Helldivers 2 CEO says devs get "tons of feedback" but have "no good tools" for dealing with it, as yet another update has some players up in arms over nerfs
Escalation indeed
As Helldivers 2's latest update launches to familiar balance complaints, Arrowhead's CEO says the studio needs to better organize the flood of feedback it receives.
Speaking on Twitter, Helldivers 2 boss Shams Jorjani acknowledges the popular talking points around flamethrower changes and the new difficulty option before sharing that the team is considering all of that and thinking about its next steps.
"I've gotten like over 200 tweets today with suggestions, opinions, and thoughts on what people think," he says. "We have a lot of discussions going on internally at the studio as well as we evaluate this update and plan ahead."
In reply to a fan who asked if the team would ever pursue an in-game feedback form, Jorjani says, "We need large-scale surveys/sentiment gathering. We get tons of feedback right now, but no good tools for collating all of it. That's also on the roadmap."
Elsewhere, Jorjani talks about other ideas like a Diablo 4-style PTR server or doing developer streams to offer a greater sense of transparency.
Jorjani's words are already being echoed in Helldivers 2's Discord, where a community manager says the following:
"We have heard your feedback about our change to fire and how it has affected flamethrowers, and we appreciate our community's continued honesty about how they feel about Helldivers 2. We're now having a lot of internal discussions about the best course of action."
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In an effort to take a temperature check, Arrowhead has also opened up a new poll to see what everyone makes of Helldivers 2's Escalation of Freedom update. After 27,500 votes at the time of writing, most are neutral or unsure, the second largest group thinks it's a miss, and the final group reckons it's a hit, though it's worth noting that the difference between the latter two groups isn't huge.
And, wouldn't you know it, a player feedback form has arrived, too.
"We don't want your thoughts and feelings to be lost in the channels, but it is difficult to keep up with the many pings and DMs in the server during busy periods like this," a community rep says, before adding, "We are still researching other methods of providing feedback to us, but for now, this is how we'll collect it in Discord."
Iain joins the GamesRadar team as Deputy News Editor following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When not helping Ali run the news team, he can be found digging into communities for stories – the sillier the better. When he isn’t pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new hat, you’ll find him amassing an army of Pokemon plushies.