Replying to a player on Twitter who said recent patches have made the game “unplayable,” Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt conceded that he’s not satisfied with his studio’s current balancing approach.
“Hey, yeah I think we’ve gone too far in some areas. Will talk to the team about the approach to balance,” he wrote. “It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.”
Credit grinding is only possible on high level missions, which are easier done with the unbalanced weapons. Even then on average you will extract with 5-10 credits per mission, which makes the 1000 point buy-in take ~150 missions to complete, ranging from 25-40min per mission.
So you estimate someone playing an average of 30min per mission * 150 missions = 75hrs of play time (if you’re lucky to survive and extract each mission that is).
Or someone can pay $10 and instantly have access to those clearly over powered weapons.
This is by definition a setup of micro transactions, which is weighted to put players who don’t no life the game to feel like they have to keep buying credits to get usable gear.
It doesn’t take nearly so long. I have about 100hrs of playtime and I’ve unlocked three premium warbonds without paying anything.
Each premium warbond gives you 300 SC (the free one gives a lot more), so the real number you need is 700.
Credit grinding can be done solo on any difficulty, and is pretty quick on the easiest (Trivial). No need to extract - once you pick up the credits you can leave. There are usually 20-40 SC per mission you can find. I did this for an hour or two (maybe 300SC worth?) but decided it wasn’t worth my time. The vast majority is from playing with friends.
I think in a few years there will be too many warbonds to possibly grind out as a free player, but IMO right now it’s fine.
Maybe you have the premium currency confused with samples? Samples are the upgrade materials that are a REAL grind, you need to extract with them to keep them, and they are not available from microtransactions at all.
The first one gives something like 850 and I had enough between it and missions for a warbond by the halfway point and around 20 hours, I really don’t get where they think this is that bad
You do have to play a lot, and the whole system is designed to be addictive and prey on poor impulse control. 20-30 hours per warbond/month is a lot of time to dedicate to one game.
Helldivers 2 has all the bones of a game built to exploit you, it just isn’t that bad compared to some other games.
The entire warbond system was built on the precipice of a very slipery slope but I think they haven’t quite lost their footing yet. Warbonds could have been time limited, but they opted to make them permanent. The grind could have been extraordinarily tedious, but i think SC gain is steady enough that I haven’t felt the pressure to buy into it (for context, i work full time and I have the drive to play maybe 8-10 dif8 missions per week)
I get credits all the time and I rarely crack hard
The other person covered most of it, but also, I’m at about 20 hours, only level 9, have mostly done solo level 1s with some 2s and a handful of missions with friends.
I’m around halfway through the first warbond and between what you can get in it and from missions, I have about 1200 super credits, at least 600 of which I got in mission.
(Edit to add: 5 to 10 per mission? You’ll find multiple pickups of SC most missions and each one gives something like 10 so that’s nowhere near accurate)
It is absolutely farmable. I know several people who’ve unlocked multiple premium warbonds without paying a dime, under level 30 and not no-lifeing it.
On top of that, nothing in the premium warbonds are significantly better than everything in the base warbond. You could never bother touching the premium warbonds and do perfectly fine.
Plus, these are not micro transactions. They’re not pay to win, they’re not predatory expendable items to boost a mission or something like that. If anything, they’re micro DLC that you can fairly easily unlock just by playing.
I wonder if you’ve even been playing the game at this point because these are all things you’ll figure out pretty quickly if you do.
Edit to add: I see someone responded and deleted their reply but it was something about how the other warbonds only give 30 SC each. That is completely inaccurate, they each give 300, with 100 in each unlock. This is incredibly easy to verify, all you have to do is log in, open the warbonds, and look. As for the rate of acquiring them otherwise, I refer to how long I’ve played and how many SC I’ve gotten in that time of very casual play. Just logged in to check and it’s at 1160 SC, 550 of which is from warbond unlocks. So, no. It’s not particularly grindy.
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