I wrote on Friday about how Overkill decided to kick off the annual celebrations for PAYDAY 2 with some inclusions that the player base found, shall we say, distasteful. And over the course of the last 48 hours, the depth of that unhappiness became very, very, clear.
Sergey Galyonkin is the man behind the Steam Spy service and considering everything that went down, he decided to take a quick look at how it was affecting PAYDAY 2.
The news: not good, at least for Overkill.
Payday 2 dropped from 93% userscore to 83% in 2 days – over 10,000 negative reviews!
Score Rank from 86% to 56% pic.twitter.com/MoniG4KUTZ
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) October 18, 2015
Overkill’s response hasn’t done much to placate the fans either. They’re still in the midst of the 10-day long celebrations for PAYDAY 2, and as a result they’ve told fans that while they’ve heard their concerns about micro-transactions they won’t reply to them until the community events have come to a close.
If that wasn’t enough, Overkill has managed to piss off modders as well. “The reason why some mods aren’t working is that we made changes to the game code going into Crimefest that affected the functionality of some mods, as it does from time to time,” Overkill wrote — in the announcement for the fourth day of the Crimefest community event.
One wonders why they didn’t give people more prior warning before Crimefest started — you’d think breaking mod support in two was something you’d want to communicate beforehand.
But then it looks like this entire event might be an exercise in How Not To Video Game. The PAYDAY 2 community was already shrinking, with the player base shrinking in the order of thousands since August — and given how bloody poorly the last few days have gone for Overkill, that trend is surely set to continue.
Comments
52 responses to “PAYDAY 2 Got The Shit Kicked Out Of It On The Weekend”
I think I have Payday 2 on 360, never played it.
I bought it, no one played it. Took it back, Thanks EB Games
I wanted to play it >:
Tried it on release it was a bit buggy – Had a good premise but GTA kind of shat on it with it’s heists etc
That, and no-one ever played the stealth version of the heists. Every man and his dog only plays Overkill/Deathwish difficulty ‘kill ten thousand cops while wearing bomb-proof suits’ mode.
Stealth is really fun on some Missions, others not so much. Stealthing one of the normal bank missions (Not Big Bank or Go Bank) is a ton of fun.
Stealth on Big Bank was awful due to the amount of RNG.
That’s because you’re on console.
It was quite popular on PC when it came out… I imagine most people have moved on since then (like my group of friends and I) but we played the $*** out of it when it came out.
Ditto. Though I always found it a little disappointing after the first PayDay.
The whole buying weapons in a game you already paid for with real money just pisses me right off.
and they already pleased their audience when they released the game at half the usual price because they knew their game didn’t have as much content as other triple A games.
Huh?
The game wasn’t sold at 100 bucks AUD when it was released, it was sold at about 60.
It’s pretty ingenious when you realise they have managed to sell back the other half of the content at an inflated price.
Its over 100 USD to pick up all the DLC.
A lot of big games sell for like $69 these days or even less if it’s a steam purchase.
Pretty sure it was closer to 40 on Steam.
We all knew it wasn’t a full game. It’s in L4D territory.
You wouldn’t pay AAA prices for counterstrike either right?
Apples and oranges.
PS. Don’t buy retail
Note the situation on Xbox one – these developers have bad form – treat their products with caution
What’s the situation on X1?
I don’t know all the specifics, but my understanding is they got caught in the same trap as many other multi-platform titles that update regularly on the PC… they couldn’t update regularly on the consoles. Additionally there appear to have been some platform-specific bugs that haven’t been fixed and quite possibly won’t be, as well as a lack of updates with the lion’s share of the DLC apparently never going to make it.
Shit like this from the devs doesn’t help, either: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bw3jqNXCYAA-YDF.jpg
Hadn’t heard! Been playing it for a couple of weeks on X1. It’s a bit weird that they can’t update regularly on console, as both MS and Sony announced before the consoles came out they were making that whole process much easier and cheaper (if not entirely free).
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a result of certification or if it’s simply just harder to code for the consoles for some PC teams, but I know Warframe (which I love) suffers from something similar. I hear Planetside does, too?
For Warframe, the PS4 version is at least a couple major updates behind the PC version. It really must suck for the console users to see all the really cool shit that’s been added lately and know that it’s still a long way off.
Tbh as a 99% console gamer I don’t really mind being a couple of updates behind on the AA titles. It is the first I’ve heard about the x1 not getting content (at all) though, for payday at least.
That sucks. And its a shitty thing for the devs to say. I was having a good time with it, now I’ll just be thinking of the content im missing out on. Waaa 1st world probs etc end rant.
Er… oops. Uhm. Well. If it helps, for PayDay 2 I think the DLC is mostly just levels and guns and characters and masks and mods. Not entirely new mechanics (apart from the cash-shop safe-drills, of course) like Warframe’s Archwing.
I’m kidding, it doesn’t bother me that much. Life’s too short.
The reason the consoles haven’t had any upgrades is the cost the console networks charge devs to patch and update their games. The figure I saw stated by (I think it was) Simon Viklund way back, was something like $10k-25k each time they wanted to patch on the Xboc Live network alone. Given that there’s something like 30 updates, that’s in the $300k-$750k ballpark. That might be feasible for a AAA dev, but these guys are relatively small, so it becomes cost prohibitive for their business model.
They stopped charging that well before the end of last gen, I know MS did anyway.
From June 2013: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-26-microsoft-no-longer-charges-developers-to-patch-their-xbox-360-games
They have to be tight in what code is allowed in updates. If they just let anything through we’d see exploits, system altering bugs, data losing bugs and other dodgy coding issues arising on consoles. They have to submit what they want released and it’s checked over before being allowed on the console. On a PC this happens but a PC isn’t a closed system like a console and if a console has issues some releases on PCs have had it’s expect the console manufacturer will fix and support the issue where as on PC you have to fix it yourself.
That’s a pretty shit thing to do, but I can kinda excuse her considering the amount of crap they take on a daily basis that’s constantly rehashed, despite explaining in the past why they can’t/don’t update the consoles like the PC version.
It’s not fair that the game should suck on your platform and to be told to ‘go play on another platform if you don’t like it’. That’s some money-grubbing bullshit. “My product doesn’t work for you for reasons, but we got ours, so you just have to deal with it and maybe spend on us again.”
I’d have the pitchforks out over that, too.
I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen it before, even in our own workplaces.
The customer is the enemy. You work with coworkers who roll their eyes and groan at how some idiot filled in the wrong form the wrong way when it should be so blindingly obvious how to do it right – you only have to deal with that form all day every day to see how obvious it is! How can someone not get that? You blow off steam calling someone an idiot who actually really isn’t, that form is unintuitive as fuck, requiring years of experience in that field to decipher… but sympathy’s not cathartic. So you vent and call someone an idiot who isn’t, you expect the unreasonable because the reasonable frankly isn’t possible.
Thing about that is, it has to happen offline, in the breakroom between coworkers who are in the same boat – in secret. You keep that shit where the customer can’t see or hear it.
I think I read that she’s a level designer, not one of the designer/coder/PR types who would normally be answering questions about why the game isn’t working on console ports. Seems to me a dev who’s passionate about the game saw some shit, jumped in to defend it, got agitated, spoke way the fuck out of turn to the detriment of everyone else.
Died on the wrong hill.
Slightly OT..
I usually tend to bitch about other departments who have literally been handling the form/filling out the forms and still cannot grasp the basic concepts of getting it signed by the customer on the right fields =P
I believe this is a thing that happens in any place that has forms. 🙂
I stopped playing once the third xpac came out. I started finding it a bit repetitive. This still surprises me a fair bit though as until now their support of the community has been very good. A shame really!
Yeah. Textbook ‘how not to’.
Starting with: Holding a publicly-stated opinion on something viewed as anti-consumer, then doing the exact opposite of that stance without consultation or warning, and adding insult to injury by implementing that money-earning something in the place of what was expected to be a community reward.
It’s genuinely confusing and a little concerning that no-one inside the company could have seen this and had the presence of mind to say, “Do you maybe want to run this past someone who knows what PR is and/or maybe does it for a living? Because we are going to cop some serious shit for this.”
Or maybe someone did express that concern and was consciously shut down or dismissed, which is even worse.
It’s a shame, because it’s a pretty decent game, if you can buy all the fuck-tonne of DLC on special and not have to spend forty bucks on it. But ONLY if you have friends to play it with. Random match-making is toxic to newcomers/inexperienced. That said? If a friend of mine bought it and wanted to play it, I would probably re-install it.
I saw the trailer for the Crimefest last night, it has Vlad trying to get chains to go in on this business of selling “Weapon Customizations” to people and chains tells him to get stuffed which I thought was pretty funny. Also if I recall Vlad makes a comment along the lines of “It will happen with or without your help”.
The new mission they added yesterday makes you go into an earthquake zone and steal the paid unlock safes for Vlad, its as if they thought people would be all over this and would love DLC all based around helping Vlad sell safes and drills to people.
I love that this article in the URL says “Got Paddled”
I was going to go with paddled and then I got permission to deploy more Australian vernacular 😀
+1 for more Ocker. I’ve been playing Borderlands Pre-Seq, lots of ocker, though sounds out of place that nobody calls you a c*nt.
Found Boganella yet?
I just looked it up, I think I sold it as I had something better. I know where I’m going in TVHM! <3
You sold Boganella!? SHAME ON YOU GOOD SIR! SHAME ON YOU!
Dude, this is a game you SHOULD only play with friends.
Yeah, figured that out pretty early after the initial round of clusterfucks and the people who boot automatically when they even suspect they might be in the presence of a noob scrub who might inspire a clusterfuck. Early quits and other-side-of-the-world-lag-drop-outs that dump progress for everyone, denying you a reward for the last twenty minutes slog… I could count the number of enjoyable matches I had with randoms on one hand.
I don’t know what it is about PayDay2 that inspires that. Other games have managed to handle enjoyable matchmaking just fine. But yeah… unfortunately you pretty much have to play it with friends only to get much/any enjoyment out of it. Which is a shame, and why I don’t have more hours up on it.
Dude, I’m telling you, it’s the player base. It sucks a mighty bag of dicks. The attitudes and behaviour on the forums makes youtube comments seem like a civilised discussion over tea and biscuits. The only other game I’ve seen like this (CoD and it’s legion of pre-pubescent players and bros notwithstanding for the moment) was L4D. You know those jerks who would set off car alarms and leg it, or gun it to the saferoom the second the level starts, then shut the door constantly just as you’re trying to get in with a horde on your arse? That’s 98% of the Payday fan base.
I played quite a few games recently and I have had people who were pretty bad at the game but never abuse or trolling.
I had one troll when I first started playing 12 months ago. I just have enough trouble actually joining a game.
If you want someone to play with you should ask some of us on Kotaku, Im always up for it.
I find some players, particularly those who like to run the heist and micromanage are the worst for it. If you don’t follow their instructions or someone makes a mistake, they’ll turn and turn hard. I mean, if someone screws up, no harm, just restart if you can. BFD. I still get it from time to time when playing randoms. I had a guy boot me for not taking heavier armour for a Cook Off the other night. His excuse was that he didn’t want to have to constantly revive me because I chose to wear lighter armour. It didn’t matter that my perk deck and skill build give me fantastic bullet dodge stats in crouch or that I have fast recharge for my armour, or that it was a level we’ve all played a thousand times before. This is why I think this is one of those games where it’s better to play with people you know, at least you can bypass the dramas and petty crap.
Bungie are thinking, “Hey maybe we should delay our microtransactions for 300+ weapons and exotic engrams until next month?”
Just so we’re clear on this: players want a developer to drop ALL of their work to address a completely optional element of the game?
Come on, Alex. What kind of observation is this? Did you even bother looking at the numbers in that link? I get that you have to be selective to make a point in your article, but damn.
Mod support was mostly buggered during the Hype Train event last year. I believe the reasons given were changes to the games code and daily updates as part of the event, much the same as we’re seeing now. Not a defence, just a historical observation.
This^^.
[angryrant]
To be fair to Overkill though, the Payday 2 community is the worst. With every announcement, including for free shit players want, they get inundated with insults and bullshit. ie, when the community got the shits on about there being not enough DLC content for PD1, they announced they’d support PD2 for at least 2 years with DLC. 2 years later, the community bitches and moans about Overkill trying to ‘milk’ the community with their ‘greedy’ and ‘overpriced’ $5 dlc weapons and heist packs (often with more content that costs less compared to other franchises and their DLC). It’s bullshit. I’ve been playing the game from day 1 of PD1, and I love the game on PC (playing shooters on console is an utter waste of time to me, but that’s just my opinion), and the idea of microtransaction is dumb, especially when your community is comprised of mostly angry, egotistical shits who’ll still complain when they get something for nothing. But it’s not going to ruin the game. If anything, they should have linked the new safes to the billions most players have in their in-game off-shore accounts that are barely used. It didn’t matter what they did, Overkill is damned when they do, and damned when they don’t.
And for the record, fuck the Hoxhud users. Hoxhud is shyte.
[\angryrant]
I hadn’t even thought about which mod players were getting upset about. Of course it’s Hoxhud.
They didn’t do anything to help themselves considering they’ve been kind of endorsing and encouraging the development of Hoxhud given that a lot of players use it, only to perform a major update that breaks it, and without giving the Hoxhud devs a heads up that it was going to do so beforehand. That was a pretty significant own goal.
I had a lot of fun with this game. It was a great game in many ways. I always had friends to play it with which made it better, and we played all the maps all the ways you could. Then it got a bit stale and we stopped playing. I’d actually thought about coming back to it, but this gouge has fucked me right off. It already had some pay 2 win aspects with certain weapon packs, but this is all just bullshit now. I won’t appear as a lost number since I haven’t played it in ages, but I’m certainly not going to appear as a returned player.
I only ever played it with mates – had a blast, saw that the DLC was going to make keeping up with my mates a costly exercise (and resented the frequency of DLC) so just uninstalled.
Pity – was one of the better co-op games.
Vermintide is our next coop venture!! Rats for the ratgod? or something like that.
Vermintide looks sah gherd.