Arrowhead CEO says 'we need to do better' after incendiary response to flamethrower nerfs in Helldivers 2: 'Me just talking about it isn't enough, actions matter'

Helldivers 2, it would seem, is having balance problems. As fellow PC Gamer writer Morgan Park noted last week, the major update Escalation of Freedom, while bringing plenty of cool new features to the game, has also set everything on fire. Again.

Similar to the balance Ides of March, Helldivers 2 has been wrestling constantly with its balance philosophy since the game came out. This is despite the fact that then-CEO (now CCO) Johan Pilestedt wrote in May «it feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.» While promises for bigger and better patches have materialised, the change to number-tweaking strategies and a lower time-to-kill, broadly-speaking, have not.

The studio's new CEO, Shams Jorjani, has been taking to both Twitter and the game's Discord to share his two super credits on the situation and—for the most part—has maintained an admirably cool head about it all, remarking that he prefers to hear people impassioned rather than «not giving a sh*t».

His replies on Discord, however, paint an interesting picture: One of a studio racing to keep up with the demands of that loud and impassioned playerbase. Jorjani writes: «I haven't spoken to everyone of course—but many of us are disappointed on a few levels … I think a lot of you, fairly point out 'wtf—we went through this earlier this year. Why are we here again'».

The problems, he goes on to outline, have a lot to do with scale, the lead on development times, and Arrowhead's relative inexperience running a live service game in the modern era—experience it is gaining now, presently, the hard way.

«We have long lead times on development. What you see is the result of weeks and months of development work. Some changes take time before they show … not a whole lot of time has passed between now and the June balance round and most people are still on vacation.»

However, he adds, this shouldn't be taken as simply making excuses and tidying the whole thing away a second time. «We still need to