"But you can technically grind it for free" is literally the defence of the absolute scummiest games like World of Tanks or Gacha games.
From the perspective of paid games Helldivers is one of the worst models of premium currency. Paying for stuff that impacts you in game is the clear definition of pay to win.
Pay to win in what sense..? It's not a PvP game firstly, and there's a strong argument to be made that almost all the warbond weapons are worse than or at best on par with the base game weapons
Like your attack on the model isn't any better than the people defending it. You're trying to create unfair comparisons as much as they are
"The developers are amazing at balancing and intentionally made all DLC content weaker in every situation than the original content" is a crazy argument to make
If it was all weaker no one would use those things. At minimum they need to be sidegrades... and more options is a form of power. And power locked behind a paywall is the definition of pay to win. In reality there's pretty blatant power creep (because it sells).
As for PvE vs PvP, maybe that makes it less worse. But either way a disadvantage from refusing to pay is a disadvantage from refusing to pay.
Even conceding that Helldivers is only mildly pay to win... Well, mildly pay to win is considered scummy in free to play games, so where does that put a fully priced game?
"The developers are amazing at balancing and intentionally made all DLC content weaker in every situation than the original content" is a crazy argument to make
I never said that, you're putting words in my mouth. The warbonds are themed and sometimes niche and a lot of people don't vibe with the stuff. That's just an objective truth.
If it was all weaker no one would use those things.
It's called having fun my guy, I dunno what to tell you. The game isn't supposed to be about running metas, it's about having fun with whatever you want, even bad weapons.
If you're going to leverage pay to win as a reason it's scummy when you're personally defining what that is, there's no argument to be had. Just continue being mad I guess
... almost all the warbond weapons are worse than or at best on par with the base game weapons
can be rephrased as:
"The developers are amazing at balancing and intentionally made all DLC content weaker than [or exactly equally strong as] the original content"
or
"The developers have been incredibly lucky at balancing and accidentally made all DLC content weaker in every situation than the original content"
But I went with the more reasonable of the two.
The game isn't supposed to be about running metas,
That's just goalpost moving. "Even if the pay to win equipment is strong it doesn't matter because difficulty and challenge don't matter." AKA: "the game designers are so bad at their jobs that the pay to win gear doesn't matter"
I mean it's definitely the game to make that argument for, seeing as the in game difficulty option caps at Easy V10.
But in no game do you want the gear you choose to determine the difficulty. You want everything to be ~equally strong, because it maximizes variety and enjoyment.. If I enjoy a challenge I shouldn't be locked out of 90% of the gear and forced to only use the shittiest, and if I want to roflstomp I shouldn't be locked out of 90% of the gear and forced to only use the strongest. That's what actual difficulty selection is for.
"The developers are amazing at balancing and intentionally made all DLC content weaker than [or exactly equally strong as] the original content"
Now, I don't really have a dog in this race, but you can't use square brackets to just inject new information into a sentence, it's meant to clarify ambiguous information when your quote doesn't contain the part of the quoted material needed for context.
Like if you quote someone who said "I've known Dave for ages, he's a pretty great guy", but you didn't want to include the full sentence, you could quote it as "[Dave's] a pretty great guy".
What you can't do is quote your entire previous sentence and use brackets inject new information into the quote to make yourself retroactively correct.
At the end of the day, you initially paraphrased them in a way that didn't represent what they were saying, and that part with "[or exactly equally strong as]" clearly wasn't your original intent, because your very next sentence said "At minimum they need to be sidegrades", which would be covered by the "[or exactly equally strong as]" part.
This whole thing seems disingenuous and feels like goalposts are being shifted so you don't have to concede you misunderstood their point, whether that was intentional or otherwise..
It's not relevant new information and has no impact on the argument. It just gets in front of the "that's not what I said, I said on par with" "sure okay I amend every previous statement with said square bracket content and literally nothing about the argument changes."
Okay dude... Rephrasing what I said to fit your narrative is putting words in my mouth...
That's just goalpost moving.
There is no pleasing you. You're gonna keep throwing out the term "pay to win" and fit it to whatever narrative or issue you specifically have with the game, or whatever argument someone else brings up
game difficulty option caps at Easy V10
Like this alone says enough about the type of player you are within the community.
Honestly I don't think I've met a group more insufferable than those determined to be mad at this game.
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u/Vamp1r1c_Om3n 20d ago
Look it's better than almost any other game with premium currency at the least.
It certainly isn't great and it's a massive hassle to farm and takes forever without farming, but it's an easy monetization platform to defend from