Last week, I said that Operatio✤n Swift Disassembly was a suicide mission, and it looks like I’ve been proven right. As I write this, I’ve just watched Ubanea be liberated by Super Earth forces and wrenched from Automaton control. That would be a good sign if there wasn’t just nine hours left to complete the Major Order passed on from high this weekend. SteamDB shows us that it is around this time daily that player count starts to dip to around 100k, way down from the peak player count sitting at around 250k – it’s extremely unlikely that there will be enough players online in the next few hours to reclaim Tibit.
How did this happen? From where I’m standing, it’s our fault. Arrowhead gave us a diversion, and despite the clear incentive to ignore it, we got distracted. At the same time, I’m starting to wonder how well Major Orders work as a narrative device at all right ꦯnow. Here’s the lowdown.
Phase Two: Liberate Tibit
On Friday night, we finished a Major Order and all got some medals for our trouble. Hooray! Despite the fact that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:people hate fighting bots, the community gathered its bug♏-kill𒁃ers and managed to liberate the entire Trigon sector, including Phase One of the Major Order’s primary target, Troost.
The game then indicated that soon, the Automatons will be using aerial gunships against us, and that we’ll be gi꧃ven anti-air weapons to combat them. Phase Two was then launched, tasking us with decommissioning Automaton factories on Tibit. Because of , we had to take Ubanea first.
The Draupnir Diversion
As usual, things went too well, so Mr. Joel Arrowhead decided to throw in a complication. To his credit, it was made pretty clear in the High Command Dispatch posted to the Helldivers Discord server that there were two avenues to dealing with the obstacle, and while one was riskier than the otheཧr, it could be pulled off with enough coordination.
What happened was that the Automatons started an assault on Draupnir. Of course they did: narratively,🤪 the bots would expect us to splinter and try to defend Draupnir, leaving Ubanea unliberated and our progress hindered. But from a meta perspective, I imagine Joel was trying to teach us a lesson that we have failed to learn again and again: stay together, and stay focused.
If everybody moved from Ubanea to Draupnir, maybe we c🎉ould have handled the assault within a few hours and moved back to Ubanea. If everybody had stayed on Ubanea, we might have managed to clinch it before Draupnir fell. Unfortunately, we did neither of those things, setting us back ♚hours when time was already tight.
Helldivers 2 Tip: Braving The Automatons? Don't Bother With Randoms, Play With Friends
Automatons aꦬre incredible at weeding out the weak link, and fighting them alongside people you can communicate well with is key
The Failure Of The Ubanea Gambit
It took a few hours for the community to finally decide to stick with Ubanea, but by then it was too late. Just under 2🐲0 percent of all active Helldivers were on Draupnir defending against the assault, taking crucial numbe🐟rs away from Ubanea.
The worst possible thing happened: Draupnir fell anyway, freezing Ubanea at just a few hours away from liberation. We eventually managed to retake Draupnir, and now have freed Ubanea, but there just isn’t enough time to take▨ Tibit.
Whose Fault Is It?
It’s easy to blame a lack of coordination on the Automaton front, but when you realise that 35 percent of active Helldivers were still fighting bugs, and an average of 25 percent of play𒁃e💫rs were fighting on Malevelon Creek alone, it’s clear there’s a bigge🐼r problem.
Firstly, players simply will not let Malevelon Creek go – at this point, it’s a symbol of freedom and a meme, and players seem determined to take it back even ♒if it means ignoring their compatriots fighting to complete community objectives.
This is a big enough problem that the most recent High Command Dispatch on the Discord Server highlighted it, saying pointedly, “success on Draupnir, Ubanea, and eventually Tibit seems unlikely with such a large contingent diverted elsewhere…” Secondly, a signif🐭icant number of playerᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚs just aren’t interested in fighting bots, and would rather stay on the Terminid front.
Do Major Orders Even Work?
Both of these issues point to an underlying cau✨se: Major Orders just don’t work as well as they should. There is some narrative inconsistency around this. In order for players to have agency in choosing what goals they pursue, Arrowhead doesn’t dictate what planets players can play on – every person gets to choose.
But Super Earth isn’t really into self-determinism as a concept. Citizens of the F♚ederation of Super Earth don’t vote for their government, they answer questions on the Galactic Wide Web and a computer votes for them. Talking smack about the government gets you arres🌃ted or executed. Even Helldivers get executed for sympathising with the enemy. If Helldivers are Super Earth’s most loyal soldiers, why do we get to decide to defy Major Orders from our superiors? Why do we get to prioritise individualism and fight what we feel like fighting instead of what we’re told to?
We see this on the meta level as well. There’s no hierarchy, or really any truly centralised community. The closest we have is the Helldivers subreddit and official Discord server, but it’s nigh impossible to coordinate anything across so many channels – there are three chat channels on the Discord alone, constantly firing on all cylinders, and several more channels where people discuss bir꧋ds-eye strategy. And most players aren’t on these channels, they’re just playing for fun and gravitating towards the areas with most players.
This is how we end up with players spre💟ad across the Galactic map, ignoring the Major Orders. I’m not angry at these people, to be clear – games are for fun, obviously, and these people are having fun the way they want to. But it shows that narratively and on a gameplay level, Major Orders do not work all that well when it comes to directing soldiers towards specific areas. They don’t incentivise players enough to abandon their established patterns, whether that be bug-fighting or getting massacred on Malevelon Creek.
It didn&rsq𒊎uo;t help that the Arrowhead Twitter account 🥀 last week.
Taking player agency away is not the solution. Iﷺ imagine people would be furious if Major Orders forced them to play only in certain places, and that’s not what Helldivers 2 wants to do, anyway. But there are ways to manipulate pl🃏ayer behaviour outside of this. Hugely increased Major Order rewards might be an option – maybe people don’t care about losing 35 medals when a benchmark is missed, but they might if it’s 50. Or 100. Gearing Personal Orders towards specific planets might work as well, like rewarding the use of stratagems on weapons on priority battlefields.
Then again, maybe this is the ꦐpoint. It would feel much better if the community, on its own, managed to band together to achieve an objective. Developer interference would dilute the impact of every win players get, and increasing or changing medal distribution would likely throw off the balance of the game. But as it is, Major Orders just aren’t working.
Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it's up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.
