What an interesting thing to wake up to.

Nerfs go through, people are upset and voice that anger and rage (like gamers do). I don't think anyone who's been around games for longer than a few years is too surprised. Any time nerfs roll out people get pissed. But this feels way too familiar.

I've been taking time lately to listen to more documentaries, and I've found a very niche sub genere: post mortems. They're meant to dissect and analyze dead franchises and what went wrong/why it went wrong. I'd reccomend that genre to anyone wanting some background noise while going about your day.

Arrowhead is repeating a lot of mistakes I've personally seen and learned about through those deep dives. Here's what I mean:

• game takes off with incredible success, no real way to manage that success. Servers crash, game breaks. Devs forced to go on crunch to fix it.
  • game becomes stableish, new patch goes put. Game starts breaking again, devs forced to crunch to fix it again.
  • community managers start acting in bad faith, explain their vision for a live service is way different than the communities expectations. They start antagonizing their fan base.

So far, that's the spark noted version of the helldivers 2 story. The worrying piece: it's identical in a lot of ways to others. Cyberpunk was a buggy mess that bungled its launch, but their game was unplayable. FO76 had lofty promises that were never realized with ultra predatory practices. Diablo 4 started fun, then nerfed ALL the fun away and pissed their player base off to the point of no return. Halo infinate had lofty goals and promises, with a team that couldnt see any of those ideas through. Hell, bethesda and bioware and blizzard all failed (in part) due to lofty ambitions and not taking player feedback and voice into account. Those titans fell apart because they forgot the golden rule: games are supposed to be fun.

I implore anybody and any team reading this:

• listen to your player base. The vocal and quiet ones. Generate the feedback, but do something with it. This isn't the time to 'hear players' but do nothing about their statements.
• trust is what you've built with the playerbase. It's why your numbers are doing so well: trust and fun. If the trust erodes, the players will find other things to do and your game will die. But also ...
• fun is important. Right now, one of your devs just destroyed the communities idea of fun. That's got to be clarified and fixed now. I'm not calling for anyone's job, but his ideas of how your game is supposed to run do not equate to the experience most of your players expect. Not only is that hurting your credibility, it's hurting the trust factor from consumer to team.
• we will get over the nerfs. We will find other ways to beat the game. We will grumble and meme, but give the players tools to succeed and we will still find joy.

You are at a crossroads here. Legitimately, this is still a very new success. It would be worth it to learn lessons from other dead games right now, avoid their mistakes.

I like this game, I want to keep playing it, but I want to keep having fun. Make sure you don't loose sight of the fun.