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A Helldivers 2 player wrote a whole essay on how it feels to fight bots and almost nobody noticed, but one of the lead devs has responded with an essay of their own
Arrowhead Games, developer of Helldivers 2, is actively responding to player feedback, specifically addressing concerns about the Reinforced Scout Strider's balance and visual inconsistencies. The developer is committed to making the game fun, fair, and challenging, and is actively working on improving the game based on community suggestions.
Helldivers 2 may have been given a massive overhaul recently, with significant buffs to weapons and Stratagems, but that doesn't mean that Arrowhead is done trying to make the democratic third-person shooter the best game it can be.
Last month on Reddit, after the first major update of Arrowhead's 63-day action plan, one fan took to the site with a veritable essay of feedback on the balance of the Automatons. Many of these suggestions centered around the Reinforced Scout Strider, which they felt was "in a fairly poor spot overall."
They explained that the jump "in lethality and strategy from the Scout Strider to the Reinforced Scout Strider surpasses any other direct unit upgrade in the game." Not only did they have suspicions that the bot may be using the larger "Barrage Tank's rockets instead of its own," since the "size of the rocket when fired is much larger than the size of the rocket on the unit itself," but they suggested that a visual and audio cue should be added so players can react before its rockets are fired. On top of that, they proposed changes to its armor: "Adding more angles to protect the pilot from light penetrating weapons, but still leaving them vulnerable to rear angles would go a long way to fixing this unit."
There's much, much more to the overall post, which sadly wasn't really noticed by that many on Reddit, but a month later, community manager Thomas 'Twinbeard' Petersson has arrived with an update to the Reinforced Scout Strider feedback, straight from one of Arrowhead's lead devs. Matching the Reddit poster themselves, the dev in question "wrote more or less an essay which was very kind of him," and Twinbeard has summarized "the most interesting parts."
In short, Arrowhead will "dig a little and see what we can find," and acknowledging that the bot appears to have "a different look when it's being fired compared to when being mounted," the devs will "try to have those align better." He notes that "things seem correct" when it comes to damage and effect, but adds: "We've made minor tweaks for it but will look into this more properly soonish, both in terms of details but also in a wider context. What should this and other units be? Who/what should be considered chaff, how tanky or deadly should they be, which units should be able to ragdoll etc."
Ultimately, Arrowhead's "goal is to make things fun, fair and challenging," and the player's feedback is "definitely on our radar." It's always heartening to see the studio pay such close attention to fans' thoughts – especially when in this case, it didn't even come from a viral post.