I mean, I wasn’t logged in when it happened, but the two MOs were at 45% and 80%, with the children at 45% when I last checked less than 12 hours ago. So unless they somehow made up that big of a difference in under 12 hours, I don’t think this is the case.
The more likely scenario is that the game itself probably forced a win condition on the children MO, despite the larger progress on the new weapon MO.
Well the mines planet currently has 74.4k players on it and its liberation rate dropped significantly to 39%. So I think that is enough evidence, at least to me, to suggest that the game automatically applies buffs or debuffs to objective completion without any regard for player participation. Most likely under the guidance of AH employees.
Especially with all of the severely negative recent press surrounding Helldivers 2, Sony and AH wanted the easy W. And whats an easier W than rigging the outcome of player “choice” to be the morally correct one and it leading to a donation to charity for children?
So I think that is enough evidence, at least to me, to suggest that the game automatically applies buffs or debuffs to objective completion without any regard for player participation. Most likely under the guidance of AH employees.
The defense rates aren't static. Enemy forces have weaker resistance as a planet's liberation progresses. We saw this demonstrated in the recent dark fluid missions where this modifier was scaled a bit more heavily than usual as the entire community was focused on a single planet. It results in a bit of a snowballing effect, where it's initially very slow to liberate, but then picks up speed very quickly.
Of course, Joel could be putting a finger on the scales, too. But I feel like whenever they give us a choice like this, they seem to leave that choice and the consequences of it entirely up to us. They tend not to give us choices at all for the things that play into the bigger narrative, which this mission doesn't really appear to be.
74.4k people on one planet and its liberation dropping is pretty noticeable. Somehow in less than 12 hours the liberation progress was able to basically swap. I am not saying that there is definitive proof that AH is manipulating the numbers, and I agree with you for the most part, but surely you can agree the timing is rather convenient for some good press?
Especially after the player count dropped by more than 250k, probably due to the Sony Account debacle, and now they’re catching more heat from their official Discord mods going on a timeout/ban spree on people who vomit reacted to furry art.
Certainly I’d like to think it was all for good fun, but the timing is too convenient and IMO it kinda poisons the waters for the good feeling. Donating to charity is good, but they could have done that without “giving the players the choice,” so why didn’t they? Were they really not going to donate to charity if that MO somehow failed?
I'm pretty sure the charity donation wasn't planned. If it was, that's an awfully small donation for what would've been a big community event. If they had planned this, I'm sure they would have actually partnered with a charity and encouraged players to donate or something.
I feel like you're looking too deep into this. This looks more like the CEO just having a laugh with the community. Not everything is a conspiracy.
No, I am only saying that in this particular case it is very convenient for AH and Sony for this to be happening, and in my opinion it seems like this instance was a PR stunt for some good press when the game needs it.
Multiple people are calling out that the mine planet wasn’t at 80% liberation while the child planet was at 45% - are you sure you didn’t check another planet by accident, or otherwise mix up your numbers?
If you just take a look at the memes the community made you’ll see that they’re all focused on Helldivers saving the kids, which is further evidence that you might’ve gotten the numbers wrong.
EDIT: I haven’t used this website before, but this dashboard shows that marfark was at 0% liberation until yesterday. I’m pretty sure you’ve gotten your numbers wrong initially. I think when you checked and the planet had 74k players, the liberation had RISEN to 39%, which is supported by the dashboard plot of marfarks liberationb& the timestamp of 2024-06-15T02:45:04Z shows 76k active players and around 40% liberation, steadily rising up from 0 before.
why would they need to force the game outcome to get the PR win? They could donate anyway and give a snarky tongue in cheek message about the players choosing the mines.
I think a day ago it was 40% kids planet and 0% mines, but I didn’t make it a point to remember. I want to say it was 7k players on mines, and 25k on kids.
It was definitely the other way around. When I first checked the planets, there were around 1.5k divers on the mine planet and it was in the 0.x% range, while the children’s planet was around 54% with close to 60k divers on it.
Not only is it a choice, it's a choice the community has had several opportunities to make and has failed each time, and it's starting to become a funny meta-story of its own at this point.
Operation: Legitimate Undertaking would be the first time we had to make this choice, and that choice was to unlock either the AT mines or a new rocket launcher. To unlock either, we had to liberate the planets where they could be manufactured, but for lore/game mechanic reasons, we could only save the factory workers on one of those planets, before the other one would ultimately succumb to invading forces.
To unlock the AT mines, we'd have to liberate several planets before we could even reach the destination planet to begin liberating it and we'd have cut it very close to the deadline (because absolute failure was the third option, if we couldn't liberate either planet in time), but the path toward the rocket launcher planet was significantly shorter. So the community banded together to liberate the planet with the rocket launcher, since that was at least a more easily-guaranteed victory. The AT mines would have to wait for another day.
The next time the AT mines would become available again was several weeks later, and the task to unlock them this time wasn't so much a "choice", as much as it was a challenge. Enter, Operation: Metallic Harvest. The task was for the community to collectively kill 2 billion Automaton units by the deadline. "Easy, in the bag", the community said to itself, as we had just come hot off the heels of a similar major order to kill 2 billion Terminid units, which we had completed well before the deadline. 2 billion kills? No big deal, those mines are as good as mine get it hah hah hah.
Unfortunately, this major order came just after the announcement that the previous major order was actually glitched and every player in a mission was getting points for every other players' kills, basically making it so that the progression was 4 times faster than it should have been. So our previous confidence was misplaced, and caused us to misjudge our ability to actually get 2 billion kills in time, resulting in a failure of this major order. Once again, the AT mines were put on hold.
That brings us to today, with Operation: Trolley Problem, where the developers are basically giving us the mines at this point, but it's of course still up to us to accomplish, where we have to once again choose which planet to liberate. Realistically, they could have given us any other explanation for what's happening on the other planet, and we could've had those mines. But the choice was mines, or children.
We're Helldivers. We're Super Earth's elite. You think we're really about to let suffering children die? No, we're the good guys, and at least half of chose children are of legal age to work in munitions factories, so saving those children means saving the future of democracy. Sorry mines. Maybe next time.
Honestly, I hope that the community continues to never unlock the AT mines. I want to be able to look back at this game in five years and see the storied history of all the failed attempts to unlock them.
I enjoyed reading that. Helldivers sounds like a fun game, and I’ll be rooting to keep the mines locked forever now, too - no matter how much the children yearn for them.
You can enlist (for a small freedom fee) at the local recruitment office and become a Helldiver yourself.
You can help spread freedom and democracy across the galaxy by helping Super Earth gather totally not oil and destroying opposing, and obviously undemocratic, ideologies.
My bet, given how you budget for this type of PR stuff, is that it was basically the players picking the story that got told while they got a new weapon and a charity donation happened. Like if the players hadn’t chosen to do so, there would have been some contrivance for someone certainly has to save the children. Since they saved them, now the children will get together and give you this thank you gift, or something.
Well, this is the third time the community has failed to secure the AT mines, so it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game for them to just give them to us anyway.
I just learned about some of the additional context from another comment, so it definitely might not be part of this branch in the narrative. Having spent at least a little time and energy developing the weapon, they’re not gonna just waste it, and having filled out the budget paperwork for a charity donation, it’s was also going to happen one way or another.
It’s not bad or anything, it’s just how you tell a story involving unpredictable interactions, “being a business that has a budget and employee salaries”, and also the PR 101 lesson of “never withhold charity”.
Add comment