But what I’m really upset about is that people aren’t communicating and cooperating and being respectful of each other and working together and being social and pushing back the alienation and playing and finding joy.
I’m so fucking isolated these days. This is the closest thing that I have to a social outlet. And so many people in multiplayer games just have no interest in communicating or working together, or have no interest in, like… playing in a way that supports the team and works towards a cooperative goal? Like they’re playing by themselves, in a multiplayer lobby, and I absolutely do not understand it and I hate it. I don’t understand why people play multiplayer games when they don’t wan to play with people.
Yes it is 100% a helldivers thing. I want to work together to complete the mission. I want to shoot bugs and bots, but i want to do so within the context of completing a mission. I tried to play five or six 7+ games tonight and ended up leaving most of them when it became clear that the players had absolutely no chance of completion. Generally there was no communication, no marking enemies or objectives, no cohesion. Helldiver’s is so much fun when you have a tight team coordinating and working together. It’s easy, relaxed, enjoyable. But without solid team players it frustrates me to tears. Constantly doubling back to find out why people have fallen behind, and they’re fighting a bunch of bug breaches for no reason, for stuck in a battle for their life against a single charger that is no threat and they could easily just walk away from. Or people bring all strats with 5min cooldown, and then i’m doing all the at work bc i’ve got eat17s, because the railcannon is massively inefficient. People are just doing whatever they feel like instead of being part of a team, and the game is miserable that way. Every fight is much harder. No in a fun way, but in a very frustrating way. Problems that should be solved by players working together to use complimentary weapons don’t get solved and it turns in to lots of kiting and dying instead of four people laying down solid walls of firepower like you’re supposed to. People complain that high level is all kiting and it’s bc they don’t know how to play as a team, pick strats as a team, work together as a team. It’s so frustrating.
I don’t have any friends nearby, i don’t get out of the house much. This is what i’ve got right now and i can’t enjoy it bc most of the people playing at the diff level in find challenging aren’t skilled enough to be at that level in the first place, and aren’t team players. Everyone wants to run in four direction doing their own “i’m the main character” power fantasy. Hd1, you couldn’t do that. You were screen tethered and everyone was forced to work together. No one was dropping a mech and wandering off to waste time, lives, and resources fighting bug breach after bug breach, not only being wasteful but removing a whole player from the team. And since the game relies so much on synergistic combos of strats and weapons you’re losing way more than 1/4 of the teams effectiveness.
And every time i try to say “hey, we need you over here, with the team, playing the objective” i get sneers and passive aggressive comments for having the audacity to ask someone to perform their role in a cooperative game that really relies on cooperation. I’m used to herding cats in tactical shooters, but so many people don’t realize they’re in a tactical shooter and just want to fuck around, usually by themselves, and the game turns in to me and maybe someone else doing all the objectives while the other players fuck around. I have no idea what they’re doing and why they think they should be doing what they’re doing. I rarely have any trouble moving around the map, disengaging from fights, finding resources. So i just move around, and then i look back and they’re not with me, they’re losing all their weapons and lives and using up all their strats trying to solo some bug hole and it’s just slowing everything down and making everything harder. And i don’t know what to do, bc i don’t want to chase them around and babysit them the entire game, i want to do the mission. But if i go do the mission myself i might as well be soloing.
The game is so much fun, so much relief from the tedium of depression and isolation, except it’s not, because so many of the people playing are playing wrong. They’re trying to play a casual horde shooter in a niche hardcore tactical shooter, without even considering how badly that fucks over their teammates, and when you even gently try to get them on track so the mission doesn’t get bogged down you get scorn and abuse and “how dare you tell me that i can’t just do anything i want without any regard for anyone else?”
I’m frustrated to tears. I hate being stuck with this as the only thing i have to do most days.
Here’s my friend code, me and my partner play it pretty often and we want to go higher difficulty, so we need some decent players
#1973-1772
I want to play too but im currently playing ffvii rebirth
Commenting for later visibility
Don’t really have any friends to play with, so I typically end up playing solo or with randoms
Like i use the minimap all the time to keep track of where enemies are all around us, and i’ll tell the team bc you’re supposed to report contacts so the team can maintain situational awareness because eight eyes are a hell of a lot better than two, and people get snippy and upset with me like by making contact reports i’m treating them like a child or insulting them for telling them things they already know. And it’s like dude, you don’t need to make shitty comments to me, this is what you do in tactical shooters so everyone knows waht’s happening and can cooperate effectively. I’m not even talking to you, specifically, i’m telling the whole team. If you already know about it just say copy or roger or use the emote wheel to say yes. I’m not being a dick, i’m being a team player and getting treated badly for it. And then it doubly stings bc the players making snippy comments then go and get stuck in an easily avoided ambush and killed and then get killed again and again trying to get their silly useless railgun back, while i’m stuck trying to get them out with my endless bounty of eat17s and airstrikes that are efficient and chosen because they’re effective, not becuase they’re “what i like” and make me feel cool. I feel like i have to bring eat17s/airstrike/110mms/ems every mission bc so many people bring laser railcannon shield railgun and just cannot handle the enemy bc their stuff is always on cooldown and is so inefficient in terms of actually killing high threat targets. No one ever brings precision strike with its 100sec cooldown, it’s always railcannon that kills one thing every five minutes. Meanwhile i got ten eat17s, six 110mm strikes, and six air strikes in that five minute period, and all they got was one rail strike, one railgun they don’t have the skill to use, and one shield pack that is totally unnessecary if you have good movement and use cover. They’ve given up a huge amount of battlefield control for what? I don’t know. People say “oh well the 110mm is useless” and refuse to take eat17s and then they don’t have any at and complain about it and then yell and insult me when i say i don’t have that problem bc in the time it takes their railgun to come off cooldown so they can kill one tank i’ve got enough ordnance to kill up to 16.
It’s just so frustrating. I don’t need people to play meta because the meta is a good team comp. You can take any strat as long as you talk about it with your team so the team covers all bases, and then stick with your team so you can use you strats to best advantage. Instead people are running around by themselves, using up half their strats on shields and railguns, shooting railcannons at single chargers and then being unable to help with heavies for five minutes.
It’s all just so frustrating. And i struggle to understand why they’re doing these things and why they’re having these problems and what they think is happening. I have thousands of hours of time leading squads or higher in hard core tactical games. This has been what’s kept me alive through years of severe depression. “I want to” doesn’t even exist in my mind. It’s all about the team, about the group. There is no i in a rifle team. You work as a unit or you die. The “i’m the main character” playstyle doesn’t work in games like arma or ready or not or insurgency where one bullet can down you.
But so many people, the idea that a team is much stronger htan four individuals, that they should use their mic and communicate, it’s just not there, and i don’t understand what people could be thinking or experiencing that they don’t see that, and it’s so frustrating.
Christ and people will. Not. Disengage. Game after game we get bogged down for ten minutes doing seaf artillery or some random bug nest and it turns in to a death spiral as people die, respawn, and run directly back in to the swarm, alone, without asking for or waiting for help, to get their damn railgun and rover and shield pack, and then they die again, and again, and it all goes to hell and none of them will ever just disengage. I try to gently coax them to move away from the fight and regroup, but i don’t have the authority to just give orders to randos, but god if they were an arma group that would actually listen to me i could get them all out of these stupid messes so we could get on with the game.
It’s the same problem i had in dnd, as a dm, where anything i put in front of some players, they decided it was there for them to kill, and that meant it was a level appropriate challenge and that they’d win. It drastically limited potential for storytelling.
And there’s this same murderhobo fixation. People don’t want to be a small special forces team doing hit and run raids. They think they’re playing halo or something, where they’re the invincible hero who always wins, and every enemy is hand placed for them to kill. They can’t cope with the idea of a game where enemies are there to kill you, and they have unlimited reinforcements, and the game design requires you to stay on the move, choose your battles, work with your team, get your objectives done, and gtfo.
I don’t think the vast majority of the player base has ever encountered a game like this before and they have no idea what to do with it. There’s constant complaints that “the guns feel weak” and then you pry in to it and people want a 12.7mm anti-materiel rifle to be able to pen tank armor, they want their assault rifle to kill giant 500kg armorered aliens in a few shots, it’s silly. It’s not that kind of game at all. They expect a borderlands style arcade horde shooter and when they get a weird mashup of hardcore tactical shooter, slapstick comedy, and b-movie sci fi they’re confused because it doesn’t behave like they expect it.
And then so many of them will not adapt. They know with absolute conviction, that they’re playing a normal horde shooter. So if the guns can’t effortlessly blow away hordes of enemies, if the mechanics require cooperation, if they have to weigh the strengths and limits of weapons when choosing their loadouts, the game must be wrong because they cannot possibly be wrong,because there’s “no wrong way to play” so if the game doesn’t let them win and win easily with any weapon they want to use it’s broken, bugged, badly designed.
I’m just upset about the whole thing. Helldivers one was this totally unique, fun, weird twin stick tactical shooter and there was nothing like it, but it never had a large following. Now hd2 has exploded in to one of the biggest games ever and trying to enjoy it is so frustrating because people don’t know how to play, they don’t know they don’t know, and because it’s apparently taboo to correct anyone or tell them that the game won’t indulge their whims and they need to play tactically they won’t learn, they refuse to learn, and a lot of people have been gaslighting me, like “the thing you know how to do and can do reliably anf tried to teach me how to do is impossible and you’re a liar and an asshole for claiming that it can be done” gaslighting.
I’m so fucking lonely, and a huge part of it is not having people in my life who see the world the way i see it, who understand things the way i understand them. I can’t enjoy this game that i love because assumptions and tactics and goals that are so natural to me are completely alien to others, and i can’t bridge the gap bc most people don’t know their is a gap, and wouldn’t want to cooperate anyway if they did. People have outright said that cooperation robs them of agency, that teamwork is a burden. So many of them want any complexity or challenge in the game stomped flat bc they’re frustrated the game doesn’t let them do everything by themselves and let them win.
I hate depression so much. I don’t want to live like this, where some silly game is so important to making the hours pass day after day, where i can’t really go out and be around people and touch grass and live a life. This shouldn’t be important to me but i barely have anything else so it is.
And i’ve always had this problem. I’m so team focused, so group focused. I think in terms of we, of us, of the community. And how does that go over in the hyperindividualistic, callous, selfish us society? Misery. Just misery. I don’t understand people and their motivations at all. Things that seem so simple and obvious are totally alien to others. “We’re stronger together, we should support and aid each other” and i just get blank stares sometimes. People seem to believe they can live a complete human life with just themselves and maybe a spouse and. Acat, cut off from everyone else in the world.
I mean, physically speaking, they do live a complete human life with just themselves or a few people. It’s why people are isolated in the first place because they live in a society of abundance and treats and opportunity, and they waste it.
This was a good post and I get it. Gamers are some of the most atomized, hyper-capitalist freaks on the planet. Reminds me of that Dan Olson video game essay. I showed my friend who plays FF14 it and I don’t think he got the idea that was being communicated in the video about how external factors warp people’s experiences with art/games and couldn’t help but just comment on how people should or shouldn’t raid. I felt like how you feel a bit when I was talking to him a little, and obviously feel similarly about talking politics with the masses of liberals.
Could you send me a link? I’d like to read it.
Someone linked me this, it’s an hour and a half in depth analysis about how optimization and minmaxing and data mining turned WoW from a fantasy theme park to a number crunching exercise that required so much precision and conformity players had a mission controller and various bots and automation program telling them exactly how to play the game optimally. It was really painful to listen to because I’ve seen it happen in so many games, and it’s awful, any goofiness or whimsy has been crushed out of a lot of games by this all consuming need, not even to win, but to just turn the game in to calculator that will spit out the biggest possible number.
Yeah, it was the “Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft” video by Dan/Folding Ideas you’re referencing.