Helldivers 2 players are at it again: Arrowhead nerfed the fan-favorite flamethrower in the recent Escalation of Freedom patch, and the community has not taken it well. But in the eyes of Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani, it could be worse.
"I'd take this ANY day of the week over nobody giving a shit," Jorjani said recently while chatting with fans on the Helldivers Discord. "And to be clear—I have no problem with what's happening now. We want people to tell us what they like and not."
"What's happening now," as Jorjani put it, is a pretty fierce blowback to flamethrower nerfs that drastically reduced its effectiveness against Chargers. As PCG Diver Morgan Park noted yesterday, the pre-nerf flamethrower was a prime choice as a support weapon because "its power justified the risk of burning yourself and your teammates" in the midst of combat. That's no longer the case, and it's led to an uproar on Reddit and Discord, and, as usual, a fresh influx of negative user reviews on Steam—more than 2,500 of them over the past three days.
Some of the discontent is no doubt a flare-up of the unhappiness that followed anger over Helldivers 2 balance changes in June, and a meltdown in May over a plans to require players to have a PSN account in order to play. So while the nerf itself doesn't seem like something that would warrant this kind of reaction—it's one change to just one weapon—the Helldivers community is, let's say, a little touchy about these things right now.
But while some players are obviously not happy, the vast majority of them aren't becoming abusive, which is why Jorjani is willing to wade into the conversation. "People are super vocal right now—but I'm perfectly fine with it," he wrote. "People are super civil and making excellent points on multiple topics."
Jorjani said that balancing Helldivers 2 to ensure it's "fun" isn't as easy as it sounds, "because fun is subjective to different people." He also said Arrowhead needs to do a better job of "catering to different playstyles," and of communicating its intent to players—something he said developers will start to do via "regular streams, more blogs and vlogs in the not so distant future."
He also emphasized that despite what some players may think, Arrowhead is working in good faith to make Helldivers 2 the best game it can be.
"At the end of the day it's not one wizard behind the scenes pulling all the strings—different people, different teams, sometimes things lean one way, another time a different way," he wrote. "Our intention is obviously that every patch moves the needle more in the right direction—this patch has tons of other improvements that did—that's not being discussed so much because the nerfs are overshadowing it. But that doesn't mean we're not doing work in good faith or that we'll stop—but that we're human and sometimes we flounder."
