/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25550621/voultar_snes2.jpg "This Chip Fixes a Long-Standing Super Nintendo Glitch")
In case you haven't been paying attention to your Super Earth recaps, Helldivers 2 players have been engaged in a defensive war with Automatons for a while now – and while there have been some notable issues from the playerbase (and yours truly), I can't deny that Arrowhead has hit the nail on the head. The goal is in its intended goal of making the emerging story hell.
Even this second major command spawned countless memes, propaganda posters, and an entire “robot Vietnam” planet with about 30,000 personnel glued to it for almost no tactical benefit. They just think it's stylish. But it's officially over, those damned filthy robots have won.
We've lost the key demand – what comes next? Field. That's it. While the war against the Automatons has been a long, drawn-out campaign, the next major order is “Hey. Go liberate one planet.” It should be simple, right? Nice breezy task. At home and abroad, in at least one day, get 45 war medals quickly. right?
I decided to jump in and liberate some oil from the planet for Super Earth myself, and aside from some distinct Creek Forest vibes, I didn't find much wrong with it. It was a standard “bug killing” mission. I laughed, my teammates laughed, the bug laughed, and we killed the bug. It was a good time. Then I checked Discord twice and everyone was having a heart attack.
Well, that's what fear is for – courtesy helldivers.io And a few bulls are currently tearing their hair out on the Helldivers 2 Discord as we speak. Veld initially had a recovery rate of about 7%. This is the number of percentage points the insects reach on the planet per hour, and it is the number of players needed to prevail and win this tug of war.
Initially, 80,000 souls barely achieved a drop with a release rate of about 2% per hour. If they want to get above 7% and start making progress, they will need about 300,000 troops with their boots on the ground. Although some of these predictions may have been premature. Looking at helldivers.io, these defectors are currently achieving a 6% release rate at just over half that number.
But Arrowhead Games had their hand on the wheel. In the time it literally took me to write that paragraph, Field's regeneration rate had dropped to 3%, and the 180,000 souls currently crushing insects had begun to reclaim the planet in record time. If this pace continued, the players would have achieved victory in less than 24 hours.
But after seeing a 7% to 3% swing before my eyes, I was certain that the third shoe was about to drop — and sure enough, it did.
20 percent
It turns out that yes, Arrowhead is still fudging the numbers. As I was heading to bed last night, Field's replenishment rate had gone from 3% to about 6% to 20%. That's not to say that these changes were particularly unwarranted, especially if Arrowhead's goal was to make sure players contributed to the war effort over the weekend.
Players would go ahead and pull A The renewal rate is 13% with approximately 230,000 Invaders – I mean liberators – last night, according to helldivers.io. The tracking site no longer displays the regeneration rate or release rate of planets, only the overall rate. At the time of writing, our brave forces are holding the line at a rate of 0.34% per hour, with 122,000 troops crushing the bugs.
I want to stress that sites like helldivers.io are tracking sites created by the community using homebrew code. They're fun places to observe a galactic war, but I'm sure there will be drawbacks in the data flow until a developer-approved API is given for players to work with.
I also want to point out that, just like the game server issues, the Law of Large Numbers will likely mess with Arrowhead's expected GMing calculations. In the same way you might hit server testing, I'm betting that these early major requests are a way for Arrowhead to explore the undoubtedly complex math behind 300,000 players all impacting the same number at the same time before moving on to more complexity. Scenarios.
It's fun to joke about a fickle DM, but patching an Arrowhead with Veld seems to me like the equivalent of a D&D dungeon master making a boss, getting shocked at the damage his players are dealing, and smearing the numbers behind the screen to give them a good fight instead of a steamroller. Similar to running a board game, I'm sure plenty of notes are taken so that the challenge is less volatile next time.
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