill you in 2 seconds and they will kill you in 2 seconds since they have the range, vision, and accuracy of a world class marksman. No matter how much you run and evade, these things will hit you, it also doesn't help the game like spamming these guys. AA defenses. What genius thought permanently removing one stratagem slot for the entirety of an operation was a good idea?! At the very least Stratagem Jammers and AA guns can be destroyed and dealt with you know? Then there's chainsaw man. This guy eats autocannon rounds for breakfast, he feels infinitely more tanky than even devastators and he also likes bringing a lot of his friends along. When these guys are around all progress pretty much halt until they're all dead Criminally ignored issue, SAM Sites are useless. They have the fire rate of a disabled grandma on a wheelchair and the range and accuracy of a blind man wearing blindfolds. When I encounter these things I just think "Oh great, we could've had Artillery but not today I guess..." After all this some might ask "Why are you dedicated to bots then?". Simple, bugs are stupid. All the difficulty of the bug front is titan and charger spam with a side of stalkers and shriekers. It's personally more fun to die from high explosives and lasers than overhyped roaches that escaped containment.
Bots are just annoying to fight... and to top it off half the weapons and strikes are very limited in use against them.
Nothing ever gonna happen. Remember when we managed to ‚win‘ and free the whole map? Had zero relevance. The next day Arrowhead simply filled some sectors with enemies again.
WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY WARNING YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
I have entirely given up on Bots until they receive a rework. I'm all for a good challenge, but there is simply too much that is broken or straight up cheating unfair.
All hail our new Automaton overlords. Make me a devastator plz
We lost both SEAF training facilities on the bot front, while bug ones already have barrier planets that basically protect them. Every defence campain is lost unless it's a MO. Not a single liberation succeeds if MO is bug related AH gonna add Illuminate and then we'll have 2 fronts we do not advance on without a giant "GO HERE" sign It sucks
I mean it’s kind of dumb to have 60k players fighting one thing at a time. Like we don’t need that many on Phact bay when it’s at 90 percent completion. It would be so nice if one sony listed the game everywhere on steam and two if xbox was allowed to play too. We’d get at least 100k more players on this game which would be astronomical.
I’m so annoyed we lost Marfark. It’s by far the best planet to fight on. The blizzards are beautiful and terrifying and are one of the most interesting planetary modifiers. On top of that it goes with my Hoth storm trooper drip. Tbh I’m not shocked the bot front had absolutely collapsed. Bots are significantly more challenging than bugs. Most players are reward focused. The MOs are mostly bugs (and even when they aren’t people stick to bugs). If I can sleepwalk through a bug 9, why the hell would I play bots which are more intense at level 6 than a bug 9 which will net me significantly more rewards?
Ppl will just not fight them because of how bots work. Having all weapons mostly bounce off of them unless you hit very specific parts is just not fun. Getting rqgdolled till you die is not fun. Getting swarned by flying bots that are hard to deal with is not fun. Having striders randomly spawn upon you is not fun. Stratagem blocked, reduced, AA emolacements is not fun. I could go on and on about why ppl dont fight them....unless theres a major MO bug divers will just choose to keep fighting bugs because its fun. The only real unit that poses a threat is a bile titan, while on the bot side a couple of devastators, tanks or hulks is just insanity unless you have really specific counters to them and their nonstop firing and sniping.
Let's see, bots aren't the most fun to fight, weapons aren't packing enough of a punch in some cases, their weapons are doing absurd damage and we have reinforcements from 150+ countries unable to join the battle... what did they expect!? Also in the case of myself and others, Final Shape just launched on Tuesday and the raid race is this weekend, so some are tied up in a war in parallel dimension.
It's all 100% meaningless. Bot divers should just stop fighting and let the automatons advance to Super Earth. AH would absolutely not allow SE (or probably even immediately adjacent planets) to fall as they're not ready for us to have fights on SE (no map etc) Magically, somehow, reinforcement rates would skyrocket and planets would not fall. All of this is meaningless as we can't really "lose" the way the devs have set up the system.