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Helldivers 2 players say they'd give up a warbond to give devs more bugfixing time, but 'it's not that simple, skipping a warbond is a huge company decision'
Helldivers 2 is experiencing technical issues that the developers are working to fix. However, a monthly content release schedule is causing workflow problems. The community is willing to skip or delay content drops to give the devs more time, but it's a "huge company decision" due to financial considerations.
A Helldivers 2 dev says the studio is working on a handful of known issues, but fixing bigger problems is tricky when rolling out a new Warbond every month.
Earlier today, a new Helldivers 2 patch rolled out. The actual number of changes in that patch is relatively minor, mostly limited to stability improvements, fixes to armor, and crash fixes. A substantial chunk of the patch notes, however, was given over to known issues - problems that developer Arrowhead is aware of but hasn't had the chance to fix yet.
The good news is that the studio is actively working on fixing most of those issues, but the bad news is that few of those fixes seem particularly simple. In a post on the game's official Discord channel earlier today, community manager Spitz said that the problems are "either large fixes that require a bit of time or low-priority issues behind other things." Either way, "most should be patched in the next major build," but it seems that Arrowhead may have a rod for its own back because its own content-release cadence is what's causing some of these workflow issues.
Spitz goes on to explain that "it's difficult to maintain our cadence of one warbond per month while also fixing major technical glitches in time for the next patch." Helldivers 2 gets a big new content drop each month, with new weapons, armor, and more rolling out for those who are happy to throw the developers a little extra cash for the new content.
Interestingly, much of the community response suggests that players would be happy skipping or delaying a warbond in order to help the devs catch up with their workload. Responses on Discord and on social media suggest Arrowhead has definitely built up enough goodwill that the community would be happy waiting a little longer for new content.
The issue, however, is "not that simple" - Spitz says that "skipping a warbond for a month is a huge company decision." Presumably, that's a financial issue - if a warbond doesn't go out, Arrowhead doesn't get to remonetize its game for an extra four weeks. Given that we're still talking about an active audience in the hundreds of thousands of players per week, that's a lot of money left on the table. If the cost of keeping the studio in rude good health is a wonky sniper scope or two, it seems we might be missing a few more headshots rather than missing out on a warbond.